Yeah I guess this makes sense. My ideas are pretty excessive looking back on them. It’s just that we’re still very early in the game so I feel that there’s still much that we don’t know about the effectiveness of a lot of the cast yet and should wait for a little bit before we start to make any large changes them.
This is a bad idea, it isn’t just going to make those with poor high/low mixup games better, it’s going to make those with good lows ridiculously good and near impossible to deal with. There needs to be a balance here, characters are given poor high/low mixup games usually for good reasons. And if those reasons don’t exist you should be buffing those characters rather than changing the system mechanics.
Let me explain a situation that comes up VERY often in SFxT.
You fight for 50 seconds or so, and take off half of your opponent’s health. Especially in matches where people love to do boost chains, this will happen very easily, because both people are boost chaining and constantly gaining back like half the health they were dealt. At 40 seconds, someone finally gets a substantial opening and does a 400 damage combo, leaving an opponent with 20% health and a hard knockdown. They choose to apply pressure, but guess wrong on the roll (alternatively, they DON’T guess on the roll, and therefore can only apply very easily blocked meaty pressure). The opponent escapes this situation (maybe with alpha counter) and raw tags.
You’re now losing the life battle and have 30 seconds and full meter to kill a nearly full health character who stands full screen away from you. Let’s pretend it’s a character who has good keepaway (Ryu, Raven, among others).
You spend 10 seconds trying to get close. You know you have to start getting close RIGHT now, so you can’t play midrange footsies games for too long. Instead, you basically are forced to take a suicide jump or do something unsafe. You may lose the round right here.
Suppose the opponent is unable to stop your advance. You get in and now you have 20 seconds to kill 800 damage off this character. Even with full meter, this is almost impossible for some characters… I can basically take my hand off the stick and say “hit me with your best combo”. You can try your best to do short, damaging combos… a) this isn’t even possible with some characters, who have long animations on everything, and b) short combos end in hard knockdowns, which means a 50/50 chance you are unable to apply the meaningful pressure you need to win the round.
Your basically ONLY course of action is to hit with your highest damage 3 bar combo, which for many characters is over 600 damage… that’s great! Except… you gotta watch the combo. These things take 15 seconds, minimum, for almost everyone. My Ryu into Jin level 3 by itself takes 16 seconds, and my best combos that don’t use supers can’t kill. So the end result is… 15 seconds of combo, 2 seconds of watching the character stay face down on the ground, and then… a roll or non-roll, which usually ends the round right there.
Do you see how this problem started at 40 seconds on the clock? In no other game is this a problem, because:
- you can’t tag in a full life character at 40 seconds
- meaningful combos do not last 10 seconds, followed by a 10 second super
- throws do not take 4 or 5 seconds to execute
- rolls do not make applying wakeup pressure very difficult
You’re right that increasing the timer is a bad idea… it’s just going to make the matches that currently go to time out go a little longer, then time out anyway. Stopping the clock during supers IS an idea that MUST be implemented, because it means if I manage to tag you at 5 seconds left, I can do 600 damage to your character… running away is more difficult, and I don’t have to give up at 20 seconds.
I think rolls need a bit of nerfing, and throws need to be stronger (and maybe take less time to execute… I dunno, this is probably too hard to change now). These two things, coupled with a clock stop during all cinemas (pandora, super, level 3, etc) will go a LONG way to fixing this game. Once you get in, you can open people up more reliably (throws)… defense is harder (rolling nerfed)… and if I do manage to touch you, I can kill you from half health with 10 seconds on the clock (supers stopping). It’s NOT that we suck, it’s that the clock forces our hand so often.
Some other thoughts: I think it’s too early to make serious character changes. We can start to identify who the problem characters are, and who the useless ones are, but it’s too early to buff or nerf. IMO those things shouldn’t happen until at least 6 months and several substantial tournaments have taken place. I also think this game has craaaazy good potential, it’s just a shame that I don’t have the highest faith in Capcom to realize it. But it’s early, and I really, really want to be proven wrong on that point.
SF X Tekken is a good game but quite flawed. Still having the sound bug going is simply terrible.
But if they were to save it. Reduce timeouts. Increase damage by a bit to help with this. But they would have to be sure to increase damage on the right moves.
Fix the hitboxes. Some of them are quite odd or stupid like Rufus’ Divekick.
Since this thread is realistic changes, I’ll give mine. I think I posted this somewhere else two weeks ago, but I don’t remember.
Things to change:
- supers stop all clocks (including pandora) from the freeze until a) you get hit out of it or b) the first frame you are able to move after your super completes
- throws are 5 frames with a 15% range increase across the board. Additional change worth debating: throws cause unrollable knockdowns.
- roll has SOME nerf. I think at the very least, if you choose to roll, you forfeit the right to do anything other than block or tech for the first 5 frames after wakeup. I also think rolls should go less distance, but I haven’t thought too hard about how this affects the game. I’d also entertain ideas of rolls being straight-up punishable somehow, but then I think nobody would ever use them
- attacks do the same gray life as they do now, but gray life recovers 3 times slower off screen. When the clock is stopped, gray life does not recover.
(these changes are all, IMO, very easy from a programming state of view and do not require substantial reworkings of the game’s assets)
Things to keep the same:
- stages: IMO, the other fixes do most of the work and time is better spent not redoing all the stage backgrounds
- mechanics: no snap backs added, no need to change damage scaling yet, etc
- walk speeds: no universal buff to walk speed, maybe can reinvestigate on a character by character basis in first balance update
Does it do that? I actually never noticed.
Also, how about cutting gray life down with about, say, 10%? I mean, at certain points you can simply have a character down at 20-25% of his life: tag him out and it regenerates back to a point of about 35-40%. Slower regeneration is good though, it’s a bit to fast now.
Time increase is a no go. Simply freeze at supers (as well as in Pandora) and cross arts.
wow @ the kids who think crouch techs and other OSes are good game design…
Well, right now the clock never stops, so no, it doesn’t do that. In fact, if I have a lot of gray life on my point character and I land a hit, I will tag in Jin and do super. By the time the cinema is over, my point character has recovered almost all his gray life, and any gems my opponent (or I) has activated will probably have run out, lol.
Exactly. It’s replacing something that makes sense with something that is fucking esoteric.
Is this game gonna get patched soon?
Today 2 friends and myself finally cracked. After some endless mode matches we just felt like this game was already fully explored with nearly everyone doing 400k meterless combos effortless. I don´t know what exactly happened but we just put in SF4 and later Marvel and just had so much more fun while playing them… We don´t know if we´re ever coming back to SFxT or if this is just a temporary depression. It´s strange but we really had the feeling this games development on a tournament level is going nowhere.
I personally have no clue what to do to “save” this game for me, I just hope tomorrow brings a brighter future :(. It was a sad experience to put another game into the disc tray after only three months and I don´t want the game to die yet…
I have read a lot of posts on this thread recently referring to this as the vanilla version… I just cannot see what can be done to help this vanilla or beta version improve, blossom, and overall just add depth. I often wonder what it would be like w/ no chain combos, if the clock froze on all cinamatics, if throws/air throws came out quicker,but I dunno… Right now I am just trying to enjoy it as much as possible… Which at the moment is not too enjoyable (even though I have vastly improved, and still play daily) which to me is even more hurtful.
i think im settled on just making some characters a bit better, and getting rid of health recovery.
serious question. whats really the point of getting health back anyway in this game?
there are no safe tag outs or snap backs. i figure finding a way to get your character out should be enough of a reward. not half of what you lost on the way out
also it would go a long way to fixing the timer issues, and it would add some serious risk reward to jumping in at a character with average AA ability. right now i feel like people take a bunch of silly risks because you can just tag out and get a bunch of life back, so fuck it. eat the 60 dmg AA a few times, or throw out something unsafe that leads to 1/4 life or more on hit
part of what makes the 1 v 1 in this game boring is that it lacks the traditional tension in the decisions that are made in the early moments of a round. and then that lack of tension is quickly followed up by immediate clock management. getting rid of health recovery seems like it would fix both of those problems
I agree with a lot of what you said here, however does that not change the “whole” dynamic on damage and how it is received? For example, if you rely on boost combos as your main input of damage, your opponent can gain a majority of that hearlth back (due to how much grey life it leaves), as opposed to someone who uses basic or advanced combos (less grey life, yet more off the top)
yeah, but boost combos scale everything to shit anyway. it might just be me personally, but im ok with the scaling being the only drawback to abc launcher
I hadn’t actually thought about totally getting rid of health restoration…
But I think you are right, it doesn’t actually add that much to the gameplay. I suppose you could see at as a pseudo come-back mechanic (but not a bad one).
Ahhh okay, so get rid of grey life completely, make boost combo damage scaled, and regular combo damage… Well, regular?
Come to think about it though, aren’t all long combos boost combos in the end? If started with light move you have to progress to medium then to heavy to complete it? So wouldn’t that in turn mean all damage would be scaled, just abcc scaled harder?
I really do like a lot of the ideas that you’ve put up, they work to solve the game’s problems without making any major sweeping changes to the overall gameplay. There is something that I’d like to know about though about one of your changes
Due to this change, I would like to know what would happen if the opponent of the rolling player set up a command grab to land during the period of time where the opponent cannot do anything but block or tech? Would you make it so that the command grab would be forced to whiff, thus avoiding creating a completely unblockable situation? Or do you think that the rolling player should be allowed to be unavoidably punished by the command grab for making a bad decision, forcing players to commit more to their rolls?
I can’t answer for him, but watching the back and forth of these points, you have to let the command grabs rip and connect, you wanna roll? You can eat anything… Choose wisely. Just my opinion
I think health back is actually a good gameplay mechanic they should keep. It encourages tagging out and simultaneously NOT tagging out (if your imcoming character has gray life), so you have to keep an eye on your health bars. It also means you have to really decide on combo usage during a match… are you sure you want to use those two bars to do your double tag combo? It’s gonna kill all your gray life. Maybe you need to settle for a 1 bar EX move combo and less damage (but oki), or a 2 bar super combo for more damage and no oki… It also means that once you tag your partner out, there is a reason not to immediately tag him back in the next time you land a combo. It also greatly increases the value of level 3 cross arts that take off all gray life, which (IMO) are a little weak right now… if you’re going to spend 3 bars, you can almost assuredly do more damage by normal, link normal xx special, tag, cr.HP xx super. The whole mechanic forces you to make more important decisions about your characters and your meter.
It also, in general, discourages easy launcher hit confirms… these combos actually don’t scale as much as you think. They are subject to the normal damage scaling rules, but each normal that is chained in a non-Tekken combo does 50% gray life and 70% of its normal base damage (if I’m not mistaken). There are no extra damage scaling penalties, so abc launcher into Raven’s fierce loop still does a lot of damage and costs no meter. The gray life is the key to making these combos not the only thing you see in SFxT, IMO.
I think the proper solution is having gray life regenerate slower (either 2x or 3x slower, I’m leaning towards 3x). This is kind of like eliminating it altogether, but not quite… it should be the best of both worlds IMO.
I should clarify that the opponent could still jump or walk forwards/backwards during these 5 frames. They cannot, however: execute a throw (stand throw is tech only, no move comes out), backdash or forward dash, or reversal. Pressing any button during this time doesn’t do anything, even a normal. It means they MUST block a meaty, should you choose to do one.
Command grabs would be particularly strong in this case, yes… not totally unavoidable because of jumping, but jumping carries a serious risk because you will probably eat a meaty attack far more often than not. If you prefer to not be in this position, then don’t roll.
To be fair, I haven’t thought TOO hard about what this would do to the balance against characters like Gief, who have insane command grabs and insane crossups against non-rollers… damned if you do, damned if you don’t against those characters, maybe. Maybe you’d have to tweak Gief/Hugo a bit, I dunno. I don’t think the result would be any worse than what we have now, though. I think there would be ways to handle that with just smart play and not rolling.