I went back to AE, and surprisingly I’m finding heeps of players on PC. Also agreeing that spamming to play Skull Girls in every thread is hurting the game, I was never interested in it and my outside opinion of it is that if the game is good enough people would come to it by themselves, If you need to force people to play a game something is wrong. No disrespect to the amount of work or the players affiliated with Skullgirls, it’s just not my cup of tea and no matter how many times I see “X is a pile of shit, play Skullgirls instead”, I’m not going to play it.
I don’t regret purchasing SFxT at all, because I saw and still do see the potential the game had/has for the future. At the base I do enjoy the game, the idea, the majority of the art design, and the idea of gems. The implementation of all of this was horrid. Gems could have been so much more that stat boosts and now crutches. The fighting could have been so much more than jab pressure and jumping. The stages could have been so much more than flashing lights and moving objects. I know it is hard for a developer to listen to a community, because the community is usually pretty divided on things and some ideas are just awful but this really is a case of Capcom needing to at least address people honestly and take in some feedback. You are going to start people only buying your game for the brand only rather than it being a good game and I would hope that is something a company would want to avoid.
It’s funny though because I know how pointless explaining this is, there isn’t a chance in hell Capcom is going to talk about any of this honestly or in a way that isn’t just “we did some testing and the majority of people like it and it’s not imbalanced and Dan popping up in trial mode to tell you to buy our stuff is not intrusive at all”. Capcom you had all the building blocks for the perfect game, but I think you lost a few pieces along the way.
You know what, fuck that I disagree. While I don’t condone these auto-block gems because they do destroy basically what a fighting game is fundamentally, they’re still a useful learning tool. However, this argument is moot because first, they’re not going to be used as such, and second, that wasn’t the intention anyway. Why I call bullshit on this is the same reason you find so many bad players, and ones that don’t improve–in the situation you just described, new players don’t even realize they’ve done anything wrong. For all you know, they threw out an unsafe attack all the while mashing something afterwards and are confused as fuck as to why you were able to counter attack. You don’t learn anything in this situation. At least auto-block gives you a definite cue when you SHOULD have been blocking. And your analogy with the child is the same reason why it doesn’t work (fuck, there’s been studies on this). A child will resent and begin to self-hate when a parent punishes them WITH NO REASON in the same way you see players balls to the wall freak out rage when you murder them and they don’t even know why.
We can argue this back and forth till the cows come home. I don’t really think there’s any point. My only arguments were that the auto-block gems could be a useful learning tool. I am not nor ever will condone them in competitive play.
The biggest danger to SFxT succeeding as a competitive fighter, regardless of how awful the mechanics are and how little skill is rewarded, are as follows:
Gems stay banned and gem system isn’t overhauled.
The tournament standard remains 2v2. Not gonna talk about this right now.
This game needs gems. Capcom has said on numerous occasions that the game is centered and balanced around gems and that they are a core system mechanic. People don’t realize how serious banning a core mechanic is.
In levels of importance, a fighting game has the following:
System/ Engine Mechanics
Core / Gameplay Mechanics
Characters
Moves
Options/Aesthetics that affect gameplay.
Options/ Aesthetics that do not affect gameplay directly.
People are under the assumption that gems are at number 5 on the list when that is just plain incorrect. In 3s under options you could remove parrying, blocking, make life regen, etc. This goes against the game itself. 3s was meant to have parrying, blocking, and lifebars were meant to go down over time not the other way around. It is generally fine to ban things in slots 5 and 6. Examples include stages with favorable environments to certain characters (like izuna dropping people off bridges in DOA) or just stages that are annoying (the clusterfuck spacefight stage in MVC3). Also that one MK9 stage where gravity is affected. Things in slot 1 are actually pretty difficult to ban/ alter. The only time I’ve seen it happen was in a joke tournament for 3s where the first person to get hit or block anything was declared the winner (instead of whoever won a required amount of rounds being declared the winner). Slot 2 is about a serious ban as you can get and shouldn’t be done without serious consideration.
Banning gems is like banning parrying in 3s. We are under the assumption here that Capcom made SFxT a competitive title. What the SFxT community is doing by banning gems is hindering itself. If the game was created to be competitive with gems enabled, then by banning gems you guys are making the game inherently less competitive. A true competitive title requires no banning of parts and only a few small rules (that affect how tournaments get run like :no duplicate characters in a team tourney, 2/3 for pool play, 3/5 for W/L/G Finals, matches set at 99 sec, etc). Obviously very few fighters fit that definition. No matter how much shit I give the SF4 series, bans in that game have never been necessary and were done only early in the game’s lifetime (like Seth and Gouken being banned) out of ignorance. With SFxT, gems were banned without regards to how they would affect gameplay but because they would take a long time to set up.
But what happens when Capcom pulls shit like this? Was the SFxT community right in banning gems? Did they really have to ban a core mechanic to make the game more competitive? These new assist gems show an obvious and frankly pointless power creep. Did Capcom really balance the game around gems yet decide to gradually add more powerful gems that made older ones obsolete? Is the version of SFxT the FGC is playing now the most balanced version of SFxT or will it be 3 weeks from now when Capcom releases gem pack 5: DLC edition (for the convenient price of $6.99)? Is the game becoming more competitively fit or less? In either case what is happening is unacceptable. There needs to be a lot fewer gems and no two gems should be directly comparable. Capcom is altering the competitive nature of this game but not out of observation of what has been happening in the SFxT scene. Remember, these gems are already on the disc. Capcom decided what these gems were going to do a LONG time ago. If I could overhaul the gem system, I would remove all but maybe 8-10 gems carefully selected and let the game develop and alter these gems (not add new ones) as necessary.
I have a hard time considering gems to be a “core mechanic”. At best they are simply a complement to the core mechanic. Core mechanics in this game would be things like tags, alpha counters, chains, and so on and so forth. The gems that affect defence, speed, offence and so on do not interfere directly with those game play systems in anyway. Even the auto-block gem doesn’t change the core mechanics. It changes how the game is played fundamentally, but the core mechanics still remain.
I’m 100% fine with gems being competitive as long as they aren’t assist gems. If I see that flashing purple flame in your gem loadout before it says “FIGHT!” I bail on the match or lobby.
Something I feel would be a good solution is that after you win so many matches in your online record, you can’t equip any assist gems anymore except for Expert input. This would solve the problem and let noobs use it and “learn” and use them while those who surpass say 50 wins online and actually know what they’re doing won’t be able to cheat. I mean lets face it, 95% of the assist gem users use it so they can up their online record. If you are really competitive you know that gems aren’t allowed anyway.
They have had this game for over a year. They know the ins and outs of the game and people like Seth Killian who actually understand the competitive scene have said time and time again the game is balanced around gems. What the SFxT community is doing is trying to be the Smash Community. Either your game is inherently competitive or it isn’t.
My point was that the system is not a core gameplay mechanic. It complements the main gameplay, but does not alter it so severely that it can be compared to banning parry in 3S as you mentioned. And with the auto-block gems, do you seriously think that shit is balanced or competitive in any way whatsoever?
Other gems are cute… Hey look Hugo can have more power… Hey look Vega can have more speed YAWN tell me how tournament players are going to have issues getting around this?
I agree Capcom planned the game around gems. It is a shame however, that Capcom totally stepped on it’s on wang in how the gems were implemented.
Again I say: Gems- good idea, bad execution.
BAN ASSIST GEMS IN TOURNAMENTS
(if your using assist gems you should be in the training room, not a tournament anyway)
Seriously just play kof 13 and persona when it drops. It kinda sucks that the hype over capcom games will never die with all the money involved in them even though they suck
Not a solution, that’s just tuesdays and thursday nights for me.
For the rest of us who do give a care about playing other games in addition to those though, it would be nice to see more discussion and not another post along the lines of “OMG y u play SFxT? Git on dat Skullgirlz!”. Shit is beaten to death now.
On topic; these new assist gems are absolute bollocks. As much as I appreciate SUPARNOVAX trying to play devil’s advocate and not jump the gun on day 2 with these new gems, it’s clear as day that they are an absolute atrocity.
The standard assist gems were more than good enough for all of japan to roll with that auto-tech trash, but now? Boy, it will be interesting to see some of the replays rolling out of there. First to jump loses? At least until the airblock gem gets here. :rolleyes:
This hits the nail right on the head for me. As soon as I saw that you can’t play SFxT online without gems, I immediately lost any desire to purchase the game. I live in Mississippi and the local scene here is pretty stagnant, so being able to practice online is very important to me. The way it is right now online SFxT is almost a different (and much worse imo) game completely from the offline, gems-banned version of the game that I might want to play. As far as I’m concerned they might as well have released the game without an online component at all. And now to see that they’ve put in exponentially more stupid versions of the already-retarded assist gems? Seriously Capcom? So glad I didn’t waste my money on this game.