Back in the days of the AI SF4 ranbats I saw a round where both players did nothing for 98 seconds. It wasn’t a joke, just 2 major turtles.
Ever since SFxT came out, yes.
Seriously, the clock is never an issue to begin with. You win, you lose, that’s all. It’s even admirable if there is a guy who uses the clock as part of his strategy. The only people who are probably complaining about it are either spectators who want to see a thrilling fight or those who lost the match who like to make excuses.
Think about why every sport in the world has some sort of time constraint in place. There you’ll find your answer.
So that turtling and keepaway are viable strategies.
Time outs should be rare things that determines the outcome of longwinded and intense matches. They shouldn’t be every other match like in SFxT. I thought I was just bad at it, but after watching EVO…
SFxT also frequently feels hopeless to do a comeback in because of the timer, can’t elaborate on why because I don’t really care enough to think about it. Just how it felt playing and watching the finals.
I’ve never ever felt the timer has been a problem in any fighting game before, so it has to have done something differently.
people are allowed to object to an element of a game simply on the level that they don’t find it fun. in fact, that is what pretty much all objections to some element of a game are ultimately grounded in.
The Timer/Health ratio in SFxT was just horrible is all. Other games, timeouts are usually rare or feel like they were earned.
Get two defensive players in a match with the timer set to infinite and promise a tenner or something to the winner.
Several hours later because no matter how much life advantage someone gets neither side is ever under any pressure to take the offensive…
This is why we have a bloody timer.
It isn’t to make sure turtling/keepaway is a viable strategy, it’s there to make sure that a round isn’t 15 minutes of sod all happening, eventually someone will have to make a move, without the timer, who cares if the opponent has a life lead, just keep running away and play “lets see who gets bored and screws up first” for half an hour.
Because I should be allowed to win just by no letting the other guy touch me.
Seriously though, the timer and time-outs both reward and punish keep away. It rewards good keep away in that a good keep away player does not have to be aggressive and instead forces the losing player to attack. It punishes bad keep away in that a bad keep away player cannot rely on time if they do not have a life lead. If a keep away player isn’t able to play the style well, then they are forced to have to switch it up and adapt, they can’t just sit back and hope that their opponent finally makes a mistake.
It should tell you how much time is left in the round.
Ya know Timer wouldn’t be such an issue in SFxT if people actually did things other than boost combos and didn’t constantly do terrible 2 Meter switch combos.
I agree with this. I think the fgc overrate the value of combos.
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Lol well in this case…
What is the purpose of the life bar? Tell meh. Plz Guyz.
PLZ!
PLEEEEEZEEEE 
:crybaby:
I believe that SFxT would have been better if there was a way to snap in for your opponent team mate into the match, that will stop the time out, even if it takes a meter to perform, it will add a better strategy overall.
As James Chen pointed out in a recent stream, in the last tournaments we’ve seen more perfects in SFxT than any other game. This is mainly due to the need to tag out when you’re low on life. When in danger, a lot of players start making poorer or predictable decisions like a desperate DP xx switch or raw tag. I’ve myself been double perfected by Ryan recently so I know the feeling lol. I wasn’t playing that bad, it’s just that I got hit once and lost half my life, then he read my wake up reversal and punished it with another 50% combo and I died. 2 good reads is all you need to win a round in this game.
As the game evolves, we’ll also see a lot more optimized combos, setups and resets that will help speed up the rounds.
Just take a look at this reset from SimSim (good example of a very fast and effective comeback):
[media=youtube]WIcEsJ_jqIk[/media]
There’s still plenty of time remaining on that clock but fact is SimSim would’ve won that round even if the timer only had 12 seconds left. So everyone saying you can’t come back with 20 seconds either don’t understand how powerful resets and setups can be in this game or just don’t play the game at a high enough level to know how fast rounds can end.
And like a lot of people have already mentioned, there’s nothing wrong with winning by time out anyway. The only problem with time outs is that it’s not hype for the viewers (although some time outs can be hype e.g. when the health of both team is almost even and it’s really hard to tell who has the lead) but no one should care what the viewers think about your style of play. If stream monsters decided how people should play a game then Chris G would probably drop UMvC3 and Dieminion would not be playing AE.
EDIT: lol, I thought this thread was about SFxT specifically. Sorry I didn’t notice it was in general FG discussion. 
SFxT has a lot of perfects and a lot of time outs. I think both speak to problems with the game. For a game where effectively half your lifebar is contingent on being able to create a safe situation to switch characters, those safe situations are too difficult to create, especially when your opponent has momentum. On the other hand when both players do manage to switch out a lot the games tend to run overly long.
Frequent time outs aren’t just unhype for the viewers, they’re unhype for the players too. One of the things that makes the late game of a fighting game round more exciting than the late game of most other games, including most sports, is that the dramatic climax of the match coincides exactly with the end of a match. In my opinion this is a big reason why fighting games get people so much more hype than many other games. In games that can only end by time out (FPS deathmatch, for instance), the effective end of a match is followed by seconds to minutes of lame duck gameplay where excitement gradually deflates because we already know the outcome. Sure there are occasionally unbelievable comebacks in such situations, but 90% of the time it’s boring and takes away from the experience of watching AND playing.
There’s any number of fighting games where people can sometimes do sub-optimal combos and still finish the round the majority of the time. What makes SFxT so special? And damage has always been a red herring in this debate, no one doubts Hugo can end the round quickly if he keeps landing splashes, that’s not the issue.
The ability to finish the round normally most of the time something every fighting game tries to achieve, if you have to explain why… I don’t know what to tell you. Put it this way, do you think there would be any appetite for making 30/60 seconds the competitive standard for SF4? Introduce some of that awesome clock management we love so much?
So the match doesn’t go on forever…?
why is there an sfxt thread in fgd
I hear ya, it’s frustating when the time is dwindling and you know you gotta attack the partner in the back cause he still has most of his life, but I think snapbacks would create new problems. Players would target the character with the lowest health amount, so when going against a team of Hugo/Lili, you’ll probably attack Lili and leave Hugo alone since you wouldn’t have to fight him to win since you can snap her back in. Basically every fight would come down to attacking a single lifebar instead of two.
The only way I could possibly see it working is if it costs 3 bars.