…smh. I expected the hate but…come on…
Funny that I’m reading a book about guerrilla warfare currently, and changing the playing field to be more about luck than skill is exactly the recommended “playing to win” approach if you are the lesser player in a short tournament set. That kid had just enough skill to be able to enforce the guessing game to begin with and to be able to capitalize on it.
Of course this makes people extremely salty, and in other areas besides videogames as well.
I actually feel that having “extraneous” options is worse than having none. You said it yourself. It increases the time and effort that need to be spent before players can meaningfully delve the decision tree and results in shallower gameplay.
Imagine a Rock Paper Scissors variant that has 3 additional throws called Super Rock, Super Paper, and Super Scissors. These super throws have the same win/lose conditions as the regular ones, except that they always beat the originals. This game, when played competitively, is no different than regular RPS. It has a very slightly higher learning curve than traditional RPS (you learn very very quickly to always throw a super variant), but the game has identical depth.
When players are given a ton of options, they will eventually find the core group of options that will form the basis of the game’s depth. If players are given 297 variants of rock-paper-scissors and 3 super rock-paper-scissors, you can be sure that they’ll boil the game down to the three super options. Now, a poorly designed game may try to mask the fact that it isn’t deep by including too many options, but that doesn’t mean a good game can’t emerge from a game that just throws everything at the wall and enough stuff happens to stick around to keep the game good (MvC2).
Does the time and effort to learn which options are good take away from a game’s depth? I wouldn’t say so. It does take away from the game’s overall playerbase, in the sense that it stops some people from even trying to get good at the game due to all the background knowledge they’ll need to learn.
Having been to several NCRs, the answer is over 32. I get the point you’re trying to make, but it’s badly made. X-Factor and huge damage combos distort the meta. Give everybody MvC2-level combos and see what happens. Or turn the MvC2 damage up to 4 and see what happens. Heck, even the assist scaling in MvC3 would give any MvC2 team skitz plays (variations of Team Roids/OHK) serious tournament viability. People hugely mistake “completely different game mechanics” as “better balance”, and I for one remain puzzled by that. They’re different games, Versus threads are banned, and respect them as each being excellent in their own way.
Balance is not inherently good. Generally I would suggest that “balance is good” is scrub mentality: any serious competitive player is going to do what they can to get the extra edge over their opponent, unbalancing the game in their own unavoidable fashion. A game benefits from great design: severe imbalance (ST Akuma, Ivan Ooze) should probably be avoided, but minor imbalance (MvC2) clearly doesn’t hinder the game. Someone who suggests that the pawn in chess should be as powerful as the rook is clearly trying to force the game to be something that it is not: accept and play the game for what it is. A good game will keep you coming back regardless of balance.
In other words, it’s a worse version of the original game. It has more options, but the average depth of gameplay is actually shallower because it takes players longer to isolate the relevant game. In other words, “strictly worse” options are the “spam” of games. This is a separate issue from my original post, which talks about how adding more options and mechanics can hurt depth even when those options are actually relevant, because the growth of complexity is exponential and at some point the complexity will be high enough that players will be reduced to guessing (the shallowest form of gameplay possible).
I disagree with this. I think it absolutely does take away from the game’s depth. I could add a million new options to Rock/Paper/Scissors that literally lose to everything and the result would be a shallower game than just regular Rock/Paper/Scissors.
But even with the million extra options, the depth at “high” levels of play of the theoretical super-RPS remains identical to normal RPS.
For the people who take the game seriously, for the people who want to play the game competitively, for the people who would care about the game at a tournament, the game is exactly the same. It affects people who are just playing it at a casual level and who don’t want to invest the time into finding the ‘super’ options and the people who are trying to get into the competitive scene, but it doesn’t affect the depth of the game at the competitive level itself. The game may be worse as a general whole (considering playability/fun-ness for both the casual and the competitive combined), but it doesn’t take away from depth itself.
A game with 5 good options out of 5 total options has the same depth as a game with 5 good options out of 500. The game itself might be worse in a general sense because of the time that needs to be invested to find those 5 options would affect the playerbase, but the actual depth is not affected. In both games, there are still 5 good options, and that’s all that matters competitively. The average depth of a game doesn’t matter once players start playing competitively, it’s what competitive depth remains afterwards.
For that reason specifically, it’s better to err on the side of giving players too many options to combat potential problems that come up as opposed to giving them too few if the goal is to create a good competitive game (which isn’t necessarily what developers want, to answer the original question). Nobody really knows how a game is going to develop once its released to the world, and if there aren’t enough failsafe options in place, the game has the potential of devolving into just one dominating option instead of several. This is not as much as a problem now as it was 10 years ago, thanks to internet patches, but there’s a whole slew of issues involved with those I’m not going to get into right now. But as an example, Magic the Gathering has historically printed cards that are “just in case” cards in case a certain playstyle becomes too dominant as a sort of pre-emptive check.
I think perhaps this is where our differences stem from. You seem to be focusing on high level play specifically whereas I am talking about gameplay as a whole, on all levels. Even if high level play is unaffected, the average depth of the whole is lowered if mid-level and low-level play become more shallow.
I too think that “too may options” is better than “too few”. It’s just that I also think “exactly the right number of options” is better than “too many”. I also don’t think that “more options is always better”.
High tier characters are for the establishment.
Low tier characters are for the rebellion.
Carry on. Choose your side.
This is how I feel, and not to beat a dead horse, lets say hypothetically:
Character A
-good normals
-airdash/tridash/box dash
-instant overhead into combo (lolz)
-throw into combo
-otg into combo
-beefy damage
-average health
-good backdash
-50/50 mixup
-gimmick (whatever it is)
-builds good meter
-anti-projectile
Character B
-Bad normals
-No airdash
-50/50 mixup
-above-average health
-low damage
Do I need to just switch to character A even if I like character B? Do you justify character B being weak just for the sake of having an imperfect game?
Lets be a little more dramatic:
MvC engine Spiral vs someone like Balrog…what do you do?
lol.
http://youtu.be/J8a7IWL9dTY?t=16s
Are you fucking kidding me? In the context of this discussion if this occurred in 2013 there would be hell to pay.
IMO, the more fighting games that come out, the worse it gets. Even sequels of ‘good’ fighting games
with even a smidge of balance. The more systems you add, the more characters, the worse, and more
unbalanced it becomes, by default. I know you people know this.
Or rather—should expect this.
I’m of the mind where I think broken ass games like Hokuto No Ken need to fill the void some more
because I think they’re fucking fun as all hell. LoL
~K.
Already they are saying Orchid is low tier in Killer Instinct. With a game that has 7 or 8 characters (Im not sure how many) what use is it having one less tournament viable character? Shouldnt she be buffed? Wasnt the the whole point of having a smaller cast so they can fine tune the characters before season 2 added 7-8 more characters?
Geez, it’s been barely a month since the game was introduced.
Do you need more than a month to come to the conclusion that X character has low damage output, walk speed and unsafe specials?
Just playing devils advocate. How long should Orchid fans stick it out until a balance is in order? Should they be looking for some exploit of unforeseen situation that makes her a viable character? No matter how long that takes?
Remember when Seth Killian said they had to nerf Jill because she was too strong, and then the forums could never figure out what was so great about vanilla Jill and Seth never directly answered the question?
To give the old Mike Z quote.
For the context of the whole thing, Mike was basically making a comment about how newer players are quick to call out for buffs and nerfs while vetarans will simply say that “they can’t give any real opinions or advice because they don’t really know anything yet.”
1 month isnt enough time to find out all about a character.
Wait like half a year to a year and if she has no real dirt to keep her in the playing field then give some buffs out.
I assume the tester-monsters were doing broken things with her.
It’s not even that Orchid is low tier in the sense that she’s a bad character, she just seems to have less “Month one gimmicks” than other characters. The meta hasn’t even developed yet, and there’s still her instinct which has been untapped. I mean, these are the same people that said Thunder was low tier (lol) and Glacius is the best in the game (lol) and how wrong they were.
Exactly, Orchid just has less abuse-able stuff than some of the other characters. I love KI, all the characters have a healthy amount of stupid built into them that makes them interesting to play as and fight against.
seems to me that rushing to balance patch a very young game would tend to lead to shoddy buffs and nerfs like simply changing the characters HP by X% and calling it a day, and I think we all prefer a more nuanced and thoughtful approach.