I wonder if it was this heated when BrokenvC2 was released again.
DAMN good article! Completely sums up my ENTIRE opinion of this argument.
Thank you very much for linking to that.
My biggest question is…why does Sirlin want to play 3S so bad any way? Why doesn’t he wanna rebalance MVC2 or Alpha 3 or something else…why he gotta hurp and durp about 3S so much?
The whole thing behind SF3 for me is that it brings something different. Back during the time when SF3 was out there so many games that played like SF2 that it was like…what’s the point in having another SF game that plays like them? I just don’t get why people want SF3 to play a certain way when SFIV plays the way they supposedly want SF games to play. Why mess around with the game that at the time was purposely trying to be different?
Like the whole thing about making projectiles “unparriable”. I just don’t get that. If you actually played 3S you would know that parrying fireballs actually puts you at more of a deficit as far as spacing/positioning than just simply blocking them. Especially when you parry a multi hitting fireball you’re stuck unable to move longer than if you had just fucking blocked the fireball. That’s why when a Ryu player corners someone it’s rare to see people try to parry down his fireballs anymore because you don’t really get that much of an advantage for it at that spacing. Akuma’s air fireball gives him the same general advantage even if you parry it as long as it hits deep enough and his HP red fireball will pretty much get you killed if you try to parry it down because you’re stuck in parry stun for a while. The best actual parry based counter to multi hit fireballs is to red parry the 2nd/3rd hit but that’s pretty execution intensive and only screws you over if you mess up. The only thing unparriable fireballs would do is make fireballs stronger as direct anti airs, but that’s not really the ideal situation you want use a projectile for any way.
The bigger problem with fireballs in 3S has to do with the lack of hit stun, block stun, meter build, chip damage and the heavy recovery all ground based fireballs tend to have (Remy is an exception in the recovery area). Which of course anyone who actually plays 3S seriously would understand that. You could make fireballs a bit stronger in 3S simply by improving those basic aspects without doing any jump the gun shit like making them unparriable. The problem is in the fireballs not so much the parries. Keeping everything the same but making them unparriable would still lead to shitty fireball/zone game becuase the projectiles are still garbage unless EX’d outside of Akuma or Remy with a lot of meter. LOL. The only fireball characters that would really benefit from that would be Akuma (who would be retarded), Remy (who would also just be retarded) and Urien (which would make him the most braindead character in the game).
Just fireballs in general don’t really work the same as they do in the other SF games and this was done most likely because SF3 came out during a time where one of the general complaints about SF games were that fireball games were annoying for a lot of players. They made SF3 to basically be a more in your face SF game that revolved more around mid to close range game and fixating more on normal based zoning and close ranged mix ups. Sure that keeps it from playing like SF2 or Alpha but…there were so many versions of those games that it would just make the game seem more similar to everything else by just making it another game that plays like those games. ** CVS2 is more or less a SF game at heart that adopts a similar style to 3S of making fireballs generally weak and giving you even stronger options for getting around them that let you punish even harder. Of course 3S gets all the crap.**
In general though I just think Sirlin’s whole idea of trying to change around old games is flawed. It’s just more effort wasted than anything. What makes 3S what it is, is the work people put in despite the tiers and glitches. The only thing rebalancing does is divide the community amongst already old games for the sole benefit of forcing new tiers and making the game just feel different. The 3S scene was kinda lucky that it had a scene that was still accepting enough of the PS2 port even though it wasn’t arcade perfect to have it at Evo and have more people come out for it than any other game for 3 years straight. Messing with the coding and general meta game that has advanced over 12 years in 3S (with the tiers actually changing in the middle a bit more than people realize) is just adding unnecessary work to the pile. It just makes the older hardcore players who could do a better job teaching people the current game get all upset and bicker about the validity of the changes than spending time simply getting people more competitive at the game and having the older hardcores fight against and bring about new warriors.
**Keep the rebalance stuff for the new games where they are new designs made from scratch. You can rebalance those games without blowing up competitive history older than some of the people that play the games. The Sirlin method creates far less drama with newer games but destructs the community of older games. **
That is also the expected position, along with the ‘practice’ excuse.
Anyways, your scenario there happens a lot less than people think. It always strikes me as people rationalizing an emotional position.
Deviljin: because he was specifically responding to a negative trend in the community, expressed in the context of 3S. In this case its just an opportunity to frame the discussion about patching.
What his intention was is not as important as how it came across. It came across as ‘you’re all idiots, capcom fucked up, and I’m better than you’.
Being overly smug in the way that you’re coming across about something trivial as this leads me to believe you don’t have a whole lot to be smug about IRL. You have my sincere pity.
sfa2 gold, 3s version b, a3 upper, cvs2:eo, hdr, mvc3’s kneejerk patches, the entirety of SSF4AE
counterpoint?
I agree that 3S is hardly well-balanced, but anyone who cites an EventHubs matchup chart as evidence should have their argument summarily dismissed and be thoroughly castigated for their immense stupidity.
Darry’s article manages to completely miss the point. Again, Sirlin isn’t blaming Capcom for the lack of balance changes (well, he is to a degree, but they’re not the prime culprit), he’s blaming the mentality of the 3S community for not wanting any balance changes. To which Darry replies “Capcom gave the 3S fans the game they wanted.” Well yeah, Sirlin’s not arguing that. The community is sending messages that he thinks are bad messages to send.
The article is mostly just an attack on Sirlin phrased a bit more deftly than one might see from the many Mongoloids in this thread miraculously gifted with a keyboard.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying it was a bad thing at all. The guy who originally posted about it was trying to use it as some kind of proof that 3S is this awesome game. There are much better moments to choose from if that’s the point you want to make. Like I said before, hype is cool and all but its not indicative of skill/gameplay at all. Just like football isn’t all about the Hail Mary, baseball isn’t all about the home run, basketball isn’t all about dunks. It’s great that these aspects are there and people can enjoy them, but that’s not what makes the game great.
Sorry to jump in, but for whatever it’s worth, the biggest thing that’s kept me from getting into 3S more has been 3S players.
I never really got into it, but I started playing a few years ago when a friend moved into town. He liked 3S so I picked it up so we could play together. A3 was dying and I’d given up on CvS2 and I could never get into GG, so I figured why not. I wasn’t too fond of the game, but it was SF and there wasn’t much else. Then IV came out and I really got into that.
As IV fans can tell you, a lot of people like to hate on the game. There is some bitterness of course, as IV did serve to overshadow or finish off the small communities that the older games still had left. CvS2 fans went quietly, but 3S fans never hesitated to talk about how much the game sucked. Snore Fighter, Bore Fighter, lame under-powered characters. Where are the 3S characters? This game is trash if Ono doesn’t put Alex/Urien/Twelve in! 3S was perfect, OMG what an excellent game, you only play that trash IV because it’s new and popular. Etc. Insulting my game to promote yours doesn’t really make me want to play yours. I’m not saying this to you directly, not does it apply to all or even a majority, but from my pov the most negative aspect of the 3S community has come from within.
“They’re not changed to appeal to the worst whiners. Beyond that, they’re not necessarily worse, but people strongly resist change.”
The problem here is that there’s an accepted narrative, and its so firmly ingrained/subjective that it’s impossible to get to the core of the issue. I’ll grant you that the AE changes were kind of insane, though.
Blame Daigo, brah.
There is zoning in 3S, there is a misconception that your ass wouldn’t get zoned out by a Remy player. Heck, even a Ryu who uses a lot of ex hadoukens would stop you in your tracks. Ask Hugo, and Q players because they get it the worst.
I didn’t imagine someone will be silly ebough to actually say that.
That match up chart is from Arcadia Magazine not of EH origin.
Proof it’s from Arcadia and not lifted from some random Japanese wiki like most EventHubs tierlists?
@ Eventhubs.
Answer this honestly: do you even PLAY 3rd Strike? Have you ever even played it in the arcade?
Lets talk about just how important balance is in 3S for just a second.
Because of the parry system, matchups aren’t really dictated by any certain, difficult to overcome dynamic. For instance, Honda In ST getting raped by projectile characters, and raping everyone else. The tier list is much more linear because of this. Certain characters are just plain STRONGER than others.
Because of this, in my experience, in third strike, the better player wins. If you’re losing to random scrubs who play chun and yun, balance is not the issue. Balance, in third strike, only really starts to come into play at the ultra competitive level, a level which no one in this thread, with the exception of Ty and Andy, has any right to comment on.
So then whats important to the majority of the community? I’d say its the variety of characters we see in our day to day playing of the game. Anyone who thinks online play of 3S is currently saturated with chuns and yuns just because they’re top tier needs to think again. I’ve played a fair amount these couple days and I’ve seen more shotos than anything, of course, but also a wide variety of other characters. If the imbalance of the game were causing people to only pick a select few characters then I’d say its a big issue, but its not.
Anyone play the SF4 series online? Tell me what you see. Ryu ryu ryu ryu ken akuma ryu ryu ryu. All the way through. Regardless of balance. Why? Probably because the mechanics of that game are catered to shotos (safe DPs, importance of space control) but also because most of the cast is boring, poorly designed, copies of each other, from an older game but not implemented well, didnt transition well to the new engine, etc etc
Frankly I dont really care if yun is overpowered. The game is designed so that since I’m a better player, I stomp them. And you shouldn’t care either, unless you start seeing a sea of yuns and chuns online, which you won’t. Ty might care. But he plays alex, so I’m sure he’s used to it.
You can’t really blame Sirlin for assuming that his audience had the capacity to read critically. After all, I was the one who posted this on SRK, not him.
I’m not smug, I’m just right.
This is a common misconception. Parry is not some panacea that makes it more possible to win hard matches than in other games. A 7-3 is always a 7-3 regardless of the game, it’s nonsensical to claim otherwise. Furthermore, how do you describe stuff like SGGK if not as a “difficult to overcome dynamic”? The better characters in 3S abuse parries better and parries against them are weaker. Parry is not some magical balancing mechanic that exists outside the rest of the game’s imbalances; it is part and parcel.
“Characters are just plain STRONGER than others” is a description far more fitting of 3S than many other games, honestly. It’s a game where you beat everyone in the tier list below you and lose to everyone above you, and the extent to which to win/lose is defined by the distance between you in the tier list.
Yun
Chun-Li
Makoto
Ken
Dudley
Yang
Akuma
Urien
Akuma
Urien
Ryu
Oro
Ibuki
Elena
Necro
Alex
Remy
Q
Hugo
Twelve
Sean
http://img519.imageshack.us/img519/7442/thridstrikediagramcroppvj6.jpg