Krackatoa is one of the front facing members of Dustloop, a wiki which have become the defacto source of information for fighting games. He also creates educational content such as Neutral.mp4. We discuss how the FGC went from ASCI art GameFAQs guides to wikis, his content, and the state of the FGC in a post-covid world.
This is also a Youtube video! If you’d prefer the audio from the interview, here it is:
All right. So here I am with Krackatoa. For those that don’t know, Krackatoa is a, editor or administrator of Dustloop?
I am the experimental media guy.
Okay. The experimental media guy.
They were like, “no one wants to run the social media page.” And I’m like, “oh, I’ll do it.” And that was it. That was it.
Krackatoa, editor or experimental media guy of Dustloop, which for Siege people, because some of my people are R6 Siege related, Dustloop is pretty much an aggregate wiki knowledge base for a number of fighting games, which kind of takes information for all of the characters, all of the system mechanics, and puts it all in one place. And I guess we’ll start there. Why is Dustloop and its existence and sites like it, like Dream Cancel, so important for the FGC?
That’s a good question. I will say that we’ve tried many ways of compiling information over the years. Like collectively as a community, not me, I haven’t done anything but my YouTube videos and like the occasional Faust Wiki article. But generally we’ve, I’m not sure if you remember GameFAQs right?
Before my time.
Before your time. Excellent. Good. It’s better that way. If you ever want to laugh, go look up old fighting games and their guides, their written guides, their walkthroughs or whatever on GameFAQs. You can still get them I think. Combo notation is done in ASCII art, like…my god. And then all of the documentation was not collaborative. It was just like Ralph in his underwear at home putting together his Alpha 2 guide and posting it up on GameFAQs. So there was GameFAQs.
We also had the era of forum posts. So Shoryuken.com and stuff like that, where people would write advice, people would have discussions, feedback, and whatever. Then wikis came around. And they were used, usually to like record. frame data, maybe combo routes, stuff like that. Very bare bones it was mostly just like, oh, here’s some data points. We’ll keep it all as a repository.
And then Discord happened. And Discord, everyone moved into Discord and suddenly you had Discords for every character of every fighting game. So I’m in something like 27 Xrd character Discords. There’s one for every character. I don’t even – I can’t even remember if it’s 27, it’s just a lot. It’s a lot. So there’s like the main Xrd Discord, and then one for like Ky Kiske, friggin Sol Badguy, Jack-O, May, Faust. All this stuff.
Were they keeping secret tech that they wouldn’t post on the main Xrd Discord or something?
No, no, because there wasn’t tech posted on the main Xrd Discord. Everyone thought back then, It’s like, “Oh, of course we would have a Discord for every character,” you know, “all the mains for every character want to talk amongst themselves.” So then people would make Google Docs that would sit in Discord pins or Pastebins even. What else? Evernotes. Evernote, there’s a lot of good Xrd Evernotes out there. But where the hell are they? Right? Like, where? Where are they?
And we realize after Xrd and maybe around the UNIST era, so we’re talking like a few years ago, I think everyone collectively realized that Discord kind of sucks for collaborative work. If you want a permanent place for information. It’s good for collaborating and researching tech actively, but when it comes to placing all that finished work somewhere? It sucks. Because it’s buried in pins. It’s not very visible.
The pins aren’t necessarily organized.
Yeah, to get to the information you want, you have to like to go to a Discord. How’s it divided up? Are there alternate Discords? Are there character Discords? It’s like, what the hell’s going on? And so I think everyone these days is like okay, Discord, sort of like a failed experiment.
It’s great when you need to, like rope a bunch of people in like, “Hey, we’re gonna lab this stuff.” But what do you do with the stuff you’ve labbed? You stored it on a wiki. A wiki is front facing, it’s clean. Three clicks to get to the information you want, right? You go to the main page, you click the game, you click the character, you get your table of contents, or your headers, you know exactly where everything is in a very short amount of time. And so that brings us to today. That’s Dustloop’s role, the final repository, the library for like, all research and development that comes out of fighting game Discords and fighting game communities.
That’s a big undertaking, because obviously, it’s collecting all this information from however many Discords, God knows how many just for a single game like Xrd, let alone you throw in a KOF, or a BBCF, or BBTag, and all those games. How much time and effort goes into this? Because this is all volunteer based from my understanding.
So we have a bunch of volunteers, people working on the back end of Dustloop. So there was a recent sort of back end update, or like, if you check out Discord like right now versus two weeks ago, it looks very different now. So there was a big refit of, I don’t know what it is, MediaWiki or something like that. The stuff that makes up the building blocks of the wiki were updated. And that is a huge undertaking because in web development, things will just start to fall apart at the seams as you update or refit it. Maybe you had bespoke code somewhere operating the website. And it’s like, uh oh, that doesn’t work now, we gotta fix that.
So for those guys, I don’t do any of that, I don’t do any programming of note. So they were at wit’s end for the better part of a week or two. And they still might be. I think the fires have been put out mostly. But they were like, super stressed over it. They were like staying up way too late. You know, blood, sweat, and tears. And that’s just for the look of the website that has nothing to do with all the information or the content. People are spending hours and hours a day uploading video. Or cutting and uploading for like combo videos and stuff. Or guides, people are putting up images. Don’t even get me started on what it takes to get hitbox data onto the wiki. I’m sure there are hundreds of people involved in what Dustloop is today. And it is a monstrous amount of work. It is humongous.
Okay, and this is just to maintain the website and everything. How do you manage so many games, not just fighting games because that’s obviously the big draw of Dustloop, but you also have some other games. I believe the term was like, guest games or something.
It’s like a mix of the collective will of the anime fighting game community and whatever people have the gumption for, essentially. So I think King’s Field 4, one of the guys who does a huge amount of work keeping the website going, which is Tarkus, he loves From Software games. So he’s like, “there’s no good King’s Field Wiki. I don’t like it.” So he went and he made it himself. He scraped the data from the game, put it up, hosted.
And honestly, when it comes to like guest games, or these kinds of sillier projects that aren’t necessarily fighting games, it’s okay. Because obviously, if we had like, a million different non fighting games on the wiki, it would get a little messy. But because we are mindful of the front page, right? No one’s getting like King’s Field 4 shoved in their face when they’re coming to the wiki to look for Battle Fantasia, or DNF Duel, or Guilty Gear. It hasn’t been an issue at all. It’s just like a funny thing that sometimes someone might have a little heeho and, you know, make a whole King’s Field wiki. That’s just how it is.
Okay, so moving more towards what you do and your content creation, because in addition to working with Dustloop you also make tutorial videos regarding Guilty Gear. But they are very applicable to almost any other fighting game, I have found at least. What inspired that?
Let’s see. So I’ve made tech videos and stuff before and I used to be a fiendish Discord poster. People would come and ask me stuff on Discord or we’d be having conversations and I would just type way too much. I would give a two page dissertation on the best place to use Faust 5k in neutral. And it was just awful. It was terrible. It’s hard to digest. I’m pretty sure I got a bunch of stuff wrong. And it was just a lot. And one day someone asked me about Faust oki. Running oki as Faust without FDC jump K, his instant overhead stuff, whatever. It’s just I was just doing an oki tutorial and I cut up a video that was 24 minutes long. The audio was bad, I think I repeated myself like eight times, and it was just a disaster. And I made it and I uploaded it. I was too lazy to do any extra work.
And I’m like, “hey, this video is garbage, but here you go.” and the person was like, “oh, thank you.” And the more I watched the video back the more I was like, this is actually terrible. This is the worst thing I’ve ever created in the history of anything. It’s slow. It’s long winded. It’s just me sitting there. It’s still on my channel maybe. It’s just like A Long Talk on Faust Okizemi or something. And around that time, shortly after, I think Sajam had a little spat on Twitter. There was some FGC drama, very light drama, not actual drama. And he’s like, “we need more short form tutorial videos, because these long ass ramble vids are not doing anyone any favors.”.
And so you felt subtweeted?
Yeah but I was in full agreement. Because in that moment, I was already stewing on the self loathing for my own piece of content that I had just made. I’m like, oh my god, this is so bad.
So shortly after that, probably just before Strive came out, a Japanese player, and his name escapes me sadly, posted a little tiny short form video guide. With some aerial text, a little black bar along the bottom to make the text pop a little more, and it was just straight into the point. It just talked about, I forget what it was. It was just like the basics of using projectiles in neutral or something in Xrd. I was like, oh, this is great, I’m gonna copy his work. And I [laughs] stole his format. I was just like, “oh, you, you made this, I made this.”
So you can find that. It’s old, it’s on my channel, and it was just like a very, very short form tutorial. We’re talking like a minute and a half, maybe two minutes. Just an introduction to [Guilty Gear] +R Faust. And I was like, damn, this is the best way to do character content. This is the best, it’s absolutely 100% the best. So fast forward to Strive and I was like, okay, I would like to do this my own way. Something that’s easy to read, easy to parse through. Or easier. No nonsense, right? I would like to make something I could put on a wiki, essentially. Because, you know a lot of content is like, maximum engagement, maximum content.
Eight minutes so that you get to ads, no swearing the first 10 seconds. All those circus games.
For reference material, I don’t think I could put that on a wiki, right? There’s just too much in between the goods and the player trying to learn. So I was like, Okay, well, I’ll just compress this as much as I can. I can have maybe a joke or two in it somewhere. But it’s just going to be a gray thumbnail, white text. It’s real basic. The title is exactly what it says. Exactly what’s in the video. And that’s going to be how I do things. And it’s just going to be condensed, compressed as much as I can. Because eloquence is something that doesn’t come naturally to me. I talk a lot, as you might have noticed, I love to talk. I talk too much so the video format forces me to be more concise.
That brings us to today and your most recent one. Getting into the weeds of content creation, because I know everyone’s creative process is different, mine’s probably pretty kooky from an outside perspective, but is it thoroughly planned? It kind of sounds like it is. But do you have off the cuff stuff? Or do you kind of plan out from point A to point B to point C.
So for Neutral.mp4, I did a lot more planning than I normally do. I feel like if you watch my earlier content, you can kind of tell I’m winging it. Rarely do I use a script for anything. I will actually just sit down in training mode, have OBS open to capture. And I’ll literally build an idea, or have something I want to say, and I will capture a clip representing what I’m trying to say in that moment. If I need more time, I will duplicate the clip and slow it down and play it again while I’m talking. And then I’ll move on to the next idea.
A lot of my videos are circular, right? I’ll enter at some point into like, oki or a pressure situation or whatever, and I’m like, okay, here’s a breakdown of this situation. Here are your answers. Here’s how your opponent will adjust. Here’s how you adjust to your opponent’s adjustment. And eventually you’ll end up back at the starting point. A lot of my videos are like that and they close like that. Neutral.mp4 was like that as well.
Back to rock. Good ol’ rock.
This structure I feel, of having a complete structure is very important because it doesn’t explain everything, but it at least gives you a full picture of what the hell is going on.
When making your content or just kind of for your own play? Because obviously, you don’t just make tutorials, you also play these games yourself. Do you take concepts from other genres? Do you even watch other genres? FPS’s or MOBAs?
I watch a lot of card games. A lot of Hearthstone. A lot of battlegrounds
Are there any concepts you take from it, and you kind of like apply to fighting games?
No, absolutely not. It’s like an escape.
You know, that’s fair. I asked because I found, you know, Core-A Gaming and your stuff too, I found that when I tried, just thinking about it and breaking it down into fundamental ideas, I could apply a lot of the concepts to FPS games like Siege or Valorant. But these much slow paced games, you kind of are able to apply some concepts of, not necessarily footsies, but resource management and all that stuff. So I was just kind of curious if you had any similar inspiration from other genres.
I think a lot of my understanding is rooted in fighting games. And when I go to other genres, I will impress fighting games upon those other genres. Because a lot of my learning about how reactions play into decision making, how human adjustment develops in a given situation, I learned all of that in fighting games. So in head to head experiences or competitive environments, usually I’m always thinking about it in terms of what I know from fighting games.
So I know, players react in anywhere from 14 frames if they’re just twitch reactions, which is like the fastest I’ve seen, or like 20 some odd frames if they are just generally trying to react to stuff. More if they’re surprised or something’s unexpected. I might use that to like, break down a situation where I’m like, “hey, could I have reacted better in that situation?” “Did my opponent react or did they actually just make a guess?” Like a read in a given situation, are they operating on prediction? Or, you know, “what’s that situation like? How does that pan out?” I feel like a question that I’ll ask a lot, or I find myself asking a lot when venturing into other genres is, “Hey, is that reactable?” I’ll get weird looks. I’ll get real strange looks from people. They’ll be like, “what do you mean?” I’m like, “yeah, could I answer that on reaction? Like, could I pop a shield or something on reaction to this maneuver they’re doing?” And they’re like, “uhh.”
I can imagine because just thinking about Siege or something. If I asked a teammate, like “hey, was that reactable?” It’s like, “Oh, I dunno. Could you hear the C4 or could you not?” And then obviously, moving your aim, you’re not limited by frame by frame data or anything. So in theory, if you move your mouse fast enough, yeah, it is reactable. The question is, are you fast enough to react?
So to close out, I kind of want to talk about the state of the FGC, especially post COVID. You mentioned Frosty Faustings is coming up before we started recording, and I want to ECT myself, my first fighting game event in post COVID. But obviously, that’s a much different looking event, compared to probably what it used to be if I had to guess. We were wearing masks the entire time. I imagine there were a bunch of other things that changed.
I like the masks because historically, everyone gets sick at fighting game tournaments.
The post-con flu?
Yeah. tourney-bola? Yeah, yeah.
So what is the state of the FGC? Are locals coming back? Are they forever changed? And what about Majors? Are there less majors, are they more important?
I have a lot to say on the subject. I think it’s very spooky, because the cost of booking a venue has grown so much over the past, even before COVID, it was starting to rise and COVID hurt a lot of local economies. Suddenly, there’s a bunch of people rushing back into the world to do tourism. So the cost of spaces has dramatically risen. Cost of living, cost of travel, cost of everything’s going up. And so you need more people in a venue paying more money to be at the venue to make the venue sustainable. And so these sort of mid-sized events are really struggling. There’s not enough revenue. There’s not enough profit or whatever, to keep things on the up and up. Obviously, there are still events that are doing just fine.
I imagine Evo is probably not struggling nearly as much as something more midsize, but not quite local.
They [Evo] have major corporate backing, right? So it doesn’t matter. They’re immune. Because Sony will just be like, yeah, we’ll just pay, we’ll foot the bill.. It’s harder for those independent orgs or the smaller orgs. They’re less mobile. If something goes wrong, they really feel it.
And so you’re one catastrophe away from just, “well, we can’t run any more events, because it’s just too expensive. We’ve eaten through our savings. We’re not making enough money,” so on and so forth. And that also goes for local events. So we [the Ontario FGC] lost a venue going into COVID. Two venues? One or two venues going into COVID. We just got one now but it hasn’t been good for the businesses involved. So they’re more staying open out of, it feels almost like desperation as opposed to profitability. So I feel really bad about, like every city that I take a look at, it’s like, oh, this venue closed, this place closed, this place, couldn’t stay open all this stuff. So yeah, we’re definitely hurting and it probably hurt a lot of the momentum that local events had. That we had going and developing.
Are we seeing a recovery? Are we on the up and up again?
There’s obviously recovery, because people are going back to events, and I feel like there’s a huge amount of interest in events right now. But it’s like where could we have been sans COVID?
I know international play is a very unique thing in the FGC compared to esports, but obviously international play gets affected by a global pandemic. How has international play in general been affected when it comes to these big events? Obviously you do have the Japanese and the Korean players and the European players come for EVO, but maybe not other tournaments. How has that been affected? Are we gonna see a wave of Pakistani Tekken players come to Frosting Faustings?
I don’t know what their travel schedule is like.
I was just picking a random demographic.
The issue is the cost of travel has progressed to the point where things are getting kind of wild. The Yen has fallen dramatically. So traveling out of country for Japan is nonsense. Obviously, they have an EVO Japan coming up. I know a lot of people are going from the US to Japan. That might be the play going forward, right? If the Yen is cheap, it’s easier to ship everyone in as opposed to, like, send the Japanese players out. So we’ll probably see more international stuff happening. But like, we’ll have to wait and see. Because the economies of it right now are, it’s not sustainable for…you don’t look at like the most well off players or the most obvious.
The sponsored players aren’t the ones that we need to look at and be concerned about.
There’s a demographic of player in the middle, so the sponsor player that’s maybe like, can only go to so many events a year, the sponsored player that maybe just can only afford to travel locally, or can only go state to state.
The top player who isn’t sponsored and has to keep working for
Yeah, foot their own bill. So it’s always on like a spectrum. So your top top top players can probably travel a lot more. Whereas you’re just going to see a larger- well you won’t see them because they’re not going anywhere. But that’s why I talk about momentum being sort of like hamstrung because of COVID, right? So you’d probably see more players doing more things across borders had we not had COVID. Just because like the beating the economy took made travel just like less sustainable.
That brings us to rollback. Rollback [netcode], I think it can’t be understated because you look at how Strive’s done.
Yeah, saved that game.
Saved Strive. I mean, it brought Xrd back into relevancy, +R, I think KOF has some variation of it. And Street Fighter 6 is looking to have one?
Yeah, they’re doing their best.
There’s like this universal shift to rollback. But at the same time, that also is almost out of necessity. Do you think online results have more meaning now?
It depends entirely on the state of the connection at the time of the match. That’s it. That’s all. So if you’re playing on like 150 ms connection, that is a 150 ms game of Strive, or whatever it is you’re playing. If you’re experiencing two frames of rollback, that’s a two rollback frame game. That’s parity to offline. That’s pretty close. So you’d be like, Oh, wow, that connection was great. This match is worth a lot or it’s very comparable to offline play. Right? It’s not <Not Guilty Gear> but it’s a different game. Right. It’s just that’s just what it is.
All the memes about Ky’s overhead in Xrd or whatever.
Yeah, he’s gonna rollback into Greed Sever. So that’s just like the reality of the situation. Depending on like, how a match went, will determine whether or not it is legit. Because on a good connection, you might be able to react to like 5D from most of the characters in Strive. And if there’s even a few frames of rollback those 5Ds become completely invisible. It’s like, oh, oh, all right. Well, I guess I guess this is an invisible 5D now. I guess this whole matchup has changed dynamics. Stuff like that.
Okay, cool. And then last thing, anything you want to shout out or anything like that?
Just Dustloop good. Dustloop excellent. Big shout out to everyone who’s been working on that. They just did a big update so it looks super fresh. So check it out if you want fighting game info for all your favorite anime air dashers. I’ll be at Frosty Faustings in February, early Feb. I’ll be bringing a Gachapon machine to that. Giving away some prizes.