I mean, until it coalesced more into A and K dominance, you saw 4/6 grooves in high level play anyway. This is also a game that existed in an era where FGs didn’t receive updates and balance checks (see 3s, mvc2)
Even then, GGXXAC has multiple defensive options that are obviously available to everyone at the start but new players can’t really use SB or know when IB/FD gives you frame advantage vs. regular block and on what moves because that requires a lot of studying.
The issue that I feel most pressed to address is how to get new players in and keep them interested. Like I’ve said, though anyone can counter this if they think its something else, I think the biggest reason new players get disinterested with FGs really fast (provided they had initial interest) is because they feel they have to put in too much work to get good results. You can say to this, well we don’t want players like that anyway - and that’s fine.
I think we can distort the concept of put in too much work. That feeling usually comes from a combination of execution barriers, getting beat down, not knowing how to block / wanting constantly to be in a mentality where winning/doing damage is the motto. You see people online in tekken revolution who pick up Kazuya and they spam lasers and the invincibility frame counter moves because they want to win mindlessly. Randoms online in SF4 will literally spam shoryu with ryu all day because its such a high powered move and satisfying to hit. This is the era we are stepping into, really and truly.
I think we can warp the mentality somewhat, by doing a 180 on how we approach new players who want to learn the game. I think we have to move the main source of knowledge for a game from youtube/the depths of a forum to the actual game / online. If they can learn enough sitting at home and feel challenged/ interested, they will probably go on youtube eventually / forums. I think we need to show players right off the bat that they can earn lots of damage by doing mixups and not by spamming flashy moves. We need (as said above) challenges that are not only combos, but also mixups, blocking mixups, etc. I remember I was playing TTT2 with a friend who literally knew nothing about the game and he wanted to play kunimitsu. I taught him one ambiguous high low mixup with her after knockdown (f+3,3 2/4) and after that he came back a week later asking if he could go into training mode to learn this BnB. Moved me half to tears.
3S technically got a “patch.” We just rejected it since the 990512 build was better than 990608.
And even back then, A was clearly going to be dominant (even during testing, BAS was already saving some A-Groove tech).
Also, what I think games like CvS2 and A3 did wrong was add too many wrinkles and complications to what used to be a relatively simple formula. There comes a point where all these additional systems and sub-systems just turns people off from learning the game at all.
When I talk about 50/50 vortexs I mean pixel guessing mix ups. Take UMvC3, If you use a cross up move + dante jam session, you can make it impossible to determine which way to block on incoming. No amount of training mode will help you discern which way you should’ve blocked, and because of that you lose a whole character and have to do it again. Incoming has NO options unless you’re sentinel to prevent this scenario. Suddenly a 3v3 game turned only 1 character seeing play, that’s a terrible system. True guess scenario should exist but they should occur with sensible balances: limited damage potential, something preventing a repeating vortex, how easy it is to set up, etc…
Mix ups are good and ambiguous ones as well, just games have let them take single hits and turn them into ‘GG’ because your opponent couldn’t guess right. Beyond the first hit to set it up, the opponent did nothing wrong, and you have to accept 1 random hit = potential TOD. That’s bad when it falls outside scenario specific things (SC5 Ring outs are 1 hit TOD, but they are fairly balanced as you can take steps to prevent it with positioning and options you choose. No random hit = death. Usually they have limited moves to do so and the threat of RO is only prevalent in certain cases).
Point is, unreactable guessing is a bad system. It has a place and time, but we see some incredibly stupid trends in FGs where it takes the skill out of the game and makes it a 1 player technical execution dice roll. Creative setups in neutral game are where ambiguous set ups should exist, not in free snow balls set ups (EX: block a bad neutral game fireball and eat a free jump in cross over: GOOD, Get hit for 33% life, have to wake up to a meaty cross over that leads to the same knockdown: RETARDED). If at any time the offensive player has no fucking clue which way you should’ve blocked and the set up is a vortex…you have an incredibly stupid system going on.
Now If you have a mind game like a low = leads to minimal damage combo vortex/over head = frame advantage/SPD = big damage no set up. Things are fine. You can guess, or you can block the low even though you risk not reacting to the over head or taking an unreactable SPD. You gamble to avoid the vortex. You made a decision in a guess scenario to target the biggest threat.
Sure, you may be right about that. It could also have been a problem with the entire V-ism/CC system in general. I would have loved to see what CvS2 would have been like without A groove, now that I think about it. I still think somewhat that having a simplified control scheme and the option of “upgrading” may work though I guess that has yet to be seen / tested.
We still want to find a middleman between keeping players interested and accounting for low attention span and low general interest in FGs already. What I really want to address is how to reach out to the every day gamer who, forgive me for being cliche, just sits on his/her ass and plays COD/EA Sports games. I think that problem gets somewhat addressed if we have a game that has a good 1P mode as I’ve said before, that also teaches you the game. I’m not sure why the idea isn’t being explored already (probably because the scene focuses so much on 2P competition) but I think it might be a good way to garner some interest.
