The State of Wild West Guilty Gear- 9/2023
The first time I played at an event hosted by the nascent Wild West Guilty Gear must have been around 2018 or 2019. At the time, I was mainly playing a combination of Pokken DX and Smash Ultimate, and UNIST was the first anime fighter I was trying to learn seriously. I had discovered Rev2 around the time Patrick “Pattheflip” “Patrick Miller AKA Hat Trick Killer” “Smokage of the Burning Leaf” “Irene Koh’s Trophy Husband” “Foosties” Miller began streaming it and trying to teach people the game, but I bounced off of it because at the time it just wasn’t clicking in my brain and felt overwhelming to play. During one particular SoCal Wednesday Night Fights at the now-defunct Esports Arena Santa Ana venue, the UNIST players were forced onto the crowded second-floor mezzanine area to run their bracket. That night, a guy named Ruben, who I would later know as Hasan Piker stan imnotasandwich, asked the UNIST players if they would be willing to join a free ad-hoc Rev2 bracket. I went 2–2 with a fraudulent half-baked I-No (yes, Chastity, I know I still drop my IAD links, but I didn’t know what I was doing at all back then either) that managed to at least steal wins over the French Bread players who knew less about the game than I did. I didn’t know that Ruben and Tomik (Hursh191) and the rest of the players flying under the WWGG banner were trying to keep SoCal Guilty Gear alive in the absence of the previous event runners who had also moved on from the game.
During COVID, WWGG began running SoCal-only Rev2 netplay brackets where the winner would face off against the winner of Pat’s Play Guilty Gear crew’s netplay bracket, and when GGPO+R dropped we also began running those for the whole continent. Around the time Strive finally came out, the WWGG crew were burned out from a mixture of having only run netplay events for a year and change, new jobs, and not being a fan of the new title, so they graciously gave me the keys to the castle. I asked my friend Kimberly, who had gotten into fighting games more seriously with GGST, if she would be willing to help me out, and the two of us began running +R and GGST under a combined WNF Online/WWGG banner. Then Esports Arena and stuff got involved with GGST and we went on a wild ride, and the rest is history.
It’s been two years or so since we took over Wild West Guilty Gear, which itself has been running online events for three. Apart from holidays or weeks we were out of town, we’ve basically never broken continuity, even through stuff like the functional end of WNF Online and ESA Series E. In that time we’ve seen GGST change pretty drastically across three seasons and a bunch of other games come out with rollback and older ones getting it patched in. We’ve also seen other communities online expand and fill the niches we used to fill, and offline events (especially small locals and large majors) are coming back in full swing. On the other hand, doing this basically for forever with no breaks means you get really exhausted, and I think it’s time for a break.
Wild West Guilty Gear’s netplay brackets will not be returning for October 2023 and we will be on a hiatus for the foreseeable future. There’s a lot of motivating factors for this. Besides the fact that we’re pretty tired, we’re also doing our own things now. Kim is going back to school and I’m learning a new trade, and our time is occupied by that for the time being. For my part, I’m hoping that learning a skill that will allow me to work from home and make good money will also allow me to work on my actual passions such as my writing (FGC-related, fiction, poetry and more) and maybe even support the FGC in a direct fashion down the line (if we ever return, being able to pay for stream assets/commentary/other TOs/have a proper prize pool would be nice.)
There’s also just a lot of other things that we’re kind of worn out by, having taken a lot of bumps along the way here. Stuff like the +R cheating accusations ran me ragged, and other interactions with that community have unfortunately soured me on the game entirely. While I am extremely proud of the Mild West Postgrad exhibition, it’s been difficult to interact with the scene or even touch the game, and Pat once said to me very simply that if I lack passion for a particular title I shouldn’t run it anymore. Also, Kim and I were extremely hurt by a lot of the issues we had with Series E/ESA- fighting a losing battle for a bracket format that we preferred, petty arguments with top players that led to us being slandered on Twitter and even on YouTube content (some of it was also just made up- at one point I was somehow mistaken for ClassicFightingGamer, the former +Rcord admin who later formed a dedicated Discord for players who were banned for being bigots,) working on the Series E product for free for over a year when Valle was the only one involved who even knew who we were, all led us to reconsider our place in the FGC and was one of the big motivations behind us switching exclusively to Mild West (but we were both considering a break at the time, and I think it’s a miracle we kept going.) More recently, events being announced out of nowhere overlapping with us to our detriment (PSA Circuit) have been burning us out and making it hard to retain entrants, and we think it’s time for us to move on.
That’s not to say our time in the FGC is over. Kim and I will be competing and doing other stuff with GGST and other games and you’ll see us around. We’ll be offline from time to time and if you see us at any SoCal events feel free to say hi. Kim will also be playing/helping out at the Lars Canyon Dust Up!! bracket, which you can find more info about by following Despair_Tea and OzmaNeku on Twitter. As far as other Arcadian events are concerned, doveingly has done a great job at Training Mode Network of cultivating a community for several games, many of which we used to serve at WWGG. If you were a fan of WWGG events I would highly recommend the stuff that dove has been cooking as a worthwhile substitute. I’m personally looking forward to having a bit more time to actually play the games I run events for as well, and I feel like I’ve gotten the hang of commentary. I’ll also link mine and Kim’s socials at the bottom of the page. We’ll also probably be streaming intermittently on our respective Twitch pages.
I also don’t want to necessarily speak this into existence, but WWGG will probably not be gone forever. The Discord itself will remain up, of course, since Ruben still owns it, but I’ll clean up the roles and such whenever I have time, and make it a proper matchmaking server for anyone still in there. Users who want to promote their events in our Discord, off- or online, can feel free to do so. I would also really like to do something for UNI2 (UNISC, UniII, you know) when that comes out, and it will probably be a Mild West event, but we’ll see how I feel next January- no promises.
Anyway, until next time, stay safe, stay healthy (please mask at events) and tell ’em the cows sent ya.
Kim can be found on Tumblr and Twitch. I can be found on Twitch, Tumblr, and Bluesky.
