About "Skies of Honor" in the Competitive Scene

Street Fighter V was updated with a new stage, Skies of Honor. The stage has new concepts and elements that are used for the first time in the franchise's history. Basically, you can now fight on top of an airplane while you fly above a representation of Dubai. The composition is actually beautiful, but unfortunately, extremely distractive.

The following text reflects my opinion and also reports from other players about how the stage elements affect players (even physically, causing motion sickess for example) and defend the point of view that it should be banned from competitive playing, while explaining the reasons.

The screenshot above shows one of the various angles of "Skies of Honor". To understand what happens during gameplay a bit better, let's establish a couple things. Let's call the characters and the airplane "Foreground" and let's treat all the other stage elements as "Background".

First thing we have to keep in mind is that the Foreground is essentially static. It doesn't move under any circumstance. Meanwhile, the Background is constantly moving.

When we move the characters across the screen or jump, for example, the camera scrolls and follow the characters in the Foreground. Not only there's horizontal scrolling but there's a slight vertical scroll to follow the jumps.

Street fighter is essentially a ground-based game. Because of that, there's intense horizontal movement and scrolling while the battle of spacing happens.

To make it easier to understand how things like motion sickness happen in the middle of the match, I've put those red and yellow boxes that represent the usual field of vision while playing the ground game. The red box in the middle represents the space between characters, which is one of the most important elements to pay attention to when you're trying to get inside (or outside) poke range. It's one of the fundamental ways to gather information about when to take a decision.

As we are almost completely focused on the X axis of the Foreground and the Background is moving and rotating all around, it's not uncommon that it causes enough distraction for the player to actually lose track of things. Remember, we're used to the horizontal scrolling and a little bit of vertical scrolling in pretty much a straight line. We lose track of our guideline (the ground) and while tracking the jumping opponent while the stage rotates makes you completely disoriented. In a bit of time, our body responds the same way it does when we're reading stuff on a smartphone inside a bus. My first FT5 in this stage actually got me a bit dizzy and with a light headache.

This is a situation that has different results in different players. There are some who didn't notice anything wrong at all, but there are also the ones who actually needed to take a quick break to recover from things like motion sickness. Since this is something that cannot be controlled or something you can just "git gud and adapt" to, I believe the stage shouldn't be used in competitive play like Ranked Matches or tournaments. Unlike Kanzuki Beach and things like Birdie's invisible cans, this is something that may affect the player's senses.