Dude, this game is not even a year old. In case some of you have not noticed, the tier lists and matchups change all the time. When this game first came out everyone was saying viper is garbage and loses every matchup. out of nowhere she jumped to SS+ tier. you may be mad that your character has a 3-7 match against sagat, but 2 months from now you might find out its really 5-5. hey, maybe a year from now it might be realized that almost every match is about 5-5, and we just dont know it yet.
LET IT BREATH.
People that just started playing fighting games this year, just don’t get it.
ok, you want your characters stronger, and sagat weaker. Great.:tup:
You want honda’s EX oicho to be even better? It’s already the best thing he has. it’s got more range and does good damage. what else does it need?
So, what do we give balrog now that honda absolutely destroys him?
what do we give viper and fuerte?
Those are just examples off the top of my head because those are the characters I know the best.
And your comment about EX Oichio illustrates pure ignorance - it has the same range as jab and does 10 more damage, which is still less than the fierce version- it’s a complete waste of meter. It should execute faster or provide some invulnerability to throws or something to make it worth actually using the meter on.
None of this will make honda destroy balrog, sorry.
EX Oichio and an ultra that actually works like it should aren’t going to change these matchups - we’re talking about being able to actually land an ultra on someone who’s already stupid enough to jump in on you, and an EX Oichio throw that should have some meter-worthy properties.
Fuerte could use more health IMO, but other than that I’m not a Fuerte player. Viper vs Honda is something you’d have to ask Viper players about - but I think her Ultra should be a little more usable, I’ve seen it fail to connect for no reason on the last few hits.
A true 6-4 matchup isn’t that bad - it’s a slight advantage, but most of the stacked matchups in SF4 are actually 7-3 and people are too conservative with calling it a 6-4.
I understand what you’re saying, and it definitely makes sense. What I was talking about in the OP isn’t some kind of huge balance patch every few weeks. I just mean things like shaving off a few frames here and there for the worst characters to bring them up a little.
As anyone who has mained a low tier before knows, it just gets frustrating after a while. Don’t you think the game would be a little more fun if capcom gave Guile, and some of the other low characters just a little boost to make things more interesting?
But you’re right, they shouldn’t change too much, or too often. A big part of the fun of fighting games is trying to master all the little things, and if they kept changing the little things over and over it would get annoying too. I think there is a sweet spot though, where they give a few buffs here and there and once the tier list is a bit more condensed they could leave it alone.
DLC and patching is here to stay. This isn’t 1998. If the companies want to change something, they will. That being said. I personally doubt the companies would put that much time and effort into balance patches. This isn’t exactly WoW here ya’know. Balancing is a cycle of testing, re-testing and putting it out there. And once it starts… usually it doesn’t stop until the next game gets primary support.
Seriously, its way to early to even think of patches if they will at all. On the other hand, the oldtimers need to realize that there are not full arcades brimming with folks losing thier quarters like a decade ago. Online play is where most people will get alot of thier experience now. And with this great opportunity for more competition comes things like DLC and patches. I wouldn’t harp so much on folks for bringing up the idea. Just trust in the bottom line of the company.
Well said - this is what matters the most. Your whole post was right on the money too.
Capcom struck gold with SF4 - it sold out the ass on console all over the world.
It makes business sense to follow it up - probably in another year or so - with a Champion Edition with some new characters and tweaked balance.
As much as I’d like to see some DLC balance changes I don’t see it happening.
I don’t see how anyone can possibly be against this. Maybe they fear that it will get out of hand and just make some overly buffed character too good, but this isn’t WoW and that isn’t going to happen without a massive boost.
Making Guile suck a little less won’t make him shoot up to top tier - worst case scenario is that he rapes Honda even harder but it’s not hard to look at individual problem matchups and make some adjustments.
(Honda gets owned by Guile because of sonic boom and sonic boom’s recovery, but Honda has issues with fireballs in general, fix this and you fix a lot of Honda’s problems)
Like I posted before…99% of the people here and everywhere are scrubs. Myself included. Leave it to the people who know the nuances of the game.
Everyone talking about “Balance” when mother fuckers…YJDK. Not even kidding. drop it.
**halcyonryu ** has his shit right. read his fucking post.
Also, leave sagat alone! I don’t even play him or like but… hes not that powerful. He hits hard sure but he moves like jello, he needs the high damage output to make up for his lack of mobility and lack of good footies.
FUCK, sometimes I just want to Rip my dick off and quit life when I read some of the shit here.
By the time enough time has passed to make any meaningful balance changes, the next Street Fighter IV will already be out, and everyone will have switched to it, making balancing this version pointless.
I disagree for many reasons that I’m sure have been stated numerous times. I would prefer functionality patches over balance patches. I’d rather they leave the balance changes for the next iteration, and fix up this game’s shitty interface and lack of features in the meantime.
Video games are the perfect example of the butter fly effect and Murphy’s law. An innocent little tweak can blow up in your face quickly. Not to mention there is always a coin flip factor when you change a game. What new glitches do you introduce by messing with the code again? What do you create/ruin by making small changes? If you mess with the Kara system what problems do you create? Hell I have seen games get weird game breaking glitches on a compiler error! Even if you are using software specifically made to edit details like frame recovery or the like, glitches in that software can introduce glitches in the game.
You say “Oh if we just tweak this we know for sure it will work” and I laugh my head off. Because in my 8 years of studying programing and my 18 years of playing video games I have seen some pretty damn funny and scary things that simple patches can do to a game.
No, but by tweaking speeds, priorities, and damage you change a move’s combo abilities, vulnerabilities, and usefulness. And especially in a game where the #1 character is only #1 by a slight margin you can change one hell of a lot.
Strange that is almost what I could say about your posts. Except you seem to just condensed anyone who disagrees with you.
HE IS STILL BANNED! The #1 in that game is still broken and in fact some of the nerfs actually added to that! -FACT!
His air fireball nerf gave him one of the best cross up games. See that is a perfect example of what I am talking about. Unintended consequences. A small change like the direction of his air fireball and all of a sudden the players found a whole new use for it. It gave him one of the easiest to land supers in addition to this. So I guess the balance did exactly what many on this board have warned against.
2 + 3) Not worth debating.
The thing is you are taking a game that was horrible at balance and comparing it to SF4 which is a game that is one of the most balanced SF games around. The two are apples and oranges. It is like saying if I live a 6 hour drive (ST) away from work that a 1/2 hour drive (HDR) is a huge improvement. Sure, but when I am already 1/2 drive away then is it going to be as beneficial to move closer? The difference in the characters were night and day in ST. ST Akuma was an overpowered elite boss in that game. Old Sagat was a damn nightmare to fight.
It isn’t like SF4 where it is already rather close to balance and the difference is so slight. In fact I would say all HDR has done is bring ST close to SF4’s level of balance.
Kind of like people were saying Rolento was high tier about this time in Alpha 3’s release. Boy did that change.
The bulk of a character is well known, but little details change character’s rankings. Little details are still being discovered especially about the characters that are hard to play.
Although yes Vega sucks. Not much is going to change that.
Are there balance issues, yes. Are they so game breaking that Sagat is unbeatable, no.
However players love to complain about the slightest imbalance. A fact I generally get tired of. Hell if the only difference between two characters was that one was a frame faster on a single move I am sure someone somewhere would complain about it.
If Skill can win out consistently then I am content with the game as it is. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.
i’m gonna be so happy if a year from now everyone is joking about how it seemed vega was terrible at first but actually he’s mid-high tier.
all without patches.
I’d rather have every 2 years a new version of the game ala championship edition, super street fighter 2, ST than have 6 month patches which screw up the game constantly.
I would maybe feel differently if the game was clearly and without doubt full of 8-2 or 9-1 matches. but since that isnt the case it doesnt matter.
if the tier lists were static then maybe i’d change my mind too, but thats not the case either so…
…now you’re talking about crashes and glitches, when we’re talking about balance.
Do you not see how you’re going off track of discussion just to try and ‘debate’?
Generalization. How exactly are you going to break something by increasing the recovery of tiger knee or tiger shot? How are you going to break anything by making Vega’s ST actually work as an AA by adding some invuln frames at the start up?
How the fuck can you say SF4 and SF2 are apples and oranges? The entire point is that HDR was a balance improvement and that’s inarguable.
As an example of balancing done right it’s great. Honestly dude this whole post is…ridiculous.
Why not improve the lower tier characters so they’re more competitive?
No because glitches in the game can result in imbalances or changes in the game. I have seen it destroy tactics and create new ones. If a glitch gives invincibility to a move that wasn’t intended to have it would it not make that move more powerful?
I have seen glitches make it so in FPS you crouch lower than you were suppose to. I have seen glitches allow someone to jump higher than they were suppose to. I have seen unintended function take a whole video game (Melee) and turn its metagame upside down.
Glitches do factor into balance if the glitch is beneficial. I would think someone who claims to know so much about videos games would think of that.
If I have to explain this to you then you just don’t get it. By nerfing Tiger Knee and Tiger shot you just nerfed two of Sagat’s best options and possibly ruin a few match ups that are based off of those advantages.
I can almost guarantee that an un-nerfed Akuma would start to dominate Sagat if his zoning game and TK was any less useful because as it stands Akuma already has all the tools he needs to shut down Sagat, but the only thing that keeps the match up at 5-5 is the fact Sagat doesn’t need to land many hits.
Buffing the lower class isn’t such a bad thing, but nerfing the top I think is stupid in SF4. It isn’t like HDR where the top characters were miles away from the mid tiers.
They are apples and oranges because of the different levels of imbalance.
It wasn’t as hard to balance ST since the characters were so vastly different, but when you start getting closer and closer to balance the more difficult it becomes. Just think of trying to balance a seasaw perfectly and you get the idea.
Once again you just get up on your high horse instead of actually debating. I have yet to see you actually debate without it. Anyone who disagrees with you gets written off as an idiot.
In the next title of SF4, sure why not? However don’t be whining if it turns out that another character sunk to the bottom as a result of it. I would put my money that is exactly what would happen. Not to mention I know they will try to add more characters which only mucks things up further.
Ive been playing fighters for many years now, but I still consider myself a scrub. I started playing fighters when I was in kindergarden believe it or not. despite all that, i feel as if a patch would be useless right now. I think your all forgetting about SF4 Dash. That right there is going to be the “first” patch. I think its quite obvious that capcom is going to add T.Hawk and Deejay. That means that they are going to have to fix everyone up in order to accomadate (cant spell that word) them. Hopefully t and D dont end up being bottom tier, but you also cant deny that the console characters need some work as well.
Regarding fighters in general, I believe that dlc is a must for them. Im not talking about gameplay changes, however if companies can pull it off then watever. Now I know most of you wouldn’t care about companies adding more stages, more modes, or anything else but for the casual crowd its a must. People need a reason to play these games for a long period of time. You cant just have an arcade mode thats only a time trial and add nothing else to the game. Its 2009 and companies have to stop rereleasing their games. I like street fighter alpha 3, and even I got tired with capcom porting the game to almost every single system without adding anything new (only the psp version added new chars).
what a load of bollocks. the changes for guile and honda in their matchup would echo through 48 other matchups. and what would this fix be by the way? give honda his jab torpedo from hdremix? that hardly changed his guile matchup at all. he’s still vulnerable to guile spacing him just outside of headbutt range for a combo when his sonic booms get destroyed. give sonic boom more recovery? youd be fucking guile players even harder than they have been already
the fact of the matter is that even if patching were widely accepted in fighting games, that doesn’t change that fact that fighting game are among the most difficult genres of games to make. a lot of testing and years of high level play are needed for changes to be made. almost everyone who helped with hdr had already won national and international tournaments, and it was still a testy challenge to change the game after 14 years of tournament play.
Y.J.D.K.W.T.F.Y.A.T.A.N.O
(you just dont know what the fuck you are talking about, no offence)
it’s as if people have forgotten that ST has long been regarded as the most well balanced fighting game ever. HDR is NOT a better balanced version of ST. all tournaments and high level players, regard it as being a completely different game, because it is. ST is ST, HDR is HDR.
SF4 is even more well balanced than ST. What more can you ask for?
Honestly, I think that every matchup being 5-5 would be really lame and alot of the fun and excitement would be lost. What’s wrong with a character have a couple of difficult matchups? Do you really so badly not want to come up with creative new strategies and interesting mind games?
What can you do to zangief to help him get in on sagat that doesnt also make him rape the shit out of everyone else?
new things are discovered over time. like maybe some character has something like a meaty neutral jump short that some top-tier character has no answer for. it happens all the time. some garbage character owns some high tier character with a low strong or something (true story).
