Is making a character high execution a valid execuse for making them broken?

Current Fighting Games Fighting Game Discussion
#1

I know in general older fighting game fans like me (who has followed the competitive community for years) generally feel dumb characters are dumb characters. However about 3 or 4 years back I was at a tournament that also had a smash tournament available. I remember the smash players banning chain throwing (now I don’t know what this is), but their main excuse was that the move was “too easy to do”. He even told me he could show me (a non-smash player) how to do it in 5 minutes. Another player talked about another powerful technique in the game (don’t remember what it was called), but the original guy said that’s fine because it’s harder to do. I figured that’s probably just a common mentality amongst smash players.

However I’ve noticed in the more mainstream community this attitude has been adopted. Eddie is probably one of the dumbest characters in Accent Core, but people really don’t scrutinize him because he’s easy to use. Now I know more competitive players may still think he’s stupid, but I remember when I use to watch Ogawa matches on Youtube, and players praised him. I would go to another youtube video with 3S Chun, and people would scorn her. So it seems like to some degree, people love some top tiers over the other.

More recently in the MVC2 vs MVC3 debates people seem to have Dark Phoenix and Wolverine (talking about vanilla), but talk about how greatly technical MVC2 was. In genreal when people talk about technical MVC2, they’re usually referring to Magneto. Now MVC2 was a game I played quasi competitively for a good amount of years, and Magneto was about as stupid or more stupid that Wolverine/Phoenix. He was a broken overpowered character who most people would admit has a massive luck factor. However he also gets a pass because he does require execution.

Does or should execution barriers make a difference when a character is broken and poorly designed?

#2

There’s a distinct differences between 3S Chun and AC Eddie

  1. Standard viewer finds Chun boring. She doesn’t do anything flashy or cool looking. She plays lame. People who don’t see the brain working while Chun is playing, just see her walking, not pressing buttons, punishing wiffs occasionally kara throwing. Boring.
    People watching Ogawa play Eddie see all sorts of crazy shit. Crazy blockstrings/pressure/mixups with mawaru, his high/low/fly cross up/dip under ground crossups/cmd grabs etc… They see crazy Shadow gallery loops… All of which leads to unblockables, which lead back to the above madness. Factor in hype shit like dizzy into instant kill, baited bursts, and the like and you get what most people are going to find more exciting as a character.

  2. People don’t mind Eddie quite as much just due to the simple fact that while he is absurdly powerful, many of the characters in GG are able to beat him, he has weaknesses. His defensive options are really lacking, in a game where most characters offensive options are really powerful, a knockdown into a few 50/50 (or worse odds) guesses and he dies.
    Chun, on the other hand lives in a game where the lower her opponent falls on the tier list, the less and less chance you have of winning against her. Generally people hate that, and see her as the face of 3rd Strike’s unbalance.

edit: as far as the concept goes, I think people in general don’t mind rewarding something if a player puts a lot of work in to achieve it.

Some people hated to see Cable kill off of AHVB xn because it was easy. I don’t play Marvel, and I can do it… it takes 15 minutes or less if you already have some semblance of how to TK a move… Whereas people get hype to see Rei infinite a character for the entirety of a round in HnK.

Granted, though, it’s all relevant… Justin’s Cable might not do anything spectacularly visually appealing, but it’s not like he’s doing anything “less” than someone playing a high execution character… More often, people who understand the game show respect to the guy who wins because he was better, regardless of whether he won via 63 second long Rei combo, or laming it out with Chun low forward.

The cats you see crying about character more often than not are just scrublords trolling around youtube vids.

#3

There’s a much long more detailed answer I could give but I don’t feel like typing it on my phone. The short answer is you have to give some level of respect to something you can’t yourself do, but when people lose to a broken character that is within their skill level they tend to judge themselves as better than that person for not taking that route. AKA why people called phoenix players frauds regardless of what your actual skill level was.

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#4

Mvc2 magneto was not ‘lucky’

he was full of gimmicks and his gameplan relied around resets. MSP however, has a luck factor to it because of how fragile the team is. If you lose magneto early to a sentinel team you’re pretty much done with storm/psy backing you. The team required you to pretty much bank all your cards on a lucky psyblade hit and converting into killing your opponents entire team or being good enough to get in patiently…something yipes and schmidt perfected with the team.

i guess what im saying is magneto himself isnt a coinflip character, but rather MSP is, which is why MSP players don’t get respected as much as a solid santhrax player.

#5

Except Yipes and Chris Schmidt.
I’ll never be respected, because I’m one of those random lucky dudes.

#6

No, execution barriers shouldn’t excuse brokenness, although it’s true that many people act like they do. But then, a lot of people (that I’ve run into at least) also talk as if zoning or keepaway playstyles are “cheap bitch tactics” that “require no skill” and/or “aren’t how the game is meant to be played.” In many cases these same people rely on teleport mixups or spamming derp moves like Wolvie divekick to score most of their hits. Just because most people think a certain way doesn’t mean that it’s justified. Any game should strive for balanced characters first and an even distribution of execution requirements as a secondary objective, in my opinion at least.

#7

Zoning and runaway fall under the same rule, if they don’t understand what is actually going on the player tends to think nothing I going on and "I could just do nothing too and get wins but I’m better than that"
You couldn’t fool yourself into thinking you could do trijump resets and unfly combos if you couldn’t but you might be able to pull off an AHVB, hence the cable hate.

#8

In AC Testament is probably the most derpy one. Eddie is somewhat fair except for very specific matchups like Potemkin. He has many 5-5 and 6-4 matchups which are fine, but you have to learn this unique matchup well if you want to be able to fight him. This includes character specific strategics and also some technical things like slashback the 2nd hit of the shadow ]K[, or instant block the 1st and then back dash the 2nd etc.

#9

The best reason to employ difficult execution IMO is to ‘fix’ a character that is fine at high level but stupid/annoying at low level, without actually affecting how good they are at a high level. For example, imagine if SF4 DPs actually took some degree of skill to execute. Doesn’t affect the character at all at high levels, but people sure would cry about them a lot less at low levels.

#10

Being hard to play doesn’t make a character any less retarded, it just limits the number of people who are willing to put in the time to learn how to use them effectively.

People hate on exetremely strong characters that are simple to use because no one likes watching someone do less work for more reward, it doesn’t seem fair. So even though a lot of AC Eddie’s matchups are completely retarded, you still see actively doing a lot of work in a match and that he clearly put in the work to learn the character.

When you see a (vanilla mostly) wolverine player call drones and Crossup slash -> berserker charge over and over until it works and then do a character kill combo, you get kind of tight because he literally did 0 thinking, and the whole thing required 0 effort to learn -I’ve literally taught five year olds how to play vanilla Wolverine Sent Akuma well enough to beat full grown men who actually play marvel 3 all the time-

#11

Holy shit more prodigies! Humanity is blessed with new amazing talents with each passing day!

#12

Seriously? Meter management, floaty mobility without it, boring and methodical zoning AND rushdown while fighting her.
There’s not much fear or excitement when you know exactly her plan is but it requires baiting and twitch reactions to stop. God I looooved easy situational unblockables.

#13

If you’re trying to mask one aspect of an element in a game by replacing it with another that’s just silly design. Also trying to say devs deliberately go about making a char broken then masking it with hard combos and setups is a bit of a stretch.

#14

I could program a lego robot to play team noah or team mike ross.

#15

There is no justification for a broken character. broken is broken.

#16

high execution should be a reward for stronger tools, not to gain an unbeatable character.

#17

coughC,VIPERcough

#18

“it’s to easy”
“anyone can do it”
“That’s why I don’t play these new games”

Been hearing this since sf4 dropped.

#19

This is the supercomputer that Capcom uses to balance their games.

#20

magneto is nowhere near as stupid as phoenix or as easy as wolverine. and his low health balanced him out, so he wasnt broken or overpowered by any means