Man, so many hype matches this weekend.
The Korean, Chinese and Peru qualifiers were stacked with great matches.
A lot of characters being used overall, the Peru qualifier had Kensou and Alice in the grand finals. The Kensou user is Toshi, who also had the best Kensou in XIII (and uses him in OG 2002 as well iirc).
The game's balance is in a good place right now I think, there are many strong and viable characters. Over 10 can be considered high tier and very strong and there is a whole bunch right under them that can easily give them a run for their money.
Only Iori now remains of Xiaohai's pre-patch team, the other two characters have been replaced with Robert and Leona. Madkof seems to have replaced K'/Nakoruru with Robert and Geese with Verse, Mature is still his anchor. Vash still has the best Kyo, his matches with Lacid were so hype. Lacid's Daimon and Kim are such beasts. ET representing that Andy and Beni.
The players who qualified for the championship so far are:
Cypher (Mexico)
Xiaohai (China)
Reynald (US)
Dakou (China)
Madkof (Korea)
ET (Tawian)
Bozai (China)
Naiwang (China)
Toshi (Peru)
It seems that the tenth spot will be decided at this weekend's Taiwanese qualifier. Two spots seem to be reserved for Japanese invites and 3 spots for international invites.
Top 16 (for the championship) will take place in Japan and Top 4 will take place in Beijing.
Oh and Oda attended the Chinese qualifier. According to Gato Ray, he said that two DLC costumes will be releasing this month (around the 26th maybe), they will be for Shun'ei and Nakoruru.
That is true, but I cannot stress enough how they hurt the game by not testing the online properly before submitting patches. The game already suffered at launch because of online bugs, and now people wanting to test it because of the graphical update cannot even play online properly. I don't even talk about the region lock problem.
Another missed opportunity...
Really unfortunate this happened with the upgrade patch but on the plus side it seems to have happened because they they were trying to improve the netcode, which they did do it looks like. What matches I do play are even smoother than before. Had 3 smooth sessions against people from Japan just this morning. But yeah, the timing for the online issues sucks for sure.