I assume the character ban is there to ensure character diversity, why not take inspiration from Cooperation Cup’s rules and make it so each player on a team must use different characters?
That is already on the rules too.
There is a little more to it in those games too.
To give a shitty example. Friends and I were playing paladins a long time ago. A character named ruckus was really strong at the time (think bastion who can move in turret form). Normal we would ban that character because he was dumb, but sometime we would ban the strongest burst medic. Then we would deliberately take an over abundance of shield breakers. This would basically counter the standard ruckus team composition.
In short, in some of those games the bans can provide more strategy than ban the top tier, or gimp the top player (even though frequently that is what happens).
So, teams are already supposed to think about their characters composition, only for other teams to potentially fuck that up with a character ban?
Sounds dumb to be quite honest.
Yeah that character ban shit is wack. That’s a horrible precedent to be setting too. I’m not in this to fight/watch people’s secondaries against their will, I want to see players at their best. I’d just straight ask them to remove that rule if you’re not okay with it.
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You are supposed to adapt your composition on the fly.
Overwatch tries to do this with character switching, but most of the good compositions are very static so it doesn’t happen much, and the super mechanic really discouraged switching.
No I’m not saying playing defensive isn’t fair. Quite the opposite. It’s fair as all fuck. But “fair” doesn’t necessarily make an interesting game. Interesting games or competitions if you will, generally aren’t decided tillthe very end of the series or game or match or round etc etc.
Here’s an example:
In chess there are generally 2 ways for a player to be deemed the winner of a series of matches.
the first is points based.
Let’s say you play to 10 points. A win is worth 1 point, a draw is worth a half point and a loss is worth zero points. A draw HAS to be worth SOME points or else the series could literally last forever. This is like the clock in sf5.
But this makes a problem. Once a player is up 2 to 3 points, they can simply play to draw the rest of their games and win by drawing a bunch of times. This is extremely hard to combat becaus drawing chess games is much easier than actually trying to win.
Ok so, that’s a huge problem. No one wants to see the leading p,Ayer draw the last 15 games so that he can win on points. That’s boring for the chess players AND the spectators.
So the second way is both players play to a pre determined number of wins… say 5 or 10. This is much better but there’s a huge problem. The matches can literally go on for tens if not hundreds of games if there are lots of draws.
Now personally I play fighting games for fun and as a competetive hobby. If the game isn’t fun I simp,y don’t play it. Why in that metric would a play a game where it’s basically over once my opponent gets about half a life lead and there is only 30 seconds left on the clock… why would I or anyone else want to consistently play that?
Most people don’t, which is why there are comeback mechanics. It has absolutely nothing to do with fairness. It has to do with actually getting people to play your game.
This can easily be rectified by simp,y making games higher damage over all so that one or 2 mistakes can always give a player the win. But once it becomes where a player has to win or land a combo 3-4 times or more to win, it becomes very very hard to win once behind because you basically need to outplay your opponent 4-1… hi just outplayed YOU 3-1… or so.
I don’t like comeback mechanics but they are needed in low damage games where offensive mixups aren’t super strong. Sf5 is that kind of game. It’s an offensive game with bad mixups and strong pressure. Comebacks without v trigger/super would be very unlikely in sf5 if the opponent has a 60% or more lifelead, whichmeans ince that lead has been established, the other player can basicallylet go of the course troller and try nextround or match.
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I dislike the argument that chip kills are unfair if you don’t have a fireball.
Characters don’t have the same tools. It’s like saying command grab kills are unfair if you don’t have a command grab. Or unreactable special chip kills are unfair if you don’t have unreactable special. Dive kicks are unfair to characters who have to AA with normals. Etc.
Its one of the many reasons fireballs generally aren’t very good in sfv and why grapplers are better than they have ever been.
This has been bugging me for sometime, after listening to James Chen two Fridays ago on Twitch, I think I can put this into words now. These are my thoughts, feel free to disagree. Also feel free to correct cause I’m gonna be paraphrasing James and I could be remembering what he was saying very wrong. I don’t really have anywhere to post this so I’m doing it here. So it’s really been irking me whenever I hear “Random”, “No defensive Options”, “Rock Paper Scissors” with this game. Cause I pretty much disagree with most of those complaints. Not because the complaints are baseless, but because they’re issues in all fighting games, even previous Street Fighters. But what particularly makes it an issue here? Why isn’t it an issue in Third Strike or all the Street Fighter 4 iterations? Let’s examine.
James was asked about defending against RPS, as he calls it. His answer was “There isn’t. If there was a way, no one would win.” It was either RPS or corner issues, but I’m sure it was rock paper scissors. He was discussing that all fighting games need this, and you can only really just get better at fighting games. But why is this an issue with Street Fighter V?
“Lack of defensive options”, that’s what I keep hearing. But what’s missing? I asked on the stream, no one was really able to answer other than “1 button throws need to come back.” which is non-sense. So what’s missing? There’s delayed wake-up, there’s quick rise, specific characters have armour on their moves. Specific characters have parries. There’s also V-Reversals (Which I’ll discuss more later). There’s lots of defensive options. I think this is partly why Dimps haven’t done anything cause they look at the game and not know what to actually add since other than invincible back dashes, which was a band-aid solution to meaty focus attacks, there’s nothing to add (You can argue other things from other fighters). So what is the issue?
RPS wasn’t a big issue in the earlier titles up until Street Fighter 3, because there were no dashes and after you were done playing RPS with your opponent, chances are, you were both too far away from each other to play again right away. Street Fighter 3 had parries, which allowed you to counter attack right away. Street Fighter 4 had the above combo of focus attacks and back dashes to get away from playing RPS again. So why is this an issue in Street Fighter V?
Well, the V-reversals, which would give you the reset you need to get out of RPS, doesn’t work. On top of it not working, they’re mostly punishable. “Hey, I’m getting beat down, I’m going to waste some V meter to push back.” turns into “Nope, you’re getting punished for trying to defend”. If Dimps fixed the V-reversal issue and made them work like alpha counters, where they always hit, all talk about lack of defensive options disappear. They only cause grey damage and delay your V-Trigger, so it’s not like making them hit all the time isn’t balanced. With V-reversals broken, is there anything we can do for defense? Well there’s another option.
James also said another thing during this stream. He was discussing with Sajam about having to memorize frame data. He says you shouldn’t, Sajam says you should. He was also saying that his arguments are more of a “Old man yelling at cloud” situation. Since he never had to memorize data from Super Turbo. Well, believe it or not, he had to. You don’t have to “read” frame data to have it memorized. You can see it visually, or learn it through trial and error. The older game’s combo systems were very simple back then, so there wasn’t as much to learn. In Street Fighter V, they revamped the combo system giving more options to play, you don’t just start with jabs anymore (You can). You can combo off of mediums now. You’re jabs can combo into mediums easy (As it was in Third Strike). Special moves have multiple attacks, with cooldown in-between repetition. The game has become very advanced, which requires more memorization. You have to memorize you’re own moves, when you’re safe, when you’re not safe, and you also have to memorize all opponent’s moves. Which becomes a lot. The skill in the game isn’t execution (Which up until 4, wasn’t really high), the skill in the game, is now actual play.
This is actually why Street Fighter V’s my favourite one to play (Not overall my favourite one), because it makes me think about what to do. I can’t just reset the game to get out of rock paper scissors, like some of the older titles. But, I have to sit down and think about my opponent’s moves. How can I counter attack? What move do I have that’s fast enough? What move can I do that’s safe, so if my opponent blocks he can’t counter attack? Which of my opponent moves can I punish? I find the game like a puzzle, and it’s very exhilarating, in my opinion. “Why did I lose?” “I always, thought that move was safe, which means i have to change my game plan now”. The game has actually forced me to become a much better player, because I’ve had to shed soo many bad habits.
So is the game RPS when you know what you’re opponent is going to do? I remember when season 2 hit. Balorg was broken with his V-trigger 1. Everyone was complaining. Then I remember watching Momochi play. I believe he was playing against PR Balrog, during an early tournament. What did Momochi do? He picked Ibuki (Her broken-ness wasn’t discovered at the time) because he believed her medium (Or light, can’t remember) was fast enough to attack on Balrog’s V-trigger cooldown between hits. So Momochi kept knocking Balrog out of his attacks. Momochi turned a game of 50/50 into a game of strategy and counter attack.
Now I’m not saying the game is perfect, far from it. But Dimps is doing what they can to iron out the shenanigans. The last thing left for them to do is to fix the V-reversals.
Thanks for reading
P.S. there’s no random number generator used to decide what move gets priority. It’s all based on the current frames, and maybe when the startup time.
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Being able to chip safely used to be an important part of a character. Instead of working with that, they shifted it so your primary way of getting your opponent to act is grey damage.
I’m not the biggest fan of it, but its like DJ said, you can only block so many mediums and heavies before you are forced to act. Its also why people underrate FANG and Bison’s pressure. Those two stack unhealthy amounts of grey damage on top of doing chip damage.
If your poisoned, FANG can do combos worth of damage in blockstrings. Its different which is fine. But no regular chip deaths leads to all sorts of sillu comebacks. You dont really get many checkmate situations.
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I think this only follows if playing super defensively is in fact the best way to “draw” a game. In many fighting games (including SFV) I really don’t think that is the case.
To use your example (forgive me I am not a chess expert), part of the problem is playing for a draw in chess is relatively easy. The approach of “do nothing” (or similar), or heck even hyper defensive isn’t really super strong in most games. In these situations I think you add a comeback mechanic and you often wind up in a situation where the player who is behind, is actually ahead because they have trigger on deck (seas season 3 Menat).
To use an example from a fighting game SFxT was super defensive for for many reason, it one of the big ones was how easy it was to turtle out. The good characters had loads of safe pokes, safe reversals, and flawless anti-airs that made going after somebody when you were behind really hard. However, the core problem was not the lack of an Xfactor, it was that the clock was still set for SF4, where SFxT needed a lot more time in matches. While the games super defensive nature would still be a problem, the reason you saw so much turtling and time out was simply that there wasn’t enough time to bulldog someone to the corner to try and open them up.
In conclusion, I agree the the comeback mechanic does address the issues, however I think a lot of times it acts more like putting a bandaid on a stab wound. (Hyperbole I know). It papers over the problem but doesn’t really address it.
When people are triggered by character bans cause they only play one character
The state of the broader FGC. This culture got straight shot in the back of the head.
I really like that you die if you try to use armored move when you have no health.
I’ve lost a few games due to this and won only one, but it is a nice change.
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The only part that I dislike about the armour change is that Zangief’s v-skill is 100% based on it, so you can’t use v-skill to try to build v-gauge when you are very low on health any more.
The flex punch needs you to flex and then move forward to unleash the… 9f attack.
You will be hit and die before that happens.
Other than that, it was a good change.
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This is my only fundamental problem with SFV’s gameplay.
V-Reversals need to fulfill their purpose -period. I would also add a second V-reversal that functionally differs for every character. This doubles the defensive options without overcomplicating things further by adding totally new mechanics.
New Capcom team league sounds fucking dumb as fuck.
God damn it Ono where is Rose fuck!!!
Yeah I was trying to think of how to put it but I had a similar thought.
The rough cut of my version was that other games are built more with a meta in mind, some explicitly so. A lot of games like that are based around parts of a whole usually because they are teams or lists or whatever like that.
Fighting games are a lot more individual. Individual player, individual skills, individual character traits, individual move properties even, all affecting how the match is going to play out. Combine that with the mind game aspect of FGs and you can have the same players playing the same characters give you really different matches. Its one of the reasons FGs are so fun to watch.
The other thing that strikes me as weird about that choice is that SFV is relatively well balanced in S4 (though I guess we will see what they do with it in 4.5 which will be live by the time that league starts). Yeah there are definitely characters that are better than others but the balance is such and there is enough time in the game where a really dedicated specialist player can still give you a helluva show even into some bad match ups.
Its more like a player ban - player x is good with y so ban that shit. Almost would be better to cut out the middle man and just do that if they want bans as a feature for this thing (which is the weirdest part).
At least they aren’t handing out Infinity Stones I guess.
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Hypothetically, what do you ban if you’re on one of these teams?
Worst match-up? Best character (let’s say Akuma)? One of the opponents’ mains regardless of who?
Do circumstances exist where having a ban adds something to the whole event?
Yeah. Despite my defense of bans in other games, I have no idea how this will work for a fighting game.
Still, I guess we will see. Maybe we will all be proven wrong. At this point it doesn’t hurt to just wait and see.
If one of the players on the other team only has one good character, you ban that.
Character specialization is for suckers.