well, I’m not a tourney player but here’s my observations so far:
The game is fun for alot of tourney players, but because of no gems in tourneys and the EVO tourney being 2v2 only, it’s in a sort of a purgatory state right now.
People that like it play it.
weekly streams like WNF only do 2v2 tourneys which tend to be pretty hype depending on the team synergy and big names playing. They look like they’re having a blast and the team rivalries make it really entertaining to watch.
European streams and Iplaywinner have started to use gems in their 1v1 tourneys. Its seems to help eliminate most timeouts, and overall make the game more interesting. As long as people know their gem numbers the gem selection doesn’t seem to take long at all and is worth the extra time taken because it results in a more interesting match with added strategy.
I think the game right now looks like it’s dying out, but I think because of the gem situation there’s a kind of confusion in the tourney scene in how to approach the game to make the hype optimal. WNF is sticking with 2v2 no gems, and like I said Norcal and Euro tournies are starting to use gems to see how they add to the game.
Civil War 4 just happened, and with good players and great commentary, it seemed pretty hype. Not MVC3 level hype, but good enough for a game that right now is in a weird state of being. Check out the stream archives on teamspooky’s own3D.tv channel. Again, they weren’t using gems, which to me basically forces the game to be bland by not using one of it’s main features. Not to mention people still are not doing combos that waste more time than do damage. I mean obviously that’s a viable strategy, but it’s also like they tend to make it so the opponent can recover more life, and then if they both basically played even then the last ten seconds end up deciding the match by the two last pokes. Had they done combos that were planned better for the scaling and went for resets/oki setups instead of just doing three tag cancel combos in a row (basically a waste of meter and damage). An easy example is that EVERYONE does l,m,h,launcher even to punish a whiffed SRK or off a jump in. All they had to do was raw launcher which does WAY more damage and allows the first hits of your partners combos to scale well. Kind of getting off topic here, sorry.
as for the Tekken characters being OP for their 50/50 mixups, it became obvious fairly quickly that most of those characters also have tons of opening in their strings. It was a first week complaint out of ignorance, but as people play and learn the strings they aren’t nearly as effective.
I dunno… still early. I’d like to see some real tourney players get in here and express themselves though.