Theres a difference between lowering a number and taking away an ability. Losing options will effect playstyles more harshly than having an attack do 10% less damage
It also made sonic extremely defensive focused. Removing the ability to shield cancel spin dash brought Sonic closer to what the developers envisioned, which I suspect is a more rushed down heavy character.
I mean, after Sakurai was forced to watch exactly how broken Bayo was at the invitational, I suspect she will be less dominant. She will never be a bad character, because the basic underpinnings of her design are pretty broken in a Smash context, but maybe she will at least not be ludicrous.
@@jacobshirley3457 Or maybe combine the two at times. Recently in Overwatch they gave Brigitte both a nerf and a buff. They nerfed her shield bash so it was no longer as damaging, while buffing her overall healing output from her healing aura, thus making her better fit her role as support/healer. Time will tell if they were the best changes, but the idea of nerfing items that are outside of what the character is suppose to be about while buffing what they are about is another way of looking at buffs and nerfs..
@@FrogworfKnight I appreciate that you consider modelling the behaviour, but you can't have a meaningful opinion if you don't explicitly model it. What situations does the damage mod change (combo'ing tracer, pushing Shield comp into shield comp when you're ahead on ultimates) where as the healing buff heavily favors a dps-less comp. and will drive the meta further on-towards all tanks/heals/utility, which is precisely the Problem they are trying to address (people don't like all tank heal utility comps). The problem with listening to people isn't that people overreact to or cry too much about any particular thing it is that they simply don't care about going through the entire laundry list of matchups. They want to play whatever they want to play and for it to work regardless of the situation
Balance has to be done carefully, and it's more than just "nerf this, buff that". Buffs need to be done in such a way that they increase the possibility space of a game, that is, the amount of things that can be done. So nerfing one character might actually involve making a small buff to another that puts them on equal ground. It's complex, very complex.
@@somebodylikesbacon1960 Bayo is trash in Ultimate though! Hell yea. Now, why the hell does K rool have belly armor when Bowser doesn't have shell armor?
K. Rool's belly armor activates when he's attacking using certain moves. 8 moves use it, including side taunt. Meanwhile, every other move in Bowser's arsenal has straight up i-frames. 8 moves have them, not counting throws or the i-frames after landing side-b. Jab, forward tilt, up tilt, down tilt, forward smash, up air, and down air all have some invincibility or intangibility on them, and up-smash has shell *invincibility* when travelling up (frames 14-27). _but yeah whatever_
This reminded me of the nerf of Healing Spirit in D&D 5E. Nerfing it dealt with something strong that frustrated some DMs, but nerfing it also entirely ignored that it was one of the few good things Druids and Rangers had at low and mid levels. Now they're basically back to cherry tapping with their spells that almost all require that they be one at a time for several rounds (most of their spells are concentration spells) while the other casters and half-casters fire off big things every round, sometimes 2 at a time with ease. Sometimes, a buff paired with nerf can be good too. If one thing in a kit is too strong and overused, giving them more options at the same time might help address some issues.
The spell was completely fine, but probably stronger than bad spells, and looked broken in tables that don't optimize much, which is almost all of them
@@opo33333 You could have the perfect perfectly balanced game and like every attack is the exact same thing with no fun flavoring and players would find a way to say "this is way too op" lol.
The thing about Healing Spirit is that it encouraged ridiculous play that didn't make sense. It's like if to cast Fireball you had to drop your pants and take a dump in the middle of combat. Mechanically it makes next to no difference but it entirely changes the flavour of the encounter.
I've been a subscriber for some time and I really appreciate you making these videos. I don't play fighting games at a good level but I'm the kind of person that likes to soak up whatever interesting kind of knowledge there is on a game or community. I kinda wish there was a link to donate, I think chipping in a little would help the quality work you do!
Something you guys forgot to mention was the concept of "Power Creep". Most fighting games don't have a long enough lifespan to reach this problem... but this is something that DOTA2 constantly has to struggle with. Once everyone gets buffed enough, they don't fit into the game's mechanic matrix anymore. The non-variable mechanics that persist through every match. In DOTA2 it is the Towers, the AI creeps, the jungle/neutrals. In something like SFV you have the stage size, the screen size, the timer, the health/stun bars (which are fairly similar among all the characters in SFV), the average jump height, the average reach of normals, etc. If everyone gets given a combo->reset->combo/stun->combo that KOs, the game has power creeped too far and become unfun as it is no longer about the read and react gameplay, but getting the first hit, and then winning a 50/50 coin flip. You need "meaningful play" in your game... and when you have characters like Balrog, Laura, Mika who make the game come down to 50/50 guesses, there is no present "meaningful play", there is merely a short watered down neutral game that turns into coin flips afterwards. The reach of normals, the size of the screen vs. player size/walkspeed, and the jump mechanics are all contributing factors as to why SFV has such a boring and partially irrelevant neutral game. Go watch Snake Eyez Zangief vs. Rufus in SF4. Then watch Season 1 Mika vs. Ryu. Ryu has all these short little stumpy normals that barely reach, and a fireball that can be easily beat. Meanwhile Mika mainly just fishes with MP/clap to start up their 50/50 game anywhere on the stage. SFV is too much about "taking turns" up close, and guessing on coin flips. I don't think removing meterless DP is a problem, but it also isn't a solution to the problems S1 faced. Meterless DP was "OP" in Season 1 (it made you top tier), but that wasn't because of itself being an OP mechanic, it was due to the mechanics around it eliminating the neutral game. DP was a way to get out of the 50/50 coin flips, and reset to equal in a game that is all about taking turns up close. What they needed to do was give more mid-range options to the game, longer range normals, and change the size of the screen. The overall mechanics are very poorly thought out and aren't coercive. They barrow from SF3 in a lot of ways, but don't realize the whole picture of what made SF3 so perfect. They added the "trees" from SF3, without realizing how they fit into its "forest".
@Aristotle Jalalianfard, Because there's no such thing as a perfectly balanced game anymore. There's just too many variables to consider and to weigh every single possible outcome wouldn't be reasonably viable. So in the case of buffing vs. nerfing, it all boils down to what the video mentioned at 0:54. You simply have to adapt. Because let's face it, when you're an underdog against any higher tier, doesn't seem that much more satisfying when you do come out victorious? That is probably one of the main factors for most of us not caring about whether it's balanced or not, because at this point it's gonna require skill to be exceptionally good. But as cliche as it may seem, to each their own...
@@pepkoko2229 I mean you gotta be good at the game to still win. You could play a powerful character but if you suck at the game you'll still loose. So yes probably since like I said you gotta be good, you can't just pick up smash and know everything
This video assumes that every example of over buffing would be in a creative sense as in street fighter rainbow edition. If you look even poorly at the history of a game like League of Legends, the threats of over buffing characters become clearly visible. Anybody who played during season three will remember when Kassadin was pick or ban (earning the nickname Kassa-win), and anybody who played the game when Xin Zhao was first released also would know how powerful he was on release. Overbuffing characters doesn't always mean cool and interesting new mechanics. Sometimes it can just mean a game of rock, paper, scissors and gun.
Honestly, the whole basis of the video, "Buffing over nerfing", is completely misguided. The goal of game balancing is getting the game to the perfect playable state, where abilities all have their uses, they feel good to use, and they all have answers or strategies that could answer them, creating an experience that's enjoyable for all and allow the best elements of the game to shine. You can't achieve this by simply turning numbers up, or, worse, giving new qualities to old abilities. The former will simply create larger gaps in power that will need to be addressed, while the latter means you are pushing off the core problems around that ability. You can't always buff something bad into being good, sometimes something bad is just bad, and something good is always going to be good, no matter how you nerf it, no avoiding that. Consider mercy; She's a healer whose entire kit works around healing and getting to people who need to be healed, while other supports have some sort of resource or kink in how they support people. Lucio needs to be close-by and therefore, in danger, Brigette needs to be in the front line to do real healing, Moira needs to temper her healing with damage, Ana has some powerful abilities, but they don't always line up, and Zenyatta is just not fast enough sometimes. These characters are all forced to play a certain way, but with Mercy, you simply have the best flexibility of any support, heal from far, get in close, buff a teammates damage to finish off a problem, revive that guy that went to far in, cast your ult and give full coverage of your entire team. Mercy's abilities, by function and design, are always simply going to be more critical than someone else's, because her abilities are simple, yet effective, with nothing really hindering them besides casting times. In order for you to stop her from being the best support, while keeping her viable, you would need to radically change her entire kit. Not just her ult, literally everything, and thats a really hard thing to just do, while trying to balance like a billion other characters. Reworks and a careful balance of nerfs and buffs are always going to be the answer to game balance. Sometimes the best answer for something standing too tall, is simply taking it down a peg, and if that doesn't work, you might need to think about replacing the thing completely. It's literally the worst when developers try to side-step a problem, instead of just addressing it.
that is because League of Legends is a game that largely emphasizes individual character strength. it isn't uncommon for a fed champion to 1v2 or 1v3 purely on the basis of their stats (not their skill). most games do NOT function like this which is why it's important to note the distinction.
1:36 They don't get what they're saying. Fun and balance are NEEDED hand in hand. You don't really feel rewarded after enough matches where you realise "Oh I just fought this same character time and time again with my new tactic and it's really stressing me out having to do this over and over again. It's like I'm giving them a handicap." For that basketball example... It sounded stupid for them to invent something to nerf a whole team of people that used a tactic to defeat one OP enemy.
@@LunarEdge7 I think the point there was that low scoring games were really boring to watch, so nerfing the team that did the boring tactic made it more enjoyable to watch again.
A good "nerf" imho was the Lucio rework in Overwatch. He was just way too good the way he was, but by lowering his AOE, giving a visual indicator, and buffing his wall ride and projectile damage, he feels better to play over all.
I like the pharah nerf mini rework where she fires faster but does less splash damage. It rewards hitting direct hits which makes her skill ceiling higher.
Seriously, very interesting video. :3 Adapting, flexibility, that's what I like. I know this isn't my line but : Precision beats power, and Timing beats speed.
You're quite right. The idea of picking Mika up again now that the wall bounce is gone depresses me. That was the whole reason why I played her. I understand it was very strong, but that's how it feels.
ChrisGol14 I don't think it's a matter of abusing something dumb, it's probably part of it. But that combo was fun to do and something unique to Mika. No other character did that and it was cool. There could have been other ways to nerf it besides removing it
Warzonice Yes exactly, the guy that says "adapt" hasn't listened to the video. It is really not about damage or strength or winning, it is just not fun to not be able to do all her actually fun stuff. Almost every player I met online used different followups after the bounce, I had my own too, and a big portion of those are gone. This is a neat loss for the gameplay.
But Buffs across the board can lead to the game being too quick to end though. This is especially true with FPS balance when too many guns get buffed to match the highest ttk weapons. It takes away from the back and forth of a fight and becomes a matter of who shot first (or in a fighting game's case: who got off the 1st combo).
If you're talking about TF2 they have basically the opposite philosophy, nerf any really good weapons into the ground so they're not fun to use anymore.
I think this applies amazingly to D&D 5e. There is a tendency as a DM to "nerf" your players for fear that they'll be too powerful and every battle will be inconsequential, which is a very real possibility that happens all the time. Instead I've found that if you allow your players to pull rule bending shenanigans and give them story related homebrew abilities it genuinely makes the game more fun and interesting for them because there is a greater sense of creative freedom and choice. If all a fighter can do is attack a few times per turn then theres not really any fun in playing them. In a game where imagination is *literally* the limit, why constrain yourself and your players? To "balance" this buffing simply do the same for the encounters that you plan. Create situations where the environment is interactive and have the enemies think creatively to use external elements to their advantage. Even homebrew some mechanics to swing things in an unexpected way - is there a time-constraint? are they moving? are there environmental dangers? As much as the rules of the game are vitally important, the fun of the game is the reason you all sat down in the first place. Games are meant to be fun, not balanced.
We don't play 5e specifically, but our group has a similar approach in that new characters are allowed to invent new tricks: wizards research new spells, fighters develop new fighting techniques, etc. This is limited by the logic of the setting, but _not_ by any kind of "game balance"-the closest concept we have is scaling, e.g., if you're inventing a 3rd level spell, it should be roughly as powerful as existing 3rd level spells. If this new shit of yours is scaled appropriately but ends up trivializing future adventures anyway, then congratulations, you win D&D. The DM doesn't even "buff" enemies compensate, because his adventures aren't designed to be balanced in the first place. He preps content based on what he thinks would be interesting to run, _not_ based on what he thinks we can handle-usually keeping multiple scenarios ready at a time so we don't have to feel bad about noping out of stuff that turns out to be too dangerous. That in turn means we can weigh risk and against reward and pick our own battles based what _we_ think is an acceptable challenge, and the game effectively balances itself!
Comparing nerfing a character (game mechanic) to nerfing a player (person) is false equivalence. The basketball example was to make the game more fun. Nerfing characters in video games is for balance. The basic argument against buffing more than nerfing is parsimony. You buff the weak and nerf the strong equally toward the center because it's easier. It also maintains game balance and doesn't push things to be overly offensive or gimmicky.
A change to a game mechanic will necessarily nerf and buff players. Good point about it being easier to move towards the center, but if you look at the history of a fighting game with many updates, the characters get more abilities (though the damage is often tweaked systemwide). In Street Fighter 2, before the Super Turbo update, no one had an overhead attack. Getting an overhead when you didn't have one before is a huge buff, and it's awesome.
Where does it end tough? Video games are for the masses too and at some point characters will get so complex and hard to learn that nobody will have fun but a handful of nerds who have the time and skills to learn those characters by heart. Fighting games already are viewed as hardcore and hard to get into and adding more and more and more abilities wont make it easier.
@@CoreAGaming Nobody having an overhead attack is more of a game mechanic and adding them was a change in mechanics. If everyone or some characters got a (fast ranged) attack that hits regardless of how you're blocking would it be awesome? Probably not. Because it's a bad mechanic if not done well. It has nothing to do with it being a "buff".
Wobbling isn’t banned at most tournaments and people do complain about it lol you can find tons of clips of people getting tilted after getting chain grabbed
_[starves self to show approval]_ honestly one could make a video on this divide in balance between skilled and unskilled players alone. And I'd watch that in a Heartbeat!
flaws in games can sometimes really help the community which blizzard hates, they always try making there game perfect in every way and deny the flaws.
yea they listen way too much to whining. Nerfing classes/cards/characters to the ground so that NO ONE plays it anymore. (I'm looking at you warsong commander) You might as well remove the card by now.
Naw, they got something better. Why buff when you can power creep and have them pay for the new content. One costs money and one makes more money. duh.
They mostly listen to raw Data and then looking for Posts, which support their Data, and that is often why they fail to create good Buffs or Nerfs. Mercy is the best example. She is picked damn often, because they created her in way that, she automaticly becomes a must pick for many Teams. (a low entry Skill Healer, that is able to Heal a Team Solo, as long as nobody tries to kill himself) Instead of adding Options, which might weaken her, but create Options, they just Nerf her to the Ground. Instead of trying to give other Healers the Options to take her Role in many Comps, they Nerf her even more. Then, they rework her and Nerf her again.
imo bayonetta's nerf was necessary, she is still a good character and almost always makes it into top 8 on tournaments. She does not feel unfair anymore
Bayonetta was an extreme case, though. The devs had finally nerfed Sheik to not be so dominant and overcentralizing in 1.1.5... but then they added Bayonetta which was miles worse than Sheik could ever dream of being. Bayonetta was way overtuned and needed the nerf if the game wanted to not be overcentralized around one character once again (and to be honest, although she is far fairer now, you can still feel part of her overtuning even to this day).
theres no real consensus on who the best character is. there's like 7 or 8 that people always bring up as potentially being the best, but nobody can say for sure who it is. main ones are diddy, cloud, bayo, sheik, fox, mario, rosa.
I know this video generally applies to fighting games, but I feel like this analysis applies all forms of games. Battlefront 2 is my favorite example. Everything in that game has been nerfed throughout it's lifespan, and now it just feels sad.
I wrote this piece-by-piece as I watched, so some topics are in response to individual portions of the video and are not representative of the video as a whole. Also, it's a long one. Your opening argument undermines your entire point. Nerfs and buffs are absolutely not meant to make a video game more fun to watch. Professional sports is primarily for spectators. In fact, the leagues only even exist because of revenue from spectators. However, video games are meant to be played by the masses, rather than by a handful of elite players like professional sports leagues. Changing rules to make basketball more interesting to watch is vastly different than changing the properties of attacks and characters to make a game more balanced and more fair. A game that is more fair is more fun, but fun is such a subjective topic that it's not even worth discussing. NBA basketball needs to be entertaining to maintain revenue, and thus maintain its existence. Video games do not rely no spectators (barring professional leagues, but that's a different story), they rely on players. You're conflating a lot of very different ideas and overlooking a lot of important details. For one, Street Fighter 1 isn't boring because it's perfectly balanced, it's boring because of a lack of variety. Variety and balance, however, are not mutually exclusive. A ton of feathers weighs just as much as a ton of bricks, even though the two objects are vastly different. You're also looking at nerfs or buffs across the entire cast, but buffing or nerfing the entire cast is vastly different than nerfs or buffs applied to an individual character. When the whole cast is affected, it still maintains uniformity and balance, and instead of changing how one character or matchup is played, it fundamentally changes how the entire game is played. Whether or not this is for better or for worse has nothing to do with whether or not the characters were nerfed or buffed, and is entirely dependent on the design of the game itself. Therein lies the brick that, once taken, causes your entire argument to fall flat. Whether or not nerfs or buffs should be applied to a game depends on how the game is played, or how the developers want to shape the gameplay. This is an incredibly complex design topic that I'm not going to get into here, because frankly, I could write thousands of words on that topic alone. Your tangent on loss aversion is more about the psychology of fun than it is about game design. There is no universal "fun" design, there is only design which promotes depth, nuance, strategy, and all of the things that make video games more intellectually stimulating and engaging to play, and those that do the opposite. Talking about fun in video games is an invariably dead end that is neither constructive nor interesting. You also are looking at nerfs and buffs from a strictly numeric perspective, i.e. damage done, frames, etc. What you need to look at is how it influences gameplay as a whole. If a character in Super Smash Bros has the KBG of an uptilt reduced, is it a nerf if it opens up more combo potential with that move? Is your SF4 Ryu example actually a nerf if it opens up more mix-ups and strategic potential? That sounds like a buff to me, albeit a well-designed one. Your SF5 example alludes to what I was talking about earlier, with cast-wide changes shaping how the game is played as a whole. Whether or not the nerf was bad has nothing to do with the fact that it was a nerf, but instead how the game played as a result. A buff could just have easily done the same thing. Now that I've seen the whole video, I don't believe you've made a strong case at all. This is not a topic of buffs and nerfs, it's a much broader topic of game design as a whole, only it doesn't consider all of the many nuances of game design, and wrongfully attributes these changes to nerfs and buffs exclusively. You also talk way too much about fun and excitement, which are not topics of game design at all, despite being the reason people play video games. Nerfing is actually the better approach to balance for one main reason: linearity. A buff creates linearity. It potentially elevates one move or character above the rest and encourages the use of fewer game elements. The worst a nerf does is make one character or attack non-viable, while the rest of the game's content stays relatively the same. The other reason is interplay, or the interaction of game elements. Interplay has two phases: push and pull. The push is the "approach," so to speak, and the "pull" is the opening or the vulnerability. Both of these elements are essential to game depth and interesting gameplay. Buffing increases the force of the "push," and nerfing the force of the "pull." When a game has too much of either, it becomes less interesting. However, this is also dependent on the game's design as a whole, which as I mentioned before is an incredibly complex topic. Whether or not to nerf or buff is not a decision that can ever be made in a vacuum. You need to consider how it changes the game as a whole. Nerfs and buffs are equally capable of negatively shaping gameplay, though nerfs are typically far safer due to how they shift engagement away from one element and toward all of the others, rather than toward a single element.
Damn, this is some high level counter-argument. My brain fail to process all of that in one reading, so I'm gonna have to reread your piece later lol. Are you an actual game designer or something?
I don't have the necessary coding skill to program a game, but that's basically the only thing missing. Game Design is a very new, unknown field. Even most modern game developers don't have a solid grasp on design concepts, and the advent of more powerful gaming hardware is only making it worse because it allows developers to entertain through visual spectacle and passive narrative rather than well-designed gameplay systems. I'm a gamer because I love gameplay, and I'm not happy with where the medium is going. Long ago I decided to determine the specific reasons why older games seem to function on such a higher level than most modern games. It has been a long-going learning process to understand how games work and what design elements lend themselves to more gameplay potential, because I'm unhappy with the current state of game quality, gamer values, and their ability to discuss them on a meaningful level. So no, I'm not a designer. Not yet. I'm someone who has studied game design critically in an academically-minded way to at least do my part in improving the state of the medium and game discussion.
Hm, I don't know if I agree with your implication that professional sports and amateur sports are quite that distinct. I can see, if you're American especially, why you'd come to that as from what I've seen, that divide certainly exists there. But here where, professional Basketball for example, is a perfectly viable money maker there are a lot more players than there are viewers is what I'm getting at, so the rules are like video games where they appear to be designed for those who follow them first and those who watch them second. And on the other hand, more games are being designed and updated with spectators in mind. I reckon the only reason we haven't seen more is, as you said, gaming is a relatively new sport of sorts. What's most likely is a balance (heheheh) in consideration of both players and spectators, with both fields.
How often have you ever played pick-up basketball where there's an actual shot clock or timed periods? Many rules get over-looked during casual sports play because they're not necessary for the game to function. Video games, however, NEED to function. That is their purpose. A video game is meant to be played more than it is anything else, and the game's rules and design is meant to serve that purpose.
The idea that we should only ever buff the weaker characters to make them more in-line with the strongest ones is simplistic and ignores the ramifications of power creep. Using Blazblue Cross Tag Battle at the moment of writing as an example, Ruby and Gordeau are the only characters who can completely ignore the neutral game and this is why teams of those two characters completely dominated in two major tournaments. Now, we can't nerf them because nerfs are wrong, which means we have to find a way to bring everyone else to that level (that's 38 other characters who all fight in teams so there's also interplay between them all to think about as well) and then even if you manage that, we're left with a game where the neutral no longer matters, in fact it doesn't exist anymore. It's a really unhealthy approach to game design. Another thing I'd like to say is speaking from my experiences as a D&D DM, players are very, very bad at deciding what's actually fun and balanced for a game. I can ask a player if he wants his 5th level fighter to be able to shoot eye lasers and leap 60ft in the air, and he'll almost certainly say yes, but good luck challenging him with environment obstacles or snipers or flying enemies.
@@Phoenix_The_HeroHater I saw a game that nerfed everything in sight. It was champions online and it became a ghost town for it. Everything was nerfed to the weaker power standards or just made identical to other abilities. It became boring and likewise no new content came about. Also most players dont speak on the forums of any game.
Also. Many players who complain on forums are not necessarily good players. Something that seems overpowered might just be a "foo strategy". Or a skill gate character. Not overpowered except at low skill levels meant to get people into the game. Nerfing a foo strategy can ensure new players can never hope to even get into the game. Without the noob tube, call of duty would not be as popular as it is today.
Nerfing isn't bad all of the time. What's wrong with shooting eye lasers and leaping 60ft in the air? Winged Tiefling Warlock is actually better than that because they can straight up fly. Just have some aerial environmental obstacles, or obstacles that require a 60ft jump to bypass, and don't use snipers. No one finds snipers fun except snipers.
Power creep is a massive issue, MTG is a great example of it gone wrong, even if they have now found ways to make the game not about top decking lethal.
THIS is exactly what I wanted to say to the overwatch team as they reworked out all of the """situational""" characters. Balance is worthless by itself. Just because characters have a more even pick/win rate now, doesn't mean that the game was improved by the changes.
I disagree with just about everything that's said in this video. It's completely wrong. Specifically about how "balance is worthless by itself", and e-sports. Balance is the backbone of these games, and your idea of nerfs = stale, buffs = fun is nonsense. Good balance is at the core of any games fun factor. It's what allows players to be able to pick any character, and know that the playing field is level. It's irrelevant if you have 100 characters in the game, if only 10 of them are viable for consistent winning. Nerfing those 10 is the obvious and correct choice for the game, not buffing the other 90. You might buff the lowest 10 however. About e-sports. The entertaining aspect of e-sports is about the players. It's about the professionals doing things in the game you couldn't do because they practice so hard. So your worry that nerfing is going to somehow homogenize the cast into a stale, unentertaining game is unfounded. Nerfing isn't about making everyone the same. Neither is buffing. It's about ensuring that every character has a viable chance to win, and that no one character sticks so far out as to ruin or create a stale meta.
For me, yes. Killer Instinct being my top choice. KI has always had a couple of top tier characters (Sadira and Saberwulf Season 1 comes to mind), and they've consistently been nerfed until their skillsets are more in line with everyone else. The low tier characters have also been buffed on a regular basis. It's allowed that games roster to flourish, and now you will see just about every character being picked at some point in tournament play. DOA is another one, but it's mostly dead now. The top characters from each iteration were nerfed, and now you have more than just a small handful of 4 characters dominating. Things are more interesting now because of it. I can say for certain that I stopped playing games because of bad balance though. This extends to more than just fighting games. I will though, watch professionals play these games, even though I know the games balance is jacked. I'll watch them because the matches are mostly entertaining, and I didn't need to spend 100 hours of my time to realize I picked the wrong character to play as competitively.
"About e-sports. The entertaining aspect of e-sports is about the players. It's about the professionals doing things in the game you couldn't do because they practice so hard. So your worry that nerfing is going to somehow homogenize the cast into a stale, unentertaining game is unfounded. Nerfing isn't about making everyone the same. Neither is buffing. It's about ensuring that every character has a viable chance to win, and that no one character sticks so far out as to ruin or create a stale meta." Thats what SFV did, they made everyone besides 4 characters play exactly the same and made the game's execution so easy that you can do everything that a character has to offer after 2 or 1 hour on training mode. You no longer see crazy things happen between pros because the game is too simple now and i think thats why most people say that every match between pros looks about the same.
If you can figure out everything a character can do in an hour, then the game has no depth. Balance though, is a different topic. The two aren't mutual. SFV is junk because it sacrificed difficulty and skill, for casual mechanics and flashy V-triggers. Giving characters a variety of options to deal with different scenarios, adds depth to your game. And making sure everyone has these options, makes your game balanced.
Balance and difficulty are mutual in fighting games. Hard combos balance themselves by being hard to do, they may do more damage but you risk dropping it. Same as motions for specials and so on. Difficult things like chun piano combos offered a lot to pros but the majority of people werent able to do them at all. Even Core-A has addressed this on another video before (i think it was 'What makes a move overpowered' or the one he talks about selecting a main.) I disagree with your second point too, if v trigger is casual then what were Ultras in IV? The reason why the game is casual isnt because it has casual mechanics, its because it has a limited number of them. The biggest problem i have with V is that they removed close normals and killed frametraps altogether. There is so much wrong with V that im just waiting for it to die and get my hands on VI, at least there will be other capcom fighting games like Infinity in the meantime.
Capcom wants to be esports but the character balance has to be esports too. For the benefit of the players and the people watching radical changes and departures from previous states of the game just confuses everybody. Nerfs or buffs need to be indirect. Instead of nerfing characters like Mika with the removal of the invisible wall what if she just did less damage? That way Mika still has a gimmick she can abuse but it is more forgiving if you get caught by it. The opponent doesn't have to go afk when in Mika's vortex. They can wait for a reset and try again. This opens up possibilities for a comeback. Buffs and nerfs need to make it so that the game can go on instead of 'oh he got clipped he's dead'. That means more chances for players to win. That means more game for people to watch. That means more screen time on TV or twitch. That means more money for the ads. At least that's what I think. In an effort to keep the game balanced and accessible they are dumbing the game down and giving more emphasis to the neutral. If you were to play you would say that's a good thing but people watching may want to see more specials more stuff flying around on screen. Ask someone to play a fighting game for the first time and they will ask you how to do a special not how to do footsies. Capcom wants to be esports but they are still not thinking esports if you ask me. Please note that this is the opinion of someone new to fighting games and the fgc. If you managed to read through all of this I sincerely thank you for for your time. Take care
Correction: Too much nerfing kills a game. Too much buffing changes the game. A game thats ridiculously buffed can still be fun, just for different reasons.
@@xanious3759 not really, a broken game is a broken game. No one wants to play a fighting game competitively where you 1 hit everyone with 1 button. Sounds like a dead game to me.
@@xanious3759 Not really. A game that is nerfed isn't exactly killed just as a game with a load of over buffed characters isn't exactly dead. But in both extreme cases they die. There has to be a level of balance for a competitive game to be fun.
I like how he talked about how melee players are fine with wobbling and separately talked about how if something is broken the community can just ban it lol. [:
Counter strike has a great example of this. In 1.6 saving on terrorists was cancer and ruined the game like before goal tending was a thing. Players would push a site and if they lost 2 or 3 people they would just run down the clock. It was a necessary nerf that prevented the game from being unfun. On the other hand in csgo they nerfed the awp prety much soley because kennys was abusing it since he was the best awper but it made the awp less exiting and powerfull for skillful players and was just a bad nerf.
the awp still needs to be nerfed. Because it makes it difficult for saving players to break some eco-damage And defending site becomes difficult unless a terrorist got the dead ct's awp. I dont like how csgo plays out now. Its still broken and always will be.
>the awp still needs to be nerfed. Because it makes it difficult for saving players to break some eco-damage And defending site becomes difficult unless a terrorist got the dead ct's awp. this sounds like the average silver dice roll round, cs isn't balanced around that
WiSpKing the awp nerf was perfectly fine. The movement speed with the awp was absurdly fast given its weight and it being a one shot kill gun. The awp nerf brought about more rifle play, which is great.
lmao Im actually a really good supreme but I notice everyone starts awp spam when they keep losing 7 rounds in a row and all of a sudden start coming back. Why? cause the AWP is overpowered. Lmao You should only be allowed 2 kills and thats it. I just see retards charge in like they're kennyS, hopping around, jump-crouching awp shots. Drop-down crouch-shotting and going for charging in noscopes. Lmao. The AWP needs a nerf. It needs longer recoil time so You can only take slower shots.
This analysis works quite well for game genres (e.g. fighting games) that are relatively easy to balance. In fighting games (excluding SSB), there are only two players in a match, there are usually only two characters on the screen at a time, the only game mode is deathmatch, and the "levels" (aka stages) are purely cosmetic, having no impact on gameplay. Contrast that with a game like Overwatch, where there are 10 players in a match who could be playing any of the 39 different characters, multiple distinct game modes, and large open 3D maps with complex geometry. With this much complexity, game balance is an extreme challenge. Developers will never be able to achieve the same degree of balance in Overwatch that can be found in many of the Street Fighter games. Every time the developers release a balance patch, there will be unintended consequences that require further patches to fix, and those changes will have their own unintended consequences, leading to a never ending cycle of balance updates. In a game like Overwatch, developers need to balance buffs with nerfs to prevent endless power inflation.
Here's a mad thing: I've just discovered this channel (which I love) because Jozef Chen talked about it on a Brazilian jiu-jitsu podcast. So I've watched six videos in two days, and this one screenshots a Eurogamer article I wrote about the rainbow edit, at 2:59! Amazing scenes, I love these videos, my man.
6:12 This is kinda the same reason why everyone disliked the tracking buff to Mishima hellsweep in Tekken 7. It was a buff but it removed some of the identity of the characters, that being a weakness to sidestepping left. It also didn't give them more options, it just reduced everyone else's options, making it almost a nerf to every other character rather than a buff.
I will always prefer buffing weaker characters over nerfing the strong ones. People playing the top tiers won't have to completely drop everything they learned to stand a chance and the ones who played lower tier now have more to work with. You keep the playing field even without causing a lot of frustration for players. It makes things fun for everybody and exciting since now there are more options available. You also sort of avoid creating this vicious cycle of nerfing the strong while buffing the weak and creating a new dominant set of characters who will then be gimped and replaced with yet another dominant set.
The only downside is planning how to work with buffs. Unlike how nerfing nerfs the fun factor, buffing is risky because it can make things worse. It happens in MMOs where the power creep and arms race start to add up. This makes the content become boring, so they start to think of ideas that may not work for f2p players. Then they run the risk of being accused of trying to force players into spending to actually access end game content. If planned well, a buff is usually better than a nerf, but in most cases, it just ends with people wanting another buff in an endless cycle because they can feel like they were ignored.
sasukeuchiha998 It's dependent on the game. There's always a limit to how much you should buff something. If everybody has nukes than the game would be just as boring as if they were fighting with sheets of tissue paper. I think every option should be made strong but none more overpowering than the rest.
Nerfs are neccesary if you lose the ability to adapt or to be unique. League of legends is a good example, it doesnt matter how much you can adapt, if the meta forbids your chosen playstyle you will lose. Thats why everyone hates on the balancing team in lol, "op" rules over "normals" and forbidds adaptive/unique playstyles.
Part of that is the devs wanting people to play the game a certain way. League stopped being fun for me because there is no creativity in what you can do, unless your smurfing.
That usually exists because proper counter play doesn’t exist. Meaning characters need buffs that can deal with it but are just bad at doing that job. And nerfing the “op” character usually makes those who were already good at fighting them awful because now a new threat takes over and they no longer are effective. Tired of idiots fucking pretending domino effects will never happen when you change a character like magically in a COMPETITIVE GAME all characters don’t have any interaction and are only strong in an isolated vacuum that effects no one.
The problem though is that you FREQUENTLY have characters nowadays where it's impossible to buff every character up to that extent without it either being logically impossible or making every character the same... Which obviously isn't going to help the "fun" factor. In the rainbow edition example, there were some fun ideas in there, but it would've never sold as a full version because buffing everyone to that extent was mostly random gibberish and chaos. It's funny for the shock for a bit, but it doesn't stand up to long-term viewing. Although, you seemed to be more making an argument that balance isn't necessarily exciting which, while true at times, the inverse DEFINITELY isn't true. A broken game with less than a quarter of its cast being viable is pretty equally dreadful. Several games have died pretty young because they left absolute juggernaut characters untouched. Also, while sometimes this is exciting to fighting game fans, it also creates and impermeable barrier at times that keep the community from expanding. It's definitely hard to explain to outsiders why people enjoy watching the same characters in finals over and over again.
AND FOR THE SMASH BROS BRAWL QUARTER FINALS WE HAVE A META KNIGHT VS META KNIGHT MATCH AND THEN A META KNIGHT VS META KNIGHT ALL MATCHES ON FINAL DESTINATION
Smash Bros. seems to suffer from this a lot. Melee had Fox/Falco/Marth being speed demon gods, Brawl had META KNIGHT META, and Sm4sh has Bayonetta and Cloud with occasional challengers. At least 4 has balance patches.
Not . . . really. It's not pure liquid ass, but it's not particularly good by today's standards. The physics engine is exploitable to hell and back, once you reach a certain level of skill about half the roster becomes completely invalid, and a lot of the hitboxes/hurtboxes are just goofed completely. It was amazing for its time, it just has not aged well, only maintaining such a huge competitive scene out of nostalgia.
Everything you say is true up until nostalgia. Melee isn't huge just because of nostalgia, it's huge mostly because it's the only game of its kind. And the kind of game it is is reeeeeally fun to play. So you just learn to love the bullshit and how bad most of the characters are, because "hey, look what I can do with a Gamecube controller!" Now I'm gonna go play some Melee.
I totally agree. I keep saying this to people who tell me that Melee is more ,"technical", than Tekken. Then they reply with something stupid like, "oh, but for the top tier characters like Fox and Marth, the skill ceiling goes waaaaay up, so its still hype/relevant!!" sigh.... Yes, Fox has l-cancelling, wave dashing and some shining tricks. Congrats man. That's 3 hard inputs. Want me to start listing Tekken`s? LOL...I have no idea how people can be so hyped up to see the same 3 or 4 players play the same 3 or 4 characters in the same 3 or so stages. Ive played both Melee for a time and I don't get it. Maybe it is nostalgia.
buffing too much could make the game stray too far from the intended design. Certain characters who's abilities are impossible to work in the current context will have to be changed in a way that makes them less fun. In moderate amounts I agree
"Something for everyone is nothing for anyone" expresses nicely how it can all just blend together. My example would be a monk in PvP in WoW. Windwalker was fun to play at start, very different skill set than other classes had, very fun and effective to play solo in random BG. But in competitive PvP as rated BG or arena it was hardly viable. Well, the forums floated about "OP MONK" because los nobos got their asses handed to them and Blizzard did listen, stripping off the unique abilities one by one, nerfed the damage and soon we had monk that wasn't fun to play and wasn't viable in any PvP mode, not in casual or ranked, so there we go, great job (y) Of course there was the end of WoTLK iirc, where almost every class was buffed to heavens, which ended up PvP being "I WIN" macro for nearly every class. Players blowing up from 100 to 0 in two, sometimes one global cooldown. That was plain horrible, blowing up other players like that didn't even feel like you achieved something. "Oh you didn't have your defensive CD, so I win, yayyyy!" And maybe it was end of MoP, where healers were just so overpowered, that I could tank/evade 5 enemies (out of 10...) as Mistweaver for 5 minutes until I got bored and let them kill me just to get to do something else in that battleground before it's over. Then there was the feral druid as the "flavor of the month" era. He came from stealth, dropped every DoT he had and then left. And you died unless you were a healer or had something to completely negate the damage. Except if you did, he just did it again until you didn't have any defensive CD left. For most classes there was simply nothing they could do against the druid no matter how skilled you were. So far haven't played that many games with PvP really, but from my experience Blizzard has been the worst to balance anything. Probably not a suprise that I haven't played in 3-4 years, have tried couple of times, but it's just clunky and meh after playing DotA for some years.
but when the *50/50* coin flip takes over the game for the sake of *"crowd hype"*, the game doesn't become more fun to play, nor watch... yall remember when MKX came out ?! the hype finals between *Dizzy* and *SonicFox* ?!, now fast fwd some months, and people realized that the game didn't had much aside fucking 50/50s i understand that Capcom wants to make the game easier for cauals, competitive for Pros, and fun to watch for viewers, but, this game that we are playing right now it isn't Street Fighter....
The Soul Consuming Darkness and guess what? they don't care about the people in between casual and pro. The people who can play the game, but don't have enough time to play it on such a high level to the point that you can compete at evo. And that forces us to deal with BS from scrubs and such a distinctive distance in low, to mid, to high mid, to top tier characters. Literally that's how fighting games operate now a days.
Romdog G And sfv will continue to suffer criticism of the highest caliber until they cater to the people who actually have been playing their game for years and not some newbie. Nor these FGC motherfukers who are gonna make money off any fighting game and could care less if the game was broken because most FGC players use top tier characters anyway. Props to them, but the FGC community shouldn't be able to determine if a character like nash gets nerfed (infiltration and nash) because he did great with him.
This only happens when characters are created not well thought out within the games mechanics. Usually the defensive ones. Like Sadira in Killer Instinct s1, one of the game main defensive mechanics is the combo breaker system which creates options and mix ups that deepen the game and also allow it to be more offensive because it is a really powerful defensive mechanic that everyone has access to it. But Sadira in s1 had in her instinct mode an unbreakable combo that could lead to almost a full health bar. Which made the developers in S2 to study it and tweak and improve the system and other similar but not as powerful exploits of the same rule. MKX is notorious for lacking defensive options like decent anti airs overall even the 2 bar+stamina for the pushblock was too expensive to the point it only use was to avoid certain chip kill in some situations. Other good example is joke characters like Anakaris in Vampire Savior(Darkstalkers 3) he doesn't have access to most mechanics everyone else has which allow many character to have extremely abusable stuff against him even infinite blockstrings.
One thing I disagree with is the common phrase, "this isn't street fighter". When you think about it, every different numbered SF game was maybe at least 70% different from the previous one. SF2 to Alpha to Alpha 2 to Alpha 3 to SF3 to SF4 to SF5. What do they actually share in common? The very meaning of "street fighter" is to have ever-changing gameplay for every new game. Whether the game turns out good or bad, I respect the approach.
if you only buff then you'll end up with the problem of power creep. you may have a game where everyone deals on average 100dps but playable characters are slightly unbalanced. after your buff-based balancing however, everyone would probably do 1000dps. diablo 3 is a very good example. the same character is on average doing 10 times more damage from v2.0 to v2.5. all you see is stupid 12-digit damage number floating on your screen. yes the game maybe more balanced. it has also become a never ending power creep.
That's not what that term means. Power creep is when new material in an expanding game is significantly more useful than content made earlier, leaving old players in the dust. If EVERYONE gets buffed, it's not power creep.
buffs and nerfs are oversimplifying the issue, if you just buff all the time you get power creep which basically turns into modern yugioh... you HAVE to have some nerfs, because if you don't your entire game changes as your examples have shown
This, so much this, this video is frustrating because it's not like he doesn't have a point, he is just leaving 3/4 of the whole discussion aside to make the "buff good" argument look better, what if the players found an exploit? What if the damage of some character is leagues above another? What if they miscalculated during balance of some ability? What if you gatekeep new players because you need x product (like in card games) or y hard to pull off technique in order to even have a chance at playing the game? You can't just say "buff everything" and forgo nerf, and you can't call every succesful rebalance a buff, there are sidegrades also, like if you swap a teleport ability in a character for a fly technique, you are gonna change how the character plays but not necesarily making him stronger, he just fell into an all or nothing mentality here.
@@darkcat6530 It's really not though, because in modern Yugioh yes it is completely lightspeed fast and everything is overpowered but how long has the game been going? Since 2002. 20 years of playing with the same cards, no standard sets or rules format beyond the ban list. Whereas let's take a long running fighting game that still gets updates, Tekken 7. It's been out for 7 years. If we applied that to Yugioh, they'd just be starting to synchro summon after 7 years. You wouldn't call early synchro broken and too buffed though right? Tekken will eventually get a Tekken 8 with whole new balances, so what was buffed in 7 won't matter as much. But there's not gonna be a Yugioh 2 that fixes every card. Buffs can be troublesome sure but on the whole they're so much better than nerfs.
@@julianfacundocalabrese1176 A lot of your doomsday examples are kinda missing the point of the video. He's not saying there should never be nerfs, he's just saying buffs are better and breathe life into a game rather than sucking it out. Yeah if a character has an exploit move they'll get that removed, but that's not like a nerf that's just fixing a problem in the code. And if a character has way more damage than another character, buff the lower character to have better defensive options or better mobility to compensate for lower damage. Then if it's still not enough, you can nerf the damage a bit. And hard to pull off techniques are a good thing, not a bad thing. Not everyone has to use the difficult execution character, he can just be there for those who like it. Never has a really hard execution character completely dominate pickrates and the meta because some people will always wanna just turn off their brain and hit buttons to win. And just, look at a game that came out, got no patches, and is still played. Third Strike. Chun is BUSTED in that game, so is Yun, and Ken. Those characters are very widely played, yet the game is still played. Which means those characters are fun to play and fight regardless of their op-ness. What if it got a patch though? Would you say to nerf Chun's crazy super, or genei jin? Or you could buff Sean, Q, Remy, and make them at least near to Chun's level because as we established, Chun is really strong and yet the game still goes on. So more strong characters, more variety, more fun.
@@espeonage4522 well i don't see your point if a game gets rebooted then it's praticly a new game new stuff gets buffed and nerfed while in yugioh cards got better sure it isn't really a buff but the comparison works because if cahracters gets buffed more then nerfed then the powerstandards are gonna get better same thing in yugioh powerstandards got too high and it screwed up the game
Interestingly in card games, this mentality leads to the infamous term "power creep". Eventually leading to coin flip where first turn players win. I guess I agree that one way to counter this is to buff second turn players, though so far it just changes into a game of "drawing your out".
As an experiment, I would love to see someone take a game that has extreme balance issues and only apply buffs. Smash Brothers Brawl, for example. Meta Knight should realistically be nerfed and would be if that game was released during the timeframe smash 4 was released... but, what if instead of needing the obvious eat character the absolute worst character was buffed instead. Initially I thought this was an idea what would quickly spiral out of control. It won’t. A buff for any character can be seen as a universal nerf for everyone who isn’t that character while a nerf is a universal buff. You can take the worst character in Brawl and make them immune to tripping. They’ll still such, but whatever. Then decrease their knock back, the damage they take, etc etc. If it’s only offensive buffs, yeah... shit gets out of hand pretty quickly.
Decreasing taken knockback is going to make Ganon combo food for an even longer isn't it? And also Brawl could be a bad example, because since Brawl revolved so much around MK, a change to MK would drastically change how the tier list is shaped even if no other character is touched in the slightest. I feel any other game with a modicum of game balance could implement this idea, but not Brawl. You can try to buff Ganon's power, damage taken, etc. but unless those defensive measures actually help Ganon WIN against MK Ganon will stay not viable.
I would say this is accurate psychologically. However practically it poses two major problems, one is it’s much harder to buff everything To bring it up to the level of the overpowered character or ability. And if you do this too often you end up with serious power creep.
As someone who plays League of Legends, I would love more nerfs than buffs right now. There is such a damage creep in the game right now, it's so not fun to play a weaker role when you just get 1 shot by everything else.
So nerf assassins and leave ADC as they are ? Yet most toplaners can still oneshot ADC when ahead same thing with mages. So,I think your exemple is poorly chosen .
@@kris0375 agreed, but my comment was posted a year ago. If you'd ask me what my opinion is on the game now It'd obviously not be the same as a year ago when things were completely different
@@rap1d715 Maybe the developer forget to buff the defense mechanism or the health bar so there will be no one hit again, and viola you get the balance that also fun When everything is super/OP, then nothing is super anymore cuz they all in the same level And thats applied to offensive and defensive, sometimes people tend to think about OP 1 hit, but never think about OP dodge/invincibility/teleport/max health bar/shield/damage reduction/anti stun/etc, so if all character OP in both offensive and defensive then you get the balance (and its more rewarding/not boring, also its the reason why we playing game, to achieve a wild fantasy or something that not mundane)
@@N0mad493And youtube; not that that’s any surprise but the fact people are unironically blaming this video for poorly balanced fighting games, entirely because somethings too strong (which the video advocates against) is some of the most youtube/twitter gamer shit ive ever seen.
He was saying that balance BY ITSELF is useless, not that it is an inherently bad thing The goal should not be to make the game perfectly balanced, but rather to make it fun. Whether or not balance is a path to that is a more subjective discussion.
@@Rex-golf_player810 But why does buffing reach that state more than nerfing? It seems like there's nothing inherently better about either over the actual state of the game.
This is a pretty good video though it falls apart when you look at it at a competitive level. At a competitive levels, targeted nerfs need to happen to the right characters and frequently. I think about it in terms of a hero shooter or a MOBA. In those games, if there's an overpowered character they will be picked or banned all the time, every game. If there's no ban system in the game or there's nothing stopping mirror characters, every single game on both teams. It doesn't even just make competitive play hell, it makes casual play hell. It's only fun for the person playing the overpowered character, but not all the times. Sometimes I would find that the overpowered character at the time isn't what I like to play, and for people who don't like to play them or play against them, it's a lose-lose situation in terms of fun.
One thing I think isn’t covered in this enough, is that nerfs are necessary sometimes, as the developers ability to spend more time on thing to create a good game, and nerfing can be necessary for some experiences. However I love this video, rewatch it a lot, and agree with nearly all points you did cover. The point of a nerf or buff is to improve the game in enjoyment, so more interesting and thought out options given or taken to make those situations is the best way to do it I would say
It's stupid that people say "nerfing isn't fun" as if top tiers / their players shouldn't be bothered to actually learn different ways or something new
@@jetkirby3981 I’m true, but it also depends on how “healthy” a strong character, tool, or ability is. Some strong things can hurt a game, and some centralizing and strong things can help (not a fighting game but tacticooler in splatoon three is like this) the health of competitive meta. Sometimes something strong can be good healthy, and lead to diversity and sometimes nerfs are needed as it is making a game worse
7:48 People enjoyed the game, not the broken mechanic. Nobody liked wobbling, it actually caused controversy and people thought it would kill the game.
reminds me of warframe(when I used to play it) as they just kept on nerfing everything, including weapons/skills that made grinding a lot more tolerable.
Nerf usually lead to more diversity than buffs, like nerf to one top tier character can open breathing room for many lower tier characters or characters which are inherently weak to that character this is not true for buffs usually as they lead to more centralisation unless it's widespread (as you said in SF Rainbow) so nerf can lead to same results with less work than buffs
Is it better to nerf Yun and Chun, or rebalance the entire cast to match their power level? Is it better to nerf meta knight or buff literally every other character in the game? Nerfs are far more practical than buffs. This becomes even more obvious in games with 100+ characters like moba's. You do make a point about nerfs like removing invincible srk taking strategy and fun out of the game... but this more due to a lack of understanding on Capcom's part and therefore a poorly targeted nerf. Most of the time crying about nerfs amounts to players being mad that they can't win without their overpowered cheese.
I thought games where supposed to be fun. I mean I don't play Mario kart to become a professional I play it because I wanna have fun and same with smash. I think what he's trying to say is that when making a game more fun buffs are better for that. Just what I got out of the vid that's all
@@gendalfgray7889 Project M. it's a Super Smash Brothers Brawl mod. designed to feel more like Melee but on the upgraded engine and with the larger cast. Everyone seemed to love it but sadly, Nintendo shut it down
Is it just me, or is it most of the time a new version of a game comes out and some characters are nerfed and some are buffed, that the ones who were not overpowered got nerfed and the ones that are got buffed? I mean how many times have I thought, "why the hell did they nerf my character and not that character? My character barely is used on the competitive scene, or on online in general. This character needs to be rewarding players more, because conceptually this is a really cool character that is fun to play, but the character might as well not be in the game because a cabal of a handful of overpowered characters dominate the whole game, and those characters will never be nerfed because everybody uses them. Not only do they not buff weaker but interesting and fun characters, but they are usually the ones who get nerfed and it isn't talked about because people don't even use them anyway. I have a feeling some jackass who just doesn't know hot to fight a character because he doesn't see that character enough confuses it for being overpowered and bitches to the company. Maybe I'm just paranoid, but think people actually bitch out honest characters just because they are so used to their cookie cutter strategies (meaning they are everywhere on the competitive scene) with top tier characters working that they actually cannot accept it when they are beaten with brains.
@MegaToke, This may be hard to explain. Many businesses run off the "squeaky wheel" strategy, where they address whatever the biggest complaints are. Unfortunately, more people bitch about stuff, than compliment them. Have you taken the time to write/message your favorite game developers telling them how much you *enjoy* a specific character/level/game? Sorry to say, most people don't. Complaints, bug issues, balancing issues... Those are the vast majority of what is sent to companies. People need to voice what they like/enjoy more to developers so they know what the players want to *keep!*
nerfing or buffing all depends on the situation imo. there is no one right answear for how to "balance" a game. Buffing or nerfing can have the same effect to a degree because just as a nerf can change the playstyle of a character so can a buff. iam not really into fighting games but for example world of warcraft has lots of balancing happening all the time to different things and even by just buffing one ability can have the effect of flipping an entire playstyle on its head. but i do agree that it shouldn't be balanced due to the fun factor and its okay for developers to experiment but try their best to keep the playstyle and identity the same. ofc there should be leway due to those changing whenever anything is changed but keep it in the same ballpark.
Theres a difference between lowering a number and taking away an ability. Losing options will effect playstyles more harshly than having an attack do 10% less damage
Street Fighter 3 3rd Strike anyone?
"Balance is worthless by itself"
*Thanos has left the chat*
Half the chat has left the chat
Mahf LMAO
Mahf it’s half the half left the chat
wow thanks for the subtitles
One of the best nerfs that I never saw anybody complain about was getting rid of Sonic's ability to shield cancel spin dash.
That was so broken lmao
Daniel Axton It wasn’t necessarily broken but it made the game boring for everyone watching and playing
It also made sonic extremely defensive focused. Removing the ability to shield cancel spin dash brought Sonic closer to what the developers envisioned, which I suspect is a more rushed down heavy character.
Even as a Sonic player in ultimate. I didn’t play him in sm4sh. He just wasn’t fun because on the shield cancel.
Man, I had to find a new main after that lol
Edit-jkjk
Everyone laughing until we buff nerfing
wait what the fuck
nerf buffs then
Wait, thats illegal
@@sushzi4937 YEAH! Let's nerf buff with buffed nerfs!!
Nerf all the nerfs!
"Extreme cases" *shows bayonetta*
Beat me to it. GG
"Extra Extreme cases" Ness Rosalina match-up
I mean, after Sakurai was forced to watch exactly how broken Bayo was at the invitational, I suspect she will be less dominant. She will never be a bad character, because the basic underpinnings of her design are pretty broken in a Smash context, but maybe she will at least not be ludicrous.
Well they did nerf her almost istantly when she was released. Yeah, she's still VERY good but pre-patch bayo was an extreme case
What is that game at 1:34?
"Extreme cases."
_Shows Bayonetta_
Core-A gets it.
it still works on fox tho
DI intensifies
RadioWw SDI intensifies.
* shows -nerf- -buff- -patch- adapt shirt *
Avery NiteStar Glover
ESAM: *heavy breathing*
"We actually saw this concept in 1984" *Shows a picture of George Orwell*
Nice.
"Come back when you start getting banned in tournaments" - Brawl Meta Knight
For those wondering, the game at 1:35 is Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2. It's as fun as it looks.
ummm... whats the game at 1:20 tho, lol. I know its an NBA Jam but what version?
when i saw guilty gear in the vid i got really happy, what a fun game
I'm finding it hard to believe that people who follow this channel don't know the Guilty Gear series.
Scrolled down to see this! Thank you :) Great vid.
Already a big fan of Guilty, and now an even bigger fan of you
Poor Woolie, getting absolutely styled on in round one then, and being dissected to make a point now.
Wiktrawdraw
I knew it was woolie
Buffs are basically for making things more fun and challenging
Nerfs are not about making it easier, it's about removing bullshit mechanisms
If possible, nerfs should also introduce reward+sacrifice mechanics (which gamers enjoy).
@@jacobshirley3457 Or maybe combine the two at times. Recently in Overwatch they gave Brigitte both a nerf and a buff. They nerfed her shield bash so it was no longer as damaging, while buffing her overall healing output from her healing aura, thus making her better fit her role as support/healer. Time will tell if they were the best changes, but the idea of nerfing items that are outside of what the character is suppose to be about while buffing what they are about is another way of looking at buffs and nerfs..
True. If half of the people are complaining something is overpowered, the other half says it's underpowered (which I've seen before), you need both.
@@FrogworfKnight I appreciate that you consider modelling the behaviour, but you can't have a meaningful opinion if you don't explicitly model it. What situations does the damage mod change (combo'ing tracer, pushing Shield comp into shield comp when you're ahead on ultimates) where as the healing buff heavily favors a dps-less comp. and will drive the meta further on-towards all tanks/heals/utility, which is precisely the Problem they are trying to address (people don't like all tank heal utility comps).
The problem with listening to people isn't that people overreact to or cry too much about any particular thing it is that they simply don't care about going through the entire laundry list of matchups. They want to play whatever they want to play and for it to work regardless of the situation
"not about making is easier"
Why do you think people call for nerfs 90% of the time? Because they suck at the game. That's why.
Balance has to be done carefully, and it's more than just "nerf this, buff that". Buffs need to be done in such a way that they increase the possibility space of a game, that is, the amount of things that can be done. So nerfing one character might actually involve making a small buff to another that puts them on equal ground. It's complex, very complex.
5:17 c'mon man, why'd you have to bring that up again... Woolie still cries himself to sleep every night thinking of that.
jazaniac Didn't know about that :(. All I know is that he makes really good content.
Truly tragic. How broken was he after that?
jazaniac a
"Extreme Cases"
>Bayonetta clip
Well pre-patch Bayo was an extreme case, in fact she was nerfed. She's still super good tho
That's why I never play For Glory on Smash 4 after Bayonetta.
@@somebodylikesbacon1960
Bayo is trash in Ultimate though! Hell yea.
Now, why the hell does K rool have belly armor when Bowser doesn't have shell armor?
@@PengyDraws because fuck you that's why
K. Rool's belly armor activates when he's attacking using certain moves. 8 moves use it, including side taunt.
Meanwhile, every other move in Bowser's arsenal has straight up i-frames. 8 moves have them, not counting throws or the i-frames after landing side-b.
Jab, forward tilt, up tilt, down tilt, forward smash, up air, and down air all have some invincibility or intangibility on them, and up-smash has shell *invincibility* when travelling up (frames 14-27).
_but yeah whatever_
6:05 And on that day, Sir Woolington of the Zaibatsu was never the same.
Darlington strikes again
FinalDragoon this was the episode where woolie started to steal pies
FinalDragoon This confuses me so much. Is the Zaibatsu liternally Best Friends with EVERYONE?! O_o
I'd never knew they steam his match with Daigo.
He lost, but won something in return.
This reminded me of the nerf of Healing Spirit in D&D 5E. Nerfing it dealt with something strong that frustrated some DMs, but nerfing it also entirely ignored that it was one of the few good things Druids and Rangers had at low and mid levels. Now they're basically back to cherry tapping with their spells that almost all require that they be one at a time for several rounds (most of their spells are concentration spells) while the other casters and half-casters fire off big things every round, sometimes 2 at a time with ease.
Sometimes, a buff paired with nerf can be good too. If one thing in a kit is too strong and overused, giving them more options at the same time might help address some issues.
isnt that uhhh reworking?
The spell was completely fine, but probably stronger than bad spells, and looked broken in tables that don't optimize much, which is almost all of them
@@opo33333 You could have the perfect perfectly balanced game and like every attack is the exact same thing with no fun flavoring and players would find a way to say "this is way too op" lol.
The thing about Healing Spirit is that it encouraged ridiculous play that didn't make sense. It's like if to cast Fireball you had to drop your pants and take a dump in the middle of combat. Mechanically it makes next to no difference but it entirely changes the flavour of the encounter.
Dawg if they don’t like it what’s stopping them from just ignoring it
I've been a subscriber for some time and I really appreciate you making these videos. I don't play fighting games at a good level but I'm the kind of person that likes to soak up whatever interesting kind of knowledge there is on a game or community. I kinda wish there was a link to donate, I think chipping in a little would help the quality work you do!
yes i would also donate to he is one of the source of why i started my youtube channel big inspiration to me
F34RI355 Thanks man.
Something you guys forgot to mention was the concept of "Power Creep". Most fighting games don't have a long enough lifespan to reach this problem... but this is something that DOTA2 constantly has to struggle with. Once everyone gets buffed enough, they don't fit into the game's mechanic matrix anymore. The non-variable mechanics that persist through every match. In DOTA2 it is the Towers, the AI creeps, the jungle/neutrals. In something like SFV you have the stage size, the screen size, the timer, the health/stun bars (which are fairly similar among all the characters in SFV), the average jump height, the average reach of normals, etc.
If everyone gets given a combo->reset->combo/stun->combo that KOs, the game has power creeped too far and become unfun as it is no longer about the read and react gameplay, but getting the first hit, and then winning a 50/50 coin flip. You need "meaningful play" in your game... and when you have characters like Balrog, Laura, Mika who make the game come down to 50/50 guesses, there is no present "meaningful play", there is merely a short watered down neutral game that turns into coin flips afterwards.
The reach of normals, the size of the screen vs. player size/walkspeed, and the jump mechanics are all contributing factors as to why SFV has such a boring and partially irrelevant neutral game. Go watch Snake Eyez Zangief vs. Rufus in SF4. Then watch Season 1 Mika vs. Ryu. Ryu has all these short little stumpy normals that barely reach, and a fireball that can be easily beat. Meanwhile Mika mainly just fishes with MP/clap to start up their 50/50 game anywhere on the stage. SFV is too much about "taking turns" up close, and guessing on coin flips. I don't think removing meterless DP is a problem, but it also isn't a solution to the problems S1 faced. Meterless DP was "OP" in Season 1 (it made you top tier), but that wasn't because of itself being an OP mechanic, it was due to the mechanics around it eliminating the neutral game. DP was a way to get out of the 50/50 coin flips, and reset to equal in a game that is all about taking turns up close. What they needed to do was give more mid-range options to the game, longer range normals, and change the size of the screen. The overall mechanics are very poorly thought out and aren't coercive. They barrow from SF3 in a lot of ways, but don't realize the whole picture of what made SF3 so perfect. They added the "trees" from SF3, without realizing how they fit into its "forest".
parry could do the work as well, DRAGON TANG (parried) get rekt X), i love 3rd strike.
@Aristotle Jalalianfard, Because there's no such thing as a perfectly balanced game anymore. There's just too many variables to consider and to weigh every single possible outcome wouldn't be reasonably viable.
So in the case of buffing vs. nerfing, it all boils down to what the video mentioned at 0:54. You simply have to adapt. Because let's face it, when you're an underdog against any higher tier, doesn't seem that much more satisfying when you do come out victorious?
That is probably one of the main factors for most of us not caring about whether it's balanced or not, because at this point it's gonna require skill to be exceptionally good. But as cliche as it may seem, to each their own...
So in basketball, they don't wait for patches? :O
But rules rather
Just like melee 🤔
Yes. It's just that the patches take years before they get downloaded.
It's also worth noting that if you nerf too much you punish players for practicing by wasting their time with tech that no longer exists.
If you buff to much you risk rewarding players for less work.
If the tech is op then it's not really punishment.
Wait
Someone PRACTICED bayo combos?
@@pepkoko2229 I mean you gotta be good at the game to still win. You could play a powerful character but if you suck at the game you'll still loose. So yes probably since like I said you gotta be good, you can't just pick up smash and know everything
Pep Koko LMAO
There is a difference between nerf and rework
EA: "Alright, let's nerf starter weapons."
**Update log**
Starter sword damage 10 -> 20
Premium starter sword damage ($59 total) 20 -> 200
Bro I did not expect you to be on a vid like this lol
Apparen
This video assumes that every example of over buffing would be in a creative sense as in street fighter rainbow edition. If you look even poorly at the history of a game like League of Legends, the threats of over buffing characters become clearly visible. Anybody who played during season three will remember when Kassadin was pick or ban (earning the nickname Kassa-win), and anybody who played the game when Xin Zhao was first released also would know how powerful he was on release. Overbuffing characters doesn't always mean cool and interesting new mechanics. Sometimes it can just mean a game of rock, paper, scissors and gun.
Don't forget LeBlanc on release that was a massive pain.
Honestly, the whole basis of the video, "Buffing over nerfing", is completely misguided. The goal of game balancing is getting the game to the perfect playable state, where abilities all have their uses, they feel good to use, and they all have answers or strategies that could answer them, creating an experience that's enjoyable for all and allow the best elements of the game to shine. You can't achieve this by simply turning numbers up, or, worse, giving new qualities to old abilities. The former will simply create larger gaps in power that will need to be addressed, while the latter means you are pushing off the core problems around that ability. You can't always buff something bad into being good, sometimes something bad is just bad, and something good is always going to be good, no matter how you nerf it, no avoiding that.
Consider mercy; She's a healer whose entire kit works around healing and getting to people who need to be healed, while other supports have some sort of resource or kink in how they support people. Lucio needs to be close-by and therefore, in danger, Brigette needs to be in the front line to do real healing, Moira needs to temper her healing with damage, Ana has some powerful abilities, but they don't always line up, and Zenyatta is just not fast enough sometimes. These characters are all forced to play a certain way, but with Mercy, you simply have the best flexibility of any support, heal from far, get in close, buff a teammates damage to finish off a problem, revive that guy that went to far in, cast your ult and give full coverage of your entire team. Mercy's abilities, by function and design, are always simply going to be more critical than someone else's, because her abilities are simple, yet effective, with nothing really hindering them besides casting times. In order for you to stop her from being the best support, while keeping her viable, you would need to radically change her entire kit. Not just her ult, literally everything, and thats a really hard thing to just do, while trying to balance like a billion other characters.
Reworks and a careful balance of nerfs and buffs are always going to be the answer to game balance. Sometimes the best answer for something standing too tall, is simply taking it down a peg, and if that doesn't work, you might need to think about replacing the thing completely. It's literally the worst when developers try to side-step a problem, instead of just addressing it.
that is because League of Legends is a game that largely emphasizes individual character strength. it isn't uncommon for a fed champion to 1v2 or 1v3 purely on the basis of their stats (not their skill). most games do NOT function like this which is why it's important to note the distinction.
1:36 They don't get what they're saying. Fun and balance are NEEDED hand in hand. You don't really feel rewarded after enough matches where you realise "Oh I just fought this same character time and time again with my new tactic and it's really stressing me out having to do this over and over again. It's like I'm giving them a handicap."
For that basketball example... It sounded stupid for them to invent something to nerf a whole team of people that used a tactic to defeat one OP enemy.
@@LunarEdge7 I think the point there was that low scoring games were really boring to watch, so nerfing the team that did the boring tactic made it more enjoyable to watch again.
BUFF EVERYONE UNTIL EVERYTHING IS A ONE HIT KILL
Which is why divekick works
YES
if you'v ever played Call of Duty Ghosts you'll know why that's a bad move
*cough* Sudden Death in SSB? *cough*
I love DiveKick so much. Raw, simple, skill.
buff armor or health?
A good "nerf" imho was the Lucio rework in Overwatch. He was just way too good the way he was, but by lowering his AOE, giving a visual indicator, and buffing his wall ride and projectile damage, he feels better to play over all.
He's more aggressive now.
The wall ride change was one of the worst changes ever in ow. It turned Lucio from a skillful hero to a brain dead one.
Vijay Vellaithambi this isn’t talking about the most recent change to the wall riding. This is one from a while ago
Alexander Loughran Yeah, the old wallride buff was pretty good.
I like the pharah nerf mini rework where she fires faster but does less splash damage. It rewards hitting direct hits which makes her skill ceiling higher.
"Hands, hadoken, jab, teleport, crossup standing fierce" had me in tears that has got to be the best combo of all time.
In conclusion, don't nerf Korea, buff all of the others countries.
Sorry.
Seriously, very interesting video. :3
Adapting, flexibility, that's what I like.
I know this isn't my line but :
Precision beats power, and Timing beats speed.
tragic
Maybe buff South Korea though...
Korea isn’t a country
@@InexorableVideos ok what?
You're quite right. The idea of picking Mika up again now that the wall bounce is gone depresses me. That was the whole reason why I played her. I understand it was very strong, but that's how it feels.
Omar Z adapt
Mika player should start using HK more than before. It is such a strong tool.
ChrisGol14 I don't think it's a matter of abusing something dumb, it's probably part of it. But that combo was fun to do and something unique to Mika. No other character did that and it was cool. There could have been other ways to nerf it besides removing it
I feel like all they had to do was keep the grab nerf and maybe a little damage scaling on wall bounce.
Warzonice Yes exactly, the guy that says "adapt" hasn't listened to the video. It is really not about damage or strength or winning, it is just not fun to not be able to do all her actually fun stuff. Almost every player I met online used different followups after the bounce, I had my own too, and a big portion of those are gone. This is a neat loss for the gameplay.
But Buffs across the board can lead to the game being too quick to end though. This is especially true with FPS balance when too many guns get buffed to match the highest ttk weapons. It takes away from the back and forth of a fight and becomes a matter of who shot first (or in a fighting game's case: who got off the 1st combo).
Tainted Knives Good point. I wanted to cover ability buffs versus damage, but it got too long.
Core-A Gaming if your videos were longer, we wouldn't mind at ALL! great work.
+Core-A Gaming
Well you should at least make that a follow up video.
I present to you, Jojo: HFTF, so very broken, yet so very fun.
They made a similar example in a more recent video, but using the Sailor Moon fighter
@@IronicHavoc there is a sailor moon fighter? What is it like, Touhou?
+A Jojo Referencer
It’s chaos.
if nobody plays petshop the game can be "balanced"
@@CallieSqueakz what's it called
5:55 always feels good to see woolie getting owned in a video.
always good to look for the woolie comment and then see someone you are subbed to posted it
piratecheese13 Always good to see a comment looking for a woodie comment made by some they're subscribed to.
Boi i knew he looked familiar thats woolie from two best friends
Woolie deserved it, he should of just thrown the match
Who's Woolie?
Valve: OP vs OP
Every gaming company: [Visible Confusion]
I loved x10 sessions.
But if everyone is OP then no one is OP
@@itsoracle Syndrome: this guy gets it
@@itsoracle if everyone is overpowered no one is overpowered
If you're talking about TF2 they have basically the opposite philosophy, nerf any really good weapons into the ground so they're not fun to use anymore.
I think this applies amazingly to D&D 5e. There is a tendency as a DM to "nerf" your players for fear that they'll be too powerful and every battle will be inconsequential, which is a very real possibility that happens all the time. Instead I've found that if you allow your players to pull rule bending shenanigans and give them story related homebrew abilities it genuinely makes the game more fun and interesting for them because there is a greater sense of creative freedom and choice. If all a fighter can do is attack a few times per turn then theres not really any fun in playing them. In a game where imagination is *literally* the limit, why constrain yourself and your players?
To "balance" this buffing simply do the same for the encounters that you plan. Create situations where the environment is interactive and have the enemies think creatively to use external elements to their advantage. Even homebrew some mechanics to swing things in an unexpected way - is there a time-constraint? are they moving? are there environmental dangers?
As much as the rules of the game are vitally important, the fun of the game is the reason you all sat down in the first place. Games are meant to be fun, not balanced.
We don't play 5e specifically, but our group has a similar approach in that new characters are allowed to invent new tricks: wizards research new spells, fighters develop new fighting techniques, etc. This is limited by the logic of the setting, but _not_ by any kind of "game balance"-the closest concept we have is scaling, e.g., if you're inventing a 3rd level spell, it should be roughly as powerful as existing 3rd level spells. If this new shit of yours is scaled appropriately but ends up trivializing future adventures anyway, then congratulations, you win D&D.
The DM doesn't even "buff" enemies compensate, because his adventures aren't designed to be balanced in the first place. He preps content based on what he thinks would be interesting to run, _not_ based on what he thinks we can handle-usually keeping multiple scenarios ready at a time so we don't have to feel bad about noping out of stuff that turns out to be too dangerous. That in turn means we can weigh risk and against reward and pick our own battles based what _we_ think is an acceptable challenge, and the game effectively balances itself!
A fun game of "Where's Woolie" that I didn't know I was playing today.
Comparing nerfing a character (game mechanic) to nerfing a player (person) is false equivalence. The basketball example was to make the game more fun. Nerfing characters in video games is for balance.
The basic argument against buffing more than nerfing is parsimony. You buff the weak and nerf the strong equally toward the center because it's easier. It also maintains game balance and doesn't push things to be overly offensive or gimmicky.
A change to a game mechanic will necessarily nerf and buff players. Good point about it being easier to move towards the center, but if you look at the history of a fighting game with many updates, the characters get more abilities (though the damage is often tweaked systemwide). In Street Fighter 2, before the Super Turbo update, no one had an overhead attack. Getting an overhead when you didn't have one before is a huge buff, and it's awesome.
Where does it end tough? Video games are for the masses too and at some point characters will get so complex and hard to learn that nobody will have fun but a handful of nerds who have the time and skills to learn those characters by heart. Fighting games already are viewed as hardcore and hard to get into and adding more and more and more abilities wont make it easier.
@@CoreAGaming Nobody having an overhead attack is more of a game mechanic and adding them was a change in mechanics.
If everyone or some characters got a (fast ranged) attack that hits regardless of how you're blocking would it be awesome? Probably not. Because it's a bad mechanic if not done well. It has nothing to do with it being a "buff".
love this video. great idea to include a real life nerf/buff situation with basketball
As both a basketball fan and a gamer of sorts, I give you a W.
Core A gaming quote?
"The ultimate point of buffs and nerfs isn't balance but to make a game that's fun to play and watch"
4:48 "if tails, you win"
I see this as an absolute win
"Enjoyed Wobbling in Melee"
Wobbling is banned and I don't know anybody who complains about it.
He meant people enjoy Melee despiste wobbling exists
Wobbling isn’t banned at most tournaments and people do complain about it lol you can find tons of clips of people getting tilted after getting chain grabbed
Wobbling is restricted. You have to stop wobbling and murder the victim after they reach 300%.
What's wobbling?
@@R3SerialDreams2 In Melee, Ice Climbers could basically lock an opponent with pummels indefinitely.
jesus christ, you always make the best videos. consistently well thought out and well explained. fuck man, thats impressive
"The ability of a game character starts with the talent of the gamer"
-Putin AND Ghandi
_[starves self to show approval]_
honestly one could make a video on this divide in balance between skilled and unskilled players alone. And I'd watch that in a Heartbeat!
Look man I’m just saying it seems easier to Lower the range of Goku Black’s 2H than raise the range of everyone else
Stealthy Black doesn’t have too many gimmicks to open people up, his 2H is makes up for not having a low 2L imo.
There are many times when the easy solution is the best one. But it's not always the case.
Blizz still haven't learned this
flaws in games can sometimes really help the community which blizzard hates, they always try making there game perfect in every way and deny the flaws.
+l3mo No, they listen to balance whining on their forums.
yea they listen way too much to whining. Nerfing classes/cards/characters to the ground so that NO ONE plays it anymore. (I'm looking at you warsong commander) You might as well remove the card by now.
Naw, they got something better. Why buff when you can power creep and have them pay for the new content. One costs money and one makes more money. duh.
They mostly listen to raw Data and then looking for Posts, which support their Data, and that is often why they fail to create good Buffs or Nerfs.
Mercy is the best example. She is picked damn often, because they created her in way that, she automaticly becomes a must pick for many Teams.
(a low entry Skill Healer, that is able to Heal a Team Solo, as long as nobody tries to kill himself)
Instead of adding Options, which might weaken her, but create Options, they just Nerf her to the Ground.
Instead of trying to give other Healers the Options to take her Role in many Comps, they Nerf her even more.
Then, they rework her and Nerf her again.
imo bayonetta's nerf was necessary, she is still a good character and almost always makes it into top 8 on tournaments. She does not feel unfair anymore
Bayonetta was an extreme case, though. The devs had finally nerfed Sheik to not be so dominant and overcentralizing in 1.1.5... but then they added Bayonetta which was miles worse than Sheik could ever dream of being. Bayonetta was way overtuned and needed the nerf if the game wanted to not be overcentralized around one character once again (and to be honest, although she is far fairer now, you can still feel part of her overtuning even to this day).
RickRoller90001 I haven't kept up with smash in a while is Cloud now the best character ? After the bayo nerf.
No, it's probably between Diddy or Sheik right now. Some people say Bayonetta might still be the best.
theres no real consensus on who the best character is. there's like 7 or 8 that people always bring up as potentially being the best, but nobody can say for sure who it is.
main ones are diddy, cloud, bayo, sheik, fox, mario, rosa.
I still can't stand hearing the word overcentralizing due to too many MK ban threads back in the Brawl days o_o
I know this video generally applies to fighting games, but I feel like this analysis applies all forms of games. Battlefront 2 is my favorite example. Everything in that game has been nerfed throughout it's lifespan, and now it just feels sad.
I wrote this piece-by-piece as I watched, so some topics are in response to individual portions of the video and are not representative of the video as a whole. Also, it's a long one.
Your opening argument undermines your entire point. Nerfs and buffs are absolutely not meant to make a video game more fun to watch. Professional sports is primarily for spectators. In fact, the leagues only even exist because of revenue from spectators. However, video games are meant to be played by the masses, rather than by a handful of elite players like professional sports leagues.
Changing rules to make basketball more interesting to watch is vastly different than changing the properties of attacks and characters to make a game more balanced and more fair. A game that is more fair is more fun, but fun is such a subjective topic that it's not even worth discussing. NBA basketball needs to be entertaining to maintain revenue, and thus maintain its existence. Video games do not rely no spectators (barring professional leagues, but that's a different story), they rely on players.
You're conflating a lot of very different ideas and overlooking a lot of important details. For one, Street Fighter 1 isn't boring because it's perfectly balanced, it's boring because of a lack of variety. Variety and balance, however, are not mutually exclusive. A ton of feathers weighs just as much as a ton of bricks, even though the two objects are vastly different.
You're also looking at nerfs or buffs across the entire cast, but buffing or nerfing the entire cast is vastly different than nerfs or buffs applied to an individual character. When the whole cast is affected, it still maintains uniformity and balance, and instead of changing how one character or matchup is played, it fundamentally changes how the entire game is played. Whether or not this is for better or for worse has nothing to do with whether or not the characters were nerfed or buffed, and is entirely dependent on the design of the game itself. Therein lies the brick that, once taken, causes your entire argument to fall flat.
Whether or not nerfs or buffs should be applied to a game depends on how the game is played, or how the developers want to shape the gameplay. This is an incredibly complex design topic that I'm not going to get into here, because frankly, I could write thousands of words on that topic alone.
Your tangent on loss aversion is more about the psychology of fun than it is about game design. There is no universal "fun" design, there is only design which promotes depth, nuance, strategy, and all of the things that make video games more intellectually stimulating and engaging to play, and those that do the opposite. Talking about fun in video games is an invariably dead end that is neither constructive nor interesting.
You also are looking at nerfs and buffs from a strictly numeric perspective, i.e. damage done, frames, etc. What you need to look at is how it influences gameplay as a whole. If a character in Super Smash Bros has the KBG of an uptilt reduced, is it a nerf if it opens up more combo potential with that move? Is your SF4 Ryu example actually a nerf if it opens up more mix-ups and strategic potential? That sounds like a buff to me, albeit a well-designed one.
Your SF5 example alludes to what I was talking about earlier, with cast-wide changes shaping how the game is played as a whole. Whether or not the nerf was bad has nothing to do with the fact that it was a nerf, but instead how the game played as a result. A buff could just have easily done the same thing.
Now that I've seen the whole video, I don't believe you've made a strong case at all. This is not a topic of buffs and nerfs, it's a much broader topic of game design as a whole, only it doesn't consider all of the many nuances of game design, and wrongfully attributes these changes to nerfs and buffs exclusively. You also talk way too much about fun and excitement, which are not topics of game design at all, despite being the reason people play video games.
Nerfing is actually the better approach to balance for one main reason: linearity. A buff creates linearity. It potentially elevates one move or character above the rest and encourages the use of fewer game elements. The worst a nerf does is make one character or attack non-viable, while the rest of the game's content stays relatively the same.
The other reason is interplay, or the interaction of game elements. Interplay has two phases: push and pull. The push is the "approach," so to speak, and the "pull" is the opening or the vulnerability. Both of these elements are essential to game depth and interesting gameplay. Buffing increases the force of the "push," and nerfing the force of the "pull." When a game has too much of either, it becomes less interesting.
However, this is also dependent on the game's design as a whole, which as I mentioned before is an incredibly complex topic. Whether or not to nerf or buff is not a decision that can ever be made in a vacuum. You need to consider how it changes the game as a whole. Nerfs and buffs are equally capable of negatively shaping gameplay, though nerfs are typically far safer due to how they shift engagement away from one element and toward all of the others, rather than toward a single element.
Damn, this is some high level counter-argument. My brain fail to process all of that in one reading, so I'm gonna have to reread your piece later lol.
Are you an actual game designer or something?
I don't have the necessary coding skill to program a game, but that's basically the only thing missing.
Game Design is a very new, unknown field. Even most modern game developers don't have a solid grasp on design concepts, and the advent of more powerful gaming hardware is only making it worse because it allows developers to entertain through visual spectacle and passive narrative rather than well-designed gameplay systems.
I'm a gamer because I love gameplay, and I'm not happy with where the medium is going. Long ago I decided to determine the specific reasons why older games seem to function on such a higher level than most modern games. It has been a long-going learning process to understand how games work and what design elements lend themselves to more gameplay potential, because I'm unhappy with the current state of game quality, gamer values, and their ability to discuss them on a meaningful level.
So no, I'm not a designer. Not yet. I'm someone who has studied game design critically in an academically-minded way to at least do my part in improving the state of the medium and game discussion.
Hm, I don't know if I agree with your implication that professional sports and amateur sports are quite that distinct. I can see, if you're American especially, why you'd come to that as from what I've seen, that divide certainly exists there. But here where, professional Basketball for example, is a perfectly viable money maker there are a lot more players than there are viewers is what I'm getting at, so the rules are like video games where they appear to be designed for those who follow them first and those who watch them second.
And on the other hand, more games are being designed and updated with spectators in mind. I reckon the only reason we haven't seen more is, as you said, gaming is a relatively new sport of sorts.
What's most likely is a balance (heheheh) in consideration of both players and spectators, with both fields.
How often have you ever played pick-up basketball where there's an actual shot clock or timed periods? Many rules get over-looked during casual sports play because they're not necessary for the game to function. Video games, however, NEED to function. That is their purpose. A video game is meant to be played more than it is anything else, and the game's rules and design is meant to serve that purpose.
AlonditeMX teh fuck?
The idea that we should only ever buff the weaker characters to make them more in-line with the strongest ones is simplistic and ignores the ramifications of power creep. Using Blazblue Cross Tag Battle at the moment of writing as an example, Ruby and Gordeau are the only characters who can completely ignore the neutral game and this is why teams of those two characters completely dominated in two major tournaments. Now, we can't nerf them because nerfs are wrong, which means we have to find a way to bring everyone else to that level (that's 38 other characters who all fight in teams so there's also interplay between them all to think about as well) and then even if you manage that, we're left with a game where the neutral no longer matters, in fact it doesn't exist anymore. It's a really unhealthy approach to game design.
Another thing I'd like to say is speaking from my experiences as a D&D DM, players are very, very bad at deciding what's actually fun and balanced for a game. I can ask a player if he wants his 5th level fighter to be able to shoot eye lasers and leap 60ft in the air, and he'll almost certainly say yes, but good luck challenging him with environment obstacles or snipers or flying enemies.
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@@Phoenix_The_HeroHater I saw a game that nerfed everything in sight.
It was champions online and it became a ghost town for it. Everything was nerfed to the weaker power standards or just made identical to other abilities. It became boring and likewise no new content came about.
Also most players dont speak on the forums of any game.
Also. Many players who complain on forums are not necessarily good players. Something that seems overpowered might just be a "foo strategy". Or a skill gate character. Not overpowered except at low skill levels meant to get people into the game.
Nerfing a foo strategy can ensure new players can never hope to even get into the game. Without the noob tube, call of duty would not be as popular as it is today.
LaughingAlex hey man I think you got the tong dude it ain’t me
Nerfing isn't bad all of the time.
What's wrong with shooting eye lasers and leaping 60ft in the air? Winged Tiefling Warlock is actually better than that because they can straight up fly. Just have some aerial environmental obstacles, or obstacles that require a 60ft jump to bypass, and don't use snipers. No one finds snipers fun except snipers.
Talk about "better to buff than nerf" but doesn't talk about power creeping?
Power creep is a massive issue, MTG is a great example of it gone wrong, even if they have now found ways to make the game not about top decking lethal.
I would say the best way to deal with power creep is to buff and nerf everything to the mid to high tier range
Hayds 126
I’ve waited 2 months and still no way to deal with power creep.
I think Power Creep likely has the biggest problem being in Pokemon. Holy shit is it bad in that game.
@@SeriousStriker I mean, pokemon has alot of diversity, and it wouldn't be surprising if 500 of the 800 pokemons were bad and unreliable
THIS is exactly what I wanted to say to the overwatch team as they reworked out all of the """situational""" characters. Balance is worthless by itself. Just because characters have a more even pick/win rate now, doesn't mean that the game was improved by the changes.
I disagree with just about everything that's said in this video. It's completely wrong. Specifically about how "balance is worthless by itself", and e-sports.
Balance is the backbone of these games, and your idea of nerfs = stale, buffs = fun is nonsense. Good balance is at the core of any games fun factor. It's what allows players to be able to pick any character, and know that the playing field is level. It's irrelevant if you have 100 characters in the game, if only 10 of them are viable for consistent winning. Nerfing those 10 is the obvious and correct choice for the game, not buffing the other 90. You might buff the lowest 10 however.
About e-sports. The entertaining aspect of e-sports is about the players. It's about the professionals doing things in the game you couldn't do because they practice so hard. So your worry that nerfing is going to somehow homogenize the cast into a stale, unentertaining game is unfounded. Nerfing isn't about making everyone the same. Neither is buffing. It's about ensuring that every character has a viable chance to win, and that no one character sticks so far out as to ruin or create a stale meta.
Are your top 3 fighting games you find the most fun the same as the top 3 games you find most balanced? If not, why?
For me, yes. Killer Instinct being my top choice. KI has always had a couple of top tier characters (Sadira and Saberwulf Season 1 comes to mind), and they've consistently been nerfed until their skillsets are more in line with everyone else. The low tier characters have also been buffed on a regular basis. It's allowed that games roster to flourish, and now you will see just about every character being picked at some point in tournament play.
DOA is another one, but it's mostly dead now. The top characters from each iteration were nerfed, and now you have more than just a small handful of 4 characters dominating. Things are more interesting now because of it.
I can say for certain that I stopped playing games because of bad balance though. This extends to more than just fighting games.
I will though, watch professionals play these games, even though I know the games balance is jacked. I'll watch them because the matches are mostly entertaining, and I didn't need to spend 100 hours of my time to realize I picked the wrong character to play as competitively.
"About e-sports. The entertaining aspect of e-sports is about the players. It's about the professionals doing things in the game you couldn't do because they practice so hard. So your worry that nerfing is going to somehow homogenize the cast into a stale, unentertaining game is unfounded. Nerfing isn't about making everyone the same. Neither is buffing. It's about ensuring that every character has a viable chance to win, and that no one character sticks so far out as to ruin or create a stale meta."
Thats what SFV did, they made everyone besides 4 characters play exactly the same and made the game's execution so easy that you can do everything that a character has to offer after 2 or 1 hour on training mode. You no longer see crazy things happen between pros because the game is too simple now and i think thats why most people say that every match between pros looks about the same.
If you can figure out everything a character can do in an hour, then the game has no depth. Balance though, is a different topic. The two aren't mutual.
SFV is junk because it sacrificed difficulty and skill, for casual mechanics and flashy V-triggers. Giving characters a variety of options to deal with different scenarios, adds depth to your game. And making sure everyone has these options, makes your game balanced.
Balance and difficulty are mutual in fighting games. Hard combos balance themselves by being hard to do, they may do more damage but you risk dropping it. Same as motions for specials and so on. Difficult things like chun piano combos offered a lot to pros but the majority of people werent able to do them at all. Even Core-A has addressed this on another video before (i think it was 'What makes a move overpowered' or the one he talks about selecting a main.)
I disagree with your second point too, if v trigger is casual then what were Ultras in IV? The reason why the game is casual isnt because it has casual mechanics, its because it has a limited number of them. The biggest problem i have with V is that they removed close normals and killed frametraps altogether. There is so much wrong with V that im just waiting for it to die and get my hands on VI, at least there will be other capcom fighting games like Infinity in the meantime.
Capcom wants to be esports but the character balance has to be esports too. For the benefit of the players and the people watching radical changes and departures from previous states of the game just confuses everybody. Nerfs or buffs need to be indirect. Instead of nerfing characters like Mika with the removal of the invisible wall what if she just did less damage? That way Mika still has a gimmick she can abuse but it is more forgiving if you get caught by it. The opponent doesn't have to go afk when in Mika's vortex. They can wait for a reset and try again. This opens up possibilities for a comeback. Buffs and nerfs need to make it so that the game can go on instead of 'oh he got clipped he's dead'. That means more chances for players to win. That means more game for people to watch. That means more screen time on TV or twitch. That means more money for the ads. At least that's what I think. In an effort to keep the game balanced and accessible they are dumbing the game down and giving more emphasis to the neutral. If you were to play you would say that's a good thing but people watching may want to see more specials more stuff flying around on screen. Ask someone to play a fighting game for the first time and they will ask you how to do a special not how to do footsies. Capcom wants to be esports but they are still not thinking esports if you ask me. Please note that this is the opinion of someone new to fighting games and the fgc. If you managed to read through all of this I sincerely thank you for for your time. Take care
2:19 incase someone is wondering
The game is killer instinct s3
Too much buffing kills a game. Too much nerfing kills a game.
Correction: Too much nerfing kills a game. Too much buffing changes the game. A game thats ridiculously buffed can still be fun, just for different reasons.
@@xanious3759 not really, a broken game is a broken game.
No one wants to play a fighting game competitively where you 1 hit everyone with 1 button.
Sounds like a dead game to me.
@@PlayWithThatBlackGuy thats an extreme case. you could say something similar about over buffing any game.
@@xanious3759 Not really.
A game that is nerfed isn't exactly killed just as a game with a load of over buffed characters isn't exactly dead.
But in both extreme cases they die.
There has to be a level of balance for a competitive game to be fun.
@@PlayWithThatBlackGuy *looks at marvel 2*
sure
CapCom should hire you 22 years from now when street fighter 6 is released.
Well best example for an unbalanced fun videogame with a rising competitive scene is...
*ShReK sUpEr SlAm*
Actually no red hood is op
ffjdkdm e82 *fOrTnItE xDdDdDdD*
Shrek super slam also released with the 'swamp' console. Get yours now!
I like how he talked about how melee players are fine with wobbling and separately talked about how if something is broken the community can just ban it lol. [:
4:50 This challenge I would definetly take! (says "win" twice)
Counter strike has a great example of this. In 1.6 saving on terrorists was cancer and ruined the game like before goal tending was a thing. Players would push a site and if they lost 2 or 3 people they would just run down the clock. It was a necessary nerf that prevented the game from being unfun. On the other hand in csgo they nerfed the awp prety much soley because kennys was abusing it since he was the best awper but it made the awp less exiting and powerfull for skillful players and was just a bad nerf.
the awp still needs to be nerfed. Because it makes it difficult for saving players to break some eco-damage And defending site becomes difficult unless a terrorist got the dead ct's awp. I dont like how csgo plays out now. Its still broken and always will be.
no. They are simply removed from the game. And now the guns are nerfed. I kinda love/hate it. But now hitboxes and hitreg is a major issue...
>the awp still needs to be nerfed. Because it makes it difficult for saving players to break some eco-damage And defending site becomes difficult unless a terrorist got the dead ct's awp.
this sounds like the average silver dice roll round, cs isn't balanced around that
WiSpKing the awp nerf was perfectly fine. The movement speed with the awp was absurdly fast given its weight and it being a one shot kill gun. The awp nerf brought about more rifle play, which is great.
lmao Im actually a really good supreme but I notice everyone starts awp spam when they keep losing 7 rounds in a row and all of a sudden start coming back. Why? cause the AWP is overpowered. Lmao You should only be allowed 2 kills and thats it. I just see retards charge in like they're kennyS, hopping around, jump-crouching awp shots. Drop-down crouch-shotting and going for charging in noscopes. Lmao. The AWP needs a nerf. It needs longer recoil time so You can only take slower shots.
4:16 Starts to talk about nerfing things
Immediately shows clip of meta knight the game RIGHT AFTER brawl
This analysis works quite well for game genres (e.g. fighting games) that are relatively easy to balance. In fighting games (excluding SSB), there are only two players in a match, there are usually only two characters on the screen at a time, the only game mode is deathmatch, and the "levels" (aka stages) are purely cosmetic, having no impact on gameplay. Contrast that with a game like Overwatch, where there are 10 players in a match who could be playing any of the 39 different characters, multiple distinct game modes, and large open 3D maps with complex geometry. With this much complexity, game balance is an extreme challenge. Developers will never be able to achieve the same degree of balance in Overwatch that can be found in many of the Street Fighter games. Every time the developers release a balance patch, there will be unintended consequences that require further patches to fix, and those changes will have their own unintended consequences, leading to a never ending cycle of balance updates. In a game like Overwatch, developers need to balance buffs with nerfs to prevent endless power inflation.
Here's a mad thing: I've just discovered this channel (which I love) because Jozef Chen talked about it on a Brazilian jiu-jitsu podcast. So I've watched six videos in two days, and this one screenshots a Eurogamer article I wrote about the rainbow edit, at 2:59! Amazing scenes, I love these videos, my man.
6:12 This is kinda the same reason why everyone disliked the tracking buff to Mishima hellsweep in Tekken 7. It was a buff but it removed some of the identity of the characters, that being a weakness to sidestepping left. It also didn't give them more options, it just reduced everyone else's options, making it almost a nerf to every other character rather than a buff.
I will always prefer buffing weaker characters over nerfing the strong ones. People playing the top tiers won't have to completely drop everything they learned to stand a chance and the ones who played lower tier now have more to work with. You keep the playing field even without causing a lot of frustration for players. It makes things fun for everybody and exciting since now there are more options available.
You also sort of avoid creating this vicious cycle of nerfing the strong while buffing the weak and creating a new dominant set of characters who will then be gimped and replaced with yet another dominant set.
The only downside is planning how to work with buffs. Unlike how nerfing nerfs the fun factor, buffing is risky because it can make things worse. It happens in MMOs where the power creep and arms race start to add up. This makes the content become boring, so they start to think of ideas that may not work for f2p players. Then they run the risk of being accused of trying to force players into spending to actually access end game content. If planned well, a buff is usually better than a nerf, but in most cases, it just ends with people wanting another buff in an endless cycle because they can feel like they were ignored.
sasukeuchiha998 It's dependent on the game. There's always a limit to how much you should buff something. If everybody has nukes than the game would be just as boring as if they were fighting with sheets of tissue paper. I think every option should be made strong but none more overpowering than the rest.
I love the references to the history of basketball about this. Great research!
Nerfs are neccesary if you lose the ability to adapt or to be unique.
League of legends is a good example, it doesnt matter how much you can adapt, if the meta forbids your chosen playstyle you will lose.
Thats why everyone hates on the balancing team in lol, "op" rules over "normals" and forbidds adaptive/unique playstyles.
Part of that is the devs wanting people to play the game a certain way. League stopped being fun for me because there is no creativity in what you can do, unless your smurfing.
That usually exists because proper counter play doesn’t exist. Meaning characters need buffs that can deal with it but are just bad at doing that job. And nerfing the “op” character usually makes those who were already good at fighting them awful because now a new threat takes over and they no longer are effective.
Tired of idiots fucking pretending domino effects will never happen when you change a character like magically in a COMPETITIVE GAME all characters don’t have any interaction and are only strong in an isolated vacuum that effects no one.
"Where else can you do hands hadouken into jab teleport cross-up standing fierce" lmao
The problem though is that you FREQUENTLY have characters nowadays where it's impossible to buff every character up to that extent without it either being logically impossible or making every character the same... Which obviously isn't going to help the "fun" factor. In the rainbow edition example, there were some fun ideas in there, but it would've never sold as a full version because buffing everyone to that extent was mostly random gibberish and chaos. It's funny for the shock for a bit, but it doesn't stand up to long-term viewing.
Although, you seemed to be more making an argument that balance isn't necessarily exciting which, while true at times, the inverse DEFINITELY isn't true. A broken game with less than a quarter of its cast being viable is pretty equally dreadful. Several games have died pretty young because they left absolute juggernaut characters untouched. Also, while sometimes this is exciting to fighting game fans, it also creates and impermeable barrier at times that keep the community from expanding. It's definitely hard to explain to outsiders why people enjoy watching the same characters in finals over and over again.
AND FOR THE SMASH BROS BRAWL QUARTER FINALS WE HAVE A META KNIGHT VS META KNIGHT MATCH AND THEN A META KNIGHT VS META KNIGHT ALL MATCHES ON FINAL DESTINATION
Smash Bros. seems to suffer from this a lot. Melee had Fox/Falco/Marth being speed demon gods, Brawl had META KNIGHT META, and Sm4sh has Bayonetta and Cloud with occasional challengers. At least 4 has balance patches.
Not . . . really. It's not pure liquid ass, but it's not particularly good by today's standards. The physics engine is exploitable to hell and back, once you reach a certain level of skill about half the roster becomes completely invalid, and a lot of the hitboxes/hurtboxes are just goofed completely. It was amazing for its time, it just has not aged well, only maintaining such a huge competitive scene out of nostalgia.
Everything you say is true up until nostalgia. Melee isn't huge just because of nostalgia, it's huge mostly because it's the only game of its kind. And the kind of game it is is reeeeeally fun to play. So you just learn to love the bullshit and how bad most of the characters are, because "hey, look what I can do with a Gamecube controller!" Now I'm gonna go play some Melee.
I totally agree. I keep saying this to people who tell me that Melee is more ,"technical", than Tekken. Then they reply with something stupid like, "oh, but for the top tier characters like Fox and Marth, the skill ceiling goes waaaaay up, so its still hype/relevant!!" sigh....
Yes, Fox has l-cancelling, wave dashing and some shining tricks. Congrats man. That's 3 hard inputs. Want me to start listing Tekken`s? LOL...I have no idea how people can be so hyped up to see the same 3 or 4 players play the same 3 or 4 characters in the same 3 or so stages. Ive played both Melee for a time and I don't get it. Maybe it is nostalgia.
buffing too much could make the game stray too far from the intended design. Certain characters who's abilities are impossible to work in the current context will have to be changed in a way that makes them less fun. In moderate amounts I agree
"Something for everyone is nothing for anyone" expresses nicely how it can all just blend together.
My example would be a monk in PvP in WoW. Windwalker was fun to play at start, very different skill set than other classes had, very fun and effective to play solo in random BG. But in competitive PvP as rated BG or arena it was hardly viable. Well, the forums floated about "OP MONK" because los nobos got their asses handed to them and Blizzard did listen, stripping off the unique abilities one by one, nerfed the damage and soon we had monk that wasn't fun to play and wasn't viable in any PvP mode, not in casual or ranked, so there we go, great job (y)
Of course there was the end of WoTLK iirc, where almost every class was buffed to heavens, which ended up PvP being "I WIN" macro for nearly every class. Players blowing up from 100 to 0 in two, sometimes one global cooldown. That was plain horrible, blowing up other players like that didn't even feel like you achieved something. "Oh you didn't have your defensive CD, so I win, yayyyy!"
And maybe it was end of MoP, where healers were just so overpowered, that I could tank/evade 5 enemies (out of 10...) as Mistweaver for 5 minutes until I got bored and let them kill me just to get to do something else in that battleground before it's over.
Then there was the feral druid as the "flavor of the month" era. He came from stealth, dropped every DoT he had and then left. And you died unless you were a healer or had something to completely negate the damage. Except if you did, he just did it again until you didn't have any defensive CD left. For most classes there was simply nothing they could do against the druid no matter how skilled you were.
So far haven't played that many games with PvP really, but from my experience Blizzard has been the worst to balance anything. Probably not a suprise that I haven't played in 3-4 years, have tried couple of times, but it's just clunky and meh after playing DotA for some years.
but when the *50/50* coin flip takes over the game for the sake of *"crowd hype"*, the game doesn't become more fun to play, nor watch...
yall remember when MKX came out ?! the hype finals between *Dizzy* and *SonicFox* ?!, now fast fwd some months, and people realized that the game didn't had much aside fucking 50/50s
i understand that Capcom wants to make the game easier for cauals, competitive for Pros, and fun to watch for viewers, but, this game that we are playing right now it isn't Street Fighter....
The Soul Consuming Darkness and guess what? they don't care about the people in between casual and pro. The people who can play the game, but don't have enough time to play it on such a high level to the point that you can compete at evo. And that forces us to deal with BS from scrubs and such a distinctive distance in low, to mid, to high mid, to top tier characters. Literally that's how fighting games operate now a days.
Mr.blackman
Fighting game enthusiasts
are the backbone of any fighting game, SF5 has no backbone.
Romdog G
And sfv will continue to suffer criticism of the highest caliber until they cater to the people who actually have been playing their game for years and not some newbie. Nor these FGC motherfukers who are gonna make money off any fighting game and could care less if the game was broken because most FGC players use top tier characters anyway. Props to them, but the FGC community shouldn't be able to determine if a character like nash gets nerfed (infiltration and nash) because he did great with him.
This only happens when characters are created not well thought out within the games mechanics. Usually the defensive ones.
Like Sadira in Killer Instinct s1, one of the game main defensive mechanics is the combo breaker system which creates options and mix ups that deepen the game and also allow it to be more offensive because it is a really powerful defensive mechanic that everyone has access to it.
But Sadira in s1 had in her instinct mode an unbreakable combo that could lead to almost a full health bar. Which made the developers in S2 to study it and tweak and improve the system and other similar but not as powerful exploits of the same rule.
MKX is notorious for lacking defensive options like decent anti airs overall even the 2 bar+stamina for the pushblock was too expensive to the point it only use was to avoid certain chip kill in some situations.
Other good example is joke characters like Anakaris in Vampire Savior(Darkstalkers 3) he doesn't have access to most mechanics everyone else has which allow many character to have extremely abusable stuff against him even infinite blockstrings.
One thing I disagree with is the common phrase, "this isn't street fighter". When you think about it, every different numbered SF game was maybe at least 70% different from the previous one. SF2 to Alpha to Alpha 2 to Alpha 3 to SF3 to SF4 to SF5. What do they actually share in common? The very meaning of "street fighter" is to have ever-changing gameplay for every new game. Whether the game turns out good or bad, I respect the approach.
@5:20
A wild Woolie appears!
if you only buff then you'll end up with the problem of power creep. you may have a game where everyone deals on average 100dps but playable characters are slightly unbalanced. after your buff-based balancing however, everyone would probably do 1000dps. diablo 3 is a very good example. the same character is on average doing 10 times more damage from v2.0 to v2.5. all you see is stupid 12-digit damage number floating on your screen. yes the game maybe more balanced. it has also become a never ending power creep.
That's not what that term means. Power creep is when new material in an expanding game is significantly more useful than content made earlier, leaving old players in the dust. If EVERYONE gets buffed, it's not power creep.
Whats wrong with power creep？ｄａｍａｇｅ ｉｓ ｉｎｆｉｎｉｔｅｌｙ ｓｃａｌｅａｂｌｅ
@@rotatingdisc-479 So a good example of a power creep would be Civilization 6's DLCs?
@@salted6422 I dunno what they do
@@rotatingdisc-479 Basically there is not a single poor DLC civilization. They're all in the top 10 tier, with ridiculously OP situational benefits.
I've been binge watching these videos and they made me fall in love with fighting games
buffs and nerfs are oversimplifying the issue, if you just buff all the time you get power creep which basically turns into modern yugioh... you HAVE to have some nerfs, because if you don't your entire game changes as your examples have shown
This, so much this, this video is frustrating because it's not like he doesn't have a point, he is just leaving 3/4 of the whole discussion aside to make the "buff good" argument look better, what if the players found an exploit? What if the damage of some character is leagues above another? What if they miscalculated during balance of some ability? What if you gatekeep new players because you need x product (like in card games) or y hard to pull off technique in order to even have a chance at playing the game? You can't just say "buff everything" and forgo nerf, and you can't call every succesful rebalance a buff, there are sidegrades also, like if you swap a teleport ability in a character for a fly technique, you are gonna change how the character plays but not necesarily making him stronger, he just fell into an all or nothing mentality here.
Honestly yeah modern yu gi oh is a perfect example of why there should be a limit in games
@@darkcat6530 It's really not though, because in modern Yugioh yes it is completely lightspeed fast and everything is overpowered but how long has the game been going? Since 2002. 20 years of playing with the same cards, no standard sets or rules format beyond the ban list. Whereas let's take a long running fighting game that still gets updates, Tekken 7. It's been out for 7 years. If we applied that to Yugioh, they'd just be starting to synchro summon after 7 years. You wouldn't call early synchro broken and too buffed though right?
Tekken will eventually get a Tekken 8 with whole new balances, so what was buffed in 7 won't matter as much. But there's not gonna be a Yugioh 2 that fixes every card. Buffs can be troublesome sure but on the whole they're so much better than nerfs.
@@julianfacundocalabrese1176 A lot of your doomsday examples are kinda missing the point of the video. He's not saying there should never be nerfs, he's just saying buffs are better and breathe life into a game rather than sucking it out. Yeah if a character has an exploit move they'll get that removed, but that's not like a nerf that's just fixing a problem in the code. And if a character has way more damage than another character, buff the lower character to have better defensive options or better mobility to compensate for lower damage. Then if it's still not enough, you can nerf the damage a bit. And hard to pull off techniques are a good thing, not a bad thing. Not everyone has to use the difficult execution character, he can just be there for those who like it. Never has a really hard execution character completely dominate pickrates and the meta because some people will always wanna just turn off their brain and hit buttons to win.
And just, look at a game that came out, got no patches, and is still played. Third Strike. Chun is BUSTED in that game, so is Yun, and Ken. Those characters are very widely played, yet the game is still played. Which means those characters are fun to play and fight regardless of their op-ness. What if it got a patch though? Would you say to nerf Chun's crazy super, or genei jin? Or you could buff Sean, Q, Remy, and make them at least near to Chun's level because as we established, Chun is really strong and yet the game still goes on. So more strong characters, more variety, more fun.
@@espeonage4522 well i don't see your point if a game gets rebooted then it's praticly a new game new stuff gets buffed and nerfed while in yugioh cards got better sure it isn't really a buff but the comparison works because if cahracters gets buffed more then nerfed then the powerstandards are gonna get better same thing in yugioh powerstandards got too high and it screwed up the game
Interestingly in card games, this mentality leads to the infamous term "power creep". Eventually leading to coin flip where first turn players win. I guess I agree that one way to counter this is to buff second turn players, though so far it just changes into a game of "drawing your out".
Buffing instead of nerfing is how u turn the game into laser tag where whoever hits u first wins.
There Is a time and place to nerf things.
Brawl minus is my favorite brawl mod. It buffs everyone so they all have so many options to anything, and ganondorf has the hardest punish game
As an experiment, I would love to see someone take a game that has extreme balance issues and only apply buffs.
Smash Brothers Brawl, for example. Meta Knight should realistically be nerfed and would be if that game was released during the timeframe smash 4 was released... but, what if instead of needing the obvious eat character the absolute worst character was buffed instead.
Initially I thought this was an idea what would quickly spiral out of control. It won’t.
A buff for any character can be seen as a universal nerf for everyone who isn’t that character while a nerf is a universal buff.
You can take the worst character in Brawl and make them immune to tripping. They’ll still such, but whatever. Then decrease their knock back, the damage they take, etc etc.
If it’s only offensive buffs, yeah... shit gets out of hand pretty quickly.
Decreasing taken knockback is going to make Ganon combo food for an even longer isn't it? And also Brawl could be a bad example, because since Brawl revolved so much around MK, a change to MK would drastically change how the tier list is shaped even if no other character is touched in the slightest. I feel any other game with a modicum of game balance could implement this idea, but not Brawl. You can try to buff Ganon's power, damage taken, etc. but unless those defensive measures actually help Ganon WIN against MK Ganon will stay not viable.
@chimericalical your suggestion was taken! The game is called "Dragon Ball FighterZ"
I would say this is accurate psychologically. However practically it poses two major problems, one is it’s much harder to buff everything To bring it up to the level of the overpowered character or ability. And if you do this too often you end up with serious power creep.
who needs to think about balancing when you have icefrog in charge
As someone who plays League of Legends, I would love more nerfs than buffs right now. There is such a damage creep in the game right now, it's so not fun to play a weaker role when you just get 1 shot by everything else.
So nerf assassins and leave ADC as they are ?
Yet most toplaners can still oneshot ADC when ahead same thing with mages.
So,I think your exemple is poorly chosen .
No, buff ADC, they are shit
@@kris0375 agreed, but my comment was posted a year ago. If you'd ask me what my opinion is on the game now It'd obviously not be the same as a year ago when things were completely different
@@rap1d715 Maybe the developer forget to buff the defense mechanism or the health bar so there will be no one hit again, and viola you get the balance that also fun
When everything is super/OP, then nothing is super anymore cuz they all in the same level
And thats applied to offensive and defensive, sometimes people tend to think about OP 1 hit, but never think about OP dodge/invincibility/teleport/max health bar/shield/damage reduction/anti stun/etc, so if all character OP in both offensive and defensive then you get the balance (and its more rewarding/not boring, also its the reason why we playing game, to achieve a wild fantasy or something that not mundane)
Better nerf Irelia XD
This video and its consequences have been a disaster for twitter conversations
That's more Twitter's fault than the video's, that place is where media literacy goes to die.
@@N0mad493And youtube; not that that’s any surprise but the fact people are unironically blaming this video for poorly balanced fighting games, entirely because somethings too strong (which the video advocates against) is some of the most youtube/twitter gamer shit ive ever seen.
Nah this video was a loud voice for a poorly thought-out mindset
@@jetkirby3981 media literacy is dead
Or you could just pull a rito and leave the things you messed up on in the dust so no one will play them. *Cough* Aatrox *Cough*
he should be getting small buffs soon, and will be the posterchild of the diverclass at the end of 2k17
posterchild ?
PROJECT: Top Kekko *caugh* Kindred
And then proceed to nerf those who are already nerfed to the ground *cough* ADCS *cough*
He got one minimal nerf and after that was only buffed.
Here after the new FighterZ patch
No matter how many times I watch one of your videos, my emotions are always stirred. Wonderful content.
damn no one is here? Anyways another great video man! how long does it take you to make these?
Sorin Noctis Too long.
Core-A Gaming it's so worth it. These videos are premium content. You've set a prime example
+Core-A Gaming Brawl Minus pls
Patreon?
I am not so convinced. Balance can be perfectly balanced and still be fun.
There just has to be a deep understanding of the game to make it happen.
Well, he didn’t say that a game can’t be perfectly balanced while also being fun.
He was saying that balance BY ITSELF is useless, not that it is an inherently bad thing
The goal should not be to make the game perfectly balanced, but rather to make it fun. Whether or not balance is a path to that is a more subjective discussion.
@@Rex-golf_player810 But why does buffing reach that state more than nerfing? It seems like there's nothing inherently better about either over the actual state of the game.
This is a pretty good video though it falls apart when you look at it at a competitive level. At a competitive levels, targeted nerfs need to happen to the right characters and frequently. I think about it in terms of a hero shooter or a MOBA. In those games, if there's an overpowered character they will be picked or banned all the time, every game. If there's no ban system in the game or there's nothing stopping mirror characters, every single game on both teams. It doesn't even just make competitive play hell, it makes casual play hell. It's only fun for the person playing the overpowered character, but not all the times. Sometimes I would find that the overpowered character at the time isn't what I like to play, and for people who don't like to play them or play against them, it's a lose-lose situation in terms of fun.
One thing I think isn’t covered in this enough, is that nerfs are necessary sometimes, as the developers ability to spend more time on thing to create a good game, and nerfing can be necessary for some experiences. However I love this video, rewatch it a lot, and agree with nearly all points you did cover.
The point of a nerf or buff is to improve the game in enjoyment, so more interesting and thought out options given or taken to make those situations is the best way to do it I would say
It's stupid that people say "nerfing isn't fun" as if top tiers / their players shouldn't be bothered to actually learn different ways or something new
@@jetkirby3981 I’m true, but it also depends on how “healthy” a strong character, tool, or ability is. Some strong things can hurt a game, and some centralizing and strong things can help (not a fighting game but tacticooler in splatoon three is like this) the health of competitive meta. Sometimes something strong can be good healthy, and lead to diversity and sometimes nerfs are needed as it is making a game worse
7:48 People enjoyed the game, not the broken mechanic. Nobody liked wobbling, it actually caused controversy and people thought it would kill the game.
reminds me of warframe(when I used to play it) as they just kept on nerfing everything, including weapons/skills that made grinding a lot more tolerable.
Rest in pieces Ember farm
"If tails, you win 10 dollars. If heads, you win 20 dollars."
What game is at 1:35?
Guilty Gear Xrd
This is relative. In a game where constant buffs have powercrept damage into oblivion (league of legends...), sweeping nerfs are a necessity.
Nerf usually lead to more diversity than buffs, like nerf to one top tier character can open breathing room for many lower tier characters or characters which are inherently weak to that character this is not true for buffs usually as they lead to more centralisation unless it's widespread (as you said in SF Rainbow) so nerf can lead to same results with less work than buffs
They don't
Is it better to nerf Yun and Chun, or rebalance the entire cast to match their power level? Is it better to nerf meta knight or buff literally every other character in the game? Nerfs are far more practical than buffs. This becomes even more obvious in games with 100+ characters like moba's.
You do make a point about nerfs like removing invincible srk taking strategy and fun out of the game... but this more due to a lack of understanding on Capcom's part and therefore a poorly targeted nerf. Most of the time crying about nerfs amounts to players being mad that they can't win without their overpowered cheese.
He even said that in worse cases or specific cases direct nerfs are both needed and required
That's the laziness talking and crap like that kills games (just look at HotS).
I thought games where supposed to be fun. I mean I don't play Mario kart to become a professional I play it because I wanna have fun and same with smash. I think what he's trying to say is that when making a game more fun buffs are better for that. Just what I got out of the vid that's all
is it only me that come back from time to time to watch these videos?
I love games where everything feels OP
How exactly would that be possible for everything to be OP?
@@MrStrikecentral I think he means he loves games where all/most of the cast is viable. Anyone who's played PM will know this feeling.
@@MeatNinja what is PM?
@@gendalfgray7889 Project M. it's a Super Smash Brothers Brawl mod. designed to feel more like Melee but on the upgraded engine and with the larger cast. Everyone seemed to love it but sadly, Nintendo shut it down
DOTA 2 ?
Is it just me, or is it most of the time a new version of a game comes out and some characters are nerfed and some are buffed, that the ones who were not overpowered got nerfed and the ones that are got buffed? I mean how many times have I thought, "why the hell did they nerf my character and not that character? My character barely is used on the competitive scene, or on online in general. This character needs to be rewarding players more, because conceptually this is a really cool character that is fun to play, but the character might as well not be in the game because a cabal of a handful of overpowered characters dominate the whole game, and those characters will never be nerfed because everybody uses them. Not only do they not buff weaker but interesting and fun characters, but they are usually the ones who get nerfed and it isn't talked about because people don't even use them anyway. I have a feeling some jackass who just doesn't know hot to fight a character because he doesn't see that character enough confuses it for being overpowered and bitches to the company. Maybe I'm just paranoid, but think people actually bitch out honest characters just because they are so used to their cookie cutter strategies (meaning they are everywhere on the competitive scene) with top tier characters working that they actually cannot accept it when they are beaten with brains.
My exact thoughts at blizzard when they keep fucking buffing Junkrat for some stupid reason
@MegaToke, This may be hard to explain. Many businesses run off the "squeaky wheel" strategy, where they address whatever the biggest complaints are. Unfortunately, more people bitch about stuff, than compliment them. Have you taken the time to write/message your favorite game developers telling them how much you *enjoy* a specific character/level/game? Sorry to say, most people don't. Complaints, bug issues, balancing issues... Those are the vast majority of what is sent to companies.
People need to voice what they like/enjoy more to developers so they know what the players want to *keep!*
You do amazing work. Never seen anyone else explain fighting game mechanics while also using real life sports. Love the channel
This is secretly just a basketball history channel
nerfing or buffing all depends on the situation imo. there is no one right answear for how to "balance" a game. Buffing or nerfing can have the same effect to a degree because just as a nerf can change the playstyle of a character so can a buff. iam not really into fighting games but for example world of warcraft has lots of balancing happening all the time to different things and even by just buffing one ability can have the effect of flipping an entire playstyle on its head.
but i do agree that it shouldn't be balanced due to the fun factor and its okay for developers to experiment but try their best to keep the playstyle and identity the same. ofc there should be leway due to those changing whenever anything is changed but keep it in the same ballpark.