Ban macros because they are so superior to the joystick that I’ve been playing on for so many years.
Ban joysticks because they are so superior to the pad that I’ve been playing on for so many years.
Ban [random top player(s)] because they are so superior to the (optional “lack of” here) skill that I’ve had for so many years.
Ban “Banned” from the domination section because it is so superior to anything that I could write in so many years.
So far theres only one post in the thread that almost makes me want to put a serious reply.
It doesn’t bother me so much. It’s just, to me, it takes a bit away from the game. I’m a technical person, and I love me my combos and finger dexterity and all that jazz. I agree, having Macros for a Pad is probably okay, seeing as how pads, in general, cause problems due to button layout. However, Macros for Pads equals Macros for sticks, and that’s why I’m against it: because I don’t think stick players should have Macros. But if we prevent Stick players from having Macros, then we should also prevent pad players from having Macros, especially seeing as how good some people have gotten on pads without Macros.
Now, as to why I don’t want Macro’s on a stick: it really just makes things a bit easier for execution. To me, nothing is more impressive than someone who can execute something consistently, despite difficulties in performing it. I mean, there will ALWAYS be those chances that someone misses an uppercut when you jump at him, or someone screws up a Parry they successfully do in Training Mode every day. People will mess up Combos from time to time. A failed Kara Throw can sometimes mean the difference between landing a momentum-changing throw or eating a Super. Missing a Blue Roman Cancel can rob you of 30% extra damage. Messing up on that emergency Roll Cancel can cost you a chunk of life. And so on and so forth.
The thing is this: those that can overcome adversity, nerves, pressure, stress, etc. to consistently perform things without messing up deserve to win. I LOVE watching players pull off these things consistently and, somehow, if we allow Macros, seeing someone pull off the same thing with a Macro just makes it less impressive with me. Knowing that people can be prone to mess up on weird Roman Cancel Combos or Roll Cancels and such makes it that much more impressive when they don’t mess up. So I don’t think it right that we help them more by letting them use Macros.
Macros may not make a player be able to perform some of these things at a HUGELY more consistent basis. In fact, I largely suspect most pad players will ignore it… a 7th or 8th button to keep track of can be one too many. But regardless, people can get used to it… and it can be beneficial. And maybe I’m just coming from a purely technical/technician player’s standpoint, but it just feels… “weaker” to me to allow Stick players use macros. Not a strong argument, I understand, but I do feel that way.
Ok, I am going to have to back myself out of this debate now. I really didn’t want it to get dragged out like this. In fact, the only reason I even posted back into this thread was that I was called out to do so without using the terms “Arcade” “Tradition” etc
It’s just turned into a mess now, with nobody really ever going to be satisfied with either argument.
What really, honestly, intrigues me is that nearly every pad player I see mentions how much harder it is to play on pad, which is why they need macros. It really boils down to a generation gap I think. New School (used in a very loose way, since even I am not old school) pad players grew up on macros. The community was already established without macros, because that’s how we learned to play. But now the new kids on the block want to shake up the system and cause more harm than good. A good stick player, with macros, just is not something I really wanna see. The last thing I want to hear is how evo blows because the people who won did so using macros, and thus it wasn’t a real tournament anyway.
Evo is supposed to be the highest level of competition. It’s supposed to be where a players true skills are put to the test, where somebody either puts up or shuts up, where you can truly rank yourself against the elite of the elite, and possibly take home a title (or at least turn some heads).
It is very slowly turning into something that is trying to be much more mainstream. It’s kinda like when punk sold out, or skateboarding gets popular. It’s just a little sad, that’s all, to see something that is originally done for the LOVE turned into something to make money. Evo is slowly selling out.
And for what? To try and attract a new audience to a dying scene? To get the thousands of new generation pad players to come to evo? They won’t, because to tell you the truth, they won’t even know what evo is when the time comes.
Let the hardcores keep what they have, without picking away at it piece by piece.
While I have sympathies for some of your comments this time around, as I grew up on a stick too, if you take a step back to look at that mentality it’s really just a form of elitism, or to coin a neologism, tradition-ism - We want things to remain the way we had it when we grew up. We want them to remain “our thing” and get those “newbies” away. But look at the games we play - at Evo, only ST could be considered old school in any way. The rest have come out on modern consoles and have people just coming of age buying them with each new release. Unless you want to fight the same people when you are 50, there has to be new blood. There really isn’t an argument for this other than tradition, and that’s pretty arbitrary as has already been discussed.
And there will be new fighting games. New fighting games meant to appeal to new audiences and improve on old schemes. These can hardly be old-school or steeped in tradition; they are just adopted by the “old-school community.” My worry isn’t that Evo and our formats become more mainstream, it’s that the games *themselves *become mainstream *and *lack depth. If they have depth and are mainstream, there’s nothing wrong with that at all - just more competition, or if they suck, more money to be won. Plus they fuel the economics behinds the games we love. That is to say we get more of them. My biggest peave with the industry is games like SSBM and DOA. While they have merits - and this is my opinion - they have serious depth issues, even if one might consider them fun games. You can reach top-tier skill in those games pretty quick, or worse, there is no top-tier skill because things are so random so as to allow everyone a chance to win.
But for the record I don’t think giving macros really hurts much. I don’t think it will determine any fights - if the guy beat you with them he most likely could beat you without them. Mind games, wake-ups, and general knowledge of the game will always be your prime determinants. Macros don’t help you with these - at best, they help you implement them.
Still whining I see? I think I hear the call of the scrub…
Perhaps some of you will recall our criteria for banning a technique: it must be proven to be a “gamebreaking glitch.” Do you for one second believe that macro buttons are worse than RCs and infinites? Banning macros in the first places was a compromise with the arcade players while we were moving to consoles. It was a mistake, which we are correcting this year.
Hi commander, a while ago in a huge post of yours you quoted me.
You said something like, “Of course you can configure buttons in Tekken 5”. I forgot to write that I was describing previous console tournament rules.
I agree sticks are better than pads, but I don’t see how giving pad players macro buttons will help them at all(coming from tekken point of view). Pushing buttons is easy, movement is the hardest part of the game…
I guess I have one problem:
I want to make sure of one thing(perhaps this isn’t even an issue, perhaps I did not read the thread enough), tekken tag macro buttons are not allowed to be anything but tag out.
OR, we only disallow the use of side step on macro buttons(very hard to monitor).
OR, we allow side step on macro buttons knowing it is broken.
side step macro is instant side step, while pushing u is not instand side step(two frames slower I think).
Example of tekken movement with a crouch dash character: f,n,d,d/f,u,side step up macro button allows for faster “snake dash”.
I imagine instant side step would be banned as it is a game breaking button. Earlier in the thread they said shit like that won’t be allowed. But putting 1+4’s etc will be.
Hi MCP - to address some of your concerns/comments: Tekken5 is a bit different than SF in a lot of ways as you know, primarily the 4 buttons setup for our concerns. The equalizing effect may not be as great as it is for SF and other games, but it is still there - consider some rolling motions, like that one throw of Raven’s that is nearly a 360. It’s not nearly as bad as Geif’s throws but it is still sort of tough on a pad.
I can’t speak about TTT because I don’t play it. Allowing macros in that game may not do anyone any good really if it is as you describe it, but that doesn’t act as a consideration to ban them.
Of course, that is just command-wise. These aren’t under consideration though because no game evo supports actually supports them. Macros that we are talking about are the multiple *button *presses, rather than multiple *directional *or *command *presses. (To get the distinction, think of why we call some throws command throws - you have to put in a command before them. Essentially, it requires d - pad manipulation.) Essentially LK+RP can be mapped to a single button.
I’m not so sure I would call instant crouch dashing totally game breaking, but it isn’t going to happen in any case. That would be assigning a command sequence to a button - currently Tekken doesn’t allow that, and we are only talking about built-in macros which are currently only of the multibutton pressing type. So no instant crouch dashing.
I hope I interpreted you correctly MCP.
To Menthol: That’s correct as far as I understood Inkblot’s post.
C’mon im like the only guy who uses the SS button and it doesnt even help my characters, its just for show. it is broken, though i dont know of anyone who abuses it enough for it to be outright bannable.
TTT is finished at evo now too so its not even an issue.(not that i dont like Tag) ss button got removed after TTT so meh.
Yes, everyone that whines about the rules instead of dealing with them is a scrub. But changing the rules to reclassify who the scrubs are doesn’t make much sense to me. Button macros don’t break the game, but they do change the game. People got along just fine for 15 years without macros, and I don’t recall seeing a “magic moment” where that stopped happening, in any EVO fighting game. If there’s no real evidence that EVO is being significantly handicapped by banning macros, this change comes across as arbitrary. Macros not being “game breaking” is not enough to classify their ban as a “mistake”. They are still “game changing”, and they raise many questions about how far macros should be allowed to progress. (CvS2 EO comes to mind.) I think people just want to know why the games are being changed in this way at this particular point in time, and that doesn’t sound like scrub-talk to me.
To me a scrub is classified by their inability to accept whatever the rules of the game are. Not by what they believe the rules of the game should be.
So lets see, who defines ‘the rules of the game’… is it a group of players that think they know how SF should work because they’ve been playing a long time…
…BZZZZZZZT
The correct answer is ‘whoever is making the game’ (other than the ‘game-breaking’ glitch exception), this is about the billionth time someone has complained about a decision capcom has made… and it’s never made a difference unless it was game-breaking, why should it matter this time?
If capcom decides to give the game 4 buttons would our opinion of it matter? not at all, so why does it here?
If Sammy wants to keep adding and removing dust buttons every game is it our responsibility to police it? not at all.
If they decide to add PPP and RC buttons to their console ports, is it something we should bother with? not at all unless it creates a bigger problem.
If capcom added a strong and forward button to MvC2 or CvS1 ports, don’t you think people would say: “wait wait, i happen to like this macro, lets look at it a bit more”?
The point is that you can’t say “I don’t like these macros, lets ban them”, you have to say that they are gamebreaking.
I garuntee you the argument for EO being gamebreaking is about 1000 times stronger than the case for macros, so I wouldn’t worry about the slippery slope anytime soon. Is EO mode even in the PS2 version?
so “EASY”, “AUTO-BLOCK” modes (and so on) in home ports of vs. series games would therefore be tournament legal, since they are in the game? with one button specials, etc?
i really don’t understand where this attitude has come from. are you trying to say that this view about macro buttons has been the view of the SRK tournament staff for a while? if not, why now? because it sure does seem you guys are giving off a holier-than-thou attitude about it (“if you guys complain, you are scrubs”). i think the reasonable thing to do would be to at least acknowledge that people’s complaints are valid. surely you can’t feign that much ignorance over why people would care.
(personally, i mostly give a shit because i hate watching people go to the config screen. but i can understand why people are pissed - to me it seems like it makes the most difference in tekken)
If you look closely at the rules for any tourney anywhere, I think you’ll find that an awful lot of rules aren’t even in the game. E.g. best of 3 games, only the loser can change characters, loser can swap sides, right to double blind, double elimination brackets, etc. The game has none of these. Where did they come from? You may have already guessed it:
“a group of players that think they know how SF should work because they’ve been playing a long time…”
Now, I have no problems with any of that stuff. In fact I’m a strong supporter of all of it. The reasons behind all of it are clear and sound. All I’d like is the same kind of reasoning as to why button macros are now being added to the list of console game features that are permitted. I suppose this is the answer to that simple question:
i.e. that (1) even a small improvement in execution consistency doesn’t matter in competitive play, and (2) that you can’t police button macros. The first is hard to swallow, and the second hasn’t been validated.
Not really. The only thing that I’m aware of that makes EO gamebreaking is that charge moves lose the need to charge. (Corrections welcome here - I’ve never looked deeply into EO.) If EO still imposed charge times on charge moves, the game wouldn’t really change at all, save that execution for specials and supers was available through a bunch of macros mapped to an analogue stick. In fact, you could even argue that charge moves without charge time is no more or less crazy than special moves with unintended invincibility i.e. RC. So which is the better tourney game? CvS2 with EO allowed (all of which is Capcom coded and approved) or CvS2 on PS2 without EO but with RC? Suddenly that point about the tourney details being decided by Capcom rather than the players loses a lot of its lustre.
And it doesn’t stop there with CvS2. SFA3 vs SFZ3 Upper, DC MvC2 vs Xbox/PS2 MvC2, DC 3S vs PS2 3S, the many flavours of ST, the list goes on. The players dictate which version of a game is the one that gets played in tourneys. You find what people will actually support (not which one the company believes is the “true” version) and that is what you go with. I don’t see a significant amount of people threatening to boycott EVO if you add/remove button macros. Perhaps it’s the fact that so few care that a decision like this can be made out of hand.
It just levels out the playing field. The way you talk about it is like you’re growing an extra set of balls just to be able to step up and play with the big boys in all our fancy tournaments. Why can’t folks look at this as an expirement? Let EVO do their thing, see if allowing macros increases numbers and brings about better competition. Test the waters that the entire lot of us weren’t even allowed near, you know?
I just don’t understand why so many of you seem so BENT out of shape. It’s a bit mind boggling really.
