because its not a reason, 3s its not balanced, it seems that some folks belive that admiting that 3s is not balanced would mean that the game suck
not being balanced and being a bad game are 2 different things
While I’ll admit that parrying can help mitigate some of the bad matchups, 3S still has a very obvious and dominant top tier.
I agree. A game doesn’t have to be balanced in order to be fun or entertaining. It doesn’t even have to be a “good” game to be fun or entertaining. A fine example of an unbalanced, terribly broken game would be Hokuto no Ken, but that doesn’t make it not one of the most entertaining FGs to watch out there.
“Balanced game mechanics” doesn’t make any sense to me. Game mechanics is something every single character generally has access to. In the case of parries, every character can do them… but so what? Parries help characters in the game as much as it hurts them.
Game mechanics can do a lot of things for a game; creating balance is because of them is not one of them.
If a game truly has “balanced game mechanics” then they should be able to fully compensate and/or mitigate any advantages that the upper tiers have, effectively compressing the tiers. Parry in 3S doesn’t really do that since the main issue is the amount of damage the top tiers can do once they get in compared to the guys down below.
looooooooooooooooooooooooooool,
wtf do people smoke on srk lol? game mechanics can basically create a balanced game right out of the gate. Why do you think suck fighter 4 has ultras in them? is it there to NOT balance out the game? same with XF in mvc3. Those mechanics are there to add balance ON PURPOSE…
some of the reasons with imbalanced games stems from the fact that a character can neither apply good offense\defense. This character sucks because he can’t get in and has no offense or this character sucks because said character can’t play any defensive options. You can use game mechanics to allow those factors to become less of a factor.
Pot calling the kettle black, much?
Game mechanics can break a game just as much as they save a game. Often times, it is the characters who can exploit the games mechanics who become top tier. There was a good post by Viscant, I think, where he pointed out that Vanilla SF4 was all about the ultra meter and who could land it. Remember, the best characters where Sagat, Ryu, Akuma, Zangief, Rufus, Viper, and Balrog. 5 of those 7 could reliably combo into their ultra. Would Bison and Sakura been in the top 5 of CvS2 had A-groove not been put in the game? Probably not. Both were solid characters, but it was their A-groove power that pushed them over the top.
Balancing a game is very difficult. If it were easy, every fighting game would be very well balanced and we’d see 75% or more of the cast placing at majors in every game. Does anyone really believe that the SF4 team intentionally broke AE? Or did Ono just spout off that mess about overpowered characters creating a spirit of competition to cover his and his team’s asses because he knew they’d screwed up. They probably made Yun and Yang strong so people would want to buy them as DLC, but went too far. Because, let’s face it, would you pay money to download Vanilla Vega?
Fighting game mechanics when done by the right people who understand what they’re doing balance out a game from the start. Look @ ah3 and its ability to be incredibly well balanced while having sufficient game mechanics same with ggac and you can add tekken\VF to the list as well. its 2011 and sf4 isn’t even balanced even though the blue print for balance is out there in multiple forms.
people have to remember that Capcom really SUCKS @ programming. This is why sf4 takes more resources on the PC than need be, its why we have net code from 1999 even though its 2011 and its also the same reason why 99% of their fighting games have been broken pieces of shit. They’ve been incredibly lucky to have such a following while releasing garbage. Seriously, Capcom doesn’t have the slightest clue on how to balance anything, look @ their track record its more than enough proof.
The problem is that the idea often works in theory but not in practice.
As Iceman mentioned (as per Viscant), Ultras in SF4 were meant to balance the game but instead it just created an imbalance.
Why? Because some Ultras sucked total dick. Because some characters had easy, practical ways to combo into their Ultra and others didn’t at all. Not coincidentally, the characters with good, comboable Ultras were tops and the ones with shitty Ultras were mostly low.
X-Factor in MvC3 is a little better in that every character in the game can benefit from Level 3 X-Factor, but it still doesn’t balance the game that much because A) Not every character can utilize X-Factor quite well as others B) Characters who would be top-tier without X-Factor are still top tier WITH it.
In Capcom’s old fighting game engine (CPS1 - NAOMI) you have to go to a development menu select hit edit find your character then find that characters attack in order to edit them to balance the game.
On SNK’s fighting game engines (each game series used a different engine) you flipped a dipswitch which makes a menu appear in middle of the fight where you could edit the characters.
Maybe he thinks that if a lambda sword or a rachel frog or an arakune cloud net you a combo (or a combo later in the match) then it doesn’t count as zoning or something…
Also against Makoto almost every character needs to out-range her (read: keep her out of her ideal point blank range) in order to survive.
Yeah, I really can’t tell if parrying balances the game for low-tier characters, or if it just fucking breaks the game to pieces.
So, you’re playing Ryu and a Yun jumps in on you. What do you do? The logical answer is probably to anti-air his ass with a fucking SRK.
Not in 3S. You’ll get your shit parried by a half-decent player and eat a combo at best (and a super art bs at worse).
What Iceman and Return of Shiki said pretty much covers what I would have said had I had the time to respond this morning.
Now, it’s very difficult to say ASW and Examu know what they’re doing or they have gotten extremely lucky. I can’t exactly speak for the AH series since I don’t follow it that well, but IIRC from AH1 to AH2, characters just shifted from tiers and there wasn’t really overall any difference. I know AH3 tiers are pretty close, but when you think about how many characters there are in the game and all the Arcanas, it’s somewhat hard to believe they’re geniuses in balancing the game or they just got lucky with how things worked themselves out.
ASW has had a similar track record. XX was terribly unbalanced. #R was too. Slash was a huge upgrade and the tiers were very close except for Robo-Ky being pretty bad. Slash vs. Accent Core is very debatable on which is more balanced. In Slash, there was one top tier, while a majority of the cast was either A or B tier, with only two to four C tier and/or D tier. In Accent Core, there are two S tier, one A tier, four B tier, the rest in C tier, and two D tier. Still, if the majority of the cast is in one or two tiers, then the game is objectively balanced. That said, you have to look at the wide varity of things that changed from Slash to Accent Core. Many characters got new moves, force breaks were added, and some characters were practically redone (like Eddie). With how the gameplay evolved from #R to Slash (many loops were altered or out right removed, importance of meter usage in combos) and then from Slash to AC, I highly doubt ASW knew exactly what they were doing. Many changes from Slash to AC just seem like changes they did to make the game cooler and more sporadic since Slash seemed kind of dull. Fortunately, it seems that everything worked out and AC is arguably one of the most balanced fighters of all time.
Let’s look at BlazBlue as well in regards to what ASW does in terms of balance. CT was relatively broken. First game. Understandable. CS1 was a good improvement, but top tier and some characters (like Tao and Arakune) were pretty stupid. Before CS1, I thought ASW knew how to balance fighting games properly because of what happened with Accent Core. Unfortunately, the difference in tiers from CT to CS1 were about the same, which crushed my faith in ASW. At least the system mechanics were reworked into something much better. CS2, so far, is a huge improvement (system mechanics tweaked, blocking made weaker) in both system mechanics and tiers, but the game is still young and how balanced it is remains to be seen.
Overall, I think companies, even Capcom, have some sort of gameplan in how to balance their games out, but due to the complexity of fighting games (a change to one character affects every other character as well, including system mechanics), they’re very difficult to balance. Most games that end up being pretty balanced are likely by accident.
Well, compared to New Generation and 2nd Impact, 3s IS balanced! :lol:
You have to remember though that the it took ASW 4 games in order to balance out GGXX. They seem to put a lot more thought into their balance changes though. I agree that the tiers from BBCT to CS1 were a little messed up, haven’t played CS2 yet so the jury’s still out on that one, but since I started playing GG, it made me realize that ASW is a lot more deliberate with their changes for the most part. Capcom’s answer is just to nerf all the characters until they’re relatively balanced.
No fair. I like my Sean and Ibuki being S-Tier.
!) Guilty Gear Accent Core/Virtua Fighter 5
2) AH3
3) SSF4
4) Vampire Savior
5) Melty Blood AACC
Or… Crazy idea, you could parry his Dive Kick.
Do I really have to link to Kuroda videos to get this idea across?
Or we could post the video where the Yun vs Q, an 8-2 match up IIRC, is very apparent and Kuroda gets fucking raped by a Yun player at SBO. I don’t remember the Yun player, but I think it was KO. Or we could point out that Kuroda, even though he’s probably the strongest 3S player to ever play the game, finally won SBO with his team with a top tier character.
Your logic is terribly flawed because the parry mechanic helps every character equally. Think of it this way: X character has a good match up against Y character. Y character can use parries to help him against X character. At the same time, X character can use parries to shut down even more options for Y character. Keep in mind that because of Y character’s already limited options because of the match up, X character’s parries are more dangerous and powerful. It works both ways. That doesn’t sound like a balanced game mechanic at all. The match up is still relatively the same.
Even if the game mechanics may be balanced, it doesn’t make 3S a balanced game. I could argue that Hokuto no Ken is balanced because everyone can potentially kill you in one hit due to how the game mechanics allow everyone to do an infinite.
This is a thread about balanced games, not balanced game mechanics. Parry system in 3S could be the most balanced game mechanic in the world, but that doesn’t mean 3S is not balanced.
I acknowledge that. However, in the majority of games, some characters have strong anti-airs whereas others have weak anti-airs; it balances characters in that respect. However, in 3S, that universal option is there. Universal could be synonymous with balanced, but if one of the primary weaknesses of a character would be their poor anti-air, 3S’s parry system breaks that.
Supah more balanced than Vampire?