Against skill based matchmaking?

As a topic we've literally been writing about for over a decade, can there actually be any valid argument against using skill-based matchmaking in a competitive game? I recently watched a couple of youtube videos about this, which discussed an apparently recent 'debate' online about it (although it was the first I had heard about …

Street Fighter V: Competitive Design Review

A quick reminder of how we review competitive gaming design. It's all about the 1, 2, 3: 1. A level playing field. 2. Effective skill-based matchmaking. 3. Accurate and fair skill & result-based ranking. Street Fighter V seems to do a very good job at all of these on the surface. In fact, despite everything …

Running European Fantasy Strike Casual Online Tournaments?

Ok I just posted a bit in the Fantasy Strike discord about this, but here's a post to discuss here as well. I'm considering running some Europe-only online tournaments for Fantasy Strike. Long time followers of Agoners will know I used to do this for SF2 HDR. It wouldn't be anything serious or with prizes …

Team Shitty Hitty on V-League

If you pay attention to the side bar over there on Agoners -> you'll have noticed I've been putting up a link to my Street Fighter V stats for a while now, which directs you to my profile on the excellent V-League website. What's amazing about this site is how far ahead of Capcom they …

Why Ranked modes in Team-based videogames are doing it wrong

Many videogames that are really popular these days are team-based online competitive games - Call of Duty, Halo, League of Legends, Heroes of the Storm, Overwatch, and on and on. What astounds me though to this day is how little "TEAM" these games generally manage to inject into their team game modes. Oh sure, you …

V-Concerns

I was able to play quite a bit in this last and final beta for Street Fighter V this past weekend, and I noticed a few tweaks and things from beta 3, but nothing too major this time around, and to be honest, it's so close to the actual release that this beta seemed very low-hype …

Street Fighter V Beta and Fantasy Strike Alpha thoughts

A few weeks ago was a fantastic fighting gaming weekend for me with a new alpha build of Fantasy Strike hitting, AND getting access to the Street Fighter V beta on PC and, luckily, I had the spare time to play for hours too. First of all, SFV. Although I was able to play SFV briefly before …

The road to Saikyo

My epic Dan USF4 adventures have been on a bit of a hiatus recently due to generally not having much time to play, and when I did, being really tired or just generally playing rather poorly. I think my PP dipped to around 500 at the nadir of this... But perhaps inspired by watching EVO …

Kore ga saikyo-ryu da!

I've written a lot before about some of the issues I've had over the years when it comes to Street Fighter 4 - and these days I'd add that I really don't like the later-discovered flaws in the engine like plinking, and I have an insane hatred of near universal defensive option selects like 'crouch-tech'. The …

Hero Academy: Early impressions from the Academy

Asynchronous competitive multiplayer games are something I'm very interested in as they are potentially a very good fit for both my gaming tastes and lifestyle. That's why I picked out a couple at the start of last year as titles I was keeping an eye on. Skulls of the Shogun has recently been released, but …