Repeated Rebalancing/Nerfing turns me off of fighting games

Current Fighting Games Fighting Game Discussion
1

I’m an admitted purist, but the current age of continuous re-balancing ruins games for me. I actually liked it when a spinning pile driver did extreme damage. When Honda’s hands would bury you. Size and strength were visually understandable. These days it seems everyone always wants perfect “balance”, which in my opinion isn’t really a good thing. Maybe for you tournament guys who take it so seriously, but not for most casual players.

Down with the re-balancing era, release the game and let it ride.

2

Your thread title and OP opening message don’t seem the same.

3

how so?

4

I think Omega mode ultimate says “fuck balance!” while theyve released all these versions of sf4 full of re balancing…its annoying.

New versions of games arent that bad of a thing though, Im glad they finally reached Super Turbo and 3rd Strike, those are examples of justified rebalances and evolution. But then theres Alpha 3…

5

In truth, this isn’t really any different from back in the “good old days” since even then, we recieved updates and revisions of games. The only difference now is that you don’t have to spend for a new arcade board to get the updates.

6

I guess. I remember playing the original version of Street Fighter II for quite awhile. I’m getting older so I am naturally grumpier :slight_smile: . But it seems more like passing around the nerf bat is an expected part of the game now. Like as soon as a game comes out people are expecting character nerfs. I just find it annoying I guess.

7

And the effect of “just letting it slide” is having extremely tier dictated games or having incredibly broken strategies that made the game stupid.

A game doesn’t need to be perfectly balanced but balance should be still a goal. Sounds like you’re just angry that you can’t steamroll people with easy to abuse strategies.

8

No dude, not angry at all about that. It’s about the constant flux of the game and the demand for constant re-tooling. I just liked it better when the game was released as intended and people learned to adapt.

9

oh cool another balance thread on srk

time for everyone to trot out vague generalities and pretend they know more about other games than they really do

should be fun as usual

10

whatevs… fuck balance… concept only relevant for post-millennial over-entitled, self-declared S±tier level crybaby douchebags.

Play the game as it was built.

If it’s shit, wait for an update.

Still suck? Make your own damn game? Japanese dojin scene can do it. Shiyat, that fool Mike Z with his anime via nickelodeon Marvel 2 ripoff wannabe loli-con (but epic failz) skaahllgrrrrlz can do it…

Still losing? You suck. Try a different game.

Move on.

Pollute another thread.

Whatevs

11

Updates are cool if it you do it just once a year like Capcom does. Anymore often than that is just silly though.

That is, as long as “rebalance” doesn’t mean nerf whatever the best things are even if the best things aren’t actually problematic.

12

There’s some merit to the point of this thread. There is charm to a lack of constant rebalancing, and the comparison with the ‘olden days’ where they used to do it all the time too is not exactly fair.

System-wise the differences between Alpha 1, 2 and 3 are so big, that you can’t compare that to SF4 going to SSF4 or SSF4AE going to USF4. Big massive system-wide changes where implemented. For all purposes except which sprites are being used, and the presence of an alpha counter, these games are new games.

Same can be said about CvS1 going to CvS2. Or SSF2 going to ST (to a lesser, but still serious extent).

That’s not always a good thing, of course, I would have like a better balanced Alpha 2 better than that Alpha 3 stuff.

Either way, I think the constant updates do somewhat impede on the actual evolution of the game. If you think how many cool new things were discovered, literally, decades after the release of ST for example. We’re never going to have that moment anymore, where suddenly a new insight will overturn our understanding of Vanilla SF4, because nobody plays it anymore.

And we even have proof, in a way, that the updates are coming by too quick. Remember how Jill was suddenly nerfed in UMVC3, while nobody thought of her as toptier? But Capcom said they had tech that made it seem like she was broken? It was never actually discovered!

I really feel once a year is pretty silly already.

But of course, Capcom has a business to run, and rebalances with enough changes for people to care, obviously helps restart the hype for a game.

One of the great things about fighting games is just how emergent much of the gameplay is. So much of the stuff that is done by player do was never intended in the original design, and that’s awesome, and interesting. And it takes away from the game somewhat when designers no longer ‘allow’ for the game to be emergent in that way.

13

But they’re more in line with changes from SFII to later versions (CE through ST). Same with NG to 2I to 3S. Speaking of the latter, we also got Revision B of 3S. Actually, I recall more than a few games got minor board revisions as well.

14

I can understand someone being turned off by the people who are constantly asking for patches or rebalancing, however casual players aren’t going to understand a game well enough to be turned off by the actual changes themselves.

I don’t know how someone can be a purist when all of these games go through some type of change either while they’re still in the arcade or when they release to console. Only difference today is that we have the ability to patch games instead of letting them ride when people find issues which may or may not be fixed to begin with.

You don’t want to constantly make changes to a game before it’s had time to settle, but if you’re rebalancing or making changes to a game each year or so, then that will help keep it fresh. Otherwise most people are going to quit after a year for something newer, especially casual players.

15

I find this thread confusing because as others have noted there were a variety of changes in the various versions of most games. The chief difference now is that you don’t typically have a “locked-down” copy unless you stay offline.

Seems like you can just stay offline and be happy. :tup:

16

I hate constant balance updates BECAUSE I try to play fighting games seriously. BlazBlue was my favorite game for a while, but I gradually lost interest in it after a hundred updates. Looking back, I think the moment when it started to go irreversibly downhill was the discovery that sweeps were techable in CS2. It’s like, yeah, that’s totally 100% adjustable, but I LIKED untechable sweeps. With each update it felt less and less like I was playing the game I liked originally.

And this is why, after years of saying “it’s too old, there’s no point”, I started playing 3S.

17

I don’t think this time ever existed. The game was released with bugs, and there was no practical way to fix them. The people who could take advantage of the bug continued to play the game, and those who could not or didn’t want to simply quit. Not many actually adapted. I mean, there will always be counter-examples like the awesome VDO of MVC2 but by and large that game’s community is a sea of Storm/Mags/Cable/Sentinel players because all the Son-Sons and Jills either switched teams or quit long ago.

18

the old school updating is funny in retrospect. Capcom would wrap up completely new characters and system changes with what appeared to be balance changes, so instead games just seemed to get unbalanced in new ways in each iteration. I don’t really follow it but it seems like they still kind do this with SF4.

its also kind of funny how people (like me) became so accustomed to a game that obviously would never get any sort of balance change that that “do not change anything” paradigm became preferred over regular balance updates. thats probably good for marvel3 since it cant get any updates right?

even though like I said, I prefer playing a game that isn’t going to get changed once or twice a year, I’m not sure this can really work by design. how would capcom or anyone else know when theyve hit on the version that doesn’t require tweaking anymore? should they have stopped at Hyper Fighting, or stopped at Alpha 2? maybe 4th strike really would have been kickass? the world may never know

19

Based on the comments at Eventhubs and Unity, they should stop once no single character is able to win a major.

/kappa