Street Fighter 6, one of the best fighting games ever in our opinion, has been out for less than two weeks and drama is already ensuing after SFV pro Victor "Punk" Woodley criticized the Coinbox online tournament for not double-checking his pronouns while he was scheduled to play on stream, with racial slurs showing up instead.
The situation unfolded during Team Liquid co-owner Juan "Hungrybox" Debiedma's Street Fighter 6-focused Coinbox event, which had over 1,000 entrants. The Coinbox series of tournaments has been going strong for well over three years, serving for the most part as Smash Ultimate and Melee's most important online weekly event.
Punk quits SF6 tournament amid racial slurs usage
click to enlargePunk, one of the best Street Fighter 5 players in the world, who's looking to continue his legacy in the latest entry, was playing his winners round 3 match against xSpooNx.
An unremarkable 2-0 win for Punk by all accounts but one, as viewers, and later Punk himself noticed something during the broadcast - the steam layout featured racial slurs where each player's pronouns were supposed to go.
The FGC has been working towards more inclusivity and adding pronouns helps commentators and viewers avoid misgendering a competitor while on stream. Sadly, during a round between Punk and xSpooNx, the pronouns for both players featured the n-word, with Punk heavily criticizing the tournament organizers for not double-checking the information.
Punk took to Twitter to demand answers from Hungrybox and his staff, wondering why he was stuck with such an inappropriate slur as his pronouns, especially if we consider that he admitted to not filling that section of his Start.gg profile, the site most tournament organizers use to run brackets.
Hungrybox tried to explain to Punk that it could've been a hacker that wanted to mess with the stream, as they use an automated system to populate the layout with useful information, including player tag, the country/region they represent, and preferred pronouns.
As it turns out, it wasn't a hacker but rather something going absolutely wrong with the auto-fill system of the layout the organizers were using. Smash caster Rekka pointed out that the entire information was pulled from a Smash tournament in which pro player Blacktwins had used racial slurs as his pronouns.
That information was automatically uploaded to the stream ending with this disastrous situation.
A more technical explanation was also provided by multiple Twitter users, which concluded that a bug made it so the wrong information was loaded to the stream layout since neither Punk nor xSpooNx had the pronouns section of their profile filled.
In short, before the Punk match, Smash pro player Riddles played on the Street Fighter 6 Coinbox stream. Riddles also played against Blacktwins in the aforementioned Smash tournament, however, tournament organizers never closed the bracket, marking the match as "live" months after it had occurred.
Since the system used to auto-fill information assumed the live match was Riddles' most recent performance, instead of pulling from Coinbox, the layout that showed up on stream included Blacktwins' information from that Smash event.
Despite Hungrybox publicly apologizing to Punk via social media and on his stream, Punk opted to DQ from the event and has stated he won't be supporting further Coinbox Street Fighter events.
For more Street Fighter 6 content, check out how to farm kudos fast to earn your Fighting Pass rewards.
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