Way to line item quote the post and separate sentences from their context. Also, good job on missing the point entirely. You’re also not remembering a lot of stuff properly (could it be because you weren’t there? hmmmmm).
^ That’s all I needed to see. Yawn.
EDIT: Actually, nvm, I hit the main points:
-SFIV was probably the most balanced SF at launch at the time. There was strong stuff, but the tiers were fairly compressed.
If you expected balance in a cast as large as Marvel’s, you don’t understand how balance works. You can’t have a non-homogenized cast that large and expect there to not be a rigid top tier. Also, nobody signed up for Marvel to play Balance Fighter. You play Marvel for crazy action and hype. It still wound up being a great competitive game with a huge scene despite not being very Zen.
Balance has nothing to do with how often a game is patched. Patching changes balance, but rarely results in actual balance. Capcom tried many times by doing multiple iterations of each Street Fighter. Doing 30 iterations versus 4 would likely not result in things getting better. Sirlin (whose focus in life seems to be game design these days) tried to balance ST with the help of multiple top players, and they still failed to produce a balanced game. The fact remains: the cast is not homogenized, therefore strength levels will differ. Want a balanced SF? Give every character an Invincible DP, a fireball, a command grab, a 3f normal, a good low and standing poke, a way to dodge fireballs, and make sure they can all combo into super. This game, while likely balanced, would be boring as fuck. Diversity or Balance. Pick one.
The CoD thing was just an example to demonstrate that differences result in tiers, nothing more. Its popularity as a competitive game has no bearing on that idea.
If you think ST is simple just because it doesn’t have the bells and whistles of modern fighters, I don’t know what to tell you.
And yet it took multiple patches, new game systems, and several expansions before it was actually well balanced with Ultra. I don’t really feel like waiting 7 years because of an outdated philosophy about game balance.
People played marvel because it had marvel characters which radically increased it’s appeal. People didn’t pick up marvel because they wanted half the cast to have easy infinites. A game doesn’t have to be balanced to be fun, but it helps.
If the patches address balance issues then it definitely does. The only way it could be otherwise is if the company just sucks at creating a balanced meta through patches.
Capcom kinda sucks at patching things in case you forgot what thread you’re posting in. So far as I’m aware this is the first game in the companies history where they’ve actually tracked match metrics on a broad scale. The kind of granular tracking you could do in ST was “watch a dude playing the game”. That’s a garbage way to do a statistical analysis of balance and for decades it had terrible results with dozens of fighting games just being badly balanced. Just because Capcom is bad at balancing things doesn’t mean other companies haven’t figured it out. Blizzards patch model on starcraft is quite good. Just because you’re deciding to be reductive in how you view balance doesn’t mean I have to be. Plenty of games have achieved good balance with assymetric playstyles and if it’s done well it doesn’t harm the game at all.
MvC3 is a good competitive game and its internal balance is garbo. Broadly popular games can succeed competitively despite poor balance. SFV is not a broadly popular game.
But it was simple. Limited movesets, limited mechanics, limited actual space on screen. The game is much more solveable mathematically than something like SFV which is hugely more complex. Chess is simple and people still play that constantly. Being simple doesn’t mean bad, it means simple.
They can’t in one breath say that making Alex available to everyone (who only costs 100k Fight Money) is a huge insult to people who bought the Season Pass, then in the next breath say that getting 2 costumes for free that would have cost 80k Fight Money is no big deal.
People buying the Season Pass know that most of the content will be available to people for free in one way or another.
Another common one I am seeing from people is the complaint that the premium costumes should be free. Now, that would be an insult to people as they are not available to be acquired through Fight Money at all.
God damn it, man. Are you being willingly obtuse here? Here, let me spell out the central point for you in one sentence because you seem to duck it every chance you get:
Patching a game multiple times over a short period does little to actually help balance, because it doesn’t give players or the developers enough time to formulate well founded methods of overcoming strengths and weaknesses of characters and play styles, leading to inappropriate balance adjustments.
I can elaborate and reply more fully if you want, but honestly this thread isn’t the place for that discussion.
That’s not correct, as the approach is successfully being used by many developers all over the industry. Heroes of the Storm is a fantastic example of this.
If you go back a few pages I said I was for a patch cycle of small adjustments every 4-6 months. Not every month or every few weeks. Six months gives plenty of time for a meta to form and for the developer to aggregate enough information to make informed decisions. Fighting games aren’t league of legends. Skill advancement and tech take a while to spread around a community. SFV also has 16 characters while a game like LoL has 130 with almost as many items creating a near infinite number of variables. Fighting games aren’t very complex, but it’s that lack of complexity that makes small changes big. I get what you’re saying, but you’re going to far with it. You’ve been frightening into thinking balancing a game just harms it because NRS was overzealous. I think a much better example in the fighting game community is KI. Their patching and balance process has done a great job of addressing meta concerns and smoothing the transition of new characters and styles of play.
Don’t fear the future, just make sure it doesn’t blow up in your face.
Well, fuck, why didn’t you say so? I can get down with six months.
I just hate balance changes like how League does it. It’s obnoxious. No one has the chance to solve the game for themselves. Good example is this past December with Doctor Mundo. Lot of folks thought Mundo was broken, and he had a high win rate and a high ban rate. During this time they didn’t patch for like 6 weeks due to the holidays, which is 3 times longer than normal. By the end of the 6 weeks, Mundo’s winrate had returned to normal, and his ban rate had fallen. People figured out how to deal with him. The developer nerfed him anyway based on sentiments that existed at the start of the cycle. He now has below a 50% win rate in his primary position, and one of the worst win rates in his secondary position. It’s one of the few times that people actually got to figure shit out, and they went and fucked it up.
That many damn characters and they think they can get away with balance changes every two weeks. It’s absurd.
Mundo was also nerfed due to his high prevalence in pro games and because they didn’t like his play pattern. They nerf champions who are able to act with too much impugnity. Overly popular champions who create unenjoyable games tend to get nerfed regardless of their eventual relative power. It’s why urgot has been so bad for so long.
Right now mundo fluctuates between 48 and 52% wnr so I think they did OK with him. A lot of incredibly powerful champions have low win rates due to popularity with bad players. Lee sin has one of the worst in the game and is in every pro roster because he’s incredibly good.
This is why I like the way Icefrog balances Dota. His philosophy is that instead of knee jerk reactions that completely neuter characters, he does small tweaks here and there that still weaken/strengthen a character. The solution to balancing is never to outright chop the balls off of a character. You just sorta ball tap them to keep them in check as opposed to eliminating them from the competitive scene entirely.