On January 24, Joey Cuellar, head organizer of the EVO event series, announced the game line-up for this year's iteration of the series on Red Bull eSports's Twitch channel. The tournament, which is set to happen on July 14 - 16, features games both familiar and new, including;
- Tekken 7
- Street Fighter V
- Super Smash Bros. Wii U
- Guilty Gear XRD Rev 2
- The King of Fighter's XIV
- Injustice 2
- BlazBlue: Central Fiction
- Super Smash Bros. Melee
Cuellar also mentioned that they will be using Smash.gg as their new bracket/player register system. The change comes in response to the horrible bracket system used during EVO 2015. Tony Cannon, co-founder of EVO, addressed these problems in a Reddit post last year.
Evo uses paper brackets to run the event [...] This means the online brackets are updated much much later than systems like smash.gg or challonge.com. This is bad for players who are scouting their next matchup and bad for people who are following the event; especially those watching on stream. We are planning an overhaul of our bracket making software to address some of the other issues (e.g. seeding beyond top 32). Adding realtime bracket updates is something we want to put in as well.
Perhaps the most shocking news as it pertains to Smash is the removal of Melee from Championship Sunday, the last day of EVO which many consider to be when the finals of the most 'important' games are held. Super Smash Bros. Wii U will take its place, with Melee finals instead set to occur on Saturday.
Professional Melee player William "Leffen" Hjelte has tweeted his thoughts about the change, saying;
"Personally don't mind EVO having Melee on Saturday. We have better tournaments and this will stop people from calling it "THE EVENT". But yeah, I agree that melee easily deserves Sunday, but more importantly I think its hilarious that they refuse to put both smash games. To me its just another decision by EVO that I heavily disagree with, not at all surprised. Will still be there to support the community."
"Melee is doing better than ever and we do NOT need EVO anymore. 2013 we did, but now its a worse tournament in a bigger arena. EVO is a tournament with ad breaks every 2 minutes, no analyst desk, no interviews, no friendly setups, bad bo5, bad seeding, no doubles."
Do you agree with Leffen? Do you agree with this change from last year? Does it really matter? Let us know in the comments.
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