Street Fighter VI

[wargame]

Gamers8 is streaming a SF6 invitational with a prize pool of $1 million. Looks like a good pick of players are attending.

Tournament runs from today through the weekend.

[wargame]

Gamers8 Top 8, some stellar matches here.

[fuse]

Between Evo and Gamers8 it's an absolute feast for folks who like watching high-level play lately. As a general community pulse you get from keeping an ear to the ground, I find the kneejerk calls for character nerfs kinda tiresome, so it's actually fascinating that Kakeru's on top of things not just from a character pick, but very clearly from an incredible degree of skill with a mechanic (perfect parry) that's clearly not being used to its full potential by many.

Actually stuck the game on to play some tonight too, and while I've managed to get really rusty at quite an impressive rate from a couple of weeks off, my bigger take away was how bloody obnoxious that TMNT theme is in the battle hub. Keep hawking the DLC all you want, but please can we not have that blaring back at us every time you come off a cabinet?

[hudson]

You can make your own playlist of tunes you've collected or turn off ones playing in BH using your in-game phone.

[fuse]

Turns out I don't have the music option on the in-game phone yet! People are saying the best way to unlock is via maxing out JP's rank in WT, but I assume people who bought a battle pass and got a background track to select from that have it too?

Been fascinating watching all of the back and forth among FGC heads about tiering, viable characters and so on. There's been all this hate on JP and Ken for being overpowered, whereas we also have people arguing that there's a clear lower tier of characters where among others, Ryu and Zangief are hanging out. Then what happens this weekend? We have two Ryu players winning their respective World Warrior tournaments, and then Snake Eyez winning out his CPT region with Zangief, and against Reynald's JP no less

[hudson]

Just shows you, eh? Tier lists are all tosh

[Asura]

Just shows you, eh? Tier lists are all tosh

They largely are, in well-designed games.

The main problem is that they're rarely correct across the range of players. If you consider players as a scale, from absolute beginner to top-tier FGC competitor, what characters are good and bad differ wildly.

Consider SFIV; at lower levels, Adon was a bit of a beast, but as soon as you got to intermediate level play, his limited options made him really quite bad. Similarly, Sagat and Ken were somewhat derided in those games due to specific features that made them very beginner-friendly, meaning if you were playing at low-to-medium level, they were just by far the best, and there was the perception they were broken (admittedly Sagat did get nerfed).

I'm not surprised JP has come up in this discussion, because you can imagine how, as a low level player, if you play a competent JP, it's kinda like smashing your head into a wall. It doesn't mean JP is broken, or that he's high-tier, it just means that he's very difficult to deal with for a beginner due to his unconventional fighting style.

[fuse]

A.K.I is due late September, and looks a whole load more interesting to me than Fang ever did.

[hudson]

That floor slither is creepy AF

[wargame]

Very creepy but looks super interesting gameplay wise.

[Neon Ignition]

Looks interesting to play as, not a fan of her design though at all

[fuse]

Since that last update at the start of the month, battle hub tournaments now seem to be working properly. Compared to last month's on/off efforts, if memory serves, I think they have doubled the number of them at each given time, which I figure helps spread the load across more lobbies. For UK timing on days they're running it's currently 04:00, 14:00, and 21:00, with registration opening an hour beforehand. This weekend's ones had no restrictions, but even when there are rank-based lockouts you still get people smurfing (folks with Master ranks on their mains showing up on alts for Silver/Gold etc) and you just have to roll with the punches. Having done a few now I've got my platinum trophy and I figure others are at a similar position. I'm feeling a bit more free to chuck myself into ranked and see where I end up now

Have also been trying to pick out some other chars, running them against arcade mode for starters to unlock more gallery stuff but also see who fits for secondary purposes. I like Marisa a lot, but I'm also aware that she does not have something for every occasion; pinned in the corner with no OD DP for an easy (but risky!) escape plan is making me a little bitter, for starters.

[wargame]

Last week I was just a couple of 100 points from Diamond, but since then I have been on a massive losing streak and even losing to players who have a could 1000 less LP then me. It's madness.

Still love playing this everyday and still putting in an hour or so a day. Although last few days have been horrendous with the weather and how much heat the PS5 outputs. Literally a hour session would add 0.5 degree to the room temperature.

[hudson]

[MENTION=4129]wargame[/MENTION] sorry I had to bail in our short set, my kids were giving me grief . I would like to run more sets soon as I need that Ken MU info.

[fuse]

Been playing a bunch more of this over the weekend - a surprising (to me at least) amount being in World Tour mode. I'm now trying to get the secondary outfits and colours for all the characters, and while it's a bit of a grind I'm quite happy doing the daily tournament in the big arena thing for a decent chunk of XP, some cash money to go buy gifts and so on. I'm about level 70 or so now, and while there are some quests that are still way out of reach I figure I'll get there eventually. It all also counts towards kudos too, and I just maxed out the premium battle pass for the month earlier which is a good result.

Also been climbing a bit in ranked, but honestly it's far slower progress than I was expecting. Not giving up by any means, just feel like I'm still at the point in the game where I'm vulnerable to gimmicks, and two matches is often not enough time for my caveman brain to figure out what I should be doing. I also still feel like modern's a bit of a troublesome prospect at this kind of beginner/intermediate phase, particularly instant reaction anti-airs and level 3 / CAs. Part of this is probably me needing to chill on the offensive pressure, be more meter aware, and getting it into my head that I can't rely on people not having the reaction speed to drop them in consistently, as bloody anyone can when they're single commands.