Bullshit, and an inversion of the No True Scotsman fallacy. Being new to a game does not preclude you from having decent execution. Execution is especially transferrable when starting out a new game.
How exactly do you propose to filter “new players” with "old players’? All I have to do is make a new account and play new players…oh wait.
More trival features that mislead people into failing to develop the actual skills and thought processes needed to be good at a game. Statistics are pointless in a genre where there is no one overarching strategy. You threw a hundred fireballs this week? Well, good for you! Your W/L/D is still in the shitter!
I think once someone develop the fine motor skillls for fighting games, it becomes transferable for other games.
Not only because you get the timing right…you create a algorithm to adapt the timing until it’s correct.
For example, i think the buffer for special moves in kof and sf series use to be quite different beasts. But people can go on testing to adapt to it.
Yeah, it’s not such a easy task for someone that never played a fighting game. A veteran can re-experience it by changing the controler used (from pad to arcade stick/ from arcade stick to keyboard/ from keyboard to hitbox/ etc) or by switching the hand used for directionals with the hand used for attacks. But they will be back to their 100% in 1-3 months at the worst. It’s not a impossible task at all. But a imput displayer with frames of each command in trainning mode can help a lot.
I think that both the commands and buffers of some games can be modified to make things easier. But in the other hand, the command format have a influence in how special moves are used.
A charge/mash character is suposed to be preparing more ahead of time. Special moves that starts with backwards or down-backwards are suposed to be easier to use from blockstun/proximity block. Commands that starts with foward obligates people to let go of the defense. 270° are suposed to be easier to use from empty jumps (like some command throws). Characters with double-down specials can’t use the crouch animation during walk for footsies so freely. It can’t be changed withouth affecting the archetypes themselfs.
Buffers have a even more delicate ballance. Make it memorize for too long and special moves will come out when you don’t want them, make it memorize commands for a short time and the movement have to be done too fast for begginers. The “shortcuts” in both older kofs and modern sf have the same problem of accidental triggers.
But about combos, i agree with @xiceman191. The high level competition will push the execution to it’s limit to maximize return to every time a hit is landed. If you make a window bigger in a combo, it just means the high level will prolong the combo further. The only way to cut it would be to make combo systems more rigid, what would take freedom away.
So i think the actual solution used in modern fgs - let people have their freedom, just put fail safes mechanics to control things- is the ideal. The producers don’t have to think about every combo possible in the system to balance them. Let people rock, just put a damange proration/ stun deterioration/ gravity to prevent infinites/touch of deaths.
Not exactly true. Most combo systems will be broken down and the practical stuff figured out and used eventually. All making them easier to do* for the most part is to make it so that more people will be able to use those BnBs practically, instead of having to spend more time just trying to pull them off.
** By making them easier, I’m assuming that the input buffer has been adjusted and certain chains and cancels made easier, instead of hit-stun being increased across the board (which is a terrible idea in the making).*
you’re being needlessly pedantic. people don’t pick up and play these games with any sort of deliberate actions. they pick them up and they button mash without any clue of what kinds of special moves their character will perform (and it really has nothing to do with their ‘cognitive abilities’, EVERYONE does this). they just know they want to do the special moves. I can think of many games that are more intuitive and accessible than fighting games.
Well if you think about it like martial arts, there MUST be some inherent skill needed to fight. Discipline, muscle memory, reflexes and so on. So just like being an asthmatic 4 feet tall and 90 pounds won’t land you in pro wrestling, neither will weak hands get you into the faster and more execution heavy fighters. I get the impression most fans like fighting games because they are hard anyway. lol They’d be taking losses if they made it any easier in my opinion.
To be honest, you don’t have to take the execution route in execution heavy games. There are characters in those games who have exceptional normal-footsies (i.e. Slayer in Xrd and Kokonoe in BBCP) I’ve gotten away with jacking people up with 5C ALL day before taking a two-digit combo. If you’re patient, you can really win without so much as knowing a super, let alone the specials. Or at least halve their health, from my experience anyhow. But that would get repetitive really quickly for some.
How is that bullshit? Execution comes from practice. Two friends that never played the game before and thus have absolutely no practice will both have the same execution level. Just how transferable is execution from playing a FPS or aRPG to a fighting game? Or did you just want to avoid the argument by claiming a fallacy?
Then don’t make it possible to make a multiple new accounts.
Considering that you’re “actual skill” involves solely mashing out combos and fishing for them the entire match I doubt how much skill that one gets with the current mission mode.
Maybe something closer to “Hey you’ve done 100 2 frame combos, here are more “2 frame combos” that you haven’t executed yet, or some “1 frame combos” to get them to stretch your potential.”
Or “Hey, you haven’t been blocking cross ups well, here are some training missions that pertain to that”. Mission>>Block 10 cross ups in a row.
“Mission unlocked, reverse attack the opponent between his attacks”.
“Mission unlocked, perform a combo with 7 unique moves”.
This really isn’t that hard to come up with applicable missions that get unlocked while people play the game. Maybe if you decided to put 2 seconds of thought into this you’d figure that out.
Not really possible with the current consoles considering how you can have multiple accounts on a system (I’ve 5 on my PS3 and 2 on my PS4). Heck, even on Steam you can do something like this.
A proper ELO implementation can possibly solve this, but it still doesn’t prevent anyone from starting back down at zero.
ELO or TrueSkill would probably really help newbies playing with newbies but the problem is that ELO is usually used for chess and widely popular free to play titles like Dota 2 or LoL.
I don’t know how helpful this system would be when a fighting game is past the initial sale online hype.
I mean check out Skullgirls or 3SOE online. If those games had ELO rating you’d probably wait half an hour for a match and you’d most likely meet a “smurf” because high skilled players don’t find enough games and feel forced to create one if they want to play.
Search times were a huge hassle for high skilled players back in Warcraft 3 already which used a similar system.
Marvel 3 is a prime example of people resetting there rank to nadda and utterly destroying poor new players. .I asked a guy once why he resett his and his reply was"I kept getting beat by better players" then asked him dont you want to fight stronger players" fighting game players are a weird crew . Ya need a laugh take some one who thinks there great at cod or any fps and watch um have a melt down. .on a fighting game
P.s im ramblin … new games need to tone down the subsystems layered on top of subsystems. 16 kinds of meters ticks me off more these days
matchmaking by elo would be ideal if you have the playerbase size. I bet it also encourages player retention - you’re much more likely to try again if you lost to another new guy in a close match a few times than if you got randomly matched against an experienced player who crushes you.
but yeah I’m pretty sure most fighting games do not have that level of playerbase to make it work. I’m kinda curious - how much bigger is Starcraft II’s active playerbase than the active playerbase of say SF4?
also you run into the problem that fighting game online play is generally not well regarded. I’m no expert on any other genre, but my perception is that online play has more legitimacy in genres like RTS, MOBA, and FPS.
I don’t know much about Xrd so I can’t comment on that but everyone knows 1.1 Kokonoe is Brokonoe. I just want more people to play these games and watching companies shoot themselves in the foot by turning away new players is sad. Honestly I don’t feel like we need to separate the experienced players from the newbies, just make it apparent that when you lost, it was to a lvl 71 Azrael and not a noob taking advantage of the fact that so many of Azrael’s moves are + on block. Also I don’t feel the day 1 player argument is valid, I’m not even talking about two guys sitting down with no idea about a fighting game, I’m talking about people that actually want to get better, but are blocked by a wall of inputs, that are so frustrating that they make them lose interest.
Don’t know about Starcraft since I do not play that game but I can speak on the behalf of the DotA/Dota 2 community since those 2 games are the ones I’ve “wasted” a big part of my life on.
In Dota 2 the playerbase is bigger by a multiple of hundreds-thousands.
Just compare Steam charts of Ultra Street Fighter IV and Dota 2.
Dota 2 peaks at 1 million players per day while USFIV can consider itself happy if it has 5000 players.
Even there you have relatively high waiting times if you’re on the top of the ELO system which gets somewhat mitigated by the search algorithm which starts to even out teams with a strong player by giving him comparatively weaker players on his team than there are on the opposing team, otherwise you’d stay in queue for hours since there’s so few extremely high ranked players.
That’s the only disadvantage of the system and it only affects a very small percentage of the playerbase. The low-high skilled spectrum of players has the best playing experience possible since they only play against and with people exactly around their skill level.
People still complain since it’s a team game and they feel like their teammates drag them down. That is only psychological self-defense though, they’re exactly where they belong. In a 1v1 game losing is a lot more impactful on the individual since there’s only 2 ways you can shift the blame: On yourself or on the game.
Online play in the genres you’ve mentioned is more well-regarded because the games have their foundation in online play and it is much better implemented since a lot more r&d went into their netcodes.
For RTS style games including DotA the strategy, teamwork (in the case of DotA) and decision-making mostly outweigh reaction time and since both parties usually have to fight with latency issues it’s mostly balanced.
LAN is still much more high regarded and teams that often get beaten online since they live in areas with crappy internet, can often beast online even with subpar strategies on the backs of their flawless execution and reactions.
If every fighter would come with the netcode of Skullgirls or Killer Instinct, you’d see much more respect for online play and online tournaments with decent payouts as well as sponsorship for that stuff.
I feel like the bulk of the community would still talk condescending about online warriors though, since fighting games are rooted deeply in the arcade culture which is by nature offline and driven by an older generation of players that still remembers the arcade days fondly.
I’m still kind of torn between the business model that got announced for SFV. On one hand I would’ve been really happy if they went Free 2 Play, since it would strengthen the community by a crapload because the playerbase would’ve risen to unkown heights, on the other hand I’m glad it is a standard 60$ retail model knowing how Japanese/Asian developers see the Free 2 Play market and how every single Asian F2P game milks its games with Pay 2 Win bullshit instead of focusing on making a great game, accessibility through F2P and milking the playerbase with hats.
If latter approach would fit into the heads of corporate Japan everyone would win.
Wait…something doesn’t make sense. What was the purpose of this thread again? I’m now getting the impression you weren’t serious about this topic and use it as way to vent another problem.
That’s not it at all. The issue most casual gamers have with fighters is the learning curve for gameplay in general and having no clear direction on how to learn the game. Not the execution requirements for performing combos and moves. Now ArcSys fighters are a step in the right direction when it comes to teaching players the basics for their fighters, especially Guilty Gear XRD. Now if fighters were to come with in depth tutorials that teaches basics like how to utilise the mechanics of the game, and fundamentals like zoning, spacing, whiff punishing etc, and character specific tutorials, and have you practice it. More people would feel like they’re actually learning how to play, instead of just practicing combos in training.
@BLSBeeListSoldiercontinue Going on-line, having no fundamentals which means no way of actually doing those combos on a active foe. Resorting to mashing, getting wrecked. Rinse and repeat till they quit. But were the game to give them a basic understanding of the game. They’d know what to look at and improve after a lost, where as without that understanding they get frustrated and blame the game, and kinda rightfully so. I.E USFIV
Player A with no understanding of the basics lost because his opponent kept using Ryu’s fireball. “Stupid game all people do is spam fireball. Fuck this!”
Player B with an understanding of the basics lost in the same manner “OK looks like I need to work on utilising the focus mechanic and picking my jumps better to get around those fireballs”
Player A has no understanding thus no idea what to improve on after a loss. Player B has an understanding thus knows what to work on after a lost. Thus he feels like he’s learning and getting better. That’s the key.
I do agree that game flow and “how to play” the game or a character escape newer players. While the original point the OP made is that inputs artificially restrict the general FGC population, I think that the shadowy monster behind the input issue (which I think can be very tricky for new players) is actually game flow and mentality for the gameplay.
ASW has some interesting ideas to tackle this and I think they’re getting closer to an ideal solution. BlazBlue gives a very cute tutorial mode but the shining star that BlazBlue has is that they have small sections in the tutorial regarding very generic ideas on how to play each character. I think this is super cool because these characters are all developed with a set of strengths and weaknesses and style of play in mind. Having the game share these ideas in very generic terms gives new players enough information to get an idea while leaving the details open-ended enough for them to build their own foundation using the character as their material.
GG Xrd has a very extensive mission mode that teaches TONS about the game and was surprisingly honest about the inherently aggressive nature of the game (although I think they could have sold that particular point a bit harder). The cool thing about the Xrd mission mode, as opposed to BlazBlue’s, is that instead of giving you basic ideas for every character as if you’re playing them, the mission mode gives you one or two specific gimmicks/tactics/strategies that every character uses and teaches you how to combat/avoid/defend against them. So smart, especially in a game where smoke and mirrors can seem very real to the inexperienced, or even moderately experienced, player.
Are inputs problematic? I think so. I think the amount of people you would save by simplifying inputs would just get swallowed up by general gameplay soon afterward. I think the notion of fighting games being interpreted as “combat” games instead of “strategy” games doesn’t help. I’ve tried teaching tons of newer players all different types of games and outside of the various mental blocks they’ve had (ADD, boringness, wanting to do combos immediately, mad at music/art/stages/buttons/characters, etc.) the common thread I’ve noticed is that the gameplay murders their willingness to learn and a decent part of that comes from the misinterpretation that fighting games are these “combat action” beat-em-ups without scrolling stages and 1UPs.
Is it really a misinterpretation or just a misguided interpretation? Isn’t the point of different characters to diversify what type of play you might choose? That’s where “mashers” come from right? Are mashers inherently wrong for mashers? If the game allows for mashing then it’s part of the game, is it not?
I don’t think “misinterpretation” really hurts either. All I used to do was block and poke until I found a weak point in someone’s commands, is that really extremely different from fighting a boss in Zelda? And no, dickwads, I’m not saying it’s the equivalent of fighting games. I’m saying my decision making skills had a foundation, whether it was correct or not it helped to a certain extent.
You can’t classify that small a difference in interpretation as a weak point in their learning ability, in my opinion. I’m not saying you’re completely wrong, I just think you could have said that different. Because personally I would never call a fighting game a strategy game, even if I had to choose between that and “beat-em-up”. It is combat, combat itself involves strategy. Try fighting a boss in Ninja Gaiden without some strategy and you’ll get killed pretty damn quick.
In any case, the execution barrier is not really a barrier. It’s a choice of development approach. They are serving their customers, who have already become accustomed to the way things are and want more from there on out. Not to say that fighting games are getting harder every generation, I’m saying that fighting games are catered to fighting games players, basically.
In other words, the system exists because people let the system exist without complaint, or even support it. It’s a case ingenuity versus accessibility.
I’m afraid you might have missed the point, or else I’m not quite sure what it is. You are talking about special moves, but one is already playing the actual game, has ‘accessed’ it if you will, long before he even knows what a special move is. Movement, normals, etc. are all much more important and completely intuitive.
Which is why children as little as five years old can play these games perfectly, and any ‘accessibility’ issues are merely hallucinated.