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EVO Online 2021 isn’t off to the amazing launch it was hoping for, following technical hiccups and a lack of festivity in the air.
Netizens have criticized this year’s EVO Online, the online edition of the popular fighting game tournament for several decisions made by the organizers, including one blunder that lead to the Latin American finals for Guilty Gear Strive not being broadcasted.
The first complaint was how EVO would be handling its pools. For a lot of people pools were their shot at 90 seconds of fame, as even amateur fighting game players had a shot at being featured on the big screen at the start of the open tournament.
However, this year EVO has done away with that, only streaming later into the tournament where the roster would be populated with more well-known players.
Combining that with Sony’s acquisition of EVO this year, some users like Advancing_Guard on reddit have voiced their complaints.
“It’s kind of like watching the Olympics and only watching the finals.”, they said in a post which got 399 upvotes. “This feels kind of basic for a tournament. I mean, there’s Tekken pools going on RIGHT NOW and they are just showing reruns of Street Fighter V warm-ups. Disappointing first showing for SONY”.
Another issue criticized by fans is the format of EVO 2021 itself- rather than be one hyped out weekend, they’ve had to split up the tournaments into regions instead. It’s not entirely their fault- with big games like Street Fighter and Tekken refusing to adopt rollback netcode, matches will become borderline unplayable over long enough distances.
Even Guilty Gear Strive, despite sporting better netcode isn’t immune to this, with connectivity between Mexico and Latin American countries being so bad it prompted the Latin American finals to not be broadcast.
Naturally, fans took this window to roast the EVO Twitter account, for including Mexico in the Latin American region despite being part of continental North America and the sheer amount of distance between Argentina and Mexico.
The General Lack of Hype
Of course, the biggest complaint with EVO 2021 so far has been the amalgamation of all of this- a lack of hype. For many, EVO is more than just a tournament- it’s a celebration of fighting games. It’s big fighting game reveals, and fans going mad as Daigo performs a feat that will haunt Justin Wong for the rest of his career.
Of course, some of it can’t be helped- the event had to be online this year to happen at all, and no one’s blaming the organizers for that. But at a time like now the FGC community wanted a big event to look forward to, and a tournament that’s not even streaming all of its matches and plagued by network issues just isn’t going to cut it when everyone’s stir crazy from being stuck at home.
Another user, ShiningRarity, even compared it to last year’s EVO before it was cancelled, saying the old system of having one weekend dedicated to specific games works way better in terms of clarity for viewers.
“I think there’s only so much that can be blamed on the Pandemic in terms of how it’s being ran”, their comment writes. “Last year’s Evo I felt had way more communication and hype behind it, this year’s promotion has been confusing at some times and non-existent in others”.
“Last year’s proposed format of each game having its own weekend to be played with some exhibitions thrown in made a lot more sense than the weird clusterfuck of this year where some games are getting two separate tournaments and a bunch of preliminary tournaments for some of the bigger games while cramming all of the major tournaments into 2 weekends.”
