Miscellaneous Melting

Miscellaneous Melting

As I touched on in the very start of this series, there are more barriers than just the geographic and language ones between two of the most talent-dense MBAACC scenes on the planet. The most prominent of these is of course the hardware difference between the Ringwide arcade board plugged into a candy cab and CCCaster-installed personal computers. Even with some PC events on the Japanese MBAACC calendar that North American players schedule trips overseas around, people do take in the experience of getting jumpscared by Ringwide for the hell of it on their trips.

Tanking this debuff lends itself to good stories about the hoops one jumps through to come together and share in new customs that you can talk about any other time fighting gamers come together. This is after all one more thing to add to the list of idiosyncracies of the worldwide MBAACC community.

As with any other individual dividing line amongst MBAACC players, you can make a team exhibition out of this. In this case, it would be people who have traveled overseas to play on cabs against other humans in one of the arcades that has become a pilgrimage site for arcade players of the game in current years vs those that haven't. We're gonna be wishcasting some offline debuts as part of this while we're at it.

#lfg-na is a very interesting place with a unique posting culture. For all the talk about how talking about fighting games and playing fighting games are functionally two separate activities, #lfg-na's irreverence is fueled in part by the questions and answers behind playing the game. These range widely from asking if there is any [x] in chat to proclaiming that one Doesn't Even Play This Game and more. The act of hopping on the game is even enshrined in how moderation works: the "seal" system blocks users from posting anything that isn't an IP to host games or "ggs" at the end of playing games.

This humor is exported to other platforms pretty seamlessly. You see it whenever big tournaments are shilled and then streamed. This expands the reach of the various #lfg-na -isms to a wider audience for better or for worse.

With #lfg-eur being its own thing that is generally less well regarded than #lfg-na, EU players looking to hide from the former will routinely get guest spots in NA. Likewise with the various regions of Latin America, SEA, and OCE. Japanese players sitting in on #lfg-na were rare sightings as the primary place IPs were posted there before wider adoption of Discord amongst the community was Twitter. Needless to say, they get the warmest response from the regulars.

This brings us to the natural counterpart to the previous exhibition proposed involving NA players who interacted on the JP scene's terms: JP players' growing interaction with the NA scene's English-speaking online spaces, from bog standsrd #lfg-na to event stream chats and beyond.

One more thing before we dive in: 6v6 lineups were chosen because the standard team exhibition with multiple lives is known as "Pokemon style", and Pokemon teams have 6 of them.

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