That low tier knowledge is strong.
Depends on what you allow. Super Turbo also happens to be the only example of a Capcom fighting game where a character was banned from tournament play because he was simply, obviously too good, and every tournament was going to turn into Akuma versus Akuma if he wasn’t banned.
Even after you take Akuma out, the presence of O. Sagat alone prevents at least half the cast from being played. The game at a high level is then reduced to him, and characters that can fight him as well as each other. <shameless plug>This will all be fixed, of course, in HD Remix…</shameless plug>
Yeah, I wasn’t a believer in Strider/Doom being unstoppable, and I’m still not. It’s good, don’t get me wrong, but back in those days jaded speaks of on alt.games.sf2 people were describing it as though it absolutely could not be beaten, and that Strider/Cable/Doom was going to be the best team in the game. You tell me who was right, long term. 
yea ST isn’t that balanced. Anyone see choi vs tokido iirc from last years EVO? wtf was up with that claw. Same side 50\50 = bullshit, it looked damn near impossible to tell. Not to mention that the 50\50 hi\hi same side on hit was knockdown and the move could be done again. Is that even playing SF anymore? its pattern fighter @ that point…
lol @ strider\cable\doom being god of marvel. If you knew anything about team chemistry, 2 characters that use bar don’t exactly work well together. I should know since I ran that team for a good year straight. The squad itself can be pretty beastly though if strider can get a counter call AA on the assist. 100% off one bar iirc which is one hell of a trade off and you can win the game by gaining the assist advantage once you take out their AA.
Marvels early years were pretty damn funny. Strider\doom\capcom used to wreck shop cleannnnnnn. Alex valle ftw?
if you’re asking for balance, wouldn’t VF5 be a better example? probably even something like gear is a lot more balanced than marvel is.
But here’s a basic rundown of MvC2 history:
Very beginning… people still working out the kinks, and various teams and strategies came out. Iceman, Cable, Strider/Doom, and various other things came out of the woodwork as being very annoying. The fact that Iceman couldn’t be chipped by most characters in the game scared some people for a while, although by the time it came to tournament play by the summer of 2000 people had figured it out.
Duc Do started out with Omega Red/Cable/Cyclops and eventually replaced Omega Red with Spiral, both of them based around having a first character that can fill the meter in order to enable Cable to have plenty of meter to shoot people to death with.
On both the east and west coast, Doom/BH became popular early for easy space control and chip damage. On the west coast, throwing down BH and then super jumping and throwing photon charges was the vogue; on the east coast, simply normal jumping back with his fierce “butter beam” and repeatedly calling BH was a simple and nasty trap.
Strider/Doom became popular on both coasts, with Alex Valle being the best Strider player in the west and Arturo Sanchez and Eddie Lee being the best in the east.
People also developed early Magneto tactics that involved simple air jumping into hyper grav cancelled into tempest.
Viscant was the early developer of DHC tactics, with Doom/Storm/AAA and Doom/Storm/Sentinel being his early teams.
One thing that was strikingly evident, at least at first, was that it seemed that the assist system made old school pixies that had dominated MvC1 completely obsolete. The early consensus was that MvC2 was going to be a game where defense and chip damage was going to carry the day. This was generally borne out in the first major tournament at B4. Duc’s Spiral/Cable/Cyclops won the day, with Alex Valle attempting various teams to try to beat him in the grand final that wound up not working. Valle eventually started going to Strider/Doom/Sentinel to try to deal with Duc’s Spiral, which led to Duc incorporating Sentinel’s drones into his own team in replacement of Cyclops, and Cable shifting over to anti-air assist duty.
After B4, Blackheart started becoming more popular as a point character for simple attack and space control patterns once people realized that many anti-air assists could be used to set up inferno/HOD, with BH/Commando being the popular pairing on the west coast and BH/Cyclops in the east. This led to the development of BH/Sent/Commando on the west, which was used most famously by Valle and was probably his first team he began to dominate with for a while, along with Strider/Doom/Sentinel in response to Duc’s Spiral/Cable/Sentinel evolution of his older Spiral/Cable/Cyclops teams.
It was about this time that Duc discovered the counter-AHVB. Quietly, Seattle was starting to become a regular force in holding tournaments regularly, and in their isolation they developed their own way of play that most people on the outside tended to sneer at but which worked for them very well. Meanwhile, Alex Valle adapted BH/Sent/Commando and was beating Duc regularly by then (this was around late 2000, early 2001), and the now-famous Justin Wong began to dominate in the New York area with Magneto/Cable/Cammy. Ricky Ortiz was the first west coast power to challenge Justin, using both Duc’s Spiral/Cable/Sentinel team and his own Cable/Storm/Cyclops in a predictable pattern of, “use Spiral until I’m down to my last loss or two in a match, then go to Cable/Storm/AAA” that you could have traced like a computer program. However, Justin quickly seemed to figure out Ricky, and the questions began to rise as to whether or not Justin might be the east coast player that could finally break Duc and Valle’s dominance in the game.
Justin took his Magneto/Cable/Cammy to the Midwest Championships in the late spring of 2001, where he first met Alex Valle and his BH/Sent/Commando. Justin’s resounding defeat of Valle, 3 games to 1 in the winners’ final and 4 to 1 in the grand final, shocked a lot of people and forced a re-evaluation of the balance of power between the coasts, as well as a hard look as to whether or not Magneto was a dominant character or not. However, at this same tournament Justin met with Viscant, learned that Storm/Sentinel’s DHC was quite reliable, and told Viscant at that point that he intended to use it.
He came back at the B5 tournament in the summer of 2001 with it, which also featured a number of Japanese players. Seattle and the northwest began to make their own arrival there as well, with ten of the final 64 players in the tournament hailing from either Seattle or Portland seemingly out of nowhere – many of them using Cable/Doom/Commando and Cable/BH/Commando, and winning a number of upsets over some very established California players early in the tournament. One of these ten was also a young fellow by the name of Rodolfo Castro, using Magneto/Cable/Sentinel-A. Up until that point (and for a long while after), nobody had any use at all for Sentinel’s rocket punch assist, and it was considered a given that the drones were the best assist Sentinel had available. Rodolfo quietly placed in the top ten at B5 without anybody really knowing who he was; more of the attention at this tournament on Seattle players was on Rattana Phanthourath, who before Rodolfo had dominated Seattle and northwest MvC2 play.
However, Justin took the tournament without much difficulty, winning the grand final over Duc with Storm/Sentinel/Cammy and also beating Japan’s best player in the winners’ bracket 2-0 along the way, leaving his claim to being the best player in the world undisputed from that point forward. BH ceased to be a widely used character at about this point after Alex Valle fell to fifth place, and while Viscant managed to get third with his Doom/Storm teams (beating Valle’s BH/Sent/Commando in the losers’ bracket semifinals) his Storm/Sentinel also was a major factor.
Rodolfo finally “arrived” the following spring, establishing his dominance over the entire west coast over late 2001 and early 2002. It was at this point that the many uses of Magneto/Sentinel-A and Rodolfo’s innovative Cable tactics became more widely known. People had played Magneto/Cable/Sentinel before, but “Row” was the first to use the rockete punch assist as a setup for Magneto and a countercall, and even other Seattle players were somewhat slow to employ it. Magneto/Storm/Psylockes (MSP) had been known since Duc came up with it in 2000, but it was about at this point that it began to become a widely used team as well. Rodolfo’s rise in the west began to bring up speculation as to whether he would become the person who’d finally dethrone Justin Wong, and his Magneto/Cable/Sentinel-A team is to this day known as “Team Row”.
Row and Justin met for the first time at the East Coast Championships in 2002, and Justin found himself facing both Rodolfo and his close Seattle competitor Jason Kuan. Another Seattle player, Scott Wong, managed to knock Justin into the losers’ bracket, and Justin narrowly escaped being knocked out of the tournament altogether there by Thong Nguyen (who had previously eliminated Long “shadyk” Tran from the pools at B5 to much San Diego chagrin, so his silent reputation as a potential giant killer wasn’t completely new at this point). Justin eventually defeated Kuan and his “Team Scrub” (Sentinel/Cable/Commando) in the losers’ finals, but then Row dropped him unceremoniously in the first two games of the grand finals. However, Justin eventually went back to running away from Row’s characters with Storm/Sent/Cammy and was able to out-patience Row with that.
Row prepared quietly in Seattle, starting to work on Sentinel/Storm/Commando as a potential secret weapon against Justin’s Storm/Sentinel teams. Meanwhile, Justin went on to encounter “SiN” and his Team Scrub at the Midwest Championships in the same place he had defeated Valle to establish his throne a year previous, and discovered there that Team Scrub was a horrible matchup for Storm/Sentinel/Cammy. His throne was in peril there about as badly as it had been for a while, going down 3-0 in the first set of the grand finals (although he had the winners’ advantage), as SiN seemed to solve all his tactics and he struggled to find a way to deal with it. Ironically, his answer to SiN’s Team Scrub turned out to be Team Row, which was similar enough to his old Magneto/Cable/Cammy team that it wasn’t very alien to him. However, the problems that Cable/Commando presented to any team that was relying on Cammy for close range control became evident – Cammy will bounce off the first solid object that she hits, so Cable/Commando in particular creates a problem for it by dropping a human shield in front of Cable, and from that point forward Cable doesn’t have to worry about either Storm or Sentinel any more as long as he keeps Commando in front of him. Justin’s teams had relied heavily on Cammy for close range control up to this point, and it was here that he finally let go of her and shifted his main game plans to Storm/Sentinel/Cyclops. About this same time, Sanford Kelly was also starting to challenge him in New York with Sentinel/Storm/Commando as well, which came to be known as “Santhrax” after a common nickname for Sanford himself.
Justin and Row met again at the finals of the first Evolution in 2002. Row (much to the shouted objections of his fellow Seattle players in the audience) stayed with his regular team, either because he didn’t yet wish to reveal his “secret weapon” yet after having experienced Justin’s remarkable ability to adapt in person once before, or just because he wanted to see if he could solve Justin’s Storm/Sentinel without having to go to it. Justin defeated him again, and after a tough fight against Combofiend in the losers’ bracket, the rematch was set. Tom Cannon declared that the final match was going to be best of one over much booing from the audience (the auditorium at UCLA, where the tournament was being held, was wanting to close and threatening to kick the people out if they didn’t wrap it up soon). Row went to Sent/Storm/Commando, and won the first “set” of one match against Justin. With much buzzing in the hall, the rematch was set, and Justin won the second game, and with it the tournament. This was probably the closest anybody came to beating Justin for the next two years, when finally Justin’s fellow New Yorker Sanford managed to unseat him.
The rest of the game’s history is pretty much a footnote after this point. New York’s MvC2 players have only once been seriously challenged since (when Duc won a later Evolution tournament again to become the only person other than Justin to win more than one of the Evo/B series tournaments), although this is probably partly because Justin has been attending college and isn’t as dominant as he was at his previous peak. Yipes is apparently the best player from New York right now, and was Duc’s opponent in the finals of that Evolution and also won the latest one in 2007. However, Justin pretty much set the tone for modern MvC2 tactics starting in 2001, and while Rodolfo’s Mag/Cable/Sent-A eventually inspired Magneto/Storm players elsewhere to start using Mag/Storm/Sent-A, most of the evolution of tactics since 2002 has been more incremental and less revolutionary.
Pretty accurate from what I recall on the history of Mvc2, except for the post above.
East Coast wasn’t saying Strider/Doom/Cable was #1, they were saying Strider/Doom was near unstoppable. And before the advent of Magneto/Storm rushdown (which wouldn’t show for at least another year or 2), Strider/Doom WAS near unstoppable in the right hands, hence all of the top players using it(Choi, Valle, Eddie, Art).
Strider/Doom/Cable is just one example of a team that Eddie Lee used (strider/doom/bh being used by Arturo). Sentinel wasn’t to be discovered for at least another year and a half to 2 years.
you know I have to admit, those first few years of MvC2 were the best years of MvC2. With so many characters to look at and so many options and things being discovered, something new would come up all the time and in different regions, at that.
It really is a shame the game was reduced to the characters it was. If people could change the damage input/output on characters (I thought I remember reading this was possible as a DC hack??), even those fixes in itself would fix a huge amount of balance issues.
Make Sentinel take Storm damage (and do amingo damage) and make Magneto take Akuma damage. Make amingo do sentinel damage and have jill with sentinel defense. those right there would fix like a good 1/3 of the problems in MVC2.
I don’t think that will quite work so well because low tiers still have no mobility which is the main reason they can just die vs tops. If you wanted to fix the game, leave every thing as it is but give everyone a type of air dash for mobility.
Take a look @ the top 10 most people agree with, mag, storm, sent, cable, strider, im\wm, spiral, BH, cyke? of all the characters I mentioned, only 1 character doesn’t have a mobility tool and its cable. Every other character in the top 10 either has an air dash, teleport or a DJ to move around shit. Its vital to move around controlled spaced in marvel.
Then if you take a look @ the top 20, doom, cammy, morrigan, marrow, rogue, wolvies, psy etc… all have some type of mobility tool also. Air dashes, amazing dash speed and DJ’s.
once you get to about the top 30-52 - they just turn into bums vs tops because of severe lack of mobility vs teams that can just throw shit all over the place. Even if you toned down the damage, they still won’t be viable @ getting in. They’ll just have more life to get in but still suffer the same downfall.
I totally agree with you. I mean, those damage fixes I listed would fix about 1/3 of the problems,… maybe even as much as half. But you’re right, air mobility is a huge problem. Almost as important as air mobility is the ability to air dash into a combo (best shown as Mag’s air dash d/f rh and Storm’s air dash d/f fierce). I guess that helps the top keep the top 10 better than the top 20 (among other differences).
I was only speaking from the standpoint of ‘simple fixes,’ plus I recall reading somewhere that damage output for characters could be modified somewhere on an MVC2 image. If that’s the case, it could make for a totally different game. I’ll just have to dig further to find out if damage changes are really possible. That plus I’m reading on other websites that MvC2 image can be freely distributed under the digital millenium act since MvC2 is considered obsolete per a definition of being largely commercially unavailable.
I’m not sure I would be happy with people being able to manipulate damage output freely like we do with colors and music. Whats going to stop people from upping damage on their favorite characters or toning down cheap ones for MM’s to suit there goal to win?
all it will do is promote cheating and it wouldn’t be the first time someone cheated to win in SF.
The day custom colors became available, the first thing I said was, " I hope people don’t try to cheat and make 1 color teams." What do you see now, all black msp, all blue thrax. Shit is gay when your point character is the same color as your robot and allows for stupid “invisibile” mixups because you can’t see where exactly the point character is w\in sentinel. Now, the OG copy of marvel had something similar but it was only with a few characters. With the ability to custom color everything, everyone has “cheap” customs color copies because they want their team to have matching colors when in fact, it cheating.
if people are willing to go as far to use colors to get an advantage, what do you think the same people will do if you give them the ability to manipulate damage output per character?..
Original copies of the game will be mandatory if this damage scaling ever takes shape. :arazz:
Reading that Stilt post was like watching a movie! GS!!! You just filled in like 2-3yrs of my marvel experience.
Yep, that’s what will happen.
some of those color edits are AWESOME looking (bronze IM is sick!), but yea, in the end, I don’t think custom MvC2 will be allowed in tournaments much longer with how funny these color edits are getting.
I just hope there’s more to manipulate than just color seeing how Capcom isn’t doing anything about MvC2.
Not all. Duc and Justin never did, at least not in tournaments. Nobody using Strider was ever documented as beating them at all consistently. Valle didn’t start beating Duc with much consistency until he went away from Strider to BH/Sent/Commando.
Whether as a supplement to Strider or in general, this last sentence is false. Valle was using Sentinel on his Strider teams by the end of 2000 and had started using Sentinel/BH by then as well. He beat Duc in a tournament some time late that year with Spiral/Sentinel/BH, and was also using Sentinel/BH/Cyclops on occasion. I’ve seen video of both of these, before Valle started using BH/Sent/Commando as his bulwark team. At B5 Valle rotated between BH/Sent/Commando and MSP as his two teams.
On this, I agree completely. MvC1 was considered very broken in its day and didn’t last very long as a result, but there are times when I’ve despaired that MvC2 has gotten even worse. We’ve still got the pixie dominance that ruined previous Marvel games, except that arguably we may not even have DWM to slow it down and provide variety. Sentinel/Commando sort of works, and you’ve still got the occasional Cable, Strider, or BH player slowing it down, but at the top level in New York, Magneto/Storm and Storm/Sentinel are completely dominant and the bulk of the rest of the country is following suit everywhere except to some degree in Seattle/Portland (i.e. Row country), where Cable-centric teams are still very common.
I’m talking about the time period before Duc and Justin even existed as great players. Justin wasn’t winning(or even placing) in tournaments and didn’t find his groove in the game yet, and Duc had no footing yet, either.
Valle playing Sent then is nothing like how Sent was meant to be played with unfly and unblockable (which is what I meant by ‘discovered,’ not the fact that people found out there’s Sentinel on the char. select screen). Point being, there weren’t many better characters to fill the 3rd slot of strider/doom, and certainly not Sentinel at that time. Strider/Doom dominated for a while, as you can see in alt.games.sf2 (numerous complaints).
That was a fun period, regardless. And what you say is for certain true: Mag/Storm/Sent/Cable gets BORING… QUICK. IM doesn’t help, and neither does MSP. I mean it’s to the point where even MSP is boring, because all of the throw tricks and resets and mixups have just about all been found or some variations have already been played out.
I really don’t understand why Capcom can’t make MvC2 PRO, but they make something like CVS PRO. If it’s really a license issue, it’s absurd.
Can’t we get Sirlin to do some rework on MvC2? I mean a re-release of ST is nice and all, but really, if you had a remake of MvC2 coming out with players input such as on this new ST, you can bet everyone would quit playing MvC2 (original) like most people have quit Tekken 5 for DR.
this thread kinda lost its purpose but I have the answer.
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=45EN29WQ
blackazow!!!
old threads from back in the day, pre 2k3. To the creator of the thread, this is what you’re looking for. These threads go back to 00-01 where marvel was still in its infancy and you can read, if you’re willing too, about the mentality of the scene back then. Quite useful since marvel has come a long way since then.
Of course, its a huge amount of reading but what you’re asking for is within the pages. There aren’t too many OG’s who were back then who still play now so its hard to ask the new school what exactly was going on back then. However, stiltman seems to have a better grasp than I do of the scene back then.
Kinda interesting where this is leaning to now, but I had thought at work today a lot about marvel not being quite balanced by the players yet. At any rate, I made it literal in my head and got to the point where i started wondering what would happen if we started swapping out specials/normals for some of the assists.
I’ll start out by saying that I am vehemently opposed to messing with damage output and frame data for characters normals/specials/supers or affecting the way they move (although gief does need a jetpack). If you take away from what God tier has, its fucked bc it shits on years of evolution-- its got to be additive IMO rather than taking away from what is already established. But I feel like it would be 100% okay to mess around with what assists low tier has.
It would do 2 things:
A: It would open low tier the fuck up wide open.
B: And it would throw a stick into the spokes of the rice burner that is competitive Marvel.
If you thought low-tier rules was a controversy, imagine trying to dial in, and re-balance the assists for half++ the cast. BUT, think about what happens when you do something as simple as give certain characters some of their high priority/useful normals instead of some of the crummier assist types. Or give Gief Banishing Flat. Or Commando his Ninja. Remix. Imagine a Double Wolvie team that gets cr. HK assist. Wtf?
Veering a little to theoryville, but what about giving the characters that need their mediums command normals. Bison and Gief both love cr. middle kick as a tick/ground check. DF LK ??? A LOT of characters get slightly better.
IMHO this is where marvel is at in 2-3 years, and what the starter of this thread (lazy, sorry :)) should be focusing on the possibility of mayhaps.
With respect to Duc, there wasn’t really any such time. He was dominant at SHGL pretty much since the game’s beginning, and won B4 only a few months after MvC2 came out. Valle was never able to really beat him consistently until he finally went away from Strider as his final staple.
I’ve also heard rumors (somewhat unsubstantiated) that Justin was wrecking shop locally in New York a lot earlier than was generally known. I don’t have a way of confirming or refuting them, but I’ve heard that Arturo and Eddie Lee, while at B4, made it known that some kid back in New York was beating them both silly with Magneto/Cable/Cammy already at that point. I can sort of believe this for a couple of different reasons. The first is that it simply defies logic that this 15-16 year old kid (whether his name is Justin Wong or not) comes out of nowhere, picks up the game in 2001, and suddenly is the stand-alone best player in the world in the space of a month or two. He had to have spent at least some time figuring out the game and getting into a dominant form, and I don’t have any trouble at all believing that this may have happened as early as B4. Certainly it was probably a long time prior to when he began travelling and more people found out who he was. Which brings me to my second reason, which was that I saw up close how Rodolfo, even though he’d become the northwest’s dominant player well before B5, was completely unknown around the rest of the country until he started travelling regularly almost a year later, starting with his shockingly dominating victory at an SHGL monthly tournament in early 2002. Having done so, I can very easily understand why Justin might not have been particularly well known until after he too began to travel.
In the end, the fact remains that the only major tournament I’m aware of where Strider/Doom (may have) won was most likely Arturo’s win at the Midwest Championships in 2000… which Duc did not attend. As a result, I’m inclined somewhat to discount even that as a statement that Strider/Doom was ever considered unstoppable. Sure… people complained about it on message boards, but you can judge very little based on that.
Complaints on a.g.sf2 isn’t really the same thing as truly dominating. Iceman could have been described as “dominating” at one time too, but it doesn’t mean that (Rattana’s surprising 3rd place finish at SHGL in the spring of 2001 aside) he was ever considered a top tier character in actual tournament play. Strider/Doom was considered as such, but never to a point that the entire game became anywhere near the “how to you deal with this?” that it is now with the current top four.
As for Sentinel… a lot of things about him were discovered earlier than you think. Valle was winning tournaments at SHGL with him less than a year after the game came out, and was using refly heavily with it. white (Japanese player) used unfly at B5, and Seattle was heavily using both unfly and fast fly combos by the end of that year. Sure, it was a good year and a half before anybody else figured it out after seeing the Seattle people do it, but many of these things were being used a lot earlier than 2003, which is when it became more universal. Even as it was, these things only reinforced Sentinel’s place; he was already considered perhaps the best character in the game by the end of 2001.
I don’t mind Sentinel and Cable so much as Magneto and Storm. It seems like Capcom always manages to nerf the pixies they knew about in the last game, and then leaves a couple more like these two sitting around.
Due to my own position, I can’t really comment on this part…
QFT.
Double-snapbacks, unblockable, Sent damage, and Storm run-away are I think the game-defining aspects that tilt the game out of balance. It’s still a great game, but I don’t know if you could have discovered those easily in testing. Remember that the field already counter-balanced AHVBx3. But then again, Storm run-away was already pretty effective in XvSF…
They’re generally pretty playable, but you would expect after eight years(?) that people have figured out what works best to guarantee that tourney win. You play low tier, you’re going to play against people that are going to run for 99 seconds with Storm or simply trade hits with Sentinel and win because low tier can’t cope with that. (None of the brutes is as mobile as Sentinel, and no one that can keep up with Sentinel will live if they trade hits.)
It’s a lucky accident as far as I can tell…
^^ Yes, Capcom definitely went with the more is more approach.
This is pretty much true, by the time me and Eddie Lee went to B4, justin (at that time was by far the best in NY and beating out asses, but he was too young to travel at that time) of course we told cali/duc/everyone about him though and the rest is history.
aside from that, its nice to see emy name get mantioned during mvc2’s early days even if i am dogshit at the game now lol :lovin:
Stilt, you should change your custom user text to “MvC2 Historian”.
:lol:
Anybody got the history of all the IM/WM use? I don’t think Combofiend was the first one to discover/use it, though it is named after him like Santhrax.