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Discussion Patches overwhelmingly help NRS games not hurt them

Do you think NRS patching strategy is much better this time?

  • Yes

    Votes: 74 60.2%
  • No

    Votes: 36 29.3%
  • In between overeall

    Votes: 13 10.6%

  • Total voters
    123
I can't believe people are actually complaining about patches. All of my mains have been nerfed multiple times yet I love a new patch. Games aren't as simple as finding a few testers to come to some conclusion. Once you release a game to the public you go from a few testers to millions and the possibilities are endless!

I have a bunch of videos now which are no longer valid on my channel. Guess what? I put annotations stating exactly that. No harm, no foul. Goes right into the archives.
 

Slips

Feared by dragons. Desired by virgins.
Viscant's and old school player, of Capcom games. We're used to having to deal with broken shit spending years building a meta around it (and in some cases, rejecting attempts to balance or fix the broken shit).

As he mentioned, the part he enjoys the most is the way the meta develops, when people find busted stuff and eventually, somewhere down the line. Jay comes from the Marvel games, so he's had a background of having to do this for over a decade. So for him, and many other old school players, you can't just say that something is broken or cannot be "figured" out of a week or even a month of play (no matter how many players are playing the game). Prior experience has shown them otherwise.
I'm an old school player too. I played Tekken hardcore for 10+ years and it sucks knowing that after about a year of putting in a bunch of work with mid to upper mid tier characters you'll be irrelevant in tournaments because the top tier are on another level.

Old school games were broke as fuck. Can we stop acting like 3rd Strike being a 5 character game was a good thing? Can we stop acting like MvC2 was a masterpiece despite it being one of the most unbalanced fighting games ever made? Even my own personal favorite game of all-time, TTT1, and is widely considered the best of the franchise, I acknowledge in the end was a pile because if you didn't play with Ogres, Mishimas, Changs or Bruce, you pretty much had no chance.

We are in the FUTURE people. Devs can now fix balance on the fly and we are acting like it's a BAD thing. I just can't fathom how out of date this way of thinking is. NRS is doing something progressive and is getting blasted by old school players because it's not what they're used to. gtfoh.

Progression is a good thing. It pretty much always is. From democratic governments, to women's rights, to freeing the slaves, to universal healthcare, to same sex marriage, and to patching a god damn video game because some characters are clearly unbalanced. Get with the program everyone. Jesus.
 
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ColdBoreMK23

Noob Saibot
I think they're doing a great job with the patches.

Now if they can just fix the online and bring it up to date it would be nice. Considering KI and even SF4 have great online.
 

THTB

Arez | Booya | Riu48 - Rest Easy, Friends
I'm an old school player too. I played Tekken hardcore for 10+ years and it sucks knowing that after about a year of putting in a bunch of work with mid to upper mid tier characters you'll be irrelevant in tournaments because the top tier are on another level.

Old school games were broke as fuck. Can we stop acting like 3rd Strike being a 5 character game was a good thing? Can we stop acting like MvC2 was a masterpiece despite it being one of the most unbalanced fighting games ever made? Even my own personal favorite game of all-time, TTT1, and is widely considered the best of the franchise, I acknowledge in the end was a pile because if you didn't play with Ogres, Mishimas, Changs or Bruce, you pretty much had no chance.

We are in the FUTURE people. Devs can now fix balance on the fly and we are acting like it's a BAD thing. I just can' fathom out of date this way of thinking is. NRS is doing something progressive and is getting blasted by old school players because it's not what they're used to. gtfoh.

Progression is a good thing. It pretty much always is. From democratic governments, to women's rights, to freeing the slaves, to universal healthcare, to same sex marriage, and to patching a god damn video game because some characters are clearly unbalanced. Get with the program everyone. Jesus.
 

THTB

Arez | Booya | Riu48 - Rest Easy, Friends
What Slips said also brings me to this. Had this technology been around all those years ago, people would likely be singing a different tune.
 

haketh

Noob
We are in the FUTURE people. Devs can now fix balance on the fly and we are acting like it's a BAD thing. I just can' fathom out of date this way of thinking is. NRS is doing something progressive and is getting blasted by old school players because it's not what they're used to. gtfoh.
It's getting blasted because they do it horribly. KI & Skullgirls do not get ANYWHERE near the flack NRS gets. They still get some but unlike NRS they don't get the disdain becuase no changes re hidden, no changes are sprung on the community out of nowhere, & they're completely transparent & don't just do it because people are whining.
 

Mortal Komhat

Worst Well-Established Goro Player Ever
haketh I'm usually with you on most shit but that's not what people are saying here - they're literally saying they need to stop patches until XYZ rando date in the future (usually 6 months, a year, etc.) when that's completely unrealistic considering the nature of working for a publishing house like WB.

They have a plan, they have to stick to it - especially since most of the patches we've gotten were tied to either DLC being released or compat packs for that DLC. Same deal here since we got Tremor compat.
 

haketh

Noob
haketh I'm usually with you on most shit but that's not what people are saying here - they're literally saying they need to stop patches until XYZ rando date in the future (usually 6 months, a year, etc.) when that's completely unrealistic considering the nature of working for a publishing house like WB.

They have a plan, they have to stick to it - especially since most of the patches we've gotten were tied to either DLC being released or compat packs for that DLC. Same deal here since we got Tremor compat.
We know the plan, we know why it has the plan, we just don't like it
 
This.

I really like Ultra David. Per @General M2Dave's criteria, he's a contributor, and he is.

But, after mocking those who defend NRS' patching style on twitter, he actually goes on to claim that the removal of Cyrax's command grab bomb trap is why he quit playing Mortal Kombat 9. I mean, if that's the mind-set and logic we're dealing with, I'd rather take frequent patches any day of the week.
It's true, I liked Cyrax because he had options no one else had. Traps and a useful command grab? Sick, that's like the perfect combination of the two things I look for in fighting games. So when part of that got nerfed, I got less interested, shrug. But on top of that I was trying to play SF4 and MvC3 at the same time, so following changes in MK9 was hard for me. Learning one fighting game already takes a lot of time even without constant changes, so trying to play 3 very different games while one of them was changing all the time wasn't really doable for me. I thought it was sad because I preferred MK9 over MvC3, but MvC3 wasn't changing, so I could be sure that any time I spent learning things in it would still be valuable the next time I picked it up. And so I dropped MK9! Most of my local scene dropped it too, many of them because of the patching as well.

When it comes to patching in IGAU or MKX, the problem isn't whether the game gets better or worse. For sure Injustice ended up better after its patches! But along the way it lost a ton of interested players, many of whom were multi-game players who couldn't or didn't want to have to relearn things all the time. I feel like MKX patching has been a bit more haphazard so far, really more about just juggling tiers, but I'm not necessarily opposed to them either.

What I really hate in strategy games like fighting games is uncertainty, much more than I hate bad matchups or overpowered options. And uncertainty is I guess what NRS games are all about in their early lives: you can't know what's going to change when or for what reason. I enjoy the discovery phase in fighting games, but really what I want to do is get into the long term strategic phase that I feel is so fascinating. But with NRS games I feel stuck in discovery for the first half year, like I'm constantly having to relearn and re-experiment. I feel like I'll never get a chance to actually master MKX because NRS won't let me.

If they'd laid any ground rules, it might be better. If they said we're going to patch and here's our patch schedule, and we'll be looking to change this sort of thing or that sort of thing, and we're going to let people test first, or whatever, it would be easier to swallow. But these unannounced unscheduled patches with no public justifications and sometimes strange buffs, nerfs, and omissions, I don't know. I don't know if I can deal with that for much longer.
 
I'm an old school player too. I played Tekken hardcore for 10+ years and it sucks knowing that after about a year of putting in a bunch of work with mid to upper mid tier characters you'll be irrelevant in tournaments because the top tier are on another level.

Old school games were broke as fuck. Can we stop acting like 3rd Strike being a 5 character game was a good thing? Can we stop acting like MvC2 was a masterpiece despite it being one of the most unbalanced fighting games ever made? Even my own personal favorite game of all-time, TTT1, and is widely considered the best of the franchise, I acknowledge in the end was a pile because if you didn't play with Ogres, Mishimas, Changs or Bruce, you pretty much had no chance.

We are in the FUTURE people. Devs can now fix balance on the fly and we are acting like it's a BAD thing. I just can' fathom out of date this way of thinking is. NRS is doing something progressive and is getting blasted by old school players because it's not what they're used to. gtfoh.

Progression is a good thing. It pretty much always is. From democratic governments, to women's rights, to freeing the slaves, to universal healthcare, to same sex marriage, and to patching a god damn video game because some characters are clearly unbalanced. Get with the program everyone. Jesus.
Players need the chance to find their own solutions. If solutions are never found, fine, help them out. But it's hard for me to maintain interest when what's interesting to me is finding my way through the strategy with the tools given to me or, better yet, found and exploited by me.
 

rev0lver

Come On Die Young
It's true, I liked Cyrax because he had options no one else had. Traps and a useful command grab? Sick, that's like the perfect combination of the two things I look for in fighting games. So when part of that got nerfed, I got less interested, shrug. But on top of that I was trying to play SF4 and MvC3 at the same time, so following changes in MK9 was hard for me. Learning one fighting game already takes a lot of time even without constant changes, so trying to play 3 very different games while one of them was changing all the time wasn't really doable for me. I thought it was sad because I preferred MK9 over MvC3, but MvC3 wasn't changing, so I could be sure that any time I spent learning things in it would still be valuable the next time I picked it up. And so I dropped MK9! Most of my local scene dropped it too, many of them because of the patching as well.

When it comes to patching in IGAU or MKX, the problem isn't whether the game gets better or worse. For sure Injustice ended up better after its patches! But along the way it lost a ton of interested players, many of whom were multi-game players who couldn't or didn't want to have to relearn things all the time. I feel like MKX patching has been a bit more haphazard so far, really more about just juggling tiers, but I'm not necessarily opposed to them either.
So you want broken vanilla shit to stay for a year so you can not practice and still do well, instead of NRS trying to balance the game for people who invest time in it and are frustrated by this broken shit
 
So you want broken vanilla shit to stay for a year so you can not practice and still do well, instead of NRS trying to balance the game for people who invest time in it and are frustrated by this broken shit
Practice is different from relearning. Of course I want to practice, and get better, and learn. I don't want to have to re-learn. And I'm not even concerned about whether this is good or bad for my characters: I didn't call for nerfs to Cyrax or buffs to Bane and I'm not calling for buffs to Kano, Kotal, or Goro or nerfs to any of their bad matchups now. I feel a bit cheated now that I won't get to grind out Goro v prepatch Tanya anymore because I thought I'd worked out some good potential solutions that I had yet to test, but now they're irrelevant. I want the chance to figure things out.
 

haketh

Noob
So you want broken vanilla shit to stay for a year so you can not practice and still do well, instead of NRS trying to balance the game for people who invest time in it and are frustrated by this broken shit
Did you purposefully go out of your way to not understand what he said.

Fuck I really wish the PC version wasn't ass so we coulda have had a beta serve like Skullgirls did, I feel the patches would be better received if A. we had a place to test them out & B. having a test server would mean people would have a better idea of when stuff is coming.
 

rev0lver

Come On Die Young
Practice is different from relearning. Of course I want to practice, and get better, and learn. I don't want to have to re-learn. And I'm not even concerned about whether this is good or bad for my characters: I didn't call for nerfs to Cyrax or buffs to Bane and I'm not calling for buffs to Kano, Kotal, or Goro or nerfs to any of their bad matchups now. I feel a bit cheated now that I won't get to grind out Goro v prepatch Tanya anymore because I thought I'd worked out some good potential solutions that I had yet to test, but now they're irrelevant. I want the chance to figure things out.
That matchup was probably ass lol. In situations like this it's almost always either some real breakthrough tech is discovered that evens things out or flips things around (rare) or the matchup is still ass. Historically with MKX patches, with few exceptions, these kinds of things would end up being worse in retrospect. I don't want to imagine fighting vanilla superman with vanilla lex after 2 years of meta development, despite how much I worked on the matchup.

Now, maybe you+others could've really figured something out against Tanya. But the likelihood that most top players of this game see is that Tanya would still keep dominating. With keeping things as they were, you run the risk of the game continuing to be top-heavy, uninteresting, and unfun, which is exactly how Injustice was two years ago at the game's biggest showcase.
 

rev0lver

Come On Die Young
Did you purposefully go out of your way to not understand what he said.

Fuck I really wish the PC version wasn't ass so we coulda have had a beta serve like Skullgirls did, I feel the patches would be better received if A. we had a place to test them out & B. having a test server would mean people would have a better idea of when stuff is coming.
No I'm responding to that specific argument, I'm not responding to you
 

Slips

Feared by dragons. Desired by virgins.
Players need the chance to find their own solutions. If solutions are never found, fine, help them out. But it's hard for me to maintain interest when what's interesting to me is finding my way through the strategy with the tools given to me or, better yet, found and exploited by me.
We tried that in Injustice and Superman and Black Adam almost killed the entire game. Injustice was on life support until the balance patch happened. This isn't like old times where it took years to figure out the intricacies and nuances of a game because we didn't know the frame data or didn't know how certain moves worked. Sometimes it's pretty obvious when something is overpowered. Kung Jin with his footsies doing over 30% meterless with advantage + launching armor is simply too much. And it's obvious.

Not to sound arrogant, but we've been playing NRS games for the past 5 years, we know how our game's work probably better than Viscant or Justin or anyone else. It just feels a little condescending when most of NRS's players fully support and anticipate patches that we know will help our game thrive but then for our game to be shot down from players outside of our community saying NRS shouldn't change the game because they haven't had a chance to flesh it out in their spare time yet and they probably know best.

It's ok to reminisce about how things were done in the past and stand proud about how we did them, but the flow of information now and experience allows us to see pretty clearly what is over-powered and what is tolerable in fighting games these days.
 
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We tried that in Injustice and Superman and Black Adam almost killed the entire game. Injustice was on life support until the balance patch happened.
I don't feel like anything in MKX approaches how stupid & boring and dominant prepatch Superman was. The closest is prepatch Tanya but there's no way she was as good as Superman and in any case she's at least not boring. NRS learned some good lessons about charter design and balance from Injustice that it applied reasonably well to launch state MKX. But it hasn't learned about patches alienating potential players I guess.

I can tell you this, however many people were turned off by prepatch Superman etc, at least as many were turned off by overpatching. Now in MKX, there really aren't any boring over-dominant characters to turn people off, but the overpatching is still there turning as many people off as ever.

Anyway, again, not necessarily opposed to patching. But patching frequently, with no schedule, with no public justifications, with no warning, with no info as to whether even patching will continue or end tomorrow? That turns a lot of people off, and it's a big part of why MKX will go back to being a niche game competitively and why NRS games in general always seem smaller than their excellent gameplay might allow.
 

mkl

Poopbutt.
If they were small fixes to blatantly obvious and gross looking strategies it would be fine. NRS choose to patch games from top to bottom to try to balance all the characters at the same time and frankly they're not very good at that. Puzzling changes, overbuffs, overnerfs, useless changes, far outnumber the actually necessary changes and that's the reason why players get annoyed with the patches. Especially when they come from other games with a stable meta. As UltraDavid said, if there were scheduled patches with more reasoning behind their thought process it would be different.
 

Ashenar

Just a slightly above average player.....
I don't feel like anything in MKX approaches how stupid & boring and dominant prepatch Superman was. The closest is prepatch Tanya but there's no way she was as good as Superman and in any case she's at least not boring. NRS learned some good lessons about charter design and balance from Injustice that it applied reasonably well to launch state MKX. But it hasn't learned about patches alienating potential players I guess.

I can tell you this, however many people were turned off by prepatch Superman etc, at least as many were turned off by overpatching. Now in MKX, there really aren't any boring over-dominant characters to turn people off, but the overpatching is still there turning as many people off as ever.

Anyway, again, not necessarily opposed to patching. But patching frequently, with no schedule, with no public justifications, with no warning, with no info as to whether even patching will continue or end tomorrow? That turns a lot of people off, and it's a big part of why MKX will go back to being a niche game competitively and why NRS games in general always seem smaller than their excellent gameplay might allow.
I wouldn't be opposed to there being no more balance patches for the next 2-3 months at this point. What do you feel about that ?
 

d3v

SRK
I'm an old school player too. I played Tekken hardcore for 10+ years and it sucks knowing that after about a year of putting in a bunch of work with mid to upper mid tier characters you'll be irrelevant in tournaments because the top tier are on another level.

Old school games were broke as fuck. Can we stop acting like 3rd Strike being a 5 character game was a good thing? Can we stop acting like MvC2 was a masterpiece despite it being one of the most unbalanced fighting games ever made? Even my own personal favorite game of all-time, TTT1, and is widely considered the best of the franchise, I acknowledge in the end was a pile because if you didn't play with Ogres, Mishimas, Changs or Bruce, you pretty much had no chance.

We are in the FUTURE people. Devs can now fix balance on the fly and we are acting like it's a BAD thing. I just can' fathom out of date this way of thinking is. NRS is doing something progressive and is getting blasted by old school players because it's not what they're used to. gtfoh.

Progression is a good thing. It pretty much always is. From democratic governments, to women's rights, to freeing the slaves, to universal healthcare, to same sex marriage, and to patching a god damn video game because some characters are clearly unbalanced. Get with the program everyone. Jesus.
Patching is fine once the game actually has been explored and the meta fleshed out after a long period of continuous play. Patching after a week? Fuck no.

What we have now is alot of hindsight, hindsight that tells us that you can't makes changes that quickly. That what seems hella broken at first isn't always as bad as you think it was.

Look at vanilla SFIV. Everybody goes around about how bad vanilla Sagat was, yet alot of people in the know acknowledge that Akuma was the real threat. Not only that, thanks to what we know now, we can see that, had the game continued, Cammy would have moved up (she already was favorable against Akuma) and that Gen, with how good his cross up shenanigans were in vanilla, would have simply run the game. Yet all that was never figured out in the year and 2 months that SFIV was out on console (let along arcade). And took people looking back at the game and analyizing stuff to figure it out.

Additionally, hindsight also taught us that balance and/or not being broken does not equal quality. Take a look at the sad fate of Marvel vs. Street Fighter. Here's a game where Capcom did their best to address every broken, infinite combo scenario in previous games, yet nobody loves that game. People figured out that the game was boring as fuck. Just about everyone not named Wolvering or Omega Red had to run the same game.

And as for Marvel 2, you gotta be kidding me if you think that nerfing Mags, Storm, and Sent, keeping them from running the stuff they could do would have actually made the game any better. At worse, any changes done to them would have cut the game's life short since as the shit that made them broken is exactly what started to push that game's meta forward into what it is today.

For alot of old school thinkers within the community, what matter more than balance and the number of viable characters, is having interesting match ups, no matter how skewed they may be. Alot of stuff has already been written about this by guys like S-kill or Maj (both of whom have, interestingly enough, taken up game design jobs at one point or another).
Seth Killian said:
Because fighting game characters (as individuals) lack the complexity of a set of chessmen, establishing a background of "sameness" in fighting games is for these reasons, usually a disaster. Witness games like the later Mortal Kombat installments, KI2- true dogs of the fighting game world. In an MK-style game, even though you have a lot of characters, they all play in a depressingly similar fashion. Everyone has the same basic moves and options. The difference between them (aside from their different heads, and cool "personalities") boils down to some characters simply having better versions of that same set of moves. Whee! They also mix it up with "different" specials. Of course, these also fall into depressingly similar categories (the crummy projectile, the teleport punch, etc.), and of the ones that arent uselessly suicidal, there are some that are just obviously better than the rest. The characters that end up being the winners are the ones with the best versions of what everyone else has too. This leads to a terribly flat game, and while it may seem "balanced", its not actually an improvement- everything is just dumbed-down. Ironically, these simplistic attempts at balance, while intended to help the game, end up hurting it by making all the characters that much less interesting. It merely forces you to play in a far more restricted manner, to squeeze that tiny margin of superiority out of your remarkably similar moves.

This is a waste of time, and is at odds with the basic motivation for having had different characters in the first place. Why have a lot of characters when they all play the same way? Better to simply have a few (or even one) far more developed characters. Chess trades multiple characters for incredible depth in one, and though theres nothing wrong with that (ask me about my idealized "All Ryu v Ryu" SF4), thats not what the scrub actually wants, nor is it commercially viable.

Down to your last wish, scrubby! If he wises up here, he should realize that he shouldnt be wishing for "balance" (in any simple sense of the word) at all. What he should wish is for truly varied characters, none of whom is so weak so as to necessarily lose in boring ways. You dont need to focus on avoiding powerful characters- you just want to keep everyone interesting. I call this "meta-balance".

SSF2T provides an excellent example of this type of meta-balance. In a "normally balanced" game, the possible opposing sides are identical, or at least functionally very similar, and of course, everyone has a roughly similar chance to win. Does everyone have a roughly equal chance to win in ST? No way. Are there stronger and weaker characters? You bet. Theres quite a bit of distance between first and last place on the rankings chart. However, look at what you get in the trade: the characters in ST are genuinely different- very few play in ways that are at all similar. Each has distinct strengths. This is cool on its own (real variety is more fun), but adds even more in another way- the relative importance of each of their individual strengths varies from matchup to matchup. This is how genuinely different characters really repay the effort that their design requires- with real depth. Being good at a meta-balanced game doesnt entail just mastering some characters gimmick, then repeating it all day, come what may. Instead, you have to understand their strengths *in relation* to those of the other, different characters. Youll often need entirely different tactics against different opponents, even though youre playing the same character throughout. Chun Li, under some circumstances is best played as a keep-away turtle, in others wants to rush you down, doing anything she can to avoid being pushed back, and in still others, somewhere between these two extremes. This is how you get a game that stays interesting and becomes deeper with time, instead of a quickly-won race to discover whos stupid version of the same generic attack cant be retaliated against, and is therefore the champion.
Maj said:
When you introduce a third character, the number of matchups triples. Now when you institute an upgrade, you have to cautiously strengthen two potential rivals to that exact same degree, then compare them with each other to make sure their matchup doesn’t suffer. Every minor tweak can snowball into a series of adjustments echoing back and forth. We’re still talking about three characters here. Well, if you have a cast of 56 diverse characters to balance, you’re basically screwed. Nobody’s that smart.

Clearly, demanding 20+ evenly matched characters is an unrealistic expectation. What would be considered a reasonable number? Looking through the Classics, i’d say any “good” fighting game with a legitimate top tier of four or more characters is perfectly acceptable.

The real question is, at what point do tier rankings factor into the perceived value of a game? Certainly they don’t matter in the beginning, because early impressions almost always turn out laughably inaccurate. It takes everyone three to six months to grasp the game’s true nature. Is it offensive? Defensive? Structured? Chaotic? Technical? Intuitive? Tactical? Instinctive?

If we’re lucky enough to find a deep, rewarding game on our hands, the next step is running it through the tournament gauntlet to ensure it doesn’t degenerate into a one- or two-character affair. As long as its top tier holds steady at four or more characters and the game itself doesn’t break down into abusing one narrow tactic, it can survive indefinitely as a competitive mainstay. This is a proven fact, because numerous such games have thrived for nearly a decade in the tournament circuit, until a sequel or upgrade was released.
This is why we're often at odds with alot of the new players who're quick to call for patches on everything. We don't want a balanced game if it comes at the cost of the game being interesting. We don't want patches if they's just kneejerk reactions to nerf stuff just because people think having a character be "over-represented" at a tournament is a bad thing.