Jade’s plan, in the abstract, had seemed fairly reasonable. She would go to the closer game when two were playing at once so she could see people pull out their individual tricks, while he’d watch the games that were further apart to try to pick up on their competitions’ strategies.

Part of that– the part where he ingratiated himself with some of the other people there and got other people’s thoughts on things, was going well.

The other part, looking for the way the teams played together, was going annoyingly poorly.

Mostly because, at least in the first game, there hadn’t been much of any strategy at all.

Oh, they’d managed to close out the game all right, and they’d done so commandingly. Too commandingly. Not a single member of K.A.R.T. (name origins unknown, but it seemed to be some kind of inside joke among the founding members) had managed to get a lead on their direct competition, and the Cutters (formerly known as Larry’s Intense Cutters’ Korporation– though they hadn’t been incorporated, nor had they ever had a single member named Larry) had just sort of… shut them down at every turn.

It wasn’t even the version of that that was entertaining. No, they’d just brute-force won every symmetrical engagement, and they’d gone to great lengths to keep the engagements symmetrical.

It was the issue when one team just had wildly better numbers than another, and he’d been aware of the fact that it could happen, but this was a particularly brutal example, with nothing to really learn from it, and his eyes and ears were already wandering to other people’s chatter, though never in the same direction at the same time.

He knew better than to stare at strangers, listening to their conversations. Now, at least.

Mostly, the chatter was vaguely pointless or stuff he already knew, but he did occasionally pick up something useful.

For example, the two thirteen- or fourteen-year-olds behind him and to his right. They weren’t exactly going in that much depth with comments on the actual abilities at play, but he was getting very direct information about how a Banner team, a team that focused primarily on ally buffing, with some summoning, would deal with both sides.

Useful information, even if it wasn’t directly applicable to him. Their counter strategies would have been useful to the fourth seed, and he was honestly fairly impressed with their analysis. He didn’t like that they used specific abilities when a class would do in some situations, but that was could also be a shorthand they were using.

It was because of how much he was listening to them that when a familiar voice came from the same direction, he almost jumped in his seat.

Instead, he turned to the side a little, looking out the corner of his eye.

It looked a bit like the kids’ older sibling, but that wasn’t really why he was looking. Instead, he watched as the girl who’d spoken to them walked off.

If that was Jessica, she’d made fewer alterations to her player model than he’d thought, and it would also explain why she’d said that they could meet IRL today after the competitive matches.

Not that he’d say anything about her. It was more likely that Jade could figure it out on her own, and if she didn’t…

Well, that would be more entertaining. The only thing he’d be losing was the opportunity to talk to their new carry first.

Which was actually disappointing, now that he thought about it. Which was a little weird, all in all. Usually he didn’t much care when or if he talked to people.

Worth examining for later, but also not important.

The second match had started, and… he tried not to groan, and mostly succeeded. The noise of disgust still got out, to his chagrin.

K.A.R.T. hadn’t even bothered to vary their strategy, and the Cutters had just switched out the carry’s element.

Fantastic. Now he had to sit through the second trouncing, trying to take notes that weren’t “get better players or abilities that don’t directly compete with your opponents’” and keeping his disgust for the utter lack of variation in check. Poorly in check, but still.

It was a direct consequence of the way discourse had gone in the community that a lot of people were playing things extremely similarly, even when they didn’t necessarily need to. After Clouds had won the first National tournament, much of the variation that people had been using was very quickly drowned out by copycats playing the same teams as they had run through their bracket and finals.

It wasn’t as though they were bad, of course, and it was certainly possible that he or Jade or Jessica or Rayne was missing something huge that would get in the way of their plan, but he didn’t really think so.

It had happened before, and he fully expected it to happen again, that a group got so focused on a solution that it became the solution that everyone used.

The usual solution to that, of course, was for the developers of whatever game to buff another strategy past its objectively balanced state intentionally, but with Granduon’s claims that the game was AI-balanced and the laws against misleading advertising that had passed a few years ago…

He suspected that the actual reason was that they didn’t want to risk the fines while they were still raking in money.

At least he’d get to watch the good people of the Cutters slap them down for that decision. Maybe next time they’d learn.

The wouldn’t, based on the historical data he could see with two taps on his fold-out. But he preferred to think the best of people until they directly proved him wrong.

It was with that in his mind that he mostly tuned out the sounds around him, to the point where a tap on his shoulder was unexpected for real rather than something he pretended not to notice until whoever it was actually touched him.

He turned around, and was face-to-face with the girl he’d thought was Jessica.

“Hey, are you Nathaniel?”