Improving the Online Experience

A look into online features

Playing online is great for multiple reasons. It gives players a chance to gain experience against all kinds of characters and styles. It gives you the ability to make friends and practice even if you don’t have a scene. It even gives you a chance to play top players you would have probably had to travel to play otherwise. Obviously, it has it’s problems such as lag or input delay. But that isn’t what this article is going to focus on. Instead, I’m going to talk about the features that the games themselves come with, and how they could be even better.

Point Systems vs Win/Loss Records

In Super Street Fighter 4, winning a ranked match rewards you with two types of points. One for overall skill, called “Player Points“, and another for individual characters, called “Battle Points“. The Battle Points, or BP for short, are saved up until you rank up the character. While the purpose of this is mainly for bragging rights, it does make players hungry for that top leaderboard spot, so obviously, players won’t want to lose their points. And if players try to disconnect before they lose, they’ll be penalized and in most cases, have even more points taken. This is, in my opinion, the best way to handle online play. It helps prevent rage quits, and brings players back for the sake of leveling up.
Soul Calibur 5‘s online play offers a similar system with their ranked matches as well. And though the two are similar, I didn’t enjoy it as much. Why? The win/loss record. For those that don’t know, your win/loss record is prominently displayed with your name before every match. This can lead to some blow ups. Players definitely don’t want the world knowing that they’re 0-52. So to prevent this, they disconnect before losses. This can be very frustrating because it stops you from getting your win, and they go on having a perfect record as if they were unstoppable. Displaying the player’s record like that practically promotes disconnects, and takes from the overall online experience. And with little to no punishment for disconnecting, players have no reason not to.

 

Replays and Tutorials

The ability to save replays is one of the most valuable and best features fighting games offer today. With that said though, it still has plenty of room to improve. In Street Fighter 4, players can follow their favorite players to stay updated on their matches. However, you can only watch the replays they chose to save. Why not have the ability to watch their last 5 or 10 matches? Watching a player lose can be even more educational than watching them win. Another gripe I have is that you can’t just search for a certain player or character that you want to watch. Sure, you can browse the pre-filtered videos from the replay channel, but you can’t search for ONE individual character or player. This is kind of annoying, and would be a nice feature to include.

My next idea was inspired from Halo’s replay editor. As far as I know, there isn’t one in any of the mainstream fighters today, and even if there were, other than making a Blanka taunt montage, you may be wondering “what would be the point?” Well, if the game had a good search function, it could lead the game to being one of the best online experiences possible. Imagine searching for a certain setup or combo for your character, and finding user created content to help level everyone up. Sure, most of that can be found on youtube, but it would be nice to have in the game itself. To take it one step further, what if the game had it’s own video database full of character specific tutorials such as the ones found at youtube.com/RandomSelectTV? (/plug) This would be especially helpful to newer players, who may not even know the FGC exists yet.

Online Training Mode and Tournaments

Say what you want about Street Fighter X Tekken, but online training mode is sick. Say a friend wants to show you a certain setup online. Normally, you would set the rounds to max and hope that you can learn it quickly. But online training mode takes all that hassle away! It really is a convenient feature that I hope is explored in future fighting games.

Much like the replay editing idea, this last one may just be wishful thinking. The original Street Fighter 4 featured Tournament Mode, in which players were moved into a new group after winning, and would then play another player who had also won. Losing meant you started over, while winning meant you continued to progress until the final round. While this was kind of fun, it didn’t last long. I’d like to see this come back, but first, it would need to be polished. Players could be entered into an actual bracket showing the player profiles of all the entrants. This way, players would at least see their progress, and have the chance to prepare for the matchup  the same way they can in an offline tournament. And to take it even further, imagine the game developers themselves hosting these online tournaments. Individual state qualifiers all leading up to a national online tournament? Sounds pretty epic for an online feature.

Of course, some of this is just wishful thinking. But online play will continue to improve as the scene grows. Who knows, maybe one day we will have the character video hubs as a feature. Only time will tell. But until then, what kind of features would you like to see?

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