Now as much as I like this game one of the big issues I have about playing this game competitively is that it just doesn’t make sense for it to be played in a 2/3 match format. Here are some general reasons…
1. There’s no rounds. Now there was no rounds in MVC2 but the difference was in that game stray hits did not convert to damage as easily as they do in MVC3. Just like in MVC2, a lot of teams in MVC3 are based on synergy that happens when all 3 members are available. Due to things like how high the damage is and the insane extra damage your asssist takes if your assist gets blown up by a stray hit or beam super, you can really easily lose tools you need to win the match. People are catching on with how to lame out non Dark Phoenix based XF3 characters. In general durping it out in XF3 is not a solid excuse for giving the opponent another chance to win. It doesn’t really revolve a lot around skill and more so like a last ditch attempt to run back the match. Which creates further randomness.
The game feels more like a 2 stock match of Smash Bros. being played 2/3 times to declare a winner than something of a normal fighting game with rounds. Momentum is too strong in MVC3 for having people go 2/3. You just don’t get enough time to adjust to your opponent especially considering your opponent has access to 3 different characters that you have to learn to adapt to their specific play style of with/without assists. Especially with XF there’s just no way to humanly adjust to this in a 2/3 match format without picking the absolute highest tier in the game and making sure you just shut out what everyone can do before they can get it started. Teams like Viscant’s Wesker/Assist/Phoenix team. A team where no matter what happens there’s always a way to win unless Phoenix dies to a snap in.
2. The damage in general is too high. I shouldn’t even have to explain the ways the damage ends up being too high in Vanilla MVC3.
Even with Ultimate MVC3 I just see it as a game where it’s too easy to kill people for getting one or 2 random reads during spacing. Things like ground bounces, hard knockdowns, lack of hit confirming required for combos and other general things that make it easy to combo and do a lot of damage to the point where all you need is one more reset/mix up and the character surely dies. There will most likely still be combos that can TOD most standard health characters since the game’s combo system is so open ended especially with assists any way. XF1 and 2 might not be able to kill 2 people off as easily as they used to but they surely will get rid of one without too much issue and leave time to doing big damage to the next off breaks as usual.
When you lose characters in this game you lose resources you need to win the match and are then forced to rely on mechanics that people agree don’t really revolve enough around skill like XF to amount comebacks. Without XF MVC3 would be the same game as MVC2 where when you lose one or 2 characters the chances of you winning go down extremely hard. The only difference is MVC3 put in a system that people agree is only strategic enough to help balance out the 1 vs. 3 character issue in a very quick, dirty way where neither the winner nor the loser of the outcome really feel satisfied about what happened. The mechanic at best helps people who aren’t that great at the game still do something worth talking about at the battle. At high level play XF1 and 2 are more important and somehow utilize more strategy than XF3 any way outside of Dark Phoenix.
With those things above I feel the best way to make the game more fair and interesting for people in tournaments is to make the game 3/5 matches. This will allow the game to retain it’s cheap, punishing nature and still allow all the easy confirms into big damage while enabling players more time to adjust to each other’s reactions, decisions and characters. Viscant even posted saying that he agrees Vanilla MVC3 isn’t an ideal game for a 2/3 match format and I don’t see much anything about UMVC3 that will make it more redeeming for a 2/3 match format. The game’s damage will still be plenty high enough where matches won’t take forever in a 3/5 match. It will give people more time to win and adjust over the things that can easily make the matches based more on momentum than back and forth battles of attacks and combos.
People before had brought up the changing the damage setting thing but I don’t think that’s such a great idea since the guys that do the most damage will still the most damage any way and they will still get really strong benefits off resets any way. Not to mention it forces a change of the game’s mechanics and the ways damage is distributed against things like the strategy guide.
What I’m ultimately trying to do is make a poll that will last for about 5 weeks to see the results I get. If enough are in favor of changing MVC3/UMVC3 to a game of 3/5 match format I’d like to see the results get passed along to anyone important who plays or runs MVC3 tournaments seriously or any Evo staff members that holds serious MVC3 tournaments.
High damage is just the way the game is. Learn to block and play smart and have a back-up plan for team members dying. ST isn’t played best 3/5, either.
The difference is ST has rounds, MVC3 doesn’t. When you lose characters in MVC3 you lose resources and it’s way too easy to open people up in a game like MVC3 IMO where it makes sense to be just pressing buttons at each other for only 2/3 fights. That barely gives you any time to get adjust to the player’s play style considering you have to adjust to their play style with 3 different characters to begin with.
ST also doesn’t have left/right mix ups that take away half your character’s life or mulitple up/down mix ups that can do the same thing. Then getting another free mix up into more damage on the next character. ST doesn’t have XF either.
Well as much as Marvel 2 should have been 2/3 I think the problem is MVC3 needs to be 3/5 EVEN more. MVC2 got away with being 2/3 since the conversion of attacks to damage and ways to create mix ups weren’t as canned and easy to create as the mix ups in MVC3. The damage assists take when getting hit in MVC3 is absolutely absurd and forces random swings of momentum where you lose your assist off one stray hit. It could happen in MVC2 but surely not as easily as hitting 2 people and making it even easier with turning on XF. With the invincible assists getting toned down in UMVC3 this will be even more of a problem.
I like 3/5 for MVC, but I don’t think 3/5 can be the standard for all tourney matches because that would take too long. I don’t need to see Randomscrub get bodied by Good player 3 times.
I think we should save it for top 8 or top 32 in majors. During EVO I was shocked at how fast good players got eliminated in top 8.
I don’t know if 3/5 would change much. I think the most fair would be best of 3 sets of 2/3 matches, but 9 matches would get pretty obnoxious pretty fast.
I thought about this but it would take a long time to implement considering Capcom would have to come up with new health values for the characters and then release it as a patch. Plus Capcom already felt the better thing to do with the game (not that it’s the correct thing) is to bring down health values for quite a few characters. They supposedly bumped Arthur’s health to 1 million but he’s surely going to need that when he still doesn’t have an air dash or teleport. Asking them to change things up again when they’re already changing things would be quite the bit of work. Whereas 3/5 matches is something the community can just change and make tournament matches more be about the better player instead of just the guy who swung momentum 2 times.
Hm idk. MVC3 does not have rounds nor is a slow paced game, but I remember (Iirc) everyone fussing about Noel Brown ‘‘making’’ <Insert-name-of-tournament> 3/5 and even the commentators got incredibly tired due to how long everything lasted (With them repeating that over and over. Iirc)
But Im not actually the one playing but at least as a watcher of the streams, I’ve never thought ‘‘Oh I wish this fight lasted longer cause <insert complaint>’’ mostly due to the crazyyyyy amount of participants streamed. Maybe in the top 8/16 if it isn’t already. However I do not know if its annoying for participants but I feel the tournaments will last soo much longer if a 3/5 is issued for every match while some tournies already last pretty long. Sorry if I did not read everything correctly or if I remembered the things mentioned wrong.
That’s the thing though. The commentators aren’t playing (at least not at that moment) and neither are the stream monsters making comments about it.
If people could get through 2/3 CVS2 matches (which also usually lasted…a really long time if all 5 rounds were fought) then we could certainly do 3/5 matches of a game where people’s characters drop lots of health and/or their entire lifebars off combos.
Well like I said above…you don’t need to see them get bodied 3 times if you actually go to Evo.
That’s like complaining that you’re seeing some guy that Federer or Nadal are clearly going to beat in Tennis even though it’s going to last a long time.
Which if you think about it it only takes one more match to kill a bad player a 3rd time if they really are that bad. With how fast the matches go in MVC3 any ways I don’t really see much difference there.
It’d be about the same as someone losing 2, 5 round matches of CVS2. It takes a while but they still lose in the end and maybe it didn’t end as fast as a Super Turbo or 3rd Strike 2/3 but it’s not like it was an eon either.
IMO top 8 of every game should be 3/5 at a major but especially MVC3. I remember Final Round did 3/5 for top 8 at MVC3 and I WAS SURE other tourneys would at least adopt a top 8 for a game where you can open up people so fast as MVC3. When last year’s SFIV tournament had crazy results for top 32 and 8 I can only imagine the monsters in MVC3 that went out early do to getting hit by stray hits and up down and left rights a bit too often in a 2/3. If you’re going to do that though you might as well just give everyone access to the 3/5 so people aren’t randomed out so much from the get go any way.
In a game where your next character has to deal with a free mix up as they come in to BS characters like Zero where you will surely get hit for free…it just doesn’t make sense to just 2/3 a game of momentum swings. At least 3/5 will give you more time to readjust yourself against the opponent’s movements so you can create your own momentum.
Yeah this would be the bare minimum I would accept for even a local tournament for this game. Top 32 at a major certainly needs to be more than 2/3 also. I would say anything semi finals related at Evo needs 3/5 at the minimum. I would still like all matches 3/5 just so there’s more time to adjust to all fights and not just simply a reward you get for getting far enough in 2/3 momentum fights.
I actually thought about this for a while. Basically I was weighing how often it seems like the “better player” loses (i.e. gets randomed out) vs. how much longer events would take if matches where 3/5 throughout. My conclusion was that top 8 should be 3/5 but not any further out in the bracket than that.
Only problem with your logic is characters already died fast in vanilla, now several characters got health nerfs on top of doing more damage in general.
I disagree with how much you’re downplaying how bad it was in 2 ( lots of matches even in top32s where someone would reset the DC 7 seconds into the round ), but yeah, things are too crazy for 2/3 to really be sufficient.
I disagree somewhat. From a stream monster point of view, there are definitely players who I hate to see lose. When they lose to bullshit in 2 quick games, I definitely feel like there should be another one. When clockwork got eliminated by xray, I really felt like he didn’t have enough time to recollect himself, and he was just completely out of the second game and couldn’t block. 2/3 is definitely too short for how fast you can die in this game. Someone needs to link the 5 second victory with sentinel+haggar “fastest mvc3 win” or something.
I like the idea of 3/5 but don’t know if tournaments (especially majors) can keep on schedule. I think everyone already knows tournament usually runs late. Could you imagine it being even more behind schedule? I know Tekken is 3/5, but the number of entrants is a lot lower. Final Round this year did run 3/5 in top 8, but that was because at that time they realized they had extra time so they asked the players. They just didn’t do it for the hell of it.
P.S Marvel 2 GF used to be 4/7. Or ECC was at least.
From a players perspective I would like 3/5 the whole way. From a viewer perspective I would like 3/5 for top 8, and 4/7 for GF (bringing it back!).