FGC Roundup - June 4, 2016

The FGC Roundup returns with a look ahead to your viewing weekend as far as fighting games go and all the biggest stories that matter from the week that was in the fighting game community. Let's start with a glimpse at The Fight, down in Bogotá, Columbia. 

The Fight! serves as the fourth leg of the Latin American circuit of the Capcom Pro Tour and it will be up to the region's best to defend their turf from foreign invaders. It won't quite be the situation we ran into last week at Japonawa with the Trinity dominating the field as only EG|kBrad will be the only American player in attendance. The trend of heading down to South America for Capcom Pro Tour Points seems to be alive and well! So far this season Kenneth "kBrad" Bradley has only accumulated 68 points and sits at 21st on the CPT Global Rankings. He could use a Top 8 finish aside from his second place finish at JAM Festival earlier in the year (which makes up the bulk of his points) and double-digit numbers simply aren't good enough anymore. His EG teammate, Justin Wong, has 716 currently at the top of the leaderboard. Time to get to work.

Other notable players in attendance are other internationals such as China's PandaTV|DarkJiewa and Melty|Will2Pac from the UK. The rest of the field will be hometown heroes including Lima Salty 3 winner Brook|Misterio, Chancho Kay, DT Pikoro, ON PX Rocklandkyo (a well-known King of Fighters mainstay), Px Lm3, TSD Gx IoRosn, TSD Gx Moro and Serpentaurus. While the Latin American region might be viewed as a potential point buffet for anyone willing to make the journey down there should be plenty of competition for the international players to handle this weekend.

DarkJiewa is potentially primed for a big points weekend sans the Trinity as his former Top 16 finishes earlier this year are showing that he's a player on the rise. kBrad is no slouch with Cammy either but the pieces haven't all fallen into place as of yet. Perhaps he can turn his tournament fortunes around at The Fight! and earn a spot in the Latin America regional finals alongside Justin Wong, Chris Tatarian, and Misterio. Will2Pac could very well help to reverse the regression of the EU scene as well with a win overseas. Smaller in scale but still fascinating nonetheless. The Fight! can be found over at ColombianoFGC on Twitch. All the action starts on Saturday (June 4th) at 8 AM PT/11AM ET.

Time to Mash

The other half of the duo of Capcom Pro Tour ranking events, Tokyo Button Mashers, will be missing players such as Tokido, Infiltration, Mago and the like thanks to Street Fighter V Crash. That doesn't mean there will be any shortage of Asia's elite present in Tokyo this weekend. The killers are assembled, ladies and gentleman. 

Current CPT Asia points leader, MSJ|Haitani, is one of the likely frontrunners as his Necalli is deadly and his recent run through ranking events has been nothing short of spectacular. Eita ranked second in points on the Asia regional board, is also a serious threat. Others to watch for include GO1 and, of course, RB|Daigo Umehara. There are other names that haven't made much noise so far on the Tour that will likely make their presence known this weekend as well. Hori|Sako has to be one of them as his past accomplishments and clean play will inevitably translate to success in SF5 at some point. Nemo, Dashio, Itabashi Zangief, Kindevu, and MOV are also others to keep an eye on in the brackets full of players all looking to start making their mark in the CPT this year.

Daigo is, perhaps, the most exciting unknown for the weekend. His seventh place finish at Stunfest was disappointing to some but not too surprising considering it was his first real tournament of so far in Street Fighter V. His punish-game was lacking, and he simply didn't appear to be the same Daigo "The Beast" the world saw in the latter days of SF4. If his BeasTV broadcasts are any indication of his progression, he seems poised to break out at any moment. 

Tokyo Button Mashers kicks off on June 5th at 9 AM JST / Saturday (4th) at 7 8 PM ET/5 PM PT on Twitch.

Final Impact

The ongoing saga of Street Fighter V Crash will finally come to an end this weekend as Team Topanga meets Team Razer in the Team Finals. The event, broadcast live from the Nexon Arena in Seoul, South Korea, is the culmination of many weeks worth of tense battles featuring some of the best Street Fighter talent that Asia has to offer. The biggest thing to watch for has to be the potential vengeance Tokido could exact upon Infiltration. If last week is any metric to judge by, however, Fuudo and Xian might be able to take care of the heavy lifting. 

Team Topanga, however, is formidable and should give Team Razer a slate of matches that pushes each Razer member to their limit. The Capcom ranking events this weekend are worth checking out but, without a doubt, Crash will have some of the most exciting moments on offer from the FGC on Saturday night when things kick off.

All the action can be caught, as in weeks past, on the Crash stream starting at 1 AM ET on Saturday. 

Ibuki Delayed

Everyone's favorite ninja, Ibuki, will be back in Street Fighter V. She, however, didn't make the May release deadline as her reveal was done at Combo Breaker last Sunday before Grand Finals. So much for that release schedule, eh Capcom?

TechRaptor shared the news earlier this week but an explanation from Capcom (via their Capcom-Unity blog) about the "reasoning" for the delay soon followed. 

Ibuki Release

The first thing we want to address is the release of our next DLC character, Ibuki. We had originally aimed to release her in the last week of May, but in order to provide the best experience possible for our players, we decided to postpone her. We are doing our best to release the content in the last week of June.

To reiterate, we are currently aiming for the last week of June to release both Ibuki and the Cinematic Story Mode.

We apologize to our players all over the globe for not communicating this change to our release schedule sooner.

While we planned to talk about the timing of her release this week, it’s clear that we should have been more upfront with everyone on the shift in timing.

Moving forward, the development team will continue to put quality of the product above all else. This may result in additional delays in content deployment. That said, we will be much more transparent when plans change so all of our fans know what to expect.

Please continue to support the development team in any way you can. They are working very hard to bring you the best Street Fighter yet and positive feedback and support helps more than you can imagine.

Haunts, a community manager for Capcom, also addressed other reported issues of input lag and further refinements to the rage quitting system within the game. The full posting can be found at http://www.capcom-unity.com/haunts/blog/2016/06/02/updates-on-street-fighter-v-development-vol-1.

Things can be get delayed, no doubt, but it's disappointing to see Capcom already deviate from their release schedule. The character, though, looks great and the WinnerStaysOn sessions preview of her and the last episode of Capcom Pro Tour Talk (featuring Combofiend) gave a great glimpse at her toolkit. She will drop alongside the other big part of the June update (by the last week of the month) featuring a "Cinematic Story Mode" and other changes as well. 

Noel Brown Banned from CPT Events

The focus of watching tournaments should be the games themselves but this past weekend an incident occurred that just could not be ignored. Noel Brown, a known name within the FGC who has had recent issues regarding the treatment of females, acted inappropriately before Loser's Finals of Street Fighter V. The video above, at the appropriate point in the stream's runtime, shows exactly what Mr. Brown did to a female attendee. Harassment shouldn't be a part of the tournament environment for anyone, male or female, and Combo Breaker responded quickly to the incident.

Noel Brown is banned from Combo Breaker 2017 and could be turned away in 2018 as well. Capcom soon responded as well and issues a ban from all Capcom Pro Tour events for Noel Brown through 2016. This will be the first time they've ever banned a player from competition and will use it as a baseline moving forward for future years. Ultra Arcade also issued a statement regarding their former player's release and his inability to attend Ultra Arcade sponsored events such as the Killer Instinct World Cup for the duration of the 2017 season. 

Capcom Pro Tour Rule Change

The recent rule changes to the Capcom Pro Tour rules seemed to single out a specific sponsor, Team YP, from competition but a wave of negative feedback regarding that decision seems to have moved Capcom to further iterate upon their ruleset.

Capcom will not allow, and will not allow third parties, to display, advertise, or otherwise promote in any manner sponsorship, endorsement or commercial or any other type of affiliation with or by (i) adult content sponsors, such as a publisher of pornographic websites or (ii) companies that manufacture, sell, distribute or market alcoholic beverages, cigarettes or vaping (e-cigarette ), drugs, guns or other weapon on the official media content or channels (such as event video streaming and social media) of Capcom or any Tournament Organizer for or in connection with the Capcom Pro Tour.

So, not only adult-entertainment sponsors but those representing cigarettes, vaping, alcoholic beverages, guns, drugs or any other potentially "unapproved" sponsors will not be allowed to be promoted or shown on stream during Capcom Pro Tour events.

This does not mean, however, that players sponsored by these organizations cannot compete. Players can compete regardless of their sponsor affiliation but there won't be any TeamYP tags on Fillipinoman or Valmaster anytime soon. Same goes for TheSteamCo which sponsors quite a few FGC personalities as well. 

Capcom seems to be really moving forward with this notion that the FGC is supposed to be for all and that's a good thing but the core of the community has always seen itself differently and there will likely be further discourse over the issue in the months to come. Their approach is starting to echo Riot's with League of Legends. The kingship over their property that might be worrying to some. We'll see how the rest of the season shakes out but moving forward into 2017 and beyond it will be something to watch for.

That will do it for this week's FGC Roundup. We'll be back next week with more big news and tournament action from around the fighting game community. Stay free, Internet