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Multiple top Street Fighter 6 competitors vent frustrations over laggy setups after final Premier event, push for future change

Multiple top Street Fighter 6 competitors vent frustrations over laggy setups after final Premier event, push for future change

December 16, 2024 Entertainment & Lifestyle


It goes much beyond this one tournament, however, and probably beyond just the PlayStation 5 too


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Multiple top Street Fighter 6 competitors vent frustrations over laggy setups after final Premier event, push for future change


This weekend served as the final opportunity for many Street Fighter 6 players to earn a spot at Capcom Cup 11, but not everyone walked away feeling as though they weren’t really given the chance to perform at their best.






The Kings of the World tournament served as the last offline Premier event of the Capcom Pro Tour 2024 season where some top competitors vented frustrations over laggy setups, which has been an ongoing issue in the scene for quite some time now.









Current Evo 2024 champion FLY|Punk and the United Kingdom’s own Mouz|EndingWalker were the ones seen mostly leading the charge talking about the problems faced not only this weekend but a wider look at the offline space for SF6 in general.




“That is easily the worst setup I have ever touched in my entire life,” wrote Punk on social media, who does not really tend to hold back on offering criticism for events he attends.


“I know the venue is Samsung but I just realized the monitors is also Samsung im pretty sure that’s why they so bad I don’t know one person who has ever played on a samsung monitor,” he continued after finishing the tournament in 9th place. “CPT has to get standards I shouldn’t be flying 10+ hours to fight technical problems instead of my opponent.”


Some point to PlayStation 5s being used as the main culprit of lag or setup issues. Some point to the monitors with various brands, models and configurations offering different play conditions (often times at the same event). And others even look to other hardware and circumstances like HDMI splitters and stream setups.




The real answer, however, is multi-layered and likely a combination of all those factors and SF6 itself.




It’s a problem that’s popped up even outside of open majors considering even the Sajam Slam finals at Twitch Con this year had to deal with lag on their stream setup.



EndingWalker is apparently among the growing population wanting CPT and large-scale events to switch from PS5 over to PC while offering doubts on the console’s consistency and performance.


“With this being end of season I think it’s finally time I share my opinion on this PS5 is not a competitive console,” wrote EndingWalker. “It’s inconsistent, laggy, the vast majority of Pro players use PC to practice. Flying 10 hours to go to a tournament and lose to the setup without learning isn’t ok.”




There are quite a few players voicing their agreement with the young pro as well like former Capcom Cup champ SPY|NuckleDu hoping for PC to become the tournament standard for SF6, especially with more and more of the competitive community using that version personally.




But things are obviously not quite that simple.




PCs can work great for limited / smaller events like Red Bull Kumite, however, scaling that up to fit the needs of a major tournament drawing potentially thousands of players is a different beast.


Although the debate’s been going for years now, that doesn’t change that PCs would still be more expensive for tournament organizers to acquire and maintain compared to consoles.


And without standardized hardware, tools, configurations and more, PCs can offer up even more inconsistencies setup to setup while also potentially opening the door to more performance drops depending on the game (and its own configurations).




PS5s did have inherently more lag on prior Unreal Engine 4 fighting games, and there was the issue of PS5 USB ports melting at Evo last year — though this SF6 season, there’s less indication that simply switching platforms would solve all the problems.


One could try and make the argument that tournaments could try changing to Xbox Series X|S, but there’s a few other issues with that including new costs and no guarantee that performance will stabilize at a large enough factor to justify it.


Moreover, Sony is part owner of Evo and a fairly major sponsor of fighting game tournaments now, so they’re less likely to back off pushing their own hardware to be used at events between the PS5 and Inzone monitors.




We also should take a look at Street Fighter 6 itself to see if there’s something in the game that could be causing it to not play nice with PS5s or setups over time.


Seeing these types of lag complaints is much rarer for Tekken 8, Guilty Gear Strive, King of Fighters 15 and other tournaments on the same hardware from everything we’ve observed (but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist).


The hardware and software being run at these major events now are more complex and multi-layered than they ever have been before, and somethings just do not play nice with each other even if there’s no real hard reason you can pinpoint as to why.


These ongoing lag issues in SF6 may not be easy to solve on a major level, but it’s something that tournament organizers are going to need to work together and use their smart heads to figure out some sort of improvements for future seasons.


At the very least, organizers should have “fresh” PS5s on hand to switch to if the console does look like it’s presenting a problem.





As Punk and EndingWalker mentioned above, there’s going to be less and less incentive for players to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on attending big tournaments just to have suboptimal play experiences when they could just be staying with their personal setup at home.


Nothing is ever going to be perfect, and offline tournaments are going to provide variation no matter what with all of the different hardware and work involved — but it should be low enough so that it doesn’t hinder the experience and competitive spirit.


People can point back to arcade cabinets offering the best experience because the game performance would theoretically remain the same, but then controls and inputs are going to be different unit to unit.

Even after all these years, it doesn’t look like PC is a fully viable option yet for open-bracket fighting game majors without standardized hardware and setups that won’t break the banks of TOs already running on paper-thin margins.


The FGC may have to make due with trying to maximize what we have already or get creative with solutions like we’ve seen in the past.



Image by Alexa from Pixabay.








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