SFxT Gems, or Why Capcom Should Be Ashamed of Itself

Capcom's new fighter, Street Fighter x Tekken, was released on March 6. The crossover title features a ton of characters from both legendary fighting game franchises. It also includes a gem system, which allows players to add power-up bonuses to their characters. It also features some of the most brainless design decisions I have had the misfortune of witnessing in a video game. It's a really cool idea, but the way Capcom implemented this system is so abysmal that it actually detracts from the game.


Want To Set Up Your Gems? Get In Line

The first, and perhaps most important, failure is the gem setup interface. The thing is full screen and displays seven gems at a time. Yep. Seven. There are 55 default gems, 36 preorder gems, nine special edition gems, for a total of 90 gems max available from day one. You only get all of them if you ordered the Special Edition. Of course, players will likely have the option to buy all the extra gems. Using only the default gems, the player will have to scroll through eight pages of gems to select three, then save that gem unit for use in play. With all gems available, there would be 13 pages of gems to choose from.

Then you're done, right? Well, sure, if you never want to switch your gem loadout ever. Otherwise, you need to go through the process again and save more gem units until you have enough to cover whatever situations you feel like you may need in a match, so go ahead and do all of that over again as many times as necessary.

Okay, now we're done, right? No, you're done. Now it's player 2's turn. Yep, Capcom thought it would be smart to have a gem setup interface that displays only seven gems at once and can only be used by one player at a time. I can't even come up with a clever way to describe how mindblowingly stupid this is.

What Is All This Glowing Crap?

When the conditions to activate a gem are triggered, the character glows the color of that gem. The look is, well, not very attractive, and kind of distracting. The gem depicted near the cross gauge also enlarges and starts to glow. So, what happens if there are two gems activated? Well, there's sort of a mixed color glow, which is kind of tacky and confusing.

What happens if a cross gauge gem and a life gem are activated at the same time? Honestly, it's hard to tell. Sometimes it seems like there's a mix of colors, and other times it seems like the character is glowing both colors alternately. How can you tell when you have two of the same color gem active at once? Then consider that defense gems create a yellow glow...but so do EX moves. Just another potential source of confusion that could be easily avoided with a little common sense. The easiest and least confusing way to tell the difference is just to look at the glowing gems next to the gauge. The glow around the character is almost completely unhelpful, and it can actually be confusing in some cases...so why make the characters glow at all?

The Metagame That Wasn't

Boost Gems in SFxT aren't active all the time. They all have different activation conditions and varying lengths of active time. This is how they justify having seven different Lv. 1 speed gems, for example. In theory, knowing your opponent's activation requirements could add to the depth of the game, since you could intentionally try to prevent certain gems from activating.

In the real world, though, this is unlikely to ever happen. Gems are represented by the image of a gem next to the cross gauge. There is no visual distinction between a gem that activates after blocking 5 times and a gem that activates after connecting with a launcher. You just have to know. Good luck keeping up with the activation requirements of six gems per opponent for every opponent you play, all in the heat of battle and assuming they never change gems between matches.

Without this aspect of play, the purpose of having so many near-identical gems is diminished. All it really adds is more micromanagement, which means more configuration time, which means more hassle getting to the actual game.

Buying Your Way to Victory

As mentioned before, players can get access to special gems by either preordering the game or buying those gems as DLC. These specialty gems are generally better than the default gems. For example, there is a default Level 2 speed gem that boosts speed by 15%, but it comes with an 8% defense penalty. It is activated by performing 4 special moves. One of the preorder/DLC gems has the same activation requirements, but it offers a 20% boost and no defense penalty. There are many similar examples.

Capcom claims that they balanced the gems against each other, but it's clear that some gems are just flat-out better than others. There is absolutely no reason to pick the default Divine Speed Level 2 gem when you can use the preorder/DLC one, unless you just don't have the better gem. This rewards the player who spent more money or preordered from the right place. It is no longer a level playing field.

Can We Play Yet?

It should go without saying that this whole process takes a ridiculously long time. If you watched any of Cross Assault, you would have noticed that there were many cases in which setting up gems took longer than the matches did.

This is bad enough in a tournament or competitive environment where the default is to play best 2/3 games. Imagine what this means for the causal player who has a few friends over and wants to play pass-the-controller after each match. Who wants to spend 5 minutes setting up gems again every time a match ends? Just as with all the other problems, the easiest way to deal with is just to pretend they don't exist, as much as the game will allow.

Okay, So Gems Are Bad. Can't We Just Ignore Them?

Yes and no.

In the competitive scene, Big Two has banned already gems for the time being, and Wednesday Night Fights has also banned gems until at least after Capcom's announced tournament mode is released. This mode is supposed to let you store your gem units on a USB stick, which can be moved from setup to setup. While this solves the problem of having to reconfigure your gem units every time you sit down to play, it doesn't solve any of the other problems associated with the gem interface. In addition, it means players will have to carry flash drives with them to store their gem loadouts, and that many tournament organizers will have to purchase USB hubs so that players can load their gems onto tournament consoles.

If the competitive community decides to ban gems permanently, then they can avoid most of these problems. Unfortunately, Capcom decided that gems are so important and integral to the game that they didn't allow for any method of disabling gems. Sure, players have the option to just not equip any. This works fine offline or in player matches against people who have already agreed not to use gems. Where it doesn't work is in online matches that aren't pre-arranged.

If the competitive scene goes gem-free, the competitive player who wants to practice by playing matches online has three equally crappy choices. He can play online only against people he already knows, which restricts his options and somewhat defeats the purpose of online play; he can play without gems against players who most likely will be using them, thereby handicapping himself; or he can play using gems, which means he would essentially be playing a different game than the one he would be playing in tournaments. It's a lose-lose-lose situation.

What Could Have Been

Street Fighter x Tekken's gem system had the potential to revolutionize fighting games by letting players customize their characters to fit their own playstyles. Instead, they released the game with an inefficient, clunky, and poorly designed gems system that undermines what appears to be an otherwise well-designed fighter. The truly shameful part is that these aren't small inconveniences, but rather major issues that can only be explained by a systematic lack of common sense. Gems are, in essence, a gimmick that can't easily be avoided. If Capcom couldn't do a better job than they did of implementing them, they should never have included them in the game in the first place.

Regarding the Canada Cup fiasco

Before I get into this, from everything I've heard from the people who actually attended the event, it was amazing. As a spectator from home, it was great to be able to see some fo the strongest players on the planet gathered in one place and competing.  I think it's important to acknowledge that the event itself was a success, in spite of the failures of the stream.

Alright, now that I got that out of the way...

First of all, I am completely in favor of finding more ways for people who produce tournaments and streams to finance their efforts. That produces more and better events for players and allows for upgrades in all aspects of the event. That's a good thing. People look at the debacle that was Canada Cup's stream and try to turn it into some "money = bad" equation. Kill that noise. That stream's undoing wasn't the monetization. It was the incompetence exhibited in implementing it.

We've all heard the expression "make them an offer they can't refuse." That's typically the best way to get people to pay extra, right? Overwhelm them with value; that's business 101. The expression isn't "make them an offer they'll want to refuse, and then make them pay to do  so," is it? Of course not, because that would be stupid. That's pretty much exactly what the Canada Cup stream did, though. They chose to cripple the standard product in order to justify the existence of a premium product. That's bad business.

Sure, they wouldn't put it to you like that, but that doesn't change the fact that that's what they did. They ran ads as often as 15-20 times per hour, which is completely ridiculous. Compare with any other broadcast medium. Do you see commercials after every basket in basketball games? After every first down in football games? Moreover, do they put ads right at the height of the excitement? Do they let advertisements kill the drama? Of course not, that would be stupid. But that's exactly what happened on the free Canada Cup stream.


But what about the bonuses that users got for their $8.95? Ad-free streams? Yeah, awesome deal you get there. Now, instead of an ad every five minutes, you get to watch commentators talk about how you weren't watching an ad until the ad you weren't watching ended. 720p?

Does this look like 720p  to you? Also, apparently many premium viewers were getting ads anyway. On multiple occasions the TwitchTV ads were run direct on the stream, cutting off the commentators in mid-thought. All of these things are frustrating but bearable on a free stream. All of these are also completely unacceptable on a premium stream. The ironic thing is that the subscription actually gained some kind of actual value due to yet another of their failures: running ads over actual match footage.

Now, it's important to understand that they did not run the ads over actual matches intentionally. The ads are not timecoded to synchronize with the on-screen action. Whenever they send the command to play the ad, the ad will play. If your feed is 30 seconds behind, it doesn't matter; an ad will play right then...even if there's still a match going on.

Even if it's not their fault technically, though, they're still to blame. The fact that this was a problem just demonstrates how ridiculous the frequency of ads was. If you don't have enough down time between matches to run an ad without risking it overlapping the actual gameplay, maybe you shouldn't be running an ad right then. Ignorance is not an excuse. If you don't understand how the ads work, maybe you shouldn't plan on running hundreds (yes, hundreds) of them over the course of the stream. This is just common sense and basic respect for your viewers. There is no justifiable reason for not being aware of the problem well beforehand.

There's a reason groups like Team Sp00ky, Level|Up, IPlayWinner, FinestKO, and others have been broadcasting for a long time now and this issues such as these have rarely, if ever, occurred. Have they had problems? Sure, all of them have. Have they had problems on this magnitude? Absolutely not. Why not? Experience, due diligence, and the good sense not to overextend themselves got them to where they are today.


The bottom line is that, although the "Freemium" monetization method is a good one and one I'm particularly fond of, the people involved didn't have the preparation, experience, or plain common sense to implement it. What's worse, because of their incompetence, they have potentially hurt the market for other, more qualified streamers and tournament organizers to use a similar model in the future.