Street Fighter 5's online tournament mode features some interesting rules like requiring a wired connection and raising objections to laggy opponents
Though we've known about it for some time, Street Fighter 5: Champion Edition's new online tournament mode finally opened up for the public to try out via a beta event this past weekend.
We've already detailed our impressions of the limited look Capcom gave us of SF5's next big feature though we can now know even more about it since the company has released support and manual pages that detail almost everything about online tournaments.
The new online manual appears to confirm that players will indeed need to always (at least for now) register for in-game tournaments using the official website. It will not be available from within SF5 itself.
When entering, it appears as though you can enter a different gamertag than what is on your CFN ID though players can get disqualified for using inappropriate or misleading names.
Perhaps the best part of this whole process is the fact that these online tournaments require a connection speed of at least 3 Mbps or higher and a wired internet connection to participate. Players found in violation of these rules will also be disqualified from brackets.
If players have suspicions that their opponent is playing on a poor connection or Wi-Fi, they can file an objection during the tournament if bad lag or other potential foul play is suspected.
The rules do not offer up what happens in cases where objections are raised, but I assume if anything not above board is detected, the subject in question will be DQ'd. You don't want to pointlessly flag opponents for no reason either, as you'll be banned if you're found to be submitting a false report.
One of the major complaints about the beta test was how long it could take between finishing matches and when the next one would start — bracket results also do not update during this time. This is apparently partly due to the need to allow time for objections and potential changing of results, so do not expect it to change for the final release.
You can still leave the bracket room during that downtime, however, and play other modes of the game like go back to Training, but you will be disqualified if you're not back in time for the start of the next round.
Perhaps the most glaring omission in this feature set is the FAQ also confirms that players will not be able to spectate live matches in game, so players who are eliminated early would need to wait for the brackets to update to watch replays of the previous matches. If the tournament is being streamed elsewhere like Twitch, Capcom says the tournament will include a link to said streams.
Street Fighter's tournament mode will offer a bunch of options to customize tournament experiences to allow players to choose things like single / double elimination brackets, banned characters / costumes, character select settings, rounds and more.
I'm cautiously optimistic that Capcom can execute on this plan since what little I've tried thus far appeared to be fully functional, but it'll be interesting to see this feature be the backbone of the Intel World Open qualifiers next year.
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The new tournament mode will assumedly launch with Street Fighter 5: Champion Edition's full release on February 14, 2020 though Capcom has said they will do more tests leading up to get there.
You can find out all of the details about the online tournaments in Capcom's support FAQ and instruction manual.
