Championship Mode

Today saw the release of a previously announced update to Street Fighter IV. The update came with a few features that many people thought should have been included in the original release: the ability for top players to upload replays of their battles to a central server, the ability for anyone with the update to watch and save these replays, and an entirely new online ranking system.

There's no way around it, the replay functionality is very nice. Though only the top 5,000 players in the new ranking system (which I'll get back to in just a moment) are able to upload and share their favorite fights with the world, which means that regular people can't save any given fight of theirs on a whim, it can actually make the game better. That is, since only the top players can share their replay data, those of us who actually study the game and its players to get better have a whole new resource to use. The replay data itself is great because you gain access not only to the replay video, but you also gain access to the actual controller input data in addition to the ability to play it all back in slow motion.

Then there's the new ranking system. To be fair, calling it a ranking system might be a bit misleading since it's more than just that. The update gives players access to a new online Championship mode. Though there is little variation in practice from Championship mode to Ranked matches, it does make winning individual matches a bigger deal than simply gaining Battle Points. In Championship mode, the game creates pseudo-tournament brackets on the fly.

In order to make this work with the drop-in drop-out nature of online gaming where people can't typically set aside hours on end to compete in a tournament, the system keeps track of which round in a bracket you currently sit. After winning a match, you advance to the next round just like any single-elimination tournament. Unlike traditional tournaments, though, the next opponent is anyone that you are randomly matched up with who is in the same round of a bracket and has a similar score.

Which reminds me, there's a new scoring system to go with Championship mode. Winning tournament brackets gives you Championship Points. These are basically the same as your Battle Points in Ranked; they go up and down with wins and losses. Beyond CP, there's an additional Grade Points system. GP are earned by playing Championship matches; winning tournaments results in considerable gains, but losses don't seem to damage your GP score. These are what determine your ability to enter higher tiers of tournaments.

There's also a feature that publicly tarnishes the image of people who ragequit. Before a match starts, you can see the percentage of games your opponent quit prematurely. A definite plus!

All in all, the update is very nice. No, it doesn't totally change the game. Yes, there are things still to be desired (such as the ability to save any and all matches for later viewing). But the overall results is good and easily worth the 15MB to download.