I guess I’m just getting old. I miss the days when I could play a game, take my time learning it, NOT have to grind in training mode and play shitty laggy online play to master bread-and-butter strategies within 2 weeks of release, or else get my ass handed to me by every single person, even in casuals. Everything is so fucking rushed these days. I loved the evolution of MvC2, where over the first 3 YEARS (not months) of release, the game constantly evolved due to new discoveries in the game’s engine and gameplay. And then the game just settled into the high level play that it ended up being when it was retired for MvC3. Imagine if instead, MvC2 was constantly patched; no AHVB, it’s broken! Why is Magneto so fast, why does Tron’s assist do so much damage? It would have completely changed the game and in the long run, made it worse IMO.
I did drive to TGA to play games, but look at the games: Third Strike, MvC2, CvS2, ST. Games that had been out for quite a long time and therefore were able to be mastered at some level. When you update a game every year, and in MvC3’s case every 9 months, you significantly cheapen/weaken the quality of the competitive nature of the game. No, I’m not Justin Wong, Floe, Daigo, or anyone who wants to play these games on a full-time basis, that’s true; but I shouldn’t be forced to RUSH my experience with a game in order to get good at it, just because there might be a new version of the game coming at any moment.
You are right, Capcom does have a history of doing this. But SFII is an exception; they were trying to refine the gameplay of the ORIGINAL competitive fighting game into something they felt was the epitome of the genre. And I feel they did do that with ST (and then subsequently, they never again made another entry into the SFII series). With SF3, Darkstalkers etc. - you’re absolutely correct. But you also correctly state that it was arcade owners who took the hit previously; now the common gamer is the one forced to shell out another $40 for UMvC3 not even a year after MvC3’s release. They feel like they paid $60 for an 8-month beta and now have to pay another $40 to get the “real” version of the game; if they don’t, they’re stuck with a version of MvC3 that will no longer be played in tournaments or online, which makes the game disc a nice $60 coaster. I can understand why that’s frustrating. It annoys me that I even put any time into learning the game when it’s all going to change in November, and if I hadn’t made money off the videos I’d made of MvC3 I’d probably be a lot more livid right now for time wasted.
But that’s just me. I’m not into it like I used to be. Probably because I’m way more involved into the bigger picture now that I was when I was just part of the SF community.
Just stop the excuses. It really makes you all sound like scrubs. Sorry…=\