Player enforced game rules

Current Fighting Games Fighting Game Discussion
1

I would like to get some opinions on player enforced rules within a fighting game. I think this could be an interesting discussion, as well as a way to talk about what we like and dislike about the fg’s we play (or don’t play, but would if things were changed.) Remember that certain genres, like board or card games, often come with various rule sets, which can be extremely helpful for smoothing out the game in certain scenarios or conditions. Similarly, I personally don’t think we should shy away from the thought about player enforced rules, but I’d just like to hear what you think.

Many of the classic fighting games we play have glaring issues, whether in terms of character balance, or simply issues in the metagame. In lucky cases, some games are still able to be great games, or, at the very least, are still incredibly fun and worth playing, even if not so great of a game.

Sometimes I personally wish that we could create rules as a community who plays a certain game, and enforce those rules, in an effort to create a better game, or a more balanced one. For example, I play Garou, and I wish we could enforce a rule of limiting feint cancel loops to 4ish reps, or for kevin, 2ish. The effect would be to get rid of block string infinites, in hopes that the game would be better off for it. Things of this nature.

We have seen some games actually been given this treatment as tournament standard, for example, Last Blade 2 was released with a mind boggling number of combo infinites that were also very easy to pull off, making you wonder how the developers could overlook them. But a few players still saw potential in the game, I suppose, and they made a new list of rules for the game to get rid of infinites, as well as make the game overall play more logically. The game never seemed to garner a huge tournament output, but you can still find a healthy amount of high level footage of the game, played with enforced rules.

This makes me wonder if not the same treatment can or should be done with other games, and which, and is it possible or even logical to desire some kind of fan-modded version of certain games to clean up a crap game into something perhaps even worth tournament play. I believe samsho3 had a project along these lines that addressed hitbox and balance issues. What about a game like MVC1? There are infinites everywhere. Sure, the nature of the series I imagine likes to be absurd as possible, but would it not be a better game by limiting infinites and other broken elements a la last blade 2? Or is that a bad idea. A game like Waku Waku 7, close but so far to being a good game; fatally flawed. A game like Garou, pretty great, but with a feint meter where every feint costs a bit of a recharging bar could easily fix a lot of its issues while also being a very useful tool for balancing the cast. Give kevin and jenet and other BS characters less feint meter, give weak characters liberal feint meter. Give weak characters better feint moves as well that look more like the regular moves, which can be really powerful in neutral situations.

So what do you guys think? Play enforced rules? Yay or Nay? Which games could we talk about? What about mod projects? etc.

2

If you don’t like how one game works then just play another one instead of coming up with your own rules

3

Fighting games aren’t DnD, you play by the games rules, not yours.

4

There is no reason to create rules for glaring issues these days. Online patches have taken care of that problem.

5

MvC1, or any Marvel game really, would be worse of with any “no infinites” rule.

In any case, it takes so long to actually break these games down and figure them out, even in this day and age (refer to my article on the front page), that it’s dumb to assume that you can create a custom ruleset for it. All you end up doing is limiting the growth of the game. Imagine locking out all the old lockdown cheese teams in MvC2 because they dominated the game early on, without realizing that they would eventually be taken over by a more rushdown/reset oriented meta with the god tiers we know today.

6

“This makes me wonder if not the same treatment can or should be done with other games, and which, and is it possible or even logical to desire some kind of fan-modded version of certain games to clean up a crap game into something perhaps even worth tournament play.”

Well, I’m just a casual player / spectator of competitive fighting games, so my opinion probably doesn’t count for much, but I am working on a game mod myself right now for the SNES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters so maybe I can offer a different perspective on this.

First, making a mod consisting only of balance changes can only work for a game with NO competitive scene.

Early on with my TMNT TF mod it was meant to be a series of ‘1.0X’ patches to add some niceties like being able to select the alternate color for characters and having tournament settings set by default, but when I wanted to address some of the issues players had with the game (mostly trying to change a couple engine things to eliminate infinites/nerf dizziness), the players seemed pretty opposed to any changes. Understandable of course, so I split those changes into a new project I’m working on that I’ve dubbed TMNT Championship Fighters. But ultimately, if there’s a competitive scene in place you’re going to have a hard time selling any changes.

Second, I think new quality content (new characters especially) is extremely important to a mod’s success especially when trying to modify something with an active competitive scene.

This is more of an opinion, but I’m pretty sure this is the case. New quality (“Quality” here I’d define as being something that looks and feels like it could’ve been part of the original game) content can be very labor-intensive, especially when it comes to new characters. You need to modify the game engine to support additional characters, program the character, make all the new sprites, make new sound effects and voice clips, and then make sure they’re balanced. But in the end, I think it’s essential. Project M is one of the most successful competitive mods made, and I think the new characters, stages, costumes, modes, etc. were possibly bigger factors than the balance fixes.

I think the biggest issue of balancing alone is that while a modded version might make the game better, the official/vanilla version is usually going to be the more played and readily available version, so the official/vanilla version is more worth a pro player’s time. There may be those that enjoy cheese from being removed, but in the end it seems usually games develop ways to play around those strategies. Yeah, a player who mains a low tier might enjoy their character being able to be a contender in a balance mod, but in the end their character still exists and they get to be a low tier hero in the vanilla version, so why jump to what is usually a smaller, possibly legally dubious (depending on the company(s) stance on mods) ship?

As I see it, it’s a struggle to get either competitive OR casual players to favor a mod for purely balance reasons, though I could see some pure balance mods enjoying some success for games that lack a competitive scene to begin with. New content and particularly new characters is something that can draw in competitive and casual players alike though. Consider this: TMNT TF has 12 characters, with 10 allowed for competitive play. What I’m trying to accomplish with TMNT Championship Fighters in addition to some engine tweaks is rebalancing the 2 SNES boss characters, adding the Genesis exclusive characters, adding the NES exclusive character Dragon Warrior/‘Hothead’, and adding a new character that’d be an amalgamate of the unarmed NES Turtles. If I managed to get that done, you have vanilla TMNT TF with 10 playable characters and a couple undesirable issues, and then you have my TMNT CF mod with 20 playable characters and the undesirable issues fixed. Which would you rather play?

“If you don’t like how one game works then just play another one instead of coming up with your own rules”
“Fighting games aren’t DnD, you play by the games rules, not yours.”

That’s flat out wrong considering fighting game players follow the community’s rules, not the games’ rules. The game doesn’t prevent Akuma from being used in SSF2T tournaments, the community / players do. It comes down to whether enough competitive players and/or tournaments agree to a ruleset or not. I understand the sentiment though.

“There is no reason to create rules for glaring issues these days. Online patches have taken care of that problem.”

That works for modern games actively being patched by the developers, but not for games that aren’t having new patches developed for them.

"In any case, it takes so long to actually break these games down and figure them out, even in this day and age (refer to my article on the front page), that it’s dumb to assume that you can create a custom ruleset for it. All you end up doing is limiting the growth of the game. Imagine locking out all the old lockdown cheese teams in MvC2 because they dominated the game early on, without realizing that they would eventually be taken over by a more rushdown/reset oriented meta with the god tiers we know today. "

Understandable and I agree with you for the most part, but on the other side of the coin, cheese makes the game less enjoyable especially from the casual side of things. I think if there is a game that has little to no competitive scene, the potential limiting of growth is negligible when there was little interest in the vanilla game to begin with. Especially when you consider the possibility of additions rather than just balancing, which would add to the growth potential.

7

If you need special rules to make the game “competitive” or “enjoyable” then there is a problem, is one thing to ban things that are clearly gamebreaking, but once you have to get out of your way and start adding rules over everything in the game, then at this point i think that the more logical thing should be play something else.

8

I assume you by ‘special rules’ you mean rules that are bans on what players can do within a match, which I agree in virtually all cases is going too far. Any bans/rules should only affect the setup for a match, and not the match itself (so basically what options are set and which characters and stages are allowed). If the special rule is crucial to the game being competitive and enjoyable, then the logical thing is indeed to play something else. Which could of course be a fan mod which removes the need for any special rules.

9

People have tried this before and no one ever plays any of the modded games so it’s pointless.

Basically if you play a modern game this is a non-issue because things will be patched if they’re too strong and the game develops over time anyway. If you play an old game, you take it as it is and live with all parts of it or play something else. There’s only a few old games that really have a semi large community anyway, so when you play things like ST, 3s, KOF 98 and 2002, you know what you’re getting in to so you can take it or leave it.

If you’re just playing with your friends then custom rules are fine. Maybe there’s a fun variant of X game if you ban 3 characters and 2 techniques. But you’re unlikely to have much success convincing others to play by those rules so it will likely remain with you and your friends.

10

The great thing about this scene is that we play what we’re given without making up extreanous rules. As for these types of rules, XvsSF is the only one that has it since people will play with no infinites.

Seriously, this isnt smash.

11

While it’s generally true that the FGC plays what it’s given, people seem to forget that very occasionally we do add additional rules to games. In MvC2, dead body looping to run the timer was banned in major tournaments. The gambit hiding glitch was also banned. While it was a bug, where we draw the line on allowed glitches vs banned ones is still community driven. There have been character bans throughout the years, such as ST Akuma (even banned in HDR after balancing him was attempted).

Things like this don’t really happen happen anymore because of the ability to developer patch games, but pretending that we never have done it is being dishonest.

12

At the same time, these things tended to be the exception rather than the rule. Rules banning so-and-so character (which rarely ever happens with ST Akuma as a baseline, since that’s a pretty high benchmark for banning, hardly any other character comes close), or so and so glitch or exploit only come up when they need to. The community does not immediately go into a game looking to ban stuff or to make up arbitrary rules.

13

Oh definitely, I agree that it is very, very rare that things like this are done. I was intending to address more the people, both in this thread and others, that treat the idea of additional rules as a completely batshit crazy idea that we should never do in a million years (the “play it as is or play something else” mentality). It’s surely a bad idea to immediately start looking into adding arbitrary rules, but every once in a while there’s a game that has 100 good things about it, and then 1 thing that can ruin it and it’s worth cutting the one thing to save the game. And again, this is really only an issue with older games that couldn’t / can’t be patched. Most developers making a modern game care enough about competition to patch anything that’s game ruining.

14

The Age of Empires/Mythology communities seem to run a lot of games with Voobly-specific balance patches instead of playing the normal game.

15

If we go outside of the FGC, lots of communities have rulesets on competitive play. AoE2 had a community developed expansion, Forgotten Empires, that was often used for balance reasons. TF2 has class limits in competitive play. Counter Strike has a general no-exploit stance when it comes to terrain-collision exploits on maps. Even something like picking a map pool for RTS / FPS is a community driven rule.

Other communities don’t have the same knee jerk reaction as the FGC because they’ve all had some point where it was needed. Their games generally have more complex interactions, which can lead to more extreme game breaking interactions that need intervention. Fighting games generally have competitive play as a priority for developers, so things that hurt high level play are fixed. This isn’t always true in other genres. They all still try to avoid adding rules that aren’t absolutely necessary, but don’t have the black and white mentality that the FGC does.

16

Well yeah, I could see that.It worked with Smash bros. melee and competitive pokemon really well. But you have to consult with the community and form a poll or something and agree with the final decision unanimously. And not be ban happy.

17

This is why patching is the best thing to happen to fighting games since combos. Let’s face it, if you have to play by the honor system, there’s going to be issues. I would rather limit the power of TOs to decide the outcomes of matches to as little as possible, and once you get rules that aren’t objectively quantifiable that’s going to be a problem, especially isnce not all communities might agree to the same rules. We already have some community rules in place regarding stuff that can’t be helped, like pausing or controller disconnects, and those already cause enough controversy at times. Not to mention honest to goodness bugs that can be exploited under specific circumstances. Should we really need judges to oversee combo loops? Not to mention that it’s kind of a slippery slope. Where do we stop? Is a move too strong to be “allowed” in competitive play? Can Ken only EX tatsu three times in a match before he forfeits? Is slide into V-Trigger banned? Is Mika not allowed to set up her unblockables?

I’m no Smash expert, but as far as I know, the universal rules are basically “no items, ban gimmick stages”. They don’t ban actual mechanics or moves, in fact, they break that game in half by abusing the engine to do shit you were neever supposed to do. With Pokémon, it’s easier to do since you can simply ban specific pokémon or moves, and players can just avoid them. It’s more or less the same as banning characters that are clearly broken in a fighting game, like Gon, Orochi or ST Akuma (or rather, more like banning specific overpowered cards in a CCG/TCG). Banning specific combos or telling people how many times they are allowed to loop just feels too open to interpretation. There’s no risk of me “accidentally” bringing a banned pokémon with a banned moveset to a tournament, or me “accidentally” picking Pokéfloats in Smash. In a fighting game, I might hit the wrong button in the heat of the match, or I might forget the specifics of this community’s house rules, or I might be too focused on the match to keep track of how many times I’ve used a specific thing. Either ban characters entirely or not at all, don’t impose weirdo rules on how many times I’m allowed to hit a button.

There’s also the fact that CS, DoD, TF and DotA began as community creations, and therefore have always had those roots even when they became “proper” games with actual development studios, and in the case of MOBAs, became an entire new genre. Hell, even with older FPS games like Doom and Quake and the like, a lot of the maps and modes were community creations. Fighting games never really had that. If MUGEN ever took off as a competitive fighting game platform, it would probably be more in that seat, with more actual community enforced rules.

18

Have you ever seen no infinite mvc1? Its hilarious. Hulk can turtle in the corner and kill you off of one throw. Wolverine doesnt need to inf hell just uncombo or throw reset you. And GWM is still GWM

19

Ingame rules would annoy the shit out of me.
I’d just simply feel retarded when my instinct tells me to use a technique which gives me the highest chance to win in a scenario, but then I gotta be like “but it’s banned”.

I wouldn’t play a game like this. Reminds me too much of friends telling to not pick Eddy in Tekken 3 or to stop throwing them.

If the game is broken in the first place then fuck this game.
Not being able to pick certain stages and characters is ok, as long as I can go all out as soon as the real game has started.

I mean one cool thing about fighting games compared to traditional sports is that you don’t really need a referee to call the game.
If you start using rules like that you need refs n shit and I feel like that’s too much of a hassle, just to play a broken game.