We're back with extra trash that we got a lot of ground to cover
because so much has happened in the past week in the world of
fighting games. We have the Strive 2.0 patch
actually out in the wild and we have the reception from the
community. We got the Capcom Pro Tour
updates to know the prizing and the shape of the tour for the
year to come. We even have potentially
rollback coming to the best game ever, exclamation point Glaze.
We'll see if that comes to fruition with the Ultimate
Marvel versus Capcom 3 bounty from Max for rollback net code.
But first up, we got the big one.
We had the invincible versus beta over the past weekend and
we will get into the gameplay. But of course, I think the big
discourse around this was the rage quits and the dividing
lines between people who are pro rage quit and anti rage quit,
which brought out a lot of interesting discussion over the
FGC and beyond. Before we get into it, Adam, how
you doing, man? You're playing any fighting
games for the past week. You know, we've gotten some good
fighting games. I dabbled in the the invincible
beta. I've been playing a lot of
strike two point O, so you know, I've been having fun playing
fighting games. It's a good time to be a
fighting game, man. But you're playing more Strive
than an invincible versus. You don't want to check it out.
I mean, I've played invincible for a while, but you know, 2
point O is sick. I'm having a lot of fun playing
two point O. Dodging the the beta Yeah, I
think we should talk about the gameplay itself, because I think
even before we get into the rage quit discourse, the the the beta
gameplay itself was a little divisive, I found from a lot of
different audiences. And I think a lot of people were
eyeing invincible verses for a while to see if this was going
to be a game they're interested in.
Because, you know, let's let's be let's be a little honest
here. The visuals are a little, you
know, they're a little. A.
Little chunky with the animations, right?
Like the animations are a little jank.
You had that classic sort of Western dev fighting game charm
to it, like a killer instinct or a Mortal Kombat.
But this I think had the most amount of jank into the visuals
and how it was actually piloting when you're controlling it.
So I think a lot of people were a little a little bit hesitant
about going all in on the invincible verses train here.
And I got to play it for the first time in depth and I had a
decent amount of fun with it. But there was some weird
shenanigans with the game. And I think First off, we we can
highlight some of the the things that the high level players
found 'cause I didn't even get that far.
I found some other things strange first.
We'll get into that. But one of the big things that
we saw some players complaining about was the fact that there
were safe on block DPS, invincible DPS with armor that
lead into full combos but are also safe on block.
So like once that once people learned about that, who are
like, wait a minute, like, oh, this is the type of game we're
playing, You know, just spam the DP because that leads into a
full combo and potentially a touch of death, you know,
depleting one of the characters from the team.
For for me, like I, I didn't get as far as the DP for, but for
me, I like, my main complaint was like some of the auto commas
felt kind of like, yeah, just kind of like they're like mash,
you know, mash square, square, square.
It felt very DBFC trying to onboard people, which is fine
because like I said, I know a lot of people, they're trying to
get a lot of people who enjoy the show.
You know, I like the show too, but they're trying to avoid a
lot of people who like the show and not really teaching people
like fighting get fighting game mechanics say, but it's it's
cool. I I've seen like there's
overhead assist in the game and, you know, there's a lot of
things that Marvel 3 does right that I feel like all these, a
lot of the other attack fighters aren't doing that well.
Yeah. I'm glad you touched upon in the
auto combos. I'll I'll quickly talk about the
the overhead assist. That's something I realized a
little bit into it like I was holding down back and someone
called an assist and I clearly got hit and I'm like, wait, was
that assist overhead? And then I was seeing with the
high level players, they're just doing these full screen special
moves like invincible lariat. You just do that full screen and
plus plus an assist to cover you and you put them in blocks and
an overhead assist comes and then you go low with with your
point and character and you pretty much get a hard to
blockable pseudo unblockable situation where the high low
happens very rapidly with a few frames gap between them, almost
impossible to block by human. And I was like, oh, like that's
the type of game we're playing. Like this is AD Gen. game.
And when you get the hit, the way it operates is you have
essentially unlimited ways to combo the opponent.
The way the combo system works, if you haven't been paying
attention to Invincible versus, it definitely takes inspiration
from Killer Instinct. A lot of the Killer Instinct
devs worked on this game and you have your basic light medium,
heavy chains where you climb the tree cancelling light medium to
heavy, and then your special moves that you can cancel from
the normals. You can then cancel back into
normals out of the special moves and keep looping that sequence.
What gates that from being an infinite is that there's a combo
meter that fills up very quick. And once you fill up that meter,
they the next hit just causes the knockdown.
And so you can't just do like light medium, heavy, special,
light medium, heavy special over and over.
They'll just flip out very quick to decrease that meter.
You do any of the meter options of the special moves that will
take it like a chunk away from that combo meter, decrease it,
and that cost one of your 3 boost gauge I believe is what
they call it in this game, which is essentially like drive meter.
It's very analogous to the drive system.
So that will like allow you to continue your combo.
It'll decrease the combo meter at the cost of one of your boost
gauge or then you can also active tag and the active tags
you could do indefinitely. You can do heavy, light, medium,
heavy, active tag, light, medium, heavy, active tag and
keep swapping characters forever.
However, there is counter tags and that's where the the RPS
begins. The rock paper scissors begins.
If I if I react to you doing an active tag and I press my
counter tag button, I'll break the the the combo, break the tag
and we'll reset. However, you can either do the
regular active tag timing, or you can press heavy during your
active tag to delay the active tag timing, which means for them
to break the active tag, they can't press it right away, the
normal timing with the delay when they actually do the active
tag timing. Or you can do a faint where you
say, hey, I know you're gonna try to react with a counter tag.
I'm gonna faint the tag. And if they attempt to break the
tag in return, you get a reset combo.
But if they don't do anything and they just don't react or
read that you're trying to bait them, you can be punished
instead. So basically every combo is
essentially always a touch of death with an RPS moment in the
middle of it and some mind gauge associated with that active tag
counter system. And when people start to
understand like, oh, there's these safe unblock DPS, there's
these like high assists that hit high that I can set up hard to
unblockables, people quickly realize like, oh, this is the
type of game we're in. Like we are in AD Gen. way to
get your head and then set up a potential Tod with a rock, paper
scissors moment in between. Determine if this kills or not.
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Okay, back to the show. Yeah, it's kind of like, there's
a lot of things that I actually think this game does a lot like
Marvel 3. And when I was playing for a
bit, I was kind of like almost kind of does this, right.
But I do feel like the RPS thing is actually so good because it
kind of fixes what a lot of casuals don't like when you're
into like, you know, you're watching somebody do a long
combo and then you feel like you're in a cutscene, you're
basically in an unskippable cutscene.
So I do like the whole RPS situation of that, that the
combo breaker kind of gives you, but the person has to know how
the comma breaker work. You gotta know how the mechanics
work. And then it's just like, now
it's getting kind of gatekeeping, which even though I
don't think that's gatekeeping, that's a basic understanding of
how the game works. Like you read like 2 lines.
If you played the tutorial, you know how it works, right?
Yeah, that's one of those mechanics that is a little
dangerous to unleash into a bunch of casuals because just to
be clear, you're saying combo breaker?
This isn't the combo breaker. This is the assist counter.
Maybe it's called something else, but I I want to like draw
that distinction. There's so many mechanics.
It's like it's basic. No, because because the combo
breaker itself, there is a combo breaker which you cannot stop,
which I think is another point to talk about because the combo
breaker uses 2 bars of that drive gauge.
People were combo. You can combo breaker non-stop
in this game because the meter comes back.
I mean, it's not it doesn't refill as fast as drive drive
it's a bit slower. But basically that that that
your, your boost cage also is for each individual character.
They all have their own individual 3 bar meter.
So as soon as you get to another character, you can break another
combo. So and a lot of like casual
level matches, people are just breaking every single combo like
they're just spamming that. So it's pretty there's there's
also on one end. If they don't know how the combo
breaker works or they're out of meter and they don't know how
the active tag works, they can get looped forever.
Like if you play, if you know how to do light medium heavy
active tag and they don't understand the the counter tag
system, you have atod every single time like there is that
immediate like you lose you you fail to read the tutorial game
over GG thanks for playing. But on the other hand, it was
kind of scrappy at low level because there's constant combo
Breakers happening and some people even found like, oh, it's
kind of annoying. There's so many like combo
breaker moments. So I don't know if you felt that
that was a little, it was a little like Scrappy in in that
sense when I played. To me, I'm not really a fan of
like combo Breakers and tag fighters like 1 is fine, but
like kind of like you say, it happens so frequently.
I even in like Tuco, I'm not really a big fan of it.
So I there's like a a degen level of how I got hit.
I guess to invincible is kind of leading into that.
You know you're going to get hit by a lot of jank stuff.
So he has a combo breaker, but I don't it's it's so weird to kind
of like put into words, but I, I played for like like 30 minutes
to an hour. So I didn't get too much into
it. But I have been watching a lot
of, you know, Twitch. I watched the iPhone play.
I watched you play, I watched punk play.
So again, they look very jank, but it did look like, you know,
there is an audience there who would enjoy it.
Right. And you mentioned that the the
auto comos, I do think it's a big point that I felt about the
game. This has the DBFZ issue like you
mentioned of you can just mash light and your auto combos will
happen on whiff and if at any point someone that one of those
active hit boxes intersects with the opponent, it's going to go
into a full combo into a super animation yadda yadda.
Right? And the weird thing about it is
things in this game are weirdly safe.
When I was first playing, I went up against an opponent who
literally held down the L button as if they, with turbo on, did
nothing else. And for my first game, I was
like, this guy's kind of dangerous, you know what I mean?
I was like, listen, I've been playing fighting games for
forever at this point, and I'm, I'm concerned about this guy.
I'm, I'm, I'm there trying to steal.
OK, OK. Can I block this part of the
string and then interrupt here? No, I got hit into a full combo,
Full Auto combo. OK, let me try again.
Can I interrupt in this? No, I got you know what I mean?
Like and there was no point in the auto combo where I was like,
oh, like their pressure ended. It's clearly my turn.
And I thought about that design and I'm like, in general, this
game has the the weirdly safe things on block, even supers.
A lot of the supers were safe on block and I was like, dude, what
the fuck? Like the supers were invincible.
Some of them were not invincible in start-ups.
So maybe there's a correlation there.
I'm not sure if some are invincible though.
And I was like, dude, why is everything so safe?
Like everything on block is safe.
Just flail and reset the situation if it doesn't work.
But with the auto combo I was, I was like, you know, I don't know
with after all these years of doing auto combos like that, I'm
not sure how good of a design that is for onboarding new
players. I've been, I've been thinking
about that more and more because what happens is take player A
and player B Player A only matches auto combo L Player B is
also brand new. They're both brand new, but
player B is trying to use the other moves and get feedback and
learn like, hey, when I press this button, this happens in in
this situation and slowly build that, that sort of contextual
understanding of, of feedback from the game and this game
state. If I do this, this happens and
build that up. And that's how you learn the
game, right? Player A is going to win every
time. However, for both players,
player A might get a short term dope term dopamine hit, but
eventually they're going to be like this game is dumb.
I just mash L the entire time and I win.
And player B is going to be like, this game is dumb.
This guy is doing the same thing over and over.
And no matter what I do, they win.
And so I kind of feel like on both ends, in a weird way, it
can lead to short term retention because it's just too a little
overtuned at low level I feel like.
I don't know, what do you think? I, I have a different opinion.
I do think if player player B is going to be upset, I feel like
no matter what, player B is getting the short end of the
stick. But player A you could also
think about, hey, I'm mashing L, but this guy shot a cool laser
beam out of his eye, shot a big energy ball.
At least something did happen instead of just like, hey, this
guy's just mashing light punch and nothing.
Nothing. Cool or flashy ever happened?
So I think player A is probably having a blast now since he
doesn't have to learn that much or invest that much time into
the game. Play Reese pissed.
I feel bad for player B Play. Reese is angry.
Well, The thing is, I did see some comments of people saying
it's just a masher. Like I think that leads.
I don't think people who don't know how to play fighting games
are dumb, right? Like they understand at some
point, like, hey, I'm just holding, I'm just pressing the L
button and then shit happens. And I think that's really cool
for a super short term hit, but it's such a shallow experience
that I think it really quickly loses its allure.
That's my concern with it. I do think it it helps to have
that like moment of cool things happening, But I I think when
the auto combos happen on wif, I think that's where I find it to
be going too extreme because it becomes too D to stop even for
someone who's like a mid level fighting game player at other
titles. At first I was like dude, like I
have to like I have to stop here and think about this.
This dude literally mashing. We're both terrible at the game,
but I clearly have more experience and I'm trying to
figure it out. I had to stop and think about
it. Oh, run away, call assist, let
the assist hit them because they're just flailing.
It's like that Simpsons episode with Bart and Lisa.
Like, I'm going to keep swinging.
If you get hit, it's your fault. You know, like, but that's
what's happening in this game. And I'm like, I don't know if
that's a great design because it's unsatisfying to play as and
unsatisfying to fight against and no one's really learning
because and that's why I like how a Street Fighter does their
auto combos, which in modern it has its other drawbacks.
But and you know, in modern and Street Fighter auto combos don't
come out on whiff. It leads to the problem of it
being an auto hit confirm, which is cheap in Street Fighter.
Like you know, the the combo doesn't come out on block.
Usually for certain situations, it only comes out on a hit.
But if you match the auto combo, you just whiff 1 button until
they run into it. I think that alone give so much
more contextual feedback to a player and like, oh, when they
run into the button when it's spaced correctly, then I can
continue the combo. But it imagine if in Street
Fighter you're bashing an auto combo and the entire time
they're just flailing a whole combo across the screen and
people run into it. I don't think that would be as
rewarding for new players as the way they, they did it with
modern. And so I I have I take issue, I
think with the auto combos on width occurring.
I think that causes this weird match fest gameplay where new
players quickly, you know, drop the game.
I. For a lot of new players, well,
actually token did it. Token also actually got rid of
their auto combos as well. But for a lot of the new
players, I do think it's not how, I don't know because I
don't think it's how they one like like you said, oh, I think,
oh, I'm just mashing LLL and I won ha ha ha.
I'm so sick for like 2 hours and then never play the game again.
I think when they see the you win screen, I think that's the
dopamine hit they're actually getting.
I don't think it matters how they won.
It's the you win popping up. I think it matters a little bit.
I would disagree with you. I mean, I think that's
important. I do think it's important to let
people do cool shit quickly. I do think that's very important
and I think that the auto combos achieve that.
But I think if it's too degenerate at low level to the
point where you realize you're not thinking at all.
I, I 100% believe people it's like playing hungry hungry
hippos, bro. Like it's like playing any other
shitty game as a kid that it loses its allure.
And that's why adults don't play adults don't play those kind of
games. They want games with more depth,
right? But if you get caught in the the
feedback loop of mashing out only against other scrubs, you
are not learning anything. You might be getting you wins to
pop up. But that's that's the concern I
have is that it keeps you in a loop where at least auto combos
without with teach you about spacing and timing of when to
start the hit. I think that's a huge leap in
terms of like making that cognitive connection.
And so that's one critique I would have of auto combos in
general as what I I've, I've slowly hardened my stance in
that direction in terms of not just in terms of like, oh, it's
free wins for scrubs. I don't care.
That's not what I'm worried about.
I'm worried about like the engagement factor for new
players. So that's something I've been
thinking about though. I'm like it's a little weird and
if they're going to make them happen, make them very unsafe on
block because the new player who's trying to learn how to
counter things, give them a clear point of like OK, they
match their auto combo all the way without thinking at this
point. Punish them.
Like do something to make that clear is what I think.
And then then I feel like the games are just going to get
because if you're good at the game, you're going to be like,
OK, well this guy's bad. He's just smashing auto combo.
I'm going to punish him every time.
And you're playing this kind of watch him kill himself kind of
game. And then also for two new player
is basically I'm mashing LLL and when it works, I get a full
combo and when it doesn't, I die.
But this guy's also mashing LLL. So let me block for and then
mash LLL so I'm a punish his lol.
Yeah, but then then suddenly you have a mind game.
They they're suddenly hit confirming if the third hit is
punished, but the first two hits are safe.
Suddenly you're paying attention to what you're doing.
Suddenly a mind game develops between two mashers and they've
levelled up. Like if you if you take 2 auto
combo mashing L on turbo players together and you force them to
play that game of chicken, suddenly there's a dope.
There's like actual engagement between the players.
I think that's a way to do it. Like that would be my
recommendation or, or my theory about this.
And and for your point about like a bad player versus a
better player, the better player should win 100% of the time. 0
questions asked, but they also shouldn't be matched together.
That's leading to the rage quit problem.
The bad player is going to quit. The bad player is going to quit
because they like this guy's a block spammer or something.
He's going to block spam. Hey, man, listen, they were quit
regardless. I guess we let's get into it,
man. We're we're wasting all this
time talking about gameplay. We're 20 minutes in here pretty
much. Listen, the big take away from
this is the rage quits. I do want to.
I do want to touch on one thing, one more thing about the
gameplay, because I do. I actually do you want them to
change this are this is one of the first things I realized when
I played the game, and this might be the tag fighter player
in me. Why can you super jump and call
assist? Please, please take that out the
game. It's actually very stupid.
If you jump to the top of the screen, you call assist.
You can't see the assist because it's on the bottom of the
screen. You just super jump and call
assist and you get hit and you don't even see what's happening.
Yeah, but who's even converting that?
The other thing I felt weird about is that you have all these
movement options, but I felt like the hit boxes were so tiny
on the jumps. So like right.
And, and with am I, am I, I'm kind of a, A tag scrub.
Like in Marvel, if you super jump and then you come down with
a hit box, you come down with a big ass hit box.
Like if you get above them, you're going to hit them all the
way down. In this game.
I try, I tried try jumping over and over the beginning and I'm
like, dude, none of it's impossible to space a jump.
Try jump because your hit boxes are tiny from the air.
And I was like, OK, if I stand on the ground, I actually do
better. So does that matter?
The problem is it's like there's no, there's no big like, well,
maybe just because people aren't really playing like that playing
that much. But like Adam, Eve had like a
big like beam attack where she could hit.
I guess it's more so character dependent.
But yeah, I I feel like super jump a Sisco is kind of my thing
even. Robot, I think he had like a
dive kick that went down super fast and he just Joe call assist
dive kick. Oh oh, it's like what are we
doing? It's true yeah, a couple yeah, I
got the the robot dive kick was pretty D Gen. yeah a couple
characters had that, but I feel like in general you had
characters that had like double jump, super jump, float, air
dash, try jump and like but their hip boxes were not there
and then I'm like I'm like why? I'm like, try jumping and I'm
like trying to come down and hit.
And yeah, I just, it was, it felt way weirder to space
compared to like you play Marvel three.
You you try jump with the, with Magneto, come down with a heavy,
you're smacking them, you know what I mean?
Like, and it feels good. It feels immediately like, oh
hell yeah, I'm just moving. You know, this game, you're
like, you're moving, but then you're also whiffing and I'm
like, OK, but yeah, let's get into the the rage quits.
Of course, the big discussion point around this game was the
the culture clash going on here. And there's a lot of different
nuanced levels to this, but the rage quits were ridiculous for
the invincible versus beta. My personal experience, I didn't
play for the first day, but I did see the tweets going out and
I think the big one was from Avatar Yaya.
You know, he, he's playing the beta.
He had his first clip like the beta just started man, why y'all
rage quitting already? And that went like pretty viral,
got like over 10K maybe 15 K likes on Twitter and started so
much discourse. And then the clips and the
discussion was pouring in from every angle of the community and
the greater gaming and invincible community, which is
of course not core FGC, not core FGC people.
And then that also went from every level, right from beginner
level to intermediate to top level.
People were getting rage quits everywhere.
I didn't believe it myself until I finally booted up the game.
My very first game, I started my very first combo and they pulled
the plug after five hits. And after that it was rage quit
after rage quit. And it's very interesting to see
the culture clash because I think for some reason we're
starting to see this divide where people will go to great
lengths to justify rage quitting, really great lengths.
I don't know if you saw any of those discussion points or how
you feel about it in general. I saw so many like discourse and
like people arguing and justifying the rage quit but.
A hot take I understand it's only the FGC who actually does
it IA 100% understand there's a lot of rage quitters and other
video games like if you play like a a COD, a battlefield, a
Halo like any even like sports game, they're just going to rage
quit 100%. Why am I wasting my time?
It to me I get the divide. It just sucks in a fighting game
because like obviously you want the point or you want the
satisfaction or whatever. And it's different for fighting
games too because like matches are like 2 minutes, man.
You don't got 2 minutes to spare.
I can't help you. But it for every other game I
get it. IA 100% get it?
Yeah, I think there's a lot of people who are playing
invincible coming from different communities and that that's a
common point. Like it's very normal to to rage
quit in other games. And I do think it's very
different. Like core FGC people, of course,
were used to being in a tight knit community and basically
like antisocial behavior. It like, you know, it spreads
like it's, it's a small world, the FGC.
So if you're like a rage quitter like that becomes branded to
you, like we, we know who you are, you're not like in a sea of
millions of players, kind of anonymous and you're going to
get away with it. Like if you play ranked for any
period of time, you're probably going to run into the same
handful of people in most regions for most games.
So it's like you're going to see the same rage quitter over and
over like it. And, and, and so many times in
Street Fighter five especially, I would run into some rage
quitters and I would play them over and over and they would
just keep rage quit. You know what I mean?
It's like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, you're gonna rage quit and then
two games later, I'm gonna play you again and you're gonna rage
quit again. And it's like, dude, that's,
it's, it's silly. So I think in general, like the
culture of fighting games is, you know, suck it up, play the
game and don't try to scam people out of their points and,
and just finish the set. It's seen as really anti social
behavior. And we're going to see you
again. It's not like you're going to
disappear into the ether. We're never going to cross
paths. I'm probably going to cross
paths with you again. And you're going to look sillier
at that point. But it did make me think about
certain aspects. A lot of people were discussing
the idea of sweats sweats ruining the experience and I
will give the rage quit defenders a point here.
It is the responsibility of the game and a good matchmaking
system to prevent mismatch matchmaking from occurring and
leading to really one sided interactions in a fight a game.
For example, I do agree that Justin Wong probably should not
be matched up with Timmy who just likes invincible verses.
He's 13 years old, never played a fighting game before and it's
his very first time and he selected beginner and the
loadout for the matchmaking. I agree that shouldn't happen
and that would be a very bad experience for them.
So that's one point for the rage quit defenders in that instance.
If you're new I I get it as well right?
However, I'm sick and tired of the jumping through hoops, the
coping, the cognitive dissonance.
That's not what rage quitters alt do.
Rage quitters are not just people.
New players rage quit against Justin Wong.
Rage quitters rage quit against good players, against pros,
against bad players, against scrubs, against other people
mashing who have never played before, against other rage
quitters. Rage quitters rage quit against
anybody, no matter the skill discrepancy, no matter if
they're getting stomped or whatever.
I'm sick and tired of this this narrative that people who are
defending the rage quitting problem and invincible verses
are making where it's oh it's because the pros are playing
noobs. I had rage quits in my
experience where the guy beat me the first game free.
The second game it came down to the wire.
Last character I blocked his wake up super in one and then he
rage quit. Was that a stomp?
No, the motherfucker got downloaded and was fucking
pissed about it. Hold that shit is is that a noob
getting stomped by a pro? No, that was as even as a match
as you can get. I I think it's crazy.
I think rage quit defenders are coping out of their minds to
justify their clearly antisocial behavior.
You know you're in the wrong. You know it.
Well, you not to, you know, defend the rage quit is too, but
I also think there was an incentive to get high points
because they were saying if you got to top 20, you were in the
credits and you know, that's kind of cool to be in a video
game credit. You know I'm an SFI credit but.
Yeah, no, no flex. Or anything but yeah, I'm there.
But yeah, there's an incentive. I'm sure if other fighting games
had incentives to be higher ranked, you know, get to master
or if you're if you end the season on legend and Street
Fighter, you get something cool. It would be like, hey, I'm I'm
going to start rage quitting because I got to see my points
or whatever. So I do partially understand
that is an incentive to rage quit to try to get something
cool. And I.
Yeah, that was the other aspect of it, the Invincible, like you
mentioned, Invincible Versus announced at the top 20 in the
leaderboard after the beta. Would it be in the credits?
So at the top level, we saw Justin Wong and Daifon, for
example, tweeting about this. Daifon had a clip or he's
winning a match against another high ranked player and he's
like, please don't rage quit, please don't rage quit.
And then as soon as the last hit happens, they rage quit and he's
like, oh fuck no. And and is that a scrub being
beat up by a sweat rage quitting?
No, it's someone who's good at the game trying to to scumbag
their way into the credits. The Invincible devs did clarify
that's the rage quits did eventually count as a loss for
the person rage quitting. It would just.
And they even set a win for the person who got rage quit
against. They said it just might take
time to show up in the profile. We'll see if that's actually the
case. A lot of this trauma comes from
the fact that most fighting games online are really shit at
online and they don't properly count a rage quit as a win for
the person getting disconnected. So essentially what the rage
quitters are trying to do is that past history with most
fighting games is you. You might not be getting the
points yourself for rage quitting, but what you're doing
is you're preventing the winner from getting their points.
So if you're competing for the top 20 spot and you are #21
going up against #22 you can rage quit against them, prevent
them from getting the points from you and, and you know,
scumbag your way into the credits.
So that was what we're seeing at the top level.
This is not, this is sweat versus sweat crime here.
Sweat V sweat, rage quitting here.
OK, Rage quitters rage quit at every level.
I, I don't want to hear this Like it's just beginners doing
it. It's not just beginners.
It's, it's people who are have bad sportsmanship.
It's just antisocial bad sportsmanship.
That's all it is. And that occurs no matter the
skill level. It's it's inherent to the
personality, not to the. The, the skill level, it's
something that I think it's lost in this discourse.
So yeah, we saw it at the top level as well.
I, I do think, I don't know cuz I do think there's a lot of
people who are just turning on that game.
Obviously they have like no fighting game promise.
They never played a fighting game before in their life.
And for them, I do feel like maybe it's I like the show, I
like invincible. Invincible's cool.
Watched a couple of seasons. You know, I'm just little Timmy
trying to play, mash some buttons, play as my favorite
character and then, like you said, some sweat guys putting me
in an infinite cutscene. Then it feels like I'm actually
watching the show because I can't even play the game anymore
and I'm getting screwed over. So I don't know.
I remember when I first saw Invincible was announced, I was
like, I think this game would do like 10 times better if it was
like a Spider Man PS4 kind of game where like you have an open
world and you just kind of like flying around doing like
superhero style. And then I saw the fighting game
and then I was like, yeah, it's not.
It's kind of weird because I know everyone who's just fans of
the show is gonna get very upset, and I'm not surprised
this is actually happening. Yeah, of course.
I mean, this ties back to the auto combo thing.
And like I said, you're gonna have two complete beginners.
I guarantee you a lot of the rage quitting is between 2 brand
new players fighting each other. I guarantee you player A mashed
auto combo the entire time. Player B was was not tuned into
the mashing auto combo the entire time Strat and they were
put into an infinite movie because they don't understand
anything about the game while player A's is mashing L the
entire time. They're both equally as as new
and uninformed and bad about the game.
They're both terrible but one of them is putting the other one in
an infinite loop and they and then player B rage quits.
I guess another fellow noob like that.
That for sure was happening. There were rage quits at all
levels. I had people in my YouTube
comments saying like I'm bad at fighting against people were
rage quitting on me. I saw clips of other like more
casual fighting game streamers have getting rage quits.
It's not just pros or sweats against new players causing the
rage quits. It's at all levels of play and I
think at low level fighting games can become very
interactive, uninteractive between two equally new players
if one person happens to stumble into an easy spammable
degenerate strategy versus the other like that can happen.
And that's the danger of auto combos, I think, is you're going
to have these situations where people are saying, oh, I, I rage
quit because I'm in an infinite loop, even though what's be
real, they're just not blocking at the end of the combo.
Like they don't understand that concept.
Like, you know, they clearly don't understand how to resume
gameplay after being penalized by being put into a combo.
They just get looped because they don't get that, that
interaction point. And yeah, that causes a
terrible, painful experience. And that's where the rage quits
come from. So it's not just only about bad
matchmaking. It's also just the nature of.
Auto combo is in A tag game where you can have really long
offensive pressure. Yeah, but fighting games are
just bad. I mean, fighting games in
general are just bad for that. Funny enough, I actually do
think a lot of multiplayer games in general are bad for that as
well. There's a lot of uninteractive
multiplayer games. If you play Deadlock and you're
bad at it, you're obviously you're not playing the game.
But to me, that's kind of why I think for most people and why I
keep bringing up, I think Invincible would have been
better single player. A lot of single player games
just kind of get away with it. If the tree Sentinel's kicking
your ass and Eldon Ring, you can just go back and fight the tree
Sentinel and you guys infinite number of run back.
So it's much different for nowadays.
It's much different in multiplayer game and why I think
making single player games is kind of a lot better even for
like the past couple of game of the year are like the games
people praise a lot. It's always single player.
The last time a multiplayer game actually won was like Overwatch.
So people are just scared to play other human beings,
honestly. Yeah, I mean, it's it's tough
with the psychology of that and the lack of the ability to retry
and getting over that hump is always terrible.
Speaking of Overwatch, I watched Jeff Kaplan, the lead designer
of Overwatch and all that, like he did a podcast, the Lex
Friedman podcast, whatever. He actually, I finally bit the
bullet and watched one of those because he was on there and he
had an interesting point about his time in Overwatch and
talking about matchmaking specifically.
And he said, well, most people say that they want a good even
match, and that's the goal of matchmaking, to try to like pair
people up with equal skill levels so you have a satisfying
evil even match between two players.
And it's not a stomp either way. And his remark there was like,
well, actually what people mean when they say that is they want
mostly even match, but they want to win 65% of the time.
He said, he said that's the reality.
They say, look, the the data shows we're giving you even
matches 'cause you're winning 50% of the time.
But psychologically that is too painful for most people.
Like we're lost adverse creatures.
So a 50% win rate is fucking garbage for our psyche.
And so it's always almost a really difficult problem to
solve. And once you go to the absolute
beginner level, where all variables are like the the
beginning level of any multiplayer game is like this
primordial soup, especially for a genre you've never played
before. You have no idea what's going to
emerge as the dominant strategy. It gets two complete noobs going
up against each other. You have no clue.
But two brand new players who have never touched a fighting
game in a round of Street Fighter, and you're going to see
like the most strange, divergent evolution of gameplay that
you've ever seen before. And one strategy might reign
supreme in that wood rank experience, right?
And you can't account for that in the matchmaking.
All the players are fucking garbage.
They're all terrible. They're new, they don't know
what they're doing, but one person might beat all of their
asses. Is that a bad matchmaking
experience? I don't know if the matchmaking
matchmaking can't solve that. Like the only goal you can do is
like try to rank them up quick and get them out of that, that
lobby or get them into the next tier of matchmaking.
But that's going to be a constant painful onboarding
experience. And, and if, if people are just
going to rage quit constantly, I do think that something needs to
be done in terms of the product to like, Hey, you're banned.
Like I, I, I do think the product needs to step in and
like I, I, I think this is a place where MK did a great job
quitality like give a reward for the person getting rage quit
against. And then also like, Hey, you're
rage quitting a lot. Like you're going to get tanked
in your rank and then eventually going to get timed out like
finish the game because it's, it's 30 seconds of your time.
I, I do think the product has to handle it.
So a lot of games actually do that now, but there's so many
people who quit are, they'll just make another account.
Like I said, if you rage quit too much and like.
Marvel rivals, you'll you'll get banned like it'd be like yo,
stop, stop quitting. You're not going to be able to
play for like a day, two days a week, etcetera.
So and like those games do it, but then another account aren't
going to stop playing. And I don't think anyone wants
people to stop playing fighting games because we already have
not that many people to play with anyway.
Right. That's true.
That's true, Yeah. I mean, it's a tough problem to
solve. It did get me to reconsider my
feelings about like surrendering though.
I, I, it did make me consider like, I guess I could get on
board with a surrender option because, you know, one part of
me is like, dude, it's literally 30 seconds.
Just get over it like that. That's my pure emotional
reaction is like, shut the fuck up and deal with it.
Like I'm trying to be nice, I'm trying to be nice, I'm trying to
be nice to you. OK, I do understand a surrender
option. Like if you're tilting, if
you're at the matchmaking is actually that bad, which is I
think the highest priority, of course, is matchmaking has to be
on point. Like that is for sure.
You don't want this mixed match of a player level, but maybe a
surrender option, I suppose, and then make it entertaining.
You know, most a lot of games have surrender options, but
generally that's because they're all a much longer they're a. 45
minute long game? Yeah, You're playing for much
longer, Yeah. Yeah, so I could at least get
behind that, like add a more graceful way for people to
forfeit 'cause it's so frustrating.
Otherwise. It was really a bad experience.
Like playing the beta was a it was a really not fun.
I mean, it was funny a little bit, but it was exasperating.
I got so many rage quits and I am bad at the game.
I was not good. I can't imagine the good players
actually how many rage quits they got.
Maybe it slowed down 'cause they would rank up and fight other
more competent players and it'd be more rare.
But in my first day of playing the beta for a couple hours, I
got at least 5 or 6 rage quits. And on top of the matchmaking
bugs and all that, like it really limited the number of
games I got 'cause people would rage quit quick.
Like the moment you showed that you know how to do a combo, they
would rage quit. Or you got 1 character and
they're like, that's it, I'm out.
It was they hicked from that shit.
Some people waited to the end and when it was close and
they're about to lose and they pulled the plug, which I think
is the biggest scumbag. That to me is the biggest
scumbag rage quit. If you rage quit early, like
you're kind of a punk, but whatever.
If you rage quit at the end, you're you're that's, that's
scumbag. You're a scumbag.
I'm sorry. Yeah, I just, I, I don't know.
I do think there are, I saw a lot of Twitter comments about it
saying people just need to find the fighting game that they
really enjoy, to fight through the pain and try to want to keep
playing. But.
Door to door, Yeah, had that tweet.
Yeah, yeah, I thought that was pretty interesting.
But I feel like a lot of new players to fight a game just
don't have that. And even in Dragon Ball, when
Dragon Ball first started, I used to get Rage Quinn on all
the time playing that game. Yeah, that's what happened.
I think it's, it's growing pains and I, I think it's fine to have
that. I think this is the issue with
doing these fighting game betas is that you don't have the rest
of the single player content. And just basically I, I've just
really hardened my stance of the gameplay.
I I do agree with you that the gameplay, we've had this
discussion about how much of the gameplay matter.
I think I I on our spectrum, I think gameplay matters a little
bit more than you do at the lower level.
But I do agree that we need to stop designing around like
player retention for lower level because I think a lot of the
features we add end up actually making it worse.
Like I was mentioning the the light auto combos, I think that
actually makes the experience probably worse for low level
players overall auto combos on WIF it's 2D Gen.
But at the end of the day, no matter how simple you make it,
no matter how much you try to create features to onboard
players, they're going to rage quit, they're going to get lost,
and they're going to quit because people don't want to
lose. So find other ways to keep
people entertained and to have them, you know, want to engage
with their product. I think that's the biggest take
away. If the fighting game genre is
trying to fix the rage quit problem, then it that that's the
worst. That's the last genre that
should be trying to do that. Any other game could fix.
Any other genre could fix that. Do you?
Think it's gotten worse with like this is like a age
demographic thing, Like we're getting old.
I, I, I I had a thought about that.
I think it's, I think it's pretty normal if you're going,
if you're having a bad experience, why I experienced it
in the first place, I might as well just quit.
But was this as relevant in? Older people in gaming
communities. When I used to play COD in 2009
everyone was still rage quitting.
If somebody called the AC 1:30, they were out of there.
Yeah, I'm trying to. I'm trying to check my bias
here. I'm trying to, I'm, I'm, it's
making me wonder, like, are the kids wrong or am I out of touch?
You know that's I'll get to that point, my own status kicking in.
I 100% think even back in the day, it was just like that.
You know, for some of us weirdos, we would fight through
the pain. You know, obviously that's how
you got better at the game. You would be like, what is this
guy doing? So he's beating my ass, so he
must be doing something right. And then you would want to learn
from that guy. But for other people, it's just
like, yeah, the guy's better than me.
I'm not going to say or waste my time.
Let me get out of here and find a new game.
I guess now that I'm thinking about it, I remember playing, I
played Halo 2 and Halo 3 heavy, but I was never one to quit.
But I do remember when my teammates would start falling
off like, Nah, man. Like like when you're playing
the four V four and one person quits and then you're like,
please don't go to the other two and the the second guy quits,
you're like, hey, man, it's just me and you, buddy, come on, hang
on in there. But I guess, yeah, I maybe I was
weird. I would even if I was the last
one, I would kind of just fuck around.
Like that would become an opportunity to play hide and
seek with the other four. Like it would kind of be like a
weird break. Like the game's over, you lost.
And I would kind of just like troll with them and then lose.
But I never quit. Maybe I'm just a weirdo.
I never, I never quit out. I kind of just hung out in the
lobby until the game ended. I think that's the fighting
game. Players in US, that's like, hey,
OK, my team might be asked, everyone might have left, but
there is you can either do something funny or there's
something to take away from that.
Yeah, maybe I was just always destined to go down this route.
I don't know. I, I, I would get pissed at my
teammates, but I wouldn't quit. I'd just like, oh fuck it, games
games over. Yep.
So rage quitting and invincible verses.
Do we have any more takeaways from this?
I think the main thing is I think the people defending rage
quits to like saying it's like justified or whatever.
Listen, no, it's not. This is not.
I just think they can do things the the developers have a
responsibility to do better matchmaking.
But to say that this is only a case of people rage quitting
against the pros? No time out brother.
Rage quitters rage quit against scrubs.
Against pros? Again, close matches and stomps
and beat downs, It doesn't matter.
Rage quitters are going to rage quit.
That's an internal issue that they have.
The developers need to do their best to create proper
matchmaking, to quickly isolate players to their level and try
to provide an even match experience.
But at the end of the day, people are going to rage quit.
It has something to do with the game.
I think it's just, you know, it's internal.
But maybe we can add a forfeit function and a quitality.
Maybe Quitality was the number one thing we should learn from
Mortal Kombat. I would hate a surrender or a
forfeit in like a fighting game because it's 2 minutes unless
it's like, you know, I've been burned out and I legit can't do
anything or like I'm about to get chipped out from full screen
by happy chaos or like, you know, it's I'm no X Factor and
there's no no way of me making a comeback.
That's when I was surrender, but it was like, damn, I got hit by
zero surrender. Like what are we doing?
Hey, hey, that's that's Marvel three culture right there.
What are you talking about? Flux versus Coach Steve, folks
at the Flux versus Coach Steve, he got grabbed round start,
instant rage quit. Add 1 to the board.
Move on, Gigi. No go next.
Come on, man, that that's some Marvel culture.
That's a classic. That that to me, I think that's
bad. If it's like legitimate, like,
OK, you're probably not winning this, then it's like, I get it,
but I don't even like that rage. But you still have Virgil
Anchor. You're still gonna.
You still have a chance. Yeah, I mean, it was a rage
quit, you stilted, but but that's what I'm saying.
Like would you rather people rage quit on you then you You?
You're going up against a rage quitter.
They're going to quit one way or the other.
Would you rather them rage quit or use a surrender
functionality? It's too, like I said, I don't
want either. It's but it's 2 minutes.
It's 2 minutes. Sometimes these modern fight
games aren't even 2 minutes. They're like one minute
nowadays. It's you have to choose.
You have to choose. They're going to quit.
You are a sweats because you know how to play the game and
they're going to quit. Would you rather them rage quit
or surrender at that point? I'm thinking like maybe give him
a surrender? I guess I don't, I don't know, I
feel like you're just going to surrender literally the first
hit every single time. Then it's going to get annoying
because you boot up one match, the guy surrender, you boot up
the next match, guy surrenders, then you can't even play the
game. That was the beta IDOM.
I don't. I don't.
I don't know you're. Getting full matches though like
the guy. No no, they were rage quitting
after one combo. Dude, you said that guy quit on
you like at the end of the match, like right when you're
about to win. One of them one of them which
was a classic OG rage quit. He he gimmicked me the first
game 'cause I didn't know how to counter tag.
I was, I didn't, I was guilty. I didn't read the tutorial.
OK, chat with my tutorial that said, hey, you press medium and
heavy to counter tag. The second game.
I counter tagged him every time and I won and then he rage quit
to me. Listen, I kind of popped off on
that one. That's that's a rage quit that
makes me feel good because I downloaded your ass and you're
salty about it. Hold that shit right?
Like you know, that's a good old fashioned rage quit.
The ones that drive me nuts are you get one hit and they rage
quit. That drives me nuts.
That's the. I think that's worse.
And that was happening
constantly. That was a constant experience
for a lot of players in the beta.
I I think, I think the take away from this is Invincible should
have been a a spider Man kind of game, a single player game.
It would have been. I think it would have been much
better to me. Yeah, we'll see.
They they do, they do have single player content.
I don't know what it's going to look like or how much it's how
in depth it's going to be. So we'll see.
I I do feel this is almost like tanking the perception of
Invincible versus. I wonder how much this will
affect sales, because a lot of people are saying like, I'm
going to refund the order. This game is for sweats.
You know, you, you have to, you get mashed on the whole time and
you're stuck in an infinite cutscene with these infinite
combos. So it's a little tough.
I, I, I don't imagine the invincible devs are like feeling
the heat a little bit like shit, the casuals are not vibing with
this. So I don't know.
I don't know if they're maybe regretting their decision a
little bit. To be fair betas are always like
that even for like non fighting games and you play at beta and
people have a bad experience on the beta.
A lot of your you know like betas honestly are just taking
chances to be honest. But if the beta is good people
buy your game like Overwatch. Overwatch popped off because
they had a great beta. Right.
That's the problem too, except they they probably genuinely
need the infrastructure testing, but that's a big that's usually
the first goal of the beta. And I now now betas have become
essentially demos to probably the Sugar Rayon of the
developers. They probably don't want it to
be perceived that way. They want it to just be an
infrastructure test. But the devs are, they're
definitely listening. They were publicly stating that
they're listening to a lot of feedback, especially from people
talking about specific issues of the gameplay, things like the
safe unblock DPS and the weird, yeah, a lot of these are weirdly
safe in this game. It's pretty ham.
So maybe for the core FTC audience, the product can be
improved a little bit and people will like the changes.
It'll have to be determined if this will be the next DBFZ where
the game has that much alert, that much pull with the IP, the
single player content where it somehow manages to become a
massive hits despite the fact that it's brutal for new coming
incoming players to get into the FGC and play a 3V3 tag fighter.
DBFZ did it. I think people are trying to
recreate that magic. My vibe is that Invincible
Versus won't do that. That is, that is my vibe right
now. However, I would love to be
wrong. I would love to see somehow this
turns around. Invincible is really popular
right now, so it it might be the 1:00.
We'll have to see. The devs have a big challenge
ahead of them though. So you got any final thoughts on
Invincible Versus any when you get out there?
I, I hope that game does good. I don't wish you know any bad
things upon any other any fighting game, you know, I hope
every fighting game finds their audience, and I hope Invincible
does. The same very politically
correct there item I like your I like your your navigation of
this topic. I'm not going to say anything
bad about a fighting, you know, that's how we got me into the
DNF situation. What about the Street Fighter
Six situation never say anything about about a fighting game
I'll. Never say anything bad.
About the only bad thing I've ever said about any fighting
game is only been DNF, but that game is actually terrible.
I had way more fun with DNF than than a lot of other fighting
games that have come out recently.
I had a lot more fun with DNF. I know you ate DNF, but DNF was
one of the most fun bubble gum fighting games I've ever played,
man. You just don't want to chew on
it for too long, you know? Just get your fill and then when
it's done, you're done, you know, move on.
All right, Speaking of fighting games, in their reception,
Strive 2 point O man, you've been playing it.
I haven't checked out the update but I've been seeing a lot of
the discussion around it and it's like by and large what are
the most well received major updates of fighting in title
I've seen in years. I've been playing a lot of 2.0
and I've got to say that was exactly what I was expecting.
They fixed a lot of the Jinx stuff.
I do have a few critiques, but overall the characters feel more
new and refreshed. A lot of characters got new
tools to play with. You know, testament got double
stayed and there's a lot more nuance to the characters now and
it kind of like upgraded their kit to you know, give every
character something this just do more exciting to do.
There are some bugs. Testaments crow doesn't work
right. Eno's dive kick is punishable
and hit happy chaos was an infinite.
But aside from all that stuff, it's pretty good.
I I do think a lot of people have been having fun.
I've been watching a lot of, you know, streamers play and they'll
be like, yo, I like this character and, you know, just
having genuine fun playing a fighting game.
The only there's been a couple of of people who have provided
negative feedback to the patch. So I want to get your
perspective on this. I did see, you know, maybe a
couple Potemkin players talking about the changes because
Potemkin his his command grab had armor before and also beat
throws and it no longer has either of those properties.
So I saw some people, you know, saying maybe that was too far.
What do you what do you think? About that, I have seen some
people, and this is also what I was scared of with a couple of
nerves. And then like you're back to
grappler versus zoner. Axel, funny enough, is probably
one of the better characters in the game right now.
And you know, when the games get slower and less degenerate, the
zoner is going to prosper. So I have seen that complaint
that Axel's getting too good. And you know, Axel might kind of
hurt a lot of the characters because now it's like, hey, if I
lose to Axel, I might just lose because I can't interact with
them. So that's that's a bad thing.
You know, I I will say that's not great.
You know, maybe strong system mechanics help dodge that.
But that's just how fighting games are in my opinion.
That's that goes always goes back to ask me how fighting
games are. I can't really do anything about
that. Right, right.
So if you run into an Axel you should just rage quit.
Oh my God. Well, it's.
Learn from the invincible people man.
Just dodge the bad matchup. What are you doing?
That's just like I, I can't get mad at that because that's just
how fighting games were. If you're playing Axel and you
know, people shouldn't play Axel because they're bad people, but
that's, that's I can't, that's the genre.
That's the shitty job where we play.
Very true, very true. The other thing I saw was at
first a lot of people were celebrating the redesign for
Happy Chaos. However, it seemed like, you
know, there was an infinite discovered, which might be like
a bug that they should address. But then people were starting to
even left in himself and starting to change his tune.
Like actually, this rework is still broken in in these XYZ
ways and it's still top tier. So at first everyone's like,
yes, the evil is dead. Oh, wait, no, it's just back in
another form. So can you walk through like the
the redesign and what people thought it was going to end up
and where it is now? Because it's been a weird thing
to observe from the outside looking in.
Well, I think I still think Happy Chaos is probably weaker
than the original patch. I do think the infinite
obviously has to go, but. Can you explain the?
Infinite really quick like how does that operate a little bit
if happy chaos puts you in the corner?
Well, they changed his reload. So now if his if he reloads
once, like it'll reload all his bullets and he has a new move
where like there's a like a portal of bullets around you.
So if he gets to like a perfect spacing, he'll just like
infinite block stream you because he'll just shoot, reload
and you're just like stuck in the corner and you'll just be
stuck there for like infinite block stream.
You try to jump, you'll get hit, and if you try to move you'll
just get it. That's from the new move they
added for him for this patch. So the new move uses all his
bullets and then he can reload during it and then do it again.
Oh, well, that seems like an oversight, yeah.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying. It's like to me, I, I, but I
like stuff like that because it's like they've Arks is
already addressed. It's like, okay, yeah, you know,
we probably shouldn't have done that, but we'll probably they're
going to patch this out maybe like sometime next week.
I'd rather have, oh, maybe we maybe we fucked up, maybe
somewhere, but at least they'll go back on it.
I'd rather have those kind of changes.
Getting your Street Fighter fixed agenda and hear one way or
the other. You rather the developers swing
for the fences and then clean up after rather than like not
actually take a swing in anything at all, right?
Right. It's a cool new move.
I didn't expect an infinite to happen, but it's a cool new
move, but it's also I feel like a lot of his like toxic stuff
like when I one thing I hated fighting with happy chaos is
he'll jump to the top of the screen and then when you try to
anti air him, you'll shoot, but you can no longer shoot in the
air because that was annoying and it'll be your anti air and
then you'll get a full combo. So they fix that but he's less
toxic to fight. I do think there are some things
that he got in that's really strong with the new move, and I
think the new move is doing a lot, same with Nago.
But overall, I think the addition of new moves is cool.
You get a new toy to play with. Yeah.
OK. So you think overall, even
though he's not totally dead, it was so move in the right
direction. Like it's less toxic overall.
Interesting. Yeah, 'cause I saw, I saw both
like, Oh my God, he's dead. Oh my God, he's broken.
And then maybe now it's like somewhere in the middle, like
he's really good but but not as broken as it used to be.
But overall I've been seeing mostly really positive
reception. People are even making comments
about how different the playing experience was.
Like Strive, I think recently it's it's peak 24 hours or
something like the 11 K concurrent player count on
Steam, which is really high for a fighting game.
How many years? It's five years now, right?
Yeah, five years. Five years in for a non Street
Fighter, non Tekken title to reach that level of concurrent
player count way beyond tech and eight on Steam only being
rivaled by Street Fighter. And even then, like that's only
Street Fighter six down because of Japan like that.
That's beyond Street Fighter 5 numbers by far.
Those are that's really big for a fighting him to have that many
concurrent players. So there seems to be like a like
a rejuvenation from this patch in the community.
I, I think the patch did a lot of what people were complaining
about. I think like, I know it's kind
of like, you know, that doesn't happen anymore, but they took.
What throw? Throw PRC is gone.
You know, the matches are a lot less steam rolling because of
when you break the wall with super, you get a hard knock
down, but you're not getting, you know, infinite positive
bonus. So they fix that.
Now there's kind of a mind game can't wall slump anymore.
Like a lot of the things that people were just like this is
kind of dumb or this kind of stupid is kind of just gone.
There are, like I said, to me, I feel like it's a huge step in
the right direction. There are a lot of bugs.
Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of bugs.
There's a lot of bugs I can complain about.
But everything else is like when you actually play the game, it
feels feels nice, feels good. When's the last time we've seen
a big balance update that was very positively received?
Like when's I I? The last one I can really think
of is like it. Obviously Street Fighter bias.
I'm thinking like Champion edition season 4 Street Fighter
5. I don't know if you've that's
not to the scale of a two point O, but like the late balance
patches for Street Fighter Five, but has there been anything for
Tekken or any other title in? Recent years AVBVFZ season 3 but
that's kind of it. I'm trying to actually think
that was the one where they got rid of the fuzzy like people
getting like snap back. Loops snap meta, Yeah, yeah.
They got rid of that, but that's kind of the only other game I
can really think of. Like 6 hasn't really had that.
Tekken 8. Tekken 8 hasn't really had that.
This to me might be giving credence to the idea that, you
know, maybe the people crave the bundled update.
We, we've shifted as consumers to the season the, the drip feed
of seasonal changes. But they they finally took this
moment to be like, OK, big update, 2 point O version
change, boom, massive changes which we haven't seen in a long
time. I feel like fighting games
actually need to go back to you know, normal games have this but
like expansions like just give me an expansion I don't want
like here's 1 character is this Do I like this character?
No OK I'm never playing them yes OK is this character meta
relevant? Yes.
OK and then I could keep playing them.
No, Oh, I'm not playing this character still, I'd rather just
have an expansion of just like oh, here's 4 to 6 characters big
update play with this. You got six months, 6 to 12
months to have fun with this and you know, we'll see you when you
we see. You, I kind of agree with that,
but also it's not contradictory to your position about Street
Fighter Six where you want them to move quicker.
No, but they put it no, because if I got six, if I got 4 to 6
characters every six months and it was like a big actual massive
change. And not like, oh, hey, we made
this one move plus one to zero and like that that's nothing.
But like Strive change. I think there's like 5 or 6
system mechanic changes that they did as well, not just
character. So yeah, but this is after five
years. So you you still want more
frequent changes, but we still got, we got wild assault in
between that, we got full screen bursts in between that we still
got a lot other system mechanic changes.
OK, right, 'cause I'm just trying to draw the comparison
of, you could almost make the argument that doing a big, a
bundled version change and no changes in between would mean a
whole year of nothing changing. But then it's funny, I think
about that for Street Fighter Six, that's what they do
anyways. They they do, they do a year of
no, no changes and then they barely do changes also at the
end of the year. So that's the problem, 'cause
like even 5 was like that when St. what was it?
Street Fighter Five season what 1 to 2 was like it was nothing.
And then like when Season 2 came out, it was like, wow, season 2
is pretty big and that that's all, that's all I really want.
It's just Six hasn't had the wow, that was really big change
yet. Yeah, I mean, there's been some
impactful changes. I think the Perry perfect Perry
changes were decent. But in general, it's been mostly
pretty stagged in. And we, we, we, we don't got to
go down that debate for the 10 billionth time.
We'll, we'll spare the listeners from us talking in circles about
3 by 6 balance changes. But it's really interesting to
see how positive the reception has been for the the Strive
community. So shots to strive players, man,
Hopefully you're enjoying playing the game.
And I'm I'm interested in seeing like the next big major for
that. Just to see, you know, a lot of
people returning to the game and being excited about playing.
It should be fun to watch. Flashback actually was just this
weekend and Red Ditto went over Jonathan Tenney.
But there was a lot of like, new characters.
The top 8 felt super refreshing. Grand finals were still Red
Ditto winning, which, you know, not really surprising but yeah,
there's like 2 bed man's axle uni because a lot more, you
know, varied character. Oh really?
Yeah. Interesting.
Yeah. OK, well shout out Strive
community, enjoy the updates. Hey, we'll get right back to the
discussion, but first, I'm proud to thank today's sponsor,
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OK, back to the discussion. Speaking of updates, we do have
some changes to the Capcom Pro Tour.
We got the 2026 Capcom Pro Tour season update and not too much
of A shake up. I mean, there are some minor
differences from the previous season.
I'll give a quick rundown of some of the changes.
First off, of course, World Warrior still the main way
people or qualify flying to the the Capcom Pro Tour Capcom Cup
24 players from the world Warrior.
This time though, they mostly got rid of entirely the concept
of a super region where a super region had two players
qualifying from that region where all the other regular
regions had one. The only super region that
remains is Japan. Every other region gets one
player only qualifying and that's always a big a big point
of contention. And I didn't really like the
Super region addition because it led to a lot of infighting.
I felt like because people would fight over, oh, my region
deserves a super region, my region deserves 2 spots, and
your region doesn't. And then it got really weird,
like last year, there's only three super regions, China,
Japan and UK, which was fucking random because UK has far less
entrance. Like if you were trying to scale
it based on anything, you might think the number of entrance to
the tournament. China's up there for sure and
it's a huge country. And then Japan of course has
like 5X the next biggest region in terms of player entrance or
maybe more, sometimes 10X. So it's, it made sense for
Japan. And then UK was like, huh, like
like they got a lot of good players there, don't get me
wrong, but they don't have that many entrance compared to many
other regions of the world. So it led to like bickering
about that. So I'm kind of on board with
their only being Japan for a super region.
I don't know. What do you think about that?
I think any E should still be a super region.
We have what, 44 Capcom champions?
If you count meta twice, you got like well, 3 EVO champions I
think. If you count MENA twice, you got
like 3 Capcom Cup. Yeah you got like 3 EVO runner
up. Like what are we?
What are we saying? Naes should be a super region.
See what I'm saying? See.
See what I'm saying? The bickering that it becomes,
this whole mudslinging and piss measuring contest between each
region about who deserves. More contrast is true.
It's true. You get what I'm saying, man.
Like it leads to this weird it it makes it feel instead of like
a unifying force, it makes it feel like a force to kind of
mudslinging to other regions. That's that's I've grown to feel
that way a little bit about the Super region concept because
it's not equally distributed. And so I, I kind of vibe with
that change. They also added Chile as a
region. So I shout out to Chile.
You know, they're, they're showing some support to blahs,
the new mega star in the the FGC in his region.
So they were added. So they're being pulled away
from the South America. What are they South America West
region or no, they're S bigger east.
So they're being pulled out of that and they have their own
region now, so shout out to Chile.
But there's still some issues with that.
Of course. A lot of players were
complaining from North Africa. Big Bird was talking on Twitter
about how, you know, Egypt is being lumped in with the Middle
East, but it's a giant geographical region and their
connections don't even work. And so basically like Capcom's
kind of neglecting their geography lessons for the Middle
East and North Africa, and they're making them play like 1
bar 240 Ms. connections that don't work.
And sometimes they can't even connect with each other.
They have to flip a coin to decide who progresses in the
rackets because the IT literally just cannot connect the players
and in North Africa as a whole still doesn't have any way to
qualify. So there's still parts of the
world that aren't being served fairly from the World Warrior.
So there could be some improvements there, but I would
say this is a small step in the right direction.
But it's weird they don't just like just make another spot.
Get rid of the Japan super region and give you know North
Africa their spot. Easy fix.
True, true. They did.
They did one for Chile. Can they make one more?
Yeah. I, I, I do think this, this
program has to be a lot more egalitarian, like, just like
very equal. Otherwise it causes like a lot
of people feeling the left out. I think that's that's the one
downside that the World Warrior has has cropped up is this
feeling of neglect from certain parts of the world.
But that said, we also have more players qualifying from offline,
16 offline players from CPT This time there's going to be 9
tournaments. So there's still the first place
winner will auto qualify to Captain Cup and then the rest of
the placings will give points to the CPT leaderboard and then
seven players will place from the CPT leaderboard if they
don't get that first place position.
So those tournaments are going to be EVO Japan, Summer Breaker,
Blink, Respawn back on there, EVO Vegas, and then new to the
CPT for the first time in a while.
They might have been CPT back in the day.
Bam, Bam 16 in Australia is back on the map.
So it's cool to see Australia be back on there.
I mean, there used to be Bam. What was the other big
Australian tournament that used to be pretty big for Street
Fighter? It was something Melbourne.
There, there's Melbourne Showdown, I believe there's
Shadowlou Showdown is what I'm thinking of.
There was something, I don't remember that there's a
Melbourne tournament, there's also Shadow Loose Showdown, but
it's cool to see band back on CPT as a premier status.
So it's awesome to see. Then we have CEO and Evo France,
so we got 3 Evos already for the premieres.
And then there's two more tournaments that that that are
TBD to be determined, which is kind of random, not done yet.
I I think that's strange because like usually, you know, people
are obviously planning, but there's also no tournament in
like Europe. I mean, I know they are kings of
the world, they have Evo France, but that's still just an Evo.
It's not like a in home grown tournament basically in Europe.
I mean this. Mix up our UFA basically, right?
Well, this is what we talked about, right?
Evo is going to, it's going global and they're going to be
suffocating out all these tourist spots and, and
centralizing a lot of the action.
Like we're going to keep seeing that Evo France has already
taken over from the mix up and, and UFAUFA used to be the CPT
premier. They're not even on there
anymore, right? Like that's, that's going to
happen. Also, what's missing is, is
still no tournament in South America.
I I feel like that's something that's got to change.
The pre COVID CPT in Street Fighter five era, you know,
there were so many ranking events.
There was tournaments all over the world, including tournaments
in South America. There's a lot of offline action
all over the world. A lot of these regional events
and major events have, of course, just dried up the way
the economy is going, the the centralizing of the events in
the community. Unfortunately, all of these
events didn't survive. But I feel like, yeah, like we
should get a this, this, this list, while they added Australia
is cool. It's very safe.
It's what we've had. Of course, I love like Blink,
Respawn being on there. But I do feel like it's time
like put something in South America, like Brazil would be
crazy, right? Like Brazil is one of the
largest CPT regions and you know, they have so many strong
players and they're, they're one of the biggest regions in
general for Street Fighter. So I just think that there would
be something great there. I like, I like that, for
example, they did China last CPT season.
So we'll see what they do with the last two.
I think one of the ways they, they can help solve the issue
with the World Warrior. And you know, a lot of players,
they have trouble traveling. They they can't get access to
visas, they can't get into certain countries.
A way to help mitigate that is to just distribute the
tournaments a little bit more globally and and more easily
accessible to more players from around the world.
So like, you know, a lot of players in South America maybe
can't get visas. Other countries can come to
America, but a premiere there, man.
But but find a way to do something out there.
There's events that exist that they can do that.
So that that's one critique I would have.
But what, what do you think? Any any thoughts about the
tournament offline listing? I mean, I'm just, I'm very
curious to see where the 22 TBD tournaments are.
Like I said, I feel like 1 should still be, one could
obviously be in South America. I think that would be great.
But I'm still surprised. I feel like Europe's been kind
of getting disrespected, maybe shafted a bit because like I, I
get evos there. But I do think there's a lot of,
you know, Europe's nice and there's a lot of, you know, cool
events that could be had and could be out there.
You know, I know Europe's more of a Tekken region now more than
Street Fighter because I hear Tekken's way more popular there
from Harada. But even then, I still think, I
still think, you know, they got a Street Fighter told him it's
there. Yeah, I mean, France is still
huge for Street Fighter. It's one of the biggest Street
Fighter regions for sure. So they got evil France.
I mean, they do have evil France.
Like they, they got something. I mean, the weird thing is like
USA still has like 3 events. Like I, I, I'm as incredible as
all those events are. I I am starting to get the sense
of like, yeah, it's kind of with so few spots to go and the state
of the world right now, I'm like, you know.
I'm a breaker and CEO though. That's really two of the
greatest one I've been to. I never have a bad time when I
go there. That's one they are in terms of
prestige, quality and and delivering for the the players
like they they're the two best maybe.
Yeah, exactly. So like I, I, I think it's
unfortunate for the tour that it's so centralized in the USI.
That's why I think like hopefully we can find ways to
add more events in general. I just want more offline.
I want more events and more equally distributed.
Globally, all I'm scared of is I hope the two TBD tournaments are
just not EVO. Two Evos, like two different
Evos somewhere else you go, oh, is you know, Evo Singapore and
Evo I. Don't know.
Well, I don't think those are happening.
I I'm, I'm a little fuzzy on the schedule.
I don't think those are happening this year.
I think it's 2027. Those will kick in.
So right, yeah, 'cause there there's something that EVO
Legends event with Menardi Daigo.
Where the hell is that? It must, that must be at EVO
France or EVO Japan. Excuse me, but I think they're
kicking in the actual EVO tournaments expanding starting
next year. What I expect is some kind of
CPT event like CPT Chengdu right?
Like latching onto something? I don't know, we'll see how they
settle that. But there is more offline events
though of course. They also have esports World Cup
2026. They specify that as a special
tournament, not as part of the CPT.
There's only first place from that will qualify.
They don't get points for the other placements.
Probably because it's like the single limb format so the point
distribution would be messed up compared to a normal double limb
in top 8. And we already have 5 qualifiers
to Captain Cup already. Of course, Captain Cup 12
champion Sahara, he's qualified straight into Capcom Cup 13 and
then Street Fighter League World Championships.
They're still qualifying them into the Capcom Cup, which was
kind of a blow up last year because all of Good 8 Squad got
eliminated in the first round. And even Kolano, who was like,
you know, the star, I would say of Good 8 squad, the MVP was
like, oh, sorry for slacking off and not going to tournaments
last year. So I qualified, I'm going to
lock in. That's what I kind of think is a
bad thing too. You're kind of just letting,
well yeah, you're letting people slack all.
I don't know if like Sahara, Daigo, Daigo Taquito, Futo or
you know, Lashar's gonna go to any events this year cause
already qualified. No reason to, really.
Travel. Yeah, we'll see.
Like you mentioned, that was team rejects.
Daigo, Taquito, Lashar, Futo, they all qualified for Captain
Cup. I would I would expect most of
those people to go. I, I get the impression that I
would Daigo tends to travel as like his duty as being an
ambassador. I think he feels that way.
We saw the Shard do CEO and Comma Breaker back-to-back after
qualifying. You know, I, I, I, I would be, I
would suspect of any of the players auto qualify, those four
would be among the most I trust to still show up a little bit.
I so I was going to, I, I don't know, I don't think Sahara
really travel that much and I actually don't think maybe I
don't think Fudo would travel that much either, to be honest.
I mean, he still went to, I mean, I guess maybe once he
qualified, he didn't go as much, but he still went to EVO, yeah.
Evo's Evo. Well, he showed up a little bit
and Sahara, Sahara, after he qualified from UFA, he still
went to OR he still entered all the World Warriors.
He was still beating ass in the World Warrior.
That's that's entirely different, but he still shows
away from your home. But he's not trying to hide
tech, you know what I'm saying? He wasn't like trying to
completely go, you know, hermit mode and be reclusive and hide,
right? Like if anything, it's like more
like a MENA Rd. MENA Rd. is a bit more like
reclusive, like kind of picks and shoots when he wants to show
up and show, show off his tech, right.
Those players, I, I, I don't think they, they're more likely,
I would suspect to put a bit more effort to be public facing.
At least I hope. But one point here though, Daigo
and Capcom Cup. This is the first time Daigo has
qualified for a Capcom Cup since 20/19.
He he did qualify in 2020, but that was the season that got
cancelled because of COVID. So he did the season finals
exhibition first to five set. But we haven't seen Daigo in an
offline Capcom Cup since 2019 and he's officially in maybe
maybe because he got a little bit of a help from his friends,
especially Lachar over there, but he's in man.
Is that not a big deal? I guess I mean, I hope Daigo
does well in Capcom Cup. I guess question mark, I guess
Lashar is not going to be there to kind of pick up the slack.
But you know, Daigo's there. I, I, I hope Daigo does
something in the next Capcom Cup.
We won't know until what 2027 anyway.
And. Don't you think this is a big
deal though? No, come on.
Not really. No, no, no.
I know. I don't think so.
You've told me directly on this podcast, I think that if Daigo
was in Capitol Cup, that would like double the viewership.
It's pay-per-view now. I can't even watch Daigo.
Yeah, well, he no one's saying he's going to make that top
eight top 16 anyways. I'm saying for group stages, you
know. I got to watch Daigo in the
groups. I feel like.
I feel like the CPT kind of like the the interest in CPT has been
down since they announced pay-per-view.
They didn't say anything yet, but even now I'm like, I'm
already guessing the next CPT is going to be pay-per-view.
Yeah, I mean, I still haven't watched top 16.
I don't even know what happened to top 16.
I only know Sahara 1. Yeah, yeah, fucking terrible.
I mean, it almost was stupid talking about this shit when
they're just going to do pay-per-view.
It makes me a little, it makes me really upset because the
Capital Cup should be a big deal.
It should be a big deal. I, I hope they don't do
pay-per-view, but I I still suspect them to do pay-per-view.
They haven't really shown any signs of not doing it.
Listen, here's my fantasy, all right?
Daigo. MENA Rd., Daigo.
Pulls off the win. 10-8 something crazy.
He's locked in like fucking a madman.
Like for Capcom Club, he's ready to go.
Capcom realizes the error in their ways.
Cancels pay-per-view. Daigo's in top 16.
That's it. The world needs to see this, all
right. They unleash it to the masses on
Twitch, on YouTube, Billy Billy, TikTok Live, whatever it is.
It's out there. And then we get to see one last
dance. You know this is it.
This is the This is the Michael Jordan documentary in real time
for Daigo. This is this is probably going
to be Daigo's last Capcom Cup. I don't think Daigo's going to
stop playing. And who's to say just doesn't
get carried again next year? Cal Cal Co, are they running
back with that team and Lashar still doing Lashar thing?
It's still practically the same. I still think Lashar could just
win a lot of the time. That's the you know, that's the
beauty of Street Fighter League, that you know your favourites
can still get a Cal Co, but they're on the right team.
I guess. I guess.
You know, you know, if if I was on Street Fighter League and I
had a team of Punk Do and MENA, I feel like I would be in Capcom
Cup that. Would be a pretty good team.
That would be a good team. I would never play though.
There would be no batch if they want a Manon, yeah.
Exactly. I would never play that.
And I'll be, I'll be right there, biggest cheerleader.
This game's great. I'll be watching.
Hey, keep this. Exactly.
Keep the spirits high, man. We need a good cheerleader on
every team. All right, let's let's see how
Daigo does in Capcom Cup. That is pretty interesting.
Other than that they announced the prizing.
Man, the prizing is pretty pathetic.
So they still are doing the $1,000,000 for first place for
the Capcom Cup. And of course I don't think we
have the exact breakdown of the top 8 prizing, but you know it's
going to fall off a Cliff right? After that, the Capcom Cup
rising total is $1,297,000, so 1,000,000 of that goes to 1st
place. So the rest of them are fighting
for the $297,000. So it's going to be super top
heavy again. But beyond that, Capcom Pro Tor
2026, the prize bonuses that they're giving to the premiers,
first place premier, if you win a combo breaker, a CEO Evo.
How much is Capcom adding to the prize pool, $2000?
Yeah, well, that's for first place, a lot of money.
Sorry, I said Evo there. Capcom is giving no money for
the evos. Let me correct that.
Evo's doing their own thing. They're only doing that for
like, the comma Breakers, the blink, responds the CEOs. 2000
for first place, 1500 for 2nd, 1000 for 3rd and 700 for 4th and
nothing beyond that. So that's the CPT bonus that
they're giving out. So just to be clear, this is
going to be on top of the normal price pot.
People pay $10 to enter the tournament.
They if 1000 people enter, you know, there's, there's $10,000
into the prize pool. So they, we'll divvy that up
amongst the top players and then add to that the CPT prize bonus.
But this has been declining more and more and more every year.
And The funny thing is now the World Warrior Regional finals
for the offline tournaments, it's the same pricing for 1st
through 4th, except 5th placers and 7th placers also get money.
So you actually have a higher chance they're giving away more
money for the World Warrior Regional finals than the offline
CBT premieres. You want to hear something else
look crazy? And I never thought, I never
thought about it till you said it.
It's I think I got more money for getting 5th in my World War
regional final than I got for getting 5th at Cream City.
And I think it's the same money now.
So you'll actually get more money if you get like 5th or
7th. And if you just stay at home and
play online, then if you go and you know, beat some of the
world's best, you may not get top 4, but if you get like 5th
or 7th, you actually got to get less money.
Well, you're you're losing money because you got the this isn't
covering the flight or the hotel.
Yeah, yeah, obviously. Or the registration expenses.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the the the state of esports
for the actual tour is insane. It's all top heavy.
But also the big take away here is the ecosystem for Street
Fighter E Sports is in the dumpsters as far as I'm
concerned for being a tournament player.
Like this doesn't exist anymore. It's just it's all about just
the check at the end of Captain Cup $1,000,000 headline to
advertise for Capcom. There's no sustainability to be
found anywhere else and this is just a it's over.
It's how I feel in that sense. However, what's not over is
Street Fighter League. They upped the pricing for
Street Fighter League from 100K for the 1st place team to 400 K,
and I think the minimum pricing now is 100K per team that
qualifies into the world, and it was like 30 or 40K before.
So the pricing for Street Fighter League is going up and
up and up, highlighting once again Capcom's focus, I think,
on pivoting this all away from this open bracket.
Anyone can enter, anyone can qualify as a type of tour to
this more controlled top down Capcom esports product, which
provides a little bit more sustainability for players who
are essentially employed for a season.
And and Japan, once again, you know, they get salary some of
them and they're actually employed by their teams.
Teams might pay franchising fees.
Capcom even sometimes gives teams money to help employ the
players like they're investing a lot from the street for the
league product and it shows in the pricing commitments because
that's the only place for pricing has gone up forexed
compared to every other aspect of the pricing which has gone
either stagnant or down South St. for the league is once again
I think that's the only path forward that Capcom is is
committing to. I I get, I really think Capcom
just has this idea of like not open, not open bracket
tournaments are bad. But if you, if you're
controlling everything, you get to do whatever you want.
You get your own ads, you get your own placement, you're
everything's controlled. If you know anything Capcom
related is ours. I'm not fighting for, you know,
the last game. If you know another game has
just as many entrants. So I I get it.
I do think Street Fighter League is probably their.
I don't want to say their way out but like their smart way to
pivot, especially with how big it is in Japan.
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's incredibly successful in Japan
and they're probably actually going to potentially make some
money off of that in Japan. And, you know, they need a team
for the Japanese team to beat up.
So why not invest in the global, like throw them a bone elsewhere
because they need, you know, they need Menardi to have a team
for the team Japan to beat in the end.
So I I think they're going to continue to invest in that
direction. And it makes sense.
Yeah. Like they don't have to worry
about their Street Fighter top 8 being delayed because Smash
Ultimate is running over, you know, whatever it might be.
And, and so I kind of get it from a business perspective,
just having control of the ecosystem, but it makes me
definitely sad to see. I I still feel like by far I
prefer the offline open bracket format.
And Capcom, I think is slowly trying to just pull away from
controlling that and getting more and more of that influence
over to like Saudi Evo E Sports World Cup.
Like that's becoming more and more what's going to take over
that aspect of sort of like the in singles tournaments.
And like just that will be what's feeding into Capcom Cup
So they can have that one moment.
But what they want to really invest in and growing is, is the
team aspect. You know, I super out of left
field, you know, spinfoil hat theory.
Maybe they're doing Street Fighter League because they hear
everyone say yo games random, Johnny Donuts beat Taquito,
whatever, Johnny Donuts beat Daigo.
But if it's only Street Fighter League player, obviously if you
got in the Street Fighter League, you're good enough.
But if there's no more open bracket tournaments, there's no
more upsets. No more upsets means game less
random. Game less random equals more
people playing. Boom, fix it, everything's fine.
Street Fighter League's probably the better way to do that.
I agree with you're you're going a little too extreme.
It's it's people don't care about the randomness factor of
the skill level of the game beyond like you, me and a few
random nerds. But you're on to something for
sure. It's all about controlling the
optics. If Daigo is consistently showing
up week after week, that's far better for the retention and
viewership then Daigo getting upset by a relatively unknown
player and then that unknown player losing then to another
good player right after. Right?
Like, like we talk about upsets and I, we've mentioned very many
times on the show, upsets are good for a moment, but they have
to carry the storyline through to the finish line of an event
for it to have weight that carries the viewer's retention
across the entire moment. If it's just an upset that
happens and then it's over, it's a flash in the pan and it's it's
it's interesting as a side note, but it doesn't carry two people
being engaged because people like to know the stakes of why
they're watching an event. And you build that by, you know,
having some kind of way to judge a player's level based on the
known data points. So whoever caused that upset, if
they keep showing up or they go all the way to the finish line
like a blah storyline, then it's like, holy shit, they're going
to do it. That carries weight.
But if you cause one upset early on and don't pull through, it
ends up just hurting the star power of the later points in the
bracket, and eventually that can lead to potentially less
engagement from a larger audience.
That's saying that's the way it should be.
I'm just saying that that's a fact, that's a reality.
That's just how it operates for the casual viewers.
And having controlled ecosystem like this makes a lot of sense.
Like imagine if LeBron James could lose 1 game in the NBA and
he's eliminated for the rest of the season.
Is that going to help the viewer retention?
Like, wow, you know, this team over here beat LeBron James.
Wow, they're so good. No, they're not going to care
anymore. They're just going to be like,
oh, my star players out for the season.
I'm no longer engaged. Yeah, my team's out.
I'm I'm no longer engaged. So having a consistent season
format where no matter what you're stuck around, at least
for the regular season does help control the optics a lot more.
So I do see why if you're going to invest money, it's a more
stable way to tweak the variables as you go versus open
bracket where you have no control of what results at the
top level. You don't know who's going to
win that, if they're going to have any star power or whatever,
and it's a bit more variable. I so love the open brackets and
I think it's more hype overall for me.
But I can get why Capcom as a emotionless business play would
go more in Street Fighter League's direction because they
can control it and that's what we're seeing first hand.
Any any other thoughts on that? Any you got to.
Be on the street for the league team.
That's the way to go, man. You're trying to get sponsored.
I mean, that's obviously the best thing.
That would be the best way. But like I said, it's not even a
real player cut path to get on the Street Fighter league.
I just feel like yeah, it's fives and good, good feelings.
There's no there's no clear path.
There's no like a tryout, no, like a combine.
You know, you go to you know, you get drafted in the NBA.
It's a combine for NFL, but here it's just there's.
A combine for Street for the league, but no one gives a shit.
I forgot about that combine. There literally is a combine.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. All that does is require for the
captains to force their players that they're going to pick to
enter. That's essentially all it is.
It it doesn't change anything. I I think what's required to be
on a Stripper League team is to not play Manon.
That's that's that's the requirement.
So I don't mean you got to get on that.
There was that actually, I think the only the only Manon player
I've ever seen on any Street Fighter league.
I think it's been Tashi Kala, actually.
Yeah, not not even to Europe. Yeah, not a popular pick, man.
All right, well, that's it for the CPT updates.
We have one final story to get to this episode.
Ultimate Marvel versus Capcom 3. Is it back?
We had the TNS #200 Max trying to bring it back, man.
You want to break this one down. It was never gone, that's the
thing. Yeah, I think that.
I think that's what this this TNS showed, right?
Yeah, I mean, I entered the TNS, you know, on Friday.
It was TNS 200 for, you know, Marvel, 3200 weeks of Marvel
Three. Yeah, I think there was like 200
plus entrance for it. I want to say like 2-13.
But yeah, everyone was playing Marvel.
And then right before grand finals, Max had a video that was
saying hey, there's going to be 10K bounty for whoever gets the
rollback running for the greatest fighting game ever
made. Yeah, that's sick.
That's sick. I I hope somebody picks it up.
But at the same time, rollback's hard, man.
Rollback ought to be hard for that game.
Yeah. Yeah.
So to set some context why that would be a big deal in the 1st
place, we can like draw parallels to Melee and also
maybe explain a little bit of like how NBC3 Online even works
right now. The reason why TNS works is
because they invest their own money and.
And an infrastructure of AWS servers that are hosting the
game and players will connect to those servers using Parsec.
And they have multiple server locations all across the country
so that both players, player A and player B1's in California,
one's in New York, maybe the server will be in Texas.
Like whatever's kind of central point to them to 'cause equal
input delay to both players, but it's still input delay base.
And they have to like pay money to run these AWS servers and
multiple of them at the same time to have these players
connect from all over the country to play each other.
And so that's a big effort that TNS put on to be able to host
their events. And that's not really like a
feasible solution for every player to play each other.
You can play anyone with Parsec right now, but it'll be like,
you know, the host will have no input delay and the distance
that the connecting player has to deal with will impact their
experience. And it's not just like a simple
baked in client experience. Slippy for melee.
Slippy, the mod was developed and that basically built from
the ground up a client to do online matchmaking, even for
Melee with rollback net code. And they built this up to have
more complex matchmaking, have a rank system.
And I think the base version of that is free.
But for matchmaking and all that, there is like a, a fee to
pay to help support the development from Slippy himself
because that's a huge undertaking to to implement that
rollback net code. And that revitalized again the
melee community and led to the next evolution of that game and,
and the resurgence of the active player base over COVID
especially. So bringing that to Marvel could
mean the next evolution of this game being alive where suddenly
anyone can play anyone all the time and make that a reality.
But like you mentioned, doing rollback for this game is hard
because rollback requires all these save States and being able
to predict the inputs and, and rollback to it.
This is not a 10K dollar job really.
This is someone who if they were to do it, we're already going to
do it or wanted to do it and we're passionate about it.
And this is like a tip because this is a full time software
engineering like Rockstar type of job to pull this off.
Because this would be PS3 Xbox 360 level emulation which is
still like on the frontier of emulation.
And it would be really difficult to achieve but could potentially
make NBC3A title like Melee which a decade plus later 1520
years later still being played competitively and and getting
new people into the game even this late in his lifespan.
I think for me, I would love if that happened.
I'd really don't think it's feasible because even I think
like the newest fighting game that's gotten rolled back has
been like what Tekken 3 and I think Tekken 3 was like on the
PS2 or PS1, I don't remember. But it's it's just so hard when
you start getting to like the 360 PS3 error because like
there's so much, there's so much more movement rollback for A tag
fighter at that. It's not it's not the same as
making rollback for a 2D fighter.
So I don't know, I wanted to believe it.
I wish there was like a way, as you know, a fan of the game to
put in my own money or make the pot even bigger to incentivize
somebody to do it. Because if Marvel three got
rollback, I'm not playing any other fighting game.
I, I got what I wanted. I, I, it's, it's over.
That's all I really want. But I know it's it's just too
much of an ask. Dude yeah Marvel three with an
actual if they built it up to like a slippy level mod with
actual matchmaking and a ranked system would be insane.
I I do think it would have a actual surgeons because we've
already seen that in TNSA. Lot of the best players in in
the NA Marvel 3 scene right now are like young kids who were
babies when the game was released.
Like they learned this later in life when the game was past its
prime in the offline FGC. Circuit I I think one good thing
that Marvel 3 has that, you know, a lot of other games kind
of don't have there's no one like really downplaying Marvel
are being like, hey, this game sucks or some guy making a
YouTube video about this, because everyone who's still
playing Marvel is just so passionate and they just they
love the game because that's the only reason you're still playing
this many years later. So, and anyone whoever acts to
play marvel, I want to get better at Marvel.
All the Marvel players or even the community is so welcoming on
board and hey, I'll teach you how to play.
Hey, you want to run some matches because you got to get
any matches any way we have can at offline events.
Even when I'm at offline brackets, you know, I was at
Frosty's. I'm always just playing Marvel
casuals because I can play strive at home.
I can play Street Fighter six at home.
Marvel's kind of the only time I, I mean, this is the only time
I get to play Marvel. Right.
Yeah, that's that's an interesting point you made about
like the positive and passionate community.
It's very rare to see that with a lot of fighting game titles,
with a lot of the Street Fighter titles.
I think like the last time we saw that was like Street Fighter
Three, because even with Street Fighter Four, I think Street
Fighter 4 has a lot of positive reception.
People love that game, but that was already Co opted by the E
sports era and everyone moved on to the next title and with
Street Fighter Five, everyone moved on to Street Fighter Six.
So I don't really feel like you have that same vibe.
There's still like hardcore Street Fighter Four audience
where they're pushing for maintaining that game at that
sort of level and having like this really visible passionate
scene. It's still more successful than
I would say 5 of course, in terms of like old school revival
and there are tournaments that go out there.
I've been, I just played at the Broiler Leagues tournament at
Texas Showdown. I almost made top 8IN that
tournament. I didn't know how to play.
I forgot how to play. It was crazy.
But so like there's still events like that.
But Marvel three really stands out to me as the most modern
newest fighting game that has this sort of like retro.
I'm going to call it retro, retro, passionate community,
keeping it alive at that level. So it really does seem primed
for me to have that Melee. There's so many parallels to
Melee here where I really do feel like if they crossed that
barrier and got rollback, there would be a whole new generation
of players playing it. And the exposure from the
community's passion and you know, making content, things
like that, growing the scene and, and bringing people in
because of how passionate the scene is, I really do feel like
it could be successful in that. And we haven't seen that in the
core FGC in a long time. The the other thing is, I mean,
you know, shout outs to Tom, but every every Friday night, if I
like, if I'm even if I'm out, like if I'm out eating with my
friends or just hanging out, having a beer with my friends, I
always have TNS on my phone just watching because there's always
something exciting. Got to watch.
You know, Tong Southpaw, proxy, all of them just shooting the
shit and it's just it's good vibes and it's a good ass game,
man. It's just a good ass.
It's a good ass time every time. True.
True, it's like one of the last remnants of like that really old
school FGC hang out. Like watch some games, chill,
shoot the shit and just hang out.
Which it's been hard to replicate I think in the online
era. But TNS man should do it.
So shouts to Max for putting his money up for this.
We'll see if they actually make this more like a crowdfunding
thing. So I can see this going far
beyond 10K. I'm not sure if he touched upon
that. I feel like it'll.
I feel like this could reach like an insane amount, like an
insane amount of money if they really let everyone more more
people crowdfund are put into it.
Because like I said, I feel like so many people want more of a
rollback just so I can play my favorite fighting game and not
have to, you know, suffer playing on parsec.
Right. For sure.
Yeah. I think they might want to like,
gatekeep that until there's more hope or like a reality before
having to manage. Like, what if we have to refund
everybody? When do we do you know what I
mean? Like there's logistics there
that they want to probably keep under wraps and not blow up too
much until some some things become more apparently coming to
fruition. So we'll see where that goes.
I would I it's given me some hopium as well.
I think it'll be so sick for the community and I would love to
see the explosion of of competition and new players
joining the game because it is one of the the best games to
play and spectate. It's my favorite spectating
game. I think it's so awesome to watch
what people will cook up in that game even if you don't play.
Easily easily the best spectating fighting game.
It's one of the only fighting games I can still watch and
still be like Oh my God that was fucking sick.
It when when I watch, well, back in the day when I watched F
champ play like his, his like team would say, but it more
modern. Well, this not even really the
same modern. When I watch Ray Ray play, it is
just like it's poetry in motion, like no glaze because obviously
Ray Ray is from my scene. But like when I watch Ray play,
it's it's poetry. When I watch like liberal
Terminator play, it's it feels like it's poetry, like they're
writing poetry while playing. Backs.
No, you can glaze.
Glaze some Ray Ray. Don't worry, I'll support you.
That's my one of my favorite players too.
I always root for Ray Ray to lose his first two characters so
I can watch a Sentinel. That's my unfair bias.
Hey, Yeah, go ahead and lose your Magneto and you're doomed.
Don't worry about it. Let's get that Sentinel in
there. But yeah, we'll see where it
goes. Shout out to Max again.
Shout out to NBC three community and I think that's about it for
for this episode covered a lot of ground here.
Any words of wisdom to close it out?
Item We we've got a few episodes without getting your your final
words in. Well, my final words has got to
be if you're a rage quitter from early on, you know rage
quitting's OK if you don't do it, as long as you don't do it
against me. We we gotta I gotta get you off
the show item. You can't be endorsing rage
quitters on the show. All right?
I guess that's what we're ending on.
All right? Rage quitters just don't do it
against us. All right?
Throw me in there, please. All right, we're out of here.
Thanks for tuning in, guys. Peace out.
Take care. Thanks for making it to the end
of this Extra Trashy episode. There was a lot to cover, so
thanks for not rage quitting too soon here at the end of the
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