parabellum just switch to bison already!
Starcraft is a shitty example. Seeing as Terran is the best race. Don’t believe me? Then why are the majority of professionals Terran? Same can be applied to others.
About StarCraft, while it’s still a great game that I will never ever be any good at despite how much I used to play it, it actually isn’t all that balanced. Terran and Protoss are both very roxxin, but after Mutalisks were nerfed, Zerg has been known to be the weakest race that requires some major work to get an advantage with. Terran and Protoss are both powerful, with Toss only slightly edging over Terran. There are not a lot of Zerg players in the pro leagues of SC.
I don’t know if you guys noticed, but there HAS been a balance patch for SFIV that came with the Championship Pack. It only changed some very minor things tho, like it changed the hitbox on Gief’s Lairat a tiny bit, and added some startup to Fei Longs HK flying kick so that he couldn’t use it as part of a corner infinite.
About the keeping the arcade and console versions identical, that ship sailed when the console version added 8 characters, and they slightly altered some of the arcade characters only on the console version. And it doesn’t look like SFIV arcade will get a patch that adds the console characters anytime soon, if ever. The console vesrion might as well be SFIV CE.
However, I still sort of disagree with patching games. Unless it’s some small things like said on the first page, I don’t like shaking the snow globe up. It causes people to have to relearn characters and such. If they were to do some major changes, they should only do it once every six months to a year, but you might as well update the game entirely (SFIV Dash) in that case.
Dictator is my other main, but I’m better with Chun against most other characters.
for the people who were saying that abel needs buffing and he’s on par with guile and vega: nope.
I play abel, and I suck ass with him, but I can still beat any character in the game if the person I’m playing against is as crappy as I am.
His only matchup that’s kinda unbalanced is abel v zangief, but that only REALLY matters when you’re good. Cause i’ve beaten a pile of shitty giefs too.
(sagat does do too much damage though 
I think I got it the other way around then. That is they used to cost 100 and got swapped to 150. Because I just reinstalled my version of Starcraft (1.01 lol) before updating and that was the case. As soon as I ran the recent patch the cost became 150.
I think that came a result of cannon creeping.
I would really love to believe that, but balancing any game is never that easy.
Because what may give someone a 7-3 match up may be what keeps another match up 5-5. So by nerfing the 7-3 to get a 5-5 you turn the other matchup into a 3-7.
You guys don’t even think Fei Long needs changes? Setting his fists on fire sure is a cool way to burn EX meter. It’s totally cool that Rose has an extra jump frame for no reason?
huh?
There’s a bunch of stuff that could be fixed and wouldn’t even affect balance.
Vega’s overhead not being an overhead, for example, needs to be fixed.
It’s that easy if you’re intelligent about it. What makes someone be the 3 on the 7-3 matchup? A specific weakness to that characters strength - sometimes the way you fix that is simply nerf that strength or buff that weakness.
Buffing a weakness isn’t going to ruin any matchups because only the bad characters have these horrible weaknesses anyway.
Reducing the recovery a little bit on Ryu and Sagats fireball spam would help a lot and wouldn’t suddenly make them suck (although scrubs would think so)
If it was so simple we wouldn’t have unbalanced games to start with. Balancing games isn’t simple no matter how much you want it to be.
I think they need to patch the amount of bitching that players do after losing a match.
When it comes to fighting games, you need the playerbase to reveal the imbalances over time, internal testing just won’t cut it.
Asking it to be balanced from the getgo is unreasonable.
Look at what HDR did for ST - it didn’t introduce any new imbalances, only tightened up the existing game.
That kind of approach taken iteratively is very effective in balancing a game with as few variabls as SF4 (which is to say it has a lot more variables than any other competitive game)
I’d pay 20 bucks to give Sagat a Sean level nerf.
Or capcom can just balance 7-3 and 6-4 matchups by tweaking the normal and special moves priorities between the fighters in question.
And frankly the players in this base (including you and me) are the last people who should get a say in balancing. Half the people complaining about Sagat are not even close to pro level.
First Akuma is still banned in that game despite several nerfs so it isn’t perfect. The original SF2 came out in 1991, that is nearly 20 years ago!. Super Turbo came out in 1994 for crying out loud. We are talking about the recent addition to a game that is about 18 years old. It took them that long to finally get something balanced?! Second players are still learning the details of HDR as evident by Evo this year. They were still playing it as if it was ST. Third it was its own release not a patch. Fourth if we do get a patch, who says it is going to come from the same people who did HDR?
And at the same time you make my point for me. The player base always finds techniques the developers never imagined. Thus it is impossible to catch every little detail because every change introduces new variables.
If they came out with a new release of SF4 that is fine since if we don’t like it then we can always go back to vanilla SF4. A patch however usually does not get reversed.
^^^^
this
Beating the WoW horse even more, WoW’s PvP balance has been pretty ridiculous historically. It has tons of new content coming out every 3-6 months and the 30 hour a week MMO crowd constantly coming up with new ways of doing things, so Blizzard never has time to properly balance anything beforehand.
As others have said, Street Fighter 4 has had very extensive work done to balance the characters ahead of release, and if you know how to play, even Vega or Dan or whoever you think is the least viable character has a solid chance against Sagat or the current flavor of the month. Factor in the fact that you CAN choose a different character for a bad matchup and you’re not too bad off
I can’t fathom why people are against the prospect of a more balanced game…
Because all too often the attempt to balance things further does the opposite.