MenaRD Beamoans FT2 Format Of Esports World Cup

The inaugural Esports World Cup for Street Fighter 6 will start on the 8th of August and will go on for a week till the 11th of August. The winner of the tournament wins $300,000 which is a huge deal. 

MenaRD, the only two-time Capcom Cup winner has come out to bemoan the fact that the games up until the third phase will be a first-to-2. This means that players can only play a total of three games with the first player to reach two games winning the match. However, this format has long been criticised for not allowing players ample room to adapt and it sometimes could reward lower level players over higher ones. On the other side, tournament organizers have stated that having first-to-3 for major tournaments are a huge time sink that makes production a lot more difficult than normal. 

Mena in a post on social media stated that having put so much into the game, losing in an FT2 would be difficult to accept considering how many variables such a format has.

The sentiment was echoed by Big Bird who also said that at the very least the top 16 should feature FT3 to maximize player options.

The FT2 vs FT3 debate has raged on for quite a while and while some tournaments have started to adopt it like UFA which ran FT3 all the way, some other big tournaments such as Combo Breaker, CEO, and Evo has refused to follow that style. It does seem like European tournament organizers are more open to some of these innovations that the North American side. Japan has also largely stayed FT2, but they have so many varieties of tournaments including the likes of Topanga which has a FT7 format for the playoffs with the group stages being FT3, that it doesn't really matter that a couple of their tournaments remain FT2.