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Do certain variations by nature HAVE to be bad?

FOXSOLID

Noob
Take a variation like Inferno Scorpion...on paper or in theory, this variation has angles covered all over...so to balance this out...you have to make all of those minions extremely unsafe on block. But what's the point? It's not a solid variation, but a gimmick. Why do they not think things through and create 3 variations that are worth using? Because at this point, Scorpion only has 2 variations...the 3rd is meant to troll the new or less skilled players.
 

CrimsonShadow

Administrator and Community Engineer
Administrator
When you try to design and perfectly balance a game, with a strict schedule, responsbilities, and a budget for developers, that is marketed to 99% regular people, you'll understand.
 

FOXSOLID

Noob
When you try to design and perfectly balance a game, with a strict schedule, responsbilities, and a budget for developers, that is marketed to 99% regular people, you'll understand.
How does that apply? I'm not in this business, Netherrealm is. I'm asking why create gimmicky variations because they look cool, but truly have no substance. It's a waste.
 

TwiztidOne

I don't know who that is...
How does that apply? I'm not in this business, Netherrealm is. I'm asking why create gimmicky variations because they look cool, but truly have no substance. It's a waste.
they create them because they get the casuals hyped up.. I'm pretty sure long time casual fans of mk went nuts when they saw scorpion summoning up his minions
 

omooba

fear the moobs
the variation has a lot of potential i think all variations do. it's just fucked up by frame data. i don't think there's any variation without a lot of potential. they just have a nasty problem that nrs didn't have enough time to fix
 

Eddy Wang

Skarlet scientist
Most of it, pretty sure some of these variations were though out, but then the meta changed since day 1, and such variation didn't received anything to compensate so a gigantic hole was created instead.

Inferno Scorpion on beta build was super good because scorpion had armor on teleport without being a wakeup, his teleport cancel didn't consumed stamina, so he had a pretty good mobility to rarely makes use of minions unless he opened people up, this compensated for the lack of the rest, but after the pre-vanilla (fatal 8 build) NRS gave tp cancels a full stamina consumption and then the armor from tp was only on wakeup.

Same example can be said with KL
He was slow as hell in walking, but didn't really matter that much since his spin had armor, he could challenge people trying to poke him out of pressure or on gaps as much as he could as long he had a bar, his hat hitbox was much bigger so his teleport was designed to arise further away.

But then, NRS nerfed the hat to the point that hitting ppl on the floor is pretty hard to do, TP hammer punch also became affected by the hat nerf so his tp into hammer punch also became harder to use, lost armor on spin and didn't got anything to compensate from that, became free to wakeups, poking etc.


One of things NRS needs to look at, is watching the whole spectrum, if you're going to heavily hit a character with a system change you need to see how that will affect the character meta, so being prepared to give characters things to keep them up to that meta its necessary.
 

Dankster Morgan

It is better this way
I agree, some variations get overshadowed even if they are good. Cryomancer is a good variation, there's just never a reason to use him over Grandmaster.
 
I don't think there's ever been a fighting game where all possible play styles are equally good. The games mechanics dictate what playstyles do well. The variation system is about diversity, not balance. Balance is overrated in fighting games imo, look at 3rd strike. Games broken all over and half the cast is unplayable but it's still the best fighting game ever.