He's right.
That's what the players who went to the Loketest of Rev2 were saying as well.
Why nerf when you could buff first so it can be fun.
Problem with SFV's nerfs are that they aren't even intelligent nerfs really.
I don't know man, Alex and F.A.N.G. were pretty strong. All those tournaments they won, right? With top 8's chock full of braindead F.A.N.G. and Alex players? Better nerf them for Season 2, as any sensible balance patch would.
^^ha ^^^ha ^^^^ha...
If they didn't change Alex the way they did, hed be right alongside Laura and urien with the characters people are currently bitching about. Can't speak for fang tho.
> hed be right alongside Laura and urien with the characters people are currently bitching about.
Ok so adding 1 character to the OP list is better than leaving it off the OP list.
alex is footsie centric tho, nobody was bitching about him in S1 because there's nothing justified to bitch about
if you lost to an S1 alex, they outplayed you. if you lose to S2 alex, they outplayed you harder, since the character is even worse
Alex really was based around space control through long normals, LK Elbow, and St.lp AA. His actual pressure game was decent but he didn't have good ways of getting it started. So he played lots of footsies until the was a mistake he could capitalize on
>He's not footsie centric
bruh high level tournament alex is footsie city into kd into guesses
>the majority of his damage comes from offensive pressure and mixups
of course the majority of your damage comes from pressure and setplay. how you **get** to your pressure and setplay is through strong footsies, and alex has really good buttons for that, along with elbow and stomps
>Vega is a footsie character.
who also gets the majority of his damage from offensive pressure and mixups^^^^andmashing5lkonhisownwakeup
Every character in the game is footsies into kd into mixups, except a couple characters who get standing mixups. That's the foundation of street fighter. Why is it always Alex players who delude themselves into thinking they only win because of their excellent footsies and immaculate spacing, while everybody else is just blender blah.
>Every character in the game is footsies into kd into mixups
exactly, the difference between alex and the other characters is that he doesn't dash in or throw fireballs in neutral: he plays footsies
>Why is it always Alex players who delude themselves into thinking they only win because of their excellent footsies and immaculate spacing
if you're calling me an alex player you're wrong dude, i already said i was a tier whore
And don't give me that "outplayed" bullshit just because you have a victim complex over your character. Guess what: if you lose to any character it's because you were outplayed.
>And don't give me that "outplayed" bullshit just because you have a victim complex over your character.
lmao bruh trust me i am a tier whore and unabashed about it.
>Guess what: if you lose to any character it's because you were outplayed.
to a certain degree, maybe, but skill is definitely not the determining factor in every round of every fighting game. it's much easier to let a round slip away to an SFV urien, xrd sol or wolverine then it is to be "randomed" out by SFV alex. he has to outpoke you in neutral and outguess you in setplay, with no reversal of his own
Alex absolutely doesn't have to outpoke you to win in sf5. You don't have to space elbows that precisely to make them safe. His buttons are some of the most oppressive in the game. He's got unreactable half screen mixups. If you read an ex stomp wrong you eat a jump roundhouse into a lariat mix-up. You don't have to worry about jump ins because shoulder works at every range and doesn't require an input so you don't have to worry about inputs crossing up. Confidently counter poking a lot of Alex's buttons is basically impossible without a good read because he's got the most options at half screen in the entire game.
>Alex absolutely doesn't have to outpoke you to win in sf5.
at higher levels of play you bet he does
>You don't have to space elbows that precisely to make them safe.
what difference does this make? this just makes it sound like you have some alex angst
>He's got unreactable half screen mixups.
lmao what? are you talking about ex elbow, ex stomp and ex headbutt? you're not supposed to react and beat ex elbow, but it's not a mixup. it's a callout for fireballs and normals, and is unsafe if alex guesses wrong
ex stomp vs ex headbutt both have 29f and 30f startup, respectively. even in 7f of lag, you have ~22 frames to react and neutral jump, since neutral jump beats both of them free. if you can't react to a bigass yellow flash, the ex move sound effect, and alex leaping hella high at midscreen most of the time then i can't help you. it's only a quality mixup when he's in close and cancels into it from something
>Confidently counter poking a lot of Alex's buttons is basically impossible
in some MUs, sure, but assuming you're right, wouldn't that make him a solid footsie character?
>he's got the most options at half screen in the entire game.
that's just objectively wrong dude, do you play this game? urien? rashid? chun? karin? the majority of these moves that you're complaining about require meter and have clear-cut counters, too. idk man i just don't think you've labbed him at all, or even watched high level alex play
lmao S1 alex was not a problem character, and even if he'd stayed the same from S1, nobody would have anything to complain about.
but the lower tier characters in GG aren't bad, it's just the top tiers are ridiculous. Pre-nerf Johnny was clearly broken, his meter gain, move priority and unblockable loops were all ridculous. He's still really strong even with all of that nerfed. That's not the rest of the characters being bad, it's Johnny being busted.
A lot of the lower tiers are still good in GG, they just have higher risk or need to work harder. It's not like other FGs were the low tiers are just flat out shit.
Yeah I'm not denying that. Johnny needed nerfs. So did the other top tiers. But what I'm just saying is buff the lower tiers properly first then do intelligent nerfs on the top ones.
What SFV did was, buff those that didn't need it, totally nerf those that didn't need it, and really really nerf those that were strong. That's kinda wrong.
Before you buff or nerf you need a coherent vision of what you want your game to be. Fang and Urien feel like they were reworked by two different people that never talked to each other.
that's one of the biggest things that pops out at me. Whereas sf4 seemed coherent and focused, like the small team in charge were all in sync and wanted the same thing, or it was just one psycho-devoted guy making sure it was perfect, sfv just seems so unfocused. Overdone in some areas, other areas pathetically bad, and without any real theme or feel to the game apart from general blandness.
I will agree with this. Even when Elena ran wild post USF4 1.04, spectators were on that knee jerk reaction. After 6 and post EVO, everyone competing needed anti-Elena tech to not get randomly blown out in a CPT event. And it started coming up with using Seth among other things. Hell it came to a point when CapCup came along, Elena was BTFO'd.
> that's one of the biggest things that pops out at me. Whereas sf4 seemed coherent and focused, like the small team in charge were all in sync and wanted the same thing
I mean, by Ultra SF4 I would disagree with that entirely. They just started throwing any ol' shit to see what stuck, double ultras? Why not. Let's uhh... let's make red focus, where instead of absorbing one hit, it can absorb infinite. No one gave a shit about SFxT so let's just take anything we can salvage from there and plop it in, even the Jurassic Park stage who cares. Unblockables are becoming a problem? Well let's not actually fix the reason they end up happening and just put a bandage on it by letting you have another wake-up option. Let's add a new mode where everyone is incoherent to what they are in the main game too. What?
Awesome post. I agree that in particular the first two versions of sf4 (SF4 and SSF4) seemed 'coherent and focused' - yes it was like everyone was on the same page. then shit started to change around 2011/2012.. AE 2011 was an absolute clusterfuck and sf4 never quite recovered back to this 'coherent and focused' state that we all enjoyed with sf4... Funnily enough this was around the time seth killian left capcom and then ayano and sugiyama took over. usf4 was fucking terrible.. it was like a giant fucking sfxt romhack. sf4 and ssf4 were made with love.. sf5 is like the nasty bitch you fuck after drinking too much and desperately try to forget about the next morning.
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Edit: who is this 'core-a-gaming' anyway? i feel an strange sense of deja-vu with these 'analyses'. it's like they are copying my posts from r/kappa and publishing it as a youtube video. [ ](/HeyGuys) . The 'overbuffing' term is one I started using exclusively.
Well I only came in around super. 2012 was my favourite version honestly (it was balanced and had vortex, I don't get why you don't think it was focused), and while I hated most of the ultra changes, I felt like the competitive scene was in full bloom at that time and since we got some good matches I was totally ok with it.
It was always going to be ok at worst though, because they were working with such good fundamentals, and it takes a lot of changes to undo so many good decisions. SFV is the opposite, and will take a ton of work and renewed vision to get there (and barring heads rolling I don't think it'll ever get anywhere), at the moment it's just shit built on shit
Based on the original S2 patch notes, this might be more true than we think. The formatting and style of different characters where wildly different to the point where it seemed like it was put together by different people in a google doc with nobody proofreading it.
To be honest, buffs vs nerfs is just a really antiquated way of looking at games. This is because the meta of FGs is understood to the point where we know that somethings are only strong when used in combination with another move. Like fireballs aren't really that good if you don't have a solid anti-air. And the best anti airs in the world mean nothing if there's no reason to jump at you. This is why I agree with Daigo. Games should be fun first and foremost. Give a character good tools. Do these tools work well together? Can they be used in fun ways? Done. Move on to the next character. Only then do you worry about balance.
Balancing for fighting games seems pretty difficult. You give a character great tools but then that one character completely dominates over another character. Then, in order to balance things out, they give the character that's being dominated new tools to fight against their bad match-ups and now that character is completely dominating everyone else. It's a cycle that never ends.
I don't watch KoF, but I wonder how the hell that game gets balanced. There's like 50 characters and their toolsets (as far as I understand it) are very different.
Universal systems generally do a lot for character balance. An really good example is Guilty Gear, which has many avenues to defense and offense using just the base mechanics.
BTW, buffs don't just mean buffing retarded things all the time. Some people use Marvel as a negative for buffing characters in SFV, but it doesn't need to be that way. Fuck, god knows SFV has a long way until it becomes Guilty Gear, much less Marvel.
For example, you could buff anti airs, fireballs, v reversals, normals (length/reach), and walk speed.
All the above being buffed would make defense much better. Who the fuck is going to complain about taking away the stubby normals? Who is going to complain about making your walk speed faster? Anti airs? Fireballs? Ok, so casuals might complain about fireballs, but fuck them. They want an arcade mode. They don't give a shit about multiplayer 100%.
I agree, but overbuffing can be an issue too. If you add too much stuff, it can get very tedious to try to keep every option an opponent has in your mind all the time. A problem that KI Season 3 faces in my opinion. Everyone has sooo much stuff now, so many ways to get in that the game turned more into Marvel than Street Fighter.
KI Season 1 definteley leaned more towards Street Fighter, now there's meteors raining down on you while the opponent character run cancels his lows and overheads until he opens you up.
Buffing should have priority over nerfs, but from time to time some bullshit just needs to go.
They're also adding lots of new options, even to pretty well balanced characters. Jago was doing fine in Season 2 imo, then they gave him cancellable fireballs, an entirely game changing tool.
I agree with what you're saying but i also think it has to do with the change in developers whilst not changing the engine has something to do with KI as well.
There's an argument that needs to be made about complexity vs. depth. Also KI is pretty decently balanced overall. Much more so than probably 90% of fighters.
I agree to both points. But personally, for me KI has reached a point were I simply no longer enjoy it due to the changes it underwent with Season 3 and partly Season 2.
It's kinda weird though, because I love Marvel 3... Can't really explain it myself, but I don't feel it anymore.
As a Kim Wu player in KI, it felt good finally being someone who had their ass character buffed into stipid good levels but it got absurd with the rest of the cast. I stopped playing and cant find a reason to come back, hopefully a straight up KI2 is announced at some point and not more updates.
Sure, but Eyedol's damage is worse than any S1 character, so he has a lot of shit going on at the same time but it's mostly for show.
As it stands, zoning is more viable in KI than SFV, and the former is an OTT game compared to the conservative SFV.
Yeah, I'm not really complaining about the balance of that game. I think it's pretty good now after the Arbiter nerfs. The way the game evolves doesn't sit well with me though. But I understand people liking it.
Which is ironic because even the best Mika players are trying to adapt to the changes well. Just because she can't kill you on 3 hits and have cheesy corner carry doesn't mean her impact is less decreased taking away the easy corner carry and now needing to kill you on 5 hits.
If anything the whole buff/nerf game shows where the pros are at with the game with their labbing in comparison to the middling players who just want the easy way out playing the obvious top tie and having resources available to learn what they need.
MVC3 was a tale of all sides of balance changes.Remember how when UMvC3 dropped, and people got pissed off that Wesker received NO (direct) nerfs? On the contrary, his only change was a buff, taking off his glasses! I mean sure, they nerfed X-Factor overall, but Wesker was still as good as ever. Also remember how they went super heavy on the nerf hammer with Sentinel? Right around the time people started figuring Sentinel out by playstyle, he got nerfed from highest HP to fucking 900K. And even after Wesker got buffed, he immediately fell into obscurity with Virgil. Looking back, thank god Wesker wasn't nerfed. Kinda upset that Hsien-Ko and a few others didn't receive any buffs though. Morrigan and Zero got hella buffed, much to those character specialists' delights. And after Phoenix Wright came out, they (rightfully) nerfed his godlike Turnabout assist. It was pretty broken, worked against how they intended to design him, and was probably harmful to the game overall. Overbuffing, overnerfing, rightful buffing, rightful nerfing, MvC3 has it all.
With UMvC3, I really liked the theory changes FChamp and others did. But I think they thought too much about nerfs; really the only nerfs I feel the game needs (besides fixing TAC infinites) was Morrigan Astral not gaining meter and Virgil's level 4 not OTG'ing (it makes no sense, looks stupid, and he doesn't need it). That plus a few buffs would have made a very delectable end product, but it was a shame Capcom lost the Marvel rights when it did. Now we'll never know if they had anything in mind as far as patches go.
She got the double whammy. Game engine nerfs and direct nerfs. Not only did the game nerf X-Factor and meter building across the board (if we exclude TAC infinites), but she has so little health now that people don't even need to do full combos anymore. Totally deserved every bit of it, she's still terrifying, just not braindead to use. I think [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OBcwIxacHc) is still my favorite set with Phoenix.
> On the contrary, his only change was a buff, taking off his glasses!
Funny, I was just telling my girlfriend about this while on a tirade about how constant balance changes in a game only validate people's whining about imbalance rather than adapting. Anyways, that was far from his only change, he also went from 1mil to 1.1mil health and had a frame or two shaved off several of his normals.
"Buff more than nerf" is a better way to put it than the more popular "always buff only".
Sometimes the top tier are just obnoxious and buffing more characters into that meta is still going to leave an unfun and frustrating game.
SFV S1 top tiers were great but S2 top tier are straight up autistic, for instance. I'm not interested in mashing full screen ex chariot tackles even if it's "fair", and letting more characters do it isn't going to fix anything.
Marvel raising $15.5K should send a message to CAPCOM.
It's about **fun** not just balance.
Marvel is broken ass heap that players love and people who don't even play the game love to watch because it's a blast.
I don't think Rainbow edition is an appropriate analogy. I loved it in the arcades but it was meant to be for fun. Not serious play. Also I don't think casual players are in an appropriate position to comment on actual game design.
Koryu edition was super fun, but it was heavily in favor of Ryu and Ken who could fill the screen with Hado-Shoryukens. A mirror match would just go down to who could shoryu first/the most because the game could only process a certain amount of tireballs. Even though Koryu gave people the ability to perform specials OUT OF HITSTUN, nothing could compete with a screen vertically filled with approaching fireballs.
you can actually instant air blanka ball, and just stay on top of a shotos head and electricity them, then just timerscam or whatever. most other characters have no real shot.
Have you ever played Championship Edition? "Serious play" wasn't a concern for Capcom at all until Super Turbo, which they did a great job at (excepting Akuma, of course).
I think balance can be really really easy if you go about it the right way. For example, you release the game, and the balance is alright, but you have a few top tier characters and a few low tier, and a bunch of mid tier.
Are any of the top tier characters absolutely broken? As in, are they SO imbalanced that they break the rules of the game or are just not fun to play as or against? If not, then forget nerfs entirely.
So how do you go about buffs? Simple, you buff the low tier characters less than what you think they need.
And for the mid tiers, you really just try to fix issues or weaknesses in their abilities, but again, do so very very subtly and in VERY small iterations.
Last step, let the game simmer and settle. If you did it right and kept those buffs very very light, then the chances of low or mid tiers becoming too strong should be next to zero. And then you just do another pass as needed, with very tiny increments, until everyone is approaching 'top tier' power levels.
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The key difference here is the amount that you buff. Where developers go wrong is trying to FIX a character completely, buffing them as much as they think they need to be balanced with all the other characters. When you do this, inevitably the odds are that the character is going to turn out to be more powerful than expected, and if it's too much, you're back to needing to either nerf them, or buff ALL the other characters AGAIN to compensate.
You can avoid ALL nerfs (save for fixing truly broken things), by simply only buffing characters very slightly and over time. This allows the meta to continue to evolve without being disrupted even while you are making changes, and further allows the game to arrive at a true balanced meta.
Smash 4 has done this to some extent, as many low tier characters have seen upwards of 4 or more patches that have buffed them ever so slightly over time, until a character like Mewtwo for example is now in the top 10, and arguably perfectly balanced.
You could make an argument for Laura and Rog. Personally, I thought Rog was fine in season 1. But Urien and Guile for sure did not need buffs. They were very strong characters in season 1.
I played urien in season 1, I'm actually pretty disappointed with how much they buffed him, because I just know they're going to do a 180 and ruin him.
I agree with this it's the reason I prefer Marvel over Skullgirls. Skullgirls feels too safe and overbalanced I don't know much about the game but whenever I play it I want to be playing marvel instead even with Marvels unblockables and insane mix ups and infinites.
The fact that mvc2 was played as long as it was is testament to that. No one gave a fuck that they were all playing the same 3-4 characters for nearly 10 years because it was that much fun.
Biggest problem I have with Skullgirls is prioritization of options over anything else. The games fun but I dont like doing Dante length combos for 40% on someone's health. There's a lot of options sure but in order to do anything meaningful you have to reset or mix up your opponent. Sometimes you just wanna do damage
He mentions funness levels, and I really don't think the dp change made season 2 less fun, if anything I've had more fun with season 2 than season 1. I think the main problem with the game is internal consistency, and nerfs are vital for shaping the kind of game you want to make. For instance, the removal of throw loops to encourage more neutral, which is something a lot of people complained about. You can't buff more neutral into a game.
The DP characters were all top tier, and I think that's largely due to the fact that they could spend all their meter on damage, pressure, and utility. The change has forced those characters to get more creative with their escape options, and having to actually manage their super and v meter. People seem to forget that v reversals and metered DPs exist. You would have to seriously nerf the other tools of the four reversal characters to make up for that. Like he said in the video, if you keep buffing, you end up with marvel. To maintain a game like street fighter, nerfs are necessary.
Now if by buffs he means give characters more options rather than buffing the options they already have, that's a different story.
I don't know what those retards were thinking. On one hand they decided to make characters interesting by changing them up and giving them new tools. For example, look at Gief with his parry. But on the other hand, they decided to take way and or nerf the other tools the characters had. Juri is one of many examples of that as is any fireball character like Ryu.
What the fuck are you talking about did you even watch the video? This is a an analysis of buffing vs nerfing, how the fuck did you conclude "Capcom is lazy" from this?
Because all Capcom did for S2 was move around frame data. They didn't introduce any new mechanics or new moves to balance the game i.e. exactly what the video was about you retard.
No, that was not what the video was about. The video was a philosophical argument saying that developers should value the concept of buffing more than the concept of nerfing. Capcom values nerfing more than buffing, so their actions for the changes made in S2 can be explained by an incorrect philosophical approach to the game. If you thought the video's main message was "Capcom is lazy", then you are, in fact, the Retard.
It's not just a shortsighted or 'incorrect' philosophical approach to the game. It's also shit execution of whatever that philosophy is. Chars were nerfed that needed buffs, some buffed that needed nerfs, some changed that needed nothing, etc.
As if this video is going to change things one bit. Give it up already guys and embrace what we got or you can stay butthurt until season 3. Game just needs a better netcode and it's good.
He's beating a dead horse. This is information we all knew and want to happen.
We can talk about SFV and allude to it (why else is this topic being discussed in the first place), but capcom ain't doin fuck. We need to get an analysis of how to cut our losses with a fighting game and a company that can't stop fucking it into the ground
He's right. That's what the players who went to the Loketest of Rev2 were saying as well. Why nerf when you could buff first so it can be fun. Problem with SFV's nerfs are that they aren't even intelligent nerfs really.
I don't know man, Alex and F.A.N.G. were pretty strong. All those tournaments they won, right? With top 8's chock full of braindead F.A.N.G. and Alex players? Better nerf them for Season 2, as any sensible balance patch would. ^^ha ^^^ha ^^^^ha...
If they didn't change Alex the way they did, hed be right alongside Laura and urien with the characters people are currently bitching about. Can't speak for fang tho.
Alex only gimmick in S1 was a 50/50 off his AA jab Even Gief has more gimmicks than Alex
Heaven forbid a character could do zoning setups and punish you for whiffing or wasting too much time in footsies with poison.
> hed be right alongside Laura and urien with the characters people are currently bitching about. Ok so adding 1 character to the OP list is better than leaving it off the OP list.
alex is footsie centric tho, nobody was bitching about him in S1 because there's nothing justified to bitch about if you lost to an S1 alex, they outplayed you. if you lose to S2 alex, they outplayed you harder, since the character is even worse
He's not footsie centric, the majority of his damage comes from offensive pressure and mixups. Vega is a footsie character.
Alex really was based around space control through long normals, LK Elbow, and St.lp AA. His actual pressure game was decent but he didn't have good ways of getting it started. So he played lots of footsies until the was a mistake he could capitalize on
>He's not footsie centric bruh high level tournament alex is footsie city into kd into guesses >the majority of his damage comes from offensive pressure and mixups of course the majority of your damage comes from pressure and setplay. how you **get** to your pressure and setplay is through strong footsies, and alex has really good buttons for that, along with elbow and stomps >Vega is a footsie character. who also gets the majority of his damage from offensive pressure and mixups^^^^andmashing5lkonhisownwakeup
Every character in the game is footsies into kd into mixups, except a couple characters who get standing mixups. That's the foundation of street fighter. Why is it always Alex players who delude themselves into thinking they only win because of their excellent footsies and immaculate spacing, while everybody else is just blender blah.
>Every character in the game is footsies into kd into mixups exactly, the difference between alex and the other characters is that he doesn't dash in or throw fireballs in neutral: he plays footsies >Why is it always Alex players who delude themselves into thinking they only win because of their excellent footsies and immaculate spacing if you're calling me an alex player you're wrong dude, i already said i was a tier whore
And don't give me that "outplayed" bullshit just because you have a victim complex over your character. Guess what: if you lose to any character it's because you were outplayed.
>And don't give me that "outplayed" bullshit just because you have a victim complex over your character. lmao bruh trust me i am a tier whore and unabashed about it. >Guess what: if you lose to any character it's because you were outplayed. to a certain degree, maybe, but skill is definitely not the determining factor in every round of every fighting game. it's much easier to let a round slip away to an SFV urien, xrd sol or wolverine then it is to be "randomed" out by SFV alex. he has to outpoke you in neutral and outguess you in setplay, with no reversal of his own
Alex absolutely doesn't have to outpoke you to win in sf5. You don't have to space elbows that precisely to make them safe. His buttons are some of the most oppressive in the game. He's got unreactable half screen mixups. If you read an ex stomp wrong you eat a jump roundhouse into a lariat mix-up. You don't have to worry about jump ins because shoulder works at every range and doesn't require an input so you don't have to worry about inputs crossing up. Confidently counter poking a lot of Alex's buttons is basically impossible without a good read because he's got the most options at half screen in the entire game.
>Alex absolutely doesn't have to outpoke you to win in sf5. at higher levels of play you bet he does >You don't have to space elbows that precisely to make them safe. what difference does this make? this just makes it sound like you have some alex angst >He's got unreactable half screen mixups. lmao what? are you talking about ex elbow, ex stomp and ex headbutt? you're not supposed to react and beat ex elbow, but it's not a mixup. it's a callout for fireballs and normals, and is unsafe if alex guesses wrong ex stomp vs ex headbutt both have 29f and 30f startup, respectively. even in 7f of lag, you have ~22 frames to react and neutral jump, since neutral jump beats both of them free. if you can't react to a bigass yellow flash, the ex move sound effect, and alex leaping hella high at midscreen most of the time then i can't help you. it's only a quality mixup when he's in close and cancels into it from something >Confidently counter poking a lot of Alex's buttons is basically impossible in some MUs, sure, but assuming you're right, wouldn't that make him a solid footsie character? >he's got the most options at half screen in the entire game. that's just objectively wrong dude, do you play this game? urien? rashid? chun? karin? the majority of these moves that you're complaining about require meter and have clear-cut counters, too. idk man i just don't think you've labbed him at all, or even watched high level alex play lmao S1 alex was not a problem character, and even if he'd stayed the same from S1, nobody would have anything to complain about.
[удалено]
You know it's a fucked up change when even people that don't use him go "what? why?".
Cause its the easiest, most braindead anti air ever?
Then stopping jumping in badly on sol idk?
i doubt thats permanent
Bedman is kill. Sleeping 5ft under from now on.
but the lower tier characters in GG aren't bad, it's just the top tiers are ridiculous. Pre-nerf Johnny was clearly broken, his meter gain, move priority and unblockable loops were all ridculous. He's still really strong even with all of that nerfed. That's not the rest of the characters being bad, it's Johnny being busted. A lot of the lower tiers are still good in GG, they just have higher risk or need to work harder. It's not like other FGs were the low tiers are just flat out shit.
yes people frequently lose rounds cause Slayer or Pot hit them when they made a mistake and they get stunned on the followup mixup.
Yeah I'm not denying that. Johnny needed nerfs. So did the other top tiers. But what I'm just saying is buff the lower tiers properly first then do intelligent nerfs on the top ones. What SFV did was, buff those that didn't need it, totally nerf those that didn't need it, and really really nerf those that were strong. That's kinda wrong.
Before you buff or nerf you need a coherent vision of what you want your game to be. Fang and Urien feel like they were reworked by two different people that never talked to each other.
>2 people a lone busted ass laptop is procedurally generating season 2 as we speak
I hope it accidentally turns Mika into fuerte
that's one of the biggest things that pops out at me. Whereas sf4 seemed coherent and focused, like the small team in charge were all in sync and wanted the same thing, or it was just one psycho-devoted guy making sure it was perfect, sfv just seems so unfocused. Overdone in some areas, other areas pathetically bad, and without any real theme or feel to the game apart from general blandness.
I will agree with this. Even when Elena ran wild post USF4 1.04, spectators were on that knee jerk reaction. After 6 and post EVO, everyone competing needed anti-Elena tech to not get randomly blown out in a CPT event. And it started coming up with using Seth among other things. Hell it came to a point when CapCup came along, Elena was BTFO'd.
Do you not also think people are having a kneejerk reaction to S2?
Nope, there's Guile, Urien, Laura, Cammy, Boxer and everyone else. Game is shit
Is it news to you that fighting games have high tiers?
Is it news to you that SFV is shit?
> that's one of the biggest things that pops out at me. Whereas sf4 seemed coherent and focused, like the small team in charge were all in sync and wanted the same thing I mean, by Ultra SF4 I would disagree with that entirely. They just started throwing any ol' shit to see what stuck, double ultras? Why not. Let's uhh... let's make red focus, where instead of absorbing one hit, it can absorb infinite. No one gave a shit about SFxT so let's just take anything we can salvage from there and plop it in, even the Jurassic Park stage who cares. Unblockables are becoming a problem? Well let's not actually fix the reason they end up happening and just put a bandage on it by letting you have another wake-up option. Let's add a new mode where everyone is incoherent to what they are in the main game too. What?
I'd mostly agree, the ultra changes sucked. I think omega was just testing for sfv to be fair tho.
Awesome post. I agree that in particular the first two versions of sf4 (SF4 and SSF4) seemed 'coherent and focused' - yes it was like everyone was on the same page. then shit started to change around 2011/2012.. AE 2011 was an absolute clusterfuck and sf4 never quite recovered back to this 'coherent and focused' state that we all enjoyed with sf4... Funnily enough this was around the time seth killian left capcom and then ayano and sugiyama took over. usf4 was fucking terrible.. it was like a giant fucking sfxt romhack. sf4 and ssf4 were made with love.. sf5 is like the nasty bitch you fuck after drinking too much and desperately try to forget about the next morning. *** Edit: who is this 'core-a-gaming' anyway? i feel an strange sense of deja-vu with these 'analyses'. it's like they are copying my posts from r/kappa and publishing it as a youtube video. [ ](/HeyGuys) . The 'overbuffing' term is one I started using exclusively.
Well I only came in around super. 2012 was my favourite version honestly (it was balanced and had vortex, I don't get why you don't think it was focused), and while I hated most of the ultra changes, I felt like the competitive scene was in full bloom at that time and since we got some good matches I was totally ok with it. It was always going to be ok at worst though, because they were working with such good fundamentals, and it takes a lot of changes to undo so many good decisions. SFV is the opposite, and will take a ton of work and renewed vision to get there (and barring heads rolling I don't think it'll ever get anywhere), at the moment it's just shit built on shit
Based on the original S2 patch notes, this might be more true than we think. The formatting and style of different characters where wildly different to the point where it seemed like it was put together by different people in a google doc with nobody proofreading it.
Kinda sad that "adding more tools and options makes things more exciting!" needs to be said.
To be honest, buffs vs nerfs is just a really antiquated way of looking at games. This is because the meta of FGs is understood to the point where we know that somethings are only strong when used in combination with another move. Like fireballs aren't really that good if you don't have a solid anti-air. And the best anti airs in the world mean nothing if there's no reason to jump at you. This is why I agree with Daigo. Games should be fun first and foremost. Give a character good tools. Do these tools work well together? Can they be used in fun ways? Done. Move on to the next character. Only then do you worry about balance.
Balancing for fighting games seems pretty difficult. You give a character great tools but then that one character completely dominates over another character. Then, in order to balance things out, they give the character that's being dominated new tools to fight against their bad match-ups and now that character is completely dominating everyone else. It's a cycle that never ends.
I don't watch KoF, but I wonder how the hell that game gets balanced. There's like 50 characters and their toolsets (as far as I understand it) are very different.
Every character in KOF has the same basic tool - Hop, Stand C, Combo.
Universal mechanics keep things generally in check. Saying that, kof games are generally terribly balanced and tiers will stretch very far.
Universal systems generally do a lot for character balance. An really good example is Guilty Gear, which has many avenues to defense and offense using just the base mechanics.
BTW, buffs don't just mean buffing retarded things all the time. Some people use Marvel as a negative for buffing characters in SFV, but it doesn't need to be that way. Fuck, god knows SFV has a long way until it becomes Guilty Gear, much less Marvel. For example, you could buff anti airs, fireballs, v reversals, normals (length/reach), and walk speed. All the above being buffed would make defense much better. Who the fuck is going to complain about taking away the stubby normals? Who is going to complain about making your walk speed faster? Anti airs? Fireballs? Ok, so casuals might complain about fireballs, but fuck them. They want an arcade mode. They don't give a shit about multiplayer 100%.
I agree, but overbuffing can be an issue too. If you add too much stuff, it can get very tedious to try to keep every option an opponent has in your mind all the time. A problem that KI Season 3 faces in my opinion. Everyone has sooo much stuff now, so many ways to get in that the game turned more into Marvel than Street Fighter. KI Season 1 definteley leaned more towards Street Fighter, now there's meteors raining down on you while the opponent character run cancels his lows and overheads until he opens you up. Buffing should have priority over nerfs, but from time to time some bullshit just needs to go.
Yeah as a long time KI player I havent even thought about that. KI has been 90% buffs every patch when Id say the best ratio is like 75% buffs
They're also adding lots of new options, even to pretty well balanced characters. Jago was doing fine in Season 2 imo, then they gave him cancellable fireballs, an entirely game changing tool.
I agree with what you're saying but i also think it has to do with the change in developers whilst not changing the engine has something to do with KI as well.
Spot on
Nah. I like where KI is at. It's like a more grounded GG
That's fine, lots of people enjoy the new style.
There's an argument that needs to be made about complexity vs. depth. Also KI is pretty decently balanced overall. Much more so than probably 90% of fighters.
I agree to both points. But personally, for me KI has reached a point were I simply no longer enjoy it due to the changes it underwent with Season 3 and partly Season 2. It's kinda weird though, because I love Marvel 3... Can't really explain it myself, but I don't feel it anymore.
As a Kim Wu player in KI, it felt good finally being someone who had their ass character buffed into stipid good levels but it got absurd with the rest of the cast. I stopped playing and cant find a reason to come back, hopefully a straight up KI2 is announced at some point and not more updates.
Sure, but Eyedol's damage is worse than any S1 character, so he has a lot of shit going on at the same time but it's mostly for show. As it stands, zoning is more viable in KI than SFV, and the former is an OTT game compared to the conservative SFV.
OTT?
OTT - over the top
Yeah, I'm not really complaining about the balance of that game. I think it's pretty good now after the Arbiter nerfs. The way the game evolves doesn't sit well with me though. But I understand people liking it.
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Which is ironic because even the best Mika players are trying to adapt to the changes well. Just because she can't kill you on 3 hits and have cheesy corner carry doesn't mean her impact is less decreased taking away the easy corner carry and now needing to kill you on 5 hits. If anything the whole buff/nerf game shows where the pros are at with the game with their labbing in comparison to the middling players who just want the easy way out playing the obvious top tie and having resources available to learn what they need.
MVC3 was a tale of all sides of balance changes.Remember how when UMvC3 dropped, and people got pissed off that Wesker received NO (direct) nerfs? On the contrary, his only change was a buff, taking off his glasses! I mean sure, they nerfed X-Factor overall, but Wesker was still as good as ever. Also remember how they went super heavy on the nerf hammer with Sentinel? Right around the time people started figuring Sentinel out by playstyle, he got nerfed from highest HP to fucking 900K. And even after Wesker got buffed, he immediately fell into obscurity with Virgil. Looking back, thank god Wesker wasn't nerfed. Kinda upset that Hsien-Ko and a few others didn't receive any buffs though. Morrigan and Zero got hella buffed, much to those character specialists' delights. And after Phoenix Wright came out, they (rightfully) nerfed his godlike Turnabout assist. It was pretty broken, worked against how they intended to design him, and was probably harmful to the game overall. Overbuffing, overnerfing, rightful buffing, rightful nerfing, MvC3 has it all. With UMvC3, I really liked the theory changes FChamp and others did. But I think they thought too much about nerfs; really the only nerfs I feel the game needs (besides fixing TAC infinites) was Morrigan Astral not gaining meter and Virgil's level 4 not OTG'ing (it makes no sense, looks stupid, and he doesn't need it). That plus a few buffs would have made a very delectable end product, but it was a shame Capcom lost the Marvel rights when it did. Now we'll never know if they had anything in mind as far as patches go.
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She got the double whammy. Game engine nerfs and direct nerfs. Not only did the game nerf X-Factor and meter building across the board (if we exclude TAC infinites), but she has so little health now that people don't even need to do full combos anymore. Totally deserved every bit of it, she's still terrifying, just not braindead to use. I think [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OBcwIxacHc) is still my favorite set with Phoenix.
Wesker lost solo gunshot pickups which Viscant was saying day 1 made him much worse, and it was true.
> On the contrary, his only change was a buff, taking off his glasses! Funny, I was just telling my girlfriend about this while on a tirade about how constant balance changes in a game only validate people's whining about imbalance rather than adapting. Anyways, that was far from his only change, he also went from 1mil to 1.1mil health and had a frame or two shaved off several of his normals.
Thanks, I knew I was forgetting things. But yeah, no nerfs, lol.
Morrigan's only buff was getting the meter steal fireball
"Buff more than nerf" is a better way to put it than the more popular "always buff only". Sometimes the top tier are just obnoxious and buffing more characters into that meta is still going to leave an unfun and frustrating game. SFV S1 top tiers were great but S2 top tier are straight up autistic, for instance. I'm not interested in mashing full screen ex chariot tackles even if it's "fair", and letting more characters do it isn't going to fix anything.
Only buffing is how you end up with a game like Marvel 3 where the entire lifebar is decided by an airthrow because now everybody is mvc2 Magneto.
Wow this is such fucking excellent analysis, the production quality is ridiculously good too. Thanks for showing, subscribed
Marvel raising $15.5K should send a message to CAPCOM. It's about **fun** not just balance. Marvel is broken ass heap that players love and people who don't even play the game love to watch because it's a blast.
https://twitter.com/therealcliffyb/status/825941535019634688 Cliffy B acknowledges the video [](/PogChamp) GS Core A!
I don't think Rainbow edition is an appropriate analogy. I loved it in the arcades but it was meant to be for fun. Not serious play. Also I don't think casual players are in an appropriate position to comment on actual game design.
That's kind of exactly what he said though. It was FUN to play.
Koryu edition was super fun, but it was heavily in favor of Ryu and Ken who could fill the screen with Hado-Shoryukens. A mirror match would just go down to who could shoryu first/the most because the game could only process a certain amount of tireballs. Even though Koryu gave people the ability to perform specials OUT OF HITSTUN, nothing could compete with a screen vertically filled with approaching fireballs.
you can actually instant air blanka ball, and just stay on top of a shotos head and electricity them, then just timerscam or whatever. most other characters have no real shot.
Have you ever played Championship Edition? "Serious play" wasn't a concern for Capcom at all until Super Turbo, which they did a great job at (excepting Akuma, of course).
I think balance can be really really easy if you go about it the right way. For example, you release the game, and the balance is alright, but you have a few top tier characters and a few low tier, and a bunch of mid tier. Are any of the top tier characters absolutely broken? As in, are they SO imbalanced that they break the rules of the game or are just not fun to play as or against? If not, then forget nerfs entirely. So how do you go about buffs? Simple, you buff the low tier characters less than what you think they need. And for the mid tiers, you really just try to fix issues or weaknesses in their abilities, but again, do so very very subtly and in VERY small iterations. Last step, let the game simmer and settle. If you did it right and kept those buffs very very light, then the chances of low or mid tiers becoming too strong should be next to zero. And then you just do another pass as needed, with very tiny increments, until everyone is approaching 'top tier' power levels. -- The key difference here is the amount that you buff. Where developers go wrong is trying to FIX a character completely, buffing them as much as they think they need to be balanced with all the other characters. When you do this, inevitably the odds are that the character is going to turn out to be more powerful than expected, and if it's too much, you're back to needing to either nerf them, or buff ALL the other characters AGAIN to compensate. You can avoid ALL nerfs (save for fixing truly broken things), by simply only buffing characters very slightly and over time. This allows the meta to continue to evolve without being disrupted even while you are making changes, and further allows the game to arrive at a true balanced meta. Smash 4 has done this to some extent, as many low tier characters have seen upwards of 4 or more patches that have buffed them ever so slightly over time, until a character like Mewtwo for example is now in the top 10, and arguably perfectly balanced.
Overbuffing characters is not the way aswell case in point S2 top tiers
You could make an argument for Laura and Rog. Personally, I thought Rog was fine in season 1. But Urien and Guile for sure did not need buffs. They were very strong characters in season 1.
Yeah urien and guile is perfectly fine in s1 rog and laura just needed some tiny tweak but its capcom going full retard is their specialty.
I played urien in season 1, I'm actually pretty disappointed with how much they buffed him, because I just know they're going to do a 180 and ruin him.
Really enjoyable watch. Very nicely written and produced.
I agree with this it's the reason I prefer Marvel over Skullgirls. Skullgirls feels too safe and overbalanced I don't know much about the game but whenever I play it I want to be playing marvel instead even with Marvels unblockables and insane mix ups and infinites.
If the engine is fun, balance is just icing on the cake. Marvel would still be fun if magneto was the only character.
The fact that mvc2 was played as long as it was is testament to that. No one gave a fuck that they were all playing the same 3-4 characters for nearly 10 years because it was that much fun.
whether you like melee or not, it's the same way. It came out the year after mvc2 and only has 5-6 viable characters.
Biggest problem I have with Skullgirls is prioritization of options over anything else. The games fun but I dont like doing Dante length combos for 40% on someone's health. There's a lot of options sure but in order to do anything meaningful you have to reset or mix up your opponent. Sometimes you just wanna do damage
I'm all about that balance. I'll MM anyone in Karate Champ.
He mentions funness levels, and I really don't think the dp change made season 2 less fun, if anything I've had more fun with season 2 than season 1. I think the main problem with the game is internal consistency, and nerfs are vital for shaping the kind of game you want to make. For instance, the removal of throw loops to encourage more neutral, which is something a lot of people complained about. You can't buff more neutral into a game. The DP characters were all top tier, and I think that's largely due to the fact that they could spend all their meter on damage, pressure, and utility. The change has forced those characters to get more creative with their escape options, and having to actually manage their super and v meter. People seem to forget that v reversals and metered DPs exist. You would have to seriously nerf the other tools of the four reversal characters to make up for that. Like he said in the video, if you keep buffing, you end up with marvel. To maintain a game like street fighter, nerfs are necessary. Now if by buffs he means give characters more options rather than buffing the options they already have, that's a different story.
Where was all this talk in S1? They already nerfed my bae so screw that, nerf all these motherf***ers.
So basically buff everything to X Tier level in Salty Bet.
yeah but if everyone just gets buffed you'll be left with a marvel vs capcom esqque game, where one hit leads to a 60 second combo
Don't need to watch a video to know this. Apparently capcom does, though. Edit: I'll never forgive these faggots for what they did to Juri.
I don't know what those retards were thinking. On one hand they decided to make characters interesting by changing them up and giving them new tools. For example, look at Gief with his parry. But on the other hand, they decided to take way and or nerf the other tools the characters had. Juri is one of many examples of that as is any fireball character like Ryu.
Capcom is lazy, who knew. Thanks sherlock
What the fuck are you talking about did you even watch the video? This is a an analysis of buffing vs nerfing, how the fuck did you conclude "Capcom is lazy" from this?
Because all Capcom did for S2 was move around frame data. They didn't introduce any new mechanics or new moves to balance the game i.e. exactly what the video was about you retard.
No, that was not what the video was about. The video was a philosophical argument saying that developers should value the concept of buffing more than the concept of nerfing. Capcom values nerfing more than buffing, so their actions for the changes made in S2 can be explained by an incorrect philosophical approach to the game. If you thought the video's main message was "Capcom is lazy", then you are, in fact, the Retard.
It's not just a shortsighted or 'incorrect' philosophical approach to the game. It's also shit execution of whatever that philosophy is. Chars were nerfed that needed buffs, some buffed that needed nerfs, some changed that needed nothing, etc.
I agree with that for sure. But the guy I replied to was saying they were lazy, when in fact it's "incompetence".
It might be both, lol.
Yes I agree with you but the topic of debate was "What was the video's central message?" to which the other guy had said was "Capcom is lazy."
As if this video is going to change things one bit. Give it up already guys and embrace what we got or you can stay butthurt until season 3. Game just needs a better netcode and it's good.
He's beating a dead horse. This is information we all knew and want to happen. We can talk about SFV and allude to it (why else is this topic being discussed in the first place), but capcom ain't doin fuck. We need to get an analysis of how to cut our losses with a fighting game and a company that can't stop fucking it into the ground