Health bars are not a bad idea in and of themselves, but it's not something that I like to see in games. It opens a Pandora's Box of issues for game devs and us as well. As you guys mentioned in the podcast, there is no way that a designer can possibly know the tier lists when they are making the game outside of how they see them when designing the characters. They can't possibly foresee the unique uses we may come up with after 3, 6, 12 or even 48 months of gameplay and testing. So setting the health bars based on tiers will be yet another point that developer and gamer won't agree on.
Also too, remember that the games you cited as examples are Japanese-designed with their ideas, cultural influences and social biases. Some of those social biases do extend to the genders. For example, I play vanilla MvC3
very casually and my team is She Hulk, Storm, Chun Li. Now I don't have the specific numbers, but a buddy of mine that played Marvel competitively said that that was actually a pretty good team other than the fact that it has little hit points. They generally seem to set the hit points based on character concept. Like Zangief has the most hp because he is big and strong and Chun Li has some of the lower hp because she's fast (and pssst. Don't tell anyone but she has the bewbz too). So I could see NRS designing this game and still giving Superman the most HP because, well, he's Superman. Doomsday, Bane, same thing. Sinestro, Deathstroke, et al, would be lower because they zone. Catwoman, HawkGirl, Killer Frost would get the least because they can do massive damage once they get in and we gave them excellent tools to do that (and they haz the bewbz shhhhh).
The control preset issue hit me as well @EVO. What happened to me was, my opponent decided to change the Set 1 controls forcing me to change to Set 2. I set my buttons, saved my preset and selected my character. Apparently, Set 2 did stay to what I had set it to BUT when I went into the match, the game defaulted me to Set 1. I firmly believe I lost that set because of the added stress and aggravation that little fuck up caused (it was against that scrubby Grundy player I was telling you about
AK Pig Of The Hut).
As far as the hype at EVO, I think a lot of it (for both Injustice players and non) was the 2 days of mainly 3-5 characters. I mean, during top 8, it got to a point where even I couldn't defend our game anymore and the Capcom guys sitting behind me laughed their asses off when I screamed for someone to pull out Scorpion. From where I was sitting, people were actually cheering when KDZ did f23 Breath simply because it wasn't jump back Eye Laser any more. I'm not knocking KDZ at all. He did the right thing and played to win. For me, I take this as a challenge to level up my game so that we either see less Supermen or at the very least force Supermen players to do more. I hope more people develop this attitude. Superman is tuff no question, but he is beatable.