@doubleF, I think you’re looking at this the wrong way. No one can argue that frequently by the 20-25 second mark a victor has already been decided (failing a blow up) and your opponent gets to play the up back and taunt button game, but even then you would have to examine what led up to that point. Lets look at some scenarios;
a) You got blown up
Thank your lucky stars that this isn’t Marvel and you even still have a reason to hold the controller. Mechanics aside, consider the average blow up in Marvel (2 or 3). In those cases, the match is OVER by about 15-20 seconds because someone lost a key assist, got happy birthdayd, or just got caught in a reset that has already taken their point character out of the equation. There might be some super hype evo moment type comeback to be had, but lets face it, most of the time you just do the super jump pray for a hit confirm game until your opponents assist finally swat the fly. SFxT at least gives you the chance to undo a potential blow up, given that after a 60-70 second beat down, you probably have 3 meters, which for most teams is a 50% damage combo waiting to happen. You might say, well yeah but with 20 seconds, I’ll never be able to catch him and use those three meters, but consider this; Most of the big damage solo characters (Mishima, Grapplers) lack special mobility options, meanwhile most of the pixies (Zoners, Ninjas) have teleports, special movements, or just plain kick ass tag cancels. So at that point, you need to look at your team makeup. Do you have a big combo waiting in the wings off a tag cancel from a Hunting Hawk, or Pinwheel or is your Guile / Asuka dream team simply designed to get lamed out?
b) You blew them up
In SF4 (disregarding ultras, for the moment) a blow up, even in your favor generally means nothing. With a few exceptions (usually ridiculously bad match ups) eating a huge combo or reset right off the bat still leaves you with ample ground to do something about it, even at 50 and sometimes even 30 second mark. However, those type of slow paced back and forth tennis matches fly in the face of SFxT’s design. SFxT is not designed to facilitate 20 minute crouching forward shodowns between Valle Ryu and Daigo Ryu, if it were Ryu wouldn’t be able to hit confirm a crouching medium into launcher (bring in health up or heavy hitter partner), ex moves (HUGE opportunities off EX Donkey or EX SRK) or simply tag cancel a tatsu (which can lead to all sorts of grimey options depending on who your partner is). The point there being, in SFxT (as someone mentioned earlier) if you put someone in their place earlier on, they stay in their place. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. IMO, it makes your opening offensive that much more significant, because the dominant player now sets the pace of the match as opposed to constantly living in fear of the reversal FADC or worse ultra that could instantaneously remove their advantage.
c) Its still fairly even
The timer still doesn’t really matter. Fact is, even if your opponent is running away at 50 seconds, anyone (except some choice Tekken cast by my reckoning) still has an opportunity to catch them and swing the tide of battle with a single hit confirm. SFers have their godlike normals and EXs, Grapplers gon’ grapple and most others have /something/ that with the right tag cancel can turn the tide of battle. Here are a few examples;
Julia: Anything off f+2, 1 or b+2,2 and if she lands a HCF+Fierce, prepare for combo video.
King: Without meter, Combos off spin xx elbow bounce, wizard mixups, or just play the reversal game, with meter anything grounded into EX DP+K strings. Or anything airborne into super.
Law: QCF + anything tagged into anything
Nina: Anything into qcb+k
Ogre: Jesus christ what can’t he do?
Dhalsim: Any properly executed Tiger Knee Tele-headbutt counter is a free tag combo, or you know, just play dhalsim and win via annoyance.
or just use tried and true SF4 shit, it all still works. Overhead shenanigans, dive kicks, random wake up / supers.
If you can honestly say you (or your opponent) is confident enough to turn off their basic gameplan after 50 seconds and there’s nothing you can do about it, no timer adjustment will avail you. What would another 25 seconds do? He’s obviously better than you. You want to give him more time to rub it in your face. How bout less time? omae wa mo shinderu, buddy.
IMO If there was an adjustment to be made it would be the supers (or at least cross arts) eating up 10-20 seconds worth of clock before the actual killing stroke, not so much because it allows the leader to cinema scam, but because its bull shit that 75% of the supers won’t actually kill until the full length of their animation happens, even if the opponents life bar depleted on the first or second hit.
That said, there is still a lot to be said for pandora which despite a lot of disregard is a viable tactic for many characters. Any character with an easy meterless ground bounce (even paul has one of those) or an EX stun (Yoshi even has a meterless one) is ripe for pandora abuse. You might say that will never be as viable as just fighting it out with another character, but once people said x-factor level 1 would never be worth sacrificing level 3, and then wolverine happened.
