This reminds me of the Bucky O’ Hare episode where Deadeye won a contest like this but still didn’t get to fuck the girl.
Willy and Jenny forever I mean fuck this thread.
The easiest answer is more convenient access to competitive play and more access overall. Like, on some on my way to most trains in NYC a competitive LAN center or something would have to be there ready with like 20 new players for me to play in multiple games. This would mean that people would have to actually go to those places though. and we all know that is not likely to be the case
I’d say that’s the advantage japan has seeing as how they almost always have someone to play.
Then theirs advertisement, which is expensive ass hell so i don’t think it will go that route for a while.
Responsibility also lies within te publishers to advertise the game well, especially as a competitive game and not as some random dick around with your friends game. I thought that P4A possibly could have been more popular had Atlus spent more time exposing it in America.
I don’t really think FGs can break out of niche in america again unless everyone gets tired of playing modern warfare and stuff. I’m fine as long as it grows little by little every year though
We’ve done that for MvC2: the MvC2 low tier tournaments went on for years and kept refining the tier list. The huge fucking elephant in the room is that generally if you ban XX that just means that YY gets that much stronger and you have fewer options to beat them. After banning the god tier then you need to ban the top tier then you ban the now-unbalanced members of the middle tier and then you watch Ruby Heart, glitched Juggernaut, and Colossus tear everyone up. When you ban characters you end up with the same problems but fewer choices on how to “fix” the problem. The problem is you, not the game.
I’ve got friends that work there. PM me your address and I’ll send you a drawing of a penis, Mr Jerk Pants.
I disagree, fighting games really aren’t accessible at all.
g
I think that having “mindless” fans and stream monsters are going to be a large facet in growth. Twitch.tv, Youtube, and other places to watch players is a growing part of gaming communities and should be used to bring players together across the globe. I don’t see the majority of viewers becoming pro but they will be casual and will contribute to the community. I know that fans of other games donate thousands of dollars to their favorite players or teams just to help them travel or stay in team houses. A large viewership seems like an essential addition to growth. The question is how to draw the people in?
If the FGC to grow in terms of pot size and sponsors, the games need to be more presentable to an average gamer and family tuning in to watch a game. This has very very little to do with character balance, it’s more to do with the potential viewership audience and people who want to play the game. Assuming that a stream monster only watches streams and provides nothing more than an additional ad-count for sponsors, there has to be a way to keep them engaged even though they keep “seeing the same damn characters every match” without actually damaging the integrity of the game. This goes further than just the stream monsters too, what about just a casual viewer who knows nothing about fighting games in general and just wants to watch the EVO top 8 or something to see what the hub-bub is all about?
The air of professionalism needs to grow with fighting game tournaments, which has almost nothing to do with character select or game balance. It’s all about making the games presentable and appealing to make sure more people play them and get more people to watch (which gets more sponsors and advertisers). This can be from simple things like cleaning up the speech of commentators and making sure racist remarks or profanity doesn’t dominate commentary to more drastic things like making sure the game won’t turn off viewers by the visuals alone.
If a game is competitively interesting, then players will play it. After that point, it’s figuring out how to sell that competitive atmosphere to viewers. There is no need to change the competitive spirit of the game to get viewers.
One thing that could really benefit viewership without damaging integrity is something simple from sportscasts like instant replays where commentators go over exactly what went down in the last match or play. There’s a lot of complicated stuff going on in high level play which have absolutely no time to be explained mid-match and would go right over a lot of people’s heads, but if there could be some time set aside for match analysis during streams, that would really help. There’s obviously a conflict here with tournament standard time schedules and riding momentum in the middle of a match, but this ties into how professional tournaments can get.
Case example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAdtFRs2yhA
To an un-educated viewer, what do they probably see? They probably just see Cyclops doing uppercut xx super over and over again and winning 1v3. That’s not super impressive. But what’s actually going on?
At 0:22, Wong blocks a reset attempt that almost certainly would have killed him when Storm drops the combo and attempts to cross him up
At 0:34, Cyclops push blocks hail storm to stay in the air longer in order to better punish Magnetic Shockwave
At 0:47, Cyclops is now using his runaway to build up meter for another Super Optic Blast, since he’s burnt out his stock
At 0:57, Cyclops lands Gene Splice, but instead of burning the meter he just gained, Justin opts to instead mash it out to save meter for Psylocke
At 1:10, a missed Gene Splice makes Cyclops vulnerable to be punished, but he tries to make the most of it by deliberately whiffing the first part and then punishing an attempt to punish
At 1:13, I’m pretty confident, although not entirely, that it wasn’t that Justin didn’t block at that moment, but that he couldn’t because he had used up his aerial action after a normal jump (in essence, self guard breaking) which Psylocke immediately went for the punish, but ultimately drops
From 1:13 onwards, Psylocke is abusing s.hp xx psy blast because it’s a relatively safe chip move, but she whiffs it at a crucial moment which Justin uses to cinch the match
There is no way that a person who doesn’t actively play MvC2 knows just how impressive that come back is, and without anyone to explain it to them, the hype is lost. Having a brief instant replay of this exact moment with qualified commentators can really help.
OP’s post demonstrates exactly what the fighting game community lacks in tournaments and streams. OP is complaining about character select and balance and seeing the same people over and over again, but doesn’t understand why that’s the case. OP doesn’t understand what’s actually going on in a match with those “stale combos.” That’s a general indicator that casual stream monsters just don’t understand what’s going on in a high level game. But it’s not exactly possible to get them to sit down and join a tournament and experience all that for themselves. That’s just fighting a losing battle. But what we could do is show why those combos aren’t as dull as they seem on the surface, and explain the hype we all feel when we see something ridiculous.
As an aside:
Keep it classy
MLG had the right idea in this aspect with one of their DoA tournaments where they disallowed extraordinarily skimpy costumes on the female characters. There’s a whole slew of other things that MLG has done wrong with fighting game tournaments, but that was one thing they did right. No matter how hype Arcana Heart 3 or Vanguard Princess might be, or no matter how awesome the competitive scene is for those games, the fact that they’re games filled with loli looking anime characters or extremely busty barely clothed chicks will always keep it and its players from attracting huge sponsors. How many companies honestly want to be seen promoting games like those? What’s a normal person tuning into a fighting game stream going to think if the first thing they see is two bikini clad girls with breasts as large as their heads duking it out? This is admittedly mostly a matter of taste, but it’s something to be considered for getting the community to grow overall.
On a somewhat related note, there’s also all the casual racism and sexism that goes on in commentary (although it’s gotten a lot better). That’s not going to attract outside viewers no matter how much talk about “it’s part of the community” is thrown about. Imagine the casual viewer tuning into top 8 for a major and then suddenly bombarded by nothing but profanity and racial slurs. They’re not coming back. Sure, maybe the people actually at the tournament are all cool with it, but a stream reaches out a lot further then just the people there.
To be fair, Mixah was talking about the community, not the games. But I agree that the games could be more accessible by simply laying everything out on the table and presenting things in a way that’s easy to follow. You don’t play chess without knowing how each piece moves.
There are two branching routes and I consider it one side not keeping up to the other.
There are a set of people who are and should be focused on bringing more viewers to the community a.k.a people making that youtube / twitch / sponsor money
There also is and should be a set of people focused on getting more people to attend actual events.
There are also people who are in both groups, but the success of one group isn’t the fault of the other. .More people are showing up to tournaments so that group is doing their job, they just aren’t bringing in new people at the rate that stream viewership is increasing.
I don’t think you understand what he means by “stream monsters”. Please don’t tell me you think that a bunch of immature trolls spamming Twitch faces in the chat, copying-and-pasting the same dumb jokes over and over again, and complain about subscriber-only chat that only costs a few bucks is beneficial to the community.
How long have you been into fighting games exactly? You don’t sound like someone with enough experience to be making huge claims about how to help the scene grow.
I don’t understand why its such a common assumption that all us rank and file players are working towards the goal of making sure top players get paid, like this is just some benevolent pyramid scheme.
Slightly offtopic but:
I havn’t run into posts getting buried before i assume that’s something new that came with the forum change.
Is there a way to permanently turn it off so i don’t have to keep clicking individual posts that anyone knows of ?
maybe if you stop posting that would be a good start
No, stuff that is buried is automatically sent for mod review.
>random select for meets
>Marvel 2 and Marvel 3
I think everyone jumped on you a little too quickly. I agree the FGC needs to grow but we are growing. We are growing in terms of more stream monsters and in terms of complacent players.
OPs copped it harsh so far but,
Starcraft; it only got so big in Korea because they had broadband during the late 90s RTS craze. Us westerners got broadband along with Halo/COD so they’ve kinda stuck. Finally fighters are getting some decent netcode and with Twitch and Youtube being built into games, Origin etc there’s a chance more people could get into them.
Hyper Inferno nailed this, good commentating and presentation is far more important than adding meta game, even then there are more realistic options than random (different character per tournament round? not using the same in consecutive rounds? (did I just make it into scrubquotes?)).
Aside: Didn’t the London SF4 release tournament ban Seth?
[Edit] cacked up the quote first time
Origin would ruin fighting games.
The question is: If you want more money involved, where’s it going to come from?
You also need developer support, and there’s no money in it for them. Big events would either have to attract new people to the game (and we’re talking a lot of new people) or they would have to sell you more stuff. And the existing FGC is pretty fed up with DLC and yearly releases.
And some of the stuff like better replays could be helped immensely if it were built into the game (with visible hitboxes anyone?). And that kind of complexity is pushing you towards PC, which has somehow never been any kind of preferred by any fighting game publisher.
Also, fragmentation among different games is a problem.
Community wise, I think we need more sessions and fewer tournaments. It’s a fact: 25% of all people go two-and-out in double-elimination tournaments. Part of the problem here is cost of equipment. If setups were plentiful enough it would help both types of events. Sessions could be bigger/have more play time and tournaments could do something like Swiss pairings.
Finally, maybe it’s the advent of the internet, but people are flaky as hell. I bet there’s a bowling league in your [anyone’s] town that has better and more regular attendance than your local weeklies.
lol legit candidate for worst thread of the year