Reversal isn’t a 50/50 and it isn’t free. It’s a high risk low reward option most useful for forcing an opponent to respect your defense when they’re doing frame traps a normal can’t handle.
You have rock paper scissors, well actually more than that but you get the idea.
Meaty is one option against an opponent.
Whiff baiting is another option.
Safe jumping yet another option.
You also have walk up like I’m going to meaty but block instead.
Oh, there is also shimmy.
That’s at least 5 options off the top of my head the attacker has vs someone waking up. That means the defender has to decide if he wants to roll the dice and have a reversal beat an attack, which is at the very least based on what I’ve jotted down, a 20% chance of winning rock paper scissors. This also isn’t random, but a thought process from anther human who may or may not be training you to do what they want on wake up.
It’s definitely not a free 50/50 since at least 4 other options allow the attacker to punish the person failing a reversal, which in this game leads to a CC for extended damage and usually a corner carry if you’re not already there as the defender. Not only that, but a dropped input during a reversal attempt against a meaty, the one option reversal is meant to beat, results in getting a decent punish. That’s a risk vs reward both the attacker and the defender are taking. The attacker takes the smaller risk of getting reversal for a larger reward of good damage vs a defender taking a larger risk to get a smaller reward of simply resetting to neutral.
What do you get for a “free 50/50” ?? A neutral reset, unless someone like Ryu had full meter and super canceled, in which case the attacker should have respected Ryu at that point since the meta changed the second Ryu had full meter.
For frame traps it’s a similar risk. An attacker could use a normal that is 4 frames of start up that’s +2 on block. That means a 2 frame window, which means no normal is going to beat that out. The attacker can do it again, and maybe train the defender to think the attacker is doing something mindless. The defender might see the third attempt and try to reversal to gain some room to breathe, but this time the attacker only did 1 attack and backed off, and the defender just whiffed their reversal. Again, this is all part of rock paper scissors, but in the case of SFV, it’s mostly just rock for the defender while the attacker has rock and paper and isn’t throwing out scissors.
Look at the risks vs reward and then think about why it doesn’t make sense to nerf something that was already risky. Then look at the change in balance from offense to defense and see how a defender now has one less option to play rock paper scissors with in a game that is very heavy on rock paper scissors. Instead of nerfing the over all game because 4 out of 22 characters had good reversal tools, they really should have given more people those same tools. SF2 had a cast of 16 characters and all but 1 of them had a meterless reversal. Not all reversals were equal, but with good timing and execution they at least worked to reset to neutral when needed. Perhaps if v.reversals actually worked and didn’t suck horrendous horse cock then having a reversal that always cost meter for the entire cast would be fine if none of the cast had meterless reversal drawn from the critical arts bar.