I'm in awe with the apparent fact that fighting game tournament organisers didn't anticipate so many registrations for a new release of best known fighting game of all time.
This is sub-par.
you aren't as familiar with the US scene so i'll cut you some slack here
here's the deal. some majors around the US rely on one game or one style of game as their main calling card in order to stand out from the rest. it gives you a more distinctive reputation if you can be THE tourney for a particular game. examples:
Final Round: Tekken
Northwest Majors: Anime, particularly the more niche anime games
NEC: all the "poverty" games during the dark days (Melty, Arcana Heart, MK, DOA)
UFGT: Mystery Tournament
Season's Beatings: Marvel 2 during that game's peak
so you have situations like this sometimes, and they aren't unique to this particular tournament. the past couple Final Rounds have gotten a TON of complaints from viewers due to the amount of time Tekken got on the main stream. it's way out of whack with the game's numbers and probably suboptimal from a business standpoint, but Tekken has long been FR's core identity and it has a higher level of play there than anywhere else outside of Evo or the US. they want to keep it that way, stream monsters be damned.
having been there for tournament, i can safely say that the Pacific Northwest is the most anime-heavy FG scene in America. particularly in terms of the love for non-Evo-material anime games like Skullgirls and UNIEL, only the Midwest comes anywhere close. Northwest Majors is also by far the smallest tournament that anyone considers a "major", and frankly it tends to feature a much lower level of play for Capcom & NRS games. NRS in particular had NEVER drawn good numbers there IIRC - Skullgirls this year had more players than i think MK9 or Inj ever had there!
so there was plenty of past history to suggest MKX wouldn't be this big, and there was also a desire to feature the tournament's "signature" games. the idea is that the tournament comes off best by showcasing the games with the highest level of play relative to other majors, and for NWM that's Skullgirls and UNIEL. they could have perhaps done a better job forecasting MKX's popularity, but i think this was reasonable. this is something other majors need to learn from more than a blowup for them, i think.
so yes, i'm not angry about this at all. i totally get why yall are still paranoid about MK's status within the scene, but i think it's time to stop worrying about a return to the dark days. this community is daniel bryan at this point - you'll always have your fans and a better spot than most, even if you get "buried" here and there.
