Wow, that Iron Galaxy part really was eye opening. They really did what the hell they set out to do, find a solution and make a very reasonable balance change, while even giving the players the extra treat of pulling the curtain and explaining the thought process. Gets hated anyway.
The moral of the story actually is that players have no fucking clue how to balance a game. I REALLY wish more folks would watch that Iron Galaxy section of this vid because, as a dev myself, it nearly brought tears to my eyes to see someone on tape finally say what I've been trying to tell people for literal DECADES. The internet as a whole almost never actually understands what the real problem is when it comes to game balance and, more often than not, it takes weeks or months to actually diagnose what the problem really is (like he said).
That depend on the game and the type of player you're referring. Speed runners are a different breed, they will make the entire dev team/QA look like a complete joke for how much they break the game. However, no average player play like them. So it both side have no clue.
There is a popular saying, i think maybe coined by Mark Rosewater of MtG. "Players a GREAT at identifying certain problems, but TERRIBLE at identifying causes or solutions"
Iron Galaxy, the same people that nerfed Sabrewulf because of two people? Good take and all from that guy, but still didn't care for that and I like those guys.
The core problem with fighting games is that no matter how hard you try there are two things you just can't control 1- a player's hurt ego 2- the fact that a top tiers will always exist and any balance changes would just change who's the top tier
Exactly, it is all just a cycle. It doesn't matter who is buffed or nerfed. In the end, there will always be a top tier, who it is is the only thing that changed, and we would be back to Square One.
As a UX designer (not in video games). The customer always, always want to fix the symptom and don't want to hear about fixing the problem. It's infuriating sometimes. But to run a bussiness you also have to thow a bone to the customer otherwise they will eventually stop paying. I sympathise with the developers. It is a hard task to both balance the game in a "correct" way and pleasing the customer at the same time.
This is why a lot of competitive game companies end up just taking the road of cyclical balancing where they just purposely let things be OP for a while before nerfing it and then making something else OP
It's very different in the video games landscape though, in your case you work for a company and they pay you 100% of the money you get from your service. They are the only client you have, you can't lose them so you better treat them well. In a fighting game, your source of money is way more complicated, you're selling products that people buy and pay you once, plus there are sponsorship deals, licensing, etc etc. Your only worry is to keep the scene going, there isn't a single entity to please. One lesson game devs learn about competitive games is that there will always be people complaining, and the amount of complaining isn't necessarily tied to the health of the scene.
@@rafaelbordoni516 Not sure what point you think you're making or trying to contradict but it's not addressing the one we are. Users of B2C and B2B services complain all of the time. They are not that different (we do experience fewer death threats though). The point is designing an experience is nowhere near as easy as the users/players, who have a very limited few of what the work entails, believe it is. It's addressing the Dunning Krueger. "Your only worry is to keep the scene going, there isn't a single entity to please" Keeping the 'scene going' is a challenge of all design, we don't just one and done and it's a huge misconception to believe that is the case.
@@nyxranobody3690 Even without the stones Thanos has done some incredible feats. Like actually taking on Ghost Rider who (at his full power) is clearly stronger than Dante in any way. But even with those feats Thanos would be slightly lower than Dante.
Same thing with MVCI Dante happened with Labcoat 21 in DBFZ. When she dropped, she was far and away the most powerful character in the game, and then the next patch absolutely eviscerated her with tons of nerfs, and she was STILL the best character in the game, just by a much narrower margin. It wasn't until the NEXT balance patch that she was brought down to the same level as the rest of the roster.
For me everyone should trate a game as an ecosystem: No person will know how it will function until someone carefully study how it works. If you introduce a very strange organism to that ecosystem, like a big balance pach or a strong DLC charcter, you problably will ruin the natural order in it, and will problably miss the illness you where trying to fix because you give it the wrong medicine thinking it was another cause for that problem.
That Jago story is really interesting. I think a lot of players of video games in general forget that there is no job or college course or degree that is ABOUT game balance. This isnt even fighting game exclusive. As someone who loves so many multiplayer video games, that Jago example is felt in games like Overwatch or League or and competitive multiplayer game.
I agree with the 2 take aways from all this: Knee jerk reactions to things are typically a bad idea, especially when a lot of moving parts are involved. Loud people complaining aren't always right when it comes to figuring out what the solution and fix is. The Iron Galaxy segment pretty much sums it up. Players definitely found a problem, but they had no clue what was actually the culprit, regardless of what they thought. Usually, when players bring up problems, the solutions they suggest are extremely surface level and don't tend to address the root problem affecting the system as a whole. Devs need time to study the issue, see if players find a way around it that "solves" it, and then implement the right fix that will properly address things. It takes a good dev to do that; there are plenty of devs that have no idea what they are doing. With that said, you can't just shotgun out a change because a group of people were large enough and loud enough.
Your comment has made me realize that balancing a game is a lot like assuming the role of detective: The playerbase finds a crime and then pins the blame on whatever they dislike most (in Jago's case, it was his healing). Rather than crumble under the volume of the mob's voice and its accusations, game developers should instead find the true culprit. If a character's move should be theoretically balanced but performs poorly in practice, it may just be that it doesn't have the support it needs to do what it was meant to (i.e. Jiren's slow command grab in DBFZ being made more powerful indirectly by buffing other aspects of the character).
@@jasonalen7459 That's about it. Of course players only pin the blame on the first thing they notice, they don't spend more time thinking about it. When you feel sick and go to a doctor you don't just want a pill that blends out the pain, you want the doctor to figure out what illness you actually have because you can't tell yourself. But when playing games the players think differently. They don't feel any problems on themself, and very often they think of themselfs as experts of this game because they are somewhat good at it. But being good at playing and being good at programming are two different thing that many players just won't get.
Dont forget that people cried manon was broken. They really had her in top 5, she was considered on par with jp. Now i often see her as bottom 3, if not the worst.
Yeah as a casual fighting game fan watching all of these games from afar, I admire the restraint Capcom has had with just letting things play out and not changing things so suddenly. I remember when Juri was too good and I literally had a friend call me cheap for play Honda in the beginning. I'm not saying it's a perfect answer, but I'm interested to see how everyone feels next year.
That's just the natural progression of grapplers. They're "broken" until people figure out their strike/throw. once that's figured out, they rocket to bottom 3 because they just do NOT have the tools the rest of the cast has specifically to compensate for their grabs being strong.
Yeah out of all of them street fighter is low key balancing the best rn. They’re not listening to the crying players and are actually giving the game time to breathe. I thought guile was the best character for the first month of the game, now I think it’s Ken. Many people said Manon was busted then they figured out her drive rush and neutral in general is weak and she has a lot of bad matchups. People were screaming “nerf juri,” now you barely see her in tournament anymore. The game is changing by itself that in my opinion is a sign of good balancing. Because they aren’t patching anything huge and changing the mechanics of the game yet the players are now experimenting and seeing potential in every character. There really isn’t a huge difference between ryu and Luke outside of better frames and oki. Yet there are pro players choosing to play ryu. I think if they took the mk route and instantly just nerfed the shit out of something without waiting for that thing to change (which is ironic considering everyone was saying sareena was the best kameo upon release then people figured out her shit and realised she was and that someone like cyrax is better) there game would be a lot more balanced.
This is pretty typical for new games, especially new Street Fighter games. Every single time Cammy is placed solidly midtier on release and skyrockets to top 5 within a couple months.
@@Prodbyjah464 I think as usual, people don't realize the depth of everything and this is why SF6's approach is actually great. People don't get that Juri can have a terrible time against zoners like Guile. She doesn't have many tools to get around projectiles. Hers goes along the ground and can't cancel out the opponent's fireball, and even her dive kick needs to be a read instead of reaction, which is very risky. If she wasn't INSANELY agile she'd get even more destroyed in a lot of matchups. Ever since maining her I fear Guile more than ever. She needs half-screen dash > throw and fullscreen DR because even those are dangerous against a skilled and aware opponent.
I want Keits to balance all my fighting games. I love the level of thought and analysis he and his team put into making changes, especially when they could explain why they were making changes so it didn't just feel random "oh cause we felt like it"
Never seen that KI developer video before. That man is smart, most gamers never know what they want but as a developer you need to figure out what gamers need rather than want.
Same, never picked based off anything but If I like them or they look cool, though for mk1 I actually ended up picking top tier for the first time, not the kameos though thank god
For me is a concern as I try not to use a Top Tier unless is really some of my all time favorites like Noob Saibot, Kabal, Jade or Smoke.. Thankfully in the last 2 games none of them has been considered top 5 maybe except Kabal but he was execution heavy in MK11.
Still remember a Ken Lobb interview in one of the big magazines about KI2/Gold back in the day. The topic was about the absence of Riptor, Thunder and Cinder. He basically said you could either have more characters and an unbalanced game, or fewer characters and a balanced game.
Harada said effectively the same thing once when talking about Tekken. How it was one of the biggest frustrations making fighting games, because it's the two things that players want the most yet they completely work against each other.
I've always preferred the former. I couldn't care less about competitive play. I play with who I want and consider the most fun to use. About 80 percent of the time, they are *far* from the best. However, that doesn't mean I don't understand or care about balancing.
On the topic of KI, I remember something I heard a lot in film class, which is that audiences are great at identifying a problem, but terrible at identifying a cure. Another good example similar to Jago is Jiren from DBFZ. He was super low-tier, and a lot of people blamed it on his 5H being a slow command grab. Now, he's super good despite his 5H being barely any faster, but his combo and stagger game is much stronger so the 5H is a lot more threatening.
Yup, you can literally see the top 8 of every major tournament, and the variety of characters is astounding. Even in top 32 is rare to see the same character more than twice. Just this past weekend we had two majors (one in JP and other in the US), and the top 8 for both of them were: Pyra/Mythra, Steve, Mr. Game and Watch, Sonic, Yoshi, Ryu, Fox, Shulk, Min Min, Incineroar, Corrin, Roy, Rosalina, Peach and Rob x2. Two top 8's, two different countries, and only one character repeated (Rob). Obviously the game isn't perfect, but it's still incredible how well balanced it is for the amount of characters it has.
The whole "super strong DLC character" thing will ALWAYS bring me back to Blazblue when we got Kokonoe 1.0. She had so much crazy shit that people nicknamed her "Brokenoe". She got nerfed and was still pretty good. And the funniest thing about it, is we'd been begging for her to become playable for YEARS.
"Developers have to find the disease instead of listening to people crying about the symptoms" Overwatch could have learned so much from this instead of panic nerfing and buffing everything.
As someone who’s worked in software (not video game) QA: it’s so true that you can never fully anticipate how someone will use your product. You can run so many manual tests, automated tests, usability studies, accessibility studies… it simply won’t be enough because someone out there is always either way smarter or way dumber than you
It's wild how balanced a game like Smash Ultimate is with such a large roster. There are some outliers like Ganondorf at the bottom or Steve at the top for example, but it hasn't had another Brawl MK or Smash4 Bayo and tons of characters are competitively viable. If you look at things like the top 8s and 32s of tournaments, they're so varied.
It’s balanced this way because most of the characters are genuinely not very unique or different from one another and the games engine itself does not lend well to a fun competitive game. Ult has some cool stuff but the game is like 80% lame shit
no matter how talented and dedicated your QA team and Testers/developers are they simply won't be able to stress test, experiment and push the boundaries of the game to figure out how it'll be played and what is and isn't good like 10.000+ players can. It's simply a numbers game. When your game gets into the hands of that many people, new stuff that the devs simply couldn't foresee will be discovered.
NRS had pro players on their QA / test team. You mean to say nobody played once against baraka / cyrax or raiden / cyrax or anybody / cyrax and didn’t say wait a second, this is super silly guys? It’s hard for me to buy that. It’s boring as hell to watch / play against string on block into cyrax into plus frames and then into another one of those sequences Dying endlessly by literal chip should set off people who play casually or competitive. Then again mk1 released with an endless amount of bugs so maybe it was not even looked at
I'm a Melty Blood AACC fan (something you may be able to tell by my pfp) and this game I think is one of the craziest fighting games in terms of content because of how massive the roster is. 93 characters and counting, because there are 31 unique characters and each character has 3 distinct style choices, labeled Crescent, Half, and Full Moon. This is one of my favorite things about it. It is really interesting how lots of characters in that game have their 3 choices not too different from each other in terms of power (Shiki Ryougi and Shiki Nanaya for example), while other characters are totally different (such as C-Roa and C-Seifuku Akiha, who are orders of magnitude more powerful than the other versions of themselves, mainly C-Roa.) But, the most impressive thing about it is how relatively fair the game is despite having to juggle balancing 93 characters. There are only a few bottom-of-the-barrel character versions, as in less than 10 of 93 (Though F-NAC is admittedly unusably bad) while there are really only two characters who are memed about for being disgustingly good, the aforementioned C-Roa alongside F-Hime. Despite this, almost any character is viable if you practice, and there's also plenty of reasons not to play the best version of any character. Even with how crazy good C-Roa is, I personally play H-Roa because C-Roa is ridiculously reliant on optimal inputs while H-Roa is much more manageable while still being high mid tier. All in all, I think its one of the best fighting games due to its sheer diversity of characters while still retaining a good balance, which is hard enough with like 20 characters, and this game has more than 4 times that.
Week one every one cried about Sareena being OP with double blades… turns out you can just duck it… lol how people cry first without actually going into training mode to find a solution.
Still watching the video, I'm dying to see what kind Hell will be unleashed when League of Legend's Fighting game finally comes out. Fighting game + League players = Be afraid.
@@ddubblegaming3263Kazuya can be zoned out but the risk reward is still in his favor. If he gets you, you're dead. If Steve gets you you're also dead AND he can zone you out. It's crazy.
Both are literally the worst designed Smash characters in history. Sure, Smash 4 Bayonetta and Brawl Meta Knight were also way over-tuned, but Kazuya and Steve are just straight up horribly made.
@@MasterSprintersan1I think kazuya is extremely poorly designed But steve I'll defend because they somehow managed to translate a lot of his own series's design into a fighting game character's kit, it's just that a lot of the laughably broken tech he has was discovered AFTER ult's development cycle, which is a damn shame
I like his take about why DLCs are potentially that good. Like people have this weird (but not completely unfounded) idea that DLCs that have been super good because they want to convince people to buy them, which I feel does not make sense. So I agree with Max that the main reason why that tends to happen are because devs want to add more stuff, have new ideas etc. And I've always believed that since there's a significant gap between making the first 20-30 characters for the base game, and the individual characters that get released in a span of 5 or so years, with gaps between one another. And by then you would develop a different design philosophy, you'd develop a different balancing philosophy, you'd develop new ideas you wanna try to squeeze in. Because making DLC characters for FGs is almost like making characters for a new fighting game, yet not quite there yet.
Yeah, I've noticed that DLC characters aren't necessarily better, they just have more complex/numerous tools on average since the Devs have cool ideas they want to implement. (Same reason new characters are usually more complex than returning ones on average unless you alter/improve the returning character's moveset.) It's just that having more complex/numerous tools means that there are more ways for them to be good, which then usually means they are stronger.
Masahiro Sakurai touches a little bit on Balancing in His Shoryuken video. I'll let you watch it, but he touches on how he thought he should've made Ryu's input commands stronger than what they currently are compared to the normal inputs
KOFXV was definitely like that at first, but then when B. Jenet and Krohnen took over they stayed at the top for a fat minute. It took two rounds of nerfs for them to finally be considered just okay now lol. This recent patch the top tiers are a lot more ambiguous though.
Dota 2 is my main game and I'm always in awe when I read the patch notes because it definitely feels like they take more of a "find the disease" approach to things. You see stuff like a .1 mana per second nerf on someone change them from top tier to bottom. Or a +1 starting armor become a meme about a char who traditionally had 0... but it has a HUGE gameplay feel. Or if a group of heroes seem particularly strong Ice Frog will nerf an item (that they were all using) rather than nerfing the heroes... or may add a new item to counter whatever meta they were doing... it's a super interesting and SUPER complex balancing act. And then they just throw caution to the wind it seems at least once a year and do some kind of MASSIVE update that completely redefines everything and suddenly it feels like I have a whole new game to play again!
I'm worried about Asuka in Guilty Gear. Because Strive hasn't exactly been known for nerfing characters, but Asuka is to the point where he is almost unplayable to fight against if in the right hands. So they're either going to nerf him and make him unplayable or basically ignore him and keep him this broken
@@qxpn9220"real fighting game fans would feel like shit"💀 like gobou isn't a real fighting game fan lol. Asuka is a cool character that people have been asking for. (Before you ask, no I don't play asuka, I play zato lol)
@@qxpn9220Hi, it’s me, the One True Scotsman, here to tell you that Asuka being in GG is great and something that fans have been wanting for a long time because he’s so integral to the lore. Fighting games have had long range mage type characters for years now, he’s nothing new.
@@massgunner4152 Anime fighting games design unique characters that don't reminisce past/recent character playing style. Which is why they always come off as broken because balance wasn't even the factor when it come to character design.
I remember reading a balancing dev said their views are 1) Perfect balance is impossible, that's something you have to accept 2) No matter what, you should strive to ensure Garbage and God Tiers are empty. No one should be that bad and none that good. 3) No character should have better than a 6-4 match up. Meaning if two equally skilled players play 10 matches, at most the player with the character advantage should at best win 6 and lose 4.
As a game designer, (not fighting games but still experienced) 1 and 2 are spot on, while 3, in practice contradicts with your rule one, as intended balance is a type of perfect balance, and balancing for matchups instead of game feel, fun, and character individuality, often just makes the problems worse, as characters in similar archetypes to those with bad matchup spreads will also benefit from those changes.
@@yummmemonty7450 That's a fair point. I wouldn't be surprised if that's not something strictly followed and more just a "Hey, if this matchup is too skewed maybe you should reevaluate both characters and see what makes one too strong and the other too weak." But yeah, I agree with you point 3 is a bit weird, but I can get what his intent was in saying it.
Point 3 limits your character design scope. Characters like Dhalsim and Gief are gonna have extreme matchups because they're extreme character archetypes. Haggar vs Magneto in UMvC3 comes to mind as the absolute extreme of this.
Look, listen and be amazed by TitanFalls Main Philosphy when it came to deaigning it. " No ONE player or character is Over Powered, if EVERYONE is over powered." Becomes intense sure but fun intense. Peraonally to the KI dev, " You can be proclaimed pros, influencers over the game. But you are not THE DEVELOPERS. WE hear you, we will listen but we will not be bullied into making the game unfun to a more casual playerbase"
I've been playing Marvel Snap lately and really appreciate the transparency of the patch notes. They'll state their vision for a card and admit that they aren't sure how to achieve it, so they're over-/under-tuning a card temporarily to see what happens. They've also admitted that some synergies/playstyles were just completely overlooked by their internal teams. I don't think fighting games can take this exact approach, but it's nice for devs to speak to us like they're people who have ideas and make mistakes.
I completely disagree with max about sf6. The meta is constantly changing and very few things seem to stay true from month to month This game has so much richness that it is evolving for the players until now. A patch in sf6 right now will kill amazing slow player evolution.
People will never see this point for what it is. I truly think its better for a game to gestate and let all of the dust settle before touching anything about it. Especially in the case of SF6. The devs clearly put a lot of thought into its mechanics and character matchups. They cant account for every possibility on their own. That's where the player base comes in. After months and months and mountains of player data they can THEN start to make the decisions needed to truly add balance to the game. Its most likely just a loud minority of players complaining the most about the balance at the moment, of which im sure most of them are top players. Im not even talking about named top players like Punk, but people who are in Master rank as well. These people make up so little of the actual player base that it makes little sense just to try and balance around them. Meanwhile I, a plat player, am having a blast with this game still.
@@Drunklotus Right, unless something is really broken, frantic balance updates very close to release are just gonna throw people off. In the end, updates are glamorous, but you want to reach an ultimate version that will never need change. People are still discovering new things in classic tetris, still discovering new things in third strike, and in the more broader term of games, still discovering new things in chess.
I’ll be very interested in what the launch week of T8 is going to be like as well, especially since this is actually the first Tekken game in the franchise I’ll be playing at launch, so it’ll be fun experiencing all of the highs and lows of it all.
"Hey guys, I actually come from the early 90s and was magically transported to this time! Just wanna say as a fellow video game player the future is DA BOMB!! I love fighting games! Gotta tell me what's fresh these days??" *"Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat!!"*
One example i find interesting was the development of a brawl mod called project plus (plays like melee with some vets having a 90% identical moveset) Right when they released mewtwo and roy, mewtwo was the best character in the game, but interestingly enough, the dev team addressed something completely different. They realized that by trying to make everyone balanced and using melee fox as the balancing point, they made most of their characters not fun to fight and mewtwo was one of the most frustrating characters due to having broken range, combos, and recovery. In addition, they ignored the philosophy melee had where being offstage meant that you were highly likely to be edgeguard. This made character that had near guaranteed combos, early kill moves, and recoveries that made smash ultimate sora blush. The game wasn't fun for a lot of people after they were done trying out all the surface level stuff. The dev team spent a full year changing the game's balance to reward more skillful play and clever ways to recover instead of having them autopilot their way back to stage. I think this was the best decision they made and while the game will always have its own problems, at least they god rid of one of their biggest ones.
If you only play the characters you like, you never have to worry about balance patches. Chasing the meta is a waste of time since it often changes, and as such it isn’t something to really concern yourself with if you aren’t a professional.
And that's the reason why I'm more of a half-casual player. I may try to fight in competitive styles with friends and sometimes online, but I don't try keeping up with the top players. I just wanna have fun with my character and don't care much about losing.
@@Carlitonsp1I agree, but Ngl, I do feel like all the characters are playable, but there always gonna be those Character that play the game better than most
@@Carlitonsp1 Don't know where you've been looking but they dropped off hella after the last few updates. Pretty much since update 2.1 those two have pretty much just seen a big drop off some of the most used characters right now have been Terry and Ralph and even Orochi Yashiro
As a Tiny Channel about the mmo Guild Wars 2's Balance (which has excellent combat, but often a limited development bandwidth allocated for their balance team) : It's refreshing to both see someone who's as knowledgeable and passionate about fighting games as Max talk about balance, and refreshing to know that a HUGE STUDIO like NRS can make both good calls as well as just as baffling decisions as GW2! It turns out studios are studios and nobody's perfect. Certainly not me! 😄
Amazing Video! All your content has been an amazing way to get into the fighting game community. It's always welcoming -- easy to understand even for beginners -- but full of depth -- sometimes I watch vids like this twice through just to catch even more of the points you're making and digest them. Entertaining and educational in equal measure. Really means a lot to have someone as positive and passionate making content for people like us. Keep it up!
Balancing Pretty much any game is a nightmare and there’s so many factors to take in it can be overwhelming what matters is not rushing your balancing decisions and that each step towards better balance is also a step towards a more fun experience.
I don’t know about the slower approach to content, but I honestly like SF6’s more restrained approach to balance. Ken and JP are clearly dominant, but the best players in the world are winning without them. The system is so complex and rich that people can quickly develop new strategies to challenge old ones. That’s good balance. I just hope the Ken and JP players are ready to adjust after Akuma drops.
There's one thing about balancing that you also have to keep in mind, and that's the core of a charatcer. Sometimes the idea and kit of a charatcer is naturally better or worse than others, just from the way they were conceived. The question then comes that how much can you change a character before you lose their core identity? If you go too far, you then lose the identity of that character and frustrate people as that's not what they signed up for.
Keith said it best. Sometimes people cry way way way too much instead of trying to adapt and that's why some people hate casuals (not all of them). Though lately some PROs been on their feelings about the games. Sometimes you need to let the game run to see how it performs and then you can take some notes and find a way to fix it but not listen to everything a salty player says.
Shotgun to the knee approach with SF6 would legitimately destroy that game. I still believe that balance patch next year should have little to no nerfs and all buffs (unless Ed or Akuma are game breaking in some way) as much as I hate fighting Ken and Cammy they do NOT need nerfs and neither does JP. The way that game is right now they really just need to bring low tiers up, not even to top tier status but just up from where they are. Characters like Lily, Gief and AKI especially. The game is just near pristine right now and they really should just keep that, taking away will just muddy the enjoyment that is there right now, thoughtfully adding will only enhance it.
The general rule should be if you can’t get it balanced just give everyone dirty stuff. Fighting games are way more fun when characters are overpowered or a little broken as opposed to boring and not strong enough.
I picked up SF6 three weeks after the game was released and hit diamond in 2-3 weeks. SF6 is my first street fighter to take serious and a lot of people told me I was carried by my character. That character was Manon.
And they aren't actually wrong. What people like you miss is that a character can be weak and strong at the same time. Manon and Honda are the perfect example. Both are clearly bottom tiers yet at lower level of play they have an effective and simple gameplan that will carry players, but the higher you'll climb the harder will become since people will figure out how to deal with your character.
@@VerGiLL1 seriously lol. Other even easeier gamplans include zoning, drive rush, invincible moves or oki on knockdown all of which Manon lacks in this game. At this point I have a lot of the cast to Diamond+ even random select and I'll tell you there are much easier strategies than using Manon even at lower levels.
Many people were also angry that NRS didn't nerf Johnny. But i believe it's not that simple to balance him. Because if you nerf his frames he's gonna be trash but have a good parry. If they nerf the parry Johnny is gonna be way less fun. I think Johnny needs a really well thought out balance changes that don't make him garbage which will take time OR just leave him as he is because he's really fun.
what's happening (happened?) in sf6 is what I like the call the Melee Effect. If you look at the first tier lists for melee, you see top tier characters initially in low tier spots. It wasn't until the player base itself figured out how to use some of the characters more optimally and how to exploit other character's weaknesses
Your notes on Dante reminded me Khronen in the patch before the last one. Him & B. Jenet got double knee-capped, and they were still the best 2 characters in the game, the gap just got smaller.
Smash Ultimate actually had a really interesting approach to balance coming out of Smash 4. Almost universally, the best moves were nerfed and the worst moves were buffed. It didn't matter what character those moves were on or how important those moves were to the character's gameplan. That approach shrunk the power gap and expanded the options for characters that previously relied on 3 good moves to carry their otherwise terrible kit. It was pretty genius for a first draft, even if there were a lot of kinks that needed to be worked out.
It's interesting in terms of general game balance too. Since I play MMOGs, there are lots of people who only complain because the have put in hundreds of hours into one class and can only see the balance in terms of how everything relates to their character. Clearly, the devs need to have a clear vision of what their game is and also never to just agree to everything the community says, because it can be so lopsided.
Not a fighting game, but waiting out to hear the problem instead of patching it quickly reminds me of the Corpse dilemma back in Darkest Dungeons. And months later when they eventually gave an option to 'fix' the problem, less than (I think) 5% of players toggled the patch.
Similar balancing stories can be found in a lot of strategy games too, Garen and Sniper (from LoL and DotA 2, respectively) are both beginner's trap characters that have had their share of OP seasons specifically because of that presumption hiding how powerful their buffs actually were over time. Sniper in particular ended up dumpstering an entire tournament overnight with a series of initial meme picks before getting picked/banned every single game (patch 6.83 and TI 2014), leading to him getting nerfed HARD the following season.
I think SF6 has waited a bit too long given 10 of the launch characters weren't available for public playtesting. It's been tough maining Lily when other characters have clearly better tools but then Hibiki regularly sits on top of the MR leaderboard so she can clearly get the job done.
@SalGoodguy ironically that's why I dont play mk1 because I run into smoke, baraka or Raiden. It's like fighting games today are very bias towards certain characters while others are never giving the chance to shine or don't have the tools necessary.
@@ShikiRyougi05I actually counted the other day, out of 15 games in ranked I played, 11 were kens. 2 JPs and then the others just random. I’m in master, and my god u just hit the same top tiers again and again
On the other hand, people whined like hell about Marisa and Manon in the first few months of the game. If they had watched the game quicker those 2 characters would've suffered a lot. Cuz rn Manon is Bottom tier and iirc only BigBird Managed to win a tourney with Marisa and that was in the first few months.
No more is the signal to noise harder to dig through than the internet, with so many ways for people to project and expect everyone to listen to their caterwauling. So I appreciate when the devs take time, study, learn, and wait for the dust to truly settle instead of knee-jerk react to the baying of livestock that is the Keyboard Developers and the Gamers™.
Nash in Sf5 was my main throughout but it was sad how they nerfed him to the point that he couldn't compete, he only got slightly better in the final game update, whereas all the so called buffs and added target combos etc they gave him did nothing to help him be better at anything, no 3 frame, no invincible wake up, not much pressure in neutral, VT's weren't amazing had no comeback factors behind them like the better characters
They overreacted to his EVO win. Nash was one of the most balanced characters in the game and the nerfs happened way too early. They ruined his normals and his teleport.
@@first2three Indeed that's why since then i'm more for buffing weak characters and unless something is completely busted leave characters alone for the most part, bcz taking away what makes a character fun to use only ruins the overall experience imo
My favorite DLC balance story is Pokken Tournament DX where they released exactly 2 new characters (along with 2 support sets) through DLC: Aegislash and Blastoise. Aegislash on release was undeniably the #1 best character in the game. In the next patch, he was toned down just enough to where people actually still debate to this day whether he's still the best character or just top 3. Blastoise released afterward and has been known as the definitive bottom tier of the game. Blastoise didn't get any fancy balance changes, but obviously everyone tried to make him work, and actually to some success... just enough to argue "Is he the worst, or maybe bottom 3?" Complete balance between the DLC.
You can't always listen to the playerbase when it comes to balance because they'll want something nerfed just because they got owned by it. They don't actually care about balance, they just don't want to get better.
So many devs and people forget that all kinds of data matters. Reach, damage, combo-ability, start up frames, end lag frames, set-ups, baits, movement speed etc etc. The best way is to make like a big chart of all these stats overall and check missing acts of weak characters and why strong ones are strong. We all know Sol's 50/50 pressure into a counter punish which made it even stronger. Because it wsn't a normal 50/50. It was a counter 50/50 if you failed the check. Just frame trapped into command grabs lol. And that is without his insane combo damage from the stronger counter combo starters he would get. Just insanity.
"This isn't what we asked for", the rallying cry of entitled gamers. If Nintendo listened to angry fans, they'd have taken out the item durability in Tears of the Kingdom... which would have made the Weapon Fuse mechanic worthless.
If they're mechanically better then I think they can compensate with less health and/or damage, slow sown their frames. Anything to compensate so they're not fastest, strongest, highest health with most useful moveset.
In theory? Sure. In application? Not so much. No amount of individual skill is going to make up for your opponent having better tools than you do. Tier lists exist for a reason. Low/bottom tier isn't necessarily bad. They just don't have the tools a top/high tier does.
@@dylancross1039 I didn't say tier placement doesn't matter at all. In some games, it matters more than others, but overall, player skill does matter more. I mean, as a DK main, if I tried my hand at Steve, I wouldn't know a dirt block from a diamond pickaxe.
As soon as I saw this, I immediately thought of killer instinct. Their balancing around the mid to late season 2 were great. Especially when they fixed my boi fulgore.
I definitely like it more when devs wait for balance patches. Smash did really good on this. Ultimate never really got a "balance patch," we just got stuff adjusted when the next DLC came out. Unless I'm mistaken, I know it's had hotfixes but usually the game wouldn't be patched till the next DLC character. Which was a big timeframe between each patch but it did a lot of good for the meta of the game in the long run.
Something that bothered me about NRS first balance patch is that they decided to nerf some of the top tiers (Raiden, Baraka, Cyrax and what not), but still Johnny Cage remained untouched and he is still one of the scariest characters in the game to fight against But, the characters that needed the most help remained also untouched or made even worse. You can say that Scorpion got nerfed in a way, his air combos are a bit harder to do and they do less damage, and Sub-Zero which needs a couple buffs also remained untouched in his frame data and damage scaling...
I've been doing my own little balance adjustment in Smash Ultimate using the custom power in the game's settings. I understand what it's like to be a dev behind these balance changes in fighting games.
And then there is me playing like three fighting game series casually, mostly against cpu or locally and using characters that feel good and look cool but still watching these videos
I do personally enjoy street fighter 6 taking its time with the balance. Sure it can come off as stagnant but consider that some games like SF3 3S are still insanely popular to this day despite its obvious balance issues and people have still been playing the shit out of it for decades. I consider myself a casual player and people can learn a game at a different pace, especially fighting games where you can always learn new things on a very high skill ceiling. So while some top players may have already figured out the game at its most some may still be figuring it out and get a much better understanding of it without monthly or bi monthly drastic changes. And unlike a game like SF3 on the other hand we KNOW there will be change to the balance and we wont have to wait for like a super edition or a 4th strike at full price for them to happen. I wouldnt be against perhaps bi-yearly balance patches but with new characters being introduced over the year i wouldnt see it as an absolute necessity. I feel like SF6 has been prioritizing quality over quantity over all and i've been enjoying the game for that reason (aside from new world tour content). And i'll add that in contrast to Overwatch where a same character got 2 major overhaul/rework within a year and i've hated both of them ill gladly take this approach instead.
Shit, people made a rebalanced ROM hack of 3rd Strike and nobody plays it. It's on Fightcade and nobody plays it. Meanwhile everyone is in the 3rd Strike lobby playing the ever-loving shiznite out of the unpatched game. Playing low tiers, even. I am no exception as two of my mains are Twelve and Q.
I completely agree on the Tekken DLC. Fahkumram felt that way as well and I think they definitely ignore some balancing if not a lot but they also add a LOT of identity and that’s something that sticks out. Fahkumram literally is the same size as Marduk and yet has a COMPLETELY different playstyle. Pokes, mix and plus frames
Wow, that Iron Galaxy part really was eye opening. They really did what the hell they set out to do, find a solution and make a very reasonable balance change, while even giving the players the extra treat of pulling the curtain and explaining the thought process.
Gets hated anyway.
That was really cool to hear. I like how they fixed that issue
The moral of the story actually is that players have no fucking clue how to balance a game. I REALLY wish more folks would watch that Iron Galaxy section of this vid because, as a dev myself, it nearly brought tears to my eyes to see someone on tape finally say what I've been trying to tell people for literal DECADES. The internet as a whole almost never actually understands what the real problem is when it comes to game balance and, more often than not, it takes weeks or months to actually diagnose what the problem really is (like he said).
That depend on the game and the type of player you're referring. Speed runners are a different breed, they will make the entire dev team/QA look like a complete joke for how much they break the game. However, no average player play like them. So it both side have no clue.
There is a popular saying, i think maybe coined by Mark Rosewater of MtG. "Players a GREAT at identifying certain problems, but TERRIBLE at identifying causes or solutions"
@@Underground3 Being able to break the game, doesn't mean they necessarily know how to fix it.
Iron Galaxy, the same people that nerfed Sabrewulf because of two people?
Good take and all from that guy, but still didn't care for that and I like those guys.
I don't feel like we needed 5 months of Raiden and Baraka deleting 50% HP of their opponents everytime they sneeze on their general direction
Negatives aside, I appreciate my health bar not exploding every time Baraka looks my way
What healthbar? - baraka
*Baraka laugh from that one interaction against Johnny Cage*
Chip damage is like 200 damage.
Yea a character with mix doing 50% per touch is fucking insane games still mad fun tho
“I’d rather explode than have T A R K A T” - Baraka, probably
The core problem with fighting games is that no matter how hard you try there are two things you just can't control
1- a player's hurt ego
2- the fact that a top tiers will always exist and any balance changes would just change who's the top tier
Exactly, it is all just a cycle. It doesn't matter who is buffed or nerfed. In the end, there will always be a top tier, who it is is the only thing that changed, and we would be back to Square One.
The true balance are the friends you make along the way 🤗
The one piece is real!
Damn man 😢
I need no friends on my way to the top.
As Nogla once said to Marcel: “You Bitch”
Right in the feels, man. 😢
As a UX designer (not in video games). The customer always, always want to fix the symptom and don't want to hear about fixing the problem. It's infuriating sometimes. But to run a bussiness you also have to thow a bone to the customer otherwise they will eventually stop paying.
I sympathise with the developers. It is a hard task to both balance the game in a "correct" way and pleasing the customer at the same time.
Same here. You work in design/research you learn how to read between the lines and not take user/player complaints at face value.
Customers do not know what the fuck they want. :^)
This is why a lot of competitive game companies end up just taking the road of cyclical balancing where they just purposely let things be OP for a while before nerfing it and then making something else OP
It's very different in the video games landscape though, in your case you work for a company and they pay you 100% of the money you get from your service. They are the only client you have, you can't lose them so you better treat them well. In a fighting game, your source of money is way more complicated, you're selling products that people buy and pay you once, plus there are sponsorship deals, licensing, etc etc. Your only worry is to keep the scene going, there isn't a single entity to please. One lesson game devs learn about competitive games is that there will always be people complaining, and the amount of complaining isn't necessarily tied to the health of the scene.
@@rafaelbordoni516 Not sure what point you think you're making or trying to contradict but it's not addressing the one we are. Users of B2C and B2B services complain all of the time. They are not that different (we do experience fewer death threats though). The point is designing an experience is nowhere near as easy as the users/players, who have a very limited few of what the work entails, believe it is. It's addressing the Dunning Krueger.
"Your only worry is to keep the scene going, there isn't a single entity to please" Keeping the 'scene going' is a challenge of all design, we don't just one and done and it's a huge misconception to believe that is the case.
Lore accurate Dante air comboing the shit outta Thanos is such a beautiful idea to me, nice stones bro now check this SPINNY MOVE
I would say that lore accurate Dante would still lose to lore accurate Thanos, but he is way cooler.
@@unskilledgamer3642with stones yes without stones Thanos is in the grave
@@nyxranobody3690 Even without the stones Thanos has done some incredible feats. Like actually taking on Ghost Rider who (at his full power) is clearly stronger than Dante in any way.
But even with those feats Thanos would be slightly lower than Dante.
To be fair feats really stop mattering against ghost rider since marvel writers just LOVE to turn off his powers if they don't want him to win
Same thing with MVCI Dante happened with Labcoat 21 in DBFZ. When she dropped, she was far and away the most powerful character in the game, and then the next patch absolutely eviscerated her with tons of nerfs, and she was STILL the best character in the game, just by a much narrower margin. It wasn't until the NEXT balance patch that she was brought down to the same level as the rest of the roster.
There is no way someone thought of the 21 percent nerf and expected her to be fair
I can hear all the kid buu mains laughing maniacally 😂
Funny that she was originally the final boss... I guess having to wrangle THE HUNGER was holding her back A LOT!
For me everyone should trate a game as an ecosystem: No person will know how it will function until someone carefully study how it works. If you introduce a very strange organism to that ecosystem, like a big balance pach or a strong DLC charcter, you problably will ruin the natural order in it, and will problably miss the illness you where trying to fix because you give it the wrong medicine thinking it was another cause for that problem.
Perfect analogy
yeah the ecosystem is the perfect word for game balancing. great idea!
Mk is trash dnt waste time
Happy Chaos: Hello there...
That's just tourneyfaq speak for "I don't like new things".
That Jago story is really interesting. I think a lot of players of video games in general forget that there is no job or college course or degree that is ABOUT game balance. This isnt even fighting game exclusive. As someone who loves so many multiplayer video games, that Jago example is felt in games like Overwatch or League or and competitive multiplayer game.
I agree with the 2 take aways from all this:
Knee jerk reactions to things are typically a bad idea, especially when a lot of moving parts are involved.
Loud people complaining aren't always right when it comes to figuring out what the solution and fix is.
The Iron Galaxy segment pretty much sums it up. Players definitely found a problem, but they had no clue what was actually the culprit, regardless of what they thought. Usually, when players bring up problems, the solutions they suggest are extremely surface level and don't tend to address the root problem affecting the system as a whole. Devs need time to study the issue, see if players find a way around it that "solves" it, and then implement the right fix that will properly address things. It takes a good dev to do that; there are plenty of devs that have no idea what they are doing. With that said, you can't just shotgun out a change because a group of people were large enough and loud enough.
Your comment has made me realize that balancing a game is a lot like assuming the role of detective: The playerbase finds a crime and then pins the blame on whatever they dislike most (in Jago's case, it was his healing). Rather than crumble under the volume of the mob's voice and its accusations, game developers should instead find the true culprit. If a character's move should be theoretically balanced but performs poorly in practice, it may just be that it doesn't have the support it needs to do what it was meant to (i.e. Jiren's slow command grab in DBFZ being made more powerful indirectly by buffing other aspects of the character).
@@jasonalen7459 That's about it. Of course players only pin the blame on the first thing they notice, they don't spend more time thinking about it.
When you feel sick and go to a doctor you don't just want a pill that blends out the pain, you want the doctor to figure out what illness you actually have because you can't tell yourself.
But when playing games the players think differently. They don't feel any problems on themself, and very often they think of themselfs as experts of this game because they are somewhat good at it. But being good at playing and being good at programming are two different thing that many players just won't get.
Dont forget that people cried manon was broken. They really had her in top 5, she was considered on par with jp. Now i often see her as bottom 3, if not the worst.
Yeah as a casual fighting game fan watching all of these games from afar, I admire the restraint Capcom has had with just letting things play out and not changing things so suddenly. I remember when Juri was too good and I literally had a friend call me cheap for play Honda in the beginning. I'm not saying it's a perfect answer, but I'm interested to see how everyone feels next year.
That's just the natural progression of grapplers. They're "broken" until people figure out their strike/throw. once that's figured out, they rocket to bottom 3 because they just do NOT have the tools the rest of the cast has specifically to compensate for their grabs being strong.
Yeah out of all of them street fighter is low key balancing the best rn. They’re not listening to the crying players and are actually giving the game time to breathe. I thought guile was the best character for the first month of the game, now I think it’s Ken. Many people said Manon was busted then they figured out her drive rush and neutral in general is weak and she has a lot of bad matchups. People were screaming “nerf juri,” now you barely see her in tournament anymore. The game is changing by itself that in my opinion is a sign of good balancing. Because they aren’t patching anything huge and changing the mechanics of the game yet the players are now experimenting and seeing potential in every character. There really isn’t a huge difference between ryu and Luke outside of better frames and oki. Yet there are pro players choosing to play ryu. I think if they took the mk route and instantly just nerfed the shit out of something without waiting for that thing to change (which is ironic considering everyone was saying sareena was the best kameo upon release then people figured out her shit and realised she was and that someone like cyrax is better) there game would be a lot more balanced.
This is pretty typical for new games, especially new Street Fighter games. Every single time Cammy is placed solidly midtier on release and skyrockets to top 5 within a couple months.
@@Prodbyjah464 I think as usual, people don't realize the depth of everything and this is why SF6's approach is actually great. People don't get that Juri can have a terrible time against zoners like Guile. She doesn't have many tools to get around projectiles. Hers goes along the ground and can't cancel out the opponent's fireball, and even her dive kick needs to be a read instead of reaction, which is very risky. If she wasn't INSANELY agile she'd get even more destroyed in a lot of matchups. Ever since maining her I fear Guile more than ever. She needs half-screen dash > throw and fullscreen DR because even those are dangerous against a skilled and aware opponent.
I want Keits to balance all my fighting games. I love the level of thought and analysis he and his team put into making changes, especially when they could explain why they were making changes so it didn't just feel random "oh cause we felt like it"
Never seen that KI developer video before. That man is smart, most gamers never know what they want but as a developer you need to figure out what gamers need rather than want.
There needs to be multiple devs like him on every team
Buff zangief in MK1
no way man, Zangief with Jago kameo is so fucking broken you gotta be outta your mind, especially since his final smash is so busted right now
I pick the character I like and connect with and then get as good as I can with them. Top tier is never a concern for me picking my character.
It shouldn’t be unless you compete. I don’t understand why I have to only play Baraka Raiden and Johnny
Same, never picked based off anything but If I like them or they look cool, though for mk1 I actually ended up picking top tier for the first time, not the kameos though thank god
Valid
@@j.b.595 the big advantage of having friends to play with. You can enjoy those games without competing for the meta online.
For me is a concern as I try not to use a Top Tier unless is really some of my all time favorites like Noob Saibot, Kabal, Jade or Smoke.. Thankfully in the last 2 games none of them has been considered top 5 maybe except Kabal but he was execution heavy in MK11.
Still remember a Ken Lobb interview in one of the big magazines about KI2/Gold back in the day. The topic was about the absence of Riptor, Thunder and Cinder. He basically said you could either have more characters and an unbalanced game, or fewer characters and a balanced game.
Harada said effectively the same thing once when talking about Tekken. How it was one of the biggest frustrations making fighting games, because it's the two things that players want the most yet they completely work against each other.
I've always preferred the former. I couldn't care less about competitive play. I play with who I want and consider the most fun to use. About 80 percent of the time, they are *far* from the best.
However, that doesn't mean I don't understand or care about balancing.
On the topic of KI, I remember something I heard a lot in film class, which is that audiences are great at identifying a problem, but terrible at identifying a cure. Another good example similar to Jago is Jiren from DBFZ. He was super low-tier, and a lot of people blamed it on his 5H being a slow command grab. Now, he's super good despite his 5H being barely any faster, but his combo and stagger game is much stronger so the 5H is a lot more threatening.
Special mention should be given to Smash Ultimate, to where last I heard, every character has about a 50% win rate. That's some pretty insane balance.
That is seriously impressive
Yup, you can literally see the top 8 of every major tournament, and the variety of characters is astounding.
Even in top 32 is rare to see the same character more than twice.
Just this past weekend we had two majors (one in JP and other in the US), and the top 8 for both of them were: Pyra/Mythra, Steve, Mr. Game and Watch, Sonic, Yoshi, Ryu, Fox, Shulk, Min Min, Incineroar, Corrin, Roy, Rosalina, Peach and Rob x2.
Two top 8's, two different countries, and only one character repeated (Rob).
Obviously the game isn't perfect, but it's still incredible how well balanced it is for the amount of characters it has.
Outside of Steve, smash ultimate is one of the most balanced fighting games of all time
But Smash isn’t a fighting game :)
@@zaneheaston8254bait :)
The whole "super strong DLC character" thing will ALWAYS bring me back to Blazblue when we got Kokonoe 1.0. She had so much crazy shit that people nicknamed her "Brokenoe". She got nerfed and was still pretty good. And the funniest thing about it, is we'd been begging for her to become playable for YEARS.
Should I expect a meteor to fall?
--Rachel Alucard, on Kokonoe's arrival (before getting Astral Finished)
"Developers have to find the disease instead of listening to people crying about the symptoms"
Overwatch could have learned so much from this instead of panic nerfing and buffing everything.
As someone who’s worked in software (not video game) QA: it’s so true that you can never fully anticipate how someone will use your product. You can run so many manual tests, automated tests, usability studies, accessibility studies… it simply won’t be enough because someone out there is always either way smarter or way dumber than you
And when we're talking about 5 million people using your product(MK for example) then you will for sure have a lot of both :D
So the KI team learned what Harada learned years ago........"Don't ask me for SHIIIIIT!" .
It's wild how balanced a game like Smash Ultimate is with such a large roster. There are some outliers like Ganondorf at the bottom or Steve at the top for example, but it hasn't had another Brawl MK or Smash4 Bayo and tons of characters are competitively viable. If you look at things like the top 8s and 32s of tournaments, they're so varied.
It’s balanced this way because most of the characters are genuinely not very unique or different from one another and the games engine itself does not lend well to a fun competitive game. Ult has some cool stuff but the game is like 80% lame shit
I love how the thumbnail has all these cool characters. Then there’s Minecraft Steve.
no matter how talented and dedicated your QA team and Testers/developers are they simply won't be able to stress test, experiment and push the boundaries of the game to figure out how it'll be played and what is and isn't good like 10.000+ players can. It's simply a numbers game. When your game gets into the hands of that many people, new stuff that the devs simply couldn't foresee will be discovered.
Idk why ppl don't understand this. No matter how much testing goes they won't find everything
NRS had pro players on their QA / test team. You mean to say nobody played once against baraka / cyrax or raiden / cyrax or anybody / cyrax and didn’t say wait a second, this is super silly guys?
It’s hard for me to buy that. It’s boring as hell to watch / play against string on block into cyrax into plus frames and then into another one of those sequences
Dying endlessly by literal chip should set off people who play casually or competitive.
Then again mk1 released with an endless amount of bugs so maybe it was not even looked at
I'm a Melty Blood AACC fan (something you may be able to tell by my pfp) and this game I think is one of the craziest fighting games in terms of content because of how massive the roster is. 93 characters and counting, because there are 31 unique characters and each character has 3 distinct style choices, labeled Crescent, Half, and Full Moon. This is one of my favorite things about it. It is really interesting how lots of characters in that game have their 3 choices not too different from each other in terms of power (Shiki Ryougi and Shiki Nanaya for example), while other characters are totally different (such as C-Roa and C-Seifuku Akiha, who are orders of magnitude more powerful than the other versions of themselves, mainly C-Roa.)
But, the most impressive thing about it is how relatively fair the game is despite having to juggle balancing 93 characters. There are only a few bottom-of-the-barrel character versions, as in less than 10 of 93 (Though F-NAC is admittedly unusably bad) while there are really only two characters who are memed about for being disgustingly good, the aforementioned C-Roa alongside F-Hime. Despite this, almost any character is viable if you practice, and there's also plenty of reasons not to play the best version of any character. Even with how crazy good C-Roa is, I personally play H-Roa because C-Roa is ridiculously reliant on optimal inputs while H-Roa is much more manageable while still being high mid tier. All in all, I think its one of the best fighting games due to its sheer diversity of characters while still retaining a good balance, which is hard enough with like 20 characters, and this game has more than 4 times that.
Week one every one cried about Sareena being OP with double blades… turns out you can just duck it… lol how people cry first without actually going into training mode to find a solution.
Still watching the video, I'm dying to see what kind Hell will be unleashed when League of Legend's Fighting game finally comes out.
Fighting game + League players = Be afraid.
If the same community that plays the actual moba shifts over, prepare for a very toxic fighting game lol
If it's *those* kinds of players we're on about, then I think we can safely say they'll drop the game on day 1, regardless of how good it is
@@logantaylor1834league players are very stubborn. They’ll stick with it out of spite
Source: Me, a league player
Nah, im pretty sure none of those league players know how to do a quarter circle. They'll leave quickly.
@@pinksywedarnoc8017ok but you don't know how to freeze a wave (also there are no motion inputs in Project L)
Seeing Steve in the thumbnail had me laughing, Bro is an unstoppable force in Smash along with Kazuya. 😂
Ironically a good zone lowkey bullies Kazuya. STEVE though? Ridiculous
@@ddubblegaming3263Kazuya can be zoned out but the risk reward is still in his favor. If he gets you, you're dead. If Steve gets you you're also dead AND he can zone you out. It's crazy.
Both are literally the worst designed Smash characters in history. Sure, Smash 4 Bayonetta and Brawl Meta Knight were also way over-tuned, but Kazuya and Steve are just straight up horribly made.
I would rather fight Steve than Kazuya. Kazuya is a menace.
@@MasterSprintersan1I think kazuya is extremely poorly designed
But steve I'll defend because they somehow managed to translate a lot of his own series's design into a fighting game character's kit, it's just that a lot of the laughably broken tech he has was discovered AFTER ult's development cycle, which is a damn shame
I like his take about why DLCs are potentially that good. Like people have this weird (but not completely unfounded) idea that DLCs that have been super good because they want to convince people to buy them, which I feel does not make sense. So I agree with Max that the main reason why that tends to happen are because devs want to add more stuff, have new ideas etc. And I've always believed that since there's a significant gap between making the first 20-30 characters for the base game, and the individual characters that get released in a span of 5 or so years, with gaps between one another. And by then you would develop a different design philosophy, you'd develop a different balancing philosophy, you'd develop new ideas you wanna try to squeeze in. Because making DLC characters for FGs is almost like making characters for a new fighting game, yet not quite there yet.
Yeah, I've noticed that DLC characters aren't necessarily better, they just have more complex/numerous tools on average since the Devs have cool ideas they want to implement. (Same reason new characters are usually more complex than returning ones on average unless you alter/improve the returning character's moveset.)
It's just that having more complex/numerous tools means that there are more ways for them to be good, which then usually means they are stronger.
Max is still teaching me new things in fighting games. Much deserved success max. 😮
Masahiro Sakurai touches a little bit on Balancing in His Shoryuken video. I'll let you watch it, but he touches on how he thought he should've made Ryu's input commands stronger than what they currently are compared to the normal inputs
That KI interview is goated. I wish you had linked it in the description so I could watch the full thing later.
KOFXV was definitely like that at first, but then when B. Jenet and Krohnen took over they stayed at the top for a fat minute. It took two rounds of nerfs for them to finally be considered just okay now lol. This recent patch the top tiers are a lot more ambiguous though.
Dota 2 is my main game and I'm always in awe when I read the patch notes because it definitely feels like they take more of a "find the disease" approach to things. You see stuff like a .1 mana per second nerf on someone change them from top tier to bottom. Or a +1 starting armor become a meme about a char who traditionally had 0... but it has a HUGE gameplay feel. Or if a group of heroes seem particularly strong Ice Frog will nerf an item (that they were all using) rather than nerfing the heroes... or may add a new item to counter whatever meta they were doing... it's a super interesting and SUPER complex balancing act. And then they just throw caution to the wind it seems at least once a year and do some kind of MASSIVE update that completely redefines everything and suddenly it feels like I have a whole new game to play again!
Scorpion in Injustice 1, despite being nerfed heavily, still was fun to play imo.
This reminds me of the Core A-Gaming "Why we should buff instead of nerf" video.
I'm worried about Asuka in Guilty Gear. Because Strive hasn't exactly been known for nerfing characters, but Asuka is to the point where he is almost unplayable to fight against if in the right hands. So they're either going to nerf him and make him unplayable or basically ignore him and keep him this broken
@@qxpn9220"real fighting game fans would feel like shit"💀 like gobou isn't a real fighting game fan lol. Asuka is a cool character that people have been asking for.
(Before you ask, no I don't play asuka, I play zato lol)
@@qxpn9220Hi, it’s me, the One True Scotsman, here to tell you that Asuka being in GG is great and something that fans have been wanting for a long time because he’s so integral to the lore. Fighting games have had long range mage type characters for years now, he’s nothing new.
What wrong with Asuka? You don't like dealing with pot of greed or Exodia in turn one.
Now that i think of it there seems to be a pattern of anime fighting games with poor balance patches.
@@massgunner4152 Anime fighting games design unique characters that don't reminisce past/recent character playing style. Which is why they always come off as broken because balance wasn't even the factor when it come to character design.
I remember reading a balancing dev said their views are
1) Perfect balance is impossible, that's something you have to accept
2) No matter what, you should strive to ensure Garbage and God Tiers are empty. No one should be that bad and none that good.
3) No character should have better than a 6-4 match up. Meaning if two equally skilled players play 10 matches, at most the player with the character advantage should at best win 6 and lose 4.
Look at ninjakilla mkx Liu Kang wintrate 😂
As a game designer, (not fighting games but still experienced) 1 and 2 are spot on, while 3, in practice contradicts with your rule one, as intended balance is a type of perfect balance, and balancing for matchups instead of game feel, fun, and character individuality, often just makes the problems worse, as characters in similar archetypes to those with bad matchup spreads will also benefit from those changes.
@@yummmemonty7450 That's a fair point. I wouldn't be surprised if that's not something strictly followed and more just a "Hey, if this matchup is too skewed maybe you should reevaluate both characters and see what makes one too strong and the other too weak."
But yeah, I agree with you point 3 is a bit weird, but I can get what his intent was in saying it.
Point 3 limits your character design scope. Characters like Dhalsim and Gief are gonna have extreme matchups because they're extreme character archetypes. Haggar vs Magneto in UMvC3 comes to mind as the absolute extreme of this.
Look, listen and be amazed by TitanFalls Main Philosphy when it came to deaigning it. " No ONE player or character is Over Powered, if EVERYONE is over powered." Becomes intense sure but fun intense. Peraonally to the KI dev, " You can be proclaimed pros, influencers over the game. But you are not THE DEVELOPERS. WE hear you, we will listen but we will not be bullied into making the game unfun to a more casual playerbase"
I enjoyed your half Arnold Schwarzenegger half surfer frat boy accent at 9:22
That Keits clip always makes me second-guess specific nerfs (or buffs!) I'd want to see
I've been playing Marvel Snap lately and really appreciate the transparency of the patch notes. They'll state their vision for a card and admit that they aren't sure how to achieve it, so they're over-/under-tuning a card temporarily to see what happens. They've also admitted that some synergies/playstyles were just completely overlooked by their internal teams. I don't think fighting games can take this exact approach, but it's nice for devs to speak to us like they're people who have ideas and make mistakes.
thats the new ish marvel card game right?
@@kR-qj7rw yep!
I completely disagree with max about sf6.
The meta is constantly changing and very few things seem to stay true from month to month
This game has so much richness that it is evolving for the players until now. A patch in sf6 right now will kill amazing slow player evolution.
People will never see this point for what it is. I truly think its better for a game to gestate and let all of the dust settle before touching anything about it. Especially in the case of SF6. The devs clearly put a lot of thought into its mechanics and character matchups. They cant account for every possibility on their own. That's where the player base comes in. After months and months and mountains of player data they can THEN start to make the decisions needed to truly add balance to the game. Its most likely just a loud minority of players complaining the most about the balance at the moment, of which im sure most of them are top players. Im not even talking about named top players like Punk, but people who are in Master rank as well. These people make up so little of the actual player base that it makes little sense just to try and balance around them. Meanwhile I, a plat player, am having a blast with this game still.
@@Drunklotus Right, unless something is really broken, frantic balance updates very close to release are just gonna throw people off. In the end, updates are glamorous, but you want to reach an ultimate version that will never need change. People are still discovering new things in classic tetris, still discovering new things in third strike, and in the more broader term of games, still discovering new things in chess.
… isn’t that point exactly what Max said?
I’ll be very interested in what the launch week of T8 is going to be like as well, especially since this is actually the first Tekken game in the franchise I’ll be playing at launch, so it’ll be fun experiencing all of the highs and lows of it all.
"Hey guys, I actually come from the early 90s and was magically transported to this time! Just wanna say as a fellow video game player the future is DA BOMB!! I love fighting games! Gotta tell me what's fresh these days??"
*"Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat!!"*
I'm surprised that Smash Ultimate Kazuya didn't come up when Max started talking about the DLC anomaly.
One example i find interesting was the development of a brawl mod called project plus (plays like melee with some vets having a 90% identical moveset) Right when they released mewtwo and roy, mewtwo was the best character in the game, but interestingly enough, the dev team addressed something completely different. They realized that by trying to make everyone balanced and using melee fox as the balancing point, they made most of their characters not fun to fight and mewtwo was one of the most frustrating characters due to having broken range, combos, and recovery. In addition, they ignored the philosophy melee had where being offstage meant that you were highly likely to be edgeguard. This made character that had near guaranteed combos, early kill moves, and recoveries that made smash ultimate sora blush. The game wasn't fun for a lot of people after they were done trying out all the surface level stuff. The dev team spent a full year changing the game's balance to reward more skillful play and clever ways to recover instead of having them autopilot their way back to stage. I think this was the best decision they made and while the game will always have its own problems, at least they god rid of one of their biggest ones.
If you only play the characters you like, you never have to worry about balance patches. Chasing the meta is a waste of time since it often changes, and as such it isn’t something to really concern yourself with if you aren’t a professional.
And that's the reason why I'm more of a half-casual player. I may try to fight in competitive styles with friends and sometimes online, but I don't try keeping up with the top players. I just wanna have fun with my character and don't care much about losing.
I really can't enjoy fighting games if not playing them competitively and yet I never cared (and Im secure I'll never care) about meta
KOF xv seems to be doing fine with balancing and pleasing the playerbase.
After 16 months of Khronen & B. Jenet dominance.
No just No…
@@Carlitonsp1I agree, but Ngl, I do feel like all the characters are playable, but there always gonna be those Character that play the game better than most
@@Carlitonsp1 Don't know where you've been looking but they dropped off hella after the last few updates. Pretty much since update 2.1 those two have pretty much just seen a big drop off some of the most used characters right now have been Terry and Ralph and even Orochi Yashiro
@@A_mir0_0 Yes just yes
I play who I can. I don't care how "good" they are. If I can play them, I will.
As a Tiny Channel about the mmo Guild Wars 2's Balance (which has excellent combat, but often a limited development bandwidth allocated for their balance team) : It's refreshing to both see someone who's as knowledgeable and passionate about fighting games as Max talk about balance, and refreshing to know that a HUGE STUDIO like NRS can make both good calls as well as just as baffling decisions as GW2! It turns out studios are studios and nobody's perfect. Certainly not me! 😄
Amazing Video! All your content has been an amazing way to get into the fighting game community. It's always welcoming -- easy to understand even for beginners -- but full of depth -- sometimes I watch vids like this twice through just to catch even more of the points you're making and digest them. Entertaining and educational in equal measure. Really means a lot to have someone as positive and passionate making content for people like us. Keep it up!
Balancing Pretty much any game is a nightmare and there’s so many factors to take in it can be overwhelming what matters is not rushing your balancing decisions and that each step towards better balance is also a step towards a more fun experience.
Ive never seen such an uproar of people so upset 😂😂 I love the patch
The ending video is a really good messages to gamedevs of any game with a competitive element in general.
I don’t know about the slower approach to content, but I honestly like SF6’s more restrained approach to balance. Ken and JP are clearly dominant, but the best players in the world are winning without them. The system is so complex and rich that people can quickly develop new strategies to challenge old ones. That’s good balance. I just hope the Ken and JP players are ready to adjust after Akuma drops.
😂😂😂
There's one thing about balancing that you also have to keep in mind, and that's the core of a charatcer. Sometimes the idea and kit of a charatcer is naturally better or worse than others, just from the way they were conceived. The question then comes that how much can you change a character before you lose their core identity? If you go too far, you then lose the identity of that character and frustrate people as that's not what they signed up for.
Always value your point of view. You make some of the best videos on fighting games, wether you are playing them or discussing them.
Keith said it best. Sometimes people cry way way way too much instead of trying to adapt and that's why some people hate casuals (not all of them). Though lately some PROs been on their feelings about the games. Sometimes you need to let the game run to see how it performs and then you can take some notes and find a way to fix it but not listen to everything a salty player says.
Shotgun to the knee approach with SF6 would legitimately destroy that game. I still believe that balance patch next year should have little to no nerfs and all buffs (unless Ed or Akuma are game breaking in some way) as much as I hate fighting Ken and Cammy they do NOT need nerfs and neither does JP. The way that game is right now they really just need to bring low tiers up, not even to top tier status but just up from where they are. Characters like Lily, Gief and AKI especially.
The game is just near pristine right now and they really should just keep that, taking away will just muddy the enjoyment that is there right now, thoughtfully adding will only enhance it.
The general rule should be if you can’t get it balanced just give everyone dirty stuff. Fighting games are way more fun when characters are overpowered or a little broken as opposed to boring and not strong enough.
WOW, this in an insanely good deep dive!
I picked up SF6 three weeks after the game was released and hit diamond in 2-3 weeks. SF6 is my first street fighter to take serious and a lot of people told me I was carried by my character. That character was Manon.
Manon debuted in 6.
If you’re making a joke I missed it.
@@robertbouley7697 I meant sf6. I use to watch sf4 and didn’t pay attention to sf5 so sometimes I forget the newest one isn’t 5
@@fibonacci37 👍🏻
And they aren't actually wrong. What people like you miss is that a character can be weak and strong at the same time.
Manon and Honda are the perfect example. Both are clearly bottom tiers yet at lower level of play they have an effective and simple gameplan that will carry players, but the higher you'll climb the harder will become since people will figure out how to deal with your character.
@@VerGiLL1 seriously lol. Other even easeier gamplans include zoning, drive rush, invincible moves or oki on knockdown all of which Manon lacks in this game. At this point I have a lot of the cast to Diamond+ even random select and I'll tell you there are much easier strategies than using Manon even at lower levels.
I like how when you said "DLC character" and my first thought was Leroy😂
Many people were also angry that NRS didn't nerf Johnny. But i believe it's not that simple to balance him. Because if you nerf his frames he's gonna be trash but have a good parry. If they nerf the parry Johnny is gonna be way less fun. I think Johnny needs a really well thought out balance changes that don't make him garbage which will take time OR just leave him as he is because he's really fun.
what's happening (happened?) in sf6 is what I like the call the Melee Effect. If you look at the first tier lists for melee, you see top tier characters initially in low tier spots. It wasn't until the player base itself figured out how to use some of the characters more optimally and how to exploit other character's weaknesses
Your notes on Dante reminded me Khronen in the patch before the last one. Him & B. Jenet got double knee-capped, and they were still the best 2 characters in the game, the gap just got smaller.
This was really interesting thanks max and vs gamers.
Smash Ultimate actually had a really interesting approach to balance coming out of Smash 4. Almost universally, the best moves were nerfed and the worst moves were buffed. It didn't matter what character those moves were on or how important those moves were to the character's gameplan. That approach shrunk the power gap and expanded the options for characters that previously relied on 3 good moves to carry their otherwise terrible kit. It was pretty genius for a first draft, even if there were a lot of kinks that needed to be worked out.
It's interesting in terms of general game balance too. Since I play MMOGs, there are lots of people who only complain because the have put in hundreds of hours into one class and can only see the balance in terms of how everything relates to their character. Clearly, the devs need to have a clear vision of what their game is and also never to just agree to everything the community says, because it can be so lopsided.
Not a fighting game, but waiting out to hear the problem instead of patching it quickly reminds me of the Corpse dilemma back in Darkest Dungeons. And months later when they eventually gave an option to 'fix' the problem, less than (I think) 5% of players toggled the patch.
Similar balancing stories can be found in a lot of strategy games too, Garen and Sniper (from LoL and DotA 2, respectively) are both beginner's trap characters that have had their share of OP seasons specifically because of that presumption hiding how powerful their buffs actually were over time.
Sniper in particular ended up dumpstering an entire tournament overnight with a series of initial meme picks before getting picked/banned every single game (patch 6.83 and TI 2014), leading to him getting nerfed HARD the following season.
Love the balance of gameplay and education that comes from this channel. That segment from Iron Galaxy was awesome.
I think SF6 has waited a bit too long given 10 of the launch characters weren't available for public playtesting. It's been tough maining Lily when other characters have clearly better tools but then Hibiki regularly sits on top of the MR leaderboard so she can clearly get the job done.
I definitly agree. I no longer play the game because i literally only run into JP, Ken, Juri and it's just...so...so boring
@SalGoodguy ironically that's why I dont play mk1 because I run into smoke, baraka or Raiden. It's like fighting games today are very bias towards certain characters while others are never giving the chance to shine or don't have the tools necessary.
@@ShikiRyougi05I actually counted the other day, out of 15 games in ranked I played, 11 were kens. 2 JPs and then the others just random. I’m in master, and my god u just hit the same top tiers again and again
On the other hand, people whined like hell about Marisa and Manon in the first few months of the game. If they had watched the game quicker those 2 characters would've suffered a lot.
Cuz rn Manon is Bottom tier and iirc only BigBird Managed to win a tourney with Marisa and that was in the first few months.
@@mellochello921the problem is the playerbase in general, everyone now is a tierwhore.
Arcsys method: Buff Johnny
Always love to see leeroy nightmare being mentioned
No more is the signal to noise harder to dig through than the internet, with so many ways for people to project and expect everyone to listen to their caterwauling. So I appreciate when the devs take time, study, learn, and wait for the dust to truly settle instead of knee-jerk react to the baying of livestock that is the Keyboard Developers and the Gamers™.
The only way to make a balanced fighting game is to only have one character.
So, Street Fighter 1?
Footsies
Even then it might be unbalanced lmao. Therea history of certain players being given priority depending on if they are player 1 or player 2
Nash in Sf5 was my main throughout but it was sad how they nerfed him to the point that he couldn't compete, he only got slightly better in the final game update, whereas all the so called buffs and added target combos etc they gave him did nothing to help him be better at anything, no 3 frame, no invincible wake up, not much pressure in neutral, VT's weren't amazing had no comeback factors behind them like the better characters
They overreacted to his EVO win. Nash was one of the most balanced characters in the game and the nerfs happened way too early. They ruined his normals and his teleport.
@@first2three Indeed that's why since then i'm more for buffing weak characters and unless something is completely busted leave characters alone for the most part, bcz taking away what makes a character fun to use only ruins the overall experience imo
My favorite DLC balance story is Pokken Tournament DX where they released exactly 2 new characters (along with 2 support sets) through DLC: Aegislash and Blastoise.
Aegislash on release was undeniably the #1 best character in the game. In the next patch, he was toned down just enough to where people actually still debate to this day whether he's still the best character or just top 3.
Blastoise released afterward and has been known as the definitive bottom tier of the game. Blastoise didn't get any fancy balance changes, but obviously everyone tried to make him work, and actually to some success... just enough to argue "Is he the worst, or maybe bottom 3?"
Complete balance between the DLC.
You can't always listen to the playerbase when it comes to balance because they'll want something nerfed just because they got owned by it. They don't actually care about balance, they just don't want to get better.
100% facts
I love the fact that steve is next to cyrax in the thumbnail. Makes it all so surreal 🤣🤣🥺
So many devs and people forget that all kinds of data matters.
Reach, damage, combo-ability, start up frames, end lag frames, set-ups, baits, movement speed etc etc.
The best way is to make like a big chart of all these stats overall and check missing acts of weak characters and why strong ones are strong.
We all know Sol's 50/50 pressure into a counter punish which made it even stronger. Because it wsn't a normal 50/50. It was a counter 50/50 if you failed the check.
Just frame trapped into command grabs lol. And that is without his insane combo damage from the stronger counter combo starters he would get. Just insanity.
my thoughts are that everyone should get absurd bullshit mechanics and instead of making them weaker they just make other characters stronger
minecraft steve being in the thumbnail is proof we're in the best timeline
"This isn't what we asked for", the rallying cry of entitled gamers.
If Nintendo listened to angry fans, they'd have taken out the item durability in Tears of the Kingdom... which would have made the Weapon Fuse mechanic worthless.
Inevitably, some characters will be mechanically better than others in any fighting game, but player skill matters more than tier placement.
If they're mechanically better then I think they can compensate with less health and/or damage, slow sown their frames. Anything to compensate so they're not fastest, strongest, highest health with most useful moveset.
In theory? Sure. In application? Not so much. No amount of individual skill is going to make up for your opponent having better tools than you do. Tier lists exist for a reason. Low/bottom tier isn't necessarily bad. They just don't have the tools a top/high tier does.
@@dylancross1039 I didn't say tier placement doesn't matter at all. In some games, it matters more than others, but overall, player skill does matter more. I mean, as a DK main, if I tried my hand at Steve, I wouldn't know a dirt block from a diamond pickaxe.
Incredibly interesting video and topic!!! Please do more of these!
As soon as I saw this, I immediately thought of killer instinct. Their balancing around the mid to late season 2 were great. Especially when they fixed my boi fulgore.
I definitely like it more when devs wait for balance patches. Smash did really good on this. Ultimate never really got a "balance patch," we just got stuff adjusted when the next DLC came out. Unless I'm mistaken, I know it's had hotfixes but usually the game wouldn't be patched till the next DLC character. Which was a big timeframe between each patch but it did a lot of good for the meta of the game in the long run.
Something that bothered me about NRS first balance patch is that they decided to nerf some of the top tiers (Raiden, Baraka, Cyrax and what not), but still Johnny Cage remained untouched and he is still one of the scariest characters in the game to fight against
But, the characters that needed the most help remained also untouched or made even worse. You can say that Scorpion got nerfed in a way, his air combos are a bit harder to do and they do less damage, and Sub-Zero which needs a couple buffs also remained untouched in his frame data and damage scaling...
I've been doing my own little balance adjustment in Smash Ultimate using the custom power in the game's settings. I understand what it's like to be a dev behind these balance changes in fighting games.
MK players don’t want balance 😂. They all jump to the top tiers regardless.
And then there is me playing like three fighting game series casually, mostly against cpu or locally and using characters that feel good and look cool but still watching these videos
I do personally enjoy street fighter 6 taking its time with the balance. Sure it can come off as stagnant but consider that some games like SF3 3S are still insanely popular to this day despite its obvious balance issues and people have still been playing the shit out of it for decades. I consider myself a casual player and people can learn a game at a different pace, especially fighting games where you can always learn new things on a very high skill ceiling. So while some top players may have already figured out the game at its most some may still be figuring it out and get a much better understanding of it without monthly or bi monthly drastic changes. And unlike a game like SF3 on the other hand we KNOW there will be change to the balance and we wont have to wait for like a super edition or a 4th strike at full price for them to happen. I wouldnt be against perhaps bi-yearly balance patches but with new characters being introduced over the year i wouldnt see it as an absolute necessity. I feel like SF6 has been prioritizing quality over quantity over all and i've been enjoying the game for that reason (aside from new world tour content).
And i'll add that in contrast to Overwatch where a same character got 2 major overhaul/rework within a year and i've hated both of them ill gladly take this approach instead.
MvC2 has like 6 viable characters out of 56 and people still play it
Shit, people made a rebalanced ROM hack of 3rd Strike and nobody plays it. It's on Fightcade and nobody plays it. Meanwhile everyone is in the 3rd Strike lobby playing the ever-loving shiznite out of the unpatched game. Playing low tiers, even. I am no exception as two of my mains are Twelve and Q.
I completely agree on the Tekken DLC. Fahkumram felt that way as well and I think they definitely ignore some balancing if not a lot but they also add a LOT of identity and that’s something that sticks out. Fahkumram literally is the same size as Marduk and yet has a COMPLETELY different playstyle. Pokes, mix and plus frames
I used to call him "Fuhkyermum"
No i didnt want 1 touch 50 to 60 percent to be normal. 1 touch and 2 resets is where the game should be.
Customers usually don’t know what they want. Good video, Max!!