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A professional Mortal Kombat player was recently disqualified from an official tournament for playing with a custom name criticizing the developers behind the game.
The player, Titaniumtigerzz, made it to the tournament’s live broadcast when he played with a custom moveset titled “WhyDidNRSdoThis.” Shortly after the match began, the stream awkwardly cut back to the live casters, before they announced that his opponent would be advancing.
What led to Titaniumtigerzz getting disqualified from this Mortal Kombat tournament
Recent developments and updates to Mortal Kombat have changed how the game can be played. Previously, each character had a few premade developer variations that could be played at will.
These variations were never meant to totally change how a character was played, but rather give players small ways to focus their character on specific playstyles.
Usually what happened was that for each character there were one, and very rarely two, variations, that were considered competitively viable, and all others went unused.
The latest major update to the Mortal Kombat competitive scene made custom variations tournament-legal, allowing players to show off their builds live on stream.
As expected, players named their custom variations a variety of funny or silly names, very rarely giving them descriptive names that could cue opponents about what they’re up against.
Titaniumtigerzz’s name, “WhyDid[NetherRealm Studios]doThis,” was meant to be a way to poke fun at the developers for allowing players to create their own broken, frustrating, and annoying variations for the tournament scene.
When asked by Kotaku about the character variation, Titaniumtigerzz said “it was meant to be funny since the character I was using is basically extremely easy. The joke was, ‘Why would they make such an easy character?’"
Awkward DQs lead to awkward moments for the Mortal Kombat tournament
This disqualification was seemingly unexpected, as the commentators who had been talking about the match initially, called the cut-away a “bad transition.” The professional commentators, usually talkative, eventually became silent, as their smiles waned and one stated that they had “a little problem here.”
They seemed uncertain about what exactly they could say on stream, so they simply stated that his opponent would be advancing. This reaction seemed extreme considering how mild Titaniumtigerzz’s joke was.
The commentators even seemed taken aback by how dramatic the reaction was. Shortly after fans found out about why Titaniumtigerzz was banned from the Mortal Kombat tournament, the phrase WhyDidNRSdoThis began to trend on Twitter.
Overall, this came as a shock. Mortal Kombat and NetherRealm Studios have been a major part of the fighting game community for a decade. They should, by this point, be well aware of the way members of the fighting game community poke fun at one another.
If they’re willing to disqualify someone for something this mild, it sets a bad precedent for the game as a whole.
