It’s proper discrimination against irritating bs. Again with the Magic analogies, Wizards intentionally overprices goofy cards like Timesifter, Knowledge Pool and the like that cause the game to not make sense because players generally despise them. They’re the sort of stuff you pull off a couple times as a joke and leave it at that.
It takes more effort to balance a move by getting the risk vs reward to be more equal while also maintaining a strong overall archetype than it does to simply slap high health on a character who has poor tools to enact his gameplan or low health on a character with good tools.
Tools and options will in 90% of situations trump health because tools can prevent you from taking damage in the first place. If you have an overwhelmingly good set of options for every situation then the opponent has less ability to actually ever land a hit. Likewise if you have poor tools in most situations you are going to get hit more often and still have trouble getting your gameplan going. It’s much easier to simply add 100life to a character than to fix the underlying problems with their toolset.
It CAN be used in somewhat interesting ways and it is an option but it doesn’t mean it’s a good one. There is a reason that games that use health for balancing are almost always dominated by characters who end up being low to average health but have the best set of tools for a large variety of situations and/or one or two extremely powerful tools that are difficult for others to overcome.
Also in SF2 all characters had 144 health but there was damage scaling modifiers in place for different characters (3 dif groups) what the main difference between that and health is that A. random factor allowed for even Zangief to be hit for the same amount of damage as Ryu, and B. Throws were unscaled. Everyone always took the same amount of damage from a throw as every other character.
I think is much more difficult to balance a cast of characters that have different stamina than one with the same stamina.
And balance is not the only thing - there are other factors, too. Killer mentioned - character design - and I think that’s very important, too.
I really doubt Capcom decided to just give Akuma a ton of tools and then lower his health as a trade off. I think they designed him as a fragile character with many tools. Same as they designed Dhalsim as a character with great keepaway tools but less health. Same as Zangief was design as a grappler that has trouble getting in, slow walkspeed, but more health to trade.
And I think that’s smart design, and it makes the game more interesting.
You have high health grapplers, low health Dhalsim and chun, glass cannons Seth and Akuma. Yes, they don’t always succeed with their balance, because, like I said, is difficult to achieve a perfect balance, especially when you have to take into consideration different staminas.
But instead of making everybody more similar, I think is much better to just give them more tools. I honestly wouldn’t want to play a game where Zangief, Dhalsim and akuma all have similar health. That would be a boring game.
On the contrary, if I could, I would make stamina differences even more noticeable.
Btw, I just read Gen thread at Capcom unity - people wants more health and a better walkspeed.
There is a reason that Akuma has consistently been top tier or at least above mid tier in most games he has been in while gief is usually below mid tier at best in most games he has been in. Health is not a good way to balance. It isn’t any more difficult to balance a game with characters who have low health and characters that have high health because that gives you more leeway for an excuse as to why their tools being UNBALANCED is ok.
In a game where everyone had the same health it’d be much more difficult to balance a character like Akuma and a character like Gief. Ask ANY Akuma player, would you give up demon flip for 100 more health? I bet you 90% of them would say no. Ask any Dhalsim if they’d give up s.HP for 50 more health, I bet none of them would take that. Then turn around and ask any Dudley, “Would you give up 100 health for all your DPs to be 3F and invincible for 4-5F?” I bet most would jump at the chance.
You can achieve that by giving them better/worse defensive options, no need for a health reduction.
Now buff her health to 1000 and we’ll see whether that does nothing?
I’m not sure whether you understood what I’m saying?
I’m saying that a good game designer gives his grappler the necessary tools to compete. A bad game designer makes a shitty char and then buffs his health to 1100, because he’s too lazy to think up a way to make the character good. A good game designer makes a JoaT char whose tools are a little bit weaker than the ones of specialty types, or makes a sorta-JoaT with one glaring weakness in a specific area. A bad game designer makes a god of gods and then nerfs his health to 800 because he’s too lazy to think up a way to make the char not broken.
… naturally, this doesn’t really work out well. Shitty chars with a lot of health are still shitty chars, so they’re neither really fun to play nor actually good. The higher you climb on the skill ladder, the worse these characters become due to the tools and neutral game becoming more relevant. That’s part of the reason why classically in Capcom games, the Grappler characters are god tier at scrub level and gradually become worse until they’re at best midtier @ high level. Potemkin shows how a grappler can be top tier without being a shitty archetype that lives off extra health.
Also ROFL @ stating SG has same health chars due to the all girl cast. Wait for Big Band to come, wee there you’ll have another 14300 character, this time male. And dodging the GG argument with “It’s quite different” is just… talk about having no point and trying to justify one’s opinion by pulling crap out of thin air.
You still haven’t proven at all why having characters with different stamina is a bad thing, or why using health to balance characters is bad. You just gave some theoretical examples about bad game designers, that have very little to do with the reality.
You talk about grapplers having necesary tools to compete and about lazy design. Are you reffering somehow to Zangief ? because most people agree he is a great character, and a well designed one. Actually all of capcom’s original characters were great, that’s why the game has such a tremendous success, they were no lazy design.
Zangief is fun to play - that’s why he is one of the most popular characters, and he is competitive, otherwise Snake Eyez wouldn’t have won a major, and other gief players placed top 8.
And yes, usually grapplers are not top tiers, not because capcom is lazy or anything, but because they are difficult to balance.
Also, regarding god of gods - I’m not exactly who you are reffering to, because last time I checked, nobody called Akuma or Seth broken or anything. On the contrary, many people think (me included) that Akuma is a fairly well balanced character.
Using only health as a way to balance a game is stupid. But fortunatelly that’s not the case with SF4, otherwise this game wouldn’t be called one of the most balanced games.
And I would be very interested what would you give/take to Zangief/Dhalsim/Akuma so they have 1000 health but still keep their uniqueness.
And I’m curious why can’t a good game designer give a character higher/lower than average health, and also make the character fairy well balanced. Because last time I checked, this is what Capcom did to SF4 - a game where we are stilll debating who are the true bottom tiers.
It is habitual for the top 16 in SSf4AE2012 in tournaments to have 10-12 different characters.
In fact, just this week there were 7 different characters in the top 8 in Civil War.
And guess what?
Not one Cammy or Akuma.
- AGE|NYChrisG (Sakura)
- EMP|Dieminion (Guile)
- TS|Sabin (Dhalsim)
- TS|Min (E. Honda)
- Vivaldi (Rufus)
- DarkChild (Balrog)
- FNEX|Madness (Adon)
- EMP|NuckleDu (Guile)
Now let’s look at EVO last year:
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WW|Infiltration (Akuma)
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AVM|GamerBee (Adon)
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CVPR|PR Balrog (Balrog)
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eLive|Xiaohai (Cammy)
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MCZ|Daigo (Ryu)
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HumanBomb (Sakura)
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BT|Dieminion (Guile)
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TH|Poongko (Seth)
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Kindevu (Cammy)
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Haitani (Makoto)
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RZR|Fuudo (Fei Long)
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Dogura (M. Bison)
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DMG|iPeru (El Fuerte)
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Kyabetsu (C. Viper)
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coL.cc|Mike Ross (E. Honda)
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EG|Justin Wong (Rufus)
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WW|Ryan Hart
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DRS|Chris. (Ken)
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Hsien Chang (Yun)
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Hori|Sako (Ibuki)
Well this is the biggest fighting championship in the world. If some characters are so damn unbalanced why don’t they dominate the game? The tendency for any game, especially such a straightforward one, is for the optimal elements to stand out quickly enough. I`ll be damned, **there are 19 different characters in the top 20, and there are 25 different characters in the top 32!!! **
**This does not even include characters whose potential has been explored further this past year, such as Gen and Hakan.
Isn’t that nuts? There is no other game like it. Not this level of balance. **
Call this game what you want, don`t call it unbalanced.
This is why Capcom should really focus on the low tier characters. If la character is on this list up there then I reckon he is doing just fine. Not perfect, but sure as hell is doing fine.
We would just like to add a few more characters to that list up there, not to take these away from it.
I want to see Dan, Hawk, Oni, Juri , Yang and Vega right up there too.
I can somewhat understand why they buff and balance with health/stun. What I don’t understand is why characters with bad wake up (Dhalsim for example) have low stun
Because seeing stars is fun? (not)
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Again…while Guilty gear gives everyone awesome tools, some characters take damage worse than others. Chipp takes the most damage, and Potemkin the least. So health/stamina/taking damage/whatever was used as part of the balancing factor.
Remember how he was introduced? Yeah…as a Ryu with air fireballs, teleports, faster regular fireballs, invincability on sweeps and cr forward, faster flame fireballs, the raging demon. Akuma was initially a hidden boss design, a far superior shoto in every way. Since this was his initial design, that is why Akuma in following games has always had the most tools/options but to try to balance it out Capcom gave him less health. This wasn’t Capcom’s brightest hour in character design.
- As far as stamina for balancing it hasn’t caused bad character design by Capcom other than the aforementioned Akuma and Seth.
Concerning the grapplers in SF4, it is interesting(not really surprising) to see that the 1100 health grapplers, like Gief and Hawk are having in overall more problems and also are worse than the 1050 health grapplers, like Abel and Hakan. Capcom has an “interesting” way of balancing regarding the grapplers, as an example Hakan gets much better footsie and anti zoning tools than the 1100 comrades, but in return, they give him some drawbacks like situational AAs,the negative effects of being unoiled and nerf his health, but he is still much a better grappler than Gief and Hawk. He pays some kind of an Akuma tax.
Hakan pays the “bend over when not oiled” tax.
I have no doubt that a Hakan will make top 32 this year.
Kimo will also go to EVO 2013, but it won´t be easy for him. But hey, he knows, how to defeat some guys like Vangief, PR Rog and FChamp, he also improved according to Ricky Ortiz, he will probably do it better this year, compared to 2012, where he ran into a Fuerte and he didn´t knew the matchup, which caused him to lose. Let´s hope he gets some Dhalsims as opponents.
You can’t really use tournament winnings and placements as a proper argument either for or against balance though. A player will always have more imput to their success than their character, see Daigo trying to pick up Akuma and doing worse with a character known to be better than Ryu. Its not a data set that can be justified.
To make a judgement on balance like this you have to remove as much of the player as possible and look at their stats. Look at specific instances of what mistakes a character can make without getting punished or what kind of opportunities characters have to punish other characters. Look at where they do well and where they don’t match-up wise with a larger set of data in a more controlled environment.
I do agree that the game is really well balanced and that Akuma and Cammy are the weakest top tier characters we’ve probably seen, but its how their balanced that is poor. Vortex is valid play but being vortexed isn’t fun, it stops you from playing the game if done right. If we look at Ibuki as an example, she does less damage and has much more risk involved with her vortex than Akuma and Cammy making her vortex more fair, for a lack of a more apt term. The SF4 team just needs to apply more risk to the top tier vortex to balance it out or (less likely I assume) weaken their non-vortex options so that its harder to set up.
TL;DR: Tournament placements aren’t good for judging balance, players do more for that. Balance vortex options on top tier.
I would have thought it was pretty obvious.
Sim has a strong zoning and keep out game. His health is lowered as a means to reward those who manage to break through to do their work. If Sim were to have average or even high health, it would make the process of defeating him (within the given time limits) difficult for many characters. Obviously some characters are better tooled to crack his defence (Yun, Fei, Hakan, Abel) than others (Ryu, Gief, Makoto, Guile, etc) however.
A similar health approach has been applied to Guile also, who also has a strong keep out game and is well tooled to zone in ways somewhat comparable to Sim. Capcom said so much in their recent updates to SFxT and also in their commentary for balancing Guile in both AE and AE 2012.
Just FYI, Makoto totally wrecks Sim. It’s one of his worse matchups.
Also, I really don’t understand how at this stage of the game people can still argue Sim has good zoning tools. How many tournament relevant characters can Sim effectively zone? 2? 3?
Most of the cast that you see in a top 8 goes through Sim’s tools without any fucks given.
Is Kimo going to be in NorCal this weekend? Cause I sure as f-ck know who I will be rooting for
Having low health so that it’s not so hard to take out a character like 'Sim once somebody gets in is understandable, but Sim’s own damage output is way too low right now to justifiy the reward they get vs. the struggle (i.e. the opponent gets way too many chances to live and get in as it is right now).
Watching Art’s 'Sim in Civil War AE finals this past weekend was kind of painful because it shouldn’t have taken that long to take the rounds that he did imo and for some close rounds that he lost, I feel definitely would’ve gone to Sim if he had a little more damage to work with. Also being chased corner to corner 3-4 times just to stay alive (because you can’t kill the opponent quickly enough) is ridiculous.
Basically what I’m trying to say is while I think low health is okay for characters that are hard to catch, don’t stack low damage on top of that and force them to make too many correct choices because then you have them pitted against above average health characters (and most likely average/above average damage to boot), who have all the time in the world to figure you out and get the big opening because they just… won’t… die.
Guile’s damage seems a bit more on par for what it should be for a heavy zoning playstyle, but at the same time most of his small openings allow him to get a clean cr. fierce or st. fierce attack (sometimes CH fierce into another fierce). They do the average damage of heavy attacks, but it’s way more than what Sim is doing in the long run. Not saying Sim should do the exact same (because he still has more reach), but just a little bit more to make it more fair. Then the health deficit would actually be more justified imo.
Hi akuma mains, remember this thread?
http://www.capcom-unity.com/street_fighter/go/thread/view/7411/28312267/Akuma_petition_from_Akuma_players
Yup , you guys whined to capcom about “breaking your character”. “I am moving characters thanks to you” ,waaaaaaaah, signed akuma mains.
For literally the next year akuma easily remains in the top 3, if not the top position in the worlds tournament scene.I have kindly provided this as a warning so as to not make yourselves look foolish again.