To play Devil’s Advocate here (keep in mind I prefer high damage games… my main these days is KI, and it just launched a character with a 100% combo):
There is an argument to be made that a high damage game can coddle new players (I think you see this in SG actually). To take two incredibly extreme and incredibly unlikely examples:
Pretend there is a game in which every hit takes a life bar ie the highest damage a game can have. In this case, I would posit that good players would still win; the top 100 would look roughly similar, etc. But there would be a massive amount of variance. Bad players do unpredictable shit. Good players do get hit by unpredictable shit. With no duration to learn, adapt, and download the other player, a great player’s advantage is significantly marginalized. This is one of the reasons that Grand Finales run best 3/5 at a minimum (usually). This is also the reason why good players will occasionally get knocked out of pools by an unknown.
Now pretend the opposite game… one in which there are no combos and each move does 1 damage. I’d venture a guess and say that a new player would almost literally never win a match (assuming no one dies from boredom). These would heavily favor a pro player. A shitty player would absolutely hit the pro with mashed jabs, jump attacks, random DPs, etc. A good player, however, would eventually pull ahead… probably by a huge margin.
Of course, high damage is hype while low-damage often isn’t (see my jab argument in our other post), so devs walk the line between the two.
But I would argue that lower damage heavily favors good players, and higher damage generally favors weaker players.
High damage does favor weaker players (which is a good thing), but it doesn’t coddle them (which is also a good thing). It causes a lot of them to quit playing in fact. The argument being made in this thread seems to be that those people who quit are actually all Daigos and Infiltrations, if only we would hold their hands and tuck them in at night. Because giving up when things get tough is the first sign of excellence, I guess.
In any competition, experienced competitors will beat beginners and they will do so without effort. I’m trying to figure out why you think this is a problem that should be fixed. The fact that a huge skill gap exists is literally the reason that the competition has value; nobody wants to see me and some other scrawny fuck have a boxing match, FFS. Making that gap smaller has only negative effects on the game.
People who would give up because they were frustrated CANNOT potentially get good enough to put up a fight against me. They are useless, and serve the sole function of lining Capcom’s wallet. If this “more players=more good players” meme amounted to anything, I would have played SF4 for more than a few months: competition was the only reason I played it in the first place, and dropped it when I noticed that it was easier to find a strong opponent even in totally dead games.
The high damage would be fine if it was in the right places. Zoning damage should be enough to kill people but the way its set up, zoning is that thing you do until you lose the game for doing it. As it is, weaker players with certain characters get a lot more opportunities than they should. but in all fairness, outside of ST, this has been mostly true for a lot of SFs.
I don’t disagree. I was just responding to the notion that “if I’m a good player I am going to win anyway so why make me do it 4 times” argument from Dime. The problem with that argument is in the first case (1 combo) there is actually less a chance the good player would win than in the second case (4 combos). Within reason, lower damage is also good because it removes variance in clutch moments (tournaments).
So a good fighter in theory would have just enough damage (whatever that imaginary number is) to make the game hype while removing tedium from winning and losing because no one wants to have to poke their opponent 100 times.
As for the rest of this conversation, I am generally in favor of fairly hostile mechanics to new players. I am fine with having to spend time in training learning a bnb. I am fine with games that blow up new players, etc. I am fine with it because it "weeds out the weak’ so to speak.
That said, I am concerned with the lack of players the genre has, and I am fine with unobtrusive mechanics to make it easier to enter the genre. Because while we might not be pushing out Infiltrations and Daigos… we are absolutely pushing out potentially decent players (the unwashed masses) that simply don’t want to put up with 200 games of “no-reward” losses (and who can blame them… the FGC is a special bunch) when they can get it much easier from other games like LoL, OW, and even SC. And the lack of new blood coming in absolutely could be a problem for the genre in the future. I mean… wasn’t Capcom on the verge of bankruptcy? That’s the titan in the genre, and even they were having a hard time making money… and sales reports for SFV were pretty fucking low.
I’m thinking jump-ins should have the counter property when they get countered, just like DPs. That way, there’s more of a deterrent. But then again, if they fix the input delay, it may not be necessary at all.
I mean…
It’s the only time I was really ever pissed watching Momochi win. He was one of my favorite players to watch in SF4 (Cody <3). This was also the first time I really ever wanted Fuudo to win.
Also, I was literally told through text today by a top Ryu player in the U.S. that he will no longer be taking 5 seriously. “Overwatch reminded me that games can be fun sometimes.” Lol brrt.
Hype also for that Tokido parrying moonsault until I thought about the fact that the character gets a full ground punish off of that for free and the execution requirement basically doesn’t exist, and it became less exciting
Mega not hype for the cheesy Ryu unblockable setups which got me longing for those AE era Akuma unblockables - hey at least those looked tricky
Also not hype for the jab x V Trigger timeout which gives you time to draw up a play over on the sideline and then come back and confirm into super
Stupendous doing well with Gief and getting some really sick anti jump SPD reads was hype, but unfortunately he didn’t make it further
You mean people that enjoy a broken netcode, 8f of input lag, and an extremely watered down combos system, are excited for an extra character in the same bad, unfinished game.