I aboslutely adore all the jabs at Hakan. They show your ignorance of the character well.
That aside, this is a pretty good article. Kudos.
Honestly I think its just to many characters to balance properly. Someone is going to be top, thats just how it is. I wouldn’t mind a game with 12-20 characters with great balance.
If it’s high damage and is used too often as a means of victory without much effort… nerf!! aka headbutts.
I agree, but they can minimize the gap between the top,middle and bottom. Right now, the top is way above the middle and bottom. Hell, even among the top there’s a disparity. Makoto and Ken are considered to be right up there with Viper (I think that’s the case, don’t quote me), but you rarely see these characters in top 8.
nice rework 
TL:RWT (Too Long; read whole thing)
Interesting article that has fair points (some of which I disagree with but overall well written and well articulated.)
The only way to do it right is to immediately nerf the top 3 or 4, and Buff the bottom 15. And not Capcom buff (which is very little and bottom stay bottom) but really substantial buff like Makoto got. Do that then set up a tournament, or do it before a major one. For example, Let say EVO, you release the patch in June, you give it a month, you have a tournament, a major one with some 3000 competitors and you see results. If you get variety in results, and based on the frame data and discussions, if you have a lot of variety and more parity, you WAIT and give it many more months to see how things turn out as more tricks are found. If you still see the usual suspects, then no more nerfs, but this time buff the bottom 25, as you get more buff, the advantages of the usual suspect will begin to diminish and even out.
As someone said, if Capcom was willing to patch over the long haul, you would eventually get a really balanced game. Can it ever be 100%, no, But I’m sure capcom can make the difference between top and bottom should be diminished.
Great article. We’ll see if Capcom actually responds in this way. I hope so, but I’m also worried. There was a lot of complaining so I’m afraid they’re going to go overboard with the buffs/nerfs and we might end up worse than how we started. Personally, I went to see the nerfs in Super reversed and the buffs kept - maybe a handful of additional buffs to the lower tiers. That should be more than enough.
One thing I wanted to note though, adjustments in damage/health can have a fairly big impact on matchups. Chun vs Sagat went from 4/6 to 6/4 from SF4 to Super based on damage alone. This isn’t always the case of course, but sometimes just being able to stay alive a little longer really helps a character out.
Cool read yeah, but some opinions feel really at odd with what I believe. You should try to work on this article further, you could get front-page.
Viper doesn’t need her life nerfed, she just missed the Super and AE nerfs batch and needs her ultra damage to be lowered a little cause it’s just too insane. It’s a guaranteed comeback every round, combined with her vortex, it’s not how she was designed to be IMO.
Also, I believe that Honda eats most low-mid char alive (he always tends to be an all or nothing character anyway), and metagame-wise he’s not that bad (Fei doesn’t like him). Buffing charge characters is most likely a bad idea. A “Guile, Balrog, Honda” top-tier makes for super boring tournaments.
I say just let the Virtua Fighter staff balance SF(I know it won’t ever happen but a man can dream). They pretty much have one of the most balanced(if not the most balanced game ever) fgs on the market lol. And please no yearly updates, at least let the metagame evolve a couple years before another update.
JS, PR Rog, Ross, Dimenion (+ shout outs to F.Champ) play a very exciting and at many times offensive style considering their characters are defensive based.
So this statement is really just following the quo that super was a “turtle fest” when turtling never got anyone anything outside of XBL.
P.S for the record Fei can be a turtling prick when he’s good and ready too.
Poor Rose 
I just wanna let you know that you called Hakan and Honda ‘zoning’ characters. Would you care to elaborate?
Lol’d
Whatever though, keep claiming it’s the characters winning and not the players. I’m sure Capcom is going to keep balancing around the mid tier like they have been doing, bringing the top down every iteration until we have a game full of mid and low tier worthy characters and the top tier is again just a “best of the meh”.
Well, I think it’s a fair distinction. Both characters can neither reversal effectively nor can they run away from trouble either. In Vanilla/Super, I would have called Honda a ‘charge’ character (which I think is kinda offensive because it implies he doesn’t have to move) but a charge character, or ‘defensive’ if you like, needs to have a reversal now he just has a shitty chop and nothing more.
So, since both characters want to keep you at arms length, they are, for lack of a better term, zoning characters to me. And Hakan isn’t a grappler, the throws are there to scare and trick you more than throw you otherwise why would normal and command throws beat his (except oiling but then his zoning abilities become even stronger anyway.)
@Mr.X
There are a lot of Vipers popping up these days and there were 3 in top 8. When there’s about ten characters played in Top 32 and Viper is three of them along with Fei and Yun, well, that’s enough for me I guess.
Viper may not be top, but she’s pretty damn good. I really…really…hate people like you who think that insane 50/50s[or worse] makes a game worthwhile. This is actually why I don’t care much for Poongko. He has a shoryu that is so invincible that if you press ANYTHING, you’ll get hit. And if you sit and block after a few? Well he has things for that too. Not to disdain his reads or anything, he’s an impeccable player, but it IS a binary choice. And one that does itself when he has 2 meters btw. If you do an invincible move he cannot FADC it and he’ll just hit you out of yours. Anyway, Super was so much more interesting than this game, but you’re too blind to see it.
Both games are flawed IMO. Super for being far too “tame” and consisting of almost nothing but “meh”, boring characters (and I don’t mean “boring” as in “defensive”. I mean boring as in lacking good options), and AE for turning the high level meta-game into a giant cluster-fuck of 50/50s and frankly, dumb guessing games. However, I do feel that AE was at least a step in the right direction despite its flaws, as introducing two “complete” characters served as a way to expose the rest of the cast for what they are: mediocre. So hopefully Capcom will try to capture what both games did right in Ver. 2012.
Did Flash use Viper at all outside of the 2 times I saw on stream (losing both times with her I might add)?
I don’t even want to count Kindevu as a Yun player because he used like half the roster on his way to Top 8.
Viper is never going to be popular character simply because people are intimidated by her execution. Besides you’re undermining Wolfkrone’s and Latiff’s skill.
It’s like people don’t understand you have to be able to use the tools that make the character strong in order for the character to be strong. You just don’t pick Fei/Yun/Viper and win championships.
I have no idea when I said something that justifies these responses. You should trying the things you reply to.
Also, block better.
I think super guile had a very complete defensive game FOR WHAT WAS on the table at the time. He did solid dmg in the middle ground so that if/when you finally got on him you would worry about his somewhat lackluster defensive options. and REALLY worry about him getting away again. I think the unfortunate part of super was that it died out before Cammy got to make her impact. And now he faces chars who have DKs/cmd throws/have good ways to get past FBs and actually something I just noticed, are difficult to anti air because they change their trajectories and move very quickly[Burn Kicks]. I would argue that these because those chars are ‘complete’[I assume you mean yun and fei] they are ‘apex predators’. There’s no compelling way to revamp the tiers centered against them without unhauling the game in my opinion. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there’s someway to make defense against 50/50s, safe jump ins and absurd frame pressure more viable with just property changes. No sarcasm, but I’m just not that clever.
Please don’t. There’s a reason why when Viper hits a burn kick you risk another like. 5 knockdowns.
“I can’t block it so it must be bullshit”
If you think SF4 mixups are hard to block simply because you have to choose between left and right, you don’t know what hard is.