Street Fighter 6 is one of the ‘big three’ fighting games releasing within a twelve month period, with the other two being Mortal Kombat 1, the timeline resetting return to NetherRealm’s favourite universe, and Tekken 8, the continuation of decades long story-telling from Konami.
There are other fighting games of course, but none quite have the quality, budget or development time that those three have, which is why one particular feature present in Street Fighter 6 is puzzling, and quite rightly getting berated by fans.
Related: Street Fighter 6 Review: Punching Down (PS5)
Street Fighter 6 Features Regional Matchmaking?
Being a fighting game, Street Fighter 6 was always going to have to function on it’s online side of the game as much, if not more, than the single-player storyline. After all, taking your skills online and finding out you’re not anywhere near as good as you thought is half the fun with these fighting games these days. However, it seems that those folks over at Capcom have made a bit of an error in the way they’ve implemented the matchmaking on Street Fighter 6, and it’s drawing ire from fans around the world.
Regional matchmaking was thought of as long gone in many gaming arenas, with other developers choosing the more modern version that’ll match available and stable connections to one another, regardless of physical distance. Basically, if you can connect comfortably to the server with low ping, you’re good to match someone else.
This enables those that commit to the game to always find other players, whereas regional matchmaking does the opposite. If you’re the only player in a hundred miles to play the game? Well you won’t be playing online often.
Related: Mortal Kombat 1 Beta Access Dates Announced by Ed Boon – Fight!
And it is in this vein that players are annoyed. Regional matchmaking is fine if you live in a city, or densely populated suburb, but if you’re in the middle of nowhere, or stuck out in the countryside, you may be alone in your playtime, or as some fans have admitted, playing the same people again and again.
Over on Reddit, this very issue was brought to Street Fighter subreddit, and it seems it’s a feature that a huge portion of the player base dislike and want gone.
“So any news on Capcom fixing regional match making? I love this game but I’m in Canada and at diamond I’ve been fighting the same like 10 people on repeat, it is garbage and needs to go.
Honestly felt like the same 5 people, it wouldn’t be so bad but 2 of them played Jamie and 2 of them played Blanka… how do we get Capcom to fix this?”
And those in less-populated countries are really feeling the restrictions.
“Same here I live in Iceland and it takes me up to 10+ minutes to find matches and its usually the same people. Dont have the same issue with other games, wish they would have fixed it by now.”
“My buddy in Kazakhstan has to use a VPN in order to play against more than his 5 normal opponents. I have no idea why Capcom won’t ditch this.”
No announcement one way or the other has been released by Capcom, but with all the technology available in modern gaming nowadays, the decision is quizzical at best, redundant and unfair to customers at worst. Will they change it? If they want to keep the playerbase up they’ll have to, especially with the release of their two biggest competitors on the horizon.
What do you think? Does regional matchmaking frustrate you? Let us know in the comments!
Source: Reddit
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