- Player data showed the average SFV player was like 35-45, so a lot of them would be reaching retirement age in the next decade or two.

- With the core audience retiring and dying off, he feared for the future of the series. He didn't think they could coast on the name Street Fighter alone. They needed conscious effort.

- He made the new game on the base assumption that young people don't know what Street Fighter is. That's not what he actually believed, but it was essential for their goal of revitalising the brand and drawing in a new audience.

Excellent breakdown here from the extremely skilled player who discovered it, Eazytobeat.

Curious

I got into fighting games since early summer and it's the only genre I touched now

I was on fightcade for awhile but after going through some tox intense games, started to realize the ranked route isn't for me anymore. Happy to just face local friends and go through arcade at the moment

This is purely about assist cooldowns in the Evo France build, I'm not gonna be talking about Cyclops at all and the other characters are unchanged in this build.

With that, let's talk about assist cooldowns

How they work:

In Tokon, whenever you call an assist, they stay onscreen after doing their attack so you can tag to them. In the new build, there's a 3 second timer on calling the assist again which only starts ticking down AFTER the window to tag into the assist ends and they leave the screen.

If you tag into the assist, that 3 seconds turns into 5, and this also happens if the assist gets hit.

How it felt to me:

For me personally, it felt...weird. Part of me thinks that it should be 2 and 4, that way there's still a delay in the assists but it doesn't feel as long. I tested with a stopwatch, and from the moment I pressed the assist button, it took 7 seconds for the assist to be available again.

Although, take my opinions with a grain of salt because I'm different, I actually ENJOY the chaotic nature of assist spam and I think tag fighters need some chaos in order to feel like tag fighters. IMO decreasing stuff by a second would be the perfect middleground of having a lot more honest neutral but still having those moments of scrambling chaos.

How I think it'll affect the meta:

Now, once again, the characters and mechanics were completely unchanged in this build, so I can't give a statement on what the actual patch will be like, but honestly? This feels kinda "Rich get richer" right now. With the lower emphasis on calling assists, the current top 3 of Spidey, Magik, and Storm, will be much better because those guys can get in way easier compared to the rest of the cast. Maybe a movement speed buff could fix that, but idk about that much. Storm especially, 22H + Forward wind is basically a Shooter assist with how much it helps you approach in neutral.

Champion might be the only low tier to benefit from this change, simply because his lack of assists isn't a crippling weakness now. I forgot at the moment to try his assists but I'll try them tomorrow to see how the CDs work for him.

Also, Doom is gonna be a fucking MENACE, because his zoning is good enough that he could easily stall out assist timers to have way more assist access than most other characters.

The one thing I didn't like:

I'm mostly neutral-to-positive on the changes, I think they're a little too harsh but they're a step in the right direction. HOWEVER. There's one mechanic that feels like bullshit to me.

If you use an assist in a combo, and then wallbreak off of that combo, your 3 second Assist timer does not start ticking until the wallbreak animation ends! This really sucks for post wallbreak oki, which feels dumb because that oki is SUPPOSED to be your reward for a wallbreak!

What REALLY pushes this over the edge for me is what happens to the opponent. If they get Happy Birthday'd and you hit both their assist and their point character, and then you get a wallbreak off of it....

Your opponent's assist cooldown starts ticking down immediately! And it doesn't even get the 5 second penalty thing either!

What this means in practice is that if you get a Happy birthday combo where you hit the point character then the assist, then you call your own assist to extend the combo, and you end it in a wallbreak:

When your enemy stands back up post wallbreak, YOUR assist will be on the 3/5 seconds cooldown, bur your opponent's assist will be back. You're actively fucking up your oki with wallbreaks!

This is the only part of the mechanic I find bad and think should be changed or removed outright, the rest of the interactions seem to make sense and feel reasonable. But the wallbreak situation is just ass.

Anyways, that's all I got. If you don't wanna read everything:

TLDR what the fuck why can I see what's happening onscreen #notmytokon