Pace is really important in the “basic actions feeling good” category. I think Marvel 3 has good pacing, SF4 has very deliberate and conservative but not poor feeling pacing, while SFxT’s pacing is utterly out of whack.
Pace is a huge influence on levels of frustration and satisfaction a player has when playing a game. If someone is guaranteed to die and it takes FOREVER, that ultimately makes the first hit leading into that A) a buzzkill, B) the entirety of the round not gameplay.
Pacing is what caused GG people to despise Blazblue (among a couple of other things), and why Skullgirls is pretty much totally dead.
Nostalgia/brand recognition, netplay, and giving people who suck at fighting games a false sense of being able to compete with shortcuts & comeback mechanics.
a tournament game’s playerbase in my opinion primarily relies on a combination of brand name recognition, aesthetics, availability of learning tools, and just how fun/flashy the game is at the scrub to mid level that probably ~95% of players will remain at.
your example is a lot like saying:
Most of them don’t see “block DP -> guaranteed punish->2 mixups on knocked down / resetted character -> victory” as some sort of epitome of strategy in the genre.
xfgc can be baited and it can also often be beaten by cancelling to invincible moves, 2f snapouts, 1frame grabs, chaining to throw, suki cancel, it is by no means guaranteed. please take your complaints back to 2011
its pretty obvious that it would, a game with bad netcode is going to be played a lot less. A lot of people I know wont play KOF13 because the netcode/online system is bad, and thus they have no one to play against online, which also means that they likely wont have anyone to play offline. People come up with a million reasons to not play that game, this is one of them
Everyone praises Blazblue to have the best netcode ever, how many people are playing it in tournaments? Then everyone complained about how terrible the netcode of MvC3 and UMvC3 were…
I dont know why you think im saying that netcode is the only factor in people playing a game. Theres really nothing in my post that should have triggered your response, at all.
I don’t think so dude. We have an offline FG scene here and nobody wants to play KOF. We got top players like Jaguar promoting the crap out of this game with prizes and giveaways, and the turnout numbers are still small cause[S] SF4 & MVC3[/S] Capcom fighters weren’t on the list of games. Netcode wouldn’t have made a difference; MVC3 proves that if a game is popular enough, people will play it regardless of a crappy netcode.
I would say one thing that makes games mainstays in tournaments that goes unmentioned is character identification. Many people (some top level and some non-top level) buy and really get into fighting games because X character is in the game that they grew up playing with. Whether it’s Ryu players flocking to the seasoned veteran or Rose players (such as myself) flocking to the shame-wow fortune-teller. Either way character identity is very important for some.
Other than that main reasons why games are popular in tournaments is because: Big pots $$$, brand recognition, popularity of the game in tournaments, the fighting engine of the game itself, the character balance (games with broken aspects such as the Vs. series always seem to be popular).
For stream monsters or for players?
For players, a top player is someone to learn from how to play your character better. I don’t really remember people “admiring N-Otoko” (just an example from a pre 09’ scene) but look at him as sort of a teacher. I don’t think people were interested in what food he likes and what his farts smell like, like people are now with current scene “celebs”.
While I do agree with you that 09ers (that includes myself) should learn from top players rather than look at them as “celebs,” people watch stream for more knowledge for their character/s and/or for entertainment. I mean I watch mortal kombat streams all the time and personalities like 16 bit are hard to ignore.
I think the reality is if a FG doesn’t have SF4/MVC3 entry level of difficulty it won’t be as popular. I have Kof13 and i struggle with the tighter executions and mechanics. People from 09 (like myself) onwards have been brought up on easy inputs, when companies release a game with a higher difficulty than the market’s “bread and butter” it’s going to struggle in comparison.
