Jason Axelrod

If you were at NEC this weekend, or perhaps watching the 8WayRun video stream, you may have heard that FilthieRich from Namco was in attendance! I myself spent a few minutes talking without and briefly discussed the need for a relationship between the players the Namco itself. Well clearly our pleas haven't fallen on deaf ears and Namco has today, launched the Official Soulcalibur Facebook Page!

What does this mean? Well we can't really say at this point, but now we know Namco is reaching out to its players and they want to know what you think! We now have an official, central place, where we know Namco will be looking!

While you're at it... don't forget to also check out 8WayRun's Facebook Page as well.

You may already notice... 8WayRun.Com has been updated and completely overhauled! I think we can all agree that the upgrade to vBulletin4 a few months back was a mistake; it should never have been done and it did nothing but hurt this community. Thankfully, some new software has just entered it's beta stages, and it's already so polished that I'm taking the risk and upgrading our community to it.

With any new software, there are of course some changes you will have to get used to. The biggest change you will notice that when you click on a thread name, instead of it bringing you to the beginning of the thread, it will bring you to the most recent unread post (as far back as 28 days). It will take a bit to get used to this, but before you know it... you'll be browsing other forums and wondering why the feature is missing! There are other small changes that you will figure out in time.

The chatroom has been temporarily replaced with Mibbit IRC until Addonchat brings up support for XenForo. The Wiki is also relatively empty as I will be working for the next few days in converting our data to the new format. The Events RSVP system has also been completely overhauled... in which case, all existing event information and RSVPs has been lost. If you have an upcoming event, just make a new event thread, then send me a message and I will merge the old thread with your new one.

You may also notice that "premium" membership has been disabled. I'm working on ideas for the new premium membership system that will give higher incentives for people to join... things like physical goods and prizes, as well as true motivators. If you are a current premium membership and wish to get a refund for overpaid months, message me. Of course, I ask if you would instead kindly chalk it up as a donation for 8WayRun.Com and let it go.

For the past two months, I've been hounding our host, complaining that our server has seen a message performance decline, doing everything I can to see what they could do to tweak our settings and boost performance. But at this point, I've come to the conclusion that we've just been growing too much and now our current service plan can no longer support us.

So today I put in for a server upgrade... We'll be going from a 512mb plan to a 768mb plan; a full 50% memory boost. So the server may be down for a bit later today during the upgrade, but you probably won't notice because of how bad our server has been acting for the past few weeks...

Earlier today, at the Tokyo Game Show 2010, Katsuhiro Harada dropped his bombshell and announced Tekken Tag Tournament 2 for arcades (and consoles?). Really this came as no surprise as the Tekken community has been expecting a new Tag game between every 3 core titles. While very few people actually expected an announcement for Soulcalibur V, I can already see that many people here on 8WR are a bit "miffed" on the lack of news.

I have just spoken directly with Harada on Twitter about this very subject. He has asked me not to post anything from our conversation to the public, but pretty much it has come to that Namco still needs more proof that there is indeed interest for sales in Soulcalibur V. Basically what that means is that we must continue to spread the word about the Facebook Like Petition as much as possible. Only with the direct support and power of this community will Soulcalibur V truly be possible.

While it may be true that Soulcalibur IV has sold more copies on consoles than Tekken 6 (according to VGChartz); it can never be so simple. If you look at the entire franchise history, Tekken has sold over 40 million, while Soulcalibur has only sold a quarter of that. So while 3 new Tekken games have just been announced (T7, TT2, TvSF), we may have to wait a bit more before we find out any news on the Soulcalibur franchise. Just keep putting the word out about the Facebook Like Petition and 8WayRun!

*EDIT* Harada-san has informed me that VGChartz does not accurately reflect sales in Europe; and at this point Tekken 6 is rocking Soulcalibur IV's socks off. This certainly makes sense as Soulcalibur is most popular in the US.

Well for the past week, this website and several others have been ablaze, discussing the possibility of another installment in the Soulcalibur franchise. While Soulcalibur IV was hugely successful outside of Japan, the game was obviously designed to be the last in the series; especially since the word around the rumor mill is that Project Soul, the group responsible for SC3 and SC4 had been disbanded. Last week, Katsuhiro Harada, the producer of the Tekken franchise for Namco dropped the bomb that he would only look into another Soulcalibur game if it appeared to him that there was enough interest.

While some may have thought Harada was simply trying to boost his twitter following; this community banded together, with the help of other fighting game communities to show Harada that the interest still exists. In less than a week, 3,000 people signed the Facebook petition to prove to him that we still...

With the success of some community driven fighting games, it seems that Namco has realized that they too should try to be a bit more active amongst their respective fighting game communities. Since then Katsuhiro Harada, the producer for the Tekken and Soulcalibur series has been very active in talking with his fans. A few days ago, one of our local veterans, Enkindu, discovered a short mention of Soulcalibur on Harada-san's twitter. In short, he mentioned that Namco could possibly put work into a new Soulcalibur game if the interest was high enough.

Well since then, several members of these forums have been sending tweets to Harada, asking him for the game, showing him that there is indeed an interest in a sequel. Well as of one hour ago, it seems that Harada has informally responded to my tweet in which I requested a new Soulcalibur game, and that he involve the folks here at 8WayRun. I'm not sure if Namco even knew we existed, so I felt it worth mentioning. While not making...

As you can see, there has been some changes here at 8WR. We are now running the most current version of vBulletin4. The main reason for this upgrade was for security reasons, but with the upgrade comes a lot of changes, hopefully for the better. I really have no interest in going over them all, so I'm sure you all with figure them out in time.

As it stands, the upgrade isn't complete. Naturally I have a lot of styling work to do in order to get this website to look a bit more similar to our old styles. For now, I have released this new version as it stands so that the downtime on these forums would be minimal. I've been preparing for this upgrade for a few months now, so bugs should be few and far between; nevertheless, you should keep me informed of any issues you find.

Of course, we have also lost a few features in the upgrade. I have removed the arcade system; it just seems pointless and I don't see any reason to bring it back. As well, the online tournaments and ladder...