I was wondering if my TE2+ with Jasen’s Customs Hitbox layout panel is tournament legal? I know that the TE2+ doesn’t have a SOCD cleaner and Hitboxes were banned before because you could press left and right at the same time. Do I need to get a Brook UFB which does have a SOCD cleaner in order to be tournament legal? I plan on going to EVO 2017 this year. Do they even check for stuff like that? Lemme know. Thanks.
I went to the red bull battleground tournaments and used a modded te with a hitbox panel and never once had someone ask me about it. Wasn’t that socd thing mostly an issue because of the game was coded that allowed you to block both ways?
yeah I think it was older games like MvC3 and stuff but I wasn’t sure if tournaments were still butt hurt about it. In SF5, with my TE2+, when you hit both left or right directions, the last button you pressed is the direction that registers. With an SOCD cleaner it would just be neutral but it doesn’t make a difference anyway. If I’m trying to block by holding back and accidentally press forward… I get hit. With and SOCD cleaner the same thing would happen because neutral would get hit. Anyway good to know.
Vanilla MvC3 was the last time a high profile game had an issue with it. It’s not particularly an issue anymore, but SOCD cleaning on HitBoxes is still recommended because of the nifty shortcuts you can do with it. Here’s the general rule of thumb for “is this legal in tournaments?”:
One button, one input.
FullSchedule’s stick a few years back added two buttons to the face – up/forward and up/back – which was ruled illegal because he was binding two inputs together on the same button. HitBoxes don’t do this - since they have one button for each cardinal direction (technically the same as joysticks, which have four microswitches for the cardinals), you’re fully legal.
My wife competed at Evo in SFV last year using a non-SOCD-cleaned HitBox layout on a TE2 Rivals stick, and didn’t have any issues with it. Like I said, games now discretely clean the inputs to keep SOCD blocking from happening, so it’s not an issue of legality. It just handles better when you have the cleaning. 