♪ “For the times, they are a changin-.” ♪
Oh how such beautiful irony truly nurtures the soul.
Anyway, I’m still confused as to why everyone is so angry about the new gem system mechanic in Street Fighter X Tekken here on SRK.
…I thought the community on this website loved Jem. 
I dont think we all would hating this Gem System if at NYCC then released a playable build to really let us take it in and analyze it. Instead its still pretty mysterious, and we are left with more questions then answers. This is like watching “LOST” fuck this.
There’s no doubt that the Gem system will be fun to explore. We all love fighting games, and messing with aspects of then, tweaking and min-mixing characters is I’m sure a secret desire of many many players (whether casual or not). It’s the way they are choosing to implement and market them is what is problematic. In my personal opinion, it is more than that, it is unacceptable. We need to make a statement to Capcom that this degree of microtransaction elements will not be swallowed hook, line and sinker by the community. I humbly suggest that even if people do buy the game, they not support this revenue system and send them the message that we are that compliant and pliable.
I’m sure they are reasonable people and will not go against the wishes of the community that gives these games life.
And what’s the point in this?
I don’t care if there’s no more physical editions if they make us PAY again for some extra additions to the game via DLC.
Bolded for the lols.
#JemforMvC3 was mistranslated by Capcom and became #GemsforSFxT
Looks like we have to wait until December for some solid news on SFxTK…booooooooooooooo they better go balls out at the Asian Game Show in Hong Kong. I mean like 10 character reveals. And too see if Capcom did anything about the the DLC gems
December? What about London Comic-con and “X the line”?
He tweeted about an hour ago. he said nothing new until December and as for that show it’s not gonna be anything we don’t know all ready just like the last episode
And the next playable build will only show up in January.
3 more months of Gem whining, yay.
I don’t understand the hate for this picture from here and from twitter from people like UltraDavid. Can anyone clarify?
I think Westlo highlighted why this is pretty much a non-issue.
That picture is exactly why I stopped going on the SF X Tekken boards so much, this game is gonna be pure casual fun with the family and granny (Oh oh, I hope she brings the dog!) :3! but I doubt itll be great on a more srs level.
W/e We’ll just have to wait I guess. I do like how they thought Crouch teching was hard…or that they think its unfair that a player who practices for months can beat a beginner who’s new at the game (Onos been talking about this ‘‘problem’’ for a while now too, trying to give better players a handicap for having trained. Stupid T_T)
This picture is an encapsulation of Ono’s terrible, terrible fighting game design philosophy. He does not want people to invest time and brainpower into his games. He wants to do his best to allow people who have not invested anything to nevertheless be able to win, and that makes for really bad games. Fighting games are just strategy games, or at least they can be and used to be, but he wants to neuter that side of it.
So we get things like ultras, which are blatant comeback mechanics that actively penalize the player who does better for the first half of a round. Then we get xfactor, which is even more of an active penalty, along with a major anti-strategic character in Phoenix, along with a blatant directional gambling system in team aerial combos. And now we get this ridiculous game with every game mechanic ever used in a Capcom game plus some, and those some include what was the craziest anti-strategic comeback mechanism ever in Pandora before other people thankfully stepped in and nerfed it to uselessness as well as the gem system, which has as its goal, LITERALLY AS ITS STATED GOAL, the “solution” to the “problem” of disparity between levels of players.
That is not ok! Ultras turned out not to be awful, obviously we’d prefer them to be nerfed but they didn’t kill the SF4 series. Xfactor and Phoenix DID turn out to be awful, but hey at least they’re getting nerfed in Ultimate. Pandora got nerfed pre-release. But gems, I dunno how you nerf that. It seems like Ono is staking out his position as clearly as he can with them. They are meant to be ANTI-strategic; they require monetary investments instead of time investments; and they are poorly designed in goals and selection. I am not ok with that.
Here’s all I want out of a fighting game, and I never thought it was much to ask until these past couple games. I want to be able to control space and mix up my opponent using a cast of diverse and interesting characters and to be able to win most of the time if I’m the better player. And I feel like SFxT is designed with a very different objective in mind.
I honestly believe that you’re taking everything out of proportion. Ono wants it where anyone can play the game and have a good time. This does not inherently mean that any chance of a game being a viably competitive are shot. Things like handicaps are not a bad thing as long as they never enter competitive play. As I said in another thread, Capcom is just simply trying to have its cake and eat it too.
- Ultras are not complete comeback mechanics. The fact that I can strategically use focus attacks to build ultra and still be in the lead should say this.
- I’ll admit, X-Factor is dumb, and Phoenix is a character that’ll either be really good or really bad by design. That being said, that’s another group of developers working on that. Not Ono and co.
- What’s so different with TACs then high-low mixups? Fundamentally, they’re the same. Interestingly enough, it’s not too far from Smash’s DI.
This going off a whole lot of nothing. We don’t know fully what gems are fully capable of, as others have said millions of times. And for monetary investment, this may be no more than the Mu-12 route where you can unlock the gems ala Smash Bros. or you can skip that process and get the unlock key for a cheap price that requires no effort from the developers.
TL;DR: Calm down, and think. A lawyer always smiles, no matter how bad it gets.
But lawyers are also known for sucking the fun out of things.
Something I’ve learned from playing fighting games for so long is that deeper metagames almost spontaneously develop from almost anything. When you see things like WWE All-Stars and Catherine on fighting game streams, you can rest easy knowing that pretty much anything with a Versus mode will develop a scene in some way, especially thanks to the internet where you have sites like SRK, TZ, 8wayrun.com, Smashboards, and so forth. Whatever these gems amount to, the players will ultimately figure out a way to make it competitive.
As for stuff like Dark Phoenix, I actually enjoy watching the numerous “anti-Phoenix” tactics that have spawned from the headaches she’s given us. It’s a metagame within a metagame and added a new layer of strategy to the game. For things like Ultras, I don’t see it as a penalty to the winning player as much as it is something for the other player to have waiting in the wings. If you’re opponent has Ultra, it just means you need to use some mindgames to bait the opponent into using it. And of course, I’ve already stated that I’d rather prefer Ultras which rely on meter than DMs from Fatal Fury Special onwards that needed none but still did insane damage.
As for these Gems, this is what I think will happen. The final game will come out, people will pick it up, and look at the Gems and think “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?” Then a month or two in, thanks to sites like SRK, we’ll start to sort out what gem combinations are best for what, and ultimately that will begin the start of the “tournament-accepted” gem packs and what the consensus will be on the best combination for each character. By EVO, we’ll have a general idea of what Gems are about and how to go about them in tournaments. If everyone knows what gem set they want, it shouldn’t be too long to set up configurations at the select screen. Maybe 10 seconds extra at the most.
There’s no sense even arguing that ultras are not comeback mechanics, why even bother? It’s literally created to give an advantage to a player for taking damage, whether recoverable or not. I feel like I’m getting baited and I’m not gonna get involved in that. And nah, what a lawyer does is identify potential bad situations his clients might face in the future and try to plan around them before they even come up, and if something goes wrong, argue like crazy. Also… I’m not going off of nothing.
Anyway I’ve been thinking about this a while, I’m not just reacting off the cuff. Every time a new piece of information comes out about this game, the situation gets worse. It was a fun game at E3! And then downhill all the way. I figure it’s way too late and we’re way too unimportant to try to change SFxT now, and luckily we have Skullgirls, 2012, Ultimate, KoF, TTT2, SC5, etc to play instead. But imo we need to let Capcom know that we are not ok with this anti-strategic design philosophy prevailing over the pro-strategic stuff we like. I don’t want them to keep going down that road in future games. I’ve always thought that Capcom designed the best games, but with Ono’s involvement it’s getting harder to say that now.
I mean much of it was our fault. Capcom saw how successful SF4 was with its comeback mechanic, and again Marvel3 with its bs as well, and that’s thanks to us as the purchasing users (nevermind that virtually no one bought either game because of the presence of comeback mechanics). SFxT is just following that line of thought closer to its conclusion. We have to let them know that that’s not ok.
I’m not 100% sure, but I guess that “Disparity between high level players” thing means, that if player X knows how to tech,
but player Y don’t, so player Y picks “tech gem” and because of that he can only pick four boost gems etc, because he’s lacking in fundamentals. Player X knows how to tech, so he can pick five boost gems, so player X has a better character, because he knows fundamentals.
Am I making any sense?
…I agree with pretty much everything that you are saying but I think that Capcom is aware of it as well.
The important thing about this interview is when he talks about separating the SFxT approach from the main Street Fighter series:
That’s what I was getting at earlier. These Assist Gems exist solely to identify those issues. As I said before, worst case is that we ban assist gems, but they seem like too impracticable in the long run to be of any concern.
Interesting…
I don’t see how Gems dumb down the game…If anything it adds much more than ANY fighter we have had previously. The gems, aren’t a comeback factor…even Pandora is hail mary.
In the most basic of the sense, gems add alot of mind games to competitive play. Imo if I see a sim loaded with power gems that tells me alot about that player (unless I’m getting Baited) either he is very aggressive and or risky. Where as if i see a sim with defensive gems and auto teching, he’s prob weak upclose and i can prob get him to burn most of his meter by throwing him more than normal.
A more confident sim isn’t gonna worry about defensive gems if there “zoning” and AA game is strong (provided sim plays like this at all in sfxtekken)
But as time goes on we will see more and more of that…
Sure i could get my boy to play who is scrubby but knows a few basic’s and tell them to equip auto tech block and defensive up gems…but now he’s gimped when it comes to super meter and whatever else.
There are hundreds of gems. so i can’t even theory fighter beyond what they have previewed…
Saying its not fair for a person to have something that someone else is also getting kinda old to me. I see people at mvc3 tournament and watch people on streams lose to something that has been available to them from day one on disk but the 1st thing they say when they lose is " I never fought that before". And there’s no way to replicate and felica/morrigan/doom player to practice against in training mode. And it goes both way’s I watch people get bodied and then adjust…which honestly is what the heart of fighting games are about…adjusting and over coming.
I think you guys are missing something about the Boost gems. Some of them are going to activate specifically because you are playing badly. They are trying to dynamically adjust the ratio/handicap as the match is being played.