Quarantine Tournament Results, #FixUltimateOnline, and the future of Smash

We live in a different world now. As I write this blog, I sincerely hope that you and your loved ones are safe, at home, with enough food and supplies to sustain yourselves.

And on top of food and supplies, I hope you had enough practice to play with the ~7 frames of input lag resulting from online connection, because local tournaments will not be held anytime soon.

Hosted by Alpharad and Cr1tikal, the tournament exhibited an exorbitant amount of entrants, due to stay-at-home orders issued during this pandemic (from 32 to 5,121).

As we adapt to these life changes, we can only hope that the developers at Nintendo are adapting as well. The Smash community has made #FixUltimateOnline trending on twitter to get the developers attention. This trend arose after the fact that the game's top competitive players have already said their opinion on the matter.

Truthfully, our society is undergoing a telecommunicational update -- in both hardware, and software, the way we will connect electronically is going to change. Our devices are becoming more connected than ever, with even more information than we could have imagined. And when it comes to gaming, every millisecond counts.

And when it comes to the Smash Ultimate Fighter Pass Vol. 2, I really hope that our nation's telecoms infrastructure is running on a network with capacity and bandwidth, because it has to. Competitive Smash has become a community of players who truly love the game and the excitement it brings. Melee tournaments are still being held online. Not only has the game been out for for over 19 years, but it was ported onto the PC by independent developers who love the game. If that does not serve as a testament for the love of the game, I don't know what does. With Smash Ultimate being the LAST Super Smash Bros. game, its future lies in the heart of the community, us.

See you online! Edges don't scare me!