Month: February 2016

This year’s NorCal Regionals will experiment with a new way to handle emergency registration, organizer John Choi announced this morning. Folks who register for Street Fighter V, Ultra Street Fighter IV, and Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 on-site will be placed into separate pools without seeding or player limit, forcing them to face other late registrants in order to make it out.

Their reasons are three-fold. First, this makes the process transparent, heeding complaints from their previous outing. It also keeps late registrations from throwing chaos into an established bracket, meaning pool assignments won’t change from their first publishing apart from fixing errors. And finally, the organizers hope to deter emergency registration in favor of the online process, which will help brackets run smoothly at the event itself.

“Note that online pools are typically 16 or 32 man brackets and NCR historically receives over 50 emergency registrations, including many top players,” Choi explained in his official statement. “So it is your choice if you want to wait to do emergency registration, pay more money, and gamble on this final bracket being smaller in number or lacking seeded players.”

Pools for the three aforementioned titles will all run on the same day to avoid players gaming the system and waiting for an easier bracket. Adjustments will be made should the tournament receive zero emergency registrations, but we all know how unlikely that is.

Of course, this also has its downsides, notably for community members who can’t reliably plan for a tournament months in advance. Coupled with the already steep costs of emergency registration, this move could likely prohibit some players from attending the tournament altogether.

Choi also addressed last year’s biggest fiasco, which forced them to replay a portion of the Ultra Street Fighter IV bracket after noting that the game wasn’t updated properly. NorCal Regionals will be training every staff member in how to confirm a title’s version and double-checking before finals. Street Fighter in particular is set to run entirely digital on PlayStation 4 to alleviate chances of the mistake happening again.

NorCal Regionals 2016 is scheduled for March 25-27 in Sacramento, California. More details can be found here.

Source: John Choi