Personally, I don’t think 3P makes the game too different from what it was “supposed to be”. Since I have seen War Machines already doing 3P fly combos (and refly infinites) manually when I quit playing 10 years ago. And now that the “glove inf” exists, that leaves much less chances of making a mistake (you need like, what, 8-10 air dashes only to 100% anyone except GWM and CapCom).
Wolv’s dash inf, by itself, does crap damage, unless you do it to 99 hits (which player 2 can’t do). It doesn’t work using it like that anyway since there are players who will lag you (meaning if you can do it offline, it is actually MUCH MORE reliable there than online).
But realistically, the dash inf is just mostly used as a wall-carry to do the corner 100% uncombo. i.e. this means you only actually need to do it around 8 times, so it shouldn’t be hard to do even offline, 8 times is few enough that it should be easy to pull off consistently before making a mistake. Also the actual combo leaves some room for mistake (you can hit the s.mp quite late after the s.lk, and it still combos). So you can just do Mag-style slide/claw LK, then hit the MP separately.
And against the characters who are immune to Wolv’s uncombo juggle (e.g.: Gold WM, Hulk, Chun-Li, Megaman, CapCom, etc.), you’ll notice that even online, the dash inf isn’t really used often against them as the major damage dealer. Most wolv players just duo, or go for the combo into super (or switch to WM (LOL)). But then, that might just be because of the risk of being lagged
I think 3P would be MUCH more an issue in games that have Magneto and Storm in their roster.
But then, people in the arcade nowadays can actually do that XvSF stuff manually. And consistently at that. Meaning if the MvC offline scene wasn’t virtually dead, I think offline players would be able to pull off the “online stuff” just as easily.
Although I DO get the argument that 3P bindings remove the “human error” factor in matches, I’ve seen people pull off 3P consistently to the point that I think it doesn’t change the gameplay, just the odds (and not by much). And quite frankly, matches won due to execution error aren’t satisfying at all.
Well, here’s hoping that MvC origins undoes that “deadness” of the MvC arcade scene, even if just a bit.