I’m now officially more concerned with why blufang wants shit-tier character mains to switch their character. I don’t even care about ES. I need a report on why Vega players should be switching to someone else. I play Bison/Rose/Honda. If we had ES tournament standard, do you think I’m going to just jump ship to Sagat (who I can’t fucking play at all)? NOOOOOPE because V.Bison is good. S.Honda is DOPE. AE.Rose is ok! If we have Ultra Tournament Standard, only Rose is not nerfed.
With USF4’s changes, not everyone comes out with a better character. Hell, one of Honda’s biggest tools in the zoning war is U1. Now it’s too slow to** reliably **use on reaction to fireballs.
I love how whenever you reply to Blufang with something that puts him against the wall, he jumps to another point and forgets about the other things.
I said 14 characters would be really viable, but some niches could be filled that could end up giving us around 20, 21 or 22 (at least) viable characters. You worry too much about sprites being viable, yes, T.Hawk and Gief have different tools and different gameplans in some matchups, but on their core, they are about getting in, knocking you down and riding that knockdown to hell, and I’ll gladly trade having 2 mediocre grapplers (Ultra Hawk and Ultra Gief) over having one really viable grappler (Vanilla Gief) with a ton of irrelevant ones (Every other Gief but 2012 (Since 2012 Gief could be usable on the Fuerte matchup because having U2 really does fucking do that matchup a ton better) and every Hawk version).
I wouldn’t want for MvC2 Cable to be nerfed to hell just for Iceman to become viable, they have similar gameplans, so just let Cable be a monster zoner instead of chopping everyone’s balls off to keep everyone viable.
Not trying to kill, it can be a fun side mode. That’s all it deserves to be. That’s all it is atm, and hopefully that’s how it stays. You can enjoy your vanilla Gief, vanilla Akuma, and handful of others there.
Using Akuma as an example doesn’t mean much. Nearly everyone had reductions only going from V to S. Cammy had reductions from V to S and she’s arguably the best character in AE12.
Look at the changelog. Looking at Akuma’s changes compared to everyone else, I’m not seeing too much bad, here. Granted, this doesn’t cover all damage changes, but I’m seeing a couple of buffs here and there.
there’s 8 characters in 3s with a viable chance of winning a tourney for us mere (non-Kuroda) mortals. best player in So Cal was a Yun player. best in Japan is a Chun player. best on east coast is a Yang. best in France is a Dudley. best in UK who, Harmonaz? if so, Akuma. “only Chun/Yun/Ken can win” was never true.
but past those top 8, I think it gets pretty rough. yeah there’s exceptions like Genki Alex or Pierrot Remy or Kuroda, but mostly if you want to have a shot at winning you should pick top 8 IMO.
but that’s fine. 8 characters is enough so long as they represent different archetypes and are all fun to play. still, 8/19 as viable is a lot different from ~8 viable in a SF4-sized cast.
To me, this seems like a mode which is intended to extend the life of the game. In 3 years or whatever, everybody might be bored with Ultra, but maybe by then the community will have explored All Select and be having fun with it. It could replace Ultra as the tournament standard once SF5 is the main game and SF4 is out of the limelight.
What about the worse characters who had tools taken away that could allow them to compete, in the mind of those that grind it out, and followed their character through every version. Every character changelist thread has “I wish we had that back, to fight this.” or “Why is Cammy/Akuma getting better, or Viper not hurt by changes very much at all? When my character gets dumped on completely because the devs didn’t want the game to be about one thing. they haven’t researched a whole lot. and only these characters come up on top”
There’s precedent in just 1 game ST with old and modern versions. Yes this one will have tons more nuances not everyone will know about, but why would a counterpick to just something well known be your 9-1 autowin button.
For the life of the game, both versions coming at the same time, yeah its a big dilemma. And who has the time to grind out how everything works against everything else, even if everyone follows what a small group does to figure things out, the game might grow and grow into new things. Even without system changes kept in place between games. Was Trade DP, the big one more of a system change even if only a few characters had it, or was it a by character change?
But when everyone only wants more SF4, now you have it. Yeah it was silly to put them both out at the same time, but everyone wanted old tools back for how long and more and more SF4 for how long, so that’s what they did.
2 and out, loser bracket, counterpicks welcomed. Thought this scene was about all that too. Which one is it? You like counterpicks or you don’t?
But the health argument is something I forgot about in all this, so definitely other people probably aren’t thinking about that either. Are all the details out and Health is part of the old versions package like you can assume, or will Capcom muck things up somewhere, or only make it frame data changes in the sake of their long requested “balance.” Like: Vanilla Tools, Ultra Health.
THawk is screwed, fine. Who still plays THawk? Does he run up into the Sagat in the bracket before he’s done, every time? Or tons of other characters he can’t fight against either knock him out of the tournaments. They know that going into it. For as much as Vanilla Sagat was the best, he didn’t go on a tear to win every tournament. And THawk already never had much chance to win tournaments since his inception into the game.
The thing is, like, people across the FG internet are acting like this feature will end up being Divekick Fighter 4: Sagat Edition, when there are enough good versions of character to prevent that. Hell, even without thinking of all the available characters, I have:
I counted 28 (potentially) viable characters, but I’ll accept the 23 if you don’t want the U characters counted. That’s more than half. I don’t see what the problem is.
Also, some characters aren’t going to have any overlap. There’s only going to be one version of Bison that anybody uses. You don’t actually have to learn 182 matchups.
Let’s have a community driven rebalance of the game, because we want the game to be as balanced as possible. Now, let’s let all that effort go to waste.
Save this for casuals/side tournys. Ultra is the main focus here.
I think a lot of people overreact about Vanilla Sagat, seems like a lot of people here weren’t around in the vanilla days. A lot of characters can compete against Vanilla Gat and that’s not just 12 or 15 characters. Justin Wong was the strongest player back in 09 and he was using Balrog and Rufus, in Japan Akuma was considered much stronger. In the two grand finals at EVO Sagat was non-existent, Sagat is not a broken top tier like some people pretend, he was beatable, in the first ever SF4 tournament in Japan RF got beat by a Dhalsim player.
he had even matches, and might have lost 2 or 3. he still dominated. you cant just go by tournament results either. vanilla sagat wasnt played much in america, and at that time japan was running mostly single game single elimination or teams
im sure someone can pull the old BP rankings. like half or over half the grandmaster ranks were all sagat players
in any case im not really on either side of this whole thing. i said before i’ll play whatever.
just offering the other side of the argument because i dont hold any bias
I don’t think anyone from any of the games is straight up broken enough to really be an issue. Just seems like even more choices which isn’t a bad thing. I can imagine a character from a previous version once thought as shit turning out to be a good match up against some characters in another version.
No character just got buffs, there’s always a trade off between games. Do you go with the slower stronger version of Ryu or the faster slightly weaker one? (very broad example I just made up).
A lot of characters weren’t playable in the arcades, I can think of Seth, Gen, Cammy, Fei-Long and Sakura. The outcome would’ve been different if those characters were available.
So what was the point of the ultra balance patch should ES be the main game? Adding 5 new characters? The new mechanics? All the balance changes? Cause all these ultra characters will be horsecrap in ES. So why pay 15 bucks? Just make it a free update, the data is all there, just unlock it and you have ES mode. Forget the new stages no one likes, the new characters that will be as useless as servbot in MvC2. It would be a total waste of community feedback, effort of the devs, testing, and definitely money to the consumer.
maybe seth and cammy would have been competitive on a large scale. my scene had one of the OG high level seth players in vanilla. joshthefunkdoc. knew about all the ultra traps, and nasty teleport mix ups. at the time he was pretty good. would travel on EC. people in NY knew about him. all i know of vanilla cammy is that she did 300dmg for dp fadc dp
the top vanilla characters were just flat better than the others you listed tho. i believe all the console exclusive characters got overall buffed going into super except gen, and his changes were more of a redesign than straight nerfs. they needed help
sakura didnt have a cross up, and her and fei’s damage, was very middle of the road in vanilla. fei carried his vanilla damage values up until AE. vanilla gen was decent. i think the legend of vanilla gen is better than the character actually was tho. fei was also full of small things that needed fixing. (i played gen and fei in vanilla)
stuff like forward dashing after bocked lvl 2 focus would push the opponent out of jab/short/throw range. broken 30+ frame start up HK chicken wing after his infinite was removed. 10 frame super. then he got a bunch of hitbox adjustments and they buffed a few things for him, nerfed everyone else and he came up good in super
anyway point being the strength of the console exclusives is mostly debateable. we can speculate about it all day. the only factual non opinion based thing we can go from is that 50%+ of the vanilla arcade bp grandmasters were sagat
man, you are out of your mind if you think some characters from ULTRA will be useless …
ibuki against anything that dosnt have DWU ?
E.ryu with working unblockable + no DWU ?
Oni ?
Sakura ?
Juri ?
Makoto ( just imagine Ultra makoto against Vanilla seth lol )
thats on top of my head add to that 2 ultra + red focus + DWU … vanilla characters might have big damage output, but with red focus lvl 1 cancel crumple to ultra is no joke, and remember that the level of play today is no where near the same as the Vanilla days where peoples jumped in like kangaroos
to your point unblockables/reverse blockables dont/shouldnt work on vanilla characters. they came along after capcom provided a bug fix for the vanilla unblockable ultras going into super
we cant really know actually till ultra where we will be able to test, and IMO we might see some really weird glitch with all these old/new/hitbox/frames data collapsing
