Month: May 2016

Tournament standards rarely change, but they are by no means set in stone. Community decisions on changing the standard usually lean towards banning characters, choosing or banning specific stages, or more commonly which kinds of monitors and sticks/pads are acceptable. However, in recent months the Skullgirls community has slowly been shifting its mindset on how tournaments should be run altogether. The intention being to make entire tournaments run Best-of-Five matches, not simply for Grand Finals or even Top 8. In a Best-of-Five (often referred to as 3/5) set, a player must win three games to win the series.

To give a bit of backstory to this shift, it’s important to know just how quickly Skullgirls runs. There is no need to button check, thanks to push to set button select at the start of the round. Tournament mode hastens the starting of subsequent matches by backing out to controller select after unplugging any controller. There are very few cinematic events, where some other games have unskippable winposes, supers, cutscenes, or what have you in the middle of a match. The loading time for matches in comparison to most other current games also appear to be markedly quicker, making for an overall quicker experience.

All this culminates in Skullgirls tournaments often finishing ahead of time, or finishing on time despite another game cutting into the time allotted for SG. For example, at Winter Brawl X the Skullgirls TO decided to just run all of pools at the same time, resulting in two hours of bracket time being finished in about an hour.

As more players are starting to play Skullgirls and the tournaments are getting bigger, there has been a growing desire to shift to 3/5 matches. The community has been seriously having this discussion building up to this year’s Combo Breaker, with people for and against it disecting the pros and the cons.

This isn’t the first time the Skullgirls community as a whole has decided to alter the Tournament standard for their game, if you didn’t know. After the PS4 version of Skullgirls came out, the community eventually got to the point where they refused to play on PS3 setups. The main problem with PS3 was occasionally a setups with missing DLC or an out of date version would pop up, but a big reason was that the PS4 version simply looked and preformed better. After this point, most events moved with the community’s decision and provided PS4 setups, but that wasn’t the case every time. There was at least one tournament, not to name any one specifically, in which due to a  PS4’s were not provided for play. In that case, instead of playing on PS3 or making a big fuss, the Skullgirls players simply scrounged up their own setups to hold the tournament and Top 8 on.

As far as the community effort towards playing 3/5, two recent experiments were held with this new standard in place. Northwest Majors VIII and XenoEncore were two tournaments held in April, and both were sort of guinea pigs to test how 3/5 would run throughout a whole event. The majority of players and spectators from both events seem to believe that 3/5 ran amazingly, and look forward to having this trend continue in the future. That future currently being Combo Breaker, which has already aligned their rules to accommodate 3/5 for Skullgirls.

Just a few weeks after the completion of its French edition, KAKUTOP is back with the full European edition of its invitational league. KAKUTOP League is a great opportunity to watch Europe’s best battle it out to determine the best all-around player. And with this being the first KAKUTOP to useStreet Fighter V, you don’t want to miss out.

As usual, play begins with two groups of five players. Each player in the group faces off against the other players in a best-of-five set. The top players from each group will then proceed to finals, where matches are best-of-nine, with deuce rules.

You can watch KAKUTOP complete with Ken Bogard’s fast-paced French commentary on Gaming Live’s Twitch channel, but if you’re more interested in English, check out Unequalled Media’s English restream.

UnequalledMedia (English)

Watch live video from UnequalledMedia on www.twitch.tv

GamingLive_TV1 (French)

Watch live video from GamingLive_TV1 on www.twitch.tv

Results

Street Fighter V

Group Stage

Group A

Problem X and Valmaster advance to the finals stage. Alioune will play against Packz for the last spot in the finals stage.

1. PXP|Problem X (M. Bison)
2. YP|Valmaster (Chun-Li)
3. Alioune (Chun-Li)
4. BX3|Duppsko (Ryu, Birdie)
5. LLL|MBR (Ryu)

Group B

Luffy and Phenom advance to the finals stage. Packz will play against Alioune for the last spot in the finals stage.

1. RB|Luffy (R. Mika)
2. BX3|Phenom (M. Bison, Necalli)
3. Perilous|Packz (Karin)
4. Melty|Will2pac (Laura)
5. CCL (Chun-Li)

Source: Gaming Live