Revison of Spectator mode

PichiQaz

Member
Jul 2, 2018
10
13
It happens sometimes that you are messing around in the pixel lobby when you see two of the best players of TFH aproaching each other. You can feel that the fight between those two will be remembered for Eons to come (or you are still just a noob and one of those is using your main character, so you use the oportunity to learn).
The battle rumbles the earth, reactions as lightnings leave you speechles, you discover things you have no idea your character is capable to do.
You are watching gods fighting.
The match is about to end, a jab from anyone will end the 1-1, mind games take place, and chip damage end the match.
A rematch is inevitable, that can not end like that, the screen turns black. You expect to see immediately those two players fighting again...
You are again in the pixel lobby screen...
Wut?
They two began to fight again before you could access the menu to spectate...
Dammn.

-Why is it not posible expectate a match between two players continuously?

My theory is that the way the game treat an expectator as a player but with inputs deactivated, and at the end it can not diferentiate the player from the spectator so it does not know who to ask for a rematch, so it immediately puts everyone in the lobby and the process repeats whenever a spectator is in the match. It is an hypothesis that is not based in any information whatsoever, is just a hunch.

An hour pasess by, in 20 minutes you must leave to school. Is at this moment you see the two players stop fighting and are around the pixel lobby. You go and select the player you want to spectate and see is about to fight another high level player.
The match initiate...
It is a training match...
Those 20 minutes lapses in what it feels a blink of an eye and you have lo leave...
YOU CAN NOT!!!!!!
You are traped, your only option is to close the program.

-Why is it not possible leave a practice match, or any match when you are spectating?

This is not a problem at all, is just anoying at best. But if the game reaches consoles in the future, that will be a problem because it will mean that the person have to exit the game and go back again. And loading times, even if they are as short as 15 seconds, people whant to avoid them as much as possible.

The next day you log in again ready for some fights, when you see the same two players fighting, but you can not spectate them. They already began.

-Why you can not spectate a fight that has already began?

Some people fight for hours straight, but unless one of them is streaming or recording, no one can see what is happening.

If the spectator mode got a revision in the future (after the important stuff is done first like the level 3 supers, chapter one and saltmines 2.0), these points would be nice quality of life additions:
-When in the pixel lobby, being able to spectate a match of people that is already fighting.
-Being capable to spectate rematches without exiting to the pixel lobby first.
-A menu for the spectator to leave in the midle or when a match ends.

A lot of times we tell the developers to change, add or remove stuff in a game or program, whithout knowing all the things that are linked and conected to eachother. Perhaps altering the spectator mode began causing crashes with the players, so it is not always as easy as to change some values and problem fixed.
Maybe it is because the connetion between the players can not be altered once the match has began, and a posibble solution to that would be adding some kind of dummy spectator that is always transmiting the information, even if there are no real spectators. And when someone want to spectate, he have to conect to these dummy and it will re-transmit the information from the match to the spectator. Because this dummy will re-transmit the information, it probably will have a latency, but for a spectator a 0.5 or a 5 seconds latency will not matter.
The idea of this dummy is to allow to spectate a match that has already began by conecting to it and not to the players, and to keep watching the rematches.

It is posible that an idea like this will cause a drop on the performance for the players, so in the menu you could activate or deactivate the capability for other to watch your matches (I imagine a bath like courtain in front of the fighting animation that is in the pixel lobby to indicate that you can not spectate that match), or probably it is not possible at all and I'm just talking dumb stuff.

Whatever the case, thank you for reading this unecessarily long post.
 
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CamTSB

僕は誰なんだろう?
Mane6 QA
Feb 2, 2016
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Ontario, Canada
twitter.com
Strangely enough, we actually answered this question in the stream we had about half an hour after you made this post!

Not to call out any obvious points you made, but yes, as it sits the spectator mode sucks a lot. We want to improve it, and that's something we're going to definitely do down the line.
 
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PichiQaz

Member
Jul 2, 2018
10
13
Thank you guys, lets wait then for those improvements in the future.
Wish ya'll the best.
 
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