As someone who hosts lobbies & tournaments with PARSEC, I would like to address a few things:

Twitter Concern #1: Hosts will have a playing advantage while running parsec on their own PC.

^ Pairing Parsec with Cloud PCs (Example: AWS and Google) has fixed this issue.

Twitter concern #2: Costs

^ Understandable. This only applies to people who choose to host lobbies & tournaments, not players.

AWS & Google offers $300 in credits. Out of pocket? It’s about $1 an hour for AWS & Google (depends on # of CPUs) + a couple $ for storage.

^ This is probably going to be the same amount of money you spend to travel to a local/arcade and putting down quarters. If you consider venue and tournaments fees, this is actually allot less.

^ Clarification - You spend a couple of bucks a month for storage fees. It varies on the game size.

Twitter concern #3: It takes up more TIME (tournament duration, connecting players in and out, and troubleshooting issues).

^ Two players will hit the connect button & it’ll take 1-3 seconds for me to allow them through. If all goes well, both players can begin their match.

^ Connection issues mostly comes from players not following instructions (turning off apps/vsync in client settings/recording devices). It takes a minute for them to fix this & we’re good to go.

Unknown issue? A reboot of parsec from host or players take a couple of mins.

^ These issues do come up once or twice in every tournament I run. It is minimal.

Considering, I had to deal with lobby crashes because players cannot hit rematch and have to return to room every single time, this is not a big issue for me. I cannot speak for other games.

^ Overall tournament time has been faster for us. I have gotten the hang of the streaming regiment and players are comfortable with connecting in and out.

A increase in # of players has affected tournament time. That’s why Andy and I have two servers for our Tuesday pools.

Twitter concern #4: A 3rd player will connect mid match & affect the current gameplay between 2 players.

^This is only possible if the host was careless & decided to connect a player during an existing match. There would no reason to do so.

Haven’t experienced this issue.

Twitter concern #5: Parsec = replacement for better netcode.

Absolutely not. See my thoughts below. https://twitter.com/angelapickles/status/1291782870046928897

Twitter concern #6: A player’s experience can be affected by their opponent’s internet.

^ Parsec is not p2p. Your connection doesn’t affect the other player. In other words, only you can lag yourself out.

The only time both players lag is when the cloud server lags.

Twitter concern #7: It takes away lobbies and does not bring in new players.

^In an ideal world, all fighting games would have functional lobbies.

I can’t speak for all games, but take a look at UMVC3, Samsho, & KOFXIII. People are running weekly sessions & tournaments.

Hosts have been using twitch bots to open a queue system for players hop in and out. I’ve been getting this common feedback that it gives off this nostalgic arcade feel, except it’s just virtual.

^ Samsho went through almost half a year without new players. On top of that, we were losing existing players due to poor netcode and crashing lobbies.

As a TO, I was about to call it quits. Weekly entrants were dropping and people & top players lost the drive to play.

^ We saw that the UMVC3 scene had progress with Parsec and took a chance. There was nothing to lose.

I can confidently say now that Samsho in NA is reviving itself and is beginning to thrive on a competitive level again. All thanks to our community for being open to it.

^ In every weekly tournament, we will get at least 1 new player interested in picking up the game.

One of our community members has created a beginner to intermediate discord to welcome these new players and recently hosted a tournament. It’s going pretty well!

^ You don’t have to take my word for it. Ask the players who have experienced this for weeks and months. Or, try it yourself before making a judgement call.

No TO is crazy enough to go through all this tedious work to yield minimal results. The feedback has to be worth it.

This isn’t a perfect or a permanent fix. Parsec could use allot of improvement & I trust that it will get better w/ all the traction that it’s getting.

In a time w/ limited resources & options, we just have to go w/ what we have and hope that Devs will step up their game.

The mainstream games can take a hit but smaller communities will take a bigger blow during this pandemic, simply due to poor netcode.

I rather do what it takes to keep a community alive and even help ignite the flame with older games.