I’ve decided to try and enter at least a few of the tournaments in this series: Gfinity Street Fighter V Challenger Series.
It’s not super high-level stuff, but it’s fun and open to everyone (I think EU/UK focused though), and most importantly for me, they are on weekdays when I am actually likely to be available. I would’ve liked to have entered more tournaments this SFV season, but almost all of them – including every single one of the online EU CPT events are on weekends I am already booked to be away. I’m just too busy at weekends generally unless I know well in advance and make special plans for things.
Here’s some video footage from the event yesterday where I got to ‘2nd’ out of the 9 entrants – although it’s only Single Elim, so realistically, only the winner is an accurate placing. It’s taken from my live stream so shows the lag I was seeing at the time too. The other match I had was even worse lag than any of these too, so I’ve not uploaded it to youtube. This stream demonstrates how there are definitely still some connectivity issues with SFV’s netcode, when I can’t even get good matches within my own country. It’s very weird though, as testing among friends even in my own city displays that there’s something (router, ISP?) that SFV’s netcode and/or servers just cannot cope with properly, when other games do. I’ll get perfect offline-like connections every time to certain people local to me, where as other local friends it’s always either a bad-but-playable 2 bars, and will also randomly give us a ‘server connection match’ where it’s a total mess and completely unplayable. You can see a similar thing happen below in the two different matches I play vs LightingWolf (Birdie) as we get a server match to start with, and then go back to the character select screen to attempt to get a better direct connection, which works, and shows a much lower lag for the next game.
I really wasn’t playing too great to be honest, and I’m especially annoyed I dropped a lot of easy combos (especially off wakeup s.LK) vs SadMusician in the finals. I also whiff too many moves, my reactions are bad, and most painfully of all, I somehow screw up a really easy throw-loop which would’ve given me a round. SadMusician’s clearly much better than me though, and had a way more solid neutral and anti-airs which really exposed some of my lack of knowledge in the Vs Boxer matchup, so I feel even if I corrected my obvious mistakes I probably still would’ve lost, but at least I would’ve been a much better match. Anyway, this is really interesting stuff for me and has given me a lot of info of things to work on 🙂
I should also note that all the contenders were really cool, and via the Gfinity website and their dischord channel, it was nice to actually be able to chat with my opponents before and after matches, which is a refreshing change from the horrible lack of communication features within SFV itself.
I’ll be back for more Gfinity matches soon! Gotta get all them G Points, and raise my life’s V-Gauge.
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