This is an interesting position to take. You basically just said:
“Balance is a bonus that’s nice to have… too bad patch technology allows us to have that bonus.”
There’s a lot of new players from the PC community that kinda falls under that. Pretty much since even the 90s they’ve been used to games being regularly patched.
The arcade community and PC are pretty much on opposite spectrums from my perspective and growing up with both sides.
But then you have companies like NRS doing exactly what you just said, which results in games like Injustice getting patched every month because the community (top players included) whines and cries about whatever they can’t beat.
Examples: Scorpion, Doomsday, Deathstroke, Batman, Superman, Batgirl
My point is, listening to the community is fine, but not all the time.
Well of course there has to be a good balance. The NRS patches every month was pretty amusing, but IIRC each new DLC character broke the game somehow so they just patched things to keep shit interesting.
Another reason why I dont believe in DLC characters in fighting games lol.
Strong characters arent a problem. I just hate to see a game evolve into a 4-5 character tournament tier. Makes shit boring. I mean in reality the internet has created an environment where you can discover new tech for low tier but lets be real low tier is still low tier. Still dont understand why a timeframe and budget werent allocated for UMvC3 patch.
Because UMvC3’s meta actually evolved even without a patch. In any case, Marvel’s meta has always been driven by how player have able to break it.
Well maybe there can be some compromise. Maybe.
Online “loketests” that allows interested players to opt into a separate server to test changes? Aside from online being a absolute asslike option compared to offline, it’d be more accessible and if devs were to listen ideally they’d hold off on throw out patches left and right… and let the community extensively test changes over a longer period of time. Then hopefully, they can make better decisions on what needs to be changed or if anything needs to be changed at all, any time soon, while the main game can still be explored.
Or better yet, a option to download and test these changes in a separate mode offline. Like training room/vs.
It’s a thought. Though fighters are certainly better off with slow but well-thought out patches or releases/or even no patches at all, vs frequent band aid balance patches unless it direly needs it because of sheer imbalance or game breaking glitches rolento knife glitch holy fuck. That’s one thing for sure.
Well as of now theres not much of an answer to stuff like Morrigan Doom and lvl 3 Vergil. Maybe in 3 years who knows, its still kinds lame. I mean I dont think devs knew the power in her unfly but whatever.
Game could have used a patch not to mention unpatch some things like Tron and Phoenix Wright invincibility, Sentinel health…etc etc
you make it sound like people learn more from charts then watching tournament videos.
Or Infiltration’s signature lame, smothering playstyle that eventually just infuriates the opponent into hanging himself. You rarely need to panic mode with that kind of style against most people.
He said “balance is nice to have, but not necessary. Sadly achieving it with frequent patching switches players from a ‘how do I beat this bs’ mindset to ‘omg nerz0rs ban!’ mindset.”
Sure, but is it because of the current balance or because players aren’t looking in the right direction? They tend to look at the top tier while there’s always a chance an unexpected team could actually hold awesome unknown power a la Kusoru’s Joe-West-Raccoon. Patch too early and you’ll never know.
Personally I like the skullgirls model of having a somewhat public beta where every change gets tested in the open before those are grouped in patches for the actual game. For any compromise of that kind to work though you need to examine and test player complaints with an extremely critical eye to find out which ones are legit.
I think the way most fighters tend to go is that everyone and I mean EVERYONE starts off the game casual when it first comes out. Those that win a lot and are interested will eventually start evolving into little competetive scenes and a meta game is formed.
Now if there’s character imbalance found during the early days then anyone who plays said imbalanced character will win more often and therefore be more likely to want to play competetively. If the game is too balanced people will feel as though it’s not worth playing if they aren’t doing especially outstanding with any characters fairly soon they’ll quit the game and no meta forms and then the game dies into obscurity.
This tends to tie with a characters ease of use also. Love or hate them, without your basic Shoto like characters like Ryu (even if they are found to be only mid tier later) then lot’s of players wouldn’t pick up the game that well.
If anything I think the best option would be to at least TRY and balance the roster but still have one or two characters who are simple enough to play the game and get people interested/used to the game. Skullgirls is pretty well balanced in comparison to a lot of fighters (especially assist based 2v2 or 3v3 fighters like Marvel) but it still has characters like Filia who are a bit easier to pick up and get used to the game without that character necessarily being better than everyone else.
I don’t mind accidental imbalence as long as I can find a fun character to play, but having the developers intentially **** on/bless characters really gets on my nerves, especially when a character had the potential to be interesting but gets ****ed because “lol joke character” or whatever.
I can accept that stonger and weaker characters exist and have played both ends of the spectrum (sometimes with the same character over series lol), but come on, making a character intentionally useless is just a waste.
Well Marvel is different in that you want a patch to level things out, there are plenty of counter characters to Morrigan/Doom but those are still low tier teams and or characters.
Trish, Morrigan, Storm, Dormammu can all deal with characters on the team at the same time BUT its just not wise to put effort into a team specialized to kill one team, thats why all the good teams in this game are goo, because they are multi-purpose.
Wow, that’s such a thing? 0.o
Pretty much.
I was thinking a step further in the actual mechanics of the game.
So you know how changing something like a general hitbox on a move to “fix” a bad matchup, you could accidentally fuck up 20 more matchups?
So think about Tekken… You know how WGF, post electric mode in Tekken 3 went from being a mid to a high (Think Heihachi’s WGF in T3 was a mid, but Jin’s WGF and EWGF was high), so regardless that it has a monstrosity hitbox that hits opponents falling by your feet, it will miss Ogre while ducking, even though it passes through his jaw?
What if say…
Blanka’s vertical ball couldn’t hit Hawk out of a j.lp only. So in the state of vertical ball, you cannot hit Hawk in the state of j.lp. It only affects that mtachup. Now, if you say that’s broke, it’s not. Because Blanka has other anti airs that he could use. He could also back hop and trip guard. He’s got options, but now you have to know if they’re going to do a j.lp or a body splash or something… BTW - I dont’ play SF4, don’t care about it, so I’m just throwing out a hypothetical situation that probably wouldn’t work if you take into consideration the entire matchup.
Things like that (Probably better examples within this matchup exist) could help balance that single matchup without potentially fucking up every other matchup the character has.
The main question is not whether it evolved, but whether it improved. UMVC3 is different now, but is it better?
This is something I agree with. I think the key point is that a game does not need to be balanced to be fun, but any game can be made more fun by improving the balance.
There was no change in the mindset of players. The same people who thought ‘how do I beat this bs’ are still thinking it. Good players still come up with new tech. The only change is that casual players, who never had the ‘how do I beat this bs’ mindset, are asking for updates instead of quitting the game entirely. If there were no patches those people would not be labbing it up to come up with new tech to beat the established powerhouses. They would simply not be playing at all.
In theory there would be no friction here, because good players can adapt to any patch. The problem is that there are a lot of mediocre players who can only really win by exploiting bad game balance, and they don’t like it when balance patches expose their fraudulence. Basically anytime I see someone complaining about balance patches I internally assume that player is a fraud. If he was any good he would be busy adapting to the patch instead of whining about it on the internet.
a game can be made more fun or less fun by improving the balance. improving the balance does not always make something more fun. See: various iterations of SF4
It seems to me like throughout all your arguing, you’ve never really had a solid understanding on what a tier list really is. I’d suggest looking into one again and trying to understand the information they’re trying to portray.
Pretty sure that he means if the game was perfectly balanced, there wouldn’t be a low-tier.
But there will always be tiers. It’s just a matter of how compressed they are that speaks to the game balance.
I think the problem with overzealous patching is that it doesn’t always give the game time to develop organically. Sometimes new tech is found while someone’s trying to figure out a way around something that seems imbalanced. so patching out the imbalanced stuff can sometimes make it so that the game doesn’t really get sussed out as deeply as it could if they’d just left it alone. I can only imagine what games like ST, Third Strike, MvC2, etc would be like today if Capcom had just patched stuff that seemed imba at the time.