New players hurting SF?

Current Fighting Games Fighting Game Discussion
381

I don’t want to sound biased, but I think Chun is one of the few characters in SF4 that can actually be played in really different styles, most to pretty good effect.

I can watch an unlabeled chun video and tell you if its Nemo or Nuki (assuming I know that its one of the two), because they do actually play pretty different. Nuki has a more frantic, almost random playstyle (its actually really calculated to SEEM random)…where Nemo has a bit more minimalist style. Rather than try to confuse his opponent, Nemo just keeps things so safe and annoying that it doesn’t matter if his next move seems “random” or not, because 99% of the time its super safe.

Agree? Disagree? Its just my opinion and of course it could reflect my lack of skill compared to the pros.

382

If you watch a lot of SFIV (or any game for that matter) you can easily pick out the players. Daigo’s Ryu is unmistakeable (in fact, [media=youtube]2FWqMGqXOAk]he plays Sagat in exactly [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UX_McVuP7E[/media]). No Blanka can turtle like Mizoteru, neither can they rushdown like Shizuoka Saikyo. Pamyuu plays a very aggressive Boxer while Maeda Taison is more patient. Justin’s Boxer has more focus on footsies. Dagger G’s Guile is one of a kind. Never seen that kind of corner pressure from any other Guile. Zangitan’s Gief has an extremely good defensive and spacing game and never misses a punish, while Itabashi is OK with taking a damage if it gives him a chance to trap his opponent. There’s lots of other examples, but you really have to watch many different players in order to start noticing how players differ.

383

i think this has more to do with the character example you mentioned than the whole game itself.

384

http://gootecks.com/podcast/street-fighter-podcast-31-uks-ryan-hart-zak-bennet-live-at-dreamhack-in-sweden/

yah, seriously just listen to that podcast and listen to what Ryan Hart says. He pretty much lays it out perfectly as to why SFIV is so mundane to play. Like people attempted to belittle peoples abilities for their supposed inability to punish the tactic of FADC ultra, but it isn’t just that which makes the game so stale.

385

In response to the OP…

Old school players will usually implement things that they know…
That is for the old strategies to stilll work, the game mechanics must be designed as such…
Therefore in an old school players hands: SF4 would = SF2 Turbo…

We like the old games, but also want new ones…with new strategies and not the same old tried and true bs.
The Alphas added something different, then came along the 3D stuff, then the versus series, 3s, some more shit
and now SF4…they all have their quirks but we see a Capcom willing to try new things and not stick with the
status quo.

Scrubs offer some garbage recommendations sometimes, but so will the old school players and the pros…if your not
beating everyone you play and winning tournaments all the time, trust me something in the game is gonna piss you off!

It all comes down to getting wins and if this and this was revamped maybe I’d get more…
And as far as production and sales, yea majority rules…the man with the dollar will usually get his way in this system.

386

I couldn’t agree more. A2 and A3 let you cancel off of any chained rapid fire attack-but you don’t necessarily get a lot out of it unless it was a level 3 super cancel. Like c.LK>c.LKxxlight Tatsu or something for Ryu because a DP won’t reach and a normal fireball is too slow. There was Sakura’s old c.LK>c.LK>LKxxShouoken, but god knows she pretty much needs it. I don’t think you could chain as many lights overall in the Alpha series anyways, A3 Chun had like…2 normals that chained into others or something? Stand jab and crouch short, and stand short could be chained into. While in SFIV you can pretty much just randomly mash all over the light attack buttons for 3 or 4 hits barring a few exceptions.

Ryu in particular seems to have pretty low push back, it always amazes me how little he has to walk up for a tick throw.

387

He was just talking about bad matchups and tiers. Nothing new there. The irony is that SFIV has more tourney viable chars than SF3.

388

Ryan is clearly hating on SF4 for valid reasons… the same reason why every good player that dislikes SF4, dislikes it.

It’s not about bad match-ups and tiers… he’s talking about how SF4 is limited in OPTIONS. To me, almost all characters suck in SF4… so yeah… there are more viable characters, since the bar is lower. He’s not talking about balance. He’s talking about how stiff the game is.

From what I know, most good players don’t really like SF4. You guys have to realize there’s a reason for that…

389

Everyone is busy trying to figure out why people don’t like SF4.

Now figure out why people don’t like your game.

390

^Yeah…I can find plenty of people who dislike CvS2 (myself included) and even if I wanted to play the game has been fairly flat-lined over here for quite some time.

While I understand and agree with that sentiment to some extent (as well as the quality over quantity statement from a few pages back) the simple truth is that we need the masses.

Capcom is a big company, and it takes a lot of money for them to make games. They want that money back - and more of course. We “hardcore” players just aren’t enough. If Ono hadn’t pushed the game as something that would sell to the general population, it probably wouldn’t have been made. Without the masses, we would be stuck playing the same games for another 10-20 years.

I also felt that the community was getting thin. Though its not obvious, we are constantly losing players - people who just move onto other things, people who become busy with work/school/both/whatever, people who have families and can no longer keep up with it, gamers who are no longer with us, etc. Sure, we get some new blood from time to time, but not enough to offset how much is lost. So we needed the influx of new players. And yes, the majority will never make it past casual play and will eventually give up the game. But hopefully we get that percentage that decides to stick around and learn. Through them, the community grows. We get better attendance at tournaments, new people to play against, and maybe even some new top players will rise from their ranks.

And still, its just a game. Why are we trying to shut out people who want to play? Just because they don’t play the way we want them to? I said before, I think one of the problems we have now still is that there’s no sort of division or anything. On SRK we’ve got the pros, the casuals/newbies, and everything in-between. Same for tournaments. Not everyone can or wants to invest themselves into the game that much. And that’s fine for them. It annoys the hardcore, but we’re not exactly in a position to be elitist - not unless we want to continue playing the same games against the same people for the foreseeable future.

391

way to be oblivious…jesus christ

392

Oblivious to what? You want to talk about limited options? Play one of the many 8:2s in ST and then get back to me.

393

From what I see, there’s still plenty of innovation coming out of Japan, even if the numbers aren’t big anymore. I mean… the game is 9 years old at this point.

But yeah… I could fine plenty of people that hate the game too. Difference is… I can find plenty of people that play SF4 very well, that hate SF4. I think that says something.

I hate how people like to dismiss all anti-SF4 sentiment as empty hate. There is absolutely no reason why I wouldn’t have loved SF4 to be “my game” too. It was everyone’s hope… so to dismiss people’s dislike for it as simple hate is silly. It doesn’t make sense for anybody to hate SF4 for anything other than purely substantive reasons. People have real gripes with the game… and I think a lot of those gripes are valid. I think the fact that a lot of really good players tend to say the same things is important.

394

I’m not dismissing the gripes about SF4. I understand that there are mechanics people don’t like about the game and I agree with quite a few of those points. We already know what people don’t like about SF4, it’s a dead horse by now.

The thing people can’t seem to figure out is why no one is playing their game.

395

Define “playing your game”… Because I am getting competition for what I’m playing at the moment, in KOF-land (South America) no less. Can these numbers compete with the numbers of players SF4 is getting? Of course not, SF4 is still fresh and Super is right around the corner. If “being played” means it sporting an active playerbase that approaches the numbers new titles pull…Nobody’s games are being played at all, except maybe Tekken 6.

396

but the same thing can be said about 3s and mvc2. i mean, people who are winning evo for these games have said that the game is boring and is merely a means to an end (getting paid) these days. so i think the point you make that “really good players” don’t like the game and are only playing it as a means to an end is not as valid as you make it out to be, because you can point to to top players that think the game is fine, and most certainly some that think the game is the best one out of anything. of course, there is the obvious time factor out there that 3s and marvel have had plenty of time to get boring, but they also had plenty of revisions too, revisions that have helped a lot to assuage issues people had with said games (cvs1 to cvs2 definately comes to mind)

397

Marvel players talk shit about Marvel all the time… but they don’t mean it. That’s known. They just get mad when they lose, but they’re always drawn back to that CRACK.

At this point, it’s 10 years old… so yeah… it may be a little more true than it was before, but I always take Marvel players talking shit about Marvel with a grain of salt. Especially if you hear it from Sanford or Brandon…

As for 3S… yeah, a lot of top 3S players never liked 3S that much. I think a lot of those players laid out why they didn’t like it, and I think 3S is missing a lot of what draws some players to Street Fighter, so those gripes were valid too. I do think that 3S provided something that other SF’s don’t, and so it spawned a new type of player that plays it for a slightly different reason than other players may play SF, but there’s something of value there.

I think with SF4… there’s just LESS. It’s not a different feel when you play… it’s just a feeling that the game lacks. It’s just not as robust as other games, and that is the gripe that you hear all the time.

398

I like SF4, I would probably like it less if I didn’t use Guile though. I’m sure if I used Ryu or Sagat, then the game would get stale to me as well. They exploit the system like no other character does. But hey, that’s the game, any game really.

In terms of variation. I don’t know, I can’t really believe there isn’t. I have watched tons of Guile player from Japan and America. Yoshio loves to counter poke, Yazu loves to sonic boom you to death, Dagger G loves his mind games and lockdown, Hiko loves to take calculated risk, and Fuson loves to mix you up with solid offensive. I rarely see two Guile players play remotely similar in SF4. Even in my local community, there are some Guile players who rush, I personally prefer to turtle you until the cows come home.

Yeah, we will undoubtedly see matches that play out similarly, but that’s any game. For example, I can watch a Marvel match, and I can’t tell who is playing whom. The only time I can really tell is when we have a low tier person known for a low tier team. In CVS2, a lot of the matches play out very similarly. And I love CVS2 way more than I love SF4. But let’s be honest, most matches are all about footsies and spacing, and we’ll see a lot of the same shit over and over. Alpha 2 and 3 are much the same way.

I know undoubtedly players will come to the public and say bad things about games.  We've heard the Cannons talk bad about A3.  We've heard Shaeffer talk bad about ST.  We've heard Justin Wong talk bad about CVS2.  We've heard countless top players talk bad about 3s.   A top player coming on a podcast and talking about what he doesn't like about a game is nothing new.   It will continue to happen.  We'll undoubtedly hear credible top players talk bad about SSFIV.   People pretend like this has never happened before when it's happen many times before.

SFIV is not a garbage game. If people won matches in SFIV based on dumb shit, yeah I’d say you’re on to something. Half of the matches we’ll see someone simply outplay their opponent. I thought that was a hallmark of any good game. And while many people aren’t forcing themselves to hate SFIV, there are many of us who aren’t forcing ourselves to like it. Honestly, instead of going to a tournament I could be doing anything with my time. Getting a weekend job, playing something else, getting my dick sucked by some big booty ATL girl… you name it. I just go to tournaments because I like the game, and I’m sure that’s the same for a lot of players out there.

The FG scene was crazy predictable and boring before SFIV.  Back before it came out, you never knew when you'd play iin another tournament, especially if you live in ATL where there no arcade scene.   And people who dominated games, dominated them hard.   In CVS2 and MVC2 Evo, you knew who to expect to see in top 8.  SFIV has revitalized the scene.  Who can't respect that.
399

This is true for “average” players, too. I remember thinking Capcom had gone the KOF route the first time I played it. “Now there’s a super jump and short hop (UOH), and look at this Remy dude, this is King of Fighters!”. Keep in mind 3S was the first game in the SF3 series I got to play, so the pace was alien to someone expecting SF Alpha. Many of my buddies remember me giving 3S shit after first playing it and they still bring it up at times. Still, I could see the depth was there and ended up liking the game after all. Whereas SF4’s skill ceiling is so low, I don’t even bother.

400

i thought Ryan’s criticisms of SF4 were cogent and not unreasonable. i can’t say that i disagree with him or others who might dislike the game for similar or different reasons. although, Capcom has done some good things with SF4, like the new characters (except for Furete) turned out relatively well for example. ultimately,IMO, SF4 is a middle of the road game and obviously there’s plenty of room for improvement. it’s just a question of how far Capcom is willing to go in SSF4.