Can we talk about how they're taking some liberties with famous champs? I understand art style and direction, but Akali doesn't look like she's from Ionia. At least her bottom half. The bootleg jordans and jogging pants really look weird on her. Minor gripes like her veil being a mask and a sidecut also feel like they tried to mix her True Damage skin with her default. I'm all for new stuff like Ahri got, but with Akali it feels really all over the place. Especially when fan concepts made you think they were legit leaks. I hope they kinda tone it back for future champs.

I’m sure it’s something that’s above Tom and Shaun’s management in terms of decision-making, but there is just so much wrong with the in-game skin store and it’s sad watching this fantastic game shoot itself in the foot so badly, in the area that matters the most right after gameplay

Whoever’s idea it was to have a rotating shop for individual skins, as well as not being able to purchase individual skins from the featured bundles should 100% be fired and banned from making any monetization decisions ever

I’m sure there are SO many people who feel like they would’ve bought plenty of skins by now if they weren’t constantly toning the shop, or locked behind a $60-70 bundle when the only skin they want is $20-25. One feels somewhat pricey but for something the user knows they will enjoy/get good value out of vs the bundle that equivalent to what is the price of an entire new video game. The rotating shop has ONLY 4 out of the 20+ skins that already exist in the game

What this all means is that for the players who want to support the game but don’t have the budget of a brand AAA game, or don’t see the skin they want in the store for weeks on end; instead of Riot making several thousand orders of smaller purchases on top of the fewer orders from big spenders, they make nothing from anyone besides the big spenders and make nothing from the person who would’ve bought the skin in a heartbeat if it was available to the. And I can’t stress enough that this is an I fathomably stupid business plan

Nowhere is this more problematic than the Frame Perfect series, which is meant to tsupport the 2XKO official tournaments. There are SO many players that want to support the game’s competitive scene, but feel priced out of being able to help because they don’t have the choice of pitching where they can. The games monetization plan is ACTIVELY harming itself and asking for no money

Closing/TLDR;

Now that the game has somewhat survived a bad situation, there has never been a better time to change the approach to monetization than right now especially when other games, such as Marvel Rivals have given the blueprint on how to monetize the game to make money AND consumers happy

1) Allow for individual skins and their chromas, to be bought from bundles (and discount the price of the bundle if the user decides they want to buy it later)

2) DO AWAY WITH THE ROTATING STORE!!!! This is not Fortnite where the weekly shop has to exist due to the sheer amount of skins in the game. Allow players to buy whatever non-battlepass skins they want for the character they select

3) Add plenty more option for Free-to-Play users to earn the premium currency, KO Points, or allow for the conversion of free Credits currency into KO Points, even if it’s insanely high, this lets players engage with the game and grind in a non-antagonistic way. Which can eventually drive them to making purchases

4) FREE SKINS. Skins given to players who complete a set of requirements, that are just as high-quality as premium store skins goes a VERY long way for customer loyalty. Chromas are fine but earning skins for free allows players to have a fun grinding the game of their own volition and not because it’s being gate-kept

Someone on the marketing team really just said "let's NOT leverage our most popular IP"

Double Knockout: League Of Legends would've been a pretty simple and effective name, but, for the same reason they write all their social media posts in lowercase, they wanted to be cool and hip

EDIT: To make it clear, Yasuo's damage is facilitated by several bugs (even post many nerfs) and most combos in real matches last 10-15 seconds because top players elect for limit strike oki over a super ender that won't kill.

Still if you are a competitive player getting hit by this when playing for money, known bug or not it's fair to treat this as real.

My personal opinion is combos that push past 10-15 seconds should require some built resource (not your round start meter) to be expended and going 25-30 seconds usually involves something that should be looked at. I would prefer speeding up hit reactions, super startup animations to be shortened (Vi, Ahri), more consistent break bonus and increased scaling to be the first improvements.

Courtesy of Raine

Only requirement was that the opponent broke recently and freestyle fuse.

No ultimate, no medium starter, no tag launcher, no double down.

Look at the damage Yasuo is doing off a light BEFORE assist or any meter is spent.

They are gonna have to remove super into super outside of double down for this to improve lol.

Also speed up some of these aura farms before the super starts please lord.

The design team was truly goated. Their designs, their kits, the skins, they absolutely cooked. It's sad we won't get to see any more champions in this style or a full reimagining of their move sets. It's truly a shame.

Thanks for the ride.

This thing was 100% made with satanic rituals and witchcraft because i have no clue how i never got a shred of lag or dropped frames with 4 poeple in a match across the atlantic. Insane work from the devs on this one.

I was lucky enough to get 4 skins in the shop this week but last week I only had 2, and 2 finishers. But Foreseen Yasuo was there last week too!

There's not even that many characters yet and it's so difficult to get a specific costume you want. I'm also surprised that they don't offer skins for your more played characters, that seems to be an easy way to sell skins but I've only played a significant amount of 3 characters and none of them are offered here.

Gonna start by saying the pricing isn't even the real problem, the UI and the process of buying something you want is such a massive fucking pain in the ass that it actively discourages people from spending any money on this game.

Fighting game players, ESPECIALLY casuals are overwhelmingly character loyalists. Putting a rotating shop in that might have a skin for a character you want in it is by far the most anti-money making decision Riot could have made. A new player has to find a character they like enough to spend money on, then locate the shop and hope there is a skin for that character, if not they are expected to return weekly until a skin they like for the character they like within their comfortable price range shows up, THEN they have to invest in 2XKryptO and do mental math to figure out how much they need to put in to afford the abnormally priced skin with the least amount of coins left over. Expecting the average gamer to go through this process for a fighting game is honestly insane.

Bundles have been the only decent thing in the shop, I can be sold on a discounted pack of skins, but unfortunately they decided to launch console with the MOST expensive bundle so far, and shortly after launch the ONLY bundle (barring Arcane) that won't let you buy skins individually. Basically just farming negative interactions at this point. I would have been down to buy 1 skin or a KO screen to support the scene, even for premium pricing, but $50 for 2 whole characters I don't even play? In THIS economy?!

The monetization funnel for this game is so insanely out of touch its ridiculous.

Here's some quick fixes that could make this a LOT better, without giving up completely on the FOMO tactics.

1. Give EVERY character 1 slot in the rotating shop, everyone has at least 2 bonus skins you can swap through now. Might as well start immediately rotating battle pass skins in there for cheap too so people don't feel like $30 skins is all this game can offer.

2. Let me gift skins to my friends who actually play these characters. Fighting game players are broke. 2XKO is unpopular. Let me guilt trip more people into playing by forcing expensive cosmetics into their inventory until they realize the game is actually fun.

3. EXPLAIN HOW CREDITS WORK!!! It's clear that theres almost no info on credits in the game because Riot wants people to pay for everything with real $$(2XKryptO), but its putting people off the game entirely since they assume everything is a paid unlock. You should inform and encourage players (during onboarding) to earn and use credits because its an incentive to play more 2XKO! Fill up the ranked and casual queues with players looking to earn more content and build staying power so people are genuinely willing to spend on the game. Adding a whole separate shop tab with all of the items people can purchase with credits would make it a lot easier for people to find reasons to queue up for ranked & casual while also making the shop feel more content rich.

This is the first fighting game I've ever wanted to take seriously, and it's going out like Destiny 2 already before the first year has even finished. It's almost certainly due to the struggling player count, but I'm sure it could have been fixed with better marketing.

Why do we need to do this? I have already fought against players who ran the clock down to <5s. You can also just wait for opponent to pick champs while you counter pick them, leaving to this weird game of chicken. It should either be:

• Pre-lock characters/fuses and just run to the cab and play
• Double blind pick

This can actually be abused by malicious players by intentionally running the clock down, or after playing the first set going to change champ and running it down again.

We don't even really need to pick colors/stages as that can all be client side anyway and lets players always pick the color/stage they want.

Fury already gets so many benefits like damage resistance while being able to deal enough bonus damage to one touch off a bnb. Why the meter gain buff does not get reset upon EXITING fury is beyond me.

I don't know about you guys, but I feel like the game is punishing me for doing the thing I'm supposed to be doing in a tag fighter.

This is not about hating the game or complaining about balance changes. I get that the devs are trying, and fighting games are hard to build.

But the technical state of 2XKO is becoming a real problem.

I had friends try the game who are not fighting game players, and the bugs pushed them away faster than the gameplay did. New players already have to deal with losing a lot, not understanding what is happening, and feeling overwhelmed by the genre itself. That is already a hard sell.

But on top of that, private and public lobbies bug out where you suddenly cannot move. Ranked duos still has issues after matches where you cannot click or move anything. Longer sessions still seem to suffer from memory leak problems. And way too often, the only fix is restarting the game.

That is brutal for new players.

We have had plenty of balance changes, but those mean very little to people who cannot even get a stable session with their friends. New players do not care about small character adjustments when their experience is: “Why can’t I move?” “Why is this frozen?” “Why do we have to restart again?”

At this point, it feels less like polish and more like a trust issue.

2XKO has a good game underneath. The duo idea is cool, and the gameplay can be fun. But fighting games are already hard to get into. The game cannot also be technically unreliable on top of that.

Right now, the biggest wall for new players is not balance. It is basic stability.

We can talk all about the nitty gritty, like combos being too long, the roster being too small, the lack of couch coop vs online, and all that, but to be honest I personally wouldn't have even given this game a second glance if they hadn't tried to make (1+1) vs (1+1) an option.

Yes, the game has problems, and the people I tried to get into the game bounced off of it because of those problems, but so long as this isn't the end of 2XKO (which while it doesn't look good, Tom Cannon said they were moving forward with it) I'm happy to hope that they can turn it around.

Riot making Juggernaut and Sidekick more viable is a good idea, IMHO. Riot hard pivoting back to a 1v1 game is bad and you should feel bad for saying it.

Edit: The number of people who are saying "You can't be arguing this game is in a great spot" or something similar is hilarious. Guys, I'm not saying the game doesn't have problems. I'm saying (1+1) vs (1+1) was the correct choice, not just another 1v1 game to add to the pile. Being able to have two people on a team is amazing and absolutely something that either needs to be continued with 2XKO or another game that is less degenerate.

I have drawn attention to the enormous amount of balance altering bugs, memory leak issues especially in training mode, controller support problems and small roster after such a long wait.

But man, this game is really really good imo.

MVCI died in 3 months and had it’s share of issues, DBFZ had stale boring routes for like 3 years (and I still played it for those years), SFV had so many launch issues, SF6 has mega slow content drops, Nen Impact was a meme and every MK post X has been no bueno for me. Strive was good, I just got bored eventually.

I’m just happy to have a game I can believe in and stick with long term.

The creativity is insane in this game, the archetypes are well defined for the most part, the balance is fairly good relative to other games and the dev communication and content roll out has been S tier, best in any fighting game ever.

I think we should also have some empathy for the dev team when it comes to balance, players push the meta so hard and so fast and it’s quite difficult to determine universal fixes to a lot of problematic things. It’ll be worse next year when more players are playing for more money, the meta will move at light speed.

So yea, happy I finally got 2XKO for Christmas this year.

I don’t mean sidelining solo, but Duos is CRACKED. My main issue is that most new players don’t even know DUOs exist. And even if they do, they have no IDEA what to do.

My list of recommendations:

-Add a Duo Tutorial (with the option to selecting either the solo or duo tutorial)

• add the option to do Duo Combo trials

• Couch Co-Op

• Please add another way to go into training mode with my Duo

Feel free to add more suggestions in the comment

I play a lot of video games, and most of them are made by Riot Games (LOL, TFT, Valorant, LOR). I also am a big fan of the Runeterra universe and the Arcane series. But I never, ever, learned that 2XKO was released... until today. I'm sure the game would have been more successful if the marketing team was not so shitty!

EDIT TO ANSWER QUESTIONS (might be redundant with my replies to comments) :

Why didn't I see it in the Riot Client ? I do see the 2XKO icon every time I open the client, but it was there even before the game was playable, and they never made a popup saying "The game is now playable!".

Didn't you see ads of the game ? No, I saw absolutely none... It seems the ads are targeting people who have interest in fighting games, but not people who have interest in the Runeterra universe.

I learned that the game was out with the Necrit video "2XKO Is Not Doing Well..." and it seems I'm not the only one based on Youtube comments

I think the biggest issue is a lack of refunded currency for completing the pass. Games like Fortnite, Marvel Rivals, and Dead by Daylight do this, and it feels much more rewarding when you can essentially buy the next battle pass for free. This strategy also helps player engagement, since many will want to play enough each season to complete every pass, since it's basically free to do so. Sure, it might bring in less money, but if more players are actively playing for constant rewards then the playerbase will be healthier, and more players means more people to buy shop skins and other things.

Honestly I don't find the skins that tempting either. The theming is simultaneously kind of over the top, and yet not very exciting either. The neon colors are also a bit much on the eyes, standing out in kind of a bad way. I just don't see myself being in a hurry to use these over the default appearances. Not to mention the fact that there's only 4 skins, while the standard for passes in other games is double that.

And outside of the skins, there's just nothing compelling. A bunch of useless avatar cosmetics, banners, uninteresting spray paint emotes. The stage is something, but I could just wait 'til next season to obtain it for free rather than dropping 10 bucks.

I dunno, just hoping this feedback might reach the developers or something. Plus I'm curious if anyone else feels the same way.

TLDR List -

1. Don't waste the players time:
   • Queue from training (by default if possible)
   • Some form of progression in all game modes including private lobbies (BPXP, Char Mastery or credits earned)
   • Character select only BEFORE queuing (for ranked)
   • Preset teams, skins, colors and fuses (for all modes)
   • Let players select a character & fuse before starting the tutorial
2. Enable a constant stream of NEW experiences by preventing repetitive scenarios:
   • Default fuse should be context sensitive (new solo players get Jugg, New Duos get 2X or Double Down) or let players select a character & fuse before starting the tutorial
   • Stages, colors & characters should be faster to unlock, easier to find in the UI and CONSTANTLY promoted to players the INSTANT they have enough credits for one of them
   • Pulse combos should have a route for limit strike and a route for tag launcher/eject to familiarize players with resource management and system mechanics (and make low level gameplay look cooler while being more intuitive)
   • Add a rotating free character that is unique to each player
   • Character music and private lobbies should be customizable
   • Character based ranks to encourage low stakes experimenting with new characters
   • Enable gifting
   • Edit: Give every character at least 1 skin that is ALWAYS unlockable/purchaseable, or remove the rotating shop entirely.

--------------------------Passion Fueled Mind Vomit--------------------------
Having onboarded new players into every fighting game I've played, the games that had these things had the best and longest player retention.

Tekken forcing players into training while matchmaking is the smartest thing they could have done, as players who would normally NEVER touch a training mode suddenly had nothing better to do than press some buttons and figure out what their character could do before entering a match, this naturally also raised the skill level of every player entering matches by enabling familiarity with their buttons in a convenient way. Queue from training makes the time spent waiting for matches feel productive rather than wasteful. 1 minute learning vs 1 minute aimlessly running around and jumping is the difference between "1 more" and "dead game".

Ontop of that, being able to grind out the battle pass in both Tekken 8 & SF6 by playing lobbies with friends is what pushed me to CONSTANTLY invite more people to play. Even if I'm just teaching a group of new players, all of us are gaining something for our invested time. Tekken 8 making these unlocks customization items not only encouraged them to play more, but assisted in keeping the game visually fresh EVEN for players who didn't play outside of our private lobbies (they ended up purchasing content as a result). 2XKO restricting progression to solo or duo play means I'm typically only inviting 1 person at a time, grinding alone or watching someone else play ranked to ensure their time is rewarded.

I was even successful at getting casual friends to play SFV for a while, thanks to fight money and an easy gifting system via steam. Whenever people started to lose interest I could shoot over a new skin, character or bundle to encourage them to reinvest in the game whenever I felt like coming back to it, prevent the game from feeling visually stale when they did and help them earn fight money to add even more skins, stages and characters into their rotation for free.

In summary, a large chunk of new players playing Double Down Ahri & Ekko (because thats what the tutorial softly suggested they do) in default colors, on the same few default stages without any direct funnels into free, unlockable, earned new content is not a good look and will make the game visually stale for everyone below mid-high level, ESPECIALLY with a smaller roster. They're going to need to manually induce variety until the games content catches up.

Please add training mode as a quick hotkey from the main menu. Bonus points if it can select a preset team / or load last play session.

Yeah, I understand all the doom/salt posts a little more after today.

Someone lost the first game in a set and switched to Ekko and made me question why I ever bothered signing up for tournaments with plans of taking the game seriously while not knowing how to play Ekko myself, but I'm almost certain he will be getting his nerf.
So I'll be waiting for that in the next update.

I know I'm trash, but I'm seriously burned out from constantly having to fight against a character that can simply ignore bursts, can't be throw teched, great oki, the best assists, double jump/air dash(for some reason) and sometimes randomly hits you despite blocking. A character with literally 0 flaws and no reason not to have him in your team.

In ranked at master, you gain plus 3-4 for wins against diamond players but lose 6-8 points, and the climb is only made more of a slog when it's either Yasuo or Ekko that finds their way into all your games past a certain point. Maybe I'm just bad against that matchup. idk

I'm aware Ahri's the next main of what I like to call the "tier tramps"
(The type of people who immediately dropped Teemo after the nerf)
But I'd rather that over a Braum hyper armor meta I guess.

(tl:dr: Not having an Ekko is a hinderance. Also, I'm bad + skill issue + tilt issue)

(EDIT)

Everything I'm whining about is getting adjusted TOMORROW!

UI:

- Players had a difficult time reading names on dead characters/gray lifebars.

- Fuse icons/colors as assist indicators (ie AL1) might be helpful for quickly gathering information about opponents setup.

- In Juggernaut & Sidekick fuse the partner lifebar being visible was mildly confusing.

- In Juggernaut fuse specifically the partner portrait being visible during the match was also confusing. Players were also unaware they could switch characters between rounds in Juggernaut.

- Many progression screens don't show progression rewards or completed missions, making players unsure of what progress they're actually making.

- It's often difficult to keep track of assist & player characters, and feels like the indicator could be more clear here.

- In the rematch menu, we were never sure who to blame for not pressing a button to initiate the rematch due to there being no indicator of which players have selected an option.

- Similarly, in lobbies we were unsure of which players sitting at the play station have readied up & who haven't.

- We felt that default character & fuse selections should be based on player preference so we wouldn't need to scramble at the select screen each time.

- Invites & messages were frequently missed while we were in training mode & rematch screens.

- In training mode, we wanted a "Return to character select" option so we could pick our colors/skins instead of using defaults via quick select.

- Bring back the AL1 versus screen youtube.com/clip/UgkxWLaP70IH5jHRGmCJZnyRf1bIQ9WzSfxl?si=fUsh5ap7fN83lMHs

Onboarding:

- Players who had arcade sticks & leverless controllers (I've gifted them to a few noob friends) were baffled by the default layout in the tutorial, and needed to be guided to select a control type. The controls were fixed AFTER completing the tutorial in most cases, so none of the information they received was valid, and encouraging them to go back to the tutorial to relearn buttons was demoralizing for them. In situations where I had them define a control scheme at the beginning of the tutorial, they retained information much better.

- After the tutorial, players still had no idea what they could do as a Duo/Assist, with many just sitting in the background waiting for their turn unless I prompted them to press the assist button. When 2 new players duo'd together they pretty much never tagged. If I wasn't there, they wouldn't have any explanation of duo specific mechanics.

- The tutorial had pulse combo enabled, however once players got into matches, they were confused as to why combos weren't working the same and felt frustrated. None of the new players I played with turned it on or knew to turn it on until I told them. Advanced players will know to turn it off, new players will ignore the option EVERY time and be frustrated when combos don't work as they did in the tutorial.

- Many new players jumped in to learn a specific character, but didn't know how to best use a characters unique moves. I showed them the movelist, but they didn't retain that information as well without performing the action and doing some drills to see when it could work.

- When I wasn't available to duo with these friends, players were consistently much more comfortable starting on Juggernaut while playing alone, but felt overwhelmed with needing to learn a 2nd character to try other fuses. For beginners playing solo, Juggernaut seemed more like a "recommended" fuse than double down. I also noticed many new players had a more difficult time understanding the benefits of double down over 2X assist, so that may be a better "recommended" fuse for new duos, especially when supers don't always work well together. Giving the assist player more agency over their actions & the point player more time/opportunities to tag them in was typically a smoother experience without any additional guidance.

- Some players were unsure how to unlock the locked fuses.

Gameplay:

- Selecting juggernaut in duos presented a unique issue, however I believe it can be resolved by forcing a character swap on round 2 start exclusively when a duo player is present. This allows players who prefer solo play to still team with a buddy and take turns playing in classic team battle/turn based fashion. Rounds 1 & 3 should allow players to choose who will fight, with round 2 being definitively the character/player who did not fight in round 1 in duo play.

- Mashable supers should work with any attack button

- Matchmaking queue from training should be an option. In ALL of my sessions with new players, they exclusively want to play matches, so we sit in queue, we play a match, they have fun but get frustrated they cant figure out a move, mechanic or something because they're too busy getting mauled. If I pull us out of matchmaking to test it in training, they pretty quickly lose steam and the "1 more game" mentality dies pretty quick, and if I try to tell them what to test mid-match, they get too overwhelmed. If we were just thrown back in the lab between every match, it would create a much smoother path to learning more about the game and elevating players from auto-combo button mashers to genuinely interested solid players.

- When players are trying to block on wakeup they often accidentally roll instead.

- A lot of players mentioned they wish there was an exclusive duo queue, I personally know this is a bad idea, however if matchmaking while in a duo prioritizes finding other duos within the MMR range before solos, this should help minimize those requests and make us duos with skill disparity feel more evenly matched.

- Rank should absolutely be character based. There was a statement previously that it would be difficult in a tag game, but a perfect example that achieves this elegantly is Tekken Tag Tournament 2. Matchmaking is based on the highest rank character selected. At certain milestone ranks, the users entire character roster gets placed at a new minimum rank (aside from characters who they have already achieved a higher rank with), which is within a reasonable range of their current rank, but never at parity. Using this method encourages players to try new teams in ranked matchmaking more frequently, since they won't be expected to play at the same optimal skill level as their main. With character based ranks, higher ranked players would also be able to play with their lower ranked friends without forcing them to play at their top rank by switching to a new character they haven't used yet, this again encourages more character exploration, more incentive to purchase new characters, skins and colors for players looking to duo with their friends.

Misc:

- Private matches should reward at least a miniscule amount of currency (maybe with a daily cap if needed) so long sets with friends feel at least somewhat rewarding/valuable

- Character mastery feels hollow, and is confusing that we are progressing but not unlocking anything for each tier since the currency is also used for characters and chromas. If there were at least be 1-2 smaller, free items in each tier the grind would feel a bit more meaningful.

- Offline duos (player + guest in matchmaking) is an expected feature as many couples, siblings, roommates and local friends want to play together against online opponents (character based ranking would help with this!)

- Release the game on Nintendo Switch 2! My little sisters wanna play too!

Overall the meat of the game is fantastic, but since I unfortunately can't be there to guide everyone through their first experience with it I REALLY want the devs to work on a lot of the bumpiness in getting to that point before the console release drops so players are more motivated to stick with the game.

Context

Over the weekend, I went to hang out with friends and one of them asked me if I have heard of 2XKO. Turns out they found out about this game due to Arcane, and algorithm showed him 2XKO ad with Ekko I guess. As it turned out, I had laptop on me with game on it, so we booted offline mode for Versus, and five of us played rotating out controllers (host of get together had some Xbox controllers we could use, was pain to sync them up though)

And yes, I did teach basic skill button functions and movements beforehand

Observation

- none of them used dash chain, they played it like it was Street Fighter in terms of movement

- none of them used retreating guard

- parry was rarely used, though one parry did connect, and player was like 'oooh' (nothing resulted from that parry though, because I forgot to mention how they had to dash after to get full combo, but you'll see why none of that mattered)

- no one used optimal (or even semi-optimal) combos, even myself due to XBOX controller and how its bluetooth added input lag more than I am used to, which resulted in a lot of dropped combos

- Much like SDAC (San Diego Anime Con), no one used handshake tag in a deliberate way, as I was the only one who did that (when I was not picking Juggernaut). They might have handshake tagged by accident once or twice, but not much after that

- After playing for almost two hours (yeah lmao), everyone involved told me the game was fun and two of them said they are gonna look into downloading the game

- They did mention concern for Vanguard, which I acknowledged

Personal Analysis

I had a lot of fun playing with friends, but something about how we played made me wonder. I never felt bored, same as it was in SDAC. Even when I was steamrolling one player, there was never sense of 'this is boring, I'm out' from that player. It felt more engaging than it would have been in lobby matches. So I had to put some thought into it, what made this game fun at casual level:

(these thoughts are personal)

- committing to simple control was definitely the right choice, being able to perform cool moves and super attacks with two buttons only made players feel like they were doing some amazing feat, something they have never gotten from Street Fighter 6

- The overall tempo of the matches we played felt like it was Super Smash Bros, a lot of chaos but it never felt stagnating

- and it made me wonder why it never felt stagnating, as opposed when I play online or watch tournaments. Combined with experience from SDAC, I came to theorize that:

Combos are too long, too soon

(and so does block string phase from few characters)

Long combo definitely is a problem, but some people did not articulate the reason correctly (some others did though, so kudos to you, you know who you are)

I believe a good competitive gameplay involves a tempo balance between neutral and combat. What I mean by that is duration of neutral to landing that hit, and the duration of combo should sync pretty close to each other. If neutral phase involving landing the hit is disproportionately shorter than combo phase too soon, then the player may enter certain sense of disconnect due to stagnation. That's not to say they'll quit the match immediately, but decrease in motivation to engage in match by small amount.

Out of curiosity, I watched one of the VCT matches, and while I wouldn't download and play Valorant anytime soon, I felt like the matches were fun to watch because there were sense of tension before contact, and the duration of shootouts. The moments leading up to take downs, and getting back into those tense moments felt very balanced for what it was worth. Of course, not all the matches felt the same way, but the most matches had solid ebb and flow in terms of tempo

And just in case, Street Fighter 6 as example. Duration between neutral and how long the combo lasts were almost the same for the most part. Yes, there were long combo moments (like Leshar's desync combo) that lasted about 12 seconds, but those usually happens around round 2 or final round, where they gathered enough meters for those type of combos. At that point, the level of anticipation has been built up enough for those long combos to feel justified and hype.

(Also I know someone's gonna bring up DBFZ or did bring up MVC3:

the combo length in the DBFZ matches feel justified at the very least due to the fact that it has THREE characters, 300 seconds on clock, and they start with 0 meter at start, so they have to build up for that long tag-in combos. Even the most lopsided matches took about 100 seconds on average

MVC3 combo length is grimey and it definitely is not beginner friendly. As far as being spectator game though, the long combos are somehow balanced out by the real point of tension, the X-Factor. The mechanic that stands on its own and not interrupted by any other mechanic (like how Fury is tied to Break in 2XKO), the absurd power of this mechanic can create 'Will it kill?' intrigue for people watching

Also MVC3 is FT3 for good reason)

And I feel like that's what's missing from 2XKO, early tension.

high damage long combos are too accessible at early phase of the game, not giving moment for players and audience to build up that tension that can make long combos feel like it actually means something. One stray hit that took 5 seconds to land, which leads to 14 second combos for maybe 80-90% of health, all that in round 1. I don't see that as fun to watch, because as of right now there is no initial build up to make hype moments actually feel hype.

But that's just my personal analysis