EVO Japan has returned over the weekend, with a major event bringing the biggest western fighting game series to Japan. Things didn’t go entirely smoothly though. There was a problem with the set-ups at EVO Japan that definitely factored into events. Complaining about set-ups is nothing new in fighting games, but the EVO Japan problems seem severe enough that it’s cast a shadow over the tournament.
EVO Japan Problems with Setups
EVO Japan proceeded smoothly for its opening rounds, at least to everyone on steam, but problems began once we reached the top 8 of games. The best example of the issue might be with Punk and Momochi fighting in the Street Fighter tournament. The match got delayed while a new monitor was found before Punk eventually lost. He’d go on to talk online about his problems and call out the laggy setup. It’s always frustrating to see hardware interfere with the competition, especially if you’ve been looking at Street Fight betting.
Source: @PunkDaGod
There was talk for a while of the EVO Japan problems with setups just being players complaining about their equipment. It has been confirmed that these were legitimate issues though. Organizers issued a statement over Twitter apologising for the EVO Japan problems.
Source: @EVO
More Problems with Brackets
More problems have been explained by those who worked on the event. Specifically, a volunteer tweeting their experience on @KDE_BViz. They were an unpaid volunteer. They cited a lack of understanding of fighting games, tournaments, or brackets by some staff. The Tekken 7 event was a paper bracket which introduced human error into the occasion. There was difficulty in running pools, along with general organization issues.
T7 was run on paper brackets. event of this size shouldn’t be on paper still. too inefficient. It introduced the possibility of human error having to read/write and place the results manually (loser of A go to X etc.). then the heads manually hand checked every paper bracket.
— KDE | Tri (@KDE_Viz) April 3, 2023
On the specific monitor and lag issue, they’ve cleared up some of the problems there. Sponsored monitors were in use. There may have been problems with consoles too. Some have said that rebooting the PS4s might have helped.
While it seems like the staff event tried to get things running smoothly, there were organizational problems with EVO Japan. This is a shame as it was an exciting return for the event. Organizers have promised to do better next year though, so we can hope EVO Japan is just having teething issues in its return to the schedule and the normal EVO will see an improvement.
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