THTB
Arez | Booya | Riu48 - Rest Easy, Friends
This will be a living OP, in which I shall add to it over time. Bear in mind, do not take what I am about to say as the law. It's not. It's merely a thread based on the ideas of one person, taken from his experiences and studies of the subject at hand. While it may match your ideas, it may not match others, and that's fine. The point of it all is to share ideas. So, without further ado, let's get started on this here post.
Introduction
Balance. I'm pretty sure everyone here has discussed balance at one point or another. Whether it's to complain about how broken a disliked character is, or how their favorite isn't strong enough. Or it could be how exactly to close the gap between top and bottom tier. What to nerf. What to buff. Things like that. When the time comes for a patch centered around roster balance, developers sometimes take feedback from the players themselves, whether it's by directly asking them or lurking on our forums to see what is shaping the balance of the game.Introduction
Doing a re-balance of the roster can be super difficult, because the act of balancing itself is a very delicate thing; there's a lot of things that can throw off the balance even more, even though the suggestions may seem favorable for the game at the time. So...when the time comes where our opinions will affect the future of the game's balance, how do we go about providing overall constructive feedback? Well, read on and we shall see.
So wait, how early is too early for this all???
A common opinion of when to look at things and re-balance is generally no earlier than around a year. Fighting games take time to evolve. Things that seem powerful now may not be as bad later on, and weaker options may blossom into beautiful weapons of mass destruction on the entire cast. There's no telling how things will turn out. So, a year's time seems perfect, right?
Well...not always. There's a couple things to remember...discoveries within fighting games are found much faster than they were back in the early days of the genre, mainly due to not only technology allowing the spread of information at a much faster rate, but also a larger amount of people playing and discovering. For example, Super Street Fighter II Turbo is a very old game...actually, it turned 20 years old back in February. Needless to say, the game has had a lot of time for players to refine their skills within the game. To the point where some would say, "Players just don't really make mistakes anymore." However, bear in mind, it did not evolve as rapidly as, say, the Street Fighter IV series has...which, in 6 short years, has become so refined that it could be as difficult to get into from the very bottom as ST has become. Oftentimes, games are now broken down exceedingly fast, to the point where a full year isn't always needed to see where things are headed for the most part.
So how long should we wait, then?
There's not a set time. Some games just have discoveries found at a much more alarming rate than others. You'll never, ever know exactly when is the right time. Though, bear in mind, technology today has allowed for some things that could have shaken up how balancing was perceived back in the day, such as patching. Now, developers are able to push out updates to their consumers through the internet. Had this been a thing in the 90s, we may have gotten used to patches coming out as frequently as, say, League of Legends gets updated.
BUFF EVERYONE TO DA TOP!
There's a lot of people who suggest just buffing everyone to the level of the top tiers and nerfing no one. And when you think about it for a moment, it makes sense. Everyone on the same level of strength results in balance gap closed, which means balance is just about perfect. So...why not do that?
Well, there's plenty of factors that can make this idea fall on its face.
Characters Can Have Some Pretty Volatile Designs.
-There are times when characters have designs that are simple enough to get right without much trouble. That is, they may not have things that easily shift the character up or down. Just slight adjustments here and there, and they are good to go, and even some more moderate adjustments in most places don't necessarily make or break them. Then you have those douchebag characters that just have that one thing (or two/three) that, when touched just a hair too much, either makes the character much more powerful than desired, or weaken them to the point where mental tombstones exist in the minds of players that miss their beloved characters of yesterday.
Sometimes, these characters are really good because this thing (or two/three) is just a little bit better than it should be in relation to the cast. Or they are really bad because this thing (or tw-okay, I think you get the point) isn't good enough and gets trumped by everyone else. It's these characters where sometimes, you can't just tweak up or down and be fine. Sometimes you have to cut elsewhere to make sure that things don't go out of hand. And sometimes, the character just needs to be left alone because maybe the design is just way too volatile to even think of touching.
Characters May Be Getting Buffs To Handle One Thing
-Unfortunately, there arises situations where characters are just too overwhelming for a lot of the lower end of the roster. That sucks. But at times, it's merely one thing (or...you know what I'm gonna say) that causes this issue. And the answer to fixing the problem may allow for this overwhelming factor to do a 180 and not become an issue. But...everything you change doesn't just affect this one character. It affects every other character.
Let's do a quick examples that I'm sure plenty of you are very familiar with. Injustice. Superman's f23 breath. Superman's f23 was pretty beastly. The speed of the move is really good, but that wasn't the issue...it was the range of the move. It was very difficult for many characters to properly combat against. On top of this, breath was 0 on block, and left Superman far enough out of range to where it was very easy for him to whiff punish opponents trying to stop the move with their own faster but stubby normals. And the sequence was unavoidable for some characters, either without meter investment (that Superman could neutralize with another ability of his) or at all ;_;. It all left Superman in a constantly favorable situation on his end. Now...bear in mind, this didn't just affect low tiers. Some of the stronger characters were affected, too.
So...what could have been done? If the "buff everyone" mentality was used here, this would have resulted in things such as characters gaining much faster MB b3/f3s (which would probably be a little too much for some characters and creating another problem), faster backdashes (also could have ended badly), or faster ranged normals (which could've worked out horribly in the long run as well). There's a huge risk for unintentional negative effects from one of these "buff everyone" solutions that could've just resulted in characters gaining an excess power that pushes them a little too far north than you'd want them to be. And if you didn't want to take anything away, further re-balances would just be buffing and buffing and buffing...of course this seems exciting, eventually it leads to a game where everyone may just end up too ridiculously powerful for either the game's system itself to handle, or too much for the players themselves to actually deal with...creating the dreaded "IT'S JUST NOT EVEN THE PLAYER IT'S THE CHARACTER" experience.
So, the developers, instead of going down that extremely unstable route, decided to just weaken both the range on f23 and lower the advantage of breath. What resulted is that, while Superman took a hit, everyone was now capable of dealing with him without requiring otherwise potentially unnecessary improvements that could've just expanded into a buff war to keep everyone around the same level. And you know what? The changes were fine...Superman is still good, but no longer steamrolls characters.
So, hopefully, you get that sometimes, cuts have to be made. Does it suck for the players affected negatively? Yeah. But is it healthy in the long run? Definitely. Closing the gaps is a very delicate thing, that isn't solved by improving. You have no idea how things will turn out.
More to come soon!
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