Fighting game community

Something I've wanted to rant about for a long time on an article comment on the Penny Arcade Report.

This article's message is kind of silly. "The fighting game scene is very accepting... and by that I mean not accepting at all!" Lots of mixed words here, and the overall counter-point of "but we have cool clips of competitive matches!" really has nothing at all to do with the topic at hand.

I'm a huge fighting game fan but I've always a had a bone to pick with the American community. While it's commendable in a way, the community has this sense of camaraderie that is almost too much to bear, and the culture itself has a kind of ignorance as a result: whereas FPS or RTS comptitive communities can and will stand up for themselves and the games they love (i.e. FPS gamers rejecting new games and sticking with Quake 3), the fighting community seems to just take whatever comes their way as Divine Truth, and the way the culture as a whole acts seems more akin to a riot tearing its way through a city block rather than a civilized group of people. Something that has really irritated me of late, although it's not related to the topic at hand, is the wanton acceptance of whatever the new "official" fighting game is: the fighter community will never accept games that may be better, if they are not official, and Capcom has done a frankly awful job of delivering good fighting games lately. But, simply because it's Capcom and it's the newest, it's the gold standard. I'd love to see the FPS or RTS communities reactions if a major company tried to pull what Capcom did with UMVC3.

I'm sure a lot of this attitude has to do with the fact that fighting games on a whole are just a much more personal affair, and so everything is instantly more intense and passionate, be it acceptance or disapproval. As the article states, online fighting gaming has only recently become a thing, and as usual the real-life "riot group" of fighting gamers are quick to dismiss it as fake, unimportant. Given the up-close-and-personal "arcade" mentality of the scene, it's easy to understand why, as location has a huge role to play in fighting game supremacy. Whereas some other gaming communities see this at times, it's usually on a much "smaller" scale where it's country vs. country (i.e. Starcraft, which for a long time was "Korea vs. the world"), fighting games tend to create this automatically, with this locational rivalry appearing on scales as small as arcade vs. arcade down the street. Again, it's commendable in a way, but it really is prohibitive towards growth and I'm not really sure if anything can be done for it.