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Reacting to: Analysis: Why We Should Buff More Than Nerf
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 4 มิ.ย. 2020
- original video:
• Analysis: Why We Shoul...
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The smash community needs more general FGC content to relate to. Things like core a gaming are perfect. It seems like most smash players ONLY play smash, and have limited knowledge of other fighters. Let's start changing that!
Yes! This is also part of why smash and the fgc fight so often. Too little crossover between the two
Most Smash players only play smash because it is so much different than other fighting games. Smash shouldn't be apart of the FGC and It shouldn't be at EVO imo. A lot of the FGC doesn't like smash and smash players., so it doesn't make sense for the smash community to associate with them.
i would agree with you if other fighters weren't so boring
I agree, I have occasionally played other fighting games and watched Core-A-Gaming vids to hell and back, BUT the same thing applies to the general FGC, they don't know what they're talking about either 99% of the time, so they think smash has no technical combos, requires no skill, genuinely sucks, etc
@@bob-km4uq Now there i disagree, Smash is a fighting game so it only makes sense to have it featured at evo and be a part of the FGC, also, Smash Ultimate had the most entrants in evo history aswell as being one of if not the most succesfull fighting games of all time, plus most people in the FGC don't know what they're talking about.
"Imagine Fox, but you can't combo or edgeguard it" Yes. Its basically smash 4 Bayonetta
And with waaay less technical entry level
Also Pika in 64, lol
@@AthensHorseParty not really
Core A gaming is arguably one of the best channels of the fgc,and i wish we had more of those deep straight to the point analysis etc.
Honestly I think it's one of the best channels on TH-cam.
It also does a great job of knitting together the FGC community as its pretty inclusive. Really love the channel and perhaps the attention it may start gaining from people in the Smash community.
It is honestly one of the best channels on TH-cam, probably top 3.
Brawl Minus still gets updates and tournaments for those interested. It's actually a pretty balanced game now.
NICE!
Brawl minus hasnt received an update in almost 3 years lol
Wasn’t there also a Brawl Plus? I remember it.
@@FordFourD-aka-Ford4D yeah there was
That pm
"you nerf one character, another one is the best. you nerf that character, another one is the best. for these people, it would be a never ending problem."
false, they would nerf other characters until theirs was the best and then say the game is finally balanced.
The vast majority of people would not be happy, since different people want different things to be better. People will always exaggerate a character's strength based on the one person who is doing much better than anyone with their character.
Every Fox main ever insisted that Melee was balanced, despite give or take half of the cast being considered completely unviable, but when Hungrybox became dominant, they wanted to ban Jigglypuff.
@@rubberduck8096 Straight FACTS
Thats just project m devs
There's one topic that didn't get mentioned, and that's when a character has a tool that is too overwhelming for most of the characters. Key word is most. People wanted Brawl Meta Knight and Smash 4 Bayo nerfed because they overpowered everyone, but if the top and high tiers were unaffected by these characters, I doubt people would've still wanted nerfs. Nerfs should be saved for big cases, but I think that bar should be lowered a bit if one or two characters invalidate half the cast because their strengths are that good.
Not to take the piss but that's because the video is biased(it's an opinion piece). Nerfs are absolutely the right thing to do, sometimes.
... but really people don't care about characters beating half the cast, or else they'd have a problem with Melee. What they want is a good variety of top tiers. In other words, balance only really matters at the top.
This is true, but the point of the video is that buffing is better than nerfing in MOST cases, which still aligns with your point.
Kiwi Karp lol most pros still thought Metaknight and Bayo were oppressive as hell. the only people who didn't think this played metaknight and bayo
Let’s not forget about pre-patch diddy. I still continue to argue that he was worse than bayo ever was.
@@albinofroggy pre patch diddy couldn't carry bad players to beating pros unlike bayo.
With the loss aversion thing: if you enjoy a specific playstyle with a character and the character get's nerfed, that playstyle might no longer be viable and forces you to play differently. If the character get's buffed, that playstyle you ejoy will still be viable. It might not be the most optimal strategy anymore depending on the type of buff the character recieved, but that old way will still work. this is also why these hyper modes suck in the long run. People want to win, so even if you don't want to change to the most optimal playstyle and stick with whats fun for you, others will be willing to adapt, forcing you to adapt as well. Give a hyper mode enough time, and it will be reduced to some very few extremely optimized strategies. The keyword why this is problematic is meaningful counterplay. dying and not knowing why you died sucks. Failing without knowing what you need to change to prevent that failure to occur again is extremely frustrating. If things get faster and weaknesses are removed, this step of analyizing becomes more and more difficult.
Fun fact: Falco in smash 4 got buffed into smash ultimate for the most part, right? well, a lot of his moves actually got nerfed, to where - combined with the engine changes - he is a significantly better character, but my playstyle is no longer viable.
And I can speak from firsthand experience that loss aversion is a thing because of this. My character got buffed, but because my playstyle is no longer viable with him, he feels significantly worse for me. I played him when he was bad, and complained MUCH less than I do now that he's good. He just doesn't feel right to me anymore.
He seemed to only be considering nerfs that remove abilities and not ones that simply lower a few numbers. You can make a kick do half as much damage without ruining combo potential for example
dude, you just contradicted yourself in not even 2 lines.
If you character get nerf it doesn't mean your playstyle become unviable. It is it, it mean that other are just way better.
Well if you nerf all other other character but you ...i'm sorry but how would that make your character sitll be viable?
there is no difference between having your character at 100% and be nerf to 80% to be closer to the rest fo the roaster and having all the rest of the roasted jump to 120% while you stay at 80.
Aside from maybe realising that you are not as good as you thought without your character being too strong. Suddently you become weaker and you have to blame yourself or if it's buffs, you blame poor balancing and how other are busted. Buff ONLY leads to featurecreep
I'm really happy Core A Gaming has finally reached the Smash Community in some way
The problem I have with the buff over nerf mindset is power creep.
Project M 3.02 is what happens where instead of nerfing fox they tried to buff everyone up and it creates a nightmare in gameplay. Yugioh is also an example of what happens when you go too far with power creep or recent magic the gathering with green.
The second is, if you have a problem character, sometimes you need to hit that character. Otherwise nothing changes.
The third is that resource wise it’s easier to nerf a character instead of buffing 20-70+ characters.
You need to hit the nerf button sometimes. Even with a game like melee, Fox is not a standard of a balanced character he’s clearly pushed in a lot of areas on a cast level.
I agree with more subtle changes rather than hyper extreme ones. But I don’t think always buff over nerf is a good idea. People seem to hate nerfs so much sometimes that I feel like people want to buff instead of hitting problems that need to be addressed.
This is why I think PM 3.02 missed the mark with not hitting certain characters more.
I get the issues with patch culture where people want nerfs over self improvement, but sometimes it is needed.
Personally, I loved PM 3.02 and felt most characters got overnerfed in 3.5. I played Lucario so when I could no longer sweatspot from beneath the ledge in 3.5, I stopped enjoying the character. Were Pit and Mew2 strong? Sure but they weren't unbeatable and tough MU could've been solved by buffing rest of the cast. It wasn't a Bayonetta situation. I think the nerfs dismayed a lot of players, like Armada dropping Pit, and resulted in new toptiers like Wolf. This combined with the streaming situation on Twitch reduced PM 3.5 viewership compared to 3.02 (3.5 had some bigger tournaments like Paragon but Sktar 3 and Apex 2014 were the pinnacle of spectator popularity for PM).
tbh i tought EXACTLY about yu gi oh watching this video and how it's always the opposite, Konami doesnt likes stable metagames, then instead of actually giving weaker decks options they just nerf everything into oblivion
They dont care about making the game fun, they only care about pushing their product forward
Fighting games aren't card games
YES YES YES YES, MORE ARMADA + CORE A GAMING
I concur
There's a good paper called 'Bad is Stronger Than Good' about loss aversion.
It's amazing how many of these correlate directly to Melee. Hungrybox utilizing a slow, spectator unfriendly (yet effective) strategy to the point of people wanting the rules changed. The PAL version of Melee being less popular than the NTSC version in part due to how it nerfed many of the most popular characters (Falco and Marth's spikes being Meteor Cancelable/Fox's Up B covering less distance/etc.). The desire to give the smaller player a chance to shine, leading to near-one hit kill items like the Dragoon and Final Smashes in the following game.
Core A Gaming's videos are always a slam dunk. Glad to see you giving your take on them, and hope to see you do more.
I think what Ultimate needs is changes to the low risk, low-medium reward gameplay across the board. Nerf safety, buff potency on more moves.
This might be controversial, but I actually think Byleth's Up B mix up is really sick. It's not true and is highly committal, which presents a risk, but it can get you an early kill or big damage if you get it which is a nice reward. But unlike Falcon Punch it's not so bad that you will never seriously feel like going for it. I wish Ult had more things like this imo.
Watching Woolie get bodied in that clip will never not be funny. He's such a good sport about it too, which makes it all the more endearing.
Meh he seems a little toxic towards the smash community
@@rakkatytam nah thats pat. i wonder if armada knows that pat called him a piss baby
“Getting a small lead and then running away” “That must have been awful for the people watching” HMMMMM WHAT DOES THIS REMIND ME OF
A cube with a large appetite?
A blue ball that moves fast?
A balding guy with glasses?
@@RenShinomiya121 That doesn't sound like Hbox.
@@Mufflin
Yeah a blue ball that moves fast sounds more like him
One of my favorite competitors of all time analyzing one of my favorite videos from one of my favorite channels. What a great day!
Core A makes great videos
The best videos
Makes the FGC accessible to outsiders better than any channel I've ever seen
What an insightful comment, made by a mind with a piercing stare.
he's sound like stefan etienne the verge pc build guy
I'm glad you went into the point about "there will always be a best character" when it comes to nerfing the top characters.
This mindset has poisoned a lot of the competitive Pokemon scene where a lot of players who are not as competitive use the excuse of "well this Pokemon has X% usage because it's broken" and want the Pokemon to be banned, failing to realize that there's always going to be a Pokemon that is the most used and as you start to remove the threats on the top, you may end up with a Pokemon that becomes even more broken due to its best and most common counter being removed from the game.
EDIT: Just noting that I'm referring to VGC so there's no confusion
Smogon right now reminds me of the Spongebob scene where his brain is on fire trying to remember his name. I love playing pokémon, but a lot of smogons rules and clauses make me feel restricted.
I like the simple Singles and Doubles more than VGC sometimes, but I'm avoiding their Meta Games like the plague at the moment.
The issue is that smogon is only a simulator, it can only ban things and has no way to directly buff or nerf anything without compromising the fact its a simulator for actual cartridge. Pet mods have their own rooms for that
Yes, there always will be strongest pokemon - but some mons are just made to be unbalanced like Zacian, which is outspeed only by ninjask, has the most attack and from ability he gets +1 as he enters a field, has great type with good coverage AND decent bulk to survive at least one hit from most things
This reminded me of the current situation on Monotype with Black Kyurem.
@@themasterblaze7563 The thing is that the official ruleset implemented by GameFreak (wich only bans certain legendaries and mythical Pokemon) doesn't promote diversity of Pokemon adn everyone ends up using the same few mons, and why wouldn't they if they want to win?
Smogon's tier forces you to adapt and be creative since you can always use Pokemons from lower tiers (unless they changed that and I didn't notice). Of course, we can always discuss if the current state of the tiers is good or not. They're not perfect but the only one we got.
I feel like nobody in Ultimate needs to be nerfed, even Pika. Buffs for some mid to low tiers are the way to go.
Too bad Nintendo is stupid when it comes to balancing. Its not happening.
Some characters don't get the changes they need because the community still cries when they can't deal with something, now the developers think that they need to give a character lots of cons so they can please the crowd.
When they try to buff something they only change the things that were already fine instead of the cons of those characters and well these kinda stay like the same as before.
Edit: a lot people specially in the smash community thinks that characters have to be played similar to be good and thats why the think something is too good or to bad. Different characters are supposed to play diferent for example to perfome good while playing sheik you need to move a lot a rush to land some combos if you try this with a slow character like dedede you will end treated like a sandbag so to prevent this you need to play different.
Maybe they are scared of making a character very good if they change something else
@@georgeliquor1236 what do you mean? Ultimate is a super well balanced game. Only like 1 or 2 unviable characters out of 80+ characters
@@georgeliquor1236 dude plenty of mid and low tiers have gotten buffs since the release
@@lielbouskila9853 More like 5 characters that play the same.
That Leffen callout at 19:00
I like hearing what you have to say, but I’ve heard you bring up Ultimate character’s recoveries a couple of different times now. You make it sound like every character can press up b and instantly gets back on stage for free... I get that coming from melee where recoveries are absolute trash it can feel like characters can get back a lot easier, but you can still edgeguard well and get hella rewarded for it.
There are many characters that are gimped if you just tickle them offstage. You don't even need strong knockback because their air acceleration sucks.
@Adam Thompson Captain Falcon too. U can take his stock by actually getting grabbed in his Up B, teching and punishing. Same goes for Ness. If you have a stock lead, getting hit by his Pk Thunder 2 severly decreases his recovery range, which might just spell his doom.
If a weak move trades with Corrin's up b she falls enough to kill her if she used her jump. That same thing happened in Smash 4 but Corrin was a much better character so it didn't matter as much.
@@SgtKaito Knockback is so incredibly wacky in Ultimate. Weak moves barely move you at all even at mid percents so they are much deadlier for certain characters.
2:36 Yeah, it is hard to complain about camping when you’re playing a top tier.
At that point you have to wonder which of you actually care about winning more. The person who might be used to playing that way because it's their playstyle or the person that only picks top tiers.
@@BlameTheLagFGC wait why
I think PM was a good example of buffs over nerfs, like the devs of fighting herds apparently said, personality and fun over balance.
the devs nerf a lot a random shit now a days though
In Ult basically everyone makes it back:
Cries in Doc
Good ol' "If your jump's gone, you're already dead" recovery tier
Doc would be viable is his recovery didn't suck. Why make him both be slow AND have a crap recovery?
Patrick hes mariondorf
@@dush.1746 Ha.
@Adam Thompson Lies
This video in particular is very controversial because the viewers tend to have different interpretations of the message. Some say it's that buffing the weak should come before nerfing the strong. Some say it's that nerfing is evil and should only be a last resort.
I personally got the message of buff when necessary, nerf when necessary, and being creative with balancing is always appreciated.
The video even says balance is a subjective topic. Where are you seeing so much controversy over the video?
@@guitaroach I said other people saw controversy, not me.
Buffs and everything being good is a main reason why people love MW2 multiplayer
A lot of people forget, balance is good but it's never the end-goal of a game. Fun always comes first, then balance!
The point of balance is to have a diversity of equivalently powerful strategies / characters available to players. This makes the game more interesting and more interesting to watch.
There's also the question of pacing which is closely tied to buffs / nerfs. If I take an FPS like Overwatch and double everyone's health, then I'm technically "buffing" every character significantly, but in reality all that I achieve is doubling the time-to-kill (TTK)--in other words, all I accomplish is slowing down the pace of the game, which is antithetical to making the game more interesting or fun to watch / play.
For the same reason, you can actually nerf every character's health in some games to *increase* the pace of the game, which can overall improve the experience (depending, of course, on what the game's pace was beforehand).
Nothing in balance is as simple as 'buffs are good and nerfs are bad.'
One more point: in this video, you point out how if you nerf the best character, then there will just be another best character. This is mathematically correct, but it applies just as much to buffs. If you buff the worst character to the level of the previous 'best' character, then you face the exact same design problem: you suddenly have to buff every character in the game if you continue down that path, versus nerf the subset of characters which were too good (usually no more than 20-30%).
No matter what you're doing about overall nerfs / buffs, however, you have to pay attention to pacing. Even if every character is perfectly balanced in a game, they can be balanced around taking 1 hit and dying, taking 100 hits to die, etc. As a designer you have to figure out what the right level of power is to balance every character around in order to achieve the right pacing for the game.
This.
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Balance isn't about "well there will always be top tiers, get over it". It's bullshit that light characters get only one weakness -- their weight, while pretty much everything is good or decent (except maybe Sheik or Bayo), while heavies get laggier moves (startup and cooldown), are easy to combo, easier to gimp, generally have worse recoveries, don't have many combos. Their only boon is that they kill slightly earlier and die slightly later than most of the cast, and sometimes have more reach (but usually no/small disjoints). But if you're combo food with no escape options from 0-100% and die in the next hit, what was the point in being heavy/big in the first place? It's the equivalent of Fox dying at 20 to a Bowser bair.
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Balance is about assigning a "base level" of what should be possible, and working around that. Most people agreed slightly-less-oppressive Melee Fox was a good balancing metric for Project M. For Ult I'd say it's about Inkling level, imo.
Constantly buffing, especially when you buff 60 characters to compete with 10 others, yields a high chance of one of those 60 accidentally becoming MORE broken than the initial 10.
The more sensical approach is to nerf the top 10 that are above your base metric (just a number, not saying that's the number for Ult), buff the bottom 20 to around the level you want, and see what happens as the meta evolves a bit. That's it.
15:14 "These players have like no self awareness of their skill level" That's the Dunning-Kruger effect at work. They are not skilled enough to realize what skill looks like.
Thank you for answering things I have struggled with in games that come out now
Hi Armada, at 11:54, there's a section on loss aversion, and you mentioned that you wanted to read more about it, and I think I can be of some help. This is a well known example from a field called Behavioral Economics, which is exists at the intersection of Psychology and Economics. (arguably) The most famous behavioral economist today is Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel prize in 2002 and is best known for his development of Prospect Theory with Amos Tversky. Kahneman actually wrote a book called "Thinking Fast and Slow" that is both super interesting and easily accessible, being mostly free of jargon and prerequisite economic knowledge. I highly recommend that you check it out if you are intereseted in learning more!
I think that in general buffs are better than nerfs.
But to be honest, small nerfs that don't destroy the caracter like the one that was made to joker are also a good solution.
Gun was just stupid (top 10 move in the game easily) and they made it less stupid while still being very good.
The fact that attacking joker while arsene is here removes more meter is also a good thing because it encourages people to fight and not run away.
Joker is still top 3, but now it feels like the character is not overpowered and cheap
I think something that's very very very very important to bring up in this "buffs vs nerfs" discussion is the idea of the intended play experience. There is a certain way that any given game is intended to operate and balance changes are first and foremost to stay within that space. For example, people like SamSho as a slower paced neutral heavy game, but if there were only buffs, eventually the nature of the game would change and it would become something much faster paced and would become unrecognizable. Nerfs are needed so as to keep the game deviating from its original vision and the audience that it seeks to please.
The coin bet thing is in large due to how people are naturally more risk adverse rather than gain focused. Basically most people could lose 10 dollars and win 10 dollars and they will be more upset about losing the 10 then happy about winning the 10 regardless of order.
Armada keep on making these reaction videos please they are rrally cool when you put your spin on it
"ONCE EVERYONE'S BROKEN NOBODY WILL BE"
Love these kinds of videos. Keep up the great work Armada 👍
I don't think the coin thing they used to represent loss vs gains is really accurate.
Like lets say a person has 1000 dollars, and that's it for a week till their next paycheck and they still have to pay 900$ rent.
If they bet it all and gain 2000 dollars, its nice but it doesn't make them rich. Their week might be better but their overall quality of life isn't gonna change much.
On the other hand, if they lose the 100 dollars they go into debt. They might end up on the streets in the future if they can't pay it, their credit gets ruined, they might need to beg because they don't even have money for food this week (well presumably they have a credit card but then that's more debt they can't pay). Their life can be totally ruined. I think the loss is legitimately larger than the gain there.
10 dollars is obviously a smaller gamble than 1000, but I think its still the same concept. If your life is stable, you don't want to do anything to risk it (and while people obviously take risks anyways, the coin is a risk in a very blatant manner).
A game needs to be balanced. If you only buff the characters that are not good to match the characters that are good, then you will have the Overwatch situation where everyone is busted and the game isn't fun to play. What they need to do for Smash is to buff many low tier characters or mid tiers that are inconsistent, then nerf the top characters in a way that their execution to do stuff takes more effort but without completely destroying the character. Another thing is that outside the damage buff or better frames, some characters neeeds a better recovery because if Ridley got that specific buff, then I believe many other characters can. This is another way to nerf the top tiers without affecting their frame data or damage output. Just nerf their recoveries because there is a reason of why they are top tier, their recoveries are amongs the best. Example: Joker, Palutena, Pikachu, Peach, the inklings. Many of these characters kiss the bottom blast zone and they still manage to get on the stage. Back then at Melee, you were out of the stage and the real struggle began because many of the top tier characters didn't have a good recovery. In melee there were very few characters with good recoveries like Mewtwo, luigi, zelda etc... In ultimate: Sonic, Inkling, Palutena, Joker, King K rool, byleth, bowser jr. etc etc
Honestly, in my opinion, characters should be balanced around high tiers. This keeps characters strong enough to be unique, interesting, and powerful, fun to watch and play, but not TOO strong. As for how to judge what "high tier" classifies as, I'd say something around what we see from a lot of high tiers in Ultimate. They've got a lot of unique things to them, and they're pretty good and enjoyable, but they don't have anything too crazy. Take Ike for example. He's a good character, fun to play and watch and can do pretty well, but there's not really anything busted about him. He's got clear weaknesses, but has more strengths than he has weaknesses, and rewards good players - playing as and against him. His neutral, combos, everything are pretty good, with good players he's able to consistently win neutral and combo people, and take stocks, yet it's very easy to just kill him offstage out of nowhere and he doesn't dominate neutral or anything, and he's not the fastest character in the world either. He just feels like he's in a good spot, there's not really much you could change about him, and he feels unique from the rest of the cast. That's kind of what you want from characters in competitive games, especially fighting games.
edit: also, I mentioned this in reply to another comment talking about this, but I have some personal experience on loss aversion. I'll just copy/paste my other comment here;
"Fun fact: Falco in smash 4 got buffed into smash ultimate for the most part, right? well, a lot of his moves actually got nerfed, to where - combined with the engine changes - he is a significantly better character, but my playstyle is no longer viable.
And I can speak from firsthand experience that loss aversion is a thing because of this. My character got buffed, but because my playstyle is no longer viable with him, he feels significantly worse for me. I played him when he was bad, and complained MUCH less than I do now that he's good. He just doesn't feel right to me anymore."
About the Falco thing I completely agree. I just played him for fun in 4 and a little now in Ultimate as well but the playstyle is completely different. It doesn't feel like the same character unless you are recovering. I can also relate as a Smash 4 Falcon main, Ultimate Falcon changed a lot and isn't nearly as fun to me. I don't really care that he's worse, but with footstools almost unviable, no more weak reverse knee hitbox, a worse grab, and I believe the worst turnaround in the game, it just doesn't make me feel the way I felt playing him in 4. The only thing better about him is the new raptor boost, other than that he is kinda lame. I still play him but I'm a Link main since Ultimate Falcon doesn't satisfy me enough. In Smash 4 he was so cool with tons of footstool setups and falling up air into anything, now his best combos involve mostly up airs. It basically took away my favorite things about Smash 4 Falcon.
Given the topic of this video, if you could somehow patch Melee's Mid-tier and low-tier characters to try and make them better tournament characters, which moves from those characters would you improve and how? Let's say you can only buff up to 4 attacks per character. Which moves would you prioritize in order to make that character better?
I think this could be a fun video that Armada could do in the future. (Or maybe he already has?)
As a designer, I've talked about this one before, but buffs and nerfs are for the sake of balanced and fun play, not for the sake of spectators or rulesets, regardless of what the FGC says about it.
No one could argue that hokuto no ken is a balanced game. It is a great spectacle to watch for some, but most actually playing the game find it atrocious on many fronts, myself included. Get this myth of "always buff never nerf" out of the FGC's mindset, it's VERY bad for games overall.
The argument from my eyes is that "even if you nerf a character, there will always be a 'best character'", but that fundamentally misses the point of the problem. Having a best character in a game is fine. Its the range of difference between the best character and the worst character that define how balanced a game is. It's why Third Strike is vastly better balanced than the majority of fighting games, because the difference in power of chun li versus 12 is much less substantial in comparison to the difference of power between Fox/Marth and Kirby.
Not only that, but with nothing but buffs, eventually the state of the whole game changes. If a game plays at its best with a slow, intelligent style, and an item within that game VASTLY speeds it up, such as how Cyber Dragon impacted the state of Yugioh, the entire game can become unrecognizeable to its original audience. For example, if melee got a balance change that insanely buffed very slow options, or reduced the speed of movement (while still buffing characters), the entire game shifts to a slower pace, regardless of whether they were buffs or nerfs.
Buffs AND Nerfs should only be used by designers and developers to express their vision of gameplay and nothing more. Anything more or less is folly.
Making a lot of sense. The fighting game industry is severely lacking in many game design aspects, probably because they are led so much by the player's 80s mindsets.
This "tough guy" mentality influences everything from the whole git gud message to avoiding good tutorials to actively wanting to be rewarded for their work in training mode.
True, except third strike is a pretty awful example: Ken, Chun and Yun dominate, with makoto nd dudley up there too. Usf4 is probably the better street fighter example imo (or sf5 tbh)
17:57 that accidental hard callout on LTG
I think all it comes to is _dominant strategies._ If some technique is clearly better than another, that other technique won't ever be be used intentionally. It can make sense to nerf the dominant strategy to actually increase the number of viable techniques the same (obvious) way buffing a subdominant strategy makes it viable increasing the number of viable techniques.
Having many viable strategies allows for styles. While what e.g. Fox in Melee offers is the same for everyone, there's far from one dominant way to play Fox. For that reason, you see variety of Fox mains.
The only nerf that's fucked with me bad in Smash Ultimate is Lucas/Ness's ability to cancel endlag on Psi Magnet.
That shit was sooooooooo useful, and I used it so much for baiting and optimizing movement that once the nerf happened I had to completely change up how I play them (Lucas MUCH more than Ness); and I mean, I'm ride or die with those boiis, but tbh if I liked em any less I would have stopped using them at all.
14:10 That's literally Michelangelo from NASB
"But the thing is like, crying about patches, I feel like that's a very short term solution. Because yes, one of your problems disappeared, but your biggest problem, which is that you SUCK, is still there." -armada
I feel like this is a cop-out excuse by top players who want an easy, clear cut character to make their money so they don't invest in "the wrong one", so they blame everyone's skill. Like yes, we're not as good as Armada, but anyone can fucking see Joker and Snake are clearly better characters than K Rool and Ridley.
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Constantly buffing, especially when you buff 60 characters to compete with 10 others, yields a high chance of one of those 60 accidentally becoming MORE broken than the initial 10.
The more sensical approach is to nerf the top 10 that are above your base metric (just a number, not saying that's the number for Ult), buff the bottom 20 to around the level you want, and see what happens as the meta evolves a bit. That's it.
@@EingefrorenesEisen ironically this can be seen as an exuse for those who don't want and in fact DO SUCK because no matter what, even if K Rool was the worst character in the game, people will still bitch. So i think buffing lower tier characters is better.
@@captainmega6310 I'm confused about what point you're making in the first half but, keep in mind that if you have more low tiers than top tiers/have a lot of low tiers, it's very easy to accidentally make one of those low tiers even more broken than the top tiers, and then by the "buff everything" logic you have to then buff every other character in the game just to meet the "new" top tier. And then you have an even higher chance of ANOTHER top tier being a thing until every character becomes so busted that the way the game is played changes, and alienates a lot of players.
Design philosophy is really, really important. Not everyone likes games with "touch of death" combos like Marvel.
@@EingefrorenesEisen just read it again
I feel like developers want to lower the skill floor, while unknowingly dragging down the skill ceiling with it. If there was a way to lower the skill floor while raising the skill ceiling, it'd be great. No, I have no idea how to do that, but I think it's a decent place to start the thought process
Imagine if you had everything that's good with Fox but you couldn't combo him or edgegaurd him and he had 4 times more range?
So a small PM Mewtwo?
In regards to feeling of loss.
If I recall, World of Warcraft had a Resting system. People didn't like the feeling of losing Exp gain for playing long periods.
What Blizzard did to fix that, was to just change how the system is written.
You no longer get "penalized" for playing too long. But you get "Rewarded" for playing in shorter intervals.
They did nothing to the system. They just changed how people felt about losing out on Exp gain.
This is the one video from Core-A-Gaming which didn't sit perfectly well with me and was sorta neutral on.
Characters get made the same if their strengths are taken away yes, but I also think that characters get made the same if their weaknesses get buffed too... Take SFV for example, Dhalsim is the most iconic zoner in fighting game history.. but through buffs to his close range game in SFV compared to previous games he's now physically teleporting up to people and boxing them at close range.
Not to mention when you buff a character, chances are it's a new tool to use aggressively, and if more characters get a bunch of offensive options added to them then it really hinders the technical and defensive aspect of fighting games. Footsies, baiting, mindgames, and reacting.
Gerald makes it on to my TH-cam Mount Rushmore
I think buffs and nerfs are all just tools in a developer's tool kit. Nothing should really be off the table. I think as long as the goal of a buff or a nerf helps make the character more interesting while maintaining balance, then that is the more worthy goal than just straight up stating nerfs should only be used in specific narrow sequences.
The Ryu nerf is this philsophy in action: Ryu was on a character that wasn't top tier at the time of the nerf. However, because the nerf opened up more interesting options, so it's a good change. A light uppercut means you're guessing, but a heavy uppercut means you're calling your opponent out because it's a hard read where you'd be smacked with a horrible punish if you're wrong. A smash equivalent could be to nerf an overcentralizing move a character has, where it would either unmask other moves, or buffing said other moves to compensate if it doesn't just unmask more options. Overall this may be a nerf to a character, but it gives more options at the end and thus would create a more interesting character.
"and when everyone is overpowered...
heh heh
no one will be..."
I think it's interesting to read about loss aversion Armada. It is something that is discussed in Business Economics in decision making processes
Just came to say:
LEDGE GRAB LIMITS PLEASE
It's not what everyone things either. It's not like one you breach the limit your DQed, it's just that the ledge grabs overwrite the % in case of timeout.
Enforcing the ledge grab rule would be just like the shotclock in basketball. Sure it'd suck for a few players, but overall the health of the game would improve.
The loss aversion statistic is most likely from Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, fast and slow
Some results in that book seemed very baffling to me
The only thing there you can chance is how difficult a character should be to play to master
the study is about a one-shot chance, you can't try infinitely.
Fox in melee because he is the most technical character in the game one single misstake leads to an instand loss
I wish they would make a rule against prolonged ledge camping but the fact is for most of the cast it’s not a viable strategy it’s only a fully viable strategy against Little Mac. So it’s hard to justify it
I don’t really care about nerfs or buffs all that much. However, one buff that I really want is to give Dedede’s gordo any amount of priority over anything. Pichu’s jab has priority over it. Diddy’s peanut has priority over it. The only thing that has a lower priority is fox’s laser. For it being a HUGE METAL SPIKE BALL it loses to a lot of things that it really shouldn’t be losing to. The gordo also has a property to it that is similar to Wii Fit Trainer’s soccer ball in that it has a pseudo-lock on system back to Dedede after it is hit back. That wouldn’t be a problem if LITERALLY EVERYTHING didn’t hit it back. It makes Dedede soooo much worse than he should be because one of his main trapping tools is weaker than it should be.
The GTAB had me rolling xD.
Buffing also leads to power creep.
Feel like any games that have this issue should just design characters with clear counters. OP character? Have a clear counter character for him. Continue to do that for each. Only way I see to balance things
I can agree with this, and I think it can be solved even without a counterpick character. Characters designed with weaknesses can have counterplay that any other character can engage in. If there really is no weakness to engage with that justifies to create one via nerfing tools
He just said that Buffing everyone up to Meta Knight levels would be a bad idea...isent that literally what Project M is?
and brawl minus
I personally think balance is important, so if someone LOVES a lowtier, they can still win. For example: A melee Pichu could never win against like Fox or puff or other toptiers, but in ultimate, a lowtier has chances against toptiers, which makes it more fair (imo)
So yes, people can adapt and play toptiers, but what if they don't like those toptiers? What if those lowtiers are fun for them? I know that lowtiers can win in melee (Zain's Roy) but it's WAAAAAY harder
21:20 what he says here is interesting. what he is discussed at the end is also a really important topic
2:42 good thing something like that never can happen in melee
12:20 Well it probably 2 different type of ppl the one at casino are not really there for the money they are there for the "trill of wining" the pheromone if you want vs if you give someone the choice to play a game where is a 1/2 of wining or loseing they probably would want the higher reward if they win...
But there alot there I think it more of you fell 2x more the lost vs the win. That way you remember much more whene you do a 5 lost in a row vs vs if you win 5 game in a row. Could be wrong tho but I think that what they are talking about.
I think there is a general misconception due to how people talk about buffs/nerfs, it's not about something being overpowered, as that's relative to the other characters, if the character is "broken" design wise, not balance wise, that's the best time to nerf.
These type of videos are really interesting, I like these.
I used to watch core a gaming all the time it’s nice you give your take.
That bit at the end about people's incessant bitching leading to poorly-considered changes reminds me of what happened to Monster Hunter World and slicing ammo getting nerfed very quickly when the real problem was all other bowgun ammo was just too weak.
Overall I agreed whit the video tho Nerf is still usefull at time exemple Joker's nerf to his persona thing was kinda fine too me (this mechanique is still totally unique to him and the nerf hurt only if you are bad at him since you get less recovery tool.)
Any way overall I think it work fine to buff all the character but sometime nerf is the way whene you see one character just breaking the rule of the game exemple Peach and they way she can just have full up damage that just kinda weird and odd should probably not be a thing for only her alone. Some thing make sence for only 1 character exemple pichu geting hurt by attaquing and stuff.
Any way perso I would say if you want to nerf something Nerf thing that band the rule too much or nerf thing that are a character weakness Exemple: Pichu I would have hurting himself more...
Still I think Buff are better to aim for Exemple Totally love Wii Fit in Smash Ultimate and I also think they could buff Zelda's down Tilt to be like the one form Peach where it does a slight knock down or what ever it is. (i also miss Zelda up special no DI away form Wii U i think... it was a cool kill move or may way it was just that the enemie had alwas the same lunch on the frist hit so they couldn't just go too far form her... am not sure.)
Any way I also want to say buffing something too much can also be boring Exemple I use to play Palutena in Smash Wii U and I drop her in Smash ultimate because I just find her boring... It also Boring if they buff only 1 things and make it broken as a banaid or something Exemple would be Ike's Nair (It just too good compare to the other thing in his tool I would rather them buff something else and nerf the Nair or what ever.)
Any way SORRY FOR THE BAD ENGLISH
I asked Leo, and he says he would still main Joker if he didn’t have Arsene
no one is playing guile because he's good or bad, they play him because he's fucking sick
he's got the best hair, the best theme, and the best projectile
Buffing one bad character changes that character, nerf one good one changes the whole game
If you buff that character, you nerf every other character's match-up against that character.
If you super buff that character, it becomes meta and changes the whole game.
Wouldn't the same be true for buffing a character if that character was buffed to high/top tier levels?
Overwatch has entered the chat
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this is insanely wrong pretty much every character change can change a whole game
That's just wrong logic. Every change to a character has the possibility to change the whole game
because if sakurai stuck to just nerfing everyone we would get another smash 4
Well that doesn't make sense. If he nerfed everyone into submission, then Bayo, Cloud, and Sonic wouldn't have been as problematic as they were.
@@DSmith3279 then the next op thing would be ic chaingrab uhh no counterplay to it anymore
Core A gaming has the best vids. He understands theory, and how to apply theories from various disciplines to fighting games. Really enjoyable stuff.
I think another problem is that some people fail to see that some characters have certain moves or move sets that are so versatile to the point that nerfing them wouldnt change much. Nerfing a character doesnt really matter if the character has the tools to deal with nearly all situations in the game. Even if the move is weak, if it has use, then someone will use it to their advantage.
A game with unequal match-ups need not have a best character when there's more than two of them. Characters could be a rock/paper/scissors relationship. While there's 100:0 match-ups only in rock/paper/scissors, you can have a similar probability-based cycle of dice. This is nothing but counterpicking. Every character being in a cycle means that for every option there's a counterpick.
So let's say you main character A which has a hard match-up against B. Now B has a hard match-up against C, but maybe B isn't that common, so you never took effort to main C. So you're facing the decision to play a good A in an unfavorable match-up or a slight above average C in a favorable match-up. That's what makes watching interesting. Spectators commenting on: He should have switched to counterpick. - No he shouldn't, he just got unlucky.
Well in a casino what you lose in a round is much less than half of what you can potentially win
I pretty much quit smash 4 after they nerfed sheik’s kill options.
I would’ve much preferred to deal with stronger opponents than deal with the frustration of running around for another 2 minutes because I missed a percent window.
And that's a good thing. Having multiple options is fun, don't fish for the kill at specific percents, it makes the game predictable.
One thing that most people don't really get in terms of patches, that there is no one size fits all answer. Every specific case of each specific game has a different best answer and it also depends 100% on what the devs want to achieve with the game and what the game's target public is. I don't personally like these kind of games, but it's a fallacy to think that symmetric zero sum games are inherently less interesting, it's just the kind of fun that appeals to different people, using SF1 as an example honestly just frames these games by probably the worst they can be. That game isn't bad because ryu and ken are the same, it's bad because it's badly made.
When looking for nerfs and buffs, i like to point to LoL. The reason is not "good balancing", but because of the long history of patching, you can learn a lot out of their mistakes. For example: You cant only buff, over a long time frame. It will lead to points in time, where charakters are clearly above the rest, because you cant buff everything the same. I also like the idea, of riot games, once a year buff the weakeast characters once a year, to let the S and A rotate s that the "meta" changes and it doesnt get boring over a long timeframe.
Borgreth Main problem i have with riot’s balancing philosophy is they buff perfectly decent characters in the meta to become as good as the god tier characters. Graves was extremely dominant for a little while and it took them buffing nidalee before directly dealing with graves himself, like you mention their tendency to buff over nerf has lead to severe powercreep over the years(can be seen with slows and how yuumi used to have a decaying 80% slow while varus has a 25% and kogmaw has 20%)
I agree, because of that i say learn out of their mistakes, not learn from their philosophy. These "200 years of experience" have created Yuumi, Akali and Kalista (i think you know, what i mean). I mean you should see them as a negative example. Like "Dont do X and be careful with Y, it is extremely hard to balance".
18:00 I disagree with this point about character choice, if everyone picked high tiers in every game just to be competitively viable then whats the point in the existence of the other characters? Just get rid of them, why not eh?
Especially if the game is considered a competitive game and was designed to be played at a high standard.
People don't put themselves at a disadvantage on purpose by picking a low tier, they pick that character thats the character they click with the most, the one which follows a rhythm which they share and most of all, fun value. (There are exeptions to this, namely glory hunters. Put nicely these individuals don't like fun.)
There are some techniques which invalidates other characters and therefore higher tier characters have a distinct advantage over others, as soon as that advantage gets taken away and the playing field gets leveled they whinge that they can't play like they used to. This scenario is considered a 'crutch' scenario. That individual was solely relying on that advantage to succeed in the game. It's players that are given nerfs and still manage to perform are vastly superior to those who complain.
The reason people say "welcome to low tier" or something along those lines is usually in responce to a high tier player complaining about their situation. I've seen it happen too often to count. So don't act innocent here.
It's not fair to say, "if you want to win pick another character" It's an unhealthy mentality to have. Sure you aren't bound by anyone or anything other than your morals and your heart.
We as humans all have different ways of achieving things that is part of adaptation. And there are some things that people just cannot do no matter how hard they try.
Personally I have a strong anxiety with exam/test papers. Having spent multiple years attempting to complete them no matter how easy or hard. Society revolves around this mindest that if you don't have good grades you can't succeed. And thats tough shit. Ill find my way eventually.
But as you say, learn to adapt it's easy right?
Im pretty sure he meant when used as a defense mechanism to shield your flaws, nothing wrong with sticking with a character
@@doomcabbagge1561 Correct, and incorrect. While on a casual level there is little wrong with sticking with a character as it happens we are not talking about that, your choice will cap or boost your success rate depending on the character's viability, matchup dis/advantages and general skill. But when you boil it down to core aspects only a few things should matter: player skill matchup knowledge (rock, paper, scissors) and mental game. Everything else like character imbalances either way is a design fault. A combination of skills makes a top player the most adaptive player by all means should win. Regarding your point about shielding flaws; that revolves around how well a player can play to negate them as much as possible without draining viability of that character (advantage/disadvantaged state) does that answer the query?
@@Scout5 Yeah i get it now, you were tackling more so the mechanics themselves being unfair, which it is hard because no respectable game should intend for characters to be worse, but that may just arise from the game not accomodating their playstyle
Armada: If every character have a bad recovery, there will be more off stage plays.
wtf
a more balanced game is important on being able to play whit your favorite caracter for personal reasons
Smash is similar in some ways to the other fighting games (at least enough to make it competitive) but different in other ways. And the fgc just can’t accept that. They think Smash has no tech skill and requires no combos at all. I hate it when people generalize something about a game just because it’s different at least play the game before criticizing it. I’m pretty sure 99% of the people in the fgc haven’t even played Smash and just say Smash is a bad game because their peeps in the fgc said so. This also happened in the transition from Melee to Brawl considering how different Brawl was from Melee but I’m not gonna even start with that cause that’s a completely different story. I’m not gonna bring that up
"As soon as you nerf the top, you'll have a new top to nerf"
Well... a lot of people are trying to balance to a specific target. The PM people were largely looking at the sheik to captain falcon range for balance, as an obvious example.
We can set a well defined bar and see what is above that bar. Just resist the urge to move it.
Doesnt that apply to buffing aswell? As soon as you buff the bottom, you have a new bottom to buff?
Imo, it would be a much better decision to just overhaul "toxic" characters like little mac from ultimate, he might be the worst char. in the game, but it sucks to fight against him, even as someone who's main is +2 against him (Lucina if you didn't notice already) I hate the matchup, because mac encourages no player interaction, which completely makes me unable to play how I want. Imo they should remove ko punch and the armor on his smash attacks, then buff his aerials, replenish side b after getting hit, give him functioning aerials, make his upb go slightly higher and make it snap to the ledge, honestly, they can just keep everything else (with some minor tweeks in hitstun, block stun, etc)
Oh also, can you react to more Core-A-Gaming Vids like "Why Button Mashing doesn't work"
I think that mac should mantain those awful aerial hitboxes, but with more damage or knockback in case of N-air (Making it to have always the good vertical knockback).
That way we still have a bad character in the air, but one actually able to scape from a juggle situation and not being platform camped. Also a higher jump would help him a lot and a better recovery. All of that in exchange of armor and a KO punch rework, to reward the player who connected risky attacks (smash and specials) instead of a comeback mechanic.
@@N12015 I think it might be cool if Mac's aireals could combo into grounded moves, like the worlds hardest to hit kill confirm.
I’ve always wanted nerfs and buffs to be absurdly drastic. Let’s take Ganon for example. Now, let’s see what ganon plays like with warlock punch and volcano kick having 20 frame startups. If he’s too good, we’ll just nerf him back. And then we’ll always have ‘that one week where ganon was s tier’
That reminds me of Dota 2 patches. I don't play anymore, so I don't know if Icefrog still gets crazy with the patches, but there are tons of moments like that in Dota 2's history. Most notably, there was something called a Fountain Hook that allowed you to pretty much kill any hero with a specific set up. The official Dota2 YT channel has a video talking about it from 2016 if anyone's interested.
Even if it was an unintended glitch, it was such a funny moment that you couldn't help but laugh. And there's likely tons of others that I don't remember, but thats' the first one that sticks out in my mind.
Pretzel my second idea: little Mac now has super armor during his smash attacks starting from frame 1, and what used to be super armor frames are now i-frames. 🤣
Arsene is removed from the game. Leo wins EVO 2021 with joker anyways
There was actually a patch in Smash 4 where due to a bug Diddy was immune to grabs if he shielded a multi-hit move. It got patched out a couple days later but it was hilarious to play since everybody grabs in Smash 4.
@@Relisoc please dont buff little mac that character is fking annoying and has such a bad design.
4:20 my OP reasoning is that basketball is meant to be basketball.
basketball isn't playing keep away for 40 mins. its about putting the ball in the basket.
thing isn't about feelings or spirit of the game, its just simiply what the game is meant to be.
how you play doesn't matter, but abusing rules or finding dump ways to win and completely ruin the games.
these type of things always creating rules for.
e.g
At a club i went to we played 2 v 2 football in area. and you had to atleast pass once and make content being that and the content is reset every time the opponent touch the ball.
to make the game fair, we made it that if the ball exits pass the every back of the areas in your own half the ball is always given to the players side they are defending on.
But Then I person destroyed that way by kicking out continuously, making the opponents never score and win by a 1 point.
so they made that I had to atleast pass to my team mate, but then my team mate would kick the ball out and just repeat.
so finally the rule got removed.
and the defending team just had to adapt by running really fast to the player passing the ball in.
so the point of the game was to score the ball, we all we did was kick the goal all, until time was up, which was not fun and Broken, and was gonna make everyone stop playing the game.
so i would put attacking, defending, passing, scoring in a box and say thats what the game is.
and put kicking the ball out of bounds, as not what the game is.
I remember when I first watched this video and I couldn’t agree more. Most nerfs are unnecessary are stupid. No character right now for example with ultimate needs a nerf.
Rock Paper Scissors is a perfectly balanced game that's fun. Imagine that but with 80 options, each one having equal amounts of winning, losing and tieing matchups. In a fighting game context, I think a perfectly balanced game could still be fun, especially with the fact that a better player could overcome a bad matchup and there are also counterpicks.
Please do this for every Core A Gaming analysis
Brawl Minus was crazy tho
Agreed on the mentality part of "oh if this character gets nerfed, I'll make it to top cut".you gotta up your game and adapt. Like.. ZeRo was the best sm4ash player and he had to deal with bayo who had few enough nerfs but not enough to keep her from top 8 consistently granted, he played diddy and sheik but those 2 took more to master over bayo. I mean... How many former bayos consistently make it to top 8 now? Also agreed onthe low tier character (Guile) part... I mean, me 4 example, I use kirby and he does kinda suck, I dare say he's a mid-low tier and am bein generous. but he appeals to me and i know that if I up my game, i can put up a good fight i know he lacks joker's tools or any other top tiers and like armada said i picked kirby, it's on me.
Technically, MKleo and Tweek used to play Bayonetta and consistently get top 8. But yeah, the other Bayonettas don't anymore
The pain of having you're main nerfed is so much more painful than watching anotherr character get buffed
They killed everything fun about smash 4 luigi
I feel like there are exceptions, i play joker and when they nerfed him they did it correctly. Arsene and gun are harder to use, making a lot of the other joker "players" that spam bair and gun actually have to work for wins. This also shut up alot of people that were delusional about him being the best character.
You know what hurts me the most?
They chose Sean’s music because he used to be top tier and OP in the street fighter 3 series until the FUCKING DESTROYED Him in 3rd strike
(The most important game)