How would a game play if there were no tiers? Would this be a Good Thing? Is it possible?
I think that it would only be possible with a lot of iterative design changes. You’d need to pay very close attention to your game’s competitive scene and consistently rebalance things until the tiers are even.
Also, it seems to me that tiers are very heavily influenced by how many of a character’s moves are cancellable into other moves, and so on. For example, if a character has a move with low startup, low recovery, high active frame count, long reach, and it’s cancellable into a a super, that moves them further up on the tier list.
Stuff like this makes me think it would be possible to automatically “profile” your game with a smart piece of software that would guess at tiers for different characters, which could be used to balance them out before the game is even released. Maybe if designers/developers could see a read-out of comparative stats, like “The average recovery for all moves in the game is 5 frames, but 60% of this character’s moves have a recovery of 10 or more frames,” it would be easier to keep things equal.
It seems like tiers are part and parcel of fighting games, but are they necessary? Are they avoidable? I think they take away more than they add, because essentially, the smaller the top tier is, the less of the game that is actually played in high-level competition.
Tiers aren’t something removable from games. They are inherently joined with the fact that the game has more than 1 character with unique moves. Sure, if you want to play a game with one character. Feel free.
I think the idea is to make all of the characters unique without making one of them that much better, though. I mean, there’s no way to mathematically quantify the differences between most characters. Even if there are no special moves, and you count up all of the frame data, you still can’t factor in how the character “feels” to play, or the attitude that people will take when they play them.
But… that doesn’t mean you can’t really try to balance it. What I’m trying to think about is: Is there a way to keep things balanced without taking away the uniqueness of the roster? I feel like there’s gotta be some way, we just haven’t seen it done yet.
I think it’s an interesting idea, taking a mathematical approach to game balance. Though, there are always those extra details that can’t quite be broken down into numbers…it’s still a promising idea.
The question is whether companies would be willing to go through the trouble…because that sounds like a lot of work!
You’d also have to ask whether the community would even embrace a game balanced to that degree. I think the answer is…“who knows?” In case you haven’t noticed, it’s completely random which games the community glorifies and which games the community vilifies. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. There are so many worthy games out there that are ignored and so many damaged games that are played.
So the “would the community play it” question is a crapshoot. Roll the dice and see, I say.
If anything, I think your idea could be used as an aide to the traditional balancing method.
True… it’d just be Ryu v Ryu v Ryu v Ryu… :rolleyes: Even if there were no “tiers”, there’d still be favorable/unfavorable matchups. That’s a good point.
That’s another reason I’m asking. People seem attached to the idea of tiers, but if you take a step back, it just seems like a short way of saying “how much of the game may as well not exist in competitive play”.
isnt this what they are attempting to do in hd remix? make all the tiers as narrow as possible
but it is almost impossible and it prolly wont happen in any game
if each character has unique normals, theres always gonna be that one normal (ex, chun back fierce 3s, rose cr. mp A2, sagat stone fist cvs2) thats just better than alot of others, its unavoidable
Tiers or no there will still be bad and good characters, and people will still gravitate to those good characters. People will still not use characters considered bad. You can’t make people start using all the characters a fighter has.
Isn’t “tiers” basically “good characters” and “bad characters”? yeah it’s relative, like low-tier characters aren’t necessarily “bad”, but isn’t that basically what it means?
This isn’t really true. You can make a game where all the characters are good enough to compete, even if there are some that have an edge over the rest.
Complete balance is probably impossible, but what I’ve mentioned is perfectly possible.
Well, the difficulty is… remember Freeman of MotW?? Supposedly lowest tier for years? Now he is considered pretty good since he had some strong Japanese tourneys. Of course, such an occurence is rare.
Normaly, there is only one way to perfection: iterations. In former years in the form of new games, nowadays possibly with patches.
Look at Starcraft. It’s supposedly the only perfectly balanced RTS ever… and it needed quite some time to get there.
It’s been repeated, but I’ll try to put it straightforward, for games with different characters (varying movesets):
Even if a game is balanced enough that any character can win, tiers will still exist… Because one character will be better than another character. The gap between these tiers may be almost completely unnoticeable, but there will be a tier list of some sort.
Two racers cross the line at the “same” time, but one still crossed first if you look close enough.
