Take somebody like Ricky Ortiz though. Why does he have to bother learning somebody other than Wolverine when he gets by just fine? Why bother? Players need to step up their understanding of the game more than anything to stop Grand Finals Iron Fist.
You also forget that a large chunk of the “new tech” is complete garbage anyways.
“YO CHECK OUT THIS NEW THOR RESET!” etc etc
I think there a couple of reasons we see not too many characters breaking through other than the usual characters at tourneys.
-
You play to win: It takes a lot of time to develop a new team and despite what anyone says, even though learning the commands for a character can be easy, it takes a lot of time to actually learn how to use a character properly. If you are playing to win, you have to ask the question “I have limited time. What’s the best use of it?” I think most people have realized that it doesn’t make sense to pump time into other characters if the payoff isn’t there. Therefore, it makes more sense to pick characters that are straight-forward in their strengths, master them and make them work for as many situations as possible. Some people would cite Morrigan as an exception to mid-tier turned into top-tier, but I don’t buy that. The bible listed all the things that she could do regarding zoning (just like it did with R.R. Log assist) and people just didn’t pay attention since they had other characters on their minds. If there is easy tech, it will be discovered fast enough. Also, if you are playing for money or bragging rights, are you really going to risk learning a new character, traveling to a tourney to only get blown up and waste your cash Like Viscant posted? Doubt it
-
Most characters have crappy assists: I’ve said this a lot of times, but one of the main reasons we don’t see enough diversity aside from point characters is that most characters have really bad assists. If they can’t add to team as an assist, chances are they aren’t going to make the cut. I still would like to see an updated of UMvC3 where everyone gets 3 good assists. I think that alone would improve the viability of a lot of characters.
-
High Damage and Easy confirms: Since almost everybody has a near ToD for nearly every character in the game (especially when you throw in TACs and DHCs), most matches boil down to who can get the first confirm-able hit. With so many things going on, the last thing a player wants to worry about is hitting a combo that has a super hard confirm and not high damage. Almost all the top characteristics character have these characteristics, and it’s pretty much a requirement if you want to play to win in a game as hectic as Marvel.
If you really want to see some diversity, I would recommend running a parallel tournament to the general Marvel Tourney where only the bottom-half tier can be selected (or you can only have 1 “common” character). Make it identical in terms of payout and other things so people would have a reason to actually spend time on it. Remember, most people are playing to win (usually money) so if there is a way to win 2 MARVEL Tourneys, then you’d see people latch onto that faster.
If I have any interest in said characters, sure.
Low tier MVC3 tournaments would be weird. Too much grey area to lay down any concrete rules. Would be cool to see happen though.
Who would get to determine what “low tier” is?
Low tier UMvC3 would have Hsien Ko, PW, Tron, She Hulk. Ghost Rider, Shuma. That’s pretty much about it. Not even sure if Arthur and Iron Fist fits into these, they would absolutely dominate if they were allowed.
While I would leave it to tourney organizers to decide and yes it is a little grey, I think executing it is pretty simple. In terms of picking which characters are fair,
I know a lot of people track stats on who makes it out of pools and the teams they use (hell, we have the results on SRK). Start listing characters by the frequency they are used in “out-of-pools” matches and just cut the top 25 (or top 20 or whatever organizers want.) That way, you’d be indirectly pushing people to play less seen characters and move it so “lower-tier” characters get more representation. Obviously, the list should be posted with the tourney ad so people would know which characters to practice.
If you want to leave everything else the same, it’s just character banning in essence, which is something that isn’t too hard.
How would Arthur and Iron Fist dominate? Iron Fist can be stopped dead by a bunch of the cast who have mediocre keep away, and/or super armor (Deadpool, Trish, Hulk, Nemesis, Chris, Storm, Iron Man etc.) not too mention assists would still play a critical role.
I love Arthur, but he only really dominates in XF3 with Golden Armor. I think most people now know that since he has crappy air mobility and few really good defensive options, all you have to do is snap him in and then he’s pretty much dead.
I respected your post but I have a few issues with your first point, which i think are reflective of what a lot of others are doing (but not necessarily yourself lol)-
It seems Yipes and Combofiend picked up Strange and started winning tourny’s with him pretty much of the bat. Also, Justin Wong practically picked up Spencer, Vergil and Frank West at the beginning of the week and at the end of the week came second at ECT4, and won CEO the next week with them. And all of these guys had spent a majority of both games running almost completely different teams, or characters in the case of Strange. Not having enough time may be some people’s excuse for their team selection. But I don’t think it’s a justification not to bother investing even a little time into other characters.
Still, it took Chris G in Ultimate to make people, including myself, realize how effective she can be. And he didn’t even use her right away.
And again, there are loads of other characters who had been there that people didn’t bother to look into, but it’s taken others to show that they can in fact be used. Strange is the most recent example of this. And I remember people saying Vergil wasn’t that great, he had low damage and the rest (though everybody and their mother was using him in Kubodsgarden). This isn’t tech like the infinites, and Nova’s DHC glitch we’re talking about- these are characters who were there for all to see at the character select screen.
I feel that unless people stop waiting to see what’s already out there to see what’s effective and start looking into things themselves, then we’re gonna keep having ‘hindsight is 20/20’ discoveries. Which aren’t really discoveries at all, but rather realizations that could have be made much sooner if we went to training room rather than youtube.
Fair points, but I would argue that players of that status are capable of picking up nearly anyone and using them better than 95% of us. Also, Spencer & Vergil were already proven to be good investments (a weaker case could maybe be made for Frank but I don’t really see him that much) so my guess is that top-tier players like J.Wong were studying them as pocket characters in case they needed them. However, your point does still stand, they weren’t using them in battle tested scenarios for a long time until they started winning. They basically, learned 'em, used 'em and won with 'em. Touche on that good sir
While I agree with you to an extent, I think that latent execution ability may be the difference in some cases such as Morrigan. I know a lot of people who’ve played Morrigan at our local place since Vanilla and definitely knew about her strengths but couldn’t do soul fist spam effectively no matter how hard they practice. Also, her higher damage combos are f’ing hard man! Many players (including myself) have trouble doing things that have precise inputs to make them viable, especially with the speed of Marvel. Hell, it took me since Vanilla Day 1 to finally be able to use Doom dash-cancels mid-block screen to cross-up opponents. I think that for a lot of players, the amount of time they would have to put into to use the good stuff of a character is pretty brutal. For people who have enough previous experience in fighting games, they probably can get more return for less time, so it may be less “risky” for them to look into characters. However, you are right, just because we haven’t seen those characters being used doesn’t mean that they aren’t viable, it just means that someone hasn’t “made” them viable yet.
Agreed, but like I said before, my mediocre execution does make it difficult to try out new things consistently. I think for a lot of people in my camp, we don’t always know if the reason something is “not worth it” is because it’s either just crap or it is just our execution is holding us back. Man, I wish I had god-like execution…Oh well, I’ll just have to stick to VF5:FS where I can actually do everything.
Thank you for the thoughtful response! Always nice to have meaningful discourse!
x/Arthur/Shuma would be one of the better low tier teams I think with X being like she hulk, Thor or Ghost rider. Mystic Ray is the closest thing the low tiers have to vajra/missiles. For arthur I dont even think he needs gold armour to handle the low tier with his hawkeye esque keepaway.
I think there’s a lot of good assists in this game. You don’t want characters like Vergil having really good assists because it’ll be cute that everyone has good assists.
What about getting told his wife died? He probably shed a single manly tear for that.
Will the game remain fun with those 6-8 characters?
If yes, that’s all that matters. Variety is overrated, specially since people will just flock to the top tiers and shotos either way.
If there ever comes a point where people just say “fuck it” and run Vergil or Zero on every team because anything else is too much work then yes, I probably will lose interest. The variety of viable teams in this game is pretty high, but when you have those two characters that can wreck entire teams without the help of assists it kind of gets stupid. I guess its just beyond Capcom at this point to make a game without retard friendly high tier characters.
I think this game would be much better with two changes: no Buster cancelling for Zero, Vergil only get Spiral Swords in Devil Trigger.
I don’t think this game will ever come down to 6-8 teams. Look at ChrisG: He used Virgil at CEO and did okay with him, but it wasn’t enough to propel him over Justin’s tier-whore team. A few weeks later he goes to Evo and used his original Ultimate team and beat out Justin’s tier-whore team. Last month he beat FChamp by replacing Akuma with Hawkeye.
My point is that so far strategy and execution are more important than tiers.
I think you’re underrating the community here. Now that the game has come out of its infancy, most of the people playing this game seriously have learned how to use and abuse the engine to win. It’s not like every person playing this game is able to innovate viable technology that will be come part of the standard metagame, or that they would want to if they could. You make it seem like the mid and lower tiers would be higher if people invested more time into discovery, but most people have a good understanding of how each character works and rates them accordingly.
I find it adorable that some of you still think “tier-whoring” is something to be ashamed of.
It depends on how you define “tier-whoring”. Using top tiers and avoiding characters that blantantly suck is nothing to be ashamed of. Bandwagoning to top tiers and only using characters for their cheap stuff, with no interest in learning the game’s fundamentals, is certainly something to be ashamed of. To be fair anti-tier whoring and only using low tier characters is probably far more scrubbish and stupid than tier whoring.
Honestly through.
Even if a game is balanced, people are going to use the top tier more than the low tier. People will always want the unfair the advantage because they will use anything they can win
lol what am I even reading