This is issue #6 of thegametwok newsletter, where I share Street Fighter V stats and findings.
If you’re having a fun time here, be sure to hit the sub button and bring your friends!
So much was made from LG’s Ultra Gear Fight Night Street Fighter V tournament format, I parked what I was going to talk about this week to focus on getting the stats from the three events they put together.
After watching the 3 LG tournaments, reviewing all of the stats and reading the discussion on social media, I don’t think LG made an apocalyptic error in their tournament format.
Was it the solution to the monotony that we fans have experienced for more than a decade? No.
Was it a catastrophe? No.
Could it have been done better? Yes.
Let’s breakdown the format that was used.
The closed-event 8-player bracket was double elimination. Every match was a 3-game series unless it was Losers Round 1 which was 1 game or the championship series which was 5 games each. Each game was 5 rounds maximum with a 60 second timer. Players went back to character select after every game.
From the previous paragraph, what is the most egregious error? Put it in a poll, and I’m not sure what is the winner.
Players in this era want minimum 5-game series for every match for every game, but as I’ve talked about in a previous issue, it’s hard to make a case for 5-game series if the 2-X win rate is extremely high in a 3-game series.
That being said, 1-game elimination matches are absolutely brutal. Of the 6 that were scheduled, only 2 were played. That, to me, was the most offensive part of the rules — no tournament should have 1-game elimination matches featuring some of the best players in the world.
The 5-round, 60-second timer game format was a far cry from the 3-round, 99-second timer format that has defined the Street Fighter series for 30-plus years. For many people, this was the most brutal part of the rules. It was clear the settings were copied from the Tekken series, and the organizers did not research deep enough into this.
During the fighting game resurgence in 2009, I attended many tournaments in Southern California where formats were not what anyone was used to.
One Street Fighter IV tournament I went to did 1 game, 7 rounds single elimination until the finals when it was 3 games, 5 rounds. Everyone had a first-round opponent and byes were awarded in the round before the semifinals. Make it make sense.
I was confused but also intrigued. How would players play under a format that had more rounds to win but a shorter timer?
I watched the East Asia final four in real time since that was the first time I caught wind of the debate going on. The matches had my interest, not in a waiting-for-the-car-crash kind of way but in the way of wondering how the players would deal with it.
Would a shorter clock and more rounds lead to faster matches or more exciting matches?
Of the 3 events, I charted 301 rounds of play. There were some matches that were incomplete because of a connection error and one match that was only streamed at the tail end that I skipped. Overall, I missed at least 7 rounds guaranteed.
The average round time was 45.8 seconds.
There were 49 rounds of the 301 that timed out.
Not counting the 2 matches that were only 1 game, the average match lasted 9.9 rounds.
Round Time
The average round time stunned me. Because of all the rounds that timed out, I thought it would have been closer to 60 seconds. In a way, shortening the clock made quite a few players go at a faster pace.
Look at Gamerbee, who was the fastest at 33.9 seconds. His fastest CPT Top 8 year was this year, where his round time was 46.43 seconds, a whole 13 seconds different!
Metro M was almost at the bottom at 52.96 seconds. Compare that to his lone CPT Top 8 appearance in 2020, where he had a 44.6 pace and made it to the championship series.
The 60 second timer made players act different. As a whole, it was the keystone to the whole event. Look at the average round time of the LG event compared to the Olympic closed qualifiers and CPT Top 8s:
LG Ultra Gear Fight Night: 45.8 seconds
Intel World Open Closed Qualifiers: 48.8 seconds
2021 Capcom Pro Tour Top 8 matches: 50.2 seconds
If we’re going solely on the concept of shorter time clock equals players playing faster, then going to a 60-second timer worked.
But I can’t advocate for tournaments lowering the timer. Street Fighter and 99 seconds are synonymous.
Time Over
It was clear watching the final four of the East Asia event the players were using the shorter clock to their advantage. Of the 49 time overs, 21 came from this event.
The first player to get in usually had the upperhand, held out for as long as possible and then milked the clock to the end.
Forty-nine of 301 rounds to go to time is absurd. That’s 16.3 percent, or about 1 in every 6 rounds. Here’s your comparison:
LG Ultra Gear Fight Night: 49 of 301 (16.3%)
Intel World Open Closed Qualifiers: 11 of 2519 (0.4%)
2021 Capcom Pro Tour Top 8 matches: 8 of 1041 (0.8%)
Daigo Umehara, the legend himself, won 21 rounds in the LG event, 7 by time over. However, in every CPT Top 8 round he’s played, he has NEVER won a round by time over (838 rounds in 80 matches played). He’s only been in 2 rounds that have gone to time, both losses to Gamerbee in the 2016 OzHadou Nationals. Yes, 5 years ago!
It looks surprising. It should not be. The shorter time made players act differently, one of those ways being that players used time overs to pressure their opponent.
This round by Daigo is a prime example. He’s done only a small amount of damage against Oil King, but Oil King has done next to nothing, and the clock is down to 20 seconds. Oil King forces in some moves that he normally wouldn’t try and Daigo countered them easily to a time over.
Seeing the players use the clock as a weapon was cool, until it kept happening repeatedly.
Match length
Is it better to have more games and fewer rounds or fewer games and more rounds?
Whether it’s the LG event (prior to grand finals), the Olympics or CPT Top 8s, a player has to win at least 6 rounds to win the match. It just so happened the road was constructed differently in the LG event.
So how do we interpret it when the average match was 9.9 rounds? First we have to compare it:
LG Ultra Gear Fight Night (3- and 5-game series): 9.9 rounds per match
LG Ultra Gear Fight Night (3-game series only): 9.4 rounds per match
Intel World Open Closed Qualifiers: 9.6 rounds per match
2021 Capcom Pro Tour Top 8 matches: 10.2 rounds per match
Street Fighter’s legacy is also built around 3 rounds of play, not 5. This is a tough sell.
Ideas from the event
Innovating within the fighting games community is a tough go. It’s really tough to try anything new at this point without it being shot down. First person through the wall always gets bloodied. What’s really unfortunate is during 2020 and parts of 2021 when all events moved to online, this was when new ideas should have been tried but no new true ideas were attempted.
The LG event showed that, even in a misstep such as copy-pasting one format to another, there are ways to spice things up.
The CPT Top 8s are a grind in 2021, and it’s not just that it’s online. Rounds are longer, matches are longer, events drag on. The days of a 2-hour bloc for a fighting game’s Top 8 is long gone. Most fighting game Top 8s are longer than 9-inning baseball games.
At some point, event organizers will have to ask whether the drag of events is worth it.
I think the Top 8 structure as it is currently constructed in fighting game events needs to die and be overhauled (more in a future issue). What the LG event did was give us ideas that create excitement while keeping the concept of the game intact.
I think it’s worth the pitch to make matches 3-game series at 5 rounds instead of 5-game series at 3 rounds.
This means fewer timeouts, fewer chances to switch characters, fewer delays. It makes character selection even more important. We’ll probably have more blind picks. A player only gets 1 moment instead of 2 to think about what went wrong following a loss.
But it means more opportunities within each game to have meter, to gain advantages. More consistent action.
The 60-second timer would have been great if the rest of the game shifted based on the time, such as damage scaling and meter accumulation. Since that’s not possible, we got the 49 time overs.
In a way, I hope LG conducts another Fight Night and keeps the game/round format the same. Revert the round time back to 99 seconds and change Losers Round 1 to 3-game series. Make this format theirs and let’s see how the players adjust. It could be the start of something new.
It's nice that in games we can even think about innovating! In traditional sports, we wouldn't see baseball change innings or football match lengths