I was watching SCR on stream and a match where War Destroyer won with point Ghost Rider, started game 2 with his second Nova by holding an assist during load. The match was paused at 99 and he was forced to undo it. Now according to SCR rules this seems proper to the wording…however SCR and majors are to follow EVO standard and this rule is largely misunderstood and I suspect this was posted as how they understood the old rule wording (which is wrong by EVO standards).
**So what is the rule? **
“Winner must keep exact same team (including assists), but may switch order of assists via loading screen.”
What is the SCR rule?
“After a game has concluded, winner must stick with same team and order for the next game.” -SCR wording, but leaves out the part where this only applies to character select screen.
This wording was rewritten for 2013 EVO because of how confusing the wording was prior (personal conversation with Mr.Wizard I had). There was no major mention of the word change as it did not change the actual rule, so it’s very likely people are still copy/pasting the old wording and misunderstanding it to be winner must keep team order and cannot hold assists to swap.
Please make this known in tournament play. I specifically use out of order teams to allow for optimal counter pick reorders (I don’t like Cap going anchor if I want to start with my anchor, so I put Cap 2nd and hold :a1: at most starts for default). I fear doing this at a tournament, then having my opponent pause to call me out and having to argue with the judge and create a huge mess to ensure I don’t get screwed by being forced with an undesired team ordering or a penalty.
I believe DJ Huoshen also uses the ‘hold an assist during loading’ strategy and I’ve never seen anyone having a problem with it. Hopefully the incident you mentioned is a one-off occurrence and doesn’t happen frequently.
Spoiler
P.S. I don’t think Morrigan has a Missiles assist like your signature suggests.
The Evo standard here is stupid IMHO. The fact that you-the-winner want to take advantage of this because you get the benefit of countering their counter pick is exactly why I’ve always been against it. You’re already up a game: that should be your sole earned advantage.
I’d probably suggest anybody playing against you in that environment go blind pick every round then to make sure you’re locked in and never get to counter them based upon exact knowledge.
Seems like a pointless waste of time and judge energy.
You’re still limited by the 3 you bring and you can’t swap your assist. The favor is still in the losers, but this is really helpful for counter picks after the characters are known. Think of KOF round 1 when you both pick your 3, then choose order. I’m not sure how they do winner/loser lock bu the first round allows what is the same as this.
Say for example I pick Doom Rocket Raccoon Vergil but during the loading screen of the first match I hold A2 and my order becomes Vergil RR Doom.
I win the 1st match
Now the 2nd match comes up… Am I forced to hold A2 again to keep the same order or can I just not hold anything and now play Doom RR Vergil?
I’ve always assumed assist holding on the loading screen was legal and fair.
Its been like that since forever in the vs series
You can always switch with assist holds. I intentionally misorder teams to create counter pick variations. Last EVO I did Doom/Cap/Vergil. I default to :a1: to lead with Cap, but do :a2: if Cap has a bad matchup, but this spares Cap from being tossed to anchor (I call it dynamic team ordering).
Still stupid as noted, since you yourself are noting “I can still achieve an in-game advantage and counter my opponent”.
This is the Evo rule I disagree with the absolute most. As a fan, I want to see optimum matches from both players every game. That means Game 2 I want Player 2 to have selected the best available team for them, and for Game 3 (if present) the same for Player 1. As soon as you say that the winner has additional flexible counter options you get a less excellent match-up for Games 2 and 3 (in my book). As noted the best way to counter as Player 2 is to require the WINNER to be blind-picking in matches, and that is so stupidly retarded and a waste of time I don’t even
As it stands in ‘normal’ tournaments, Player 2 in Game 2 has to both counter Player 1’s Game 1 known team AND also avoid losing to a hard counterpick in Game 3. There’s already enough damage to win probability by losing Game 1: granting Player 1 the option to counter in any part in Game 2 is a wholly needless advantage.
It’s a tough argument and I do see your point. In my book I still find it fair as I feel the advantage is still in losers and this flexibility is built into the team you bring in from the selection menu. I feel team reorders are part of the game and occur often in gameplay. You’re only changing your lead, not the overall synergy of the team. While that does have some impact it still limits you to the potential of the team, you weren’t allowed to bring in anything new to your team composition after winning a fight. It’s really just granting you a free successful hard tag before the 99.
I feel this showcases the full potential of a team and gives better matches overall, but at the same time does not fully offset the counter pick of the loser. Loser can still make changes to counter the team as a whole, the only X-factor not in their favor is what order they’ll start in. You still know who the 3 characters are and what assists are being used.
If this rule were to change, it should still be allowed during first match.
I’m pretty sure the rule was originally just copy/pasted from MVC2. It meant you could keep your point charater (so you could still play Magneto, Storm, Psylocke), but if you won you could swap the order of the assists (to Magneto, Psylocke, Storm).
You could this by character swap in the loading screen by holding both assists down, so that’s what I assume it was referring to.
In MVC3 however, they never added that feature, only the one to swap the point with one of the assists. So if you want to swap the order of your assists (say Mag/Doom/Vergil to Mag/Vergil/Doom) after winning you need to go to character select.
I don’t think it was. Inkblot or Ponder could probably better recall exactly what happened here, but as far as I’m aware it was just a bastardization of the whole “keep your exact same team you just had” rule that had been around since day one of tournaments as I remember them. I’m never aware of at any point in any MvC2 tournament where you could change around assists if you won, other than Evo which I think only was true after the first couple Evos. But I could be remembering wrong.
I remember 2k12 there was a lot of assist switching with Fchamp and that was in grand finals so either they decided to let him slide (doubtful) or the rule is you can switch assists
Well the standard team for MVC2 was 2 points and an assist so there pretty much never was a time when you’d want to swap the order of your two assists anyway.
I believe it’s a holdover from “what’s legal in arcade mode.”
After a victory in MvC2 arcade, singleplayer or versus, the winner can switch the order of characters as the next match loads even though he’s locked into the same team.
The same holds true for MvC3 arcade mode, even though the game doesn’t have an arcade release.
Some Street Fighter tournaments permit a change super/ultra rule for similar reasons.
Since the character order swap occurs after the players are finished, and players can maneuver the point character before match starts, I see it as nothing more than a prematch tag.
Back when a lot of friends and I were playing MvC2 together, we made the rule: “Loser passes. And after two consecutive wins your team is all Servbots or Rolls until you lose.” Stupid rule, but for casual gaming it kept players rotating and things moving, and it was always fun to see people actually getting “better” using Roll and Servbot.
I think it should be legal. I don’t even feel like most people would be doing it to necessarily hard counter pick the loser, it’s more to throw a monkey wrench in their plan with an element of risk to the winner as well.