@fredchuckdave: I don't think nerfing Rose would be much of a problem for many either. I wasn't saying that nerfing characters would kill the game, but if Capcom started indiscriminately rebalancing and hotfixing the game every other week it would probably impact the player base pretty badly. I was using the Rose example to present that sometimes issuing patches in such short notice might not be beneficial to the meta in the long run, and that things might just sort themselves out over time.

@starvinggamer: Again I think we're back to the situation where the next NRS game that comes out is immediately doomed even if a miraculous chain of events could have made MKX the top game that possibly rivaled SFV at least in the US scene. Basically MKX had a tiny ass window to please the tournament crowd and the general twitch audience's attention span isn't great enough to negate that.

From the Facebook of Viscant

Long gaming related blog post upcoming. If you're not up for that, turn back now.

I'm about 99% sure that Evo will be the last time I play MKX seriously. It's no great loss really, I'm not that good at the game nor do I have a lot of cachet in the NRS community. I don't expect a lot of the serious level players to quit any time soon. There's too much money in the game now and going forward I suspect that NRS will keep pouring money in to keep the game relevant into 2016.

But for me personally I just can't keep up with the (over)patching of the game. Without any sarcasm, when I heard that MKX was patched again this afternoon I took it as a joke. They patched the game literally one week ago, there's no way they would do it again, even if CEO exposed a lot about that current patch. But it's real. They put Tanya down and made some additional minor changes. And hey, if they keep adding little things to Kitana, maybe she'll eventually make a deep tournament run in 2015! Maybe.

It isn't sour grapes. My character (Sonya) is almost surely an upper mid tier character, possibly top tier now. Covert Ops has lost almost nothing since release day. With last week's patch Demolition has gone from just something to style on scrubs with to an actual legitimate character with applications in tournament play. It's only a matter of time before one of the Yomi boys actually sits down and realizes that she has a higher damage potential than CO Sonya and does a little better in the bad matches like vs. Grandmaster Sub. So the overpatching has actually worked in my favor even if I don't like it.

Normally in competitive games you can break them down into a few distinct steps.

1) Learning the basics, understanding what combos into what, what punishes what, etc.

2) Getting a rough approximation of character strength. Character X seems really good, he has a lot of stuff. Character Y seems gimmicky, she has a WHOLE lot of stuff but I'm not sure if it'll work on good players. Character Z is obvious trash, not much of value here.

3) Matchups. This character's tools match up really well with these popular ones. This character is now really important to the overall balance of the game, whether they're top tier themselves or not. This other character has a lot of stuff and a lot of damage but doesn't beat any of the common characters. Even though he has all these tools, he's not that good.

4) Mastery, becoming well versed in multiple tournament characters, understanding most relevant matchups. At this point matching up against individual players is most important. Yeah character A has a bad matchup with character B, but I know that player F jumps waaaay too much and I can beat him consistently.

5) Perfection, self explanatory.

Games that get patched don't always send you back to square one but some of NRS's patches have shown a curious knack for doing just that. At CEO I watched a bunch of dropped combos with Scorpion. His best 1 bar combo was changed, a lot of people--some who got relatively deep into the tournament--were doing the wrong combos fairly often. I saw a metric crapton of Hellfire Scorpion's running face first into armor. I can't fault the players, they had about 48 hours warning, some of them may have already got on the plane before realizing their character was gimped. This is not nearly enough time to make fundamental strategic changes or to get enough casuals to override your muscle memory. Now we're going to see the same thing with Tanya. I'm not sure what her gameplan will look like going forward. I'm not sure NRS cares, quite frankly.

With the overpatching it becomes a whole lot harder to get to the later stages of the game, the ones that are most satisfying to me as a competitive player. Every 2 weeks you get booted down the ladder trying to figure out what's week 1 stuff in other games. What's my optimal punish on this move? What does my damage output look like? Is this an advantage matchup? This kind of stuff is determined relatively early on. Getting to later stages where players try to read each other's tendencies after long periods of careful study? We're not there yet. We fundamentally CANNOT be there yet.

I mean, seriously take a step back and think about this for a second. Do you realize that the game has been fundamentally different at almost every major tournament so far? NWM was won by Summoner Quan. That character is completely different now. I think he's a lot better than some people do; people saying he's a bottom 10 character need to shut up, really. But he's still a fundamentally different character now than he was at NWM. CEO will be remembered as the Tanya tournament. That's gone now. Won't happen at Evo. Canada Cup was won by D'Vorah, a character whose fundamental matchups are not the same at this point. And this has nothing to do with player skill or a player's great intelligence solving tough matchups. The game itself we're playing has changed. Repeatedly! And nobody seems to care!

And what if it wasn't even necessary? What if we would have eventually solved Tanya Kombat X? It seems like Tempest Kung Lao beats her and Grandmaster Sub seems to do somewhat decently. What if there are 5-6 others who fight her well? She wouldn't even need to be nerfed. The competitive balance would advance, players would learn. But it's all hypothetical now. It seems that actually exploring these matchups and conquering roadblocks just isn't a part of the MKX meta.

I don't have the time to keep up with that. I barely have the time to keep up with games like Marvel that are deep into stages 4 and 5 of their lifespan. I just don't have the time or the desire to go back to step 1 every 2 weeks. I don't have the desire to spend hours in training mode and learn new techniques like Scorpion fireball run cancel blockstun traps or Sonya Special Forces block lockdowns when they'll be patched out in 2 weeks time and my hard work will be wasted. It's just not that important to me anymore. And that's a shame. Because I liked MKX. I had fun playing this game even with the awful online and just messing around. I even had some small tournament success with the game. But after Evo I'm done.

I hoped that MKX would be different and that NRS would have learned from their previous mistakes.

I was wrong.

@starvinggamer: Damn, Viscant's blog is on point. You know when it was announced that MKX was gonna have variations and all that ESL jazz, I had thought that NRS had learned to hold back a bit on their hotfixes. They had mentioned that the variations were there for players to counter bad matchups while using the same characters. Maybe I'm just not paying attention, but so far I haven't seen this put into practice.

Played a bit of MKX tonight after not playing in a while and yeah it feels way different now. While I think frequent patches don't have to be a bad thing NRS is just going about it wrong. They seem to be more focused on just trying to balance everything through nerfs and buffs instead of just getting rid of the obviously broken stuff. One of the most interesting parts about high level fighting game play is how those top players figure out ways to beat stuff that is considered strong. Why even bother trying to figure out ways to beat Tanya's air game when you know it is gonna be nerfed to hell in a couple weeks? I thought that with all the variations in the game it would bring weird bottom tier variations/characters into the light to beat certain characters. Stuff like if people figured out Kuatan Warrior Goro bodied Tanya, stuff like Infiltration counterpicking with Hakan and it being hype as hell.

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2015/07/02/mad-catz-reports-debt-warning-and-additional-credit-to-ship-rock-band.aspx

and on a semi-related note:

"I made the decision awhile ago about wanting to do something else in my life. I'm going to finish up my remaining projects and make sure they are on the right path first.

I have other plans with life. I gotta make sure my family is taken care of and I live with no regrets. I'll probably have more free time to help support the games/community that I love.

Mad Catz is not giving me the boot. They've done nothing but support me and this community. I am grateful that they believed in me enough to make decisions and be in charge of that part of the business for us."

MarkMan23

Toryuken elevated to Canada Cup status! And you thought those pools were bad.

@zella: In general the bottom 30 or so variations would never do anything/show up anywhere without buffs; that's just how people play fighting games and a lot of those characters are quite difficult to play optimally relative to whichever "easy" variation your character has.

Those gold EVO sticks must've cost quite a fortune. But on a more serious note, I hope things work out for them.

Reminder. Also fuck those hours for Europe.

I wonder if this charity tournament is also used as an opportunity for the cream of the crop in the Japanese FGC to get together and prepare for EVO. Would be a smart thing to do.

@hassun: 3 hours! Usually there's an english stream on twitch afaik. Also everyone knows you're a robot so quit whining about sleeping, you never have.

@hassun: How does one get the video to work?

@fredchuckdave: you need to create an account.

In other news, r/Kappa, an admittedly rough place, has been shut down. It's been set to private and had all it's mods kicked out.

This could spell the end of r/Kappa, along with the rest of the subreddits that have ended up in the same spot. While it is a place that frequently features some trashtalk and NSFW images, it's done some great work in sending players to majors that otherwise couldn't make it. I'd be sad if this doesn't get solved.

Time for GB to sponsor japanese players!

@hmoney001: GiantBomb Infiltration???

It was a big prank by one of the mods. It's back up now. Thanks Maikky. Bring back DrMike pls.

@thunderslash: Great haha! They even got it on EventHubs too. Pretty funny stuff

@viciousbearmauling: As Alex Valle used to say: "GOT EM!"

Almost forgot, Smug decided to follow the example of one of GB's finest moments.

Someone needs to teach me how to imbed vids. I keep getting a "This is an invalid site" warning whenever I try to.

And speaking of EventHubs, they just published an article with Capcom stating that there won't be an arcade release for SF5. That is cray, I wonder if this will affect the Japanese player base. It was one of the reasons why SFxTekken didn't have many Japanese contenders.

Fans also wondered if they were plans for an arcade release of SF5, but Capcom's answer was a succinct "No."

@thunderslash: Embedding seems to work fine for me.

I also really fear for Japanese SFV if they are no longer able to play the game in arcades. I feel that it might hurt the game a whole lot unless they can have a workaround where there is no specific arcade release but arcades still have plenty of cabinets with the game's PS4/PC version. USA to win the first SFV EVO

@hassun: Huh, I just tried again. It works now. Weird.

And yeah, I don't know how popular it is to have console stations in arcades over at Japan. They'll probably figure a way around it. I doubt Capcom would want to screw over their native audience. Either way, the rest of the world won't be able to have that "But Japan got the game first" excuse. Capcom was being serious when they said that they wanted to get rid of option selects for SF5.

@thunderslash: I'll delete the one I posted so you can embed the link.

Justin Wong and Ryan Hart are playing in the Topanga Charity Cup right now. They have a ridiculous team as well:

Ryan Hart, Poongko, Justin Wong, Pugera & Pepeday.

Bonchan and Daigo on commentary and it sounds like they are having a jolly good time.

@hassun: Salarymen have no time whatsoever, hence why Nemo has 250,000 BP.

Elena vs Vega, and you thought East Coast was lame.

@fredchuckdave: Who said that he wasn't paid in BP?

Kappa team is on the main stream
Daigo team is on the B stream
Justin Wong might win this entire tournament without playing.

@hassun: Yo we esports now? Tournament overlays!?

All these killers not even going to EVO...

If they don't meet earlier I would not be surprised if the final is Team Kachitagari vs Team Collaboration.

Edit:
Damn there goes my Team Kachitagari prediction.

Edit 2:
At least Mago woke up. We might get Daigo vs Justin Wong. Team Collaboration still looking invincible though.

Edit 3:
Unless Nemo annihilates them here. All hope rests with Pepeday.

Edit 4:
Grand finals:
Team Shinonga (Oshino, Misse, Mago, Daigo, Bonchan)
vs
Team Topanga (Nemo, Momochi, Kazunoko, Nyanshi, Jyobin)

Momochi winning without playing.

@hassun: Momochi must have at least 100 of those EG shirts.

All right with the Topanga Charity Cup out of the way we can now move on to the real reason Justin Wong, Ryan Hart and Xian are in Japan:

What?

USFIV + Gunslinger Stratos 2 = Ouka Ranbu Cup (meaning "Wild Dance of the Cherry Blossoms Cup")

Format:

8 Street Fighter players (Xian, Daigo, Justin Wong, Ryan Hart, Kyoku, Pugera, Shinba & KOK) + 8 Gunslinger Stratos teams will fight in a round robin tournament.

Each USFIV player will be teamed up with a GS team through a lottery system.

The players will play their own game (so you won't see Xian playing GS or the GS teams playing USFIV) in FT2 matches and the points of each team are combined. The team with the most points wins

Where?

TAITO Station BIGBOX Takada no Baba, Tokyo, Japan

When?

July 5th, 2015

The tournament starts at 10:30 local time which is:

18:30 in Los Angeles/PDT (July 4)

21:30 New York/EDT (July 4)

02:30 London/UTC

03:30 Berlin/CET

Time converter: http://www.worldtimebuddy.com/?qm=1&lid=1850147,2950159,5128581,5368361&h=1850147&date=2015-7-5&sln=10.5-11

Additional Info:

This one won't be on nico nico douga but on Twitch.tv

You can follow the action at http://www.twitch.tv/guns_ch

@starvinggamer: I did some dicking around with patchedya and seems like the difficult kobu combos still do the same damage; the only things that do less that I could find are Ex teleport, which even raw into a basic combo does 2% less damage now and F2 teleport into pogo does 2% less damage than just a double pogo starter (so effectively the more difficult combos do less damage in DN). You can definitely still pogo off of a back teleport so DN still has ridiculous runaway except against the handful of characters that can blow that up. For the other variations if you whiff an aerial spiral arrow it has substantially less recovery than landing off the teleport.

@hassun: Wouldn't have thought that Gunslinger Stratos and Street Fighter would be played together like that. Might turn out to be the peanut butter and chocolate of esports. Interested in seeing some high level GS play though. They should use the Street Fighter costumes in GS.

@thunderslash: This is obviously more a promotional move than a legit tournament but it might indeed be interesting to watch. I know pretty much nothing about Gunslinger Stratos.

Not to alarm anyone but Tanya might still be top tier she just has a few more weaknesses now but you still have to learn how to deal with her. 5-7 in the EVO top 8 is not out of the question, one upping Jebailey's tournament. I mean Yomi might practice the shit out of the matchup and get somewhere but I think they could have done that already.

While y'all are waiting for some hot Gunslinger x Street Fighter action. Check out Hadocon at Team Spooky and IPLAYWINNER.

@thunderslash: That MKX stream quality is interesting.

@fredchuckdave: I actually kind of enjoy it, it is like retro MKX.

Dat saturation. Trying to emulate bad arcade cabs I see.

Arturo firing shots.

Also that Marvel money:

If the KI players just colluded to split the pot they'd all make like 120 bucks.

@fredchuckdave: To be fair if you take away the pot bonuses Marvel looks pretty good. Man KI is where the easier money is at though. 32 grand for 1st in a 400 person tournament.

@zella: Aside from Ultra I think Marvel is the hardest tournament to win there (well maybe not, but it's up there) and for getting 8th you get like 1/10th of your travel price or something. Also obviously the pot bonus matters unless you play KI.

@fredchuckdave: SonicFox's response is hilarious.

@fredchuckdave said:

Source?

@flstyle: Source

@fredchuckdave: Is the spread the same on every game? I thought (and hoped) KI would spread the payout to more players than USFIV and MKX because of the downright silly money/entrants. I know Keits mentioned you're in the money once you reach top 32 but I'm not entirely sure how far down MKX and USFIV go.

EDIT: Found the tweet

Meanwhile USFIV EVO payout is top 8:

So even though KI pays out to top 32 it's actually slanted more towards the winner than USFIV's top 8 payout.

P.S. Last year's entrant numbers and (estimated payouts):

• Ultra Street Fighter 4 - 1,979 ($29,790)
• Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 - 1,014 ($10,140)
• Super Smash Bros. Melee - 970 ($9,700)
• BlazBlue: Chrono Phantasma - 508 ($35,080)
• Killer Instinct - 338 ($13,380)
• King of Fighters XIII - 319 ($3,190)
• Injustice: Gods Among Us - 311 ($3,110)
• Tekken Tag Tournament 2 - 257 ($7,570)

Source! My table for the blog is alphabetical but it looks like the numbers check out

Alex Valle was going through all the new stuff in KI he missed out on since he stopped playing the other day. I suspect someone like him is gonna show up and swoop in for dat dollah dollah billz. Have they published the bracket yet?

So the compression on that Gunslinger stream is really bad for everyone else too right?

@thunderslash: Just starting to watch the archive, seems to look great so far. Especially compared to the free nico nico stuff.

Looks like Daigo's poor performance at the charity cup did not really carry over into the USFIV x GS2 event. Still wasn't great though, a lot of dropped combos and it seems he still has serious problems with Abel.

Daigo showing off a new chip strat.

And again, with U1.

Gunslinger Stratos looks pretty crazy as well. Watching all of this just makes me sad because there will be no arcade release for SFV.