Why Do People Play 'Broken' Characters:In Defense of Character Selection

Current Fighting Games Fighting Game Discussion
21

I was in that TvC tournament (tho not present at all for any of the giant discussions, as the people in it usually had to come running to get me to spare 10 minutes to play a tourney match, I thought I was just lucky that nobody played giants against me, lol).

I like TvC a lot. I played that game a lot, and had a blast playing it. I think my team is really fun, and I enjoy the matches I have with other players. Playing against Royal Flush, K-Beast, and all these other playesr I never played with was great!

With that being said, while I wouldn’t enforce a ban, seeing as how the evo 2k11 side tourney was my first, I don’t like the giants. I don’t enjoy playing agaisnt them. Super armor is extremely frustrating to play against. Unblockable misses are extremely frustrating to deal with. Even if I win, it’s not fun. Giants are my least favorite part of the game. If we played and you beat me (which you probably would have), I would have shook your hand, but that type of character really discourages me from wanting to play TvC. I like TvC, but I think the giants are rediculous. I don’t care how bad gold lightan is, he’s not fun to play against. There was a guy at our sessions who would sometimes play GL, and while I would win everytime, they were by far the most boring matches of the night. Having a slow awkward gigantic super armor character seems cool, but playing against it really takes away from the fun fast paced nature of TvC. I don’t consider myself a top TvC player by any means, but I don’t think that I’m a scrub (I got 2nd place, that means something in a game nobody plays, right? lol) While i would think “yeah, it’s legal”, i would also think “yeah, that’s really lame”

Pretty much my thoughts on phoenix, too, actually. Lame character. Legal, but not fun to play against. Liking a game as a whole doesn’t mean I have to like every single aspect of the game. I like MvC3, but I think Phoenix is about as lame as it gets, even if I lose to a better player. I don’t think anyone thought PTX was “broken” in the sense that he’s ST akuma or ivan ooze or whatever, but he’s just incredibly lame. If you can’t do combos and want a slow character, why not just play Alex and Polymar or something? Yes, I understand your point about “do what it takes to win”. A lot of people agree. The problem is, playing against your character isn’t as much aout winning/losing, as it is about being really boring to play against and watch. It’s not like you’re picking zero and XXX other top tier and people are complaining about banning. It’s that you’re picking a super slow gigantic robot that has super armor. You just toss out something. If the opponent does something, SA absorbs it, you baroque your move and do something else until you get missles at which point you do unblockable missle into combo. And it’s not that giants are OMG IMPOSSIBLE to beat. Tekka blade does well against them. It’s that, the strategy you use while playing as and against giants are super lame and boring. I would rather play against a better player more likely to beat me using any 2 characters than a bad player using a giant. It’s not just me, it’s pretty much every TvC player now (that doesnt use giants).

If this was like, SFIV Yun we were talking about, I would 100% agree that people need to suck it up and learn how to beat it. Same with MvC3 Phoenix (lame as she may be, at least she doesn’t have constant super armor). Heck, I’ve proven before it’s possible to win with mid tiers (Noel in BBCT). I battled top tiers with low tier Arcana Heart 2 Petra against top Japanese players without giving up. I even stuck to Noel after BBCS came out and tried my best (mostly failing) against Litchi/Bang etc. But If I was playing TvC at an arcade and I played against a giant, there’s no way I would sit back down and try again. I would wait until he’s done playing or if other people were playing him, I would play a different game because it’s not worth the money if I’m having NO fun. If i won, I would hope the same guy wouldn’t sit down again to play. I’ll usually sit down and play again if nobody else will, because I want to get better, but I don’t feel like I learn how to “get better” playing against giants. I almost have to play less smart and find the thing that lames out the giants and just spam that. My Team is decent against giants, too, but that’s not really the point.

TLDR : You have good points about top tiers in general (I play whoever I want regardless if they’re top tier or not. I play Makoto in BBCS2, Riannon in Aquapazza, etc), but the problem isn’t that you’re playing top tiers. It’s that you’re playing slow, super armor robots that you can’t combo in a game that barely got 10 people at the biggest FG tournament in the world. Legal or not, good or not, by playing that character, you make the game boring.

22

The tourney play should have been the same as party play, just with infinitely more skill. The amount of variables that would affect the match was what made the game Smash Bros.

I personally feel that the variation in stages and items would have greatly enhanced the depth of the game if they had been fully explored rather than outright dismissed. Sure, playing on Hyrule with medium items will greatly favor certain characters over others, but so will playing on Final Destination with no items. Without it so controlled, players would actually have to adapt to situations on the fly.

That’s just how I feel about it anyway. If I want to play a game where the environment never changes and there are no ‘random’ items… I’ll play any other fighter out there that was designed to be played that way from the ground up.

23

I still don’t think that that criteria alone is worth a hard tournament ban. Soft ban maybe (as was done with O. Sagat in Japan) but not a hard ban.

24

Brawl is a very nice looking game. I’ll give it that. Melee is more like Super Turbo in terms of speed and animation. A classic <3

The thing is, smash players want their game to be the same as a legit fighter. And, even though Brawl is a mockery of the other two, for the most part it is.

Items HAVE been explored, deeply and thoroughly. there are characters that use items, and have advanced tehcniques to go along with them (diddy Kong is a prime example, Link is great too) Hyrule w/ medium items doesnt favor anyone, it favors randomness. Finals of MLG shouldnt end because a player got a bomb spawned on them, it should be from a sick stage spike or psychic fsmash or something.

And, there are tons of unorthodox stages in both melee and brawl. Sure, Falco does great against Ice Climbers (melee) and Ness (brawl) on Final Destination. But lets say after the first match Ice Climbers take him to Onett(melee) and Delfino Plaza (Brawl) , then hes gonna have a much tougher time. Then they can ban Final D for his counter pick. Counter picking is one of the deepest parts of smash bros, because it involves character and stage.

But, in the end, smash bros is still a ton of FUN(not gonna talk about balance or it being a fighting game or anything) regardless if you’re playing it with your 3 friends with items on high or running sets with a rival on battlefield.

25

the day i discovered stages like norfair for Samus, was the day I started choosing her again. Brawl has such a complex counter pick game

26

I totally agree. I wouldn’t ban the character since they weren’t banned at Evo. I guess soft-ban is the term I was looking for. He’s soft-banned because he’s dumb. Soft ban doesn’t warrant hard ban to me (but thankfully I wasn’t in charge of running the tourney or dealing with those decisions), but I was more pointing out how it’s not the tvc community refusing to play against and learn the matchups against top tiers, and more like people just don’t want to play against the giants at all for reasons unrelated to tiers.

27

Hey mike shut up and learn a real character you lazy bastard

28

HeartNana, grats on 2nd in the tournament. I watched the video posted on Youtube.

Ultimately what I felt you said in your response was that Giants altered the pace of the game and the game-play, making the game less fun–not that they were dominating in the game. The problem with this is that as a player, I only have one responsibility–to play the game according to the rules. It is the game designers/developers responsibility to make a game fun, not the player’s. And for me as a Giant, it was a lot of fun.

Cheers.

29

So what exactly is a soft ban, it sounds kinda childish. Like, if you pick this character we’ll all be real cold to you or what. Like an unwritten rule to socially punish those who pick certain characters? Is it a “free pass” given by the community to be rude to certain players? Or did I misunderstand how soft ban works? :xeye:

There’s also the problem of who decides what is a boring matchup worthy of banning. If the criteria is “a character that makes the game less fun for the opponent”, then Phoenix(and probably a ton of other characters) most certainly fits the bill. Most people, including me, wouldn’t have missed that bitch for a second…
How about the dog? Stupid low hitbox…

I dunno, I just feel iffy when rules start going into these gray areas with player made rules and opinions and stuff. Things always seem much clearer and fairer when you let the game set the rules, instead of relying on either the perceived views of the majority or a “back room”(or whatever smash called it).

30

Heres a soft ban (at least how Ive always known it and experienced it)

Lets say we soft ban Yun in AE (just an example) That means that, no one picks Yun. But if you do pick Yun, then the other player will pick Yun as well. They dont HAVE to, but they will because itd be stupid not to.

Thus, soft bans only work for characters that are truely broken as to the point that its unwinnable for any other character (ST Akuma was softbanned in Japan at one point before becoming permabanned, MetaKnight in brawl in some areas/tourneys as well)

31

Not always the case.

O. Sagat was softbanned in Japan simply because of lopsided matchups, when he won he won, when he lost, he got throw trapped for free.

Off course, thanks to that, USA almost won against Japan in the first invitational - only the fact that Seth (who wasn’t supposed to play that day and was only subbing for someone) lost all him matches kept Japan from losing (Valle and Choi dominated their sets with O. Sagat).

32

The more you know!
Was just speaking from prior knowledge/personal experience. Guess soft ban isnt so cut and dry :rofl:

33

All you people talking about Smash, Brawl Minus is better.

And to OP, I applaud you.

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A fan of brawl + myself.

35

That’s correct. It’s not that they’re dominating, it’s that (imo) they make the game less fun for non-giants players. I can honestly say that watching giant vs giant is TvC might be the most boring thing ever. If you enjoy it, more power to you. Thanks for the props, too!

And as I said many times, I would never personally enforce a ban, and it’s fine that you enjoy your character. Enjoy playing your giant. I would play against you if, at the tourney you said “wanna play some against my PTX?”, but no matter what, there’s no way that would be the highlight of my tvc matches because I just can’t find the fun in playing as or against that type of character. That’s really all it is. You picked a really weird example with giants and TvC, too. It’s not like everyone doesn’t want to try in any game ever. It’s just, the TvC players don’t like how the game is played when there’s a giant on screen. Simple as that. Are there fans of giants? Of course. There’s fans of every character. There’s fans of the dog in Naruto 4, there’s fans of Gon in Tekken 3, etc. But that doesn’t mean the majority of people would rather not play against those characters since they change the game system too drastically. Giants in TvC were a failed experiment

Yin - It would be more like if your opponent played galactus. A gigantic super armor thing with a ton of life thats slow as balls. Or if your opponent picked Nancy in Tekken 6. Think about it like that. Yeah, you might win but who really wants to play against galactus? That’s essentially what the giants are in TvC. But regardless of that, while I didn’t call out for the ban, it’s not like TvC has a huge scene now anyways. Obviously if there was still a large scene, giants would have been made legal without 2nd thought, but the fact that it was only 10 guys or so is why “oh there’s so few people here for a dead game that it doesn’t really matter. As the tourney runner, I can make the call.” I mean, what other TvC tournaments are coming up? You have to look at the situation as a whole, not just straight up “Should games ban characters that are in the arcade version”. I think too many people commenting on the issue don’t play TvC and don’t really understand how small the tournament was, and how it was never even meant to come to this big discussion where people are saying TvC players are causing their own community destruction and other random nonsense.

36

The issue isn’t really whether it’s fun to play against certain characters or not, it’s about whether those characters should have been hard-banned which in this case, they clearly shouldn’t since the only legitimate ever criteria for hard-banning is if the character is comparable to ST Akuma/CvS1 Nakoruru.

I mean, the same “not fun to play against/changes the game” argument could be said for Petshop in JJBA (no stand, had flight mode the entire time in a game where no one had flight mode, could block in flight), but he was never hard-banned despite the fact that he was also pretty much god tier in that game as well.

37

D3v

Sticks for joy?? I won your stick at evo!

38

You should post in the thread.

39

Oh god Rob said everything I wanted to and then some.

Playing against the giants is a soul sucking, joyless endeavor. In fact I think it was an entirely bad decision to have them in the game period. It never made sense to me to take what the versus series stood for (that being fast paced ‘insanity’ if you will) and to then create two characters who went directly against that. I played TvC plenty and I just never enjoyed playing against either of them, ever. I can not stress that enough, especially if you’re a giant player, it is incredibly god damn boring and a CHORE to play against the giants. I don’t say chore like it’s a bad match up / counter pick, the matches against them are just inherently that immensely bad. It’s one thing for it to be boring for the viewer, but if it’s boring for the viewer AND the person playing, well then you’ve got a problem. I was worried for Sentinel being the same in MvC3, but lucky that wasn’t the case.

I don’t agree with them being banned but I can sure as hell understand it.

40

In this case, which is a small side tournament for a game barely anyone plays. This was a pretty isolated incident. I said a ton of times over (how many times do i really need to say it) that I wouldn’t have banned the characters and that I wouldn’t have enforced a ban. I never disagreed with “giants shouldn’t have been banned”. You’re missing my point which has nothing to do with the banning. It was about that dude saying “People should love the game, they can’t beat it, so they ban it”, and me going “its not that they couldn’t beat it” (There were some guys beating this PTX player pretty bad at evo, which i can only assume is the OP), it’s that nobody wanted to play against it. Ban worthy? If it was up to me? No. But I don’t think they would have banned giants if a couple guys who were gonna enter the tourney didn’t say “if giants aren’t banned, then I’m not playing”. Not cause they couldn’t beat giants, but because they didn’t want to see giants on the screen in place of a two character team.

(And JJBA Petshop was soft-banned in Japan too, iirc)