1581

I think it’s pretty obvious that things are used and implemented faster thanks to the internet and youtube.

Something gets found and then everyone who watches that video now knows about it, regardless of how quickly things get found, once they are found they are common knowledge extremely fast. Not only that but you know have a catalogue of hundreds of match up and character specific guides and combos coming out all the time, not to mention more people playing the games.

It’s impossible to say that we are definitely solving games faster because it’s impossible to know but if you were given the task of solving a game would you rather have the internet at your disposal or not? I think the answer is pretty obvious.

1582

Many discoveries are usually built upon previous discoveries. New combos. Frame data. Arbitrary move properties. When more people have access to that information, the more people are experimenting and building upon previous information. Not only that, but nowadays everyone’s information is mostly current, which means the things people are working towards are usually new tech. It’s not just that information is spreading faster, but it’s also better compiled and widely available.

It’s not all that hard to put two and two together.

1583

Old way:

  • Some guy finds some tech with some character
  • He goes to a local tournament but loses because he is bad, nobody cares/notices the tech
  • Some day later some other guy finds the same tech
  • He is actually good and wins the tournament, but people don’t actually recognize the tech
  • Some day later some other guy finds the same tech
  • He is actually good and wins and people recognize the tech as something useful
  • Another 50 iterations later someone with that tech actually leaves his local scene for a big tournament
  • Another 50 iterations later the tech actually gets noticed at the big tournament and people use it
  • Character gets declared broken
  • Some guy finds some tech with some other character / a way to beat the ‘broken’ tech
  • … same thing again
  • 5 years later the cycle is complete to the point that people are fairly sure of which character is actually strong and which isn’t

New way:

  • Some guy finds some tech with some character
  • He posts it on youtube and on the forums
  • Masses of people try it out both online and offline against masses of other people
  • Character gets declared broken
  • Some guy finds some tech with some other character / a way to beat the ‘broken’ tech
  • … same thing again
  • a fair bit less than 5 years later the cycle is complete
1584

Hey Mike, tweak only what you feel needs to be tweaked. We’re here because we believe you can make a game we want to play; seems unfair to expect you to lose that ability on release day.

1585

Frame data gives us new combos and move properties. If we are given them, it cuts out us discovering it on our own. That isn’t us (players) breaking down the game faster when it’s gifted to us from the devs. Mike already tells us how IPS works and that we’ll have hitbox display and the blockstun/hitstun thing. That’s helping us breaking the game down faster, not more people waiting for a select few people who know how to explore a fighting game engine to upload vids to youtube.

Emphasis on the word discovery. Someone finding unblockable crossups was the discovery, finding out set ups for them is refining it. DHC Glitch is the discovery, DHC glitch setups is refining it.

1586

Half the old way happens now.
There are repeat vids of existing tech.
Remember that Crossover Counter vid with Zero’s DP? That was already known in Vanilla and had videos of it already.
There is list of invincible CCs and a list of 1 frame THC hypers.
Knowing you can cancel the invincible incoming part of a CC into an air hyper was week 1 Vanilla tech.
Sentinel CC Hard Drive was week 1 Vanilla shit and one of the commentators called it new at EVO because he didn’t see it before.
Marlin Pie was using Cammy unblockables before they were known to be unblockable.
The more things change, the more things stay the same.

You forgot to include “Whine for a patch” in the new way. It should replace “a way to beat broken tech” line.
Masses don’t try shit out, masses see too many buttons and go "lol impractical, whats practice?"
The only thing ending the cycle is a patch or new version.

ROM loop in MvC2 came from Japan btw.

1587

I would say that creating optimal setups would be discoveries of their own. Just because you have a roadmap to it’s general vicinity doesn’t make your discovery any less of a discovery. I’ve seen some pretty balls-ridiculous DHC setups that went leagues beyond “Magnetic Tempest DHC Wesker Counter = Profit!!!”

In situations where we aren’t given frame data, we still have far more tools to harvest the sweet spreadsheet number juice of every character (Though it’s still up to individuals in the community to do the harvesting, so it’s usually a case-by-case basis on whether that informations spreads fast enough to prove the point). I’ll totally agree that situations where we’re given frame data kind of moots that point of the argument though, no doubt about that.

It’s just that when you see how well documented everything is and how quickly it’s put on display thanks to Youtube, we end up with every player having a lot to work with when it comes to figuring new shit out, or applying it. Couple this with playerbase, and games are being fleshed out on orders of magnitude faster than games previously.

1588

I’m seeing too many lazy players dropping Wesker ABCS BBCS hyper combos to agree. Like most of this site believes anything harder than that is impractical because it requires practice. All we have is a bunch of knowledge that the majority can’t digest it.

Viscant has a whole thread I think on Wesker’s mixup tree. He’s like the only Wesker seen using it.

I’m willing to argue that the games are easier and less mysterious now than before thanks to the devs giving us information such as frame data or tools in training mode like 1 hit jump or how combos work in the engine. Imagine if we knew how juggling worked day 1 in SF4 or 3S or how HSD in MvC3/UmvC3 worked.

1589

Like Maj said in that discussion I linked, it’s not that much different from back in the day. Before someone would find something weird and post a thread on SRK about it, now they make a YouTube video. It’s still around the same number of people who actually flesh out and document the tech - in many cases its the same names. Training modes are on average no better than they were 10 years ago. It still takes a long time for stuff to go from discovery to being used by top players in tournaments.

Comparing how old and new games evolved over time, I don’t see any convincing historical evidence that proves stuff is figured out any faster these days than it was back then (at least following the advent of the good console port circa 2000). As I said before, it’s difficult to even make a comparison when games get updated so rapidly now and older games had so many more complexities to their engines.

1590

First off, a giant thank you to everyone who keeps saying how well SG will do. I’m a pessimist, though, so I’m ignoring you, but it’s nice to hear.

Really?

Those of you arguing that ‘people discovering new tech took forever to distribute it before’ seem to forget that MvC2 was *part *of that trend. AHVB vid day 1 (SRK, Wiz I think?) / IM+WM infinite and HSF loop vid week 3 / Grav->Tempest vid within a few days of discovery (hehe), Warganic’s site for keeping track of infinites, the pushblock-guard-cancel vid…I don’t think it was hugely slower to get information shared back then, since a good-enough capture card was $50, and even in the days of alt.games.sf2 information was distributed pretty quickly. I somewhat agree that “games are explored orders of magnitude faster now” is partly vanity and partly ignorance of just how fast older games were explored, coupled with how much there was that was new to find before vs how much exploration can be skipped based on prior knowledge now. :^)
To me, console versions, program pads, and the fact that there are previous games that have been explored make a much bigger difference in how quickly things are found since they allow more extensive and easier exploration by the people who want to find things. It isn’t that there are many many more clever people (look at how many players just watch vids and XCopy what they see, or how many ‘combo videos’ are LMHS aircombo etc), it’s that each clever person can be more effective because they sort of know what to look for, and they have better tools with which to search. “If I have seen this far, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants” etc. When COTA came out, it took a long time for people to figure out infinites because the properties of the game engine had to be grokked first, then people had to realize there was such a thing as an infinite combo. Contrasting that with MvC2’s release, where an immediate goal was to understand enough about some character to find a useful infinite.
(I also think part of it is that MvC2’s engine had “features” that weren’t understood for over 6 years, and all of the newly-discovered features were helpful in winning - IM reflies, guard breaks, corner unblockables, etc. In MvC3, once you can one-touch-kill anywhere with 1 meter none of the rest of the engine matters much even if it were that deep.)

All that aside…

The difficult thing about this is that it requires a company to host their own servers which consoles report to, to gather the data. On 360, because the network is tightly controlled, that means paying for Microsoft servers in a Microsoft warehouse somewhere, so currently this is prohibited more by cost than anything else. Boo. Try validating the usefulness of paying for this to people who have not yet recouped their initial investment, and who see the YouTube/IGN comments. :^|

Haaah. I certainly can take that approach, and I do. I have over a year’s experience watching people of all caliber play, coupled with plenty of time having (for example) people complain about how much damage Cerebella does without even knowing how to do special moves, ground recover, or pushblock! I can say “you’re wrong, deal with it” just fine…it isn’t my job to pacify people who have gotten into fighting games with crutches and suddenly feel like they know what they’re doing and don’t need to learn and overcome adversity. We have a tutorial mode that should hopefully help newbies get better pretty quickly, but we’ll see - the people who would rather change the game than improve, and thus call for immediate nerfs or buffs (canonical definition of “scrub” is “someone who doesn’t think they need to improve”, rather than just “someone who is not good”) probably won’t play the tutorial, but they wouldn’t listen to whatever I suggested they do, either, would they? Scrub cannon / scrub killer characters only need to be ‘fixed’ if they are a problem once people know what can be done to deal with their advantages. Before that knowledge exists, all complaints are equally invalid. Something more broken is usually found anyway. (^.^)’

As for whether I would say that if I were a shrewd marketing person who wanted everyone to buy the game no matter what…well…I’m not a shrewd marketing person who wants everyone to buy the game no matter what. We have people for that; people who aren’t me. To me, if you like it then you like it, if you don’t then you don’t. I’m making a game that I wish existed based on gameplay, not a game that exists to broadly appeal based on brand strength or the company’s legacy.

1591

I just love this line.

Also, I’m not sure whether you didn’t want to give an answer or just missed it due to the lengthy discussion over tech discovery in the internet age… I’ll just ask again and hope it was the latter :3

Again, I have no clue whether this is actually necessary, but from what I’ve seen it’d help and wouldn’t make the game uglier (actually I believe greyed out corpses to be a darn bit fancier than normally coloured ones, but that might just be me) while still keeping the corpses (which I think are pretty neat to have).

1592

Boxing Day Mike Z dropping science. Thank you, kind sir!

1593

On the topic of the tech sharing and the internet. I don’t believe this means that a game develops and is figured out all that much faster. If anything I see alot of complacency because of all the information sharing. Loads of people just sit, waiting for the next combo vid to be revealed for their character. They just sit and wait to see what character dominates a tourney. They learn the BnB and that’s it. I’ve been noticing more and more how many players are auto pilot, or rely on one specific strategy to get through a fight. They don’t explore further options, they don’t practice resets or different combos. They aren’t actually developing the the game into anything, just copying what they see. While there are still quite a few people who do the research and put in the practice, I honestly don’t think it’s enough to make the game evolve that much faster.

1594

That’s why we <3 you.

1595

I’m completely guilty of just using what’s discovered and or what I saw in a match, but I wouldn’t be able to find anything that wasn’t already found anyway.

I’m always willing to put in the lab work to learn new tech and mess around with my own variations though, people optimize combo damage pretty dam quickly though.

1596

I understand why people do it, and I can’t blame them at times. It’s time and effort spent to figure out things that people already know. I myself try to spend some time in the lab with a char before I look at videos, then I’ll look at a vid or two and see that people have already got this down (and refined it). The reason why I do it that way is to get myself into the mindset of discovery, of variation, and creativity. I know that if I just keep letting people figure these things out for me, that I won’t actually learn anything about this game (concerning MvC3 here). It just turns into Simon Says with seizure inducing lighting. Learning the game is where most of the fun is for me. I actually like just sitting in training trying to see what I can link into what. I think that’s just the kind of mindset that needs to be nurtured in these games in order for them to actually develop faster and properly.

I think it’s a good thing that you take that tech and work on it, try to add your own style and optimizations to it. I don’t mind that because that’s improvement, progress even. I just don’t see enough people doing that. Many people just want an easy answer that takes as little effort as possible. That is what impedes the development of a fighting game. LEARNING IS FUN TOO GUYS, GAWD! That being said, getting my hands on Skullgirls at SCR was too much fun. A fresh new game that people had yet to play or played very little of, and I got to sink my teeth into it… and it was delicious.

1597

Yes really. Nostalgia is clouding your eyes. News groups were FAR less used than youtube is today. How many videos can you find from 2001-2005? 50? 100? 200? Because I bet a quick google search of “Marvel 3 tournament” would show twice as many and MvC3 has only been out a year. I didn’t say you couldn’t record a video AT ALL I said you could JUST record a video. Doing so was far more of a hassle due to slow upload times, lower quality recording equipment, and poor distribution channels compared to now.

As for discovering new tech, yes a good percentage of it is the fact there are old players with knowledge of what to look for. But the thing is that there is less overlap of information being found thanks to communication spreading faster thus people spend less time researching the same thing someone else documented already. Does it still happen? Yes. But not AS often.

What is interesting about this though is the branching effect that occurs. Currently it seems like once something is discovered as “optimal” for the most part players latch onto exploring that far more thoroughly. However if less players knew what was “optimal” more variation would be explored.

For example, everyone right now is exploring Wesker tech in UMvC3, but if information on how good he was is less scarce you might see more people exploring other characters(not to say that they DON’T explore them, just that the % of wesker vs non-wesker teams would be less lopsided)

1598

You know, I figure since you are the guy behind the gameplay as well as a respected tournament player, you’d be in a better position to be listened to by these folks than anyone else.

1599

Let me refer you to this -

1600

Not entirely sure what point you are trying to make. Mike Z has a literal FUCK TON of valid points and understands the scene far more than many people. Fresh eyes are always handy as well though. Sometimes you become to ingrained in a certain way of thinking that you believe all other ways are invalid. I’m merely trying to garner a discussion. There is honestly no definitive PROOF that information spreads more rapidly or that old school players understand how to balance better than new school players. There is evidence to that theory but nothing concrete.

I played old school FPS titles at high level facing (and losing) against some of the best players in the world (cooller, ZeRo4, carnage, pick up games with cloud9 and cK.) but the communities even then only 8 years ago were very insular and if you weren’t on mIRC you didn’t know anything about the scene. And this is on PC playing games with a replay recording system built into the game and finding videos of tournaments from then is incredibly difficult.

When I see new strong players approaching Quake live and how QLive has rebalanced the original Q3A I don’t write it off, the amount of information available to the devs and players about what works on what map and optimal item routes or weapon choices based on situations is far easier to understand now than ever before where you’d often need to get someone to show you in-game how to make certain strafe jumps or shortcuts.