I like that there is a “barrier”. The more CoD kiddies that quit when they get double-perfected the better my online experience is 
They’re too busy on Plants vs Zombies. Curse my soul for liking that game.
I’m not gonna get into the eternal debate between the “sf4 is too noob friendly” and “sf4 should be more casual friendly” camps. There were a dozen threads already on this subject. But I would like to address 1 point OP brought: having too many characters. More characters were added because of casual players. The new characters were a major selling point to the casual crowd. If you don’t believe me, just go capcom unity I read the old threads - I want maki, I want karin, I want every sf character under the sun. And I’m not even joking. When I posted once about not needing more characters, one dude replied with: “what ? how can you not want more characters ? there are still 20 or 30 SF characters not in this game”
If Capcom really wanted to appeal to casuals, they would characters from others games such as Pacman… Wait…
Christ, imagine if the roster had 70 characters.
Or Bad Boxart Megaman.
Capcom seems to really hate their fans.
This is it right here. Look at the sales figures for this game. Every version sells less. Everything after super was aimed completely at the hardcore crowd. Which is kind of a labor of love when you realize how small of a crowd we are.
MAH INPUT LENIENCY
can mash random dp and ultra ? there now its accessible…nigga :mad:
I play Viper…all of this complaining falls on deaf ears.
I spent some time looking up statistics. I found a lot of old sales figures. It took me a while to sort through, the newest data I can find comes from January 2013. In 2012, fighting games made up 3.9% of the console game market. (By units sold.) For PCs, it was less than 3.2%. (Possibly even less than 0.1%.) To contrast, “shooters” had 21.2%. Also note that casual gamers make up ~30% of the entire market.
Source: ESA
http://www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/esa_ef_2013.pdf
(If you don’t like pdfs, you can see some statistics of 2009 below, which mirror 2012:)
So, this got me thinking about the net sales of Capcom… for Street Fighter. Capcom was nice enough to put all their numbers up.
http://www.capcom.co.jp/ir/english/business/salesdata.html
http://www.capcom.co.jp/ir/english/business/million.html
I can see that Street Fighter IV (X360/PS3/PC) sold 3.3M. Super sold 1.9M. Super on 3DS sold 1.1M. AE sold 300K in one week, but less than one million total… across ALL platforms. So we can only guess at an exact figure. Wikipedia says 400k, let’s go with that. The grand total would be 6.7 million. Resident Evil 5, by itself, across all platfroms sold 6.6M to date. (Despite many negative reviews for RE5, and a ton of positive reviews for SF4.)
So I looked up the top video games, in terms of sales. I found a list compiling those of the last 10 years. You won’t find any capcom games, and there was only one fighting game… Super Smash Brothers Brawl comes in at #24. It has sold 12 million units.
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/sales/software/wii.html
What does this tell us? Casual > Niche. Capcom DESIGNED Street Fighter IV for pros… and only pros. It was never intended to appeal to beginners, despite their claims. Seth Killian had an influence on the balance of Ultra SF4. Read his domination 101 series right here on this site. You’ll then understand why Street Fighter is the way that it is. In case you still don’t believe me, check out David Sirlin’s “Play to Win” book. (Free to view online.) http://www.sirlin.net/ptw He says that he has the same philosophy and mentality as Seth Killian. David Sirlin believes that ONLY pros have any say in the direction of a game’s balance. They are the only voices that matter. Which is why he invited people like Gootecks, James Chen and Seth Killian to playtest Street Fighter HD Remix. These people understand Street Fighter at an extremely high level. Which is, just a minor percentage of all players. This is for whom the game has been balanced. These people have decided the fate of Street Fighter, and their opinion is that the game should be very very hard.
THIS is the problem. Also, the fact that Seth Killian thinks that anyone struggling with Street Fighter is an idiot. Reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56r_Zx2wEOo
"What Daigo is doing isn’t magic… He’s smart." Which would imply that anyone else is just stupid. <sarcasm> It isn’t that the game is overly difficult, complicated, and unfair. It’s just that everyone is dumber than Seth. Sure, I’ll believe that one. Everyone is just dumber than Seth Killian. THAT makes sense. </sarcasm>
Street Fighter IV was designed by pros, for pros. It was never intended to be a game for amateurs, beginners, or even intermediate players. It was made to challenge the best of the best. Good luck EVER getting to that level.
it might appear noob friendly at the base level but it isn’t.
so many characters, so many different inputs. invisible stun.
objectively 3S is a simpler game with less to keep track of. whether its inputs, characters or meters. it is easier to begin playing. the only reason it isn’t noob friendly now is the same reason sf4 isn’t, it has too much history built on top of it and too many people who have been playing a long time which makes finding people around your skill difficult.
regardless of all this…
fighting games as we know them will never be easy. they were built up on the framework we know and love to eat quarters. which now just means it requires a lot of practice. that’s a large part of their appeal. the real issue is just having other players of a similar understanding to play with. as long as people have fun they might want to learn a little bit more. once someone hits that step they end up looking on the web for movelists and stuff and the deal is sealed pretty much.
mayhaps this guy read this thread and felt sorry for OP and wrote a bookshoryuken.com/2014/07/07/learn-how-to-play-fighting-games-with-our-free-beginners-guide-ebook/
But, regardless, sf4 is casual friendly. because there has always been easy difficulty. So you buy the game, mash buttons on easy, and move on to your next game. If anyone wants more button mashing easy mode then they’re actually not casual and should look forward to the learning curve.
Huh? Not the same book, and this book you reference was literally… just posted.
I love how the FGC is all like, “Lose you loser! Lose and lose! And you like it too!” Learning curve… pssssshaaaww
Edit: I’m going to read every word of that book, and I’ll still be terrible. SF4 is not for anyone but pros. Never was, never will be.
Having played all the mainstream SF games quite a bit, this is easily the most accessible. Except its really hard to master this game. SF2 is the opposite: hard to get into, easy to master once you get into it. I can play any character in SF2 above-average, for example (and 3 of them at a really high level).
This is hands down the easiest SF game ever. If you can’t take a couple months to learn and practice you don’t deserve to play it or have fun playing it. Get outta here, CoD loser.
Huh? Not the same book as…wha?
I messed around with pretty much all of them (when they were all first released) I’d say the hardest was 3s. 90% new characters, and parry timing was a pain for 1st timers. really steep learning curve. after guys started parrying 100% of attacks after some years, they way they evolved parrying into focus absorbs in this game is genius.
Still, these games are all about hours spent in training mode. hourshourshourshourshourshours. Good news is, kinda like a piano, once you’ve invested your first… idk… 50 hours maybe in core skills (special moves, basic 3-hit combos, footsies), they are pretty much applicable to all future iterations of the game.
and having access to other people’s approach is probably a very underrated part of the experience. yt and srk subforums help a lot with that these days.
First of all. Don’t be such a grinch. I don’t know if you’re speaking to me when you say ‘CoD loser’ (FYI, I don’t play COD and have played the SF4 series almost since day one) but either way you shouldn’t speak to someone like that.
And second of all, there is no way you can learn all the things I mentioned in ‘a couple months’. Even if you leaved near one of the big SF4 scenes and got to play against a lot of different characters in person often, it would take 6 months at least before you knew every character’s wake up options, vortex options, footsies options, correct spacings, etc, and then learned how to apply that matchup knowledge. But if you only play online there just isn’t the variety there to learn the matchups, and you don’t get the same level of helpful advice you do when you play a better player face-to-face.
As I said above, I’ve been playing SF4 for something like 5 years and I still have very little idea how to defeat certain characters (e.g., Fuerte, Gen, Hakan). Does that make me an idiot? I hardly think so, and if it does then you would probably also have to classify the vast majority of people as ‘idiots’ too (which I don’t doubt quite a few members of the FGC would be only too happy to do, from the comfort of their mom’s basement).
What I think it comes down to is that most of the absolute hardcore of the SF4 scene are quite happy to have all of these barriers stopping more casual players from getting more heavily into the game because they like being part of an elite clique and they probably like to think they are so good at the game because they’re ‘smarter’ than everyone else (as Seth Killian implied in the video above), but in reality a lot of them are only part of that elite because they’re the only ones willing to dedicate so much time to learning the intricacies of all of the matchups and to practice combo timing until they can do 1 frame links like clockwork.
If you were to say to the average gamer that in order to get good at a game you would have to spend literally hours upon hours practicing combo timing until you were able to be accurate up to 1/60th of a second most of them would laugh in your face. Do you think that’s a feasible option for some guy (or girl) with a family and who only has a few hours a week spare time? Of course it’s not. And guess what. Those same people don’t have the time to learn 40+ matchups in detail, and it’s not much fun losing to characters because of a lack of matchup knowledge. If you lose, it should mainly be about skill. Not about knowing some character specific combo, or character specific safejump timing, or character specific unblockable, or knowing the exact frame advantage/disadvantage on specific moves.
It’s not about ‘dumbing down’ the game and giving noobs a win button, or making it so that a skilled player and a bad player have an equal chance of winning. It’s about making it so that you can learn and get good at fighting games without having to take on virtually an extra job, and Capcom does basically nothing to achieve that.
/novel.
If a casual player doesn’t fight against Fuerte or Gen much then it obviously doesn’t matter that they don’t know the matchup since they don’t fight those characters. If this person is playing (and losing to) these characters enough that it becomes a problem then they would logically improve their knowledge of the matchup over time.
Those “barriers” are time and effort just like every other form of skill or competition you could name. I don’t think it’s unreasonable that the people who work the hardest to become the best at something are the best at it, and it’s perfectly reasonable that people who put in a fraction of the effort should not be elevated to the same level as these top players.
-I only play SHMUPs at a middling level but I can tell you that getting “good” at them requires the same level of precision (and the same amount of practice) as getting good at fighting games
-Arena FPS games like Quake may not require frame perfect execution (I don’t play Quake much and wouldn’t be surprised if there are things this precise someone let me know) but proper aim at the speed of those games is almost as precise, and learning weapon trajectories, map movement routes, power-up locations are all going to require that same amount of time to practice that matchups in SF will require.
-Even non-competitive games like Mario have speedrunning communities and those players pretty commonly perform inputs which are frame-perfect or pixel-perfect. Getting good at these games, again, requires tons of hours to practice or you aren’t any better than the millions of other people who picked it up and played it for a little while.
You say that winning should be mainly about skill and then list several factors which ARE skills. Learning these things and executing them in a real match is skillful play.
No matter what Capcom does to help people improve there will be people who put more time in to those systems than others and thus end up better at the game. If you removed so much difficult content from the game that there was no meaningful distinction between players who put in lots of time and players who put in very little, that IS dumbing down the game.
What they really need is trials that explain what to do, not just expecting you to figure out things like buffering moves on your own
lol, why are you so obsessed with1 frame links?
I can play this game online and offline and not get completely embarrassed without being able to do a 2 frame link with any consistency.