Frequent/infrequent patching and whether it is good or bad for a game, TOTALLY depends on the game itself, the community, and the developer.
Case in point, sf5 versus skullgirls:
SG used to get balance patched every day. The “tournament version” didn’t, but the ongoing beta version did. And we the players were able to dissect the changes very quickly.
It’s not hard to understand that a hitbox buff here or a frame data buff there will affect your character either positively or negatively.
Then there’s the difference between an old figured out character, or a new, no one knows wtf this character does character.
Developer matters as well. Capcom makes stupid ass changes all the time (why rape chun and ryu like they did?) when both characters in S1 had 1 or 2 obviously stupid things that needed adjusting, but not that much else…
Capcom makes some brilliant balance adjustments and they make some really stupid ones as well, that’s on them. Anyone can see that chun and ryu were too weak after S1 and anyone can see that so was Alex and fang. These characters could have all received some decent QOL adjustments.
Then there’s mobas, I’m sorry but thinking of them as only having 3 interactions and an ultimate, per character, is just really bad thinking. There are a mind boggling amount of attributes per spell for lots of characters in mobas (and frosty forgot run speed and attack animation, melee/ranged/health etc etc) but there’s also different levels of spells. You can change a characters lvl1 spell while making their lvl2 3 and 4 version the exact same as they were previously, and you could overbuff or underpower the character based on that.
Properties that spells tend to have in mobas:
Cast time
Range
Damage
Tick rate
Poison or dot properties
Types of invisibility
What the proc is (a crit that does 1.2 x damage and has a 35% chance of hitting and gas the attributes of a normal spell is different from someone like shadow mages ultimate, which is also a crit, but has like a 15% chance to hit 4X damage at lvl1 and 15% chance to hit at 6X damage at lvl3
meaning the difference in damage from that first low crit, is like 75 total damage up to about 250 when that character gets leveled up.
Versus that bigger crit doing about 250 damage at lvl1 with a lower level character, to once it and the characrer has been leveled up, it starts chunking people for 1500-2000 damge, in a game where some of the hardiest heroes have 3500 health and the weakest ones would have 1500.
I’ve literally walked up to full health low hp heroes and one hit them because my ultimate crit procked on the first hit. I’ve also walked up to some of those characters and lost fights because my ultimate crit didn’t proc at all.
But there’s a shit load of things to balance with respect to characrer abilities in mobas. Saying there are only 3 interactions because there are only 3 spells is like saying soul caliber lacks depth because it on,y has 3 attack buttons.
But this isn’t a rant against frosty. But seriously, there are lots of things that go into whether frequent patching is good or bad for any given fighting game.
Sf5 I wouldn’t want patched more than every 6 months and I would leave huge non bug related/ non QOL changes for new characters at the one year mark.
