Well VF4 Vanilla’s tutorial mode actually went into fighting theory and explained why knowing character match ups are important. VF4 EVO actually taught the player Option Selects without calling them that, high level tech in a tutorial is gold and it’s stuff they tell you need to learn how to do consistently.
[media=youtube]CVSvN4NM4Ik[/media]
It mite be a small step, but this is how you can build better players from the ground up, taking them to FG boot camp and getting them past the initial stages of beginners hell. This is what games need, to get people used to the game it self and for them to learn the tools they need to survive in competitive play…
anything that is competitive in nature has always taken lab time. In soccer, the worlds most popular sport, you have to learn how to dribble, pass and shoot. Even though it has things in it that require players to train, it doesn’t stop the majority of the world from learning to play. In billiards you have to learn a stroke, how to hold the stick, which shots to shoot @. Fuck, even @ competitive scrabble level, you have to read an insane amount of books or the dictionary to increase your verbal vocabulary. Should I be allowed to sit with a dictionary @ a scrabble tournament because training is mundane? I don’t want to read those fucking books to compete, fucking elitists. Don’t they realize they can have a bigger scene if they let me bring my dictionary with me!!
fighting games are 2 parts just like in real fighting, strategy and execution. When you don’t add both, you get games that flawed towards 1 direction. Take tic tac toe for example. The game is all strategy and no execution. If you know the game well enough, you can stalemate the game every time because strategy is the only thing that matters in that game.
execution can add lots of depth as well as balancing out techniques and specials. Something which you know nothing about because you can’t play any fighters that are that deep. I’m not saying that to pick on you but if you’ve never played a game like that, then you don’t know how execution can be a good thing. I think every character can be top tier in any game as long as you give them a top tier tool set that is hard to execute. bbh in vampire savior is @ the bottom of top tier or middle of the pack mid tier depending on your execution level. Her tier placement is dependent of your execution level rather than through developer design and easy mode top tier tools
if we were to play your most ideal game, it would be pin the tail on the donkey. Everyone is of the same skill level, doesn’t take that much practice and its competitive!
Goddamn email notification keeps me on top of these things like crazy, that’s what keeps me in it so closely ><
Optimization (if I"m reading the way you mean it right) and corner carries are more aspects of a specific kind of game, that’s more training mode stuff, imo.
I guess that feels a little different because it’s what you said, ‘optimization’.
My logic might get a bit strained here, but let’s see where it goes.
Being able to do the designed features of the game should be very quickly and easily accessible, and basic skills should be improvable through standard gameplay. Due to the complex nature of the game, optimizing your play will just about always require training time, somewhat mitigated by the style of the game.
The place things get controversial is in the question of tuning. I think practice-mode optimization should be a bit of a boost, not central to the game mechanic. The central elements of skill should be things you can improve by play; move interaction, spacing, timing, setups, learning to read, etc.
Edit: Shoultz, you don’t get it. Those things will always exist in fighting games, and intentionally trying to add them at a design level has usually been disasterous.
Make a good core game, don’t fuck around with gamechanging gimmicks.
(double, but don’t wanna poison important posts with this personality conflict crap)
It’s the nature of dialogue. Throughout this discussion I’ve been able to both clarify and more importantly refine my position on the subject.
And seriously, people seem to go out of their way to interpret posts in the worst way possible. It leaves you in a tough spot, because if you don’t check them you’re gonna get strawmanned to death.
no, I fully understand what you’re saying. You just don’t want high level training tactics to become a factor like sentinel refly from mvc2 where it was a triple just frame input if you wanted to maximize its potential but anyone could always practice their bbcs combo. My argument is that if you don’t add deep execution in your game and rewards that are earned through practice, you get games that are slanted towards 1 side which results in a bad game
Now, you’re showing favoritism rather than being objective because you personally hate exeuction. Execution adds so much to a game you can’t possibly understand because I don’t think you’ve played any technical fighter in a tournament setting where I’ve played one of the hardest fighters to ever be around and one of the better technical players in the game. I have a unique perspective that you simply don’t have nor could you ever have because you don’t play fighters seriously. So you’re opinion is purely casual unless you can prove otherwise.
I’ve been there, I’ve seen the good\bad to fighters. I’ve seen how massive execution requirements can end up helping a game. If you made the push blocks any simpler in vampire savior, it would not be balanced anymore. Low tiers wouldn’t have a shot. There are so many ways you can use advanced execution to better fighters but only people who actually know how to play know why those things are necessary. By diluting the execution requirements, I believe you dilute the quality of your game.
I’m not saying make every combo 1f even for bnbs but you need way more execution that what you’re implying for a good game. Execution does soooo much for a fighter and only people who’ve played technical fighters @ tournament level can understand that. I think that’s why you have such a hard time trying to acknowledging it
No, you really don’t. Chess, for example, is a game where study will get you far, but that’s not the design intent. You mention Scrabble, but the whole “you must study the (Scrabble, not Oxford) dictionary” thing wasn’t an intentionally added back in 1938 as a “practice mode” requirement.
Practice makes perfect, but intentionally adding gameplay elements that will not be mastered through play is egregious design. The learning method for games should always be active participation, because it respects the user’s time investment and it is far more binding as a learning tool than concocting artificial situations.
No,* tic-tac-toe* is pattern recognition, not strategy, because every move is fixed to a low-payoff Nash Equilibrium. There are no interesting decisions to make, just adherence to a very simple sequence where deviation from that sequence by either player will result in a loss.
A game that is all strategy and very low “execution” (using the fighting-game definition of the term) is go.
LOL. Did you know that in studies, my dad can totally beat up your dad?
That is a true and completely objective fact based on the volume used when I proclaimed it.
Don’t ever let anybody tell you that you don’t have a flair for dramatic hyperbole, because it just ain’t so.
There are 2 different issues
[LIST=1]
[]Should ultra high execution exist in games at all?
[]Should ultra high execution be designed into the game or left for players to discover?
[/LIST]
The first one can be answered easily, it’s not a question of should at all. The super high execution things *inevitably do *exist in every fighting game, hell in any game of beyond the utterly absurdly simple or the intentionally castrated.
The second one is where we actually differ, my attitude is that trying to design a game to have these features, given that they will exist if people have any motivation at all to play the game. As an example, it seems like Xfactor was designed to include a universal cancel in order to please people that wanted a roman cancel in the game (aka they were trying to force a high level application used for advanced combos). This made a feature that would have already been exceptionally powerful just as a “I’m really scary now!” comeback mechanic into an utterly game-dominating ‘any hit is a TOD’ technique.
A good way to put it is this: Let the game breathe from the very base level. Don’t force feed and try to utterly control high level play, but let it develop on its own. If you make the game good enough, it will develop.
Another good way to put it: The problem isn’t high execution, its arbitrary execution barriers that people have to surpass to be playing the game at all. Better execution is guaranteed to be rewarded either way.
How many ultras do you see in the average perfect?
Becuase if the actual incentive is only visual then there is no incentive for good players to do the correct motion over the easier inputs that are but into the game for less skilled players. A few pages back this thread was all about skill over substance, and if you’ll remember most of the people arguing against you aren’t playing for flash over substance. If the easier motion allows you to do the move faster or in any situation that the normal motion won’t than that substance (speed or ease) wins out over the flash of different animation, that get balanced out by giving the correct motion some actual weight behind performing it a.k.a damage. It at least makes it a decision of which of the two you would prefer in that situation.
You mean like how schools “coddle” kid who like to study by giving them good grades access to special classes and chances to graduate earlier. Why aren’t kid who never study given the same opportunities, oh yeah because that would be retarded.
and people wonder why fighting games suck for this era
people who can’t play are telling others who can play they don’t know what they’re talking about like they do themselves.
Oh well, I tried. Have fun comparing scrub argument to scrub argument. I’m sure it will get the community far, I mean look @ sfxt and its ability to be a good game by listening to scrubs and it only took till the year 2012 for Capcom to put a roll back net code in their game.
Let me tell you that guys are REALLY helping the scene. We’re so far ahead that we’re moving backwards with the game. Can’t be stopped!!
High execution has always been an iffy subject with fighting games. Some want execution to be easier to diminish the barrier to entry so a particular game is easier to dive into, while some embrace harder execution because it is more satisfying and rewards players for putting in the time and effort to master such a feat. KOFXIII is a good example of a game that demands complex inputs in order to perform the game’s much longer and damaging combos and they are very satisfying to pull off. However, this very feature has turned off some gamers, knowing that in order to maximize damage they would have to nail down a variety of complex motions and apply them in real fights.
And then you have ST: HDR, which had easier and more forgiving inputs, and look at how much people love that game, lol.
To summarize, there needs to be a balance for execution, a way to avoid making the barrier to entry unnecessarily high, but complex enough to reward those who actually put in the time to learn these things.
I agree with this
and jeezus christ, how many times have people posted VF4 training vid links in this thread?
C’mon now, that doesn’t matter at all. When you actually combine the fact that focusing an attack gets you ultra meter for no actual damage (presuming you make it through the regen period) and that even without any focused or armored moves you get access to ultras at 50%, they’re barely a comeback mechanic at all. I’ll say it again for clarity, you gain ultra meter for focusing attacks, which is good play.
Except people will. Even those 5-6 players who are truly top-level competitive at any given game go for flash when they can get away with it. Beyond that, the whole idea is to reward better play without punishing worse play… Bad play already has the worst punishment of all, losing.
Believe it or not, fighting games are games. Nobody is a pure professional, everybody is playing games as games. Comparing them to preparing a child for having a successful life is utterly awful and invalid.
Also, people gotta remember that **newer players shouldn’t be playing against veterans in the first place. **Capcom went in a completely wrong direction with SFIV’s Ultras, and especially the Assist Gems for SFxT. That is because they were trying to even out the playing field if a new player were to go against a veteran. Why should that scenario even occur? You would think new players would want to play against other new players because they are closer to their level. Going headfirst against a veteran is simply hopeless unless the new player already has sort of an idea of what’s going on in a match and is able to analyze their mistakes, but chances are, things are gonna happen in a flash, and he will be pissed off and wonder “how da hell did that happen? This game’s too hard, I couldn’t even touch the guy!”
then there should be better matchmaking for online play. I’ve outlined before that players should be able to pick their own “Class” and they would only be matched up with other players in the same Class if they chose that option. The Classes would be Beginner, Casual, and Competitive. And you would be able to change your Class any time you wished. The only problem with this is that the feature relies too much on the “honor system.” It is very possible that a veteran player could decide to troll some newer players by picking the Beginner class even though he is clearly good at a particular game, and then be matched up with legit Beginner players.
Just to clarify, you are not supposed to design your game to be hard or easy. You just make a game, with unique characters, and options within the engine. Let the players determine whether or not the game is hard or easy to play.
That is the difference between games like MvC2 and MvC3. One was designed to be ultra easy, one was just designed.
Well again, things like that are always going to exist.
I don’t like them because they don’t add anything of meaning to the game and drive people away, especially if intentionally designed into the game.
Intentionally adding a 1 frame input (as an example) and then balancing it by making it much better than it would be otherwise is bad design. It’s arms race logic, and everybody loses. That case is especially bad because the JF version becomes the standard in advanced play, and so you have to balance the game around that expectation.
Instead of making the JF version of the move better, and then having to balance around that version, why not make the JF version just flashy? You still reward the people who take the work to get it down, you give the people who haven’t done the work a good ‘oh I want to do that again, that was cool!’ motivation, and you don’t have to build the move on the assumption of the JF.
And you hit on one of the ironies of this discussion, most of the games out there *are* extremely accessible. The discussion is about values, kind of.
Oh and also about what happens if you do it poorly (looking at you Capcom).
Edit:
[quote=Negative-Zer0, post: 6919758, member: 19609]
That is the difference between games like MvC2 and MvC3. One was designed to be ultra easy, one was just designed.
[/quote]
'designed' might be a bit strong of a term. Maybe try 'thrown together over an extended bender?' :D
Seriously, that's the problem of MvC3, they were trying to copy the feel of 2, and they were trying to add things on top of it to please various people. They would have been much better served trying to build a good game from the ground up.
There is no way that only competitive players would pick competitive and even the top level would be filled with scrubs, leading to scrubs fighting other scrubs in competitive and therefore thinking that they belong on that level. there is no accurate way to judge the actual skill of the person sitting behind the controller in an online match.
The best players aka people with good local comp are far less likely to be spending time online looking for ranked matches than people who don’t have local competition so their point totals are more likely not to match their actual skill.
I’m trying so hard to keep my cool here but this is…
I…
Dude, they’re better because they’re HARDER.
That’s the reward, that’s the payoff, that’s the “here you go for busting your ass doing this”.
I do more damage than you because I played to the game strengths (Execution and thought).
I do more damage because I busted my ass learning this and doing it.
It’s like that in EVERY THING THAT HAS EVER BEEN INVENTED EVER.
Even in chess, if I spend my time understanding my queen’s pawn openings, and you don’t know shit about it, then you’re gonna lose, I’m rewarded by using my pieces to the fullest, I busted your ass because you couldn’t counter my wide ass open gameplay.
In figure skating, who do you think receives the better score, those who do the easiest of sequences, or those who do harder transitions?
I have a brown belt because I busted my ass, I know my katas, katas are a learning tool, just like training mode in fighting games, and knowledge is half the battle.
