I also think charge partitioning would make Guile a beast but only if they fix the damn flash kick first
Cover your ears, son. Daddy’s angry.
See, from where i’m sitting the first part is exactly why we shouldn’t trust Capcom. Really? They couldn’t figure out before a fucking loketest that no one could hit Bison like that? And no one there, despite being intimately familiar with the mechanics since they fucking created them thought about something that turned out to be as simple as FADC ultra with Ryu? Seriously, how are WE finding shit out? Through looking at and analyzing the framedata. What the hell stopped them from doing the same thing? It’s not like there were even any supernew mechanics muddling the issue!
And besides that, let me just make sure i’ve got the chain of events down right: They threw a bunch of crap together willynilly, then the waves of balancing came from random people going into it blind in loketests? Through questionaires, no less. I can’t imagine how that’d leave anything uncovered. But hey! Good thing they immediately caught blatant shit that Capcom and DIMPs still fucking missed!
That shit pisses me off like nothing else. It’s developmental incompetence and just proves they had ZERO insight in making the damned thing, and is fundamentally the same process as “release now, patch later”. Herpderp it into arcades, then let the players find all your obvious fuckups, fix half of them while ignoring the rest according to NO scale of importance whatsoever, then call it a day. Oh good, people who clearly had no clue shovel in a bunch of stats they didn’t understand, and it turned out to me a mess. Huge surprise. I expect that crap from the perpetual amateur hour that is the MMO sector, not a company like Capcom, not for a genre that’s been around this long, and CERTAINLY not for the franchise that kicked it off.
And then we listen to that ****** piece of PR whore garbage Killian tell us how alt costumes are so expensive to make, because on top of doing a half-assed job they feel entitled to whine about how hard they have it making tons of money off huge franchises. Fuck this company. You know why games are expensive? Because they’re largely made by the biggest fuckups possible and led by even bigger fuckups in one big gasbag of headless inefficiency. Please make my day by telling me they charged for loketests too, that’d be awesome.
FUCK. I hate this industry.
And as far as getting bored if things were “fixed too much”… sagat ryu akuma ryu ryu ken sagat gief sagat ken akuma ryu ryu sagat ryu ryu ryu ryu. I actually realized recently that i’m still interested in playing this game more, and with more characters, but i’m just so fucking sick of playing them against the same chars that wouldn’t be picked so much if things were fixed AT ALL. Even Tekken 6, with its flaws, is also refreshing because i don’t have to babysit my inputs every inch of the way.
No, i think you can force mistakes if your char is blessed with suitable options. The problem is that, first, relatively few chars do or seem to, and secondly it’s compounded by really powerful bailouts like SRKs and to a slightly lesser extent EX reversals like Messiah. The only way this works out to be slightly less than a blowout is if some opportunity is to be had from predicting a move you can do nothing else about and let it whiff. This is how a lot of chars have to get their openings.
Take Abel. If i’m wrong i’m sure HAV will say so, but his game isn’t so much pressure as it is the illusion of pressure. He has one shot at getting in and hopefully confusing you, but otherwise he has to burn EX to either double down for another shot at c.fp or abort completely with a TT attempt or backdash. He cannot effectively push anyone around, and so he can’t force many – if any – errors. Compared to Sagat, who can force you to deal with tigershots and hamper your ability to get an ideal jumpin timing/angle without eating s.rh/f.rh, or compromise your ability to focus in without eating a knee.
The cert process isn’t an excuse, and frankly even if it was it’s not a problem that acceptance and complacency is going to fix. I mean… dude, Capcom has money. Come on. We’re so far past the point of having a reason to feel sorry about big corporations in incredibly resilient markets that it’s not even funny.
I hate patches too, but it’s not because i actually hate the patches as a concept. I just hate that we need them because the industry is largely comprised of fuckwits who coded in their basement for a while and didn’t want to get a real job, instead shooting for the optimal coding environment that comes from ever-so-macho crunches.
Or on the other side of the pond, insane corporate culture grinding its employees down in a field where errors increase exponentially with that kind of shit. Errors which then require patches, meaning the whole thing is as we already know: you need patches when UR DOING IT RONG
Did i mention i fucking hate this industry?
Beatable doesn’t mean unbroken. SNK bosses are beatable. To really use the term like that, unbeatable would basically have to mean any time you touched the controls, you did damage to yourself. And your health ticked down on top of it.
You’re way off on a lot of things.
The only thing they really changed about Bison post-loketest was making the regular Psycho Crusher not fly right through the opponent on block, and maybe a few extra frames of recovery on roundhouse slide done at closer distances. That’s it. Bison with lots of recovery would more or less be useless as a character.
Even then, it took Umezono raping everyone to show us how difficult this was. Other people had tried Bison out but no one else was making him work. Even for us here on SRK, its a fair shot to say that we play the game a WHOLE lot more than the developers do. I can give you all the frame data stats and whatever you want, but you’re going to have no idea how that all plays out until good players actually sit down with the game and start finding things.
That’s the simple truth. We players are going to find things that the developers never even dreamed of, because we spend far more time actually playing the game than they do. We can think about things that they can’t.
Random people…maybe you missed where I said Umezono, top-level 3S player (and he’s no slouch at IV either) was there? A lot of other really good players besides him also turned out.
And that was kind of a problem. People on SRK kept asking us to test this and test that, but after waiting in line and getting a chance to play, we’d get matched up with an extremely high-level player who wasn’t there to test shit out, he was there to play and win. “Pick Abel and test his possible ultra setups!” Yeah, NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. The plus side of this was that we got to see the game being played at a high level and could identify things that could potentially become problematic (like Bison’s lack of recovery - you think mid-level players would have noticed this?)
They didn’t throw the game together “willynilly”, while not the finished product of course it was obviously a game that had been developed and worked on.
And Capcom was there. Maybe you also missed the part where the ONE guy who knew Sagat was going to be good worked for Capcom. They had people there watching and taking notes, playing even. I know through the grapevines that Capcom has a team of internal testers who are also pro-level players. The truth is that Capcom knew about DP FADC Ultra before even we did. The loketests are a good chance to show off an early version of the game, and get people to maybe uncover a few things that the internal testers might have missed, but don’t think they entrusted the entire game balance to a few loketests.
Even now after the game has been in arcades for almost 2 years, things continue to change. IIRC, DP FADC Ultra was found maybe the second week of the game being out - it wasn’t even something people just immediately knew how to do. It took months before anyone figured out Viper - before that she was hopelessly low-tier, and immediately after some people were putting her in S before she found her current spot. Gief started out S and has been consistently falling. Sagat had to climb up to his #1 spot. Sim moved up after Iyo showed him off, and Abel has been slowly inching up as well. Chun jumped up to the 4th best arcade character. These are things that only players with the game for a prolonged period of time can figure out. A game developer isn’t going to find it in the time given to get the game out from the green light. And that’s not their job, its ours.
First, Capcom doesn’t listen to us that much. Thank GOD they don’t. As I said before, 99% of the people here have no idea how to make a fighting game work. Myself included. Go read through the wishlist threads in the SSFIV forum, and tell me that they aren’t the most horrible things ever. The questionnaires at the loketest…maybe they read over them to an extent, but I’m sure that whatever changes were made to the game from the lokes came from the guys who were there in secret and watching the whole thing and taking notes.
Second, hindsight is wonderful. Imagine if we took the current versions of 3S, CvS2, whatever, called it a loketest and brought it to the public. Within one weekend, would people be able to find parry options selects, c.mk hit confirm SAII, Genei Jin combos, c.fp has a truckload of priority, roll cancel? And even if we did (unlikely) and Capcom “fixed” it then whatever they subsequently released would have something else that was broken/overpowered, and people would complain. There’s never going to be a perfect game - the closest thing to it (VF) is not that popular in the states. People did bitch and complain about 3S/A3/CvS2/MvC2/everything else when these games first came out…but that was 10 years ago, and now bitching has gone out of style. Except for IV, which is now somehow magically the exception because everyone forgot/weren’t around for all the dissatisfaction that came from the earlier games.
How can you blame this on Capcom? Ryu may be good but I can promise you that the vast majority of scrubs who play him aren’t utilizing the things that make him good. I was at one of the National Tournament qualifiers last weekend, and I could count the Ryu players on one hand with fingers to spare. Gief is good but very beatable, and Ken is stuck in mid-tier.
What you have is casual players who know these characters from the SFII days, or whatever other incarnation they’re familiar with, and not really wanting to bother to learn another character. How is this possibly Capcom’s fault? “They should make Ryu so bad that no one will want to play him!” That’s a terrible idea. And it doesn’t address why Ken is still so popular despite not being that good.
And its funny you say this, just a few years ago the 3S crowd were complaining about Yun/Chun/Ken, even to the point where some tournament organizers considered banning these 3 just to force something new. MvC2 has 56 characters, but the mid-tier is more or less non-existant unless you are just screwing around with friends. And let’s not forget how limited the CvS2 roster was before RC.
agreed. Cinder was initally named Meltdown in earlier versions of KI. Midway seemed to commonly patch some of their arcade games (NBA Jam, Primal Rage MK, Blitz, etc). i find it ironic that Capcom and others still can’t patch their games when those games were being patched (instead of milking the franchise and waiting to put it in the next version) in the alleged “more expensive, less efficient, less responsive to their customers” pre-digital delivery era.
Azrael,
do people love this game in japan? or do they just play it because its new?
the 4 series is setting a new precedent that is going to retire SF games with a steep learning curve. I know its hard for Capcom to find the balance between making money, keeping the pros happy and attracted new players but…ehh i just dont know if this is good for the series
I know all players have their preferences between ST, CVS, 3s and the alpha series but 4 is basically putting the nail in the coffin for all games pre sf4. they cant back track after this, they have to keep the new players happpy and then try to give the pros something
maybe i just need to let go and embrace the change
Yes, that is a safe bet. But the great thing is: The previous games will always be there…Sure, you won’t get the crazy influx of players whatever is newer is getting, but you can rest assured games like CVS2 and 3S will never permanently lose their dedicated playerbase, however small they end up getting. 3S is eleven years old, man. And still making it to SBO… If it’s not dead by now, it ain’t dying anymore.
EDIT: Also, there’s always the chance these new faces that got into FGs with SF4 will grow a pair and try the classics, eventually. That’s the best thing to come out of SF4’s release, imo
I know option selects have been around since the beginning, but they are much more prevalent in SF4 than they ever were in other SF games. I can give you 3S as another game that’s heavy on option selects, but A) it’s just buffering parry into everything… so it’s the same option select all day. Even option select parry isn’t as silly as some of the option selects in SF4. In SF4, a lot of the option selects make it so that you don’t have to think AT ALL. Also, B) 3S sucks too.
While you picked up on some of what I say about Abel, I think you missed the essence of it. What I say about Abel is that his offensive options aren’t so tricky on their own that you can just go in and do whatever you want, and net damage a lot of the time, what his offense does do, is force reactions from the opponents, and it’s your job to read what those reactions are going to be, and cover them.
At the highest levels of SF, that’s the best you can hope for, IMO. Even if you look at Magneto in Marvel, his game isn’t brute force pressure. It’s pressure to the point of forcing a reaction, properly evading that reaction, and then either punishing, or taking advantage of a shitty situation (point character just called AAA, and missed, so now you go in to rape).
So, I didn’t read your whole argument (I just saw my name and zoomed in), but I’d have to disagree with your argument that you can’t force errors with Abel. That’s all I do with Abel.
I remember the bitching about older games. I don’t see why that’s relevant to people’s complaints about SF4, but I certainly remember the bitching. The RC argument was golden. 
To be fair, Non-RC CvS2 existed for 5 months. And even in that 5 month period, top tier moved from Rock/Hibiki to Blanka/Sagat. Incidentally, at this stage in the game’s life, there are more viable characters in K-Groove than in any other groove, and you can’t RC in K…
Haha, I remember when Blanka was like top 3 in SFIV. I mean that Konami Code player racked up a 336 winning streak with him.
good points sir
guess its just a matter of me being spoiled. i actually liked the challenge in the older games. i have the worst execution among the players in the tourney scene and this is the only game i didnt have to put work in.
you also can’t forget when Rufus was pretty much god tier. He looked damn broken when people started playing him.
I have read the last few pages and I am glad to see that other players think the game is very defensive based as well. I admit to not being a huge SF guy, but I do love fighting games and I feel like SF4 focuses too much on being defensive for all characters. Might be a playstyle preference but I prefer when aggression is favored over being defensive.
You have to admit. There is far more thinking in defensive strategies than offensive ones. And defensive players are usually more fundamentally sound. A defensive player almost always out think their opponent. Offensive players typically are just trying to overwhelm them. I like a mixture of both styles and SF4 have that to a degree.
Guile doesn’t need charge paritioning. He’d be pretty broken in a game that has no parries. Remember his fk does armor break so basically due to dashin flaskick you the opponent won’t have any real geround options. It serves to be way too retarded.
Guiles real issue is the range on his pokes which doesn’t mesh well with already floating hitboxes. His damage output is also really loow and he stuns way to easily. Dashing or zoning tools are really not his problem. He xones just as fine in SF4 as he does in anygame.n The problem is that he doesn’t do significant damage off ouf opportunities which is generally what make Guile work
I really feel that guile needs a reward other than safety for flashkick fadc.
I would love to see: Flashkick > fadc > backbreaker
If you wanted to up his damage output for players who are not execution masters, then relaxing the timing to link c.jab to c.strong would go a long way. At the top levels, I assume that hitting that link is not an issue.\
I say that because the FADC mechanism is important in SF4, and Guile doesn’t benefit from it defensively. Paying two bars to make FK safe with no possible juggle seems like its beyond the point of diminishing returns, but I still find myself using it if I’m under a lot of pressure.
I openly admit to not being very good at SF but more often than not I feel like I am punished for pursuing offensive strategies than defensive ones. I find this especially difficult since I play Cammy, who, as I understand it, is supposed to be offensive. While I certainly understand and appreciate the idea of defensive characters, it just seems that the game rewards sitting back and waiting to punish. Now, this might have less to do with basic gameplay and more to do with lack of offensive options for offensive characters or defensive options like SRKs being too good, but the net result seems to be a game that favors you waiting to punish, over applying pressure to force the opponent to make a mistake to punish.
Maybe the thread title should read, “New sf hurting new players?”.
I don’t think SFIV heralds the loss of execution or technical ability in the series. If anything, maybe it will lead to a renniassance of fighting games. I’d like to see the sales and interest in older titles in the recent year and see if there isn’t a spike in demand for used copies of CvS2 and 3S. With all the flack the new game and new players that came with the game are getting, I am willing to bet the backlash to be a positive one. No serious gamer would let someone say they are only good in SFIV because the inputs are lenient and the mechanics are dumbed down…they’d probably get on 3S, learn it and love it as much as you guys do…either that or admit that they aren’t as hardcore as they thought they were ad admit to being a casual. Either way, the old timers win because either the new player admits casual interest, or they start to want more from ther games and thus you add another voice to your collective shout for a harder and more technical/flawless version of street fighter.
Take a step back to throw a punch…maybe that’s what will end up happening with the series. We don’t know, but it sounds very pessimistic here. I see the large influx of new blood as a positive.
I play around with Cammy. Not sure how she can't be offensive. I've seen a lot of top players rush down with Cammy. I think the issue with SF4 offense that it's a smart offense. The thing I noticed with most offensive players is that they turn their brain off once they get the momentum going. They just start autopiloting shit. Its a piss poor way to play offense anyway and a bad habbit that's encouraged in a lot of games. Cammy is highly competitive because of her intense pressure and mixups. The thing is interactively mixing up your attacks when you have the pressure. I think people forget to remain mindful of someones ability to counter you. Offense doesn't fall on its face in SF4. It still works just fine. Again it isn't just a furious RTSD variety. II think the SF character who really shows how offense work in SF is Guy. Footsies and mixups which lead to baiting without having to downback all day.
Parabellum: I would love for there to be some special charge crumple property. And fadc airthrow may be a reality. It’s been shown that Gief can combo into his airthrow ultra off of a trade. Hopefully command airthrows have the same properies as regular airthrows. I would also l8ike a tk airthrow as well. But I know Guile will be better next game I’m happy with what I’ve seen so far.
Branh, yeah, here’s hoping for Guile to be buffed just enough that he becomes a bit more viable. I’m not asking for top tier status, just for him to move up a bit from where he is now.
I feel the exact same about Rose. I play a lot of Rose right now, despite the fact that literally 95% of her matchups are not in her favor. Give her a few new tools (reflect fadc ST would be a great start, also reducing the startup on reflect would really help out) and we are in business!
Reflect FADC Soul Throw is what like…even if you hit the Reflect off of one normal you’re getting 112 damage for 2 bars. Not inherently too awful I guess, but Reflect itself does laughable damage, so as a combo it’s still pretty bad (unscaled RH Cannon Spike FADC RH Cannon Spike is 300, Reflect FADC Soul Throw would be 190 with SFIV damage). It’s just really hard to make that character work in SFIV as is. No standard reversal because of Alpha Counters and level 1 Supers, anti-air is a throw because of air block, primarily reliant on CCs or like for meter based damage, etc.
I’d say the difference between forcing an error and baiting is that the former is making them defend wrong, while the latter is getting them to try and do a counter or offensive move they shouldn’t. Ambiguous cross-up = forcing an error, walking up to them and waiting for a DP = baiting. But that’s really only my perspective.
Thats what I think as well. I feel the game is more the latter in baiting, than in the other. In my few recent matches I got more damage from punishing their offense, than from what my offense accomplished which is why I feel that way.
I could just not be using the tools I am provided but without going over all the tools available to see if I am missing something, that is how I feel.
Another trick I’d like to see is rh.spiral > fadc > short.spiral in the corner. (I doubt there would be time for rh.spiral but that would be even better).
But I’m just day dreaming now.
I love rose’s character design SOOO much…if she gets enough buffs to be mid tier at least, I’ll definitely play more and more Rose in Super. I’d love to have Dictator, Chun, and Rose as my three best characters.