Connection filter worked for me also - it was solid. It would occasionally get borked up by some console peasant rocking a wireless connection to his router on the other side of his house, but things were otherwise pretty good.

It gave me a pretty good indication as to what matches against dudes in my region will be like on the onus they aren’t using wireless and I gotta say, it felt pretty cool. What was especially noticeable was playing around in training mode, playing a match, then dropping back into training mode and not having to re-adjust timings like you would with SFIV due to it’s delay network system.

I like that a lot. It makes the experience somewhat uniform and therefore pretty fun.

There’s no way in unholy fuckin’ hell anyone is playing this game in any legitimate sense across large distances, but perhaps playable quality matches potentially will reach a little further than SFIV ever could, which in turns opens things up for many people - particularly you freedom lovers and dudes in Europe.

Those of us trapped on penal colony island continents remain kinda screwed, though it’s possible Indonesia and Malaysia could become our new online mates too. For a while there I was convinced I had some pretty tidy connections to Japanese dudes in the last beta, but I did have a couple whiskeys combined with being mildly retarded most of the time anyway so who knows.

I definitely want the ability to browse matches - and I expect we’ll get it - if anything because I am genuinely curious about what is possible connection-wise to further out countries.