Pfffft, even in the case of MK9 where every char shares the air normals, every character is unique between each other, they are different on hit boxes, frame data, move set, normals, etc.
So no, no character has the same move set and saying other wise is foolish.
That actually makes sense
Ehh, i think or want to think that is actually more than just that, perhaps is more about the bad experiences on how capcom usually balance their games, lets be honest, they suck at balancing them, their
Seeing how other games like GG that retains a great deal of fun, uniqueness and manage to achieve a good amount of balance i really don’t think that the mere concept of trying to achieve an acceptable degree of it could be detrimental to competitive play and/or fun.
What I hate is when people start bitching and FUCKING BITCHING about 6/4 matchups breaking the balance of the whole fucking game, and then the devs go and drop patches every few months to cater to faggot bitch-made motherfuckers, causing me to have to re-learn entire matchups. This is one thing I like about UMvC3. NO updates just because x-character won a tournament. Where’s that Morrigan nerf? NOT GOING TO HAPPEN BITCHES.
I like balance when characters aren’t crippled. When they’re all given adequate tools to be effective, I enjoy the game, like Vampire, Guilty Gear, and Virtua Fighter. When they’re all nerfed to be shit characters, like SF4 or MSHvSF, however… Fuck that noise.
I also like imbalance in games.
It provides a challenging slope to climb when you use low tiers (a la when I play Blanka in Super Turbo, I have a lot of challenges to fight against… But fuck DJ) and it provides a way to shut scrubs up (a la when I get tired of trash-talking mediocre players that get a few wins on my Blanka, I switch it up to Claw and vortex their ass into oblivion because they can’t deal with c.mp and wall dives)
I like imbalance when it can weed out scrubs from good players. A good player can still beat a Chun (3S) or a Claw (ST) if the Chun/Claw players aren’t top-notch. Super Turbo and 3S* do good jobs at this. I don’t like it when a single character becomes the only thing to see. An example of an overly imbalanced game: MvC2, and as much as I love it, you can’t see a Top 8 without seeing 8 Sentinels - and if you see a team without Sentinel, it’s MSP, played by Yipes/C.Shmidt/Fanatiq. Another would be Tekken 4’s Jin or Tekken 3’s Ogre.
*If you watch Japanese 3S, you will see a variety of characters, whereas other countries, you tend to see a lot of Chuns with a random Ken or Yun thrown in the mix, so this game really varies depending on what you’re watching. Chun isn’t that OP unless you’re MOV or another really good Chun player.
I wonder if how Capcom’s games started out have anything to do with this. Just looking at SF2, it seems obvious to me that Capcom were going more for creating unique character archetypes and playstyles than overall balance. This is why you get stuff like [this](Prelude to a Diss (Some preliminary remarks on Balance) old Dom101 article giving more importance to a form of “meta-balance” (where despite bad matchupes, the characters are all interesting) than overall balance. This seems to have carried over to their other seminal games in the mid nineties as well, which is why you see characters with such disparate tools in the Marvel games and even Vampire (lol Mr. “I can’t pushblock” Anakaris). I mean, yes you can see similar disparate tools in other games, but some Capcom seems more willing to have a cast composed of “haves and have nots”. At the same time, some of the tools given to the “haves” turned out to be quite powerful (i.e. 8-way airdash, something which I believe Mike Z has stated he will never give to any character in Skullgirls due to how good it is).
I have updated this thread’s first post to what I think would be the next hurdle that arise assuming this first “impossible” hurdle is actually achieved. Also, I have taken everyone’s criticisms into consideration as far as my posting educate has been. I’m sorry for making a fool of myself with many of my past posts. I’m honestly still kind of new at this. I’ll be chilling off on the new topic creations, or at least I’ll be using my brain or making harmless topics that I hope don’t piss people off too much.
I’ve always thought it would be interesting if there was an online-only FG that had automatic dynamic balancing. ie. collect data from all matches, weight data by skill level (top players are more relevant than new players) and then automatically apply a damage/health modifier to each character.
The modifiers are adjusted each “season”.
If we started off with a reasonably balanced game (eg. the first BB - unbalanced but playable), over time I think this approach might yield some improvements.
I can’t guarantee it would work but it would be fascinating as a game design experiment.
Having less damage or health can’t balance ST Akuma. Health and damage are very blunt tools to balance a character with. Also for an online-only FG they’d need to have the best netcode in the world to get top players to play it.
What do you mean by “bad” ? Bad compared to what ?
Anyway, I know SF4 is not well regarded around these parts, but since this game is getting an update, I was considering something very similar to this thread in one of my previous posts. I will repost here:
"I wonder what you guys would preffer: more solid archetypes or a more balanced game ?
It’s a dilemma I have for quite some time - making characters more unique at the expense of balance or make the game more balanced at the expense of making characters more similar.
For example, most people agree zoning is not that rewarding in SF4 - so we could buff characters like Sagat, Guile, Sim to strenghen their zoning game (Sagat low TS 1 fr les rec, Guile more blockstun for SB, Sim more dmg for AAs, etc) - this would make them more true to what they are supposed to be - but might also make some of their matchups more loopsided.
On the other hand, you could buff their offense instead - this way the game might be more balanced, but they would also be more like jack of all trades (and more similar to Ryu).
I just go back and forth regarding this issue, so I’m curious what do you think.
Same thing with my character. Honda’s Ex Oicho is useless right now, so it should receive a buff. I’m torned on how it should be buffed, though.
first option is - add 5 frames of invincibility and reduce the range to 1.20.
This way Honda becomes more similar to his ST incarnation, where Oicho was the most powerfull reversal. It would help honda on wakeup against safe jumps. I just don’t think honda is supposed to be abusable on wakeup, he is supposed to be the ultimate defenssive character. It would also help him a lot against Seth and Akuma.
The downside is that characters that already have it hard with Honda might have it even harder.
second option: increase the range to 1.65
This way Honda would have access to a mini light spd for the cost of 1 bar, and would make Ex Oicho an offensive oriented tool. It would have less impact on honda’s good matches, where he mostly turtles, but more on his bad matches, where he needs to go on offensive (and Ex Oicho might help him open up his opponents).
Basically - make honda more true to his archetype (the ultimate deffensive character), or more well rounded (more balanced, also less unique) ?"
This is an extremely radical idea. Radical means out of the box. It means it’s genius but it can either end in great success or great disaster. I’m mastering in Computer Science. One class I have taken is Data Mining. It deals with collecting and handling information on a very large scale (millions of people = millions of information to collect and process).
What you have suggested is actually very doable in this day and age.
If it is to be done, it must be done with baby steps. As you said, collect the info and do nothing from it but decide if a character’s dmg and/or life should be tweaked. If nothing else, at least collect the info for knowledge.
However, the question arises. Is this really the road to go down? Often times I believe in our attempt to understand everything through Big Data collection, we end up misleading ourselves through stupid interpretation of it, and our knowledge thus decreases instead of increasing. I’m honestly not a fan of big data collection when it comes to Street Fighter… but I guess it couldn’t hurt. Injustice seems to be doing it.
I see that I haven’t yet tackled my question posed in the update of this discussion.
My answer:
…I purposely prefer imbalance for characters meant to be currently “struggling” or meant to be “underdogs”. I can only speak on behalf of SF since it’s practically the only game I play currently (a little bit of Injustice too), however any FG analysis is welcome.
A good example is Sagat vs. Gief. I like it being imbalanced. Zangief naturally has to struggle (just as he would in real life) against a super awesome zoner. Zangief trained fighting bears; bears don’t zone. I think this matchup was meant to stay imbalanced. But as to whether it should be imbalanced at 8-2, 7-3, 6-4, or 5.5-4.5, I do not know and it’s not my place to say as I don’t play Zangief.
I also prefer stupid characters to be crappy. Why the hell is Sakura so strong. Am I seriously supposed to take some high school fangirl as a powerful fighter??? I have way more respect for an actual trained fighter like Makoto and Ibuki than I do for freakin Sakura… I know I’m opening up a can of worms with this.
Compared to every other SF game out there, the “balance” of the SF4 series lies on how capcom has been neutering the tools of every character into mediocrity .
As it has been said already, i really believe that balance and uniqueness are not mutually exclusive, neither of the changes that you mention would make Honda less unique in anyway.
really I think this is just America. every other country or continent I’ve seen has good character variety (usually top 8 characters plentiful and a couple low tiers after that) across their tournaments and groups of strong players. just America was it C/Y/K all day. out of curiosity I checked the 25th anniversary 3s top 8s for every qualifier, and even when there was potential money on the line it was the same way.
America, land of the top tiers
(big name American tournaments being run on PS2 probably helped this along too)
What are you normalizing when you’re just addressing scrub complaints and just shuffling around tiers instead of actually working towards a reasonable character balance?
You are, because you are forgetting that this is a fighting game we’re talking about here, not an SF anime. There’s bound to be gameplay and story segregation, and really, complaining about it just shows that you care less about the actual game and more about the story and characters. Which isn’t necessarily bad, but makes one wonder why you’re even on this forum.
You aren’t inspiring any profound discussion with this thread, assuming that’s what your intention was.
True story. I really can’t figure out why people want Dan to be relevant… Don’t you have enough characters that are relevant? Go play someone else.
Boss characters are fine to be OP as well, as long as they’re nerfed in actual play. i.e. Seth/Gouken/Akuma/E.Ryu/Oni in SSF4, Bison in A3…
While NRS practices is not generally welcome. considering how NRS game tend to have plethora of game breaking glitches, it may in fact be their best way of hadling game patches. Personally I am waiting till they finish patching the game before I dive deep into it.
Why? The things NRS patches are mostly frame data or odd interactions, most of the character’s playstyle remains intact between patches. Even the giant Scorpion nerf didn’t change the general way you play him, just made it less effective.
