Category: News

Over the past few days following its announcement, ELEAGUE and Capcom have now revealed the 32 fighters who are set to compete in the first ever ELEAGUE Street Fighter V Invitational.

Ladies & Gentlemen, your 32 contestants for #SFV @ELEAGUE Good luck everyone! Let's show the world what the #FGC is all about! #WeESPORTS pic.twitter.com/gK52gVsAgE

— John D (@diamonon) February 25, 2017

As seen in the Tweet above, the 12 players in gold are the top 12 placers on last year’s Capcom Pro Tour leaderboard, while the four in green being the four highest placing players from each separate region. The remaining 16 players were chosen specially by Capcom and ELEAGUE, thanks to their presence and activity within the Street Fighter V community.

ELEAGUE have also revealed details on the tournament format and the broadcast schedule for players hoping to watch. Starting on March 27th and finishing on March 30th, all 32 players will compete in a series of four preliminaries, with the top six competitors from each group advancing onto the next stage. All matches in this preliminary stage will be best of three. Following that, the regular season will begin with the remaining 24 players splitting into four groups of six, with the next four Fridays seeing those groups battling it out against each other in best of five sets. From there, the top two players from each group will advance to the top 8 playoff bracket on May 26th, to determine the ELEAGUE champion.

ELEAGUE is certainly cutting the Invitational fine with other events, with Combo Breaker starting on that Friday and Red Bull Kumite kicking off on Saturday the 27th. Players better have some back up plane tickets, just in case they wish to attend ELEAGUE and another one of that weekend’s events.

Sources: diamonon; ELEAGUE

An unusual SNK treasure returns!

Formerly available only in Japan as a PlayStation 2 release, ADK Damashii is a collection of five classic SNK arcade ports not yet seen before in the West. The marquee title is Ganggang Kohshinkyoku (“Aggressors of Dark Kombat,” abbreviated ADK), a one-on-one arcade fighting game with multiple planes of action. The collection also includes Ninja Master’s: Haō Ninpō Chō, another one-on-one fighting title–ninja-themed–in which players can switch between weapon-based and hand-to-hand combat.

Three non-fighting-games fill out the rest of the package: action side-scroller Ninja Combat, run-and-gunner Ninja Commando, and shooter/puzzle game hybrid Twinkle Star Sprites.

You can grab this little piece of SNK arcade history from the PlayStation Store now for $14.99 USD. As an import title, the games are still in their original Japanese language. Check out some screenshots below!

Click to view slideshow.

Thanks to Paul for the tip.

Source: PlayStation Store

In their attempt to improve everyone’s tournament experience, the organizational team over at Combo Breaker have decided to trial a new pool system for Combo Breaker 2017. In order to lessen instances of double jeopardy–where players have to fight the same person that put them into Losers’–Combo Breaker will have it so two people qualify out of Losers’, instead of just one.

As explained by Combo Breaker’s competitor director Max “CurlingW” Wasserman, each tournament that has over 81 entrants will have it so the Losers’ Finals of each pool is simply not played, and that both competitors advance forward into the next phase of bracket in Losers’ side. Brackets will still remain operate within the double elimination format, but dropping Losers’ Finals reduces chances of double jeopardy matches by almost half.

Introducing 3-player-advancing pools! Find out more from our Competition Director, @CurlingW at https://t.co/WONkEaA7aD! pic.twitter.com/QyQHXYuMC8

— Combo Breaker (@ComboBreakerFGC) February 24, 2017

Through this system, the bracket following phase one pools is 50% larger–so a top 32 bracket is now a top 48 bracket–but it ensures that everyone faces different opponents from different pools. Besides the obvious bonus of reducing instances of double jeopardy, it makes brackets go a lot quicker, as pool captains and stream runners are not waiting around for Losers’ Finals, which cannot be played at the same time as other games.

According to Wasserman at last year’s Combo Breaker, there were 60 Losers’ bracket rematches across 72 pools, with 45% of these happening within Losers’ Finals. If Combo Breaker 2016 had run the three out pool system, there would have only been 33 Losers’ bracket rematches in total, with 60% of pools having zero rematches.

This new system looks like it is beneficial for everyone involved in Combo Breaker, so let’s hope the new pools result in faster and more contended tournament goers. You will be able to see the three out pool system in action from May 26th-28th in St Charles, Illinois when Combo Breaker takes over the Mega Center.

Source: Combo Breaker

We’ve seen AI programs in traditional fighters like Dantarion’s KenBot and ToolAssisted’s army of bots, but we’ve yet to see AIs deployed to compete in platform fighters. Well, a team of graduate students at MIT have created a special AI which, through the use of deep learning techniques, has adapted and learned to play Super Smash Bros. Melee at a competitive level.

Starting with the in-game AI as a training partner, this AI had learned to beat its computer opponent within a few hours and within a few more weeks of practice, it was able to defeat power ranked players in friendly sets. The research team, led by Vlad Firoiu, had the AI learn Melee with Captain Falcon by playing repeated sets on Battlefield. With Falcon’s lack of projectile moves and Battlefield’s simple layout, the research team was able to effectively track the AI’s progress as a player, eventually getting to a stage where it could hold its own against actual pro players.

Taking it to two tournaments, the Falcon-bot was able to beat players like fellow Falcon Tempo|S2J, Mafia, Slox, Kage, Boxr|Zhu and Gravy. While the bot was responsive when players fought it like a human opponent, the bot would often fail spectacularly if it encountered a situation it had never seen before. Against one player who simply crouched at the edge of Battlefield, the bot started to “behave very oddly, refusing to attack and eventually KOing itself by falling off the other side of the stage.” According to Firoiu, the bot had only played previous versions of itself before going into a tournament setting with a real player, so it “never encountered such a degenerate strategy” in its training. Moreover, the Falcon-bot performed noticeably worse on different stages and against new characters, as it simply had not learned the matchups and developed suitable counter-measures.

The whole report on the AI’s development is a fascinating read, as it shows just how the system was eventually able to transfer information it had learned from playing Falcon, in order to learn how to play other characters. I think the Melee Gods are still safe from the AI uprising–for now, at least.

Source: Cornell University Library via New Scientist