Holy shit I just finished the vid. I was the guy who was super against including rankings but the way you formulated everything in this vid and explained it, I love it. You are a well needed individual for the community and this video is amazing. I hope people see this.
Even as a Midwesterner who knows we will get wrecked, I can't help but agree. Almost forgot those existed, used to love finding crappy old RU-vid videos of them back in the day.
i really love the way hax articulates his thought processes it’s really well put together flowed well full of good anecdotes and truly trying to make a difference for the community
The community certainly needs to keep having this conversation. While rollback is amazing we are in its first iteration, there is no reason to assume there aren't plenty of improvements to be made. I like connection locking rather than region locking. Create brackets based on internet performance, require players in the faster brackets provide evidence of a strong connection. This won't punish great play between ec/wc players with a strong connection the way region locking will. What if Leffen builds a dedicated transatlantic pipeline to get a 4ms ping? Should he be region locked to the 7 people still playing in Sweden? Of course not! Players who care more will find a way to get better connections, players who don't can suffer in the endless swamps of lag where they belong.
Coming from a UK player/viewer perspective, I would love to see this discussion encompass regions beyond the USA. I think you’ve struck a great balance between player/viewer experience in your plan, but it needs to address EU, JPN, and even Canada and SA. Of course the Melee scene is huge in NA, but it’s discouraging for players like myself who aren’t east/west coast to see any discussion on expanded regions. This is also on non-NA regions to step up as well, but if you’re spearheading this advice then it would be great to see you incorporate all corners of the world.
That's essentially a non-problem. Fiber is *much more* widespread in the EU than in the US and also way more accessible; And since distances are way shorter (and network routing is INSANELY better) than coast to coast in the US, if you have even a half decent ADSL, you can play pretty much anyone in neighboring countries. Fiber users can play anyone in EU.
Slippi + the B0XX were a serious blessing for me this year. Melee gives me hope that life will get better, because it's the only thing that has gotten better since the pandemic started. Thanks for all your passion and hard work hax
Good to see your videos again! Still loving my B0xx, has restored my ability to play. Neat to see you address rollback, curious to see what comes next from yuh!
My man really woke up today and chose a 25 minute lag johns video Nah all jokes aside I definitely noticed the difference lag made in the s2j zain lacs match
THANK YOU, I love rollback as much as everyone else and it's obviously crucial for melee to live through these times, but I think it's really dumb how when anyone has any criticism towards online it's immediately shut down and treated as being ungrateful.
One consideration about online region locked tournaments counting towards rank in 2022 is that regions should strive to have an equal number of tournaments, or tournaments need to be given a weighting system to prevent one region from overtaking the leaderboard
I think region locked qualifiers could be online, just like LACS. And then we could have a tournament where the top players of each region have a LAN tournament. I feel like that way we could get more players to enter tournaments.
As someone who plays more traditional FGs these days, rollback netcode has been able to revive countless games I didn’t think I’d ever be able to play again
I love the idea of bringing back crewbattles but i think the viewer experience is lagging and could be improved. For one, captains of the crews should announce the next player with a short timer (commentators would typically sit for 5 minutes just guessing who the next player would be and just takes too long). And two, If someone can make it, a software mod to assist with starting games up with proper stocks instead of having players run off stage and then neutral start. I think if we can use D-pad left/right to increase the stock count we start with in the CSS would be perfect and save about a minute every player swap since you start right away. In a 10v10 crew battle incorporating both of these suggestions could shave off 45-60 minutes of downtime from the VOD and keep the hype going.
Hitting the mark exactly. I have been highly conflicted about entering tournaments that aren't region-locked because I simply know myself well enough to know how awful it will be for me to play a tournament set on horrendous connection.
I'm not even from US but, as a viewer, I liked the ideas you presented, just thought that at some point you would dig a bit deeper in the internet quality. The fiber quality is surely a relevant point to be noted, but setup things like wifi vs. ethernet cable or other methods to check overall internet quality could also be a thing. And, in the end of the day, rollback is the best online we can get so far, but it'll always be like 98-99% of the offline experience, so compromises have to be made unfortunatelly.
one of the things that the tekken scene is kinda doing rn is they're having national weeklies where the playerbase is split into region-locked pools. if you get top 2 in your pool you still play in a national top8, but for the duration of the entire pool phase you're only seeing west coast v west coast matches. It seems to go a long way towards achieving many of the goals you're talking about
Other pros have said as well that above 100 ping is definitely not like CRT. From my own playing having fibre I think ~70 is still ok but anything 50 and below pretty much feels like CRT.
I just quit out of any match over 80ms latency on unranked. (Little hiccups are okay and expected online) I'm there to have fun and not be annoyed by my opponent being rolled back across the stage. Really hope they add a ping test before setting up a match. I'd rather wait for a good connection match than get an instant match at 100+ latency.
Hard agree with what was said here. Different but awesome tournies can exist that take into account the unique challenges of remote play in a competitive environment.
“Playing on an HDTV from analog conversion is just a different challenge” Lmao I know that’s not exactly what you mean but it definitely sounds like lag adaptation. Which in that context at least it’s consistent, but ping is a wily mistress.
well said Hax! I also wondered why tournaments where even being played at more than 60 ping or so. I mean, its still good and even people say its playable at 3f with a stable connection, which I find horryfing lol. The thing is it doesnt compare to the smoothness and input lag of a good connection, so competing when that is not consistent is non sense.
Really interesting video Hax, and I like a lot of these takes! My only question is that a coastal MPGR/coastal online events may limit opportunities for EU/JPN/etc. players getting ranked or known. How would you suggest alleviating this so there is a truly fair playing field, especially in COVID times?
@@mr2cents308 yeh there is already a seperate EU ranking by Phoenix Blue, which i can foresee being done again for next year with some kind of online rankings
Hax, it’s not controversial and a network engineer like Fizzi would agree. Slippi doesn’t fix WiFi stability, or having the cheapest internet package. It does allow for more comfortable play with delay vs rollback, but the delay we’re talking about here is 32ms. 50ms feels fine, but if each frame is equivalent to 16ms then going beyond whatever your rollback frame is (16ms-1 32ms-2 48ms-3)does mean there is some potential loss. We can split hairs about where we compromise as a community, as not everyone is on fiber, but to propose that this affects competitive integrity across higher pings/worse connections? Yeah 100%, a line should be drawn.
Broooo 2 PGRs would be so freakin hype. Watxhing the doc made me sad we didnt have more east/west coast rivalries and that would be sooo sick. In person Summit would be crazy
Long time player, first time caller: I'd be totally fine with more invitations in 2021. Knowing that I'm excluded from competing from these events will not harm my ability to enter shittily ran online locals and still get 4th (in 8 man brackets.)
If everyone practiced and played on a 3 frame delay it would smooth out a LOT of the issues with even good connections from coast to coast There will be some players with shit internet, and it happens, but from the testing I’ve done 3 frame smooths out almost every issue I’ve seen with 80+ ping connections
melee already does those in the rollback era, europeans are pretty much region locked out of most of these NA tournaments. It should probably also be said that NA CS has lost a lot from being region locked, and it seems like europe in melee is having a similar if less desperate time staying relevant
I don't think you get 50k viewers watching region locked tournaments and you don't get top players (like Mang0/Zain) practicing or motivated to compete if they can't play against all of the other high/top level competition. There should be multiple Super Majors/Invitationals and also Region Locked tournaments throughout 2021.
America is behind the times in terms of internet speed because of ISPs and their stupid competition agreements. Netplay would feel significantly better between regions if it weren’t for that, plus ISPs are dragging their heels on making fiber as widely available as possible. Nonetheless I’ve thought tournaments should be region locked since the beginning of the rollback era so I completely agree with you there
Only disagree with one of the last points. Keep the online top 50 pgr for east and west coast forever, but those results stay far the hell away from pgr top 100. Reserve that pgr for lan. Have 2, or even more (but not too many more) for regions in the US, where online rollback counts. Create and foster region rivalries online. Resolve the "who's the best"™ arguments for offline pgr top 100
FYI fiber internet's superior latency is greatly overstated and is basically equivalent since most of the path is already fiber either way, whether you have fiber at the last mile or not. Upload speeds are another question.
Rollback is great for the current times, but it should in my opinion never replace actual in person tournaments. Going somewhere and meeting people who you can discuss gameplay/gameplans with+make friends is great for keeping people in the community longer and for one's mental health. Not doing primarily in person tournaments can only be a short term option to avoid dying. Online stuff will simply not keep people around as long as the offline melee scene has already kept people around, and in person melee is almost definitely capable of keeping that up, online is not, it can only be a great but secondary addition.
People may not be saying it, but I fear that viewing online as the same importance as offline will make is so that an amount of offline events get replaced by online ones, which I think will be hurtful in the long term. Online should be a nice extra not even a partial replacement
The only question I have is what happens to people who are about the same distance from the east and west coasts. How would you determine if they qualify for one top 50 or the other, especially if their online tournament experiences would be roughly the same with each?
juliosnap But would those borders prevent those people from participating in tournaments that their connection would be just fine for? That's another side to the issue.
There needs to be a cut-off point for ping and connection quality to consider a set playable. Even restricting things down to regions, which would definitely help, does not completely solve this. No idea what the ping, or whatever cut-off should be though
I think there are really 2 options. The first is you just say fuck it, no rankings until in person events, we'll do these NA Wide Supermajors and prioritize the viewer experience and growth of the game over perfect player experience. I think the other option of splitting the coasts, having sperate rankings and hosting invitational/octagon events for coast vs coast stuff could be interesting but I don't think you grow the game the that way but you do make it a better playing experience. I still think that there shouldn't be an online ranking, it doesn't feel right, but I'm open for a coastal based rankings.
I think for supermajors if we had a dedicated host in Dallas or Chicago that both players would connect to (room code instead of joining via player code) we could cut overall ping times between the players in half. With a few dedicated servers for these kinds of majors and additions to the slippi client it could be possible. This would be absolutely massive for cross country play and you could play cross country with 50-60 ping for those connections that would otherwise be 100+. Edit: nvm this doesn't really work, see comments
If both players had 50 ping to this middle host then it's still the same as having 100 ping between each other because it takes 50ms to get to the central server, then 50ms more to go from there to the other player
@@TheZepple that makes sense actually. I feel like there could be other benefits of having a central dedicated host but it may actually be a not so good idea
Hax is about to que up for some Slippi and test out some velocity cancelling and missed tech B.S. on unsuspecting ultimate players that are tired of crappy delay-based netcode and input lag.
