Balance at the sake of gameplay, always a losing strategy. Though I don’t consider balance too important as long as it’s not game breaking. And I actually find games with varied and skewed matchups interesting, since it makes generalists more viable and puts emphasis on metagaming.
tager vs nu was a cakewalk compared to tager vs carl.
This.
It’s ok for certain characters to be “low-tiered” for the sake of gameplay. Noone wants to see time outs or slowly paced matches - they are not particularly entertaining to nor fun to watch (30 minutes of Guile vs Guile anyone?). That’s why as a general rule of thumb, it’s best defensive characters are mid or lower tier compared to more aggressive characters who should be higher.
Obviously, you don’t want defensive characters to be so low they aren’t playable (would be better to just not have them in at all!), but it’s just something developers usually have in mind during the character creation process.
tl,dr: nothing wrong with 6-4 match-ups.
^ F that shit. Guile4lyfe.
To me, it’s more about maintaining options than providing balance. Eliminating options is a bad way of maintaining good balance.
I’d rather play a 7:3 match that allows me to use all my moves and tactics than a 6:4 that restricts me to a subset of them.
6-4 and 7-3 does not mean the same thing between games.
The numbers are relative to the overall balance of the game itself.
It’s a poor way of looking at balance.
It’s the same thing talking about characters being low tier vs high tier. Regardless of how balanced the game is as long as there are differences between the characters some characters will be slightly better and therefore a higher tier which incidentally puts some in the lower tier.
Balance is overrated anyway. The game is a lot more fun to me atleast when every character has something broken to abuse. As long as every character brings something unique and overpowered to them it’s fine to give them slightly better or worse normals and speed and or health, the broken aspect will keep people interested in playing them which is where SSF4 failed miserably. By not giving every character something to abuse you are left with characters with simply better or worse options.
I have no idea what this means…
And while many people might not like the idea of matchup scores, does anyone know of a better way to quantify balance? Even if you look at character variety in the top 16 at majors, those choices are driven largely by how well those characters do against the rest of the cast.
In any case, my point wasn’t about matchup scores, it was about how removing options in order to provide balance is a bad idea.
I also think you’re mistaken if you think that “SSFIV failed miserably”…
having some difficulty following this thread. Personally I think their can’t be any set standards to what balance is, and if their is one than its probably very ambiguous or loosely practice. I always felt the essense of fair or balance is an illusion that can never be made. That doesn’t stop people for trying which I do admire but at the same time pity.
All I want is to be able to pick a character and have a chance to win if I play well enough. The only time I get cranky is when a character has pretty much a 100% chance at winning if played anywhere near competently. And that doesn’t actually happen all that often.
I’m still of the mindset that, generally speaking, if you can’t figure out how to get around something you haven’t spent enough time thinking about it.
True dat!
I personally like choosing the least played with character in a game and use them as a starter (hipsters dont do mainstream lol), then beating the crap outta the so called “top Tier fighters”. The most fun I had doing this was beating the crap outta a bunch of dudes at my local arcade, playing KOF2002 using Chris, Shermie and May Lee. So balance makes no sense to me. Nothing is EVER fair… EVER. If you compete in anything then one guy is ALWAYS smarter, faster, better than another… that is life. I would think that a true warrior (bear with the drama) would WANT an insurmountable challenge…
He said it failed miserably in the context that it did not give every character something interesting or a feature that makes them worth playing, which is 100% true.
I wouldn’t even consider laying hands on 90% of the low tier characters simply because they have weaker options than the rest of the cast, yet no other features that make them interesting to me, whereas I could play a character with interesting features that ALSO has strong options.
You should try out a fighting game besides SSF4 some time.
This is very true. Too many people say things like “everybody should be high tier and top tier ideally” which doesn’t make any sense. Naming tiers and assigning matchup numbers is way too arbitrary. I think the best possible way to look at such a broad concept as balance is to just examine the character diversity of top placers at a game’s tournaments, once a metagame has developed.
I think some people who say things like “balance is the highest priority because I should be able to pick my favourite character and win” are missing this. A little bit of unbalance just makes the game more fun. If your favourite character is low-tier, it just makes it more awesome when you put in the time and do well with them. And if they are high-tier, then you got what you wanted in the first place. Now, it’s obviously bad if that character is low tier because the top-tiers can all infinite him off of easy setups, but if they are just low-tier because of some bad matchups, then that just makes it more interesting.
I love low tier whoring, but yeah I don’t mind bad match up. But I do find matches where one character can dominate another simply due to perks with little regards to the user ability to be disturbing. (example:BBCT Tager vs NU)
Tager Versus Nu is nothing compared to Carl versus Tager. That’s just so unfair.
Carl vs Tager in BBCT is like honestly a 9-1 matchup.
Balance is only important if the game doesn’t give the characters any sort of good subsystem outside of their own movesets. Guilty Gear is one of the more balanced games out there in part because there’s a system there that each character has access to that allows them to deal with BS in addition to their own unique movesets. Capcom games are usually short on subsystems so if a character’s moveset is trash or they have bad options, that pretty much makes them a bad character.
I think Third Strike and Guilty Gear are examples of relative balance that still keeps the game interesting. Once you get into 3s and actually LEARN the game, you realize that it’s a whole lot more balanced than most people (who usually don’t know shit about the game) say. And just about EVERY character in GG is competitive with the top tiers being among the most difficult characters to use, so they require time being spent in order to be effective.
Balance can be done right but Capcom is a notoriously poor example (Vampire Savior excepted, I don’t know WHAT they did with that game but they need to do it again!) of how to do it.
Back in the 90’s SNK could edit the Character’s hitboxes, speed, life while in game middle of the match via a dipswitch.
Capcom had to go to a rainbow colored menu to edit stats for their characters it was like this for awhile (even on Naomi Hardware).
I dunno how the dev stuff is like in the newer games though.
Now which one will be better for balancing a game and/or making a game?
Maybe relative balance is all we can really hope for
But then you might as well say “it failed at giving every character pink hair, 12 toes and a mullet that shoots fireballs”. Just because characters aren’t able to do things you want it doesn’t mean that everyone else going think they aren’t worth playing. SSFIV’s character representation at tourneys is very high compared to lets say MVC2 or 3S. That’s basically the only metric you need.
Also, I still have no idea what “relative balance” means. It sounds like people are just talking about player options available in any given match.
That’s mostly because the characters don’t really have any truly “interesting” options. Compare that so CvS2 or A3 where you had powerful A-groove or V-ism combos. Heck, compare to MvC3 where everyone has the ability to bust you up if you make a single mistake.