THIRD STRIKE, CVS2, MVC3
Nice, say if I can make it to one of this sessions are newbies(still learning) allow?
Beginners are allowed. I’ve played against a lot of strong players, even though I’m still technically a scrub compared to guys like Don, Lenin, Minh, Tenren, Mike Z, Rom and Sanchez. So long as you have the drive to get better, you’ll fit in fine and level up a lot.
Pros and Hos only.
If you’re willing to learn, we’re willing to teach.
Tomorrow we shall have a gathering anyone and everyone is invited. The more the merrier. Anyone new interested in joining us please text me at 310 344 9367.
Hope to see you tomorrow.
So how is SFxT doing these days? I have no idea what’s going on. Who are the 5-10 dominant characters right now?
Ryu, Ken, Raven, Rufus, Hugo, Rolento, Kazuya, and just about any other character with a decent jab, pressure game, and damage output. Ryu, Ken, and Raven, in particular, are considered S tier. So! There’s my reason not to give a fuck! =D
It’s a fun little game, but I’ve played more polished stuff. 50% of your wins shouldn’t be from timeouts. Damage scaling in a combo based game shouldn’t go down to 10-fucking-percent – that’s absolutely trivial and doesn’t encourage you play execution heavy characters who depend on multiple hits. I half understand what this game wants you to do other than whore out one general strategy that half the cast can barely counter. =P
My prediction is that half of the characters who are top tier will fall off, a new set of characters will rise up who can regulate the tech game and turn it into 50/50 situations (like Raven), and you’ll have a golden 2 or 4 who won’t lose to anyone like Yun and Chun in 3s. Everyone else without patching will be garbage, including a lot of the Tekken characters. Mechanic heavy games are won by characters who abuse the mechanics better than the rest. Scaling, walk/dash speeds, terrible normals, anti-airs, and pressure options cripple too many characters.
Ya just focus on 3S. I want you to get really good with Ibuki, Necro, Yun, and Urien. I need to know they’re match up better. Since you have the talent to do this just focus on those four characters. If you want:)
Tier rankings shouldn’t mean anything at this point when the game isn’t even a month old.
I’d play other games, but no one really plays KOF, 2i, or Garou anymore. KOF was cool, and I have no idea why in the world I’ve ignored CvS2 and Guilty Gear for so long. I still want to push for Skullgirls, but honestly, I probably won’t take it super serious unless I’m actively competing in it like I do with 3s and have people to train with. That’s the biggest reason why I haven’t touched KOF 13 since Alax was my training partner from day 1 up until SCR. D=
@ Naked_Snake: It’s not the tier rankings that bother me – 3s tiers are just as bad, frankly, but that’s never stopped me from playing who I want. It’s how most of the characters even function in this game and what’s known to net you wins consistently. Jabs shouldn’t be the most insane thing to deal with, block-string wise. Sure, you can Alpha Counter, but exchanging a stock of meter to get out of jab pressure is a dumb trade. 30 hit combos that use 2 meters via complex tag strings shouldn’t be trounced by single meter, single character combos that hardly hit 7 times from an air-to-air situation. Skill requirement isn’t what boggles my mind about this game (though it’s a factor), it’s the sheer fact that winning is based around who can abuse which broken system better, currently, which this game’s supposed top tier can do with virtually no thought. All fighting games have been like this, but SFxT is just unpolished to the degree that player skill has few implications on outcomes unless you lead into what the systems are forcing you to do. =P
For the new gen games AEV12 is a pretty balanced game. What about UMVC3? Is that balanced?
UMvC3 is a bit of a different beast since most of these Marvel games typically throw balance out the fucking window and just have a bunch of PEW PEW LAZURS all over the place. Really the game is fun, but there are definitely characters who dominate the game. Still, at least there is a good amount of varierty in tournaments. I see the following in streams: Magneto, Wesker, Zero, Nova, Hawkeye, Spencer, Doctor Doom, Doctor Strange, Sentinel, Wolverine, Frank West, Super Skrull, and a few other ones here and there.
Problem is (like with any other game) is that certain characters don’t stand a chance. Poor Phoenix Wright, Capcom decided to nerf a character who already wasn’t very popular in tournaments 
UMVC3 has a stronger emphasis on team composition than SFxT, so if you have a really well balanced team that covers a teams need in what it is designed for ( IE, Aggressive rush or defensive zoning ) you have a strong team. But like any game, there are always some characters or teams that have a much stronger, better, easier, whatever word you prefer, way to do the job better and easier.
I’m not saying anything about jab pressure, I’m saying tier ranking is dumb this early at the point. Cammy probably has the best Jab pressure I have seen so far in the game. And this game rewards your method of approach in how you want to play. If you like combo combo combo combo you can do a whole lotta damage, you just have to sacrifice something for it. What people aren’t realizing, however, the game is gonna come back to footsies so much more because how much better the simple seven hit combos are at dealing damage.
I liked doing 15 hits with Asuka at the start, but when I can do more damage with her by cutting the number in half, it became clear. I want the shorter combo strings for that better reward. However, I digress, because all I’m saying is that tier ranking this early is dumb. Nothing, nothing else beyond that.
I don’t disagree with you as far as the subject of tier rankings go, but there are clearly stronger characters than others in this game that can get away with a lot for doing nothing, more than most other games. Tiers change, so I’m not holding everything I’ve heard and experienced count as fact. Likewise with this game going back to footsies, that’s gonna happen for sure. However, that’s where things are mucky, because the game will effectively dissolve most of the varied play styles currently allowed to a dominant few who do better utilize all of the tools in the game – and the general flow (i.e. Guile) – without problems past intermediate play. Half of the cast isn’t really well designed for this kind of game, which shows in some normals being god awful and others being the second coming of Christ thanks to canceling properties. Some characters suffer in other areas due to the overarching design of the game (Xiaoyu, Yoshimitsu, Paul, Bison, etc) which is more of a sign that they weren’t really tested very well.
This game is nowhere near balanced despite all of the many things you can do because, again, really really stupid crap will either make what you want to do in the game extremely redundant, or make the characters you want to play less viable. Optimization will occur naturally for various reasons as you’ve mentioned with your Asuka, but this game is outright giving you reasons not to choose some characters. If that viability isn’t really there in what you want to do but can’t, there is no real player choice – just “the best” choice. Heck, super art selection in 3s is typically superfluous since there’s always one option that’s simply the best at all times or for character specific match ups. Marvel 2 had a cast as big as SFxT, but hardly 10 of those characters were even viable for various reasons.
I don’t want this to seem like I’m argumentative about the subject or towards you; I don’t HATE SFxT or even the fact that people are enjoying it like you are. For what it is, it’s neat – no lie. However, for a game that was given instant EVO access, but has the balance of a fighter from the 90’s, and tries everything in the book without getting the basics even close to right, it is, honestly, underwhelming and flawed to amateur degrees. If the title were something completely different with a cast of completely different characters, people would bash this game to hell and back and not even care to go back to it. Yet when you have games that do what they need to do correctly but don’t have that “traditional Capcom appeal” everyone is used to with SF with your Ryu’s and your Chun Li’s, it’s not given the benefit of the doubt. I’ve heard people say SFxT is the most complex fighter yet…even though Guilty Gear, Blazblue, P4A have more mechanics than I can list on one hand. They say that gems are “pushing the genre forward”…but gems don’t have major in-game implications like grooves or ism’s aside from static bonuses you can’t directly counter, aside from assist gems, which are insanely powerful for the wrong reasons. SFxT is an “okay” game, but why hasn’t 25 years of making fighting games (ignoring the few years Capcom didn’t make anything during the dry spell) helped the biggest fighting game developer in making fighters that get the formula down right…without the regression? Where is the common sense in half of the decision making just for simple little things? I don’t mean high level game balance. Just fairness without that artificial feeling their games have now. Some of the most ingenious systems have come from Capcom – I know they’re not stupid. Mike Z made SG fair and stable in under 4 years with a fraction of the budget, with only one primary programmer (himself). Namco has Tekken figured out to a tee, and Tekken is way more complicated compared to SF with a cast just as large. Something is wrong with this picture.
I’d love to believe that SFxT gives you the freedom to express yourself in whichever way you want, but I can’t be ignorant to bad game design when I see it (it’s my real-life job to fix bad game designs, after all). The game is regressive and breeds homogeneity in areas where it should allow player creativity, like it’s juggle system, bound, wall bounce, tags, chains, etc… The game could have gone with 3s’ 6 hit juggle limit to enforce the need for SSF4 levels of efficiency if that’s what it really wanted to be. However, this isn’t true because you can do much, much more with X amount of effort…just with arbitrary penalties that realistically make no sense. Why is the game saying “7 hit combos are ideal” when you can score 20 hit combos on average with nearly everyone? It wants to be too many things at the same time, and is failing to be good at one individual thing without lopsided repercussions. =P
Ugh I’m just cranky. I didn’t mean to sound hostile and unruly. =/
Nah, it’s neither one. I respond to things that I feel like saying something about, but it’ll never ever be meant as a way to be taken as “OH HE SAID WHAT? SCREW THAT I’M PUTTING HIM DOWN.” Never, I just say things for the sake of conversation most of the time, even if it’s a pretty wide open door statement that’s easily closed. Honestly, what you say is hitting home pretty well because I will say that I do agree with a lot of what you’re saying.
I think there’s one thing missing here on the mind of SFxT. SFxT is what TVC was for MVC3. It’s the beta system set up for Darkstalkers 4. And look how MVC3 came out. I will say that I am a huge, huge, huge supporter in a balance roster and system, and I will always argue in favor of balance over obvious tiers. Someone mentioned that even J. Wong said that MVC2 wasn’t even fully explored once the God Tier was established, and I’m inclined to agree. I like balance, and I like Tekken because I can see that balance and I really want to pick it up, but at the end of the day, as much fun as I have with all of the new fighters, they suffer from one thing. They do not grab me enough to keep coming back playing, sit down, and go “THIS GAME IS LEGIT, I WILL LEARN MORE,” but rather I now go “THIS GAME IS FUN, YEAH…” and I move on.
For as much as I want to get serious about fighting games, I’m getting more in the mind of setting them aside to sit down and play other games. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, that’s MMOs. World of Warcraft. Diablo 3 in May, Guild Wars 2 soonish, and the World of Warcraft new expansion later this year WITH the beta already started this week.
These things excite me more than fighters these days. I’m not interested in them the same way, and I know it’s not because I grew older and moved on. Skull Girls I will try out, Tekken Tag 2 I will try out. Everything else I’m buying because I support the scene, because even if games aren’t that… deep, I guess for a lack of a better word, or polished if you want, the scene will always need some support. I support, but complaints GETTING HEARD is another story.
I just get tired of the fact that there are too many fucking fighting games.
I been moving away from them too, probably because I don’t have enough OCD to stick with one game. (Unless that game is TF2 which is my crack)
For me I only enjoy the Street Fighter classics and mostly only on Fridays:
ST, Alpha 2, Alpha 3, 3S, and CVS2. SF4 I also consider a classic but unlike the games I previously mentioned it hardly breaks new ground. SF4 just uses the classic formula and redresses it. The Alpha series broke new ground. 3S of course. CVS2 also broke new ground by combining the two premiere Fighting game companies of the day and matched them well.
But now it’s just all the same stuff just with a flashier design. I mean it’s still fun but it just doesn’t hit the soul like the classics do. Forgive me if I offend but playing SFxT reminds me of Capcom Fighting Jam. A game where Capcom ran out of ideas and just cut and paste and repackaged everything into one fine mess. I should get that game.
Let’s bring on Virtua Fighter. We need to bring back an esoteric fighting game to the community.
Tonight we shall have a gathering. Anyone and everyone is invited. The more the merrier. Anyone new who is interested please text me at 310 344 9367. I’ll be going around to collect the E fee so please have it ready when I ask.
Hope to see y’all tonight.
GGs all. Good comp. I now have arthritis.
@ Karafail: Don and someone tried to play Makoto against me but were instantly destroyed by my Ibuki. It’s just not the same. I wept a single tear for you as I dominated everyone mercilessly without hesitation in your fond memory. It was like ebony without the ivory, ketchup without mustard, Chun-Li without SA2, or some off the wall pairing like that. =P