Been seeing a lot of hate directed toward Viscant (and Noel Brown, for that matter) for terrible reasons lately. I’m definitely not a fanboy of either of these guys, so I won’t allow you to turn your brain off and level that attack at me before reading the rest of this. I do respect Viscant for one thing, though: he’s fully aware of how cheap his team is, and he’s not afraid to win with it. Hating on a guy for picking the best tools available to him to win is really, really scrubby.
Now, I understand where some of that hate and the accompanying accusations of “FRAUD” are coming from. You think players like Justin Wong and Combofiend have much stronger fighting game fundamentals than Viscant, and you get salty when you see them lose to L L L L L L L. Fine. I’m sure it’s true that JWong and Combofiend are the more solid players, as partly evidenced by their utter dismantling of Viscant this weekend at Devastation. But if you’re upset that picking Phoenix gives a player such an apparent leg up in this game that their skills at the character-select screen can sometimes completely overshadow fighting game fundamentals, shouldn’t you be directing your hate at the game that allows that to happen?
Think about this. What if Viscant was the only dude who was willing to use X-Factor because all the other players thought that it was too broken and using it would be an affront to their dignity? Would you be right in saying that Viscant is a fraud for winning by using such a cheap tactic? No, you’d look like a complete and total idiot, along with everyone else not using X-Factor. If you’re serious about winning, you’d be a fool not to exploit every single broken, unfair, cheap, ridiculously strong tactic at your disposal.
If you guys are right that using Phoenix gives Viscant such a huge advantage over his fellow non-Phoenix-using competitors (and I’m not saying that you are right), or even that the use of Phoenix or other top-tier teams like Wolvie/Akuma put the game on easy-mode autopilot for top players, then that makes MvC3 a garbage competitive game. That is really the root of the sentiment behind calling Viscant a fraud.
So, since you can’t hate on a guy for using what the game gives him, you need to either level up your anti-Phoenix strats, decide that, hey, maybe Phoenix doesn’t devolve the game into a complete joke at a high level of play, or conclude that the game should not be played competitively unless bannings are in order. And stop littering stream chat with your scrubby bullshit.
yeah you fuckin heard me. if everyone flocked to the toppest top tier every time instead of being mr. pony show gimmick tricks, then developers would actually try to balance their games, cuz they’ll know that people will only play what is MOST UNBALANCED.
ALSO, people that think they are super cool for using low tiers are usually cocky morons that chalk up their losses to “THAT GUY IS A SHIT HEAD HE IS USING TOP TIERS”. another way of looking at it would be, if youre using top tiers, YOU HAVE NO EXCUSES WHEN YOU LOSE. so man up. low tiers are for excuse makers.
Combofiend’s anti Phoenix tech has always been the strongest of any player and he was the one doing the stuff like running to the corner early when everyone else was trying to fight her in the mid screen like idiots. It’s gotten to the point though where Combofiend has created MID SCREEN anti Dark Phoenix tech which is ridiculously considering how easy it is for Dark Phoenix to kill you if you’re not in the corner. Good shit from him as always.
Yeah, someone in the MvC3 commentary thread was like “GF has 2 players that should be there”
wtf? you should only be in grand finals if you can win every match to get there, no other reason. Scoreboard doesn’t care who you use or your skill, if you can’t win, you shouldn’t be there.
Totally agree. Though I’m not sure if Viscant let the hate get to him or what, changing to that weird team to troll winner’s finals. Should have stuck to his guns IMO
I’m pretty sure he brought that team out because he already knew ComboFiend had a ton of anti Phoenix tech. If he had played his Phoenix team first I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t lose just as badly. He basically didn’t win a match any way.
Combo goes in the Comboratory way too much for Viscant at this point. He just has way too much shit that blows up Phoenix now and this is before her nerfs.
I actually like Viscant, but what I dislike is when someone is playing a Non-Phoenix team, and since he’s about to get eliminated, he switches to Phoenix. It’s like “Oh, I’m getting blown up so I’ll go cheap to win for sure”. It’s perfectly legal, but that Last Resort change is certainly not nice at all.
I respect Viscant’s skills, specially for his Wesker since he actually manages to get him in many times (And most of those times, he has to hold back from using Hypers because he has to save meter, meaning that even if he wasn’t Phoenix, he’d still do great).
Phoenix alone is a dumb character, but if someone wants to pick her and win like that, it’s their problem, can’t really judge them. Besides, she adds that extra hype when you are either playing or watching a match, and she gets killed, like with that Arthur who got Filipino Champ.
No, I’m not questioning it, neither I’m saying they are doing something wrong. But I don’t like that change.
I’m going to give you a nice example, Viscant played an Alternate team against Combofiend, but since it failed, he went back to Phoenix. Now, do I have something against that? No. He is a traditional Phoenix player, and he was simply going back to his real team.
What I dislike is when someone picks Phoenix even if they have no experience with her, and lose for making that mistake. So what I’m saying is, stay true to yourself, and if you are going Broken Tier, learn how to play it so you don’t turn out humiliating yourself even worse than with your regular team.
It should be noted that the vast majority of people on these forums would fail miserably to beat a top player even if they picked Akuma in ST. I sort of agree with the OP, even though I find it to be a useless topic, I am just playing devil’s advocate here. This has nothing to do with how Phoenix is cos I have never even played MvC3, I just wanted to point out that it may not be an easy task to win even with an absolutely broken character such as Akuma, because the game engine still applies and it may not be clear or easy to execute the broken tactics. In the specific case I presented, if you are not good with single-button reversals and do not have 1/2-frame precision in your inputs, you will not be able to apply the universal inescapable traps. You will just be using an unfair character, which top players - depending on the character - will destroy just cos they have much more experience, knowledge, precision and timing.
I see two trends related to new games, and they both are disturbing, IMHO. The most obvious one is games getting patched frequently, which prevents or at least creates barriers for players to fully explore the games. The other are people who are relatively new, have not mastered any game, hearing other people claim certain things are fine and repeating without proper experience and knowledge. This phoenix topic is one of them: 95% of the people who claim she is fine are not in position to state such a thing, just like 95%of the people who claimed Akuma in HDR was mid tier were not. But they were very vocal about it.
I haven’t seen many people even mentioning Viscant in this section, to be honest. I do not see it as an issue, in the first place. There is a thread on a similar thing recently, BTW.