Sirlin.net: "The Anti-Progress Attitude"

Classic Fighting Games Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike
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It does seem to be the popular opinion in the FGC that, when something in a game is unbalanced or even broken, it is up to the players to figure the problem out, and asking the developers to ‘fix’ the game is scrubby and/or weak. I think Sirlin does have a point that very few other players in other genres would continue to play a game as unbalanced as 3S, and many less would be actively arguing against a re balancing or re-tuning.

As an older person here (I’m 31), I can clearly say that there are a lot of times in life when someone will question your beliefs; not what you believe, but *why *you believe it. When that happens, I have found my first reaction is to want to curl into my shell, or maybe even disparage the person challenging me, but is that really helping, or being honest? As a community, everyone seems to have gotten the '3S is fine, it doesn’t need to be fixed, and only scrubs think it does!" memo, but when asked why?, maybe people become a little less certain, and feel a little less informed than they should be. If this article gets people thinking a little more critically about why they feel the way the feel about 3S, then it will, at the end of the day, make the community stronger; however, if it scares people into running back toward the safety of a mob mentality that they don’t fully understand or can defend…well, that says something about the community, too.

162

i would’ve thought sirlin liked third stike because hes all into that Yomi shit and reading the mind of the opponent .

163

Thats a fair point, but in my experience nobody ever learns. I’ve seen this same discussion pop up in one form or another countless times on SRK, and its the same people making the same posts every time. It always makes me ashamed to be a 3s player, because the most vocal are always the exact people you describe. They shout their favorite mantras over and over until the thread dies out, and the discussion pops up somewhere else for things to continue. I know 3s players from all over the world, and the smart ones understand the game isn’t well balanced, but they like it the way it is. The idiots you describe won’t learn shit or think more critically due to a venomous article from Sirlin.

164

I think this will sound kind of condescending and its not meant to be, but why does every fighting game have to be easy for new players to pick up and play?

Is the fact that there is very little low tier representation in the U.S. the games fault or is it our attitude towards the game? How can the game be so varied in Japan if its so unbalanced?

165

I just want 3s with GGPO fully integrated into the source code. I got that and thanks Capcom for distributing it. I get it, 3s is a shitty game and the people that play and like it must be stupid people with bad taste that plays bad games and you guys are much superior for playing ST and A2 like true ballers. I’m a subhuman piece of shit. May I enjoy my 3s in peace? I already had enough as it is for losing Megaman Legends 3 (another shitty series because it wasn’t challenging/good), at least give me 3s. It’s okay, you guys could just not play 3s and let me rot playing a shitty game while I and other players enjoy ourselves.

Stop getting mad over video games. If you guys want to have an elitist complex and say that our game is shit because we just have to do dumb shit to win, go ahead. Let us play our game.

At least I won’t get black bars anymore and I could practice red parries without using ghetto methods.

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because 3on3, 1 game, single elim mitigates the game’s unbalanced nature, while the usa format worsens existing imbalances?

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David Sirlin is like Lisa Simpson: His entire infamy is predicated on a question that nobody asked.

And what right does Sirlin have to criticize ANYBODY about an anti-progress attitude? The guy’s an MIT grad who has been reduced to selling card games online.

Frankly, Capcom NOT letting Sirlin rebalance 3SO is the only smart thing they’ve done lately.

168

hey guys online yomi tournament on sunday dont miss it.

169

I seriously hate the human race right now.

170

I’m going to say (flame me at your leisure) that what pisses me off more than anything while reading this thread is the number of idiots who scream “ITS COOL, ANYONE CAN WIN, JUST LOOK AT KURODA, HE WON WITH Q” or “OMG LOOK THERE IS ONE NECRO IN 07 THAT MEANS THE CHUN LI PLAGUE IS IRRELEVANT”

Are you fucking kidding me. Are you seriously fucking kidding me. I thought that 3s enthusiasts were usually smarter than the average bear but apparently not. Do you think Kuroda would have even lost a round if he was playing Chun? What makes Kuroda good is his ability to not only react absurdly fast, but predict his opponent’s moves extremely well. This is not inherent in the character at all. Necro does not suddenly become balanced if he wins.

and I would seriously like to know what the hell is wrong with attempting to make a chess 2, other than the fact that everyone likes to hop the “we fucking hate sirlin” bandwagon so scrutinize everything he does.

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timebandit sirlinnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn

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coz theres already a chess 1

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wow

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Sirlin can’t even win at his own “perfect” recreation of his favorite game HDRemix. There’s also a reason he was FIRED from Capcom before the game was out. On top of that he pretty much ignored everyone but a few things John Choi said to change in the final build of HDR.

Plus, he’s arguing against a game, with a hardcore fanbase, that’s been played since 1998.(I think thats the year) He’s plugging his games that 1) didn’t last long and 2) didn’t sell because of him but because of the name attached, and it was just timing. If that shit came out after SF4 it would have gone NOWHERE.

SF2 Sirlin Remix lasted as long as SF3 Alpha Upper.

Ok enough of about his failures and bad ideas.

Man maybe I should get the XBL dev kit and make a game of stick fighter, then I can say I’m a genius game designer as well.

The last thing 3s is needs is a community split. For some reason I think some of the top people at SRK would attempt to force it too by forcing the new version on the community at tournaments. I know a few TO’s that would most likely reject this (shout out to Ghaleon for getting arcade cabs for 3s and ST at Seasons Beatings) and then we’d have a ton more problems. The only reason I can see this NOT happening is if their lust for money from EVO and all that shit (You know they get paid by sponsors dont even front) is greater than their OG hate for 3s.

Removing 3s from GGPO effectively removed a lot of good online players who don’t have or have access to next gen consoles and forced them to supercade or nothing, it doesn’t need to get worse than that.

God bless 3s.

Also, Tekken 4 was worse than 3s in terms of balance. SC3 was worse than 3s in balance. Alpha 3 was pretty damn ridiculous too. Marvel vs Capcom 2. Vanilla SF4! (Rog and Sagat ruled that game)

Did anyone care? Yeah, some people. Did it stop them from ENJOYING their game? Fuck no!

tl;dr:

Part 1:Sirlin sucks at making games, he sucks at the games he makes, he was fired because he sucked at making the games.

Part 2: People play what they like, fuck the haters, fuck a rebalance because removing 3s from GGPO already killed a lot of players’ opportunity for competition (they dont have next gen consoles)

Ever since I’ve been here, it’s always been like this: Talk shit on ST, get gangbanged. Talk shit on MvC2, get raped. And now, talk shit on SF4 or MvC3, you get mauled by a bunch of retards with flame throwers who just had their apple sauce spilled on them.

Talk shit on 3s, KEEP GOING! Seriously, 3s players here are expected to just sit and take it. Fuck SRK.

175

People keep saying stuff like this, as if rebalancing is going to make the game easier. Not if you pick the top tier, it won’t. Apparently the vast majority of top EVO competitors were whiny scrubs who refused to play through their tough match-ups, just like most like most of the people we’re going to be seeing online. Can you really blame 'em? Why does all this PLAY TO WIN stuff go out the window when it comes to character selection? I know this is controversial to say in a 3S thread, but: balance is virtually always a good thing, even at the expense of being able to troll less-skilled players with unpopular low-tier characters.

[details=Spoiler]I did say ‘virtually always’…

[/details]

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Saying that 3S is an imbalanced game isn’t a normative statement. It’s just a statement of fact. The part of Sirlin’s article that is opinion is that it would be a better game if it was not imbalanced, which I’ve yet to hear a rational argument against. If it’s the case that a player doesn’t want an imbalanced game to change because they have some nostalgiac affection for it or because they appreciate its history in its current form and want to own some piece of that, then that’s fine. Just say that, instead of getting mad at what is ostensibly nothing.

Look at how angry you are. It’s silly.

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ad hominem/personal attack is specifically when you attack a person instead of a point. Everyone seems to agree his point was that 3s isn’t balanced. If he called the designer a buttface it would be ad hominem.

It is pretty funny that he cries about parrying ruining the longstanding role of fireball zoning however. Now who’s against change Sirlin?

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Throwing the term “purist” around in this context isn’t really necessary. We paid to play 3rd Strike, if they rebalanced the game it’s not 3rd Strike but a whole new game. They advertised it as 3rd Strike and that’s what 3S fans want to play.

And the whole character balance argument is getting a bit stale anyway, because it really doesn’t matter if half of the cast isn’t viable. The important thing is are the viable characters fun to play? According to the still-going Japanese 3S community and my personal experience, the answer is a resounding yes. Is it fun to WATCH 5 Chuns and 10 Yuns in a row? No. But since when did players play games for the sake of other people’s entertainment?

The balance in the game system is a lot more important than character balance, can a game present a variety of options with a balanced risk/reward? Does it have a balanced tactic/execution, zoning/rushdown, or anticipation/pure guessing ratio? And if it does, does it have well-designed characters that can provide these options at their fullest potential? 3S does, but it just happens to be only about 5 characters. IMO when you’re playing these top tiers you’re getting the full package, and when you’re utilizing the game system(a very well designed one IMO) to the fullest, you will get the maximum enjoyment out of it, and that’s when your brain registers FUN.

So basically, the game obviously boils down to whether the actual players are having fun, you would assume all the Japanese Yun and Chun players would have gotten tired of playing each other for 10 years, but this is strangely not the case. Not to mention Hugo’s recent rise on the tier list, showing us there is still room for development in this 10 years old game. The character balance doesn’t ruin the game for players(it might for spectators, but who cares?), the system balance is what truly matters.

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Even then it wouldn’t have been an ad hominem. Ad hominem doesn’t mean “he called me a bad name.” It means that he would be asserting that his point is correct because of some flaw in the character of the person making a point/counterpoint. So if Sirlin had said “I don’t like this game because [Someone] is an ass,” then that would be an ad hominem. “I don’t like this game because it’s imbalanced, and by the way, [Someone] is an ass” is not an ad hominem.

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I was one of the people who was for rebalancing 3S. I’m for fixing what’s broken. I wasn’t even going to get 3SO but I got it because the features they put in was appealing. So in the end I bought an unbalanced game, but now it’s got GGPO and trials. I haven’t done ranked matches yet, but I suspect it’s going to be filled with Kens, Chuns and Yuns (I use Dudley). I’m not interested in fighting the same characters with the same playstyles, so I’ll probably stay out of ranked matches for the most part, unless I’m completely wrong and there are lots of different players*. *I understand what Sirlin was trying to say even though it came out wrong. I would hate to make a game and spend resources on creating several varied characters, only to have players settle on 10% of the cast. What was all that work for?

I can’t help but think that if 3S was released at a different time, where patches for console games are now common, the game would’ve gotten the balance changes it needs. After 12 years of playing the same game, it’s a lost cause now. Like Haunts said, the only way it’ll happen now is with a new game (Fourth Down, ha :D), but that won’t happen.