I don’t think the theory of releasing characters weak because tournament holds true for several reasons :
Few tournament players if any would pick a fresh character over his main in a tournament
If releasing them weak out of fear then buffing them later on is real, why some S1 and S2 characters have been ignored for 3 years in a row ?
I stand by what i said several times, even though it’s tin foil hat worthy. Capcom wants some character to outperform others,simple as that.
I refuse to believe that they are clueless when it comes to balancing and when it comes to feedback provided by so many people. It’s been like this is all their titles. Or do you think Akuma being good in every SF game is just a coincidence ?
I don’t think that’s the reason because it doesn’t make a lot of sense: why favouring some characters over others? Does Capcom really want some characters to be underplayed and unpopular? Does Capcom want Juri of all characters to not show up on streams even though stream monsters love that shit? Or to have some of their brand new characters be disappointing out of the gate?
Truth be told we can’t know anything for sure.Thing is I can see bias in some of their decision making when it comes to some characters.
They are not the only ones though.A lot of devs favor certain characters or classes.Just look at Blizzard and frost mage in pvp.
PS : they could release some weak then buff later on so the players that bought them feel good.Because if they buy them strong then nerfbat joins the fight ,then imagine the rage.
This day and age there’s no reason you couldn’t make every character a tourney threat. Back in early 90s, 2000s? Sure, you’ve got limitations. Now? No way, it’s very much engineering.
I think my theory is that for game designers the unbalance is potentially part of the attraction. Underdog and all that …
Ryu was made deliberately terrible. Literally changed him to suck.
Health has NOTHING to do with how risky a character is played. A character with less health csn be played super defensively… season 1 seth with his stupid ranged jhp and dhalsim both say hi.
For akuma i think his high level play shoukd mostly be left alone. Tone down his scrubby shit ie, make airfireball even less safe on block, make his BHP not such a ridiculous AA, at least make it so that it consistently loses to crossups. Those are the only 2 things that really need nerfing for me.
If his “high level play” is touched the only thing id like to see is his v trigger airfireball take up more meter. Ex demon is fine, its a good move but not super borked in my mind.
His hp is fine, hp balancing is one of the shittest ways to balance characters.
The fact that capcom have fully invested into e-sports makes that highly unlikely. Gone are the days when capcom would develop characters that the community could team up to try and best (yun sf4), or under strengthen characters so that experts could challenge themselves against inferior players (sf3 third strike sean).
Capcom clearly want to give everyone that competes a fair shake at winning the game. The question we ask ourselves is what makes juri or ryu weak? are we using the character wrong?
The air fireball should be rather hard to space than more minus. I mean it would be a break in tradition as in that move was used to shift the neutral in prev games and the char would lose some depth in the jumping game. Anything lower than -2 also means akuma can be punished, possibly always by characters like vega.
Though at pro level that move is rarely used. I dont think at the highest level that move amounts to much.
900/850 on Akuma makes some sense, get his twice by a jump-in and you lose. Lowering stun values can create some huge problems for them on the MU scale tho.
You do realize that he has 3 different angles he can throw them at, combined with multiple different timings he can release them at, right?
Youll also notice that i said id nerf his low level scrub shit… so coming in with the basic argument of “but that shit is low level so it doesnt need to be nerfed” is a bit redundant.
At high level, outside of his v trigger airfireballs and MAYBE his trigger fireball cancel, there is nothing about him that is overpowered and in need of nerfing.
And finally, if his airfireballs are so easy to beat anf bad, that means no one uses them, so nerfing thhe hell out of them does nothing to the character. Like nerfing giefs cr.mp… not much happens.
Well then they are failing quite epic. We’ve now had about 2 years of consistent data that says Cammy, Karin, Akuma, Guile, Rashid and Bison are Gona be in the top 8 and Alex , Ryu, Vega, Nash and Chun Li are Gona be licking their balls in the audience.
Then you might get the odd balrog and Necalli pop up. There’s no reason particularly why some characters have straight up rubbish v triggers.
Tokido plays his ass off with Akuma and suddenly people think Akuma is the best in the game. akuma’s actually pretty boring now and his footsies are ass. i’d like to see less stubby normals across the board but i’d like to see Akuma play like Akuma again.
