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.
I made an account specifically to talk about this. Not only is this a really bad attitude to have when it comes to competitive games, it's wrong.
Let me give you some examples.
Street Fighter 4 is probably the single most dissected game in the history of fighting games. A game with strong scenes in North America, multiple Asian countries, multiple European countries, multiple South American countries, on and on. Top players everywhere, with relative parity across scenes. If anything, evidence has shown us that North America is one of the weaker regions in that game. A million monkeys at a million typewriters for the new age (a million dudes making youtube videos?). Our scene has never collectively been better at a game than we have been at SF4. Only other possible contender would be Melee I guess.
And yet we've made a lot of critical errors on estimating the balance of the game. Towards the end of the AE 2012 version (early 2014), Smug started making noise locally, then nationally, all with Dudley. It was assumed that Dudley wasn't just a weak character but probably a bottom 5 character. One of the rare hopeless characters in a game that was pretty well balanced overall. Matchup discussion regarding Dudley could be fit onto an index card “oh just do ________, he can't do anything, easy match”. Then Smug started winning. And winning some more. And finally taking out some big fish way out of his weight class. Were we wrong? Had we been wrong for FOUR YEARS?
Actually yeah. We probably were. Smug is a fantastic player but one of the most important things to take away from his rise as a player is that EVERYONE was wrong about a character. Smug was winning matches that we thought were unwinnable at top level just by playing BETTER. Landing “show off” combos reliably. Making reads and creating counter hits in positions previously assumed to be unwinnable. We had all the frame data. We had people from 30 countries all grinding and trying new things. We had 4 years of Dudley tournament results. How could we have made such critical errors in assessing matchups?
It's not without precedent. Vanilla SF4 we all collectively whiffed on Cammy and Fei Long, characters whose tools (intact in that version) would come to dominate future versions. In retrospect we underrated Seth also. Our understanding of that game, a game that had been out in one form or another for over a year and a half by the time we stopped playing it was very shallow in retrospect.
Let's look at other games. Our estimation of balance in another modern game reads like a comedy of errors in retrospect. The biggest debate in vanilla Marvel was “Wesker or Magneto?” Most people were with Wesker. And most people were wrong. Watching old tournament vanilla Marvel matches you will notice that not only is Magneto not optimized, what we now understand as his best move (magnetic blast) is almost NEVER used. All the best tournament players in the world DIDN'T UNDERSTAND how to use his best move! We grossly underestimated Dante (and we already thought he was a top tier character). We grossly OVERestimated Wolverine. Move forward into Ultimate. People actually seriously considered banning Wesker, a character who has become very rare because the game passed him by. We thought Morrigan was a bottom 5 character. She's actually top 3 (and the point character for what is—at worst—the 2nd best team in the game).
I could go on with repeated failings of the community at large as pertains to game balance but I've made my point and you probably don't care. The point is saying that “we know” how a game is going to balance out in the end after a couple weeks is wrong. Hilariously wrong. Without tooting my own horn, I've basically built my tournament career on being slightly more accurate at assessing general balance in 3 months than most people are at 12 months. Really that's the only fighting game skill I'm even above average at. Figuring out what a game is going to look like in the end is HARD. It takes time. Experience teaches me that no matter how good you are, a 2-3 month assessment of the game is going to be wrong. No matter how basic the game. No matter how much information is at your disposal. Hell we were wrong about DIVEKICK balance at that point in the game's lifespan!
Now, having said that.
Over the past couple pages you've named 5 characters as “obviously broken” and that there would be “no way” to adapt to them. You know enough history to know that this isn't true, but it also shows that the word “broken” shouldn't be used here at all. If you're right about those characters being that strong (and nobody's saying you're wrong), then they're not broken, you have a top tier with multiple strong characters. This is good, not bad.
So what you're really saying is that you want the game to be balanced from the bottom, not from the top. That every time any character sticks their head above a (now arbitrary) level of “too good” they should be whacked down into the pack without stopping to consider if other characters could reach that high in time. Not only is this an unsatisfying way to balance a game, it puts character balance at a premium over strategic balance when older games have shown us that players will tolerate weak character balance but NOT weak strategic balance.
And on a personal level I strongly dislike the metagame of MKX and NRS games. What results have shown us is that choosing a “main character” in this game is strongly discouraged at the tournament level. You run the risk of having your legs chopped out from under you. At any time. For any reason. Imagine now if you were a Scorpion player on June 22nd. You'd spent a long time practicing, getting ready for the end of the tournament season. You had your tickets booked for CEO and Evo. Sure there were other good players but you liked your chances.
You no longer like your chances.
If you don't play any other character well besides Hellfire Scorpion you're officially out of the running and out of the money. You've said that with the amount of money on the line and the amount of exposure for NRS that they have to engineer the results. To avoid the embarrassment of the Superman/Black Adam situation, they have to manipulate results for maximum enjoyment. I see it a different way. For players with this much money on the line it's not fair either. If you're training for a major tournament, you need to know that the game you're practicing is the game you'll be playing. And that simply isn't what happens.
To dedicated NRS players you're used to it but this is empirically unacceptable to people who play any other type of game. The potential to go into a major tournament having to digest major chances on TWO DAYS NOTICE? Ridiculous. You can't specialize in anything in this environment, game theory wise it's just a bad decision to choose to excel in something as opposed to raising your general level in multiple characters and multiple styles. The biggest factor in the metagame up to this point isn't players, it's the patch cycle! And this is OK? Is it worth putting in extra time this week to grind for Evo? Who knows! For my hypothetical guy, it sure wasn't worth putting in that extra time on June 22! All your work is down the drain.
I'm just not interested in playing "patch roulette" even though so far as a Sonya player I've been winning this game up to this point. I enjoy the game, but the constant patching prevents the game from getting to the later stages of understanding, which is the most satisfying part and the only reason I still play and enjoy fighting games these days.
It's just one man's opinion but I'm definitely not alone.
