Thing is though, there are legit blockstrings in Blazblue and Melty. Yes, you have an advance-guard style mechanic in those games but it’s nowhere near as strong as the AG in mvc3. Those are fairly modern games and while offering some kind of defensive tactic against blocking at a penalty, they still allow players to engage in oldschool blockstrings (one of the most satisfying things about fighting games in general) if the opponent’s guard bar or whatever is sufficiently depleted.
Yes, AG is necessary in MvC3, nobody is disputing that, but it’s still stupid that as a technique, it’s absolutely free. It doesn’t cost guard bar and it doesn’t cost meter. You have a huge frame window to pop it off on most attacks, it pushes players back even if they hit you with projectiles, etc. AG fake-outs aside, AG is pretty much just "I blocked something…one second later…oh, AG. "
Bursts can be baited too, and they do pretty much the same thing as AG. They get you out of a bad situation (in their case, having damage dealt to you.) AG gets you out of blocking an opponent, giving you the potential to avoid taking damage. Yes it’s not yet at the level of a burst, because you’re not taking damage yet, but it’s still something that gets you out of a bad situation if you use it properly. There’s no reason for it to cost absolutely nothing to perform.
I remember someone writing something about scrubby mechanics being mechanics that put you at an advantage or remove a disadvantage without having to pay a penalty in exchange. I think AG pretty much fits the bill, if just because it’s meter-free and gets someone out of your face, plus has a very generous window for input on most attacks. Yes it’s not easy to effectively AG small time hits like 2A’s or other weak pokes like that as they can be staggered, etc. But that’s neither here nor there. Assuming the player knows how to use AG effectively and not try to AG everything, the fact still stands that it’s a no-cost defense mechanic akin to a burst against blockstrings. It gives you a valuable change of pace…for no cost. That is the main gripe. I don’t see it as being equivalent exchange.
Then again, TAC and X factor are also free, so I just have to realise this game is all about free stuff when it comes to the mechanics.
There a few weakness people need to remember about Advancing Guard.
You have more blockstun in advancing guard than a regular block, in the air…you are vulnerable to tick throws because you will basically freeze in the air. Sometimes it’s not a good time to mash on the advancing guard on your
Some move should be blocked rather than advancing guard because you are giving up free damage. Again because you have more blockstun in AG, than in a regular block. For instance you don’t have to advance guard a launcher, because most launchers in the game are unsafe. You have to tell the difference between stuff that should be AG, and stuff that should be blocked.
You can’t mash blindly, just like you have be precise with your blocking in X-factor…same with Advancing Guard. If they mistime their blocking by mashing buttons when you are not attacking, the oppotent will get hit because you are pressing buttons when you are not suppose to. Advance guard has to be time correctly.
It’s impossible to advance guard with the level of precision that a computer can do so in training mode,so you will ALWAYS get chip out. Computer can negate every bit damage without losing chip.
There is a difference between advancing guard by crouching and standing. Crouching is reduces the most amount of chip, standing is weaker. You have to remember that when you get chips to death by Doom’s plasma beam while being raped by Magnus.
I see it as being pretty equivalent exchange mainly because…
The damage in this game is EXTREMELY high. You die when you get hit by a bnb or a bnb and then a reset unless you’re like the Hulk. Unless they DHC glitch or turn on XF or…you just fucking die in this game.
Assists shut down advance guard. When all it takes is one clean hit to take down a character assists can set up really cheap block strings especially with teleports that set up high low mix ups so you’re basically forced into a guess and if you guess wrong you get hit and probably lose your character. Blocking Sent drones + Magneto going down sets up some of the cheapest hard to block BS in fighting games and you literally can’t do anything about him going up and down and even left and right around you for a whole 3 seconds. It’s almost impossible to not get hit by this and it’s 3 whole seconds that you can’t advance guard him out.
If you advance guard when you’re not actually in block stun you throw out a normal that’s extremely easy to counter hit. There’s a lot of ways to set up block strings with characters that have instant overhead mix ups with assists like Wolverine where you can just scare the shit out of someone to blow a bad advance guard and hit them before Akuma assist even comes around.
1 frame ground throws that lead to full bnb’s or guaranteed 50/50 mix ups for a lot of the cast. They must be teched with a button combination that doesn’t let you advance guard.
Your only real defensive options in this game unless you have an invincible reversal special/super (very low percentage of the cast) is…
ground blocking (which realistically can’t work for very long unless you’re blocking Arthur)
XF guard cancel (which any character that’s good at the game has a lot of ways to bait this so you blow a bad one)
chicken blocking plus mash advance guard (pretty decent but still loses to left right dash mix ups and air throw/attack frame traps)
calling the mayor or the flamethrower girl (there’s a reason people pick these assists in this game of near unblockable offense)
This is also considering a lot of the characters that are good in the game have tools like teleports or fly/dash cancels that run through advance guard any way.
Maybe at lower levels of play advance guarding may seem scrubby but if you play against anybody who actually utilizes all the tools to get through advance guard with a good character (especially with asssts), the use of advance guard becomes limited to getting limited space from near inescapable pressure.
It doesn’t matter how hard you get punished, fact still stands that actually doing the mechanic itself is free. If it took off a little bit of meter I’d be ok with it. You could work your game about trying to drain the opponent out by forcing them to AG to get out of your mixups.
You make very good points, but the gripe about AG being a scrubby mechanic is more about what it offers as a standalone mechanic, and the principle behind the implimentation of such mechanic.
Sure, it’s fine if you use Magneto and Sentinel as examples, but what about characters who are less gifted? Tron Bonne is supposed to be a pressure/grappler character with her drill and her command throws. She can’t cross you up at light speed like Magnus, but she looks like she was intended to keep you in blockstun for a while, but thanks to AG, it just doesn’t work that way. Haggar on point also suffers immensely, and assists can’t always make it all better.
Tron and even more so Haggar aren’t really designed to have long stints as point characters. If you do play them on point you better have a ton of assists backing them up cuz that’s the only way you’re going to lock someone down long enough to put them in a mix up. Tron can at least swing around for left rights against chicken blocks but Haggar can’t even do that. Tron can definitely cross you up at basically the same speed as Magnus with the correct assists. If you had to choose between the two to put on point and load with assists Tron would definitely be the better overall choice with better options to get around projectiles. Either way both of those characters at least in this version of the game are intended to lock down other people and stop advance guards via their assists any way.
Which means if you’re using them on point you’re limiting your ability to fight advance guard in the first place. With the lack of real genuine buffs Hsien Ko is getting it sounds like she’s still going to be Captain CommandKo in Ultimate also.
A lot of the reason why people are having problems with things in this game in general is due to not utilizing good assists. Whether it’s covering teleport specials, covering start up of long start up projectiles, locking people down that mash on advance guards, assists are the key to completing offense for your characters so you’re not worrying about the advance guard mash to begin with. Once you get them to block an assist and move in you can counter hit their advance guard all day. If you don’t wanna pick good assists to set that up then…that’s what you can do also.
Advance guard for what it can do…there’s so many ways to get around it and it doesn’t actually set up any damage for the opponent. It just relieves them from offense if used correctly for a short period of time. Any character with a strong point game and assist can easily get back in from an advance guard. Like the other guy said earlier, advance guard puts you in longer block stun that allows things like air dashes and teleports more time to set up afterwards.
Most of the stuff that’s really scrubby in this game is the offensive stuff. c.L’s that anti air into full high damaging bnb combos, normals/special moves that have hit boxes that you must play super patiently against or burn your XF early to get around, 1 frame throws that lead to big damage plus a reset, assists like Akuma/Tron/Haggar that protect you from combos while giving you all day to set up combos for yourself, XF1 and 3 allowing your characters to do ridiculous things on offense that I don’t even have to mention etc.
Why did this thread get necro’d in the first place?
So… walking and punching are scrubby mechanics? Blocking, Parrying/Instablocking, hard tags? That’s a fairly absurd definition. There is a penalty, the penalty is in misusing the mechanic.
But it does matter how hard you get punished, that’s how they’ve balanced the mechanic. You simply cannot disregard the principle penalties and drawbacks associated with a mechanic and then turn around and say, it has no penalties or drawbacks because for some reason those don’t count.
yeah, basically. ag is easy to get around and is only as “free” as you let your opponent make it. its the same thing as blocking cause you have to guess which way to block in order to ag in the first place and then it beomes YOUR problem if your getting overly blocked and thusly ag’d.
i just find it funny that people are complaining about a mechanic that is SSOOOO easy to counter. i use doom ironman arthur and tron… i dont have a problem getting overly ag’d with any of them. so i dont find it bothersome at all. i just look at it as a slightly stronger block.
in fact it becomes EASIER to beat people that are predictable about there AG use. half the time i play im just studying my opponents ag patterns and doing whats necessary to counter them when ive got there game down… its fun.
walking, punching, blocking etc are all fighting game fundamentals and are excluded since you can’t have a fighting game without them. AG is not in the same league as those.
If you’re saying that the penalty is simply ‘misusing’ the mechanic, then why is Megacrash considered a scrubby mechanic when it takes 2 bars to use? You can misuse a megacrash/burst any time you want. You’ll blow 2 bars. Same can be said about X-factor. Use X-factor early in the match and you will most likely lose. It’s still considered a scrubby ‘free’ mechanic though.
In many other games, blocking isn’t free either. Block too much and you get guard crushed. Every defensive tactic should incur a penalty, no matter how small, and it should have nothing to do with ‘misusing’ the skill, but being able to use the skill in the first place. How you use it is up to you as a player, but giving the player access to these defensive skills without incurring any usage penalty just doesn’t sit right with me.
That pretty much explains what I don’t like about a lot of the newer games. Penalties are specifically set for game systems instead of forcing players to fight around them. That’s part of why I like games like ST, 3S and MVC3 so much. The game doesn’t limit you or your opponent to what you can or can’t do with the game’s systems…only the players themselves can use their ingenuity to limit what one another does. It’s more interesting to me to see a good players use 1 frame throws, staggered strings and assists to blow up advance guard than just the game doing it for you.
It’s about picking up tools and blowing shit up with creative use of them…not just doing 123 ABC and having penalties kill it off for you. Nobody would care to be creative with their offense and use the tools presented to break through advance guard if all it took was simply using it too much to get rid of it. The strength of advance guard leads to the strength of the tools that you can use to fight it.
10000% agreed. i never did like the whole block meter thing. how about my opponent get an attack meter as well? if they abuse normals too much those normals get weaker and weaker on block or hit… they lose frame advantage speed power and when there normal gauge runs out they cant attack for 5 seconds…
LOL as if.
dude just hates AG. and its probably cause hes so predictable that it fucks him over (like throws fuck over turtles) or hes using a character(s) that are weak to the mechanic.
personally i like ag, both using it and and playing against it… its just one of those extra things i can use on defense or on offense as another way to blow up my opponents blocking. its harder to try and ag everything than it is to just block stuff… hence one reason why i like it… easier blocking mixups for me when opponents seek to abuse it.
funnily enough it actually really teaches a person how to play the game as well. you HAVE to use assists to get around it, which is mvc’s way of teaching you to abuse assists…
ag is one of my favorite fighting game mechanics, takes skill to use well against good opponents easy to use against beginners its one of those “chesslike” mechanics that is simple on the outside but allows for complex mindgames when one has a deeper appreciation for the game… i think all mechanics should be like that… more or less.
I absolutely hate all forms of guard crush and BB/GG negative penalty (which is pretty creative and funny though).
I hate the idea of blocking/defensive play being punished by the developers. I respect it as a design choice and a part of the game and I love GG but I still don’t like them based on principal. Open up your opponent, throw them, bait them, overhead/low.
It’s worthless to look at AG in a vacuum, you have to look at it in game. And in game, there’s so many ways around it, beat it or bait it. AG best features are vs projectiles at reducing chip and if timed correctly letting you create a bigger window for punishment like AG Ryu/Akuma beam hyper and if you AG at the right time near the end you get to make it even more unsafe on block.
I’ll be honest. I absolutely hated AGing when I first started playing. I had the same mentality the OP had, “It’s too free”. Then, just like everyone else who play decently, I learned to use assists, empty jumps, and delayed attacks to counter it. AGing actually kinda lives up to its name; in the end, it is pretty advanced to use properly and to counter.
Clearly in the case of Megacrash and X-factor, people who call them scrubby mechanics are arguing that the risk isn’t great enough for the reward. That or they just don’t like what the mechanic does to the game. I’m not quite sure how that’s relevant to this discussion though.
That’s debatable. But things like parry, tag outs, special moves, assists, et al. have no inherent costs other than the risking misuse or failure, yet those aren’t ‘scrubby’ mechanics. The reality of it is, your definition is off from the start.
Why? It feels fairly arbitrary to just tack costs onto a skill as a cost essentially on a whim. Could you explain why MvC3 would be a better game if AG burned meter? Or that why it’s not “good enough” for a mechanic to be balanced around the usage of the mechanic within the context of the game.
Extra meter management in a game like this can never hurt. As it is now, doing classic style block strings is pretty much impossible thanks to AG. If it were meter based, that style of play may actually be viable to people who enjoy it, such as myself, and it would give characters who have moves built around that style of play a reason to actually try using them for pressure.
It just makes sense. You want to avoid being chipped out by a super? use a little meter. AG the way it is now just comes across as lazy (and yes, I hate instant blocking and parries too. At least in Melty Blood, if you did a wrong parry your guard bar would incur a penalty).
You can argue that this game is not designed for classic blockstrings, but I see that as being a design fault. AG makes sense for MVC3, but still leaves a sour taste in my mouth when I compare it to other blocking mechanics in similar styled games.