When Capcom finally announced the Street Fighter 5 beta was starting up again, everyone was ecstatic. Then people started doing the numbers.
It came late last night via an announcement on the official Capcom Unity blog: the Street Fighter 5 beta, which had been shelved due to substantial server issues, would be starting up once again.
People — myself included — had already been able to connect to the servers and enjoy online matches randomly ever since the release of the last patch, but Capcom’s announcement was the official stamp of approval people were waiting for.
There was just one caveat. Probably as a result of the immense load fans put the servers under last time, Capcom announced that the upcoming beta phase would be region specific, with separate times for separate regions.
OK, that’s not too bad, Street Fighter fans said. And then they read this sentence: “The first regional test will be begin in Europe on Thursday August 20th from 16:00-00:00 BST, and continue on Friday August 21st from 16:00-00:00 BST.”
16:00 BST, which works out to be 1:00 AM Saturday morning Australian Eastern Standard Time, 3:00 AM for New Zealanders or 11:00 PM (Friday evening) if you live in Perth. On the bright side, if you choose to have an early night tonight you can always wake up around 4:00-5:00 AM and have four or five hours of hadoukens, since the beta will run until 9 in the morning.
The one positive is that the regional stress tests are separate to the global beta; it’s a mea culpa to the community, effectively. That second phase will be open for five days as well, so no change there. But given the regional stress tests are just that — regional — you’d think Capcom could have factored in Australia and New Zealand a little more when arranging the schedule.
Comments
9 responses to “Australians Get Shafted With This Weekend’s Street Fighter 5 Beta”
5 am!? That’s usually when I start considering going to sleep.
Are we on the European servers though? Or are we on the American ones? Or even Asian? In terms of location, Asia would be the best connection. Generally we end up on American servers with online games though. Our release territory is EU. Does anyone actually know?
Looking at the tabs in my browser, it’s only showing the first 3 words of the title which frankly sums up the overall situation for gamers here…
Shinyu-Rippa!
Gunna sleep then crunch hadokens all morning!
I was under the impression that Perth was two hours behind the East Coast, not 22 hours ahead.
Friday, argh, thanks :p
How does a company not look at a map and say “Australia and New Zealand – well they’d be closer to Asia than Europe”
Boggles the mind
Of course Australia get’s screwed when it comes to something gaming related. We’ve been getting screwed since gaming began!
If you’re in Melbourne you can come and play SF5 this Saturday, full side by side versus play will be available. http://couchwarriors.org/wp/augustranbatfeaturing-sfv/
Population of Asia: 4,164 million people
Area of Asia: 44.58 million km2
Population Density: 93.4 people per km2
Population of Europe: 742.5 million people
Area of Europe: 10.18 million km2
Population Density: 72.9 people per km2
Population of North America: 528.7 million people
Area of North America: 24.71 million km2
Population Density: 21.4 people per km2
Population of Australia: 23.13 million people
Area of Australia in km2: 7.69 million km2
Population Density: 3.0 people per km2
Dear Australia – you may be a “western” country, but you’re chump fucking change on the global market scale so please kindly shut the fuck up. Your purchasing power is shit, because your market is shit, and nobody gives a flying fuck about appeasing you.