Yeah I;m done with this discussion. Good luck yall.
@petran In Vsav push blocking and to a lesser extent Guard Cancels is the equalizer that keeps the OP characters like Sassy and Raptor in check and gives every character a fighting chance. Except Anakaris. I guess Capcom no like him because he’s the only one that can’t push block. The issue is though, the push block mechanic requires like serious practice to master. Not something the average player is gonna take time to master. So those guys get stomped by even average or scrubby Raptor, Sassy and Talbain players. Because they can’t push block so they get pressured for free all match. Something that’s so ensential to basic play that it actually balances OP characters shouldn’t be that difficult to utilise. Those kind of execution barriers are just dumb IMO.
Yea but people will always quit something because they think it’s hard, no matter how easy you actually make it. I don’t think that is a valid stance to lowering the execution barrier. That’s like arguing Michael Bay is good for movies because he lowers the barrier for entry.
People have different thresholds for what they are willing to do to perform basic actions in a game. The whole idea is to appeal to more people without negatively affecting the depth of the game. If the barrier for entry can be lowered while keeping the depth to the game intact, more people would play the game which would be good for everyone. Unfortunately, this is being conflated with dumbing-down the game, which I don’t think is something anyone is arguing for. The high execution requirements can still exist at high levels, they just wouldn’t be in the most basic mechanics, like doing a move that is 1/5 of your favorite characters arsenal of moves.
I see it as the opposite. Arguing against lowering the barrier for entry is like arguing that movies should be art films that are almost too deep to be understood by the common folk. It’s an elitist attitude that sounds very appealing within elitist groups, but to outsiders it makes them look like pretentious snobs. Although I don’t think either analogy accurately portrays the situation.
That’s still no reason to have moves that are difficult to do for the sake of it. Just Frame moves are hard for the sake of being hard. “Oh look, you can have this option if you hit a one frame link” that shit just make characters that are unplayable to the majority of dedicated players never mind the casual people.
The mana cost of MtG cards is more analogous to the frame data of FG moves. Startup, lag, active frames and the like. They are intrinsic characteristics of the cards themselves. If you want a CCG analogue to execution, look no further than the rarity. An arbitrary cost attached to every card in the game, locking some players out of playing the deck they want or even playing the game at all. Ancestral Recall is broken as a rare. It would still be broken as a mythic rare. The influence of a common Dig Through Time on competitive constructed is exactly the same as the influence of rare Dig Through Time.
Some players might run into issues with respect to card cost and availability at low levels of competition, and even some pros might run into it (some pros had to play a watered down version of Ascendancy Combo at the Pro Tour because dealers ran out of needed cards, just like even Sako drops a combo every now and then) but the idea of using this as a practical balancing tool is laughable.
The real difference here is that MtG has limited play to worry about. Rarity is an excellent tool for shaping draft and sealed play. In fighting games there is no analogue. In this case execution is like a reverse-daywalker. All of the drawbacks, none of the benefits.
Good at what? I don’t mind anyone getting good at controlling their character without too much effort. Makes no difference to me. When I play against someone else the only thing that matters is their current level of skill. The time and effort they expended to get to that point has literally nothing to do with me. It’s a non-issue.
At a competitive level, yes. At the intermediate and beginner level, games would more closely reflect high level play.
LOL, this is exactly what people used to say about T.Hawk’s throw loops in SSF2T.
If everybody played that game, it wouldn’t matter if it was shit or not. The FGC would more likely enter a 500-person kusoge tournament than play Vampire Savior by themselves. Fighting games are like office suites. Even if you could come up with a far superior option to excel, word and all the rest it wouldn’t matter because everyone else would still be writing their documents in xlsx and docx format, so you’d be forced to pick up MS Office too. And once you already have MS Office by necessity, there would be no point in using this theoretically superior alternative.
o_o
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What. The. Fuck.
Are you being intentionally obtuse? Or why do you latch onto two words at the start of a long post instead of actually addressing the actual argument I made rather than half a strawman. A strawman you then proceeded to evade by drawing one of the most extraneous comparisons possible when discussing any aspect of the actual gameplay of MTG outside of Limited deck construction.
Here, the actual analogy being drawn:
There. Address the actual argument, please.
Because Ukyo is right. Committing to a huge spell in M:TG is a lot like committing to a huge thing in FGs. If it works out, great, if it doesn’t you leave yourself open to getting blown out. I play Slayer in Guilty Gear. One of his biggest source of damage is from counter hits, the big pay off is using a move called Pilebunker. Now if it hits, especially as a counter hit, its beers and blowjobs all over the place. If that thing gets blocked though, I’m gonna get opened up a christmas present in the hands of a 6 year old.
Pilebunker is easy to do, the decision to use pilebunker is way harder. the question is, given the pay off from landing it, should this move be physically harder to execute? If so what advantage does it actually give it over balancing the move through its frame data?
On a similar vein, look at I-No from guilty gear. One of her most important tools is a move called chemical love. This move was previously done by doing 632146 or HFB,F. You needed to do this consistently for combos, pressure, and what have you. In the newest guilty gear though, the move was changed to 214 or QCB. That small change opened up the character for a significantly larger amount of players to use her. Was this a bad change?
That’s kind of the thing some of you guys aren’t getting. Making the regular shit a character is supposed to do hard for the sake of hard just limits the amount of people who are able to use those characters. Just because doing a move is easy doesn’t mean the character is easy to play. Painwheel in SkullGirls has all sorts of flight cancels and frame traps and, to be honest, unless you put in the time to play with that character, you aren’t really going to do it. She is in no way, shape or form a character that you just pick up and play. You need to a lot of training mode time, everything is technically easy to do, still an execution heavy character.
Let’s forget SG for a minute and look at Dhalsim. Dhalsim doesn’t really have anything that’s too hard to do (for that double HCF in some games). Would Dhalsim be a better character if his command normals were done like dragon punches? For some of the motions that you guys wanna keep around, that’s basically what you are asking.
As I’ve said before, piledrivers are different. Some games work well with not having and others don’t. 720s definitely put in restrictions of when they can be used. Everything else though, is worth discussing.
I’m not arguing making things hard for the sake of being part of some superior master race.
I’m just bothered by people in this thread claiming that the input of a move is an invalid method of balancing, or a real cost ingame (the only place where it reliably gets erased in a binary “Can’t do, can do” fashion is in a combo a bit after a confirm), that is it somehow invalid and does not work (when it does actually work, admittedly outside of combo applications because even really hard combos get ground down and done).
To try to summarize where I’m coming from:
- I think execution is a valid balancing tool, but shouldn’t be overused. It has interesting potential because the cost a difficult input has in different situations is different, which is a rare property in other balancing methods.
- A small number of effects are too broken to be allowed, period. Most others can be balanced by finding an appropriate cost.
- I’d like to see more games that are less execution heavy, however…
- Most attempts to make traditional SF-skeleton fighting games easier actually just make the game worse and less enjoyable, either losing characteristic gameplay or making it so the game doesn’t obey you anymore.
- => Traditional games should more or less stay as is, but more combo-light games would be welcome.
- More Smash Bros, Nidhogg, Divekick style projects, where the game is built around the easier input system from the get go and to fit to it instead of taking a skeleton built for hard inputs and cramming ease into it by any means necessary. These in my experience feel good, coherent and whole in a way “easified” traditional fighters just never do. I want good games, not crap.
He wasn’t, you are more or less correct though. A couple corrections though: I was not making an analogy of committing to a huge spell - 3 mana isn’t very, and 4 is borderline. Furthermore, the cost was not the point. I defined it only to avoid the case of 1-mana things where the cost just doesn’t matter that much and doing it as a sorcery doesn’t leave you especially open to anything. The sorcery vs. instant speed thing was the point, as a comparison between having a move available at the drop of a hat vs. something you have to commit to just doing in the first place. With the complex input, you have to ready yourself mentally, focus on doing it. With a normal move style input, you could just see something happen, press a button and do it. Much more attention freed to paying attention to the opponent’s jumpin attempts for example.
This is where the mana cost ~= safety analogy comes into play: If the unsafe thing is trivial to do like a single button press, you end up doing it in bad spots less often. If it needs commitment, in practice a read in a do or not situation or the above kind of mental focus away from something else you’d want to pay attention to ideally in a more neutral one, you have to judge if the risk is worth it. Same kind of thing as having that big, expensive card that’d be disastrous if it went badly in hand in MTG. If the card is a sorcery, you have to judge whether it’s worth committing to or if you want to keep your mana open for casting the counterspell or piece of removal you have in hand. If it’s an instant, you can just hang back, enjoy the sights. React if it seems appropriate, or play your big spell if not or if the opponent’s actions warrant it.
I’m not gonna touch the MTG stuff because: 1) its hard to find proper analogues, and 2) most people won’t get it.
These two points though, need some context because you aren’t quite seeing what has happened in games. A lot of the top tier characters have been top tier for things other than execution. I don’t think there’s been a top tier in recent history who was top tier because their moves were hard to do. MvC2 Storm, SF4 Sagat/Ryu/Akuma, then you had Nu 13 in BBCT, Eddie’s moves in GG are technically easy to do ( hard execution but no extraneous motions for his main things), Chun-Li is top in 3S despite having the easiest execution of that entire game, O. Sagat in ST, Vega in ST has beyond baby cakes execution, Alpha 2 Chun is top tier and her CC is literally mashing hard kick, #R Sol was hilarious (although dust looping was kind of hard)…
Aside from EGWF, I can’t think of one move that’s top tier because its hard to do. Similarly, barring some hard to do combos (like Genei-jin combos, Makoto double fukiage, CvS2 a-groove combos) there hasn’t really been a case of a character just tops because its motion for one move is 3216594731698797. I’m not saying the characters weren’t hard to play. Nobody is looking at Arakune and saying the dude is cake to control; but all his stuff was technically easy to do. The closest something came to this was maybe C.Viper with her feints during SSF4. Even then Cammy, Guile, Fei had easier execution which mean that the Viper players were just kind of shat on for the lols. AE Yun shat on everybody even more. Hell, Kazunoko is still shitting on people with him and none of his moves are hard to perform.
The one mysterious top tier had a lot of execution attached to him is MvC2 Sentinel; and he had a lot of it for actual unintentional reasons. When they brought him back for MvC3 though, they just made his fast fly a regular part of engaging flight which meant more people could play him.
So if we honesty look at it, making moves hard to do has never been part of the balancing act. Developers never looked at SF4 Akuma’s demon flip and go “we should really make this a 360 move considering all it does for Akuma players” or anything else. If we are going to really take that look at moves, 3 frame DPs shouldn’t have an easy motion; maybe that HCBF motion in SF4 since DPs do a lot in that game.
Execution needs be there for balance most of the time? Great. Ask Capcom to change the motions for most of the roster, too many of them dudes are cheating.
If execution was used for balancing, then A2 Rose’s cr.mp and A2 Chun’s cr.mk should have special move inputs, same with 3S Chun’s b.hp (remember the twins’ palm strikes in AE? 3S Chun b.hp is arguably a better move than those).
Exactly. Thanks for proving my point.
People rather play a shitty kusoge game just because it’s more popular. UMvC3 falls into this category.
After all that is what “kusoge” games are ― “shit games” or “bad games”.
Kusoru (Final Round XV UMvC3 Champion) specifically plays only kusoge games. So since he plays UMvC3, he’s considers it to be kusoge.
To be honest, I don’t think all kusoge games are bad, just certain ones. Just like how there are both good and bad fighting games, there are also good and bad kusoge fighting games.
HnK also falls under this category but subjectively speaking, I think HnK is a great kusoge game, even though HnK is far more broken than UMvC3.
Even though UMvC3 and HnK both fall under the kusoge category, do you think the FGC would play HnK over UMvC3? Of course not.
The difference between UMvC3 and HnK is that one is designed towards scrubs and one is designed towards hardcore players.
Look at the difference between the two games. Look that the amount of effort needed to kill a character:
@ 3:45
If it only takes 5 seconds to kill the last character on your opponent’s team because of some increased damage mechanic, then you know that’s bad scrub game design.
The amount of effort needed to kill Flocker’s last character is so minimal. Compare that to Justin’s Cyclops OCV vs. Yipes in MvC2. The difference is night and day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2i2w9rAaV90
[VS]
(first match)
The amount of effort and execution needed to kill a character in HnK is incredible. Players actually have to put in a decent amount of work to win.
This is another perfect example of “Execution wins games”. The strategy itself is execution. To not drop anything. To not make a SINGLE mistake. To make NO mistakes is the strategy.
If your execution is perfect (such as the Mamiya player), then it is literally IMPOSSIBLE for the Mamiya player to lose.
The Mamiya player has already won before the second round starts.
Perfect execution means that you will never lose.
"He wins his battles by making no mistakes. Making no mistakes is what establishes the certainty of victory, for it means conquering an enemy that is already defeated. Hence the skillful fighter puts himself into a position which makes defeat impossible, and does not miss the moment for defeating the enemy.”
― Sun Tzu, “The Art of War” (Chapter 4: Tactical Dispositions)
*“What the ancients called a clever fighter is one who not only wins, but excels in winning with ease.”
― Sun Tzu, “The Art of War” (Chapter 4: Tactical Dispositions)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0ugAG8uBOk
What should be the appropiate motion for Vanilla Akuma’s demon flip? Mind you that this things leads to an inordinate amount of mix ups that are mostly safe. Similarly what should be the correct motion for his light tatsu that allows him to combo into a hard knockdown on most of the cast?
Both of those moves are way better than Zangief’s Ultra, but the hard to land ultra with little utility has to suck a dick and be a 720.
There was a discussion few months ago regarding Vampire Savior.
Zabel if used correctly should be top tier above everyone else. Yet there are very few players that can match those high execution requirements.
I like how you skipped the part with Dhalsim. Let’s look at Zabel though:
http://wiki.mizuumi.net/w/Vampire_Savior/Zabel
Are any of his moves actually hard to do? I don’t see any weird motions in there. Easy motions doesn’t mean easy gameplay. Interestingly enough you kind of disregarded the part with Eddie too whom doesn’t have the hard to do motions but is still a technically hard character to play. Bringing down the motions to a manageable level won’t get rid of all the other things that make characters hard to play.
MvC3 Morrigan doesn’t have a hard motion on her but is filled with a bunch of shit that is hard to do. Some people seem to think that making moves easier to do will suddenly turn scrubs into Ogaway. It won’t. all it’ll do is cut down some of the parts that are frustrating.
Either way, I expect answers on the Vanilla Akuma question from the rest of you dudes too. Since execution is a balancing factor, what should be the right motion for those moves?
This whole post is just you asserting that HnK is a better game than UMvC3 because of its more difficult execution requirements.
And your Marvel example is flawed. Justin’s opponents made mistakes, which is exactly the thing you’re advocating against with your Sun Tzu quotes. For Christ’s sake, the first example in the video is Justin’s opponent getting punished for whiffing a super. By your own admission, his opponent lost because of poor execution.
Personally speaking, I wouldn’t change a damn thing. I would use whatever motion Capcom decides to give Akuma.
I don’t even care if Capcom added pretzel motions, KOF motions, or VSAV command supers. Whatever command is given ― arbitrary or not ― I will adapt and learn to do them on command.
Akuma’s commands seem fine to me the way they are.
Yes, that’s EXACTLY what I’m saying. Objectively speaking, HnK IS the better game because it has higher execution requirements.
What do you think is objectively better? What do you think is objectively of higher quality? Certainly it is not a game catered towards new players.
They are the games catered towards the hardcore. The ones who don’t care about strict execution or difficult motions ― arbitrary or not, because they have reached such a level where even the most difficult of things are easy for them.
The games that demand the most out of you ― mentally and physically.
The amount of people who can play MvC2 or HnK at the highest level is rather small. Not everybody can play the game to such a level of speed and accuracy.
The point I was trying to make with this example is how scrub mechanics like X-Factor lowers the quality of the game. HnK doesn’t have scrub mechanics. Thus it takes more skill to win in HnK, compared to UMvC3.
Winning in UMvC3 requires less skill to win due to Lv.3 X-Factor’s damage increase. More damage = less work.
As far as execution and making mistakes goes…
I’m tired of people telling me that when it comes to winning at fighting games that strategy is the most important part. They always tell me that strategy wins games or that strategy > execution. Objectively speaking, this simply ISN’T TRUE.
I don’t care what game it is. This applies to ANY fighting game The key to winning in fighting games is execution, NOT strategy ― period ― no if, and, or buts. This CANNOT be argued against or denied.
I hope people stop spouting such nonsense.
Spoiler
SF4 & UMvC3
Spoiler
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDjuba9BEl0&index=25&list=PL7ibXFRYYrqZVyXjJVqM-kllRoGbdx4oC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0aRLiG5LXU
MvC2
Spoiler
(first match)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWUpmrTuKKE&list=PL7ibXFRYYrqZVyXjJVqM-kllRoGbdx4oC&index=3
SF3: 3S
Spoiler
ST
CvS2
SFA3
VSAV
VF5:FS
Spoiler
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzt9i84vj3E&index=24&list=PL7ibXFRYYrqZVyXjJVqM-kllRoGbdx4oC
Fate/unlimited codes
KOF "98
GAROU: MOTW
I don’t mean to shock you, but there are people who are enthusiastic about good films, they’re not just watching boring movies to make you feel bad. They enjoy it. Nobody is arguing against lowering the entry barrier, just saying there might be ways to do it without also lowering the skill ceiling. Why does lowering the entry barrier have to involve making the game worse? There are plenty of films that reach a wide audience and are still good. You’re essentially saying don’t be passionate about anything, because an idiot will eventually think you’re a snob.
Nobody is addressing the fact that fighting games are just not that interesting without execution difficulty. There would just be no reason not to switch to a better genre if fighting games became RPS+spacing.
Regarding making all fighting games like Smash, keep in mind that the only Smash game fit for competition is also one of the most difficult fighting games execution wise.
are you kidding dude? you clearly don’t understand what objective means when you think your opinion that quality games cater to a niche group, or “hardcore” players as you put it, is some statement of fact.
Do I need to arbitrarily use bold to explain that your opinions are not facts?
Hmm… I suppose your right. Quality of a game cannot be determined objectively in terms of difficulty.
My other point about objectivity and execution winning games still stands though.