Has The Latest Street Fighter V CFN Beta Brought Real Improvements?!

For only about a year and just a few months, Street Fighter V’s run seems to be that of a never ending struggle. One of the most significant of these has to do with the online element of the series latest title. Back in March, Capcom unveiled their plans for improving the Capcom Fighters Network inviting PC players to a free Beta to test out what developers hoped would be a big fix. Unfortunately, things did not seem to go well.

For whatever reason, Capcom has made it their goal this time around to make sure that these improvements are in fact the real deal and as a result, an update that promised balance changes and a new character were put on hold in an effort to make sure that the improvements for CFN were what the developers intended. And so this brings us to the second CFN which, this time around, was opened to the Playstation 4 players also. I had the opportunity of trying out the 2nd beta and what I came away with was a general mixed bag when it comes to this latest beta’s end result.

One of the biggest improvements that the update for CFN promised was better loading times and I can concur that this has gotten better. Whether the connection was good or bad, the wait times from the character select screen to in game play seemed to be just a few seconds. I think we can count that as a true improvement and I hope other players felt this same experience.

On the other hand, matchmaking, in my opinion, still has a long way to go. I stayed in casual and ranked matches for my entire experience. In the beginning ,I chose to stick with the 3-5 bars option and rethinking on it, this was probably a mistake. Finding matches was never an issue. Wait times stayed between 1-4 minutes at the most which seemed far better then the last Beta.

The problem I constantly came across was mainly regional. Like past experiences, I would run into a few matches from Brazil and in most cases the matches were for the most part unplayable. Teleporting seems to be a very big issue with this title in general but it can especially get horrendous at the 3 bar latency. The issues did not completely disappear when I bumped the options up to 4-5 but I can admit there were far less. Even then, wait times for matches were not long.

The ranking system seems to do its job fairly well. Once I made it into the bronze skill level, there were a few rookie matches but not frequent enough to address it as an overall problem. Overall, I think for now the CFN improvements beta at least accomplished some of its primary goals. I believe its best to release the updates at this point but there is certainly a lot more room for improvement.

Tags: Beta, Capcom Fighters Network, Street Fighter V

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thec0re3 Founder of Fighting Games Online and self proclaimed "entertainment techie", thec0re3 takes immense enjoyment out of merging his love for video games and technology to educate, create, and participate in something he has enjoyed for more years than he would ever admit to.