Is that not the biggest load of crap to anyone who has ever played bottom tier consistently for years and years?
Anyone who has ever played anything below B tier will tell you they dont want their D or Roll tier characters to be S tier, they just want characters to have enough tools to where matchups arent oddly displaced. I hate to bring up Marvel because this is just about fighters in general but you cant say that, for instance, when Seth Killian alluded to making HsienKo faster would be “too much” for her… in what way? When just making her a tad faster would only give her the theory to maybe keep up with the better half of the cast. In the grand scheme of things character balance just adds to character diversity and thats never a bad thing.
Keep in mind if a DEV even cares enough about a fighter to make a clear distinction between tiers and how good character A is in reference to character B, then why would you make a character end up SO BAD that they arent competitive and nobody will play them? The logic crumbles on itself. Low tier characters have no “personality” very rarely do they have a charm about them other than maybe some well known gimmick or exploit that makes them playable, but still doesnt make them good characters.
I never understood this logic, and it seems like devs are citing this more and more in this gaming generation when the FGC is always anticipating tweaks and re-balancing to the cast.
Well the article I just read on the home page about the upcoming Smash Bros fighter is where I got the idea for this thread.
I believe I have heard it float around in the Namco community over the years if I’m not mistaken, I believe it was a discussion some years ago about about Namco intending on making all Japanese or Mishima bloodline characters powerful.
I was looking for clarity on how could this process be complimentary to competitive fighters.
If you choose to play bad characters and stick with them, dont complain, just fight better than your opponent or switch to a top tier.
People who lose all the time with bad characters complain all the time about rebalancing this and nurf that or buff this, its stupid! Play better! What the hell is the game supposed to be if its changed every year?
I’ve never heard any dev so much as allude to this except Sakurai, who is generally agreed to be retarded because of aforementioned tripping and other silliness.
Smash as an entity is a complete anomaly and outlier in every possible dimension of fighting games; why do people consistently bring up the design decisions of that game as if it is reflective of even the most generic baseline fighters? Smash is its own unique entity–and that’s without considering the philosophy behind its design.
To the OP, Hecatom is mostly right, people these days are doings lots of armchair balancing at home because they’re playing Capcom fighters which are (no hate, just facts) some of the 1] lowest production quality fighters, 2] least internally supported fighters, and 3] most mechanically flawed fighters on the market. At the risk of sounding like a total asshole, I would recommend expanding your gaming horizons and relying less on forumspeak and things you “believe you’ve heard float around communities” (that phrase implies speculating AND gossip without very much substance).
Again, reiterating my non-Capcom hatred stance, but the world is beautiful outside of their shadow. They are a storied company with a rich history in fighting games, but people have got to experience what else the market has to offer. Real quality fighting game experiences await you if you just invest the time to look.
That’s great and I’m sure a million people the world over agree with you, but that boils down to disagreeing with his philosophy as opposed to pure idiocy. I hope I’m not taking great strides to assume that you don’t actually think tripping was intended as a “good idea” as opposed to it being implemented so forcefully to specifically impose a particular design philosophy on the game.
Either way, I have a feeling that’s neither here nor there with regards to the OP’s question. The reason I made my objection to using Smash’s design as a point of reference is because it’s so different down to its very core that comparisons between that game and fighters, as well as efforts to translate ideas, are largely moot (talking about balance and design ideas, not about in-game player ideas like “footsies” or “fundamentals”). The OP seems interested in games where balance doesn’t destroy the idea of individuality and while there can never be a true medium, there can be some great attempts and some very quality "good enough"s and these usually (more often that not over the course of this past gaming generation, to be more specific) exist outside of the realm of Capcom’s influence.
And people wonder why Capcom fighting game sales are slowly dying… again. No other competitive game/genre is left badly unbalanced for years on end. We do not live in the 00s anymore (thankfully).
Ono did this with AE.
“Arcade Edition, on the other hand, has some characters who were purposely made strong. The reason this was done is because Ono feels that having such a character helps to build community and competitive spirit.”
Ono was wrong and apologized for it, those purposefully ‘strong’ characters were nerfed in ver. 2012. It is stupid to go into game design with the intent of making this or that character purposefully good or bad. Just make the character interesting and unique and go from there without favoritism.
I think it’s because there are bigger issues than balance that need to be worked out before balance can even be addressed. When you actually get good at a game, what you really want in an update are things like system changes.
Virtually everyone that complains about balance has not even given a thought to the fact that the game starts at the character select screen.
There’s also the practical problems with balance itself. Half the time devs don’t have the slightest clue what is causing the metagame to be like it is or in what direction it is changing. What are you balancing for? Most of the people complaining about balance aren’t good enough at the game for balance to even matter, and if you’re just going by tournament results then Seth is C tier in AE. If you balance against ambiguous/subjective standards then you just get tier shuffling at best and a collapsed metagame at worst.
Obviously there are extreme examples of imbalance but in reality most of those can be handled as they crop up.
Just take a look at other games:
Dota 2 and LoL aren’t so popular because they’re balanced, they’re so popular because they’re imbalanced and the devs of these games shuffle the balance around every couple of patches just to keep things interesting.
Also balance is pretty subjective.
When 3S was very popular in the US everyone was playing Chun Li, Ken and Yun while we see quite a variety of picks in the Asian scene.
As far as I know T.Hawk in ST was considered shit tier until a couple of years when new tech was found. Who’s the judge to say what’s imba and what’s not?
I feel that’s the best approach to take as long as you don’t go over the top with asymmetric games.
Don’t complain that your character is shit tier.
If you actually want to compete rather than complain, you pick something that actually has a shot at winning.
Why would you stick with something that you think is crap other than having a nice and comfortable excuse for losing?
Honestly this is the first I’d heard that Sakurai is even involved in the game’s development at all. Clearly I’m not keeping up with Smash news. I remember the Melée players being ecstatic about the announcement that Namco would be handling development, specifically because it was assumed that Sakurai would NOT have his mitts in there.
Hah, I’m glad I read through this thread first. I was about to post this exact same thing, verbatim.
SSF4 was so meticulously well-balanced, you just know that he watched tournament crowds going bonkers about vanilla Mvc3 Phoenix later that year, and this stupid little lightbulb went on in his big lightbulb-socket head and he was like “Ohhhhh, now I understand fighting games!!”
If I recall correctly, Ono’s first Evo was 2009. (In all likelihood this was his first American tournament ever.) On finals day that year, one of the only other things that generated anywhere near as much crowd noise as SF4’s top 8 was SC4 whenever a Hilde was onstage. I guarantee you that left an impression on him. I’ll bet you that Yun and Yang never would’ve happened if it wasn’t for Hilde.