Discuss.
UFGT8 was the largest Skullgirls major thus far with 93 participants.
8 at the Break dropped it for lack of participants recently and it doesn’t seem like the number of players at WNF is increasing.
What do you think?
How’s your scene?
How’s the online scene?
My scene died week 2 or 3. What little interest it had was lost when people saw the combos / hornet bomber and what not unfortunately.
Honestly, if we could get everyone that has shown up one week and didn’t show up a different week to all arrive on the same day, I think we’d have about 20 or so. We have gotten new people; just not everyone has shown up consistently. Last week was a bit disheartening though D: I think people thought SG wasn’t happening because of the VF5 event. At least I hope that was the case. We’ll find out this week I guess.
Also, it would probably help if we were on Thursdays. That MvC3/KoF crowd seems more in tune with SG.
So that means they’re coming back after the patch?
There might be 4-5 people in Ireland who play - more realistically 2.
As with virtually every game, it tapered off and died pretty quick 
I’m hoping the patch with inject some life into it again.
In the Philippines I knew five other people playing online but they don’t seem to be playing anymore. Recently I only play with a friend locally because I can’t find opponents online. I’m hoping the patch will revive interest in the game.
I recently relocated and the new area that I live in has all of 2 players including myself
however online I can find matches whenever I want of varying calibur of players
I love the game and hope it does well but 95% of people I know who play fighting games just flat out hate the game or wont give it a chance since its not an established IP or because it plays like “a game that I dont like”
I’ve heard its too much like guilty gear or its too much like marvel 2 or its too much like blazblue on the negative side of the spectrum even though the majority of those people play those games and thus tried the game once or twice and decided to drop the game instantly with that excuse
new IP = no love for fanboys it seems 
from my personal experience the balance issues and combo system dont seem to be the excuses I’m hearing for disliking the game and thus not playing it
its somthing more along the lines of…I have been playing street fighter marvel blazblue/guiltygear kof tekken and soul calibur for years I know how to play those games and I have plenty of comp. I dont feel like learning somthing new because no one will be playing this game in 6 months anyway
really depressing TBH
So, you guys are surprised that a DLC game with 8 characters doesn’t have legs? The problem with trying to take the good parts out of other games, and put them into one game, is that, even if you do everything exactly right, all that you are giving people is something they have already seen before. Skullgirls doesn’t bring anything new to the table, it just collects a lot of things tournament players like into one package; it is high quality, just not groundbreaking or new, and that’s the problem.
Also, if people try Skullgirls and drop it, they aren’t making excuses, they just didn’t like the game; everyone is entitled to their own opinion, right?
I think it’s doing very well for a new indie IP. I’m hoping that the turnout of EVO side tournament and continued character additions will bring it to the Evo mains next year. People seem focused on the main EVO games at the moment even if they don’t intend to enter. Hopefully when people start seeing more gameplay from more tourneys they’ll start to catch on.
excuse is simply negative connotation for ones reasoning for doing somthing so yes they are making excuses
and I’m not suprised at all simply disappointed because I really enjoy the game and I want the scene to grow and flourish unfortunately that simply dosent look to be the case
My scene never even started in Edmonton. We had one guy with a long MvC2 background who went into the game hard in its first week and then stopped to train for KOF13 for EVO. We also had two other guys play for a bit but they weren’t very good and they’ve just given up to play other games.
The online scene is looking pretty abysmal. It is extremely difficult to find other people in ranked matches on both 360 and PSN. There are very few player match lobbies open. A lot of the people I friended just for Skullgirls do not play the game anymore. There are very few people playing on the Skullgirls SRK tag.
If we really want Skullgirls to last in the long run we need to rep it at events as much as possible. All of us should be going to every SG tourney in our local scenes, even if we are the only ones that show up. If you are fortunate enough to have a sizeable number of SG players in your area, you need to organize a ranbat and you need to stream it online. Also, more of us need to make the push to go to major tournaments and stream the game on our own terms, separate from the Spooky or LevelUp streams. I’m already going to EVO and when I’m done with that I’ll start saving up for the next major.
Mortal Kombat 9 had this really dark period right before EVO where everybody thought the game was going to die, but the people on TestYourMight kept pushing the game at tourneys to show that it was a game worth keeping on. They brought their own stream setups to tourneys so they could stream the game as long as they want while avoiding stream monsters. They’ve fought hard to foster a scene for the game they love and they’ve succeeded.
I think something that would help is if we had a Skullgirls-centric community site like TestYourMight.
Our locals tend to get 6-10 entrants depending on the venue, though I think a few people are missing for some reason or another and will hopefully add to that number. I don’t really know how to go about fostering that scene other than training myself up and giving advice to players at tournaments.
How do ranbats work, anyway?
As more and more DLC comes out, the scene SHOULD increase. It would help if one of the big gaming-video-people (Maximillian, Cross Counter, Finger Cramp, whoever) picked it up. I think Ultrachen helps, mentioning it every week or two, but we need more. People would be playing this game to death if it had 10+ years of fans behind it, it has nothing to do with what this game does or doesn’t do new for the genre. People like to play what’s familiar, and they like to play what big-named people are playing. It’s the same as anything else (Fashion, music, political views, literature), a majority of people are followers. If someone endorsed the game and released weekly videos, everyone’s scene would probably go “scene * 2 + 15” overnight. 50K+ (at least 1k per state) people in America have this game already; we just need to get them interested enough to start playing it again.
Max did pick it up and spent a week or so playing Solo Filia and bending over for free to people playing more than one character.
That said, I agree with the person above that said it’d do better on The Runback on Thursdays. People that play UMVC3 and maybe even KOF13 play Skullgirls. People that play SF4 and SFxT usually play those games or just SF4. Isn’t anything wrong with that; people play what they wanna play. I just think you have to play the crowd when you pick what games go together.
If the game had even four more characters, I think it would’ve done better out of the gate. It’s not doing horrible by any stretch. However, because there are only 8 characters, half or more of the characters have exactly ONE optimal assist in high level play, and two of the characters have such good assists that nearly everyone puts them on their team for exactly that reason (I’m so fucking tired of seeing shitty Parasouls and Doubles in major top 8’s, you have no idea), the game looks a lot more stale than it actually is. It’s just the way it happens with a team-based game that has 8 characters.
(Edit - Case in point, I’m watching top 4 of ECT4 and seeing a Valentine/Double mirror with a Valentine/Parasoul vs Parasoul/Double and one of those vs Valentine/Double coming up. Regardless of how GOOD the system is, that seems stale to everyone but the most devoted.)
Yeah, and that was awesome. He has, like, 50k views on each of the videos he put out (that wasn’t the ‘week of’). But, he didn’t play/put out videos after the first week and a half or so.
I think you’re right on the game selection: maybe pairing the game up with similar fans will do better. I don’t really know, though; I don’t watch streams.
Still, there’s over 6000 people watching the ECT4 stream of the top 4. That’s pretty significant. Hopefully the scene will blossom after the patch since it’ may make the game a bit more friendly to new players.
I didn’t know the scene dwindled. I was there in the first week only and so didn’t have much chance to see how well I could do in it. I really want to help promote this game and being involved in tournaments, but like I said before most people don’t like to help others out and there’s no point in trying if I don’t have the resources or can’t get any help.
Now I sort of feel like I wasted my money buying the game.
Personally i havent heard any reasons why the players in my area have dropped it. They just dropped it.
If amy one thing is to blame, i’d point at evo not having it as an official game… That REALLY hurts. Probably more than double or “long combos”
Valle i think last week or the week before was still streaming it, saying that its what the people wanted to see. This makes me think people like the look of the game, and want to follow it, just not play it when there are already so many fighters that people “want” to play yet have little time for. The average person can only really handle learning 2 fighting games at one time. Of course they could learn more, but there will be a dropoff in skill… Justin wong is a very good example of a very good player that is just spread to thin.
Hopefully these patch changes bring people in. But to be quite honest the only real way to bring people in on this game is to constantly stream it and to constantly release newer and newer videos of tech/combos/traps/resets etc. this keeps peoples minds on the games while simultaneously teaching them how to play at higher and higher levels.
I didnt mind the 8 characters at the start, but now i really find myself hoping that that dlc gets here as quick as possible as i only really resonate with one character. Inthink other people may have similar issues of being able to find a character that they actually dont mind using.
Tbqh i wouldnt play this game if painwheel werent in it.mnow look at those people that are like me only they dont like painwheel either… Having a character that you like to use in a fighting game is one of the biggest key ingredients… Its why ryu and ken and chun are in every goddamn capcom game.
-dime
Dittoed. If Cerebella wasn’t one of the original two characters… I don’t think I would have paid attention to the game, let alone played it.
I dropped the game for a while and only came back recently.
Then I got stuck playing a guy who kept abusing the Hornet Bomber assist and remembered why I dropped it to begin with.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I really like the game, but the Hornet Bomber assist “tactics” takes the fun out of the game, and I tend to not play games where I’m not having fun. And while I can’t say this with a fact, I imagine that’s why the game’s online community dropped as it did.