Month: October 2016

Growing a fighting game scene is the responsibility of each player. Not much is needed to do your part, simply showing up to events or posting online can help. The low commitment of actions like these is vital, but some members in a community take it a step further and attempt to gather a bigger crowd. In an attempt to increase their reach as a community, community leaders sometimes take unique approaches to accomplish this.

The King of Fighters community, specifically with the support of MadManCafe, is holding a survey in an attempt to gather information, targeted at increasing the range of community content and tournament organizer support. Giving a voice and hard numbers to the fan base has all sorts of useful benefits, which the folks at MMCafe are attempting to put to good use. They are raffling off free copies of KOF XIV to participants each month, to add some incentive for more people to aid in their community building.

The survey so far has over 1000 participants, with a Japanese survey netting nearly 300 and a Korean survey managing to break 100. The results of the English survey so far are detailed here, with some interesting revelations, but this isn’t the first community survey. Back in 2012, a similar survey was held by the same people, though that survey didn’t manage to break 500 entries. Even still, looking at the data from then until now is interesting. Out of the people surveyed, a majority expressed interest in casual events like locals, good commentary, and they leaned towards watching streams to learn more about their game than most other sources.

Comparing this to today’s survey, there are some interesting differences. The majority still prioritizes casual events (63%), but more players lean towards more streams (50%), more information databases (56%), and better netcode (56%) as reasons to get them excited about the game. In 2012 commentary was prioritized, but today it’s tied with combo and tech videos (59%), with streams trailing just behind (53%). The last comparison to make to the 2012 survey is on where the surveyed players are getting their content from; four years ago they prioritized streams, but today players are much more likely to look towards community sites like Dreamcancel, Orochinagi, and our very own Shoryuken for their content (81%). In this area, places players are looking for content, people are actually using Facebook as a tool a lot more (60%), in addition to the traditional streams and tech videos(54%).

These three topics aren’t the only things being polled, of course. The response to age showed that the majority of participants are between 25-34 (59%), with the combined total of players between 18 and 34 making the vast majority of players (88%). While that stat isn’t too surprising, it’s interesting to see how much crossover there is with other games. The overwhelming majority of KOF players have dabbled in Street Fighter (95%), with a good number having played Tekken (72%) and others. One of the more interesting stats is what those surveyed responded as what could entice them to show up to local events; a supportive community (54%) and casual setups (49%) are ranked the highest in what could help players turn up offline, which I think helps people turn up for a lot of communities, not just KOF.

There is a lot more data that I’m not touching on here, so be sure to thumb through the survey results yourself. It’s great to have solid data to look at for these kinds of topics, which again is linked here.

Sources: Orochinagi; Dreamcancel; Battlepage; James Alderson

Mods tend not to have a too-prominent place in the fighting game community, primarily due to most fighting games being released on a home console. Games released on PC do get fiddled with, but for consoles, Melee is probably the most modded title.

MagicScrumpy, who was the YouTuber responsible for that “Making Melee Viable” series of videos, regularly tweaks values in the game for fun. Occasionally he comes across something entertaining, and shares what he finds with the rest of us. First up, he shares a common fact about the game: that certain characters land-cancel their projectile animations and others don’t, then proceeds to show us a Melee where every character land-canceled their projectiles.

He poses the same kind of question to the cast about wall jumping, and modifies the game to allow everyone to perform this action, currently something only 8 out of 26 characters can do.

MagicScrumpy’s exploits sometimes end with nothing particularly useful learned. This last video showcases his attempts to manipulate invincibility in the game, seeing if there is anyway to trick the game in normal circumstance to prolong invincibility. He–thankfully–discovers no such tactic.

Of course, there are many, many more videos of similar content on his channel. If you enjoyed yourself, be sure to browse what else he has up.

Source: MagicScrumpy