181

moves should be good

182

so with your previous post, you express that mechanics particularity comeback hinder competition because u personally don’t like it is a better argument? I can only wonder what your view of competition is. Because comebacks has been in fighters since they were made. Blockstune, chip, damage scale, resets, pushback, and guard breack. Fighter has had plethora of things that can be considered come back, its just with this generation it becomes more apparent as they come from new situations.

183

There’s a difference between building meter for punching somebody in the face and building meter for being punched in the face.

184

Don’t put words in my mouth. Also, what you’re saying pretty much agrees with the very argument I’m making.

As I said in my first post, the main problem is artificial comeback mechanics. I have no problems with comebacks at all, but I do when the game contradicts itself by its very build. I gave the example of a game with high damage output, with a character which takes advantage of said damage output by being able to kill an opponent quickly. You guess wrong twice? This character kills you. But let’s say you guess wrong once, and the second time, you either guess right or the opponent screws up whatever was supposed to end the match. Now, you adapt to their trick and mount your comeback, in turn making your faster, safer character guess right 3 - 4 times in order to win.

That’s patently different than me guessing right twice, taking a character down to 5% life, and the game essentially handing them a free 60% damage attack or boosting their damage output by double, so that they only have to do half of the work I just did to win. Although I overall like to watch SFIV and love what it’s done for the community, the mechanics contradict themselves. First of all, the damage scaling, intended to make combos less important, instead makes them more important because it takes greater execution and timing to do guaranteed damage. Likewise, characters who are low on life take less damage from every attack. That means that if I’m winning, I have to work harder.

185

hmmmmm…
while i agree with the thinking that a move should be good to serve the purpouse of why it was build, many of the hitboxes doesnt really make any sense, or are to damn good or are to damn bad :confused: , nothing in the middle

at least you dont build it for whiffing normals

186

I wouldn’t say they are getting worse, but simply taking a different route.

187

(not sure how I putted words in your mouth but I do appologize, I’ll try not to do so with this next post)

I would say your right but whose to say that your appraisal of the game is the correct way?( for what its worth its nothing more than theory to me) Your example hasn’t helped to alter my views as i think your flow chart is far to linear.
Also if game does contradicts its very nature than why try to make sense of it? Maybe i=I’m not capable of understanding.

In the end their are winners and losers to the game. If players wants to stray away from the game than that’s their dilemma to deal with. This is how I try to approach the situation, otherwise else I’ll think I’m just being a scrub.

188

Nobody’s to say my theories are correct except to see them used in practice and either succeed or fail. However, I do think that the current attempts that developers have made to try and make games more accessible and lower the bar of entry for newcomers are largely flawed. I see the current resurgence of fighting games as a bubble that will one day burst and burst hard unless things change, but again, I won’t be proven right or wrong until enough time has passed.

As for why to try and make sense of a game that contradicts itself: because if we don’t, the game will die. For the most part, the fighting game community really pulled together hard to try and hype Street Fighter IV because it was essentially the genre’s last chance to regain its popularity. Thus, the most prominent tournaments, held by the most diligent officials, containing the highest winning purses all poured their support into the game. However, saying that this proves the game is “good enough” is flawed, because it was basically Do or Die. We had to support SFIV because if we didn’t, Capcom would never support us. They’d go back to making Megaman Battle Network 232, or whatever the hell was making them money back in 2008.

But like I said, this is what defines a “bubble”. The current popularity fighters enjoy is because of the fresh blood that’s been infused, but unless you can find a way to keep both that fresh blood happy and validate the competitiveness of your games, then the fighting genre will go right back to the way it was in the mid 2000s.

189

I think that is interesting because I have always believed that the failure of the genre was due to the lack of easy access to human opponents. It never had anything to do with game design. Fighting games never stopped being fun. I can remember playing MUGEN during my lunch break at work with people who were 100% casual and we all had fun doing it. This was before SF4 was even announced.

Online play is only going to improve from now on so human opponents will always be available. If the genre does die again it will be a result of game design this time. I don’t play Marvel, but X-Factor does look like something that could actually accomplish this. The potential for fighting games to stop being fun seems very real to me now.

It’s important for the games to stop rewarding “bad play”.

Bad play = a play style that gives you a low probability of winning with consistency, random damage, a reliance on luck, a lack of consequences for bad decision making, etc…if that play style is going to be the entry point for new players its only going to lead to frustration for everyone involved.

190

The odd thing is that newer games have probably the most consistent players at the top of them. If a game actually did reward careless, stupid playstyles, then you’d see some random scrub winning majors. You’re likely to never see that in either Marvel of SSFIV. Honestly, the truth is that being wreckless, relying on luck, and doing silly things to win is only relevant at the lowest level. X-Factor activation in MVC3 are a problem, but only low level players really don’t know how to deal with it. I mean if we were to break it down and be real with ourselves, to call a game stupid would mean it falls apart at the highest level. They actually are very consistent games at high levels. The problem really is the player themselves. If you’re being randomed out, then it’s just a problem with your game period. If you’re losing to people who you deem lesser skilled, then there is something fundamentally wrong with your gameplay.

Again, older games just gave people illusions of skill levels. For me, in ST I thought I was actually good because I could always beat lower skilled players simply because I could execute better than them. But my strategy and mindgames have really big fundamental gaps in them. This is why I could not beat people who players a much higher level. This is what we really need to talk about when discussing if a game is becoming more “noobie” vs. more high level, this never really comes up. And it should definitely be brought to the discussion more often. Because truth be told, that is the real divide in skill.

191

Yes, but nobody makes money from MUGEN. In fact, Capcom doesn’t even make money from Super Turbo aside from merchandising, licensing and port sales. They don’t make money because you and your friends have fun playing the game they made twenty years ago, and unfortunately, for the fighting genre to be considered “healthy”, there needs to be new installments being created (which is not going to happen if there’s no money to make from it). It would be like claiming that baseball is healthy if the last pro season was 15 years ago.

I largely disagree. Before I start, though, let me say that I have a bias against execution-based high level play. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against execution as a whole, but to me there’s something wrong with your game if most “high level” play comes down to dropped combos or input overlap problems. Many people don’t agree with me, and I respect that opinion. It just means we like a different play type. I hate hearing the words “dropped the combo” during the last set of a Grand Finals.

That being said, I really don’t understand it when I watch Justin Wong, Marn, Arturo Sanchez, Santhrax, or any other consistent tourney-finisher complain about how “scrub-friendly”/“random” a game is when they still win 70% of the tournaments being held. I mean, if they failed to make top 8 for most of an entire tournament season, I’d see the complaint.

192

Playing Hyper Street Fighter Alpha really opened my eyes on the erosion of hit boxes and general effectiveness of normals. I mean, do Champion Edition Ryu’s standing mp while facing SFA3 Ryu, and have him do his. Champion Edition Ryu is ridiculously faster. Throws are better. Special moves are better.

Or take a look at Champion Edition Zangief. He’s pretty much the same as later Zangiefs, except with better range on his throws and more damage, of course. But he gets a few tools that he loses in SFA2 and beyond: a very fast lp (standing and crouching) and a very good crouching hk. In SFA2 you have to choose between a fast crouching hk or one with good reach.

As for comeback mechanics, those have been around since the original Art of Fighting. In Street Fighter 2 you took less damage as your lifebar went down. I’m not a fan of the more unsubtle comeback mechanics, but small stuff like the SF2 one I just mentioned are good.

In many Street Fighter games you gained meter faster from taking damage than by dealing it. I like this as a more subtle comeback mechanic. My opponent is already winning, which should be its own reward. This is especially true in games where you need meter as counters or otherwise to get out from under an overwhelmingly bad position. Some King of Fighters games take it further and give you meter when you block.

I think comeback mechanics are symptom of the ever-degrading damage level. In SF2 it didn’t take much work to come back from being at near death, while your opponent is at full life. With a lower damage scale, it takes several high-risk combos instead of a number of carefully-placed pokes to get back ahead. In Street Fighter 4, you’d almost never see anyone make that kind of a comeback without ultras.

The ease of landing a high damage combo is much higher now, but the rewards are less. In Super Street Fighter 2, if you get a jump in with Fei Long, you get a touch of death combo that pretty much wins you the match. This was the case with Ken in a few versions of SF2 too. However, your opponent had to be asleep at the wheel to let you land these combos. If you knew how to block cross-ups, Ken was almost never going to get his touch-of-death combo off. Most of the time, he had to settle for footsies and zoning like Ryu. If your opponent messes up a little, you can probably only get them with a crouching mk into a fireball (that they can block). Maybe 10% damage, if that.

In Third Strike, most characters can get maybe 10% damage off a badly-timed move with little recovery. A few like Chun-Li can get 40% damage off of almost any mistake, or even a lucky guess. This is far worse than Ken’s touch-of-death combos, because he was almost never able to land them. Stuff like Chun-Li’s 40% combo seem like the direction they took in SF4, with Ultras, and once again, not everyone can do it. This is also true in games like SFA3 where characters with devestating combos (or even 100% combos) that can punish tiny mistakes dominate the game. A 40%+ combo should only happen if your opponent messes up bad. This is what old-timers are talking about when they say Super Turbo’s super combos messed with the game in a bad way.

193

This is exactly what I’m talking about. In my opinion, supers/ultras/X-Factor/whatever are all double-edged swords. On the one hand, you get a flashier game with cinematic attacks you can market. (A constant complaint about games like Virtua Fighter and Soul Calibur was that they were boring to watch and, thus, hard to get non-competitors interested in.) On the other hand, you force the game mechanics to validate these moves by reducing the damage to everything else. Imagine if one good meterless guess earned Sagat a 70% combo. Now imagine that same Sagat WITH meter or X-Factor. How much damage would that do? 99%? 100%? 200%??! In turn, I think normals and specials get nerfed in damage and usefulness in order to make comeback mechanics have more “WOW”.

Just a theory, though. I could be totally wrong.

194

It’s flashier, but it’s kind of empty. I mean, in Super Street Fighter 2, if Fei Long got you in his rekka kens, it meant a ton of damage (35% without a jump-in?). In Street Fighter 4, it means like… 10% damage. To get that high damage, you need meter. But it’s easier to land the combos, so they happen over and over. They want it to be flashy, but it’s really just kind of dull.

195

Well it depends on what the game is. The only game I know that has random damage (and random hitbox surprisingly) is SamShoII.

196

I completely agree. Also, it seems to me that a lot of observers, who don’t play the game, have no idea what’s happening when they watch “flashy” games like Guilty Gear, Arcana Heart, Marvel, etc. It looks pretty as hell, and people who know the game are captivated, but it’s hard for me to get people to show any interest in those games because one 99 hit combo looks no different from the next to them.

197

99 hit combos on gg or ah? o_O :rofl:, i know that you are exaggerating, but when you give examples like that one you can give a bad impression of what you are trying to say

this games outside mvc3 usually dont have a lot of combos going because there is a lot of spacing game, usally people only look at the combos because they dont understand the spacing game that its taking place as you said though, but that its usually because they have the bad notion that the neutral game should only be played on the ground

and considering that the combos are the primary way to deal damage on this games its not surprising that the specials and normals alone dont do as much damage (without counting grabs of course) as old games like sf2

198

At the same time, without solid Anti airs and normals, whats the deterent to keep on jumping in for a combo? In HF a good AA delt 10-15%. A few of those and your toast. So players had to respect the AA’s of their opponent and not continuely jumpin to try and get a large combo.

In newer games a AA does 1-5% damage, compare that with the 40% damage combo that they’re fishing for and they’ll keep on jumping in because the the deterent against it sucks.

199

I don’t think there will ever be a time when jumping is as risky as it was in HF. Almost every major 2d fg franchise since ST has made jumping less risky in one way or another.

200

Wasn’t HF’s fireball game pretty much broken or something?

I wasn’t serious about fighters then, but I remember hearing that zoning was rucking fidiculous in that game.