Is that really how the ST community thinks? And here I thought that kind of scrubbery was reserved for the new gen. I would hope that Daigo/Damdai would be at the tournament I was attending so that I can learn and level up.
I get that travel costs will add up, but if no one travelled all we’d have is online, which when brought up no one says it “counts” because it’s not offline. But to your point, yes aside from 1st, no one else is getting their trip paid for. I guess what I’m starting to feel like is regardless of the price point we’re going to get around the same amount of entrants. What’s the secret kicker that’ll get the GGPO/Supercade guy off his butt and out to a tourney?
I’m referring to the planning process. You calculate the worst scenario and see if you can afford it. If you cannot afford the $600 (tix + hotel) and solely hoping the winning will cover that, it is a bad idea. Of course if you are already there, you have to forget the mindset that you cannot beat the top players and give it all you got.
What I’m saying is that the prize money have very little impact for the players to decide whether they can go.
Unless you have $20,000 guaranteed pot like revelation SF4 (but then they only got 300+, so I guess even with $20,000, a lot of people know they are not gonna get back their cost)
For local (non top) players, they will enter if it’s affordable.
$50 / $20 makes little difference for out of towners. They have to decide whether they have time and money for the trip.
It has nothing to do with ST. It applies to any games / tournament.
Well. Except for damdai. He just needs to see if he has the time.
Great posts, from you and papasi. I feel you on the number of entrants, if I could, I would definitely go. Unfortunately, one can not control what others decide.
I am positive a lot of players will not want to go to an event knowing that they will face a person they can not beat. One can argue about it, show how this is really not the right mindset and stuff, but the point is there are people with “wrong opinions” out there and this is close to impossible to change. I see it everyday in GGPO: while it is a great place to have fun, learn and practice, you see some people who log on with either the objective of proving something, or the fear of being exposed. They rarely admit, they just come up with excuses and do not show up in offline tournaments. I am willing to bet you could get a few of them to show up if you talked to other players so they would sandbag and give matches away every time while playing these people, so they felt they leveled up and have a shot, and they would show up. That time, as a result of a miracle, all their usual real life problems would vanish and these new faces would be seen at the event.
I do not believe it is just a matter of confidence, at least not alone. There is also knowledge and training, and many know how good they are at a certain moment. My view is the same as that of Wolmar’s: tournaments are not a measure of one’s permanent skill, but his or her skill at a specific day or weekend. But even then, if one really like the game, he will show, to support it, unless real problems arise. The reality is many players do not like the game enough, in that sense. The format of the tournament may be important: brackets are OK for finding out the best player, but fail miserably at finding out the rank of other players. Round robin formats could give mid-tier players more of a reason to show up and measure their skills, but of course they demand many more cabs, which is unlikely to happen outside of Japan, unless the number of entrants is very low.
That’s the right way, but we have records and also some accusations related to good players supposedly having that mindset. There is no need to point fingers and call someone out personally, and this would just bring more stupid internet drama, but this exists.
I’d personally like to see the locals do more get-togethers and small tournaments just to hype up the game in their areas. Right now we’re just seeing ST tournaments pop-up at majors rather than being built up over time after many local tournaments (remember APEX?). It’s nice to have, as mentioned previously, a sort of league where players can compete in their area as practice and hype for “The Big One.” This doesn’t necessarily mean that a slew of new players will come flocking to ST majors, but it does help ST players get recognition in the new school community because they are a part of the local scene that includes the current popular games.
At that point you can charge whatever you want at majors because the game and scene are built up by dedicated players.
The problem is that we can’t get enough players in our local areas to come together and do something regularly without it being a major tournament (where the costs are much higher for those attending and organizing).
i liked the setup at Revelations. Ive checked every arcade in Socal and with Denjin’s closing the last JP ST cab with JP parts has gone along with it. Which means for many we have no way to practice arcade ST on JP parts and in my case means i cant justify travelling out of state nor paying 50 dollars to enter even if its local.
For our locals, I bring a supergun, we do 3/5 and $5 tournaments and we can get about 20 people, many of whom weren’t born when SF2 came out. So that’s really good. People enjoy ST and it’s not that hard to get into if you play SF4, esp if you’re willing to teach.
Owning an ST setup is cheaper than ever so I encourage everyone to get ahold of a supergun and a board to build your local scene ($350 I suppose – but maybe local scenes can fundraise for it through small tournaments? Whatever it takes.)
While it’s a shame there’s no JP cab of ST, we do have two cabs that run the Anniversary Edition of ST with Sanwa parts. One at Round One, and one at Super. Currently I know Super has a good setup, but it uses Wico360s and US parts.
I wonder if I bought a ST board and donated to super arcade, would mike give me a “Golden Token” that I could use on THAT cab to play for free forever. That would be sweet.
An excellent idea, but I doubt Suiken and Watson would be willing to go through all that trouble. lol.
Who knows, it’d be pretty sweet to put an ST board in that japanese cab over by the MVC2 cabs…you know…the one that gets absolutely no love from the ST players, lol. But I hear it’s got wiring problems to all hell…plus people complain about it not being H2H. In the meantime, I don’t really mind playing on the showcase cab up front. Plus every now and then we get some random AE players watching us play ST, one day we might just get new players to join us.
Isn’t finding an ST board today a hard find? Aren’t they rare now? When I go to eBay they’re hardly there and if they are they go for $300 at least. B board only.
I think you’re seeing the AE boards that are worth a lot more. ST/X boards go for between $150-200 and are semi-rare. If you had $250 laying around you could track one down online in a couple of weeks.
You know a lot of AE boards are bootleg. They work perfect but they are a lot of bootlegged ones. The original ones are either green shell or black shell. If you see a blue one it’s a boot. But since it’s AE and it’s considered rare it sells for $300-$400. And we’re talking about a boot. Greens and blacks can also be bootlegs. It’s a Japan exclusive game so it’s not suppose to have any other region.
But if there is someone out there who is local So Cal who can get ST/X (Preferrably Green/Japanese) who can get an ST board for dirt cheap, I’ll happily trade them my green AE bootleg (I didn’t know it was bootleg when I got it) for an ST board. I actually payed $300 for that board. It’s phoenixed so you don’t have to worry about the battery. If all you care about is performance instead of legitmacy then this deal is for you. It looks the same as any other official Capcom game inside and out but it’s just that the EPROMs inside are not official Capcom.
Since ST/X was an early CPS-2 game it’s a very hard game to bootleg. But AE was one of the last so it bootlegs easy. If you noticed a lot of ST boards are heavier than your standard CPS-2 board.
Why does every tournament have to be uniform? I like that some have high roller and others don’t, run ST however fits your particular tournament. Seasons Beatings is notorious for high stakes with them being the starters of 5 digit money matches being a part of the main tournament. Evo is in Vegas and high rollers makes sense there as well. Having these do showcase top play, and for all we know someone watched this, got inspired, and will now enter a lower fee tournament to prepare for when they’re ready for the big league
No glitches. A CPS-2 boot is actually quite good because it uses all the real CPS-2 parts. The only difference is that the EPROMs inside don’t have the official Capcom label in it. So it’s really the EPROMs that are bootleg. Bootlegging a CPS-2 board uses the same kind of method as Phoenixing a board. But instead of resurrecting the board you change the game of the board. To bootleg a AE board you have to be a computer wiz or have access to the programing for the EPROM codes. Like I said I bought mine for $300 in China without knowing it was a boot until my friend who is a CPS-2 expert, opened it. Unlike Neo Geo games, you have to be good to bootleg a CPS-2 game. AE was bootleg a lot out all the CPS-2 games because it was super rare and super expensive.
I haven’t looked in about a year but I got my US board for $150. There are somewhat rare. eBay is terrible, I got it off the neogeo forums or KLOV, I forget. I know in Japan you can get the B board for a little over $100, I was with the SBO team in 2010 when they bought it there – our scene is pretty connected so people can always see if someone will bring them back one from Akihabara. JP boards are not that rare to my knowledge.
It was a pleasure meeting you Immortal I hope to see you at EVO next year. GG to everyone who I played over the weekend especially Chris Gamble who taught me the Honda match-up. I had a great time at SB and loved every minute of playing offline ST.
As for the debate of high rollers vs. normal entry fee is an interesting one and I think it really depends on where and how we want to structure the community. From what I gather we have two kinds of players in the community, the first being people who have been playing ST since the arcade days and have been around for a very long time. These players have seen the highs and lows of the fighting game community; guys who can most likely afford the high rollers entry fee and who also have a very good chance of winning the tourney. The second type of player is the newer person to the fighting game community who are still looking for a game to play, these players are generally people who have played SF4 or HDR and are making the switch to ST or are still in the process of learning/discovering the game and may feel that a high rollers entry fee may be a bit steep. From what I spoke to people over the weekend the recurring theme was that the 50 dollar fee was a bit much.
