Capcom may be looking to wind down its support for Street Fighter 5 and begin looking towards the future, especially with the Champion Edition of the game now out. However, even four years after the game's initial release, players were still having issues with the online multiplayer, reporting laggy and unstable matches. In the end, a fan had to step in and attempt to fix it themselves.
A Reddit user by the name of Altimor shared a patch of their own making for players to download and address the issues with Street Fighter 5's netcode. According to Altimor, it only took them a couple of days to reverse-engineer Capcom's code and figure out what the exact problem was.
In a private message to Kotaku, Altimor shared their motivation behind developing the patch:
"My patch causes your game to momentarily slow down if your opponent’s game falls behind, keeping you in sync and preventing unnecessarily large rollbacks. I both want to help out the Street Fighter community and hopefully get Capcom to release an official fix. However, since we’re likely nearing the end of Street Fighter 5’s life cycle, an official fix may be unlikely."
The patch wasn't flawless since it was only effective for the PC version of the game and even then didn't completely fix the netcode issues, but it did a good enough job to result in more players using the patch themselves to play online and practice in preparation for the release of new character Seth.
However, the patch eventually caught the eye of Capcom itself, specifically the game's producer Yoshinori Ono. Fortunately, Capcom didn't start banning players that were using it, and later confirmed that it was going to directly address the netcode issues players had been complaining about.
Capcom's own patch dropped sometime after Champion Edition's release and, unfortunately, it did more harm than good, effectively disabling Altimor's patch, resulting in a lot of anger from players. Fortunately, further testing revealed that Capcom's efforts weren't in vain. Much like Altimor's attempt, it hasn't completely fixed the netcode but online multiplayer has become more of a viable option or, at the very least, serviceable.
That said, it is baffling that it seemed to take a third-party's attempt to fix this issue to make Capcom finally do something about it itself. Hopefully, come Street Fighter 6, fans won't have to be cleaning up Capcom's messes again.
That's assuming that Street Fighter 6 is Capcom's next fighting game project. A new rumor has sprung up that suggests that another Capcom VS title could be in the works. Whether it's the long-demanded Marvel vs Capcom 4 or another crossover entirely is another question.
Street Fighter 5: Champion Edition is available on PS4 and PC.
Source: Kotaku