have you seen how long it takes for zero to kill you in umvc3? or vergil dumping 5 bars? that shit takesssss foreverrrrrrrrr and those are combos, not infinites
a combo can take longer than an infinite. I’ve seen some long ass GG combos and the time it takes to perform them, some characters could of died in mvc2 already.
so by your logic, combos are a problem too because they take longer than an infinite in some cases lol
and yet, mvc2 was one of the most popular tournament games for 10 years even having multiple parts of the world participate. Do you know how hype that game was?
Developers now have to account for how people will feel when getting hit by a combo? What kind of everyone gets a trophy league, entitlement nonsense are you on?
Dear Capcom,
The combos in your game have had a serious negative effect on my self esteem, I am respectfully asking that you patch them immediately, failure to do so will result in legal action.
Hey, I agree with you that combos in MvC3 are too long!
And yeah, actually you hit it right on the head that with that one. Combos that are too long (in seconds, hit count is irrelevant) are problematic. There’s a happy medium of course, but conceptually it’s absolutely true.
A 15-20 second combo with nothing the target can do? That’s a problem.
About MvC2, I do know how hype people were! But that’s a specific crowd… and honestly that crowd doesn’t care much about infinite combos anyways, just about, and they’re pretty much guaranteed sales. The concern is everyone else.
“Big” is relative though, It’d be interesting to see what tournament participation for MvC2 topped out at and what year that was (especially as compared to attendance for other games).
No, silly, if people get frustrated, they’ll STOP PLAYING. And they’ll be that much less likely to buy the update or the next game.
That’s the whole name of the game here. Keeping player numbers up helps the super-dedicated player just as much, if not more, than it helps the casual/hobbyist player.
This case is just especially clear because it’s not a trade. Infinite combos only hurt games (for the reasons stated above), so there’s no payoff for leaving them in.
*All the designers understand this. *Thats why they’re so aggressive in dealing with infinites and such, and why people like MikeZ put so much work into infinite prevention.
Nobody who actually understands the issues at all is in favor of infinites*.
*although there’s room to argue emergency patching and such, there’s cost and development work involved in that, so its a more complex issue.
There’s a reason why a lot of casual players don’t like being comboed for over 20 seconds per combo. They feel like they’ve lost control over the game and they don’t like it. How many times have you seen casual players mistake a really long combo for an infinite? How many times have you seen casual players complain about endless wakeup games in Tekken or Soul Calibur? Lots of players don’t like the feeling of being completely at the mercy of another player, even if that is due to their own inability to get out of the situation. There’s a reason why FPSs sell so well. In many cases, no matter how poorly you’re doing, you’re never put into a slippery slope situation where you just do worse and worse.
A lot of fighting games have added systems to allow players to still interact while being comboed to let the player getting hit to feel like they’re still playing the game to mitigate this problem. The simplest example of this is air teching. While you’re being comboed, you still need to press buttons at certain points to allow yourself to air tech.
Other examples include:
Exchange counters (MvC3)
Pressing buttons when getting hit to slightly reduce damage (Melty Blood)
Throw breaking mid combo (Blazblue)
Burst (lots of games)
And even when it isn’t a system mechanic in and of itself, there can be opportunities for player interaction during infinites. MvC2 is another shining example. During the Magneto ROM, both players know that it isn’t the best strategy to continue the ROM until the undizzy. Instead, the player being comboed has to stay awake during the combo to watch for the reset and be prepared to do a new block or throw tech. In the end, the only practical ToD infinite was Ironman’s infinite, and it was still pretty difficult to get that initial hit in. Blocking or teching the reset is obviously beyond the knowledge of a casual player, but it’s something I believe that allowed the game to survive as long as it did in the tournament scene.
Long combos aren’t a problem as long as there’s a way for a player to remain invested in the game during the course of the combo. In a small way, this includes the player doing the combo dropping it, but that’s a relatively minor thing. It’s best for the game to allow for some ability for the player being comboed to do something meaningful that doesn’t take away the fact that the player doing the combo has landed that hit and is now able to do some damage.
Your not even saying they should make the game better to play, your saying the game shouldn’t frustrate players WHILE THEY’RE GETTING HIT BY COMBOS. Your saying the game shouldn’t make the person who is losing feel like a loser while they are losing. How the hell is a video game supposed to control the fact that the person playing it has anger, or esteem, or self control issues, or just plain sucks at fighting games.
While I agree, your argument isn’t the argument of the people Xes is talking about, I doubt any of them are looking to block the reset during ROM they probably don’t know that option exists. Exchange counters are a scrub placebo because there is no need to throw an exchange into a combo by default, the option to break it just like a mid combo throw only exists if the player performing the combo allows it.
As for Soul Calibur wakeup, learn to block, its the most basic defensive option there is, how do you have any right to complain about getting hit if you don’t know how to block.
Hyper Inferno said it pretty well above. (and sorry about that broken quote tag). The idea is that you want people to always feel like they have some kind of influence on the outcome and always have a chance. You do have to be careful making that kind of thing though, or you end up with XFactor.
Anyways, people feel like losers when losing because they lost. Don’t act like I’m saying the end of each round should have a picture of a ‘participation’ trophy
… although, as I think of it, why should I want the other player to feel like a loser? If anything I want him to feel like he can come back at me and take another shot. Anybody who grew up in arcades has to know that feeling… clearing a machine is only fun until you’re stuck playing the computer over and over.
And it's a *part* of making the game better to play. Making a fighting game is an intensely complex undertaking and there are subjects of concern that players don't even begin to think about. Things like making people feel like there's something they can do is part of that. (And again, every single game designer does that and has put in design elements to encourage that feeling).
Try to get out of your own space and think of it as a designer would. It's a whole different feeling.
The MvC2 example was more or less trying to explain part of the reason why it was able to survive. There were enough people dedicated and had learned the game to know about the resets and stuff to pretty much not have to worry about casual players not knowing about resets.
“Blocking or teching the reset is obviously beyond the knowledge of a casual player, but it’s something I believe that allowed the game to survive as long as it did in the tournament scene”
Regarding exchange combos, it doesn’t even matter if they’re the scrubs way out of extending combos or dealing more damage. The fact is, it forces a player being comboed to be active and to be aware that an exchange could come. If you know your opponent tends to just zone out during combos, why wouldn’t you throw in exchanges or mid combo throws? It forces a player to remain invested in the game simply because the option is there, and that makes those longer combos more justifiable because it keeps players interacting in situations where the game is nominally single player.
Do you really expect a casual player to rationally think about their decisions in a game? They want to press buttons and deal damage. Why else do you see so many people waking up with Shoryuken? They don’t want to block, they want to be on the offense. The point is, many many people entering into a fighting game are casual players. They have to get past each barrier of frustration of casual play in order to get to a competitive level. For each barrier a game has, the less and less people will actually rise to the level of competitive play and add to the scene. Learning to block on wakeup to avoid wakeup games is something all fighting games have as a way to get out of this first level of frustration (with a couple exceptions in unblockable setups). I’m sure we all have friends who have tried fighting games and have just refused to learn the game. But I’m also positive that we have had friends that were willing to learn about blocking and the more technical aspects of the game.
However, different people have different tolerances for the length of being comboed. Most competitive fighting game players now have gotten past that frustration by simply dealing with it. For a lot of casual players, that’s simply not enough and they don’t rise to the competitive level. They need something else to not be annoyed, and some examples of those are the mechanics I listed above. These mechanics won’t stop the ragiest of the ragiest casual players, but they do bring more people into the fold of playing fighters competitively than if the mechanics simply didn’t exist.
There comes a point where catering to get more casual players into the competitive part of the game actively ruins how tournament worthy a game is. For a vocal group of people, SFIV had that problem with ultras (overcoming the barrier of being unable to do super fancy looking moves). However, SFIV did draw in a TON of new players, many of which rose to the competitive level.
Edit: Oh, and MvC3 X-Factor is another thing of catering to casuals that probably ends up doing more harm than good in terms of # of competitive players added to tournament worthyness.
MvC2 is an anomaly in pretty much every way possible. There is no good reason why a game slapped together like turned out the way it did, but it turned out to be an incredible and exciting game.
The only way I can kinda rationalize it is that MvC2 was one of the last games in an era where arcade was still quite relevant, and the entire mindset of people playing videogames was in general way more hardcore than it is now.
However… do you have any numbers to back up your statement? Sure, we all have fond memories of MvC2 being super hype, but what were the attendance numbers for EVO or the other majors back then? I mean, based on tournament schedules alone, I see quite a few more majors being advertised for MvC3 than I remember for MvC2, although this could entirely be because of the Internet’s power in organizing these things.
Based on the numbers given, here are my possible responses:
MvC2 had a larger active tournament scene than MvC3:
Well, then yes. It is an anomaly, and I have nothing to add.
MvC2 had a smaller active tournament scene than MvC3:
This actually supports my theory. If MvC2 had a smaller active tournament scene than MvC3 (raw numbers here, not levels of hype), and yet sold more, this means that more casual players were unable to overcome being frustrated by the game to actively learn how to play the game (re: Cable).
MvC2 had a larger active tournament scene than MvC3, but not by a significant amount:
Also supports my theory. If a game is super popular and sells a ton, but doesn’t generate a large ratio of competitive players, there’s probably a lot of things in it that turn casual players away from learning the game and becoming competitive at it.
FPS has done this. RTS has done this. RPG has done this. Racing Games have done this. Why shouldn’t a fighting game FORCE you to think about your actions? it’s complete bullshit to me believe that a game can not be successful if they do so. Even War of Worldcraft can make you look stupid for making bad mistakes, why can’t a fighting game do so?You have to play by the rules of a game in order to win.
For fuck sakes that’s what made Mass Effect, Megaman, Dark Souls,etc popular. The issue of most games in the fighting genre is that most don’t explain why playing by the rules matter.
People say that a lot, but I’ve never seen any evidence quoted, or really any way sales of MvC2 can be related to modern games.
How do you even compare sales of a game that’s been out for almost 15 years, had a strong arcade presence, and has been released for 5 different consoles to a game that’s been out a year and has no arcade presence at all?
Tournament attendance would be an answer, but I can’t find any hard numbers. (excepting that 1800+ people signed up just for SF4 at evo 2010)
Every single one of those games takes account of the effect we’re talking about here.
Just taking WoW into account, that’s why they spent years reducing the duration and effect of mind control and fear in PvP. People getting frustrated being unable to control their characters without an escape was a problem, and one they kept trying to fix.
Anyways, its all about FORCING you to think about your actions. If there’s an exceptionally long combo (or an infinite) that the subject can do nothing about, there’s a tendency to zone out… its similar to people putting away or unplugging their sticks during super animations they know will finish them off, or why people will GG after one failed push sometimes in Starcraft.
On the other hand, if you design your game smartly so people have to remain engaged, they’ll stay more interested.
It happens all the time, and in every game modern game.
And it's not zero-sum either. You can have these things in mind and not degrade the overall gameplay experience, you just have to be actually smart about it. That's why joe schmoe off the street can't just come in and become a successful designer.
MVC3’s size is a continuation of MVC2’s growth.
Tournaments literally could not be the size that they are now in 2000, 2001 due to what we were running them on, namely arcade cabinets. In general a 150 person MVC2 tournament took 8 to 12 hours to run and CVS2 took even longer. At the first ECC I went to MVC2 ended at 8:00am. It started just after noon the day before and it ended at 8:00am, the sun went down and came back up before the tournament ended.
As numbers got larger and console games became more available we began to move over to consoles, which meant you could run a game on however many setups that you needed, all of this growth took place during MVC2’s reign. MVC3 was just born into this environment without having to prove it was worth all of this growth. It didn’t have to build its own scene, it had people waiting for it for 10 years, a tournament environment already set up for larger numbers, larger burst of new players from SF4, a huge marketing push from capcom leading up to its launch and streams.
MVC2 spent its whole life working hard building its fortune and MVC3 is its rich son who doesn’t know what work is and has a solid gold jet ski.
MvC3 is substantially smaller (at least as far as sales reflect) than SF4, MK, or Tekken though. Those are what we should be looking at, probably.
Edit: especially when we’re talking about combo length and infinites. The 2 things you can say about MvC3 is that it has extremely long combos and plenty of TOD situations.
BTW this just came up on the Norcal knockouts stream. The next time someone bitches about how they feel after a loss show them this and tell them to man the fuck up.
[media=youtube]PuqLMzr-1b0[/media]
Red Venom’s infinite in Marvel 1 is like a 1 frame link or something, I swear. after you get the venom web youre supposed to go lk crmp hp repeat, but they always drop
You guys just don’t get it. This isn’t even remotely about personal taste, or about me or Hyper Inferno getting pissed off at being combo’d. This is about how people work and the ways people enjoy games.
Acting tough and telling people to man up is good and all, but it still doesn’t get people to play the game.
We shouldn’t give a whether damn or not the other guy gets pissed or mans up or whatever… until we realize that each and every person that gets frustrated and quits ghettoizes the genre a little more.
And again, its not like this is a rare or unique problem, it’s a basic concept of game design.
My very first match of my very first major (Texas Showdown) was against Ricky Ortiz. I almost took a round, and then after that it was just brutal – even got perfect’d in one round. I don’t think anything has made me more excited to study and improve. After every loss I take I hit the guide and read up on the moves that kept getting me to learn the match up better and learn.
The only thing bad thing about losing is walking away from it with no motivation and nothing learned.
[SIZE=12px]adj [/SIZE][FONT=lucida sans unicode]ˈhärd[/FONT]
***a *(1): difficult to accomplish or resolve :[SIZE=14px]troublesome <hardproblems> <the true story was hard to come by> [/SIZE](2) **:**difficult to comprehend or explain <a hard concept>
[SIZE=12px]noun [/SIZE][FONT=lucida sans unicode]ˈge-(ˌ)tō[/FONT] b: a situation that resembles a ghetto especially in conferring inferior status or limiting opportunity <the pink-collar ghetto>
