Oh boy, a thread where I get to make a big ol' post about why *IM* right.
So! Before we get into this I want to say I absolutely love the concept of customizable variations and being able to really make your character the way you want them to be. With that being said, here's why that should probably never happen.
Firstly, balancing nightmare. Now I've seen a lot of arguments against this, even in this thread I've seen some solid arguments. They usually range very similar, Team games had this level of customization and did fine, Tekken moveslists being huge, other games in other genres doing it and being fine. To an extent, I understand all these arguments and get the logic of them but theres a few issues I have with them. Team games are HORRIBLY imbalanced. Not a single one is a balanced game in any aspect, from the falling apart at the seams MvC2 to the modern day examples like DBFZ, Team games just arent balanced and arent supposed to be. They are also the most customization you can usually have in a fighting game so as far as the "customizing in FGs" is concerned, the balancing is always sacrificed for it. With the Tekken moveslist argument that I've also weirdly heard a lot, less than the team argument but more than I would have ever expected, most moves in a Tekken moveslist are just basically whatever. A character will consist of a couple good moves and will ignore a large chunk of their moves as a result of focusing on those moves. This is absolutely something that would happen in MK11 and actually literally did happen in the custom moves. How many Kabals did you see use his parry or spin? Did you even know he HAD a parry or spin? Lastly the whole "other games have done it." Other games...arent FGs? I feel like that's pretty on the nose, they're just different and it's like comparing apples to oranges. I know this section might sound like a subtweet-esque tactic since multiple people in this thread have had these arguments but all this really is stuff I've heard in other places.
So what if we throw the balancing idea out the window? Like team fighters do, what if we embrace the chaos and simply say "go do the thing guys" this is where things get a bit more concerning to me than balance and that's the "why play any other character when *blank* exists" pops up. You could argue that with preset variations, this problem could arise as well and to an extent you'd be correct but acknowledge how much this would exacerbate the problem. Simply put, the possibility of there being one build on one character that just dominates everything and never needs changing is a lot higher than one variation preset by the dev's doing the same thing. The potential of this system absolutely killing any semblance of watch ability for the game or even the desire to play it, is astronomical. In a roster of 5 we already found this occurring with every Kabal being the same, every Skarlet was mostly the same, and so on and so forth. Scorpion was the biggest perpetrator of this because without sin Blade he became so...whatever.
In short I love customizability so much. I love the idea of building your character the way you want it to be and really shining through that way as a player but the cost to balance and more importantly the potential cost to character depth and variety within the competitive scene.
I've always been a strong proprietor of the idea that limitations drive creativity and this really isnt different, we got through MKX. This really isnt that different.
You raise a lot of good points. But wouldn't a lot of your points be true about preset variations? For example, if we couldn't customize Scorpion's load out, wouldn't the majority of Scorpion's still have picked whichever preset variation had misery blade?
A lot of the sameness we saw across characters in the beta would be true if only presets were allowed, and was probably more due to lack of balance in the beta. Which is totally excusable because it's a beta and an old build.
But I agree that players will likely discover an "optimal" variation over time, and that will be true regardless of whether we get preset or custom variations in ranked/tournament play. That happens in nearly every game with customizable options: Magic the Gathering, Overwatch team compositions, Starcraft build orders, MvC3 assist selections. Some call this an illusion of choice, but oddly the solution that some developers pick to avoid "illusion of choice" is to remove choices entirely, as if that makes their game somehow more fun and interesting. World of Warcraft did that, and their player base dropped to a fraction of what is was before they implemented to those changes.
Other developers take a smarter approach. They recognize that part of the game is learning and discovering the meta. Whoever can decipher the meta first and discover an "optimal" load out gets an advantage. But then, thanks to a decent variety of choices, someone else discovers an "optimal" answer to the new meta, and then someone else discovers an "optimal" answer to that other "optimal" answer, and the meta evolves over months or years until it stagnates. And then the developer mixes up the meta by rebalancing, adding new abilities, new characters, new cards, etc. depending on the game type.
This meta development occurs regardless of custom variations, preset variations, or no variations. Even if there's a single "load out" per character, such as in MK9, I2, most other fighting games, then the meta will be about sorting out top tier characters and unviable characters. In MKX, Kitana - who had weak mixups in a game heavily favoring 50/50s - was slept on until Kitana Prime discovered some good tech which Sonic Fox then built on, and by realizing her potential earlier than others it gave Sonic Fox an advantage.
But here's the rub: meta's reach the end of their evolution earlier when options are few, and the game grows stale faster. Give each character one variation, and the meta can peak quickly. Sure, you can add a new character, but that alters 1/30th of the game, and the meta shifts a bit but rapidly reaches equilibrium once again.
On the other hand, give players more choices, and more rebalancing levers to the developers, such as altering move slot costs, move dependencies or conflicts (i.e. moves than can only be used with other moves or not with other movers), and the meta will a) take much longer before it's "solved", and b) can be refreshed much more easily by the developer, breathing new life into the game.
And yes, this isn't easy. There's a reason why LoL's and DOTA's success hasn't been easily copied. Why MtG has remained dominant since the 1990's. There's a skill barrier among developers to get this right. Those who do and embrace the role of the meta create a game that can dominate for decades.
