Fighting Game Events and Community. Hosts of BAM: Australia's largest open esports event, Battle Arena Melbourne.
The pivotal final month of Saturday online events for CouchWarriors League 2020 has delivered a barrage of top-flight competition, with three games having concluded their ranking seasons so far. The last two weekends were a study in contrasts; Smash Melee was reduced to a victory lap for an unstoppable champion, while Tekken 7’s overall season winner wasn’t decided until the very last blow!
This strange, abbreviated but intense 14-event season of CouchWarriors League SFV came to a head on Saturday with the final CWL Online for the year. Doubled ranking points meant stakes were high, with the ladderboard leaders desperately holding onto the cash bounties attached to their top 3 spots. Even those well outside the top 3 were playing for keeps, since reaching the Grand Final here would be enough to earn another shot at the money in next month’s Season Finale. The competition has been fierce all year long, but now the finals atmosphere was palpable as players busted out pocket picks and some elite ringers showed up to snare qualification.
This weekend gave the Australian fighting game community a bittersweet taste of what 2020 might have held, were we not forced to spend most of it at home. For the first time since summer, the CouchWarriors League schedule was able to feature something more exclusive than an simple online ranbat, as the Tekken World Tour Online Challenge travelled down under!
The 2020 CouchWarriors League is well onto the home stretch, and halfway through October competition we can really see who is pulling ahead among the top contenders for each game.
Both the Street Fighter bracket on the 3rd and the Melee competition on the tenth pulled 24 attendees, giving us short but extremely fierce tournaments. It seems like after the initial boom of contenders entering following the double-points announcement, we have once again crunched the numbers down to just those players with the most points, or the most self-confidence. Read more
As we covered in our last report, the leaderboards for the inaugural CouchWarriors League had been shaken up by the announcement this year’s remaining tournaments would offer double ranking points. The Tekken 7 race was already close; now it was virtually open season.
Despite the heightened stakes – further amplified by this event’s inclusion under the official PAX Online banner – the spike in registration witnessed in other CWL Online events this month didn’t materialize. This bracket saw a bump in quality rather than quantity – Naveed “Kanga|Chand NY” Iqbal signing up for his first CWL Online event of the season, while “Moose” from SA entered for the first time since April. Two of the very best in the nation, the double points incentive had finally forced them to pick up the sticks again in defense of their leaderboard rankings.
Out of the four major games covered as part of the CouchWarriors League, Tekken 7 continues to be the most unpredictable and hotly contested. Months of national competition in these online events has failed to show a single dominant champion. Instead, a host of talented and dedicated players are constantly one-upping each other as they struggle to reel in the points totals amassed by ranbat winners in the first months of the year.
Six grinders in particular have been consistently scooping top points; Lucky Chloe main Chris “Stuckles” Stuckey, Queensland champion “Harlem”, community mainstay Kun-Mo “FAM|Gun_Mo” Yon, Master Raven players Raphael “FAM|Daitooka” Batskos & Peter “Ravenboy” O’Flanagan, and online warrior “arbiter”. Read more
Another awesome month of online competition brings new developments to the CWL leaderboards!
The weekly CouchWarriors League Online events each focus on one of the major games supported by the League, with the placegetters receiving League points as part of our ongoing tournament season. Our monthly winners also received Steam vouchers from CouchWarriors.
A handy reference for our online tournament schedule during the pandemic period is on Twitter. You can always check the current standings for each game and player in CouchWarriors League here.
Well, 6 months down and 6 to go. 2020 may have turned out to be an inauspicious year to launch our new CouchWarriors League, but just like any FGC great, we’ve adapted. Online events have kept the CWL leaderboards ticking over during the pandemic months, and we’ve even seen new players gain big opportunities from this unusual focus on netplay. Certainly for those who live outside of the main metro regions this season is looking like their best chance to make a tilt at national recognition!
Well despite the best efforts of 2020 we’ve made it all the way through June, and thu to the halfway mark of the inaugural CouchWarriors League season! Look out for a formal midseason recap to be published soon – in the meantime, here’s last month’s results!
The weekly CouchWarriors League Online events each focus on one of the major games supported by the League, with the placegetters receiving League points as part of our ongoing tournament season. Our monthly winners also received Steam vouchers from CouchWarriors.
A handy reference for our online tournament schedule during the pandemic period is on Twitter. You can always check the current standings for each game and player in CouchWarriors League here.
Another month of weekly online tournaments is in the books, and while we’re all pining for a regular ranbat sometime soon, this way of continuing the CouchWarriors League has proven to be a success. Plenty of great matches and stories emerged from the online brackets in May, so let’s run down exactly what happened for those who missed it.
The weekly CouchWarriors League Online events each focus on one of the major games supported by the League, with the placegetters receiving League points as part of our ongoing tournament season.
A handy reference for our online tournament schedule during the pandemic period is on Twitter. You can always check the current standings for each game and player in CouchWarriors League here.