Street Fighter 6 players tagged with racial slur during tournament livestream

Last night over 1000 players signed up for the Coinbox Street Fighter 6 tournament, hosted and hosted by professional Smash Bros player Hungrybox. During this tournament, racial slurs were attributed to two live players during the course of an entire match.

Initial speculation was that a hacker circumvented security measures and changed the player’s pronoun tags to racial slurs, knowing they should appear below the names of the competitors. However, upon investigating the situation, a glitch was pointed out in the software used to automatically pull player information from the tournament roster and put it to work. Ultimately, Hungrybox issued an apology to both Punk and XSpoonX, who were the two players affected.

This technical glitch was initially dismissed as a prank that both players were aware of prior to the match. Start.gg, the tournament website used to host the event, allows players to set their own pronouns on the account they use to sign up for tournaments like Streetbox. The software used by tournament organizers is designed to scan player accounts in the stream, display accurate information about them, such as their names, Twitter account, and pronouns, and display it in the stream.

Somehow, even though Punk had no pronouns set up on his account, this software apparently went back and pulled the pronouns used by another player who entered an event several months ago. Unaware of this glitch, racial slurs were displayed below Punk’s and XspoonX’s names over the course of the entire game, before they were removed.

Punk expressed his frustration regarding the situation immediately after the match on Twitter.. The initial response from Hungrybox, the face of the tournament and unaware of the flaw, was to point out the automated nature of the software. Acknowledging that Punk had no set pronouns at all, let alone racial slurs, this was later attributed to a malicious hacker.

At this point, the situation had caught the attention of the online community, which began to investigate the situation. Rekka, a UK-based tournament organizer and commentator for Smash Bros, searched Start.gg and discovered that the pronouns were drawn from a Canadian player named Blacktwins. Because they? looks like a tournament organizer for the Canadian Heaven’s Arena event in July 2022 never closed his match, which had been listed as ongoing for over 476,000 hours.

For whatever reason, the software in use extracted the Blacktwins’ pronouns and applied them to both Punk and Spoon. Blacktwins would go on to apologize on Twitter, despite not being at fault for the situation..

The situation was apparently resolved as an unfortunate technical glitch, Hungrybox publicly stated that the software that caused this problem would no longer be used. However, this did little to dampen the criticism, as many believe that someone on the team should have detected and removed these pronoun tags much sooner. Producer for Tenomedia HonzoGonzoa media company responsible for live-streaming various big fighting game events, was one such person who stated: “Yes, Punk is 10000% justified in whatever anger he feels, this had to overcome so many people to get on the air. A litany of mistakes that should have immediate accountability and not random guesswork about what happened.”

The result of all this? Punk has stated that he will no longer participate in Coinbox events in the future.. He’s legitimately frustrated with the situation: picking out tags for yourself like Blacktwin did is one thing, but having them put on you without your consent is an entirely different matter. In his live broadcast, Punk would further vent his frustrations towards those who took over the Hungrybox corner on his live stream.

Hungrybox would finally apologize in a long thread after the event. He would say: “Today was far from perfect. In addition to being the first time we’ve run a wrestler without a platform, I felt like I failed as a tournament organizer. I feel like if I had been more familiar with the broadcast and production organization, I would have They could have prevented many unfortunate circumstances.”

“A lot of it comes down to me trying to do it all at once: streaming, TOing, casting, entertainment, and production. While Smash is something I’m more comfortable with, this was a whole new ball game. In other words – I feel like I should have triple checked things more.”

“Instead of assuming the pronouns were troll/bit, I should have removed them ASAP. Also, I should have noticed that the program was buggy even before it was displayed on the screen. I became too reliant on automation. @PunkDaGod – this is on me. Not my personal. I apologize. “

They would go on to leave the future of Coinbox fighting game events in the hands of the community and announce their intention to step back for a while. While it’s a nice sentiment, it’s like the online fighting game community has a council of elders that can force players to opt out of Hungrybox events in the future. As a popular influencer, you could easily host packed events with or without the support of some respected players. Especially with Street Fighter 6, which has proven to be very popular.

With the future of these particular events in limbo, hopefully this event will stand out as a warning to future organizers to monitor streams for inappropriate content. It is certainly a difficult concert, but there are some slip-ups that you have to take advantage of.

For more Street Fighter 6 articles, check out these pieces on Drive Impact proving to be a nightmare for Street Fighter 6 players, as well as how modern Street Fighter 6 controls are the best training tool the series has ever had.