Addressing Slips's points
1.
“I know back in the MvC2 days this would be a valid argument because she'd have a counter and that is his sense of balance “
If it was just one character, fine. But Tempest KL did well against her also, seemed like it was a better match than Sub's match against her. Some Tanya players previously complained about Scorpion and Ermac. Personally I thought those complaints weren't warranted but eh, what do I know. She'd been out less than a month before the nerf bat whacked her upside the head. As I've already shown you, it takes years to actually know what a matchup is going to look like at high level. Who's to say what the matchups actually would have ended up being. And think about it, most people only had access to her for a couple weeks before the pre-CEO nerf. Did the best Scorpion and Ermac players in the world play the match out against the best Tanyas yet? What if some of her dominance was just general unfamiliarity and people would have figured it out in time? Again I point out that she was only generally available for THREE WEEKS before she was deemed the greatest and most dangerous thing ever. You don't know what would have happened with her if she was allowed to breathe and now we never will know that.
For one thing I'm sure the best Scorpion we've seen so far (MIT) has played REO's Tanya down at Yomi. And it looks like he'd rather play the mirror.
So Sub, characters with really good mobility tools, and possibly the #2 character might have been fine against Tanya. Where did that leave everyone else? As I've said before, we can understand how some patched matchups would've ended up without patches after years of mk9+injustice. Because some things in NRS games especially have pretty easy-to-understand counters. Either you have a hard counter, a read-based counter, or you're at an extreme disadvantage against something. Most of what we want patched involves things where most characters are in the third category. The second category is something I understand after years of playing a lesser character at a high level, and that's when there's debate in the patches, depending on the risk-reward levels of potential counters.
That's why Slips made the point of "maybe we'll find some glitch that lets us deal with something", because sometimes there's nothing we can just figure out with work.
“Balance is being able to pick whatever character you want and have a reasonable chance to beat any character picked against you “
I'd like that too. I'd also like a pony and an ice cream cone.
It's unrealistic and childish to think any fighting game can achieve that. It's just not possible. SFAE2012 was is possibly the best balanced modern fighting game ever and still had a handful of characters generally assumed to be useless (lucky me, I played Blanka and Dee Jay, 2 out of the bottom 4). By your definition that game wasn't balanced. That's why your definition is ridiculous. Incidentally as I pointed out in my first post, Dudley was in that group until Smug came along. So I mean...
As stated before in this thread, Injustice was actually one of the most balanced games in a while after the final patch. One final small patch down the line would've made it amazing. We had two bottom 10 characters in the top 8 at Evo 2014. In fact, every character except maybe Joker and Cyborg made major noise at some point.
Let's look at the probable bottom 10 (not listing this in order I don't want to argue tier lists lol) -
Catwoman - top 8 at Evo, top 3 at MLG, Final Round, I think UFGT?
Shazam - Won Texas Showdown, top 8 at CEO, 9th at Evo
Green Arrow - Top 8 at CEO 2014, WB 2015, multiple top 8's prepatch
Ares - Top 8 Civil War (I think), DTN, multiple top 16's
Scorpion - not much post-patch I remember
Joker - nothing major
Cyborg - nothing major
Hawkgirl - Won NEC 2013, top 8 at KIT and Evo last year
Harley - Top 3 KIT 2014, top 8 Summer Jam (I think there was another? sorry for forgetting)
Grundy - Top 8 NEC 2013, top 8 MLG, WCW
Every character above that, whether you disagree with this bottom 10 or not, has a major top 8 showing or at least close to it (I believe all have made top 8s). Considering how crazy of a game it was in its mechanics, that's a pretty good achievement.
We're not asking for 5-5's across the board. We just don't want a super top-heavy game, which is where MKX was likely headed.
Also it's bad game design to prioritize character balance over strategic balance. History has shown us that people will put up with games with mediocre or even horrendous character balance as long as there's balance among strategic styles. By the percentages, MvC2 is one of the worst balanced games of all time. Sentinel beats about 40 out of 56 characters just by flying backwards and hitting buttons. It's also one of the most beloved fighting games ever because there's so much you can do in the game with a rich strategic balance. The fact that Hayato/Roll/Amingo can't compete means nothing to the players.
I think we can just agree to disagree on that. Maybe that's the main problem here. But I don't think that would be a game that could continue to grow in the modern era, because people like variety. People like to play the characters they like, and when doing so is pointless it can really turn some people off. Sonicfox, undoubtedly one of our greatest players, switched to Tanya because there was no point in playing Erron Black (a very good character) with her in the game. And that sucks. As great as their matches can be, a lot of people don't want to just watch DJT's Lao vs Tanya over and over again. Even if everyone picked up those two characters, I highly disagree that it would be better for the game.
I was actually a huge stream monster for Marvel for a long time. Sometimes I'd even skip watching an NRS game's pools to watch it when I'm not at the tournament. But the game's been falling because shit's been incredibly stale and there's no hope for an update. I don't even know who won CEO this year, because I'm sick of seeing Morridoom, Zero, Vergil, etc no matter how high level the play is. Jan is a breath of fresh air just because he plays a MID TIER team. That's insane, it's not interesting, and it's not a game most of us want to play long-term.
“Maybe 3 years from now we'll find a glitch where you can use a just frame block breaker with no meter on the 13th frame of block stun that the devs didn't know about and it'll all be ok. Lets wait and see”
3 years? It took SonicFox roughly 90 minutes real time without any training mode or coaching to go from “it looks like I have no idea what to do against this” to “beating DJT's Cage to the point where he had to switch Kung Lao at the end of grand finals”. All with a character that YOU YOURSELF said “could do next to nothing” in that matchup. Something's not adding up here!
I don't remember exactly but wasn't Sonic just countering sometimes with armor? I know the other two he listed had armor moves+normals too slow to do anything.
“Actually, MK9 still had a decent following deep into Injustice's lifespan”
Stream numbers, entrant numbers and community interest at live events tell otherwise. It's like you think I didn't have occasion to monitor these things.
“Yes, UMvC3 and SFIV are still being played. They are still going. Why? Because there aren't any sequels to them released yet”
Injustice was as much a sequel to MK9 as MvC3 was to SF4. SF4 was 2.5 years deep into its lifespan when Marvel came out. SF4 carried on just fine. SF4 WAS a sequel to 3s/CvS2 but 3s carried on semi-competitively and even somewhat seriously in Japan. MvC3 took a lot of interest away from MvC2 but MvC2 still gets played in exhibition situations. Going to an even more apples to apples comparison, Soul Calibur 2 didn't kill off interest in Tekken 4 (you were there, you know that maybe it even should have, I sincerely regret the time I spent on T4). MvC2, 3s, GGAC all have a healthier scene now than Injustice does now despite those games being further away from their heyday than Injustice. Now either you think Injustice is an awful game (which you just said you didn't) or we're going to have to seriously consider why Injustice tailed off as hard as it did.
Both of those games actually held the third highest entrants at majors (behind SF and Marvel) pretty consistently. We're a relatively young competitive community, similar to KI, which is a main reason our numbers don't match them yet. Part of the reason we struggle to equal Capcom games is because of the 10+ years of strong competitive history Marvel+SF had before us. I'm not using that as an excuse, we just can't suddenly gain similar numbers of dedicated competitive players to match that. Injustice lost a lot of core players simply because it wasn't an MK game (let's be serious we have a lot of people who are just MK fanboys and just want to play MK whether it's good or bad). But it was still a strong scene. Despite all that, the quick releases are pretty much the reason we drop our previous games. I truly enjoyed Injustice, but I'd rather invest my time in MKX right now because it's the new thing and will naturally have more players because of that. That's fine if you disagree with that but I don't really think it's a knock on the games themselves.
You don't see a problem with that because of your ideology and affiliation. The overwhelming majority of competitive fighting gaming disagrees. Try to understand.
The majority of those disagreeing don't really play MKX or NRS games much. The overwhelming majority of those playing this game disagree with you. I think you have a disconnect because most of your peers are these guys picking up MKX as a side game. The type of strategies you're talking about btw still apply, it's just that you can do this or optimize your options better now. It doesn't require massive relearning.
But it isn't to the rest of us. And that's why the numbers are dropping and why they look to drop even further still. NRS makes great games, I just wish they'd treat them better and not drive the playerbase away.
I honestly think the biggest thing that's been driving people away from MKX is the fundamental gameplay. The 50/50's, lesser zoning options, and rushdown-heavy type of style. That's the understanding I've gotten from talking to a lot of people who were ready to devote themselves to this game. If anything, most of them only start to give it second chances
because of patches. That's fine if they don't like it, I'm going to keep playing regardless. But most of these guys complaining about the patches (and maybe you're truly not one of them) are doing so because they don't want to keep up with it, because they're not going to play it seriously anyway. Just like they stopped playing Persona, UNIEL, TTT2, KI, etc. This happens with every game, we knew some would drop off regardless. There's just an excuse they can give this time, as accusatory as that may sound. With many it's probably true. We mostly don't take them seriously because we know the patches are largely good.
But I doubt this game will die anytime soon. We just had a huge number of entrants at CEO and have over 1100 people registered for MKX at Evo. With MK9 and Injustice's history, we've seen we can hold our community strong after much weaker starts. If anything, our community's looking better than it's ever been. Sure, we probably won't get 1100 people next year, every game loses people, but will MKX be back next year? I dare you to say it won't. And it'll probably be a better game, too.
