Execution Barrier: Why is this still here?

Current Fighting Games Fighting Game Discussion
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Sure. The numbers are standard ten key layout (the right number area of a keyboard) representing directions.
on 1P side 5 is neutral, 8 is jump, 1 is croutch block…and so forth.
So 236236 represents d,d/f,f,d,d/f,f basically your standard qcf qcf motion.
Its not unique to arcade sticks or anything, its a very common way to abbreviate directions.

Back to the Ultra attempts becoming EX DPs. In SF4 you have to complete the qcfqcf to the last f input properly.
Check in training mode if your input aren’t becoming 2,3,6,2,3+PPP,6 which is the common cause of Ultra attempts becoming EX DPs.

This is not a ‘input shortcuts’ case as you say.

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Play Super Turbo, no shortcuts, youll be able to do supers without getting dp’s after awhile. But thats because its a game the OP would hate the most since timing for srk’s are the tightest in that game. haha!

So this thread has gone form complaining about execution being too hard, to pointing out how a game that rewards bad executions leads to messed up/wrong moves!

And yea, 3rd strike has the super short cut where instead of a second quarter circle you can just press down toward and then the button for the super. Its the reason low forward and short short short/super is so dangerous.

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But grapplers, especially Capcom style ones are problematic in general when it comes to balance. The tendency is to have them “front-loaded”, in other words have all their big damage options already known (powerful command grabs and grab supers). So what happens is that you end up with a character that’s usually considered strong at the start of a game’s life, then slowly goes down as the meta develops.

That, and there are likely better ways to balance out a grab super other than giving it a hard to do motion.

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In SF2 you can win even without mashing shoryukens like in SF4!

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Correct, but if you remember we were specifically talking about SF. Which is why I said if you want to make that kind of change it would be best just make a new game.

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My mistake

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I don’t want to derail what you meant by that comment, because I know you meant well. But what about a niche is “confined” when it comes to fighters? Fighting game players go into the store knowing what they are looking for. And if they don’t know what they are looking at, then they’ll figure out very soon.

I’m not trying to disrespect either genre, but look at indie games. They know what they’re getting into, that’s the danger of being a niche, it’s a double-edged sword. You might be freakishly inventive but everyone thinks you’re a nutjob. And that happens in every genre, too bad.

I call that the Copernicus Complex. Basically, fighting game players (within the next hundred or so years) will realize the sun really doesn’t revolve around them and they will start playing these niche fighters more fervently.

And that’s not as bad as it sounds, since King of Fighters is already 20 years in (I don’t know the birthday, are we already at 21? Anyone?)

Case in point, even something “niche” can eventually be mainstream. In the age of information technology, that process is sped up by some number I’m not gonna calculate. Let’s just be those proud people who were with it since the beginning.

Rule of semantics, leave out relativity. I have never considered Galaga easy to play. You, sir, are a nutjob.

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I knew I should of rephrased my sentence a bit. Don’t worry, I ain’t getting EX DPs rather just regular DPs. All I was implying that it’s not a SF4 problem.

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I think those “semi-qcf” dps are really terrible for a slower paced game like SF and work for more faster paced games like marvel 3 imo. There really isnt that much pressure to execute a dp correctly in SF, a game where footsies and spacing are (pre)dominant . To have it be so lenient like that for new players is kinda dumb, cuz most of the time new players realize ps for them is just a anti air move, something that they can try to learn, by just real time repetition (I also wanna say a Zmotion drawing makes it easier for them to translate to the use of joysticks, but most of the time trying to do a Zmotion from the icon in capcom games always felt weird to me)

If your’e playing marvel 3, where a character like spider-man needs to pull off dps in the middle of his air combos, it can be kinda difficult, so that sort of leniency can be a fine situation both pro and new players may have no qualms with. I think someone in this thread mentioned how persona 4 has Qcfs for all its moves, and thats fine because that game is super fast paced with a emphasis on systems, however S.hold in ultimax made that a moot point.

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But Im talking about his problem with doing supers in sf4. so he needs to tighten his execution so he doesnt get srk’s instead.

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Like I said before, I really don’t have respect for the idea of a move being “broken if easily performed”. At some point people will learn it and start dominating. The poster-child for this is probably T.Hawk from turbo. Damdai learned his stuff and started pwning fools left and right. Same for roll-cancelling in CVS2. People didn’t think it was practical in RL matches, until the Japanese showed us how it’s done. With enough practice in training mode, all moves are easy to do. You’re not really balancing the game, just increasing the price of entry. For some players, the price is no longer worth paying. There are other competitive games out there competing for their attention. Maybe this is great for more elitist players, because it keeps the FGC smaller and more “exclusive”. Also good for players with weaker decision-making, because they get to lean on execution as a crutch to beat newbies. For people interested in fighting tough opponents, this artificially lowers the pool of competition.

For specific moves, I think it can be handled case-by-case. If you really need those few frames of performing the 360 to balance SPD, for example, just add those frames to the startup or something. This would also have the bonus of making people commit to their moves, which is a goal I support. None of this option-select nonsense. You make your read and perform your move with conviction, and if you guess wrong you get punished.

On “changing inputs means you change move properties”. I don’t see a problem with this. Move properties get changed all the time. This should be no different. Is it really that important for Ryu’s super to be double qcf? Is UMVC3 worse because you can super with qcf3P?

Chun Li seems to have survived despite changing from a qcf character to a charge character from game to game.

The problem with this attitude is that it turns off competitive players who are interested in playing characters, not games. Best example I can give is Tekken. Oh how many players have I tried to get into that franchise, only to have them quit within a week.

Sad fact is that many people want to play Mishima characters, but they are saddled with that EWGF barrier and the competitive players I try to teach quickly identify that there is no point to playing a Mishima if you cannot EWGF consistently. Since they have no interest in any of the other characters, they just drop Tekken completely. Granted, Tekken is a bit of a special case because they put the just-frames on the flagship characters. SF4 did a bit better in this regard because they made Viper the finicky character, not Ryu. Then again, I met at least one player who wanted to play Viper in UMVC3 (he was a Vanessa player in KoF) but quit because of frustration with her combos. Same for several people who wanted to play Zero. These were FG players (but not UMVC3 players) who would have done fine with Wesker and Sentinel, but those are not the characters that interested them.

This kind of talk is like me, a software developer of more than five years, telling a college freshman that C# is not hard because I picked it up in an afternoon. It took me years of work experience with C and C++ to get to the point where I could pick C# up in an afternoon.

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I think there’s something worth keeping in the neutral buffering game, where both players are standing midscreen and one of them is pumping multiple hcf motion or something and it’s obvious since their character is moving erratically in that position. It’s a fun little situation that really lets the players taunt each other with ideas of what they’re going to do next.

There’s probably some way to enforce a traditional 720 grapple super where a jump is pretty much required unless the move is hidden behind a traditionally bufferable state (wakeup, back/forward dash, being in hit stun, etc.) but doesn’t use the traditional 720 motion or other complicated motion. Couple minutes of thoughts have landed me on a (8)741 or a (8)963 motion. Still forces the player to jump unless the player hides those initial two inputs within one of the mentioned traditional input buffer windows. This would really be awkward to get used to and would probably require a bit more tweaking to capture all the restrictions of a 720, but I think it’s a good start.

The 720 and charge moves are the types of motions that traditionally have the best reasons behind their motions because they have the most important restrictions on the ability to perform a move tied to those motions at neutral (restricting movement options in preparation for those move). Vatista from UNIEL is another example, since she has both a 46 and 64 charge, as well as 28 and 82.

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I’m not a fan of the muscle memory aspect of fighters, which is why I prefer those without long combos. I don’t really mind the DP and circle movements myself, but considering most people trying fighters out will be on a gamepad, I think they are a bit counter-intuitive. I like the way BlazBlue does it, where you can actually do some special moves with just the D button + a direction, while still having regular moves too. It makes it more accessible, but the depth is still there.

However, I don’t know if the OP’s idea would actually make fighters accessible in the long run. I think it would make them more accessible to people who don’t do well with a game pad but aren’t willing to shell out any cash for a decent stick. That used to be me, and it took me many years to come around. But people who are just not willing to take the beating and put in the time won’t stick around, no matter how accessible they make special moves and combos.

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Or you could have a system like Skullgirls where you cannot jump out of 360 motions at all and tune the game around that.

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When I say making a move more difficult to perform to balance it. Here’s what I mean. Yes with practice a player can consistently perform the motion to perform SPDs and 720 supers. But even so that 360 input no matter how consistent you are with it, will take more time to perform than say a QCF. That lil extra time needed to perform the input due to it being a 360 motion balances it, because the opponent has a chance to do something about it or get out the way. Where as if a SPD was given say a DP or QCF motion it’d be broken as hell because you couldn’t get near a grappler because they can dish out a SPD too quickly.

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This is true. That is why if you were going to create a game where moves that were traditionally longer inputs were given shorter inputs you would change the startup time of the new move to adjust for the fact that the input is a lot simpler. For example, take T. Hawk’s U2. It’s a massive hcbx2+3k motion for an anti air, but it has 0+3 startup. Obviously, if the move was changed to something really simple like qcb+3k, that’d probably be too good because it’d be too fast for such a move. But if it was changed to qcb+3k and gained like 5 additional frames of startup to become 5+3, then it might be closer. Of course, the move wouldn’t functionally identically, because right now, you can hide that hcbx2 startup motion inside something else and effectively erase those startup input frames (important for various safe jump setups and other things). If you hid the inputs of the new version, you’d still have to deal with an additional 5 frames of startup, which is why you can’t just adjust numbers for a game that has easy inputs for moves that traditionally have longer ones; you’d have to design the game from the ground up with those new motions in mind.

That’s why I mentioned the 720 specifically. There’s plenty of ways to do standing 360s that don’t involve jumping without having to hide the buffer inside anything. It’s just kind of difficult and it’s great that Skullgirls has that prevention to ease players who aren’t used to doing it. Doing a standing 720 is massively harder, and they were probably designed with the intention of forcing players to jump or hiding the buffer in something else. That being said, it’s obviously possible to do a straight up 720 motion without jumping or buffering, but I want to believe that they weren’t intentionally balanced around people’s ability to do that (which is why players that can do it have an incredibly threatening option at their disposal). I think that’s an interesting design choice to have, a move that forces a player to do something else before they can do the 720, although the 720 motion itself may be excessive for that purpose.

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The thing is, the bolded points about are all aribitrary execution barriers, and more importantly, examples of tuning a move around an execution barrier.

Go play Skullgirls. Every command grab that Cerebella has, outside of her grab super, is a quarter circle forward. All of these do decent damage and can even lead to more, yet she’s hardly the best character, not even if you look at it from a 1v1 perspective.

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Chun plays very differently in every game actually. The properties of her moves (the ones that don’t axed) always shift. She probably changes more often than any SF character.

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@d3v I’ve played Skullgirls. I guess I’m thinking of Street Fighter and other similar fighters when I’m making my point. Fighters like Skullgirls and Marvel are designed differently. The speed, and movement options in those games make dealing with SPDs much easier so it’s OK for such moves to be made simple. Unlike in say SF where it’s not as fast and you don’t have as much freedom to move, making SPD, Darkness Illusions/Raging Demons etc much more dangerous, hence they can’t be as I shouldn’t say easy, but quick to perform. Hence a input that takes a lil longer than more simple inputs. @Hyper Inferno got the right idea with his T.Hawk example. To simplify such moves without altering its properties which may kill its effectiveness like increased start up. You’d have to redesign the game. And Skullgirl’s fighting system is different from SF and made with such stuff in mind, hence why it works IMO.

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Street Fighter has been redesigned a half-dozen times now, and Capcom has made plenty of other fighters to try stuff out on.