The Anti-Progress Attitude
Monday, August 22, 2011 at 2:21PM Maybe read Archon Shiva's summary of this post first:
The way I read I, the original article had nothing against this release of Third Strike - he agreed with all design decisions that went into it, and I'm pretty sure David's not actually opposed to unlockable artwork. What he did oppose was the attitude of some players that tweaking an unbalanced game into a balanced one was a net loss. At no point was it hinted that the original balance shouldn't be part of the release, or even that a rebalanced mode should have been in: he just said he feels the proper reaction is "too bad they didn't have time/budget to add it, but that's life!", rather than "thank god we didn't get a rebalanced mode selectable at the title screen, that would have ruined everything!"
This review of SF3:3rd Strike Online at 1up.com should be considered shameful. It casually embraces an attitude that's damaging to the quality of games we get to play. What's so wrong with what's said there? This (emphasis added):
Do the developers make adjustments to characters like Chun-Li and Yun -- who are leaps and bounds more powerful than the rest of the cast -- rebalancing them as to give characters like Q, Sean, and Hugo a fighting chance? Some argue this would allow newer players to ease into the game and even provide a fresh take on the series, possibly revitalizing the competitive scene.
At the same time, if they make changes to the game, even the slightest rebalance, players such as myself who have literally been playing the game for 10 years now, might feel it's an inferior port and not play it at all -- opting to continue to fight it out at the arcades or even on the PlayStation 2.
It's great that Capcom made such an effort to translate the game to a modern console. It's great they used the only reasonable kind of networking for a fighting game (GGPO). Well, strike that. It would be shameful and embarrassing for any fighting game to not use it, so it's more of a "phew, they did an obvious thing right there." It's great they did an obvious thing right with the way the button configuration screen works. There's really a whole lot of positive stuff to say here, and I agree with those saying those positive things. BUT...
There's a problem: 3s is one of the worst balanced fighting games around. I mean that literally. It's hard to even come up with worse balanced fighting game than it, yet if you throw a stick at a pile of fighting games, you'll hit a better balanced game. James Chen had this to say in 2008 about the Evolution tournament results:
Street Fighter III: Third Strike - This year [2008], in the Top 8, we had Chun, Chun, Chun, Chun, Chun, and Yun. In 2007, we had Chun, Chun, Chun, and Chun. In 2006, we had Yun, Yun, Yun, Yun, Chun, Chun, and Chun. In 2005, we had Chun, Chun, Chun, Chun, Chun, Yun, and Yun. I don't think there's anything left to say about this game.
Yeah it's pretty appalling. It's laughable to think addressing this might make it an "inferior port." I think parrying making projectiles and zoning hardly matter is an even bigger problem, as is the shallow hit-confirm-into-super gameplay in general, but let's not even go there. Let's just imagine that stuff is all great. A game where two characters totally dominate is a problem. (Yes I know about Japan, but balance is clearly disastrous anyway.)
So what's the problem here? Is it that Capcom didn't make any effort to fix this problem? Well, sort of. I do think that's a problem, but if you follow my subtle point it's not actually the biggest problem. Maybe they did some business analysis on how much that would cost, how much testing it would take, and how much money the game would make, and they didn't like the result. (Though maybe they asked Floe what he thought and he said he'd rather play a brokeny game.)
Anyway, there's a much bigger problem than Capcom's decision here, and that problem is the reaction to it as exemplified in the 1up review. It's damaging to gaming to profess the anti-progress ideal that problems should be kept broken. Somehow this reviewer and many players think that it's a good thing that two characters dominate and other characters are comparatively worthless. Well, that's not ok. That should be fixed and you should demand it be fixed. It's exasperating to even have to say that because it's so obvious in any other context. Imagine if Blizzard discovered that Protoss vs. Zerg was an 8-2 match, but hey, the game's been around for a while so we're going to leave it! After all, it is possible for Koreans to win it sometimes. It's just so deep to have a wildly imbalanced matchups like that, and for the game to be dominated by it. Seriously though, it isn't. It's ridiculous to even say all that about Starcraft, as it would be for any other type of asymmetric game. But somehow a segment of the fighting game community has begun to cling to the idea that problems shouldn't be fixed.
Let's dispel the strawman response before it happens. "If you keep fixing things, players don't have to learn." Yes, there's truth in that and Blizzard is very conscious of it. They want to fix actual real problems with their games, but not fix every *claimed* problem. Fixing every claimed problem would mean flavor-of-the-month fixes, constant change for no real reason, and if any tactic becomes even slightly ok, bad players demand it be "fixed." Players would have trouble even developing strategies because constant changes would be happening under their feet all the time. I think that's bad, Blizzard thinks it's bad, and you think it's bad. So we can file this away as "it's not what we're talking about." What we are talking about is actual real problems, the ones that might make Protoss vs. Zerg a tragically problematic 8-2 matchup. You can bet they'd fix that and rightly so. Anyone "defending" keeping it 8-2 would look silly. And if anyone did make that defense, we'd wonder about their attitude if Blizzard announced that Protoss vs. Zerg was actually 5-5, but Blizzard plans to make it much more unfair in the future, slanting it to 8-2 in Zerg's favor to make the game more manly. Better game right?
I hope we can fight against this bad mindset and create a community where we expect major problems to be fixed in games, at least when those problems are as huge as 3s's problems. I'm certainly glad Blizzard lives in that world, but over in fighting game land, we get reviewers congratulating a company for NOT fixing the balance in nearly the worst balanced game in the genre. This issue directly affects my own games as well. Yomi, luckily, remains better balanced than any fighting game I know of, so even though it's not perfect (nothing is), it's in great shape. Puzzle Strike, on the other hand, has shown itself to have less-than-desirable balance in a tournament setting. Still better than 3s, but not really good enough. I suppose it might help me financially if I were to take the attitude that these problems are great to have, and that it makes a game deep to have 1 or 2 playable characters and a bunch of trash characters. But I just can't do it because it makes no sense. So at great cost of time and money, I've worked with my playtesters to develop the "Puzzle Strike Upgrade Pack" that adds several non-gameplay-affecting components to the game, as well as a bit of new gameplay...and...balance fixes put all the characters on equal footing. More details and pictures of it will come soon. I really hope Puzzle Strike players are going to be happy about improving and progressing the game, even though 1up's reviewer "might feel it's an inferior port and not play it at all."
Also see this followup post about loving games and allowing them to be the best they can be.
Reader Comments (95)
Sirlin, are you actually going to respond to Haunts? You know, the guy you personally called out in your original entry? You started it - don't ignore it.
Dache: What was there to say? He asked if it's bad to say that playing a game for 10 years is a reason to not want that game's horrible balance to be addressed. Yeah I think that's bad reasoning that causes us all to lose. I get nostalgia, but it's just sending the wrong message and/or not wanting to spend any effort learning the nuances of chun li's super doing less damage, or whatever. I thought I covered all this in several posts so far already though.
About the parries in Third Strike ruining the positional game (which it's pretty hard to deny they do), what would you think about a similar parry system with two simple changes:
-Projectiles cannot be parried.
-Parries cannot be done in the air.
Do you think such a system in a fighting game would preserve the spirit of parries (punishing predictable players and rewarding players good at predicting the opponent) without going overboard and turning it into a pure close range high/low mixup game like 3S?
Nothing to add but to say "agreed completely."
Not brown-nosing: when I heard of 3S OE, I hoped against all odds that there would be a Sirlin-balanced Remix mode.
I won't be buying 3S OE. As much as I love the feature set and inclusion of GGPO -- the latter makes me really want to buy it in the hopes Capcom starts putting it in future fighters like SFxT -- it's a poor game and I'm not wasting my money.
Fluffing Shirt: I think "can't parry projectiles" really would make for more interesting gameplay. It would increase the importance of zoning, and is a much less drastic solution than "remove all parries." As for removing parrying while in the air, I'm not really sure on that one. Would have to hear arguments for and against to weigh them. But it's a bit too academic anyway, I don't see such changes really happening.
I think the main thing removing air parries would do is help the projectile/zoning game by bringing back the risk factor of jumping. The classic Ryu fireball-shoryuken trap (and all variations) would still be pretty weak if you could just jump over the fireball and be ready to air-parry the dragon punch (and then punish it).
Air paries can also create a guessing game situation that could be a good thing, but your point is a good one. Probably removing both kinds of paries you said would truly allow a zoning game and would leave intact a ton of parry situations up close, and even at poking range that would still give the game a parry-feel. I think those changes would be worth trying.
If you had like 10 minutes to work on a balance fix, you could just nerf a couple things on Chun and Yun and come out better than before. But if you had some serious time to really get into it, then sure your changes might be promising.
"Dache: What was there to say? ..."
I thought he gave a pretty eloquent response that would have been nice to have seen at least an acknowledgement to. If it's just a case of 'I agree to disagree' at this point, then no amount of arguing is going to change either of your minds and that's fair enough, but from my perspective it looked like you were being petty by simply not bothering to respond at all, and it irked me.
Dache, I don't understand your post at all. No new point was really made and others responded to him saying as much. I guess one point is he talked about who the audience is, but I have already said more than once about how it sends a signal to developers. And regardless of who the audience is, the poisonous attitude that a thing is old therefore *shouldn't* be improved is just as poisonous anyway. I don't know what eloquent points you're talking about, I don't know what you think would require a response so strongly that I'm in the wrong for not posting even more about this, and I don't know what you disagree with here in the first place. I think you being irked is not a reasonable response here. We've been over and over these issues multiple times now.
It's most certainly true that there's a lot of nostalgia behind the community's desire to avoid a rebalance, though there are a couple legitimate points I think you're glossing over. Splitting the community after a game's been out so long is a potentially serious issue when looking at the competitive life of a rebalanced game.
Plus there's always an element of mistrust, that the final product can turn out worse than the previous edition. Improving balance is wonderful, but simply making a game more balanced might not necessarily make it better on the spot, depending on what system mechanics are changed in order to achieve that balance. Without trying to call anyone out, people DO like to point to HDR as an example of this. People will argue that the game is balanced too heavily downward and ends up making things in match a bit less exciting. I have a friend who mains Honda who happens to really dislike HDR, citing his opinion that making Honda have an easier time getting in on zoners but taking away some of the power he had in ST when he did get in makes his matchups a lot less tense and exciting. etc. etc.
I also think you're brushing aside the "skewed matchups can be fun" mentality a little too heavily. One could argue a big draw of ST is the metagaming that goes on before a match even starts because of how strong counterpicking can be. Though 3s doesn't really have counterpicking to that extent.
I also think that a large part of what would otherwise be an interesting and valid point is obscured by your own immense distaste for( and relatively poor understanding of ) third strike's core systems, combined with a bit of less-than-subtle self endorsement.
The whole basis of "balanced means a better game" is fundamentally unsound.
MvC2 is the most exciting tournament games ever made, FREE. On purpose or not, the execution level is insane and the game is completely balanced at high level between the top teams. This evolved over time, not because I develop decided on his own how to "balance" it.
The only way to make a game "balanced" if you have a controlled environment: i.e. a game with almost no options (SF4) or everyone is broken (MvC3). Almost no one who's been playing fighters since the '90s or early '00s will say that SF4 and MvC3 are "better" games than the oldies.
Any character can win in 3s. Twelve and Sean are especially crap for no reason, but other than that the whole cast is viable. You just happen to have a couple characters that are better. You don't HAVE to pick them to win. They aren't MSP/Santhrax. For example I'm better at 3s with Ryu than Ken, because it's more fun and he fits my style. Ken has more options but I'M not better with him. The game engine gives me that flexibility and that's "balance" to me.
I don't think 3s is the best game ever. All that matters tho to me is it's fun, although MvC2 and ST IMO are more so. And I actually know how to play all three at high level, unlike most of the people who crap on 3s because OMG unbalanced. You can say "VF is balanced, HDR is balanced" but if you don't play it at high level you're just spouting off an idea someone else put in your head.
I hope we get a 4th Strike. A FULL new game. Tweaking 3s would have been a joke and just killed the game in tournament because the community would never agree on one version -- damaging what little support 3s:online is bringing back to the game in the first place.
I don't think HDR was a mistake, but obviously many top players have huge problems with it, and that trickles down to the people trying to learn the game from them. I wouldn't want the same for 3s.
I have to side with Haunts on this one when it comes to leaving the gameplay as it is, because the people who are the target market for this rerelease are hardcore 3S fans. The biggest allure for many is the fact that 3SO is supposed to be Arcade Perfect(whether it is or not remains to be seen), which is huge for fans because all previous releases have been abysmal(Dreamcast, PS2, and XBOX ports had serious issues with things such as the speed of the game being faster then the arcade version, unblockables being taken out that were in the aracde version, etc.) leaving 3S fans SOL if they wanted a arcade authentic experience. This release gives those fans that opportunity to play Arcade 3S without the hassle of Superguns, hauling huge ass cabs, or having to drive for hours to go to an Arcade.The second biggest allure is that this is the first commercial fighting game released with GGPO netcode giving people who may have been passionate about the game, but had no competition, a chance to fight others and have a decent experience(XBOX version on 3S was unplayable online). I think this is where you, Sirlin, and people like me and Haunts differ as our expectations were different. People who where anticipating this game were promised, and expected Arcade perfect 3S with GGPO, nothing more, noting less. While this may seem like fans being against change, it more like fans wanting and getting what was expected. I can't recall a single moment during the development process where Iron Galaxy promised or claimed to be working on rebalancing the game. You may have had a point if they had promised or announced they were working on a rebalance, and such development was scrapped due to fans not wanting the game to be rebalanced. In short it's not that a rebalance is or isn't needed( that point can be argued and has been for years and years), its that its not demanded or expected from the existing fanbase of 3S. Maybe if 3SO becomes popular and the new players and the community that springs up starts to ask for or even demands a rebalance, will such a thing occur(IG has left that option open). Until then the game is what it sets out to be.
Ghaleon, if you think 3s players would reject fixes to one of the worst balanced fighting games around (see eventhubs tier list or something), then you're confirming what I'm saying. That's a poisonous attitude and it results in us getting a game where chun and yun tower over the rest with multiple 8-2 matchups. Yeah, it really would be better if the terrible characters were less terrible. Like it seriously would. That 3s players would reject this is a problem mindset that hurts us all. And I don't mean it hurts us JUST because of 3s, but because of the overall message that sends to game developers of fighting games.
Your weasel words (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word) about HD Remix are kind of a drive by insult. It fixes many balance problems while adding fun things too. I suppose it also suffers from the same poisonous mindset outlined above though.
Regarding the idea that you can't really balance a game unless everything in it is boring or everything is broken, that's a nirvana fallacy. It's actually extremely easy to improve the balance of a disastrously badly balanced game. You could make Chun Li's super do less damage or not hit confirmaable or SOMETHING, anything. Nirvana fallacy is when you say it's impossible to do thing perfectly, therefore we should reject doing it better and settle for a worse alternative. In other words, while perfect balance is impossible (yes, agree), better balance is very easy here. And yeah it's fun to have a game without two S tier characters. Baffling to hear you argue against that.
Disclaimer: I'm not a fan of ST or HDR. I really despise the game play of those games. My main fighting game is 3S.
Do I think Chun/Yun should be nerfed? Yes. Am I okay with them as-is? Kinda'. I main Alex and I've found a few Anti-Chun tricks that really help my game out, Yun is another story. I truly love the game as-is but it could stand to be rebalanced. Wanting rebalance on SRK for instance immediately labels you as a troll to the 10 or so guys on there who mostly main Ken and demand no balance changes. I've brought up the argument that the KOF UM titles have been incredibly warmly received, do well in arcades, and embraced by the community but that falls on deaf-ears to 3S Elitist Retards.
But I think you're right that Capcom wouldn't have seen enough profit if they rebalanced the game... to be honest I'd be a little worried with Ono rebalancing it (considering AE and all) and something dumb may happen like Stun Gun Headbutt Super becomes the best Super in the game or something. I'm still in favor of rebalance and one day hope it happens despite what the annoying close-minded minority say.
In my opinion, a fighting shouldn't be overbalanced (5-5 for every match) or underbalanced (8-2 matches). If it's even close to perfectly balanced, that would be boring and if there is one or more 8-2 matches it makes the challenge too great.
For example, Super Turbo is under the mark by just a little bit. It's got quite a few 8-2 matches, but overall the top tier is very balanced. But most importantly, it has low tier characters that can counter the top tier (eg Cammy counters Dhalsim, Zangief counters Balrog, Bison counters Vega, etc). The only problem with ST's balance is Honda IMO, he owns too many low tier characters and gets owned only by fireball characters. Balance Honda, and ST will be closer to perfection IMO.
I definitely agree that 3S should have been rebalanced, either in a sequel or in its present form. Even a small tweak to Chun or Yun would have been a good thing IMO.
To be fair though; the game doesn't have the worst balance in the world. Because of the mechanics of the game -parries, meaties beating wakeup attacks, every character having a super jump, etc- it is possible that a low tier character can beat top tier. You can make the argument that if the player using a top tier character can not only parry but is better at it, you're getting into the whole 'you're fighting the player not the character' argument.
I mean, if you want a game where one character literally destroy's 90% of the cast with little effort than look no further than Samurai Shodown V Special and Suija. It's a great game but Suija can shut down the entire cast but for the very top characters and even then it's a struggle. Kusaregedo is also considered top tier in that game, but he's a large grappler, so the majority of the cast has something to beat him and keep him away and he has to really work at getting in there.
So in that sense 3S is not as broken as SS V SP. I'm sure there's other good fighters where one character just destroy's everyone.
if it was rebalanced it wouldnt be 3s anymore.....
besides dividing a small community much like you yourself did sirlin to great effect, the point of this game was fan service to the people who after all this time still love the game. those who are so hung up on the tiers are not the players this game was made for, they are just a welcome addition if they join and like the game.
if they plan on rebalancing make it a 4th version rather than 3s, but since it wouldnt likely get an arcade release the relatively small scene would be divided further. the fact is though if you rebalance it i isnt the same game anymore end of story
capcom said it was fan service. those who cry themselves to sleep at the thought of chun winning another tournament are simply not the players this game was made for. and i write this as a hugo and twelve veteran who recently got knocked out of a major european tournament again by a top tier.
this article just stinks of you taking a dumb on a game you dont like rather than accepting it for what it is- FAN service, the fans being those who already love it primarily, choosing not to ruin and divide the scene like your abomination of a game and providing a modern port arcade perfect.
on the topic of imbalanced is this the same person who completely failed to rebalance akuma properly in hdr leaving him a laughing stock character. and hdr was so intelligently made that i once got raging demoned (lol this move shouldnt exist in sf2...) out of a mid air honda headbutt (just lol...) ONLINE because hdr was made so stupidly that its impossible for me to play online for more than 10 mins without fighting your laughable excuse of an 'balanced' akuma. so im not sure you are in any position to comment on such matters as poor design and balancing. you are hated by half the sf2 scene for your work.
tells a story...
to even think that the maker of, of all games, hdr which is so badly thrown together will pass judgement on other games is frankly hilarious
true might: HD Remix is an excellent game, but that's not really what we were talking about. (Slightly worse top tier, much better low tiers, etc.) What you said about people not wanting a rebalance confirms my points though, so yeah I agree. You're saying the community wouldn't accept fixing problems, but that was the entire point of what I said. It's just that I'm saying that's a problem and it encourages game companies to not fix extremely well-known problems. Meanwhile you think it's not a problem and are arguing in favor of bad balance. Deeply mysterious.
If fan service means giving fans a chun li/yun dominated game, then something has gone wrong. It would make more sense if what the fans want is problems addressed, and if fan-service meant addressing those problems. You know, like how Blizzard would handle things.
It seems you're just trolling though by bringing up Akuma. I mean your argument there would be "The reason it's good for a community to want a worse balanced game over a better one is that Sirlin didn't balance Akuma very well." (A does not follow from B.) It's irrelevant to the issue, but surely you know that. I do agree it's unfortunate that the many top players who tested the game didn't discover Akuma's power, and that many rated him lowly, including even after release. I'm thinking that if you stuck to saying how great it is that some of the fighting game community wants lots of 8-2 matchups, that wouldn't look very good for you, but diverting things to some insults about Akuma helps mask your main point.
I don't see the point in balancing the game. This game was made for the fans. Patching is still a new concept to the fighting game scene, it only really started on xbox where as PC gaming has had balance patching for years.
Balancing can be a solution and a problem at the same time depending on what inspires the changes made. Look at World of Warcraft, every class forum had armies of people moaning about how imbalanced X was or how Y was such a bad class. Blizzard would make changes and Y would become good at the expense of Z, because Y's changes affected Z's way of dealing with them. Perfect balance is impossible in a player vs player game when different characters are avaliable to play.
It would be a waste of resources to re-balance a game with a dedicated fanbase. Just make a new game.
David, you're forgetting that 3rd Strike is one of the greatest games of all time