Will we have SF2 @ EVO 2011?

Classic Fighting Games SSF2T: HD Remix
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snk-player: So HDR wasn’t presented at Evo under the most favorable conditions, I agree (one can only wonder what would have happened to the scene if it had been released the year prior as intended). But I don’t understand how that addresses the hard numbers of the SFIV series gaining a few hundred players and the SFII series dropping a few dozen players during that year. The reality is already there and there’s nothing we can do to go back and push HDR out a year earlier to establish a fanbase. As I said, HDR did well at Evo this year but it’s concerning that it became less of a factor at Evo relative to SFIV.

A question that may be more useful is SF2’s ratio of the player pie through the years. How did ST compare when CVS2 and then 3S was the main game of its day? Unfortunately, since Evo has historically never released numbers, this question may be unanswerable (or perhaps someone has the numbers and I’m just clueless). But it does force everyone to consider SF2’s relative position in the US fighting game community.

The beauty of ST was always that it would be the final SF2 game where anyone knew based on its storied history that they could practice that one version and it would never be outdated; that timelessness is part of what drew me to the game when I started playing. The transition from one SFIV installment to another may seem the same to you but it’s not the same at all to many ST fans. And unless that installment can appeal to a majority (or even a fair-sized minority as would be the case here on the EC), then you have to question why it’s not ideal to follow the worldwide classic.

If you want an analogy of what SF2 tourney players are feeling, consider that the impetus for many OG and 3S players moving on to SFIV was because new players came out in droves and there was competition to be had. Then, many of the new players stayed, thus creating in SFIV the largest scene around since the SFII heydays. Meanwhile, very few of the veteran players mention in interviews that they’re actually fond of the new series. Similarly, ST players are in the same boat: they may not have ever been fond of the new SFII installment but they were willing to give it a try to face a larger competition pool. But now, rather than a larger pool (as was temporarily experienced everywhere when SFIV first came out on consoles), some of us see no new players at all from HDR.

For tourneys in MD/VA this year (on a monthly/semi-monthly basis), we’ve ranged from 8-18 players in 360 HDR, PS3 HDR, and supergun ST. The 18 player and 8 player turnouts were both from HDR tourneys (naturally, the more depressing results later). Around 10 is the average now and it’s a similar turnout as pre-HDR. The latest $250 guaranteed pot for HDR didn’t even reach average with 2 out-of-region players driving down. So things have remained pretty constant between versions but many of the players are either from the pre-HDR era or have casually played ST and are enjoying arcade ST more. So for us, it’s been as expected. We’ve had a few ST and HDR online players come and go for their own reasons.

The same has been true for EC majors: 15-30 is the norm now and that’s about the same as pre-HDR (slightly worse off than before if you want to be precise). ST is now getting the same numbers. So maybe from my perspective, you may be able to get a glimpse of why I treat HDR so lightly. I know Cali has benefited from having HDR (since they didn’t even have regular tourneys before, outside of KS) but here on the EC, the concept of a regular HDR tourney player is an elusive ghost, excepting its lone representative in Thelo (who comes from Canada no less).

As for a resurgence, you said you were at B5. Do you remember 3S there? It was gone that one year because of lack of interest until it resurfaced again the next year due to everyone giving the game another try (this was well before AE’s release BTW) and lasted until SFIV came out. I’m not sure either of arcade ST’s feasibility at such a large tourney as Evo but I have no interest in pontificating my opinions on the best SF2 for Evo at this time.

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Why isn’t there some sf2 stream of some sort? ssf4 has 2 now

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“road to evo” june 2010, nyc hdr- 9 entrants
"summer jam" august 2010 philly hdr- 10 entrants

classic mode was also run at summer jam with 26 entrants, seasons beatings recently had 26 people for st and there are already 18 peeps pre-regged for super turbo at NEC, 0 are on the list for hdr

the east coast has grown their scene and added excitement by switching to super turbo.

@people doing this= its ridiculous to compare evo games before 2009 and after. evo is just a different beast all together now. keep in mind that super turbo, after over a decade still had a solid percentage of all the people at evo enter. hdr came out in 2008, was made for a casual audience and over 1000 of these people at recent evo’s have decided not to play it, even though its very accesible to them

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ST having to share the same cabinets with Street Fighter 3: Third Strike and X-Men vs Street Fighter, as well as this being their first attempt at something like this, I would say caused most of the issues at hand. I think, logistically, if you’re going to run arcade hardware it’d be best to dedicate it to one game rather than split between many games and many players. I don’t think we’d have seen the guts of these things hanging out if they didn’t have to be swapped. I don’t think a lot of what you pointed out happened solely because ST was run on cab but because many games, including ST, were run side by side using the same cabinets. I think they bit off more than they could chew.

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The best way to increase attendance IMO is maybe find a way to get and arcade/japanese release or even a PC release? Is there a way to do this?

As for HDR averaging 300 people in EVO, are you guys not satisfied w/ those results?

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Nope. You guy’s math are wrong. percentage-wise it is just doing ok.

ST has been pulling that number(%) or more at previous EVO.

Like I said, if the hdr tourney is 2 days before or after EVO, you’ll be horrified to find out what the turnout would be.

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I like baseless speculating.

It’s fun.

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How would dedicating the cabs to a single game have changed the problems I talked about? I didn’t even mention the part where players from 3 games had to share the available cabs, just technical problems with the actual physical cabs themselves. The wonky sticks, random resets, or unavailable converters would have happened whether the cab was dedicated to one game or not.

Though yeah, unrelated to what I talked about, it would have helped things in general to have dedicated cabs to each game, assuming that there were enough cabs to pull it off in the first place.

About HDR’s “percentage-wise” thing, I think I, and most players, would be totally happy in a hypothetical world where there is a 300-entrants tourney, even if that number of 300 was only 1% of all Evo entrants. If there are 300 HDR entrants and 30000 SF4 entrants then really there would be no reason for me to complain, and I would be sad if there were 10 entrants, even if there were only 50 SF4 entrants. So yeah, absolute numbers are still important, I feel - who cares about other games’ turnouts if you can still get a healthy absolute number for the game you’re entering.

I can’t really speak for other players, and my opinion doesn’t really affect whether they show up or not, but I think it’s pretty obvious that if there was no cabinet ST at Season’s Beatings at all and HDR was a real tourney game there instead, with a real time slot, there would have been more than 9 entrants for HDR.

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Having multiple games on the cabinets had everything to do with the problems you pointed out. Those cabs needed to be swappable and configurable for 3 different games, two of which are on different hardware to begin with. Logistically, we had 3 people who were involved in providing this equipment who were in different places at different times. I know Kajoq had a supergun, strogg brought Street Fighter III: Third Strike, and there was another individual who supplied the cabs that I do not know by name. These were good will donations, not people like Howard who had time to make a dedicated set up that was properly configured/constructed.

That meant making sure that converters meshed well with 3S, A CPS3 GAME and Super Turbo, a CPS2 game. Having a dedicated set up for one game would probably mean you could lock in things like converters and configure them properly without having to worry about switching to another game and making sure things are configured properly. Why wouldn’t it have been better if you didn’t have to have the guts of the cabinet hanging out and not having to worry about pleasing 3 different player bases sharing the same equipment?

If the head to head cabs were dedicated to ST, it meant that there wouldn’t have been a clusterfuck between the 3 guys who were running maintenance and logistics on them all while playing in other tournaments themselves. Between strogg who owned the 3S board, the guy with the key to the cabs to open up the front panels, and Ghaleon having to run tournaments as well as handle complaints… what were you expecting to happen when those cabs were rigged to switch between multiple games all while having those underlying issues? I don’t think they would have been issues for long if they had one game because it meant that personnel wise people would have had less problems to deal with and would have handled things in a much more timely fashion.

When 3S ended, we saw many of the issues we had with the ST cabs fixed the next day instead of the late evening of the first day because people actually had time to do these things rather than do their own thing at the tournament. The “faulty equipment” was very much in part for having to make sure those set ups were adaptable to multiple games/players. I think a cab with its guts hanging out is less than ideal compared to the sweet set up that Howard has in Connecticut. Hell, I know some players would have preferred to play on Supergun in a lot of cases. I didn’t get to participate in team with the rest of Maryland because I’m the only guy who played on Japanese controls on my team. I really feel that these issues weren’t addressed or handled because of multiple games and there’s plenty of evidence to support this.

Edit:

Make no mistake, I support the notion that console hardware is ideal for most people… I just don’t agree with your reasoning with the hardware errors. I talked to Ghaleon and things like the transportation of the equipment and COST are better points to make for that argument than “the shit was fucked up.” Ideally, all that stuff can be fixed and done properly, as Howard has shown… but how many players have that kind of money to “do things properly.” That’s a far better statement to make, imo.

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I stand corrected on the converters issue, even if I’m less than convinced about the rest.

But anyway, I think we agree that using cabs here, instead of consoles, brought a bunch of problems that are non-issues with consoles. So I guess my overall point is that it seems pretty damn weird to actively lobby for using cabinets instead of consoles, when using them often makes for an inferior overall experience, both for players and organizers.

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Input lag sure is ideal and convenient.

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Play on Xbox 360, done.

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You just got Thelowned dude.

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You’d have to donate all the consoles, because Microsoft won’t do it.

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I ran Season’s Beatings on Xbox 360.

For that matter, Xbox 360 is the accepted standard where I live, and as far as I know it’s also the standard used for regular HDR events in Cali.

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HDR WILL die, thelo are you worried about havint to use ST honda? that’s my interpretation i’m getting of why you’re clutching HDR so hard against your breast.

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Super NCR used PS3s, so afaik PS3 is the standard.

EDIT: You’re half right. For SCR they use the 360, for NCR it’s still the PS3 unfortunately.

…

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Obviously character bias is playing a card in the arguement mr …

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I really don’t think that’s the case lmfao

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Shirley, you can’t be serious.