Also there are a ton of players that play really hard with one character to get pretty good and then…patch times comes around and they are on pins and needles. They don’t know if all there hard work is going out the window, if what they really like or made a game plan around is squashed or what.
They don’t have high tier execution, they might not be a fast learner or they just don’t have the time or patience and jumping to another character isn’t really viable because the same thing can happen.
Remember when you could name a bunch of low tier (good) character specialize players? Between esports and knowing that you might as well play mid to top tier while waiting for a buff… you don’t really get those kind of High tier players anymore.
I’m not against dlc and patching in fighters, but to me it would have been interesting to tournaments with blanka and his glitch and how that would have changed the meta, all of a sudden if you are playing akuma and cammy you might need a pocket nash and juri. Glitches, have and always been really important in fighters. It forced growth…naturally.
I don’t see how the situation you describe is that different than the old games without patches. Old games are filled to the brim with unviable characters, and those specialists have to pick other characters or lose.
Actually, thanks in part to the fixes, balance in modern games is actually pretty good, you have a lot more freedom in which character you pick. Very few characters have been “destroyed” by SFV patches.
This goes back to what I said earlier, in the early says of hot fixes you would se characters Nuked in patches, but nowadays, the developers better understand what they are doing and you don’t see it that often.
honestly, I think SF5 being a more high stakes tournament game has done more to decrease character specialists than anything else. Even then you’re still seeing a fair amount of character specialists do damage.
If you’re going to argue on that point, you guys need to do some research on the subject. Lay down a hypothesis and you think you remember on character specialists and what the deviation would prove or disprove your initial thesis.
The EVO lineup this year is WILD
NOBODY expected Melee to go, UNIST to get in, and somehow SamSho debuting
This is crazy. RIP DOA6, KOFXIV, Xrd, and BB though, especially DOA6 and KOF. Thankfully KOF, GG and BB were at EVO JP and they knocked it out the park as usual.
ArcSystemWorks basically went into meditation mode until they can clap back with a new BlazBlue and a next gen Guilty Gear in 2020. Let’s fucking go
If fighting games aren’t an esport than nothing is. I don’t know how people sit around watching little icons spam attacks against minions. Shit is boring as fuck even with commentators trying to sound hype.
The difference was the match up didn’t constantly change and make you have to relearn it, so you usually had a off tier character and a viable one. And you could run that grind a match until you became proficient in it and not working about it changing until a new version of the game came out… Now in most fighters thats not the case, if something doesn’t change with the engine its the character, I still hear the cry’s of teen gohan players that are confused or ed players that are wondering why they are getting nerfed and getting QoL changes at the same time lol…
With sf5 you have a lot of very average characters that can’t hope to win against better characters in sets. If it wasn’t for the nature of SF5 I don’t think those average characters would even be average but straight up bad.
In SF5 in a best of 2 you can almost pick any character and depending on the day and time get 2 on someone. That’s a mask for balance in this case… Ryu, chun, ken, alex and a handful of others went from top tier or good to straight up average or struggle.
Basically a lot of so call balance or character variety is here on the surface levels for fighters but really I think it makes for over all much more boring games (in general)
I think the fgc is more accessible than ever, and I think it has changed or adapted with the times. It’s lost a bit of its identity but if that’s what people want then hey.
I don’t think Esports is healthy for it, and I don’t think patching every couple months is healthy for it unless done EXTREMELY well (EG Iron galaxy with KI)
eSports is a business model, not the actual games. At this point its very much obvious that this is the case. Any time they talk about turning something “eSports”, they’re actually talking about dropping a set infrastructure to broad cast a video game in order for a production team to make money.
