Giving people worse tools to find the information that they're looking for doesn't make the game less solvable; it just makes it more tedious to solve. The omission of frame data from Strive just makes me wait until the wiki or the frame data mod is updated for each major patch, because otherwise it's tedious to find the answers I'm looking for that I need to know. Rather than removing information, the game design would be better served to search for "unsolvable" mechanics like counter breakers, Roman Cancel, pushblock guard cancel, perfect parries; things that mean that there isn't just a single answer for a problem. That won't 100% stop a game from being solved either, but it's far better than just denying access to information.
Or maybe nut up and play the game to find your answers? This need for all the data just removes all the fun from the game. Get this,SF 2 was hella fun. No frame data, no clue there were hitboxes/hurtboxes, etc, but there was still sick high level play. When it first came put we didn't even know the move commands for certain. The organic knowledge sharing in you local scene was hype. Beyond that, 99% of you non pros asking for all this info isn't going to make you any better at the game.
@@OberynTheRedViperall this does is create a bigger skill gap between new and experienced players. Pro's still used frame data for optimising pressure and combos its just that instead of having the info in game they would pull out a camera and have both characters jump and count frames manually. They would count pixels for comparing range of moves. Just because you were bad at street fighter 2 doesn't mean it wasn't the same way back then as it is now. The learning curve has just been smoothed and the community strengthened.
The Harada thing is funny looking back because charging for frame data in T7 was an extension of that belief. I was kinda shocked at the negative reaction because i knew Harada wasn't gonna give up on not including Frame Data unless it was only filtered to the hardest of core players. The only issue i saw was if they charged for it in T8 which thankfully they didn't
I like games like Path of Exile, because the whole point is to give the players an insanely over-complicated system to solve. It's nice to have a non-competitive game like this because it doesn't matter if one build is particularly broken or weak. Trying to make a strange, not great build work by optimizing the crap out of it is really fun.
When I played Path of Exile years ago I played a dual wielder duelist guy built to evasion/dodge tank and as far as I could tell what I was doing was not remotely optimal but I liked my dude and my knife edge game plan and kept pushing it as far as I could. Good times
I think players and developers who worry about the game getting "solved" would do well to consider Melee. With zero patches in 20 years (and only minor tournament ruleset updates) the metagame is STILL changing regularly. Competitive footage from 2008 looks completely different from 2015, and footage from 2015 looks completely different from 2024. The playerbase knows that the game code is static but that doesn't stop them from continually developing new tech, matchup-specific counterplay, mastering niche mechanics, etc. The developers never ever considered the levels of play the game would eventually reach, but it got time to breathe and has ended up being one of the most enduring fgc scenes of all.
but you're not gonna have modern teams designing systems that are too open-ended for them to control what's possible at a high level. games like melee and AC+R have the accidental dose of chemical X that their respective devs have been trying to move away from ever since, but that's exactly what keeps ppl coming back decades later, in spite of the more degen aspects of that wildness (ICs wobbling, zappa sword)
Very true, and very fair. However Melee's in a unique state where no patches are ever coming, so people are semi-forced to relearn and go back to the drawing boards (Amsa with Yoshi, the DK Revolution recently). But for stuff like TFT that has consistent update patches and cycles of sets, the devs might think that the lifespan isn't there to have the full "First learning, solved, and resolving" cycle Melee does. Casuals won't care as much about innovating new strategies and instead play for fun, while the pros are going to follow trends and either hop on or try to find counterplays based off similar data. Like, when the top 4-cost or 3-cost champs are discovered and forced every game, I'm not expecting people to suddenly go back and refine the Recombobulator augment and innovations as which tiers are best to roll. There's a ton of risk which is bad for a game baked with RNG, large data sets for them don't exist because no one's picking up said augments, and the data you do have is probably from Diamond or lower players since all the good players are sticking to tried and true strats. The could change it so TFT sets are like 6 months or longer, but then there's the issue of player retention. Melee gets around it by having a VERY dedicated fanbase and legacy status, but TFT doesn't have that luxury.
The biggest difference is that in fighting games the situational awareness is inherent in the genre game-to-game, playing against your opponent pretty much depends on that. In a strategy game like TFT that isn't true, and the situational awareness fully depends on the offered augments and units, and winrate stats actively take away from that
Something Ive started to consider recently when thinking about game balance how the meta has shifted in SSBM several times over the last 20 years without a single patch. How in 2002 jigglypuff, yoshi, and DK where right above roy and and kirby in terms of strength, all at the lower end of mid tier. Fast forward to like 5 years ago and jigglypuff is "top 1" and being considered to be banned from tournaments, DK is still "lower mid tier" and yoshi is "mid tier". Now today DK and Yoshi are winning majors and jigglypuff is back to "top3/4" while kirby might be the worse character in the game. I dont think games are ever really figured out unless we dump a huge amount of resources into machine learning. Chess was being evolved until chess engines really took control and they had to be specifically designed for that game. the same computers suck at go which is arguably way more simple then chess. every year a new chess engine beats the old one so you could even say that the game is still getting figured out because how computers play the game is very different then how they did 10 years ago although i admit that may be stretching it although lets way a few more years to give a final verdict. Denying easy learning tools for players doesnt prevent games from being figured out because they arent going to be, they are just going to make it difficult for new players to pick up the game after a few years once people have already gotten lots of practice.... at least in my opinion. i totally understand the excitement of constant evolution when a new game comes out and all the techniques that constantly get evolved but i feel devs should help players learn their games as it can really only help its commerical succes IMO. not saying you are for or against this
and part of what led to DK being optimized so late in the game's life is the modern training tools built by the community (plus the ability to queue up in slippi and practice against humans whenever). a lack of info to work with can just lead to people picking whatever's obviously busted on day 1 and being unstoppable forever, since there isn't any good way to practice counterplay and bring some more variety into the game
Back in Tekken 6 days we didn't even have a record function in training mode. I remember Aris begging Harada to include it in Tekken Tag 2 and they finally caved in and acted as if it were some groundbreaking feature in 2012. Then continuing the desire to gatekeep info when they charged for frame data in T7. Thankfully in T8 they've done a complete 180 and have included some of the best quality of life features to learn the game I've seen in any fighting game.
Games being solved and metas being developed are inevitable, but you can't deny it's a magical time when people are let loose on a new thing and no one knows how anything works yet. When Splatoon was a new thing it was so interesting playing with people that had no clue what was good and what was bad, and it was so different from other shooters you couldn't reliably transfer over skills from that....fast-forward a few years though and you see the same handful of weapons and tactics. Game is still fun, but that launch window was something special.
6:05 I'd like to note that there were actually indirect adjustments to Ed with the Drive Reversal changes. Mainly making it -6, meaning he got nerfed as he doesn't have a 6 frame medium. And he is still one of the best characters in the game now.
Imagine the chaos that would break when the first guy found out that Drive Rush and Counter Hit give extra Frame Advantage because Capcom didn't tell us. For at least a very little bit, people would probably think that the only advantage gained on Counter Hit would be the pseudo Crush Counter effects on certain Punish Counter buttons. If I didn't know that Guile's Forward Medium Punch Overhead could link into Crouch Jab on Drive Rush/Counter Hit, I would have a much harder time dealing with a crouching opponent. Ryu can't do Forward Heavy Punch into Heavy DP without extra advantage either which was the easiest Street Fighter 4 combo I found when learning the game on 3DS. So many almost combos or almost links that are so hype to watch might not have even been found yet without a datamine of the game or a legion of Mew2King level grinders in Training Mode.
People just like the fantasy of being the person who breaks a thing with their gigachad brain, instead of putting in the reps to actually play the meta successfully. Which includes playing off meta stuff to check meta options, or just because it's more fun.
The big diference is in fighting games the player has way more influence over the final deed in the game itself than in most other genres, because the sheer amount of variables is too high, the amount of possible combinations is even higher, and the proximity between said variables, in time and space, is too close. The raw numbers are important, of course, that's why top tier characters exist, but the mere data gets massively changed by the filter of the player choices, fluctuating and multipying every single frame. That's why you can get a moment 37 in fighting games.
Honestly if a dev is scared of giving too much info to the players it means he isn't confident in the game balance being able to support an advanced meta. Interesting decisions should still be there even if the theoretical optimal play has been figured out, also good game have more than one catch all solutions to problems
As a very casual off and on TFT player, I really hate not knowing whats going on. For me, the experimentation phase Mort is trying to enforce feels like bashing my head into a brick wall; if anything, having someone coaching me or looking up stats and guides helps me "experience content" more than blindly stumbling my way into a top 4 I didnt earn.
yeah that's what happen when you just blindly follow some guide without knowing how people arrive at that conclusione, you lose the ability to discover the fun on your own
@@PepperoniPapaya I'm not 'blindly' following the guide, I'm using it to get better at the game so I can understand the pieces of the giant puzzle without having to spend hours and hours of my life ramming puzzle pieces together in a pitch dark room. Did someone who crashed 25 times learning to ride a bike without help "discover the fun" more than someone who had help and only crashed 5 times as a result?
@@CaptinSpyke Wtf you mean pitch dark room? The only stat you don't have is average placement/winrate data of augments. Basically every actual stat in the game is visible or findable online, from damage per auto, to spell damage, to what items you can build. The only thing you don't get to see as much of is the meta (which is still possible since we still get to see items/champions placements) Learn what the champions and traits do in the set, and put those two neurons in your noggin to work on what works well together with what augments. You can still copy meta comps from tft academy.
@@CaptinSpyke well you can still have your guides and help. Nothing the devs can do to take that away. They're just getting rid of the app that says choose this because someone else already made the decision for you.
one thing i learned from playing a lot of games, is truly enjoying a game means you enjoy playing against the top tiers of that game, or the meta that revolves around them
I enjoy conversations like this that show a contrast between different communities and devs, and brings out people to reflect on how they go about learning a game.
I think it helps to consider how "solvable" a game is based on mechanical complexity. Pokemon has been played competitively for over 25 years, in varying capacities, yet even to this day older generations that were lacking in mechanics or options (particularly gens 1 and 2) are still nowhere near being solved and see changes to their metagame over time. Obviously this is, in some part, due to players not actively being given all the information possible by the devs, but the increase in information over time is still important. Plus, as a spectator and as a player, I enjoy seeing games at their best; it's kind of wack looking back at SF4 footage, for instance, and knowing that a mild amount of top level play is just matchup checking each other because the game didn't offer as much info, and information just didn't spread as quickly. tl;dr your game will never be solved even you think things have generally settled and/or there's still a solid idea of where characters rank
I think the big problem isn't people *working towards* gaining and sharing knowledge hard and fast, it's that they just reach this endopint so early now where it's like "yep, game's over, it's Completely Solved now, you just play these characters and do these tactics and the rest of the entire game's life will just be everyone doing that and mastering these extremely specific boring options and nothing else, until the next patch where it'll be solved again within 12 hours" like it's so utterly soul-draining. Let us have fun. Let us explore. Let us KEEP learning (i.e. with how much I adore people coming out of nowhere with insane stuff from a character everyone else just 'forgot about' even in an old patchless game like Melee), not just... throw our hands up after a few days every time.
I strongly dislike the "patches as content" approach to competitive games. It makes memorization a more important part of the game, which i find unenjoyable. It also prevents games from getting into late-stage optimizations which i think are the most fun and interesting parts of competitive games. I'm so happy fighting games have resisted this design trend as much as they have.
I AGREE so much, Sajam, that devs and SOME players are terrified of certain competitive games being solved at the highest level and the variety of gameplay being dry and almost TOO similar between them.
Cause then that style of play becomes the norm. There’s too much copy and paste in fighting games these days. Once you know the frame data, there’s no real reason to experiment.
Currently frothing at the mouth looking forward to playing Vanilla World of Warcraft this thursday--A 20 year old game that people have written literal dissertations on. People still play in different ways. Because its fun, because it's interesting, and because good games are complex enough that finding the exact optimal solution to every problem is impossible. Old, ostensibly solved games are fun. They're a different experience, but the framing of "solving" a game as a bad thing is just fundamentally misunderstanding one of the appeals of games imo.
Excluding frame data in fighting games, I think we should all go into games mostly blind, whether its a multiplayer game like TFT with a ton of options or a story driven game where dialogue options can have an impact on the story. We shouldn't be afraid of losing some imaginary points or getting a bad ending. Journey before destination and all that.
Part of me wants to dabble with the idea of a weekly/monthly proc-gen or roguelike-adjacent fighting game for this reason. I mean, there's a lot of reasons. A deeper single-player experience, entry point for new players who don't want to just hit the wall with experienced players. And then a game that experienced players can play "fresh" every so often, in some ways. But really, WE are the problem. We started playing chess on a checkerboard, and gaming companies had to learn to roll with that.
I'm not sure how you could say, randomise stuff like frame data since you have to animate frames. Maybe other stuff like physics, combo scaling, speed, effects, recovery could be switched.
You could have multiple *variations* of normals... like trading range for windup/cooldown... and part of the generation is just choosing which ones go with which characters. You can also have a set of universal mechanics, and change which few of them are activated at a time across the cast, and/or if you add one additional character-specific mechanic to each character. Then it's just finding a good lineup size and per-archetype (since FG characters conveniently fit into those now)...
I think fear of being solved is less about the competitive integrity of a game and more that for a lot of players, especially within ecosystems that cater to it, really enjoy novelty. Call of Duty and TFT are both HEAVILY designed around encouraging you to do lots of different things and see lots of different interactions. Augments exist in the first place to make it harder to force powerful comps. Call of Duty rewards you for using every single weapon, scope, and killstreak to encourage players to stay in a constant state of inexperience as long as possible. Thus the player bases that have formed around them are there in large part because of that focus on novelty.
Been playing a lot of new games lately. A majority are indie games on the genre vampire survivors invented. For me to go from the wow and Diablo player who always looks up builds and am accustomed to that, playing a game that hasn't been updated to the point of balance and seeing what items are just dominant, what spells are the best etc, has been so fun. I played battle aces this weekend, a competitive rts but in a very fast arcade style. I couldn't help but notice how much more comfortable I was with a game where we don't even know what's good yet. It was a very fun time. I still love mastery, that's what drew me to eSports. I do not mind a solved game. But I'm learning to find more joy in the game before I can look up ideal builds or combos etc.
I agree with the idea of protecting that sense of discovery in a new game but doing that by hiding frame data feels wrong to me. It's like when bethesda games have difficulty settings that just turn enemies into big HP bags. Sure, you made the game _harder_ but not in a way that's _interesting._
@@pedroscoponi4905 chess is not a solved game you ignored the giant ocean of possibilities that is the mid-game that no human could possibly solve. Computers can play chess perfectly but that's just because they look forward and suss out every possible permutation.
I think it comes down to how often a player feels like every match or round plays out the same way. I'll admit that in Tekken 8 there can be some times where I feel like I've fought 5 of the same heihachi in a row. Meanwhile in VF5 every player is very different in how they play, and the character depth allows this freedom of expression. I'm hoping that VF6 knows how important keeping every round exciting is, by making sure each round feels different. In a fighting game, there should be no two matches that ever feel the same. I think that's the ideal.
I mostly have to deal with this in TCGs, and yeah, I don't envy the devs who have to both keep things fresh and let players get enough value from their cards before they have to craft/buy/trade a new deck because their old one is obsolete. Having multiple formats certainly helps, but sometimes (especially with digital card games) your deck literally dies as soon as a new expansion hits. At least you might get a partial refund by reducing it...
Chess has never been solved, what? Like some endgames have been solved, and some openings are objectively better for one player than the other, but there is no perfect play anyone is actually aware of at the moment. Even bots don't have a perfect script, they just run 100 simulations a second to estimate the best possible move given as many futures as possible
@@hanavolta9785 They're not saying there's only one solution to win. They're saying that people are worried there's enough objectively better moves found that it makes the game less fun and less interesting. Chess is studied enough to have a ton of better moves found vs other moves, but people play it anyway because chess is fun and still challenging. It doesn't ruin the game.
Chess is not solved. Solved means with a certain opening you could force a win or draw. There is no current opening that can guarantee that outcome. However, there are endgame that have been completely solved.
@@hanavolta9785 I think MtG (magic the gathering) might be to blame for this weird/inaccurate usage of the word "solved". It's used there to indicate a stagnant metagame, where the best decks and interactions are all identified. The TFT devs took a lot of design cues from mtg and started using the same terms. It definitely doesn't mean solved in the same way tic tac toe or checkers are solved (single optimal lines of play), but it is something close, where the degrees of freedom are significantly reduced because the bad options have all been ground into the dirt. Knowing to not push the a/h pawn as your first move and all the myriad heuristics like that are part of what makes chess "solved" in this sense of the word.
@@hanavolta9785 For high-level play, you're right; and the same could be said for many retro FGs. But for your casual audience, Fool's Mate (or a simple counter to it) is an entire meta.
Honestly, I think the data in TFT is more comparable to macros in fighting games. The issue is that strategy and evaluating options is the skill being tested by TFT, and in fighting games that is an aspect but not the primary skill tested. If you used a tool like macros to remove execution, the best players would still be the best, but it would take away execution and actually remove an aspect of gameplay
For me it is just about a balance of updates. I would say it is different though, going back to a game that is "finished", as I do with mvc3 all the time, cause I don't expect updates to be there, so it changes how I look at the game. For something like sf6, the stale nature sticks out more, because it is (semi) actively being supported, and I would expect more meaningful updates. That terry update should've mattered a lot more, than it really ended up being.
With TFT and other such games of adjacent subgenres, it's easy to understand where the fear is coming from. These games are, through some convoluted evolution, ultimately derived from strategy and role-playing games, you know, genres where one of the defining features is simulating a bunch of actions and interactions, and facilitating and inspiring storytelling, through crunching numbers. A traditional strategy and/or role-playing game is a numbers game, through and through, and anything with a lineage like that is susceptible to being solved to the point where some potential sources of fun are optimised out of the game, in a way that isn't quite compatible and comparable with what always began life as action games like fighting games, even if those also involve numbers at the heart of it. So one way for developers to combat this in both singleplayer and multiplayer settings is obfuscate the numbers from the players' view in some way, or come up with other ways to delay the players' development, like switching the numbers around in updates. Heck, even in the singleplayer space, I haven't played the series personally but from what I hear, one of the main draws of Square Enix's SaGa RPGs is that a lot of the interlocking number-crunching systems that make the games tick are not revealed to the player at all, which makes the initial experience of playing one of discovery and stumbling into success or failure by accident. Some people are into that over the more blatant "did you raise your stats high enough by leveling up?" questions contemporaries ask of the players.
That fear of having the game solved makes a lot of sense when execution isn't really a thing, and you have virtually infinite time for every decision you make. You just get to that point much faster if you give people the tools to crunch the numbers and pick the optimal path most of the time.
Harada is full of crap lmao All of that is just mental gymnastics to justify charging for it, like that "TK7 is 3" nonsense, or Daisuke Ishiwatari going "Guilty Gear is too fast for rollback" They're just mouthpieces, their jobs are sugarcoating and damage control, they'll just say whatever
It might be obvious in hindsight, but I genuinely believe they themselves thought that was the truth. Curious the look on their faces when we showed them that wasn't how it worked.
@@leithaziz2716 I don't think they're that naive Harada said that he's watching Project L closely, to see how they will pull off the F2P model If Riot does it, and it works, but Bamco says no, then he'll probably say "we do not consider Riot's results to be satisfactory" or something Same with rollback conversions of games, those cost a ton of money, and publishers probably aren't willing to shoulder that cost on a 10 year old game, so directors have to say that rollback is actually bad
In what setting are TFT players supposed to do this "experimentation"? Ranked mode? Do they not see how some players will be naturally reluctant to do that?
the contrast between different player personas is intersting, but it's a bit of a shame games nowadays being a big hub for all the player personas creates silo'd groups imo. It's unavoidable, but like, I'm in games to enjoy navigating the fog of the unknown and some players are not. We technically all go under the same umbrella, but it's so much easier for some player relationships to be defined by these silos. Oh this issue is a huge deal breaker for the top 2% of the playerbase, it's a nightmare this patch is unplayable this comp is so broken. Meanwhile my reply is "I dunno, it's pretty neat in gold/plat, I got a few top 4s with the bottom comp of the set".
To me the funniest example of "people not knowing how good a character actually is" is Steve in Smash Ultimate. A lot of people thought he was pretty meh at first. Funny how things turn out.
worth noting fighting games only get solved so fast and knowing frame data matters so much more because of generous input buffers. they make the game easier to get into, but they also make it much easier to play perfectly. old games with no input buffer add a sort of instability where players can't act perfectly on the first frame, so there's much more room for plays that are 'incorrect' based on the frame data i get why input buffers are standard now, but if you want a game that never feels solved there's a reason super turbo, vampire saviour, mvc2 etc still get played despite being very deeply understood
yeah bro I'm so glad the devs got scared of us solving Tekken 7 so they changed the game to be completely different (derogatory) compared to the previous 30 years. They couldn't even copy the games that actually know how to implement a meter, nah bro we got this here's a full stick of butter every turn so you can watch the exact same cutscenes a minimum of 6 times per match (rage art not included). It's actually a problem how accessible games are because even slop can succeed (even slop much worse than T8 like the recent MKs). Back in the day there was no twitter, JP devs were hermits on mountains and the only people who cared about the games were those serious enough to go out and meet others irl to play, meaning if the game was unfun it would simply fail. Simpler times, better times.
Giving people worse tools to find the information that they're looking for doesn't make the game less solvable; it just makes it more tedious to solve. The omission of frame data from Strive just makes me wait until the wiki or the frame data mod is updated for each major patch, because otherwise it's tedious to find the answers I'm looking for that I need to know. Rather than removing information, the game design would be better served to search for "unsolvable" mechanics like counter breakers, Roman Cancel, pushblock guard cancel, perfect parries; things that mean that there isn't just a single answer for a problem. That won't 100% stop a game from being solved either, but it's far better than just denying access to information.
Or maybe nut up and play the game to find your answers? This need for all the data just removes all the fun from the game.
Get this,SF 2 was hella fun. No frame data, no clue there were hitboxes/hurtboxes, etc, but there was still sick high level play. When it first came put we didn't even know the move commands for certain. The organic knowledge sharing in you local scene was hype.
Beyond that, 99% of you non pros asking for all this info isn't going to make you any better at the game.
@@OberynTheRedViper ok grandpa lets get you to bed...
@@OberynTheRedViperall this does is create a bigger skill gap between new and experienced players. Pro's still used frame data for optimising pressure and combos its just that instead of having the info in game they would pull out a camera and have both characters jump and count frames manually. They would count pixels for comparing range of moves. Just because you were bad at street fighter 2 doesn't mean it wasn't the same way back then as it is now. The learning curve has just been smoothed and the community strengthened.
@@OberynTheRedViper take your pills old man. Wake up and smell the plus frames
@@OberynTheRedViper having access to that information would bring me joy, just as much as the joy you had learning stuff organically.
"Every fighting game now just has frame data in the game." Cries in Strive (no, mods do not count).
just count 1/60ths of a second bro 😎
I do get a sick joy back in the day of hitting an unsafe move and getting away with it because it looked like it was safe from the animation
It still happens at early levels honestly
"That looks unsafe, better mash"
"Uh oh"
Imagine being me when I didn't know what a "plus on block" move was and thought I could press after blocking an attack
Even though I *know* Kim's backflip is plus, I cant help but mash cause it looks SOOOO minus.
@@hogindoz If she tries to throw, you can actually mash since strikes take priority over throws.
Me when I spam unspaced Ky slides at my floor 5 friends.
The Harada thing is funny looking back because charging for frame data in T7 was an extension of that belief. I was kinda shocked at the negative reaction because i knew Harada wasn't gonna give up on not including Frame Data unless it was only filtered to the hardest of core players. The only issue i saw was if they charged for it in T8 which thankfully they didn't
they should have, imo 😈
I like games like Path of Exile, because the whole point is to give the players an insanely over-complicated system to solve. It's nice to have a non-competitive game like this because it doesn't matter if one build is particularly broken or weak. Trying to make a strange, not great build work by optimizing the crap out of it is really fun.
When I played Path of Exile years ago I played a dual wielder duelist guy built to evasion/dodge tank and as far as I could tell what I was doing was not remotely optimal but I liked my dude and my knife edge game plan and kept pushing it as far as I could. Good times
I think players and developers who worry about the game getting "solved" would do well to consider Melee. With zero patches in 20 years (and only minor tournament ruleset updates) the metagame is STILL changing regularly. Competitive footage from 2008 looks completely different from 2015, and footage from 2015 looks completely different from 2024. The playerbase knows that the game code is static but that doesn't stop them from continually developing new tech, matchup-specific counterplay, mastering niche mechanics, etc. The developers never ever considered the levels of play the game would eventually reach, but it got time to breathe and has ended up being one of the most enduring fgc scenes of all.
This!!! I know there are some games that end up stagnating due to some inherent limits, but there are levels to be pushed that people don't realize.
but you're not gonna have modern teams designing systems that are too open-ended for them to control what's possible at a high level. games like melee and AC+R have the accidental dose of chemical X that their respective devs have been trying to move away from ever since, but that's exactly what keeps ppl coming back decades later, in spite of the more degen aspects of that wildness (ICs wobbling, zappa sword)
Very true, and very fair. However Melee's in a unique state where no patches are ever coming, so people are semi-forced to relearn and go back to the drawing boards (Amsa with Yoshi, the DK Revolution recently). But for stuff like TFT that has consistent update patches and cycles of sets, the devs might think that the lifespan isn't there to have the full "First learning, solved, and resolving" cycle Melee does. Casuals won't care as much about innovating new strategies and instead play for fun, while the pros are going to follow trends and either hop on or try to find counterplays based off similar data. Like, when the top 4-cost or 3-cost champs are discovered and forced every game, I'm not expecting people to suddenly go back and refine the Recombobulator augment and innovations as which tiers are best to roll. There's a ton of risk which is bad for a game baked with RNG, large data sets for them don't exist because no one's picking up said augments, and the data you do have is probably from Diamond or lower players since all the good players are sticking to tried and true strats.
The could change it so TFT sets are like 6 months or longer, but then there's the issue of player retention. Melee gets around it by having a VERY dedicated fanbase and legacy status, but TFT doesn't have that luxury.
god i wish we lived in a world where frame data settled arguments so effectively
The biggest difference is that in fighting games the situational awareness is inherent in the genre game-to-game, playing against your opponent pretty much depends on that. In a strategy game like TFT that isn't true, and the situational awareness fully depends on the offered augments and units, and winrate stats actively take away from that
Something Ive started to consider recently when thinking about game balance how the meta has shifted in SSBM several times over the last 20 years without a single patch. How in 2002 jigglypuff, yoshi, and DK where right above roy and and kirby in terms of strength, all at the lower end of mid tier. Fast forward to like 5 years ago and jigglypuff is "top 1" and being considered to be banned from tournaments, DK is still "lower mid tier" and yoshi is "mid tier". Now today DK and Yoshi are winning majors and jigglypuff is back to "top3/4" while kirby might be the worse character in the game.
I dont think games are ever really figured out unless we dump a huge amount of resources into machine learning. Chess was being evolved until chess engines really took control and they had to be specifically designed for that game. the same computers suck at go which is arguably way more simple then chess. every year a new chess engine beats the old one so you could even say that the game is still getting figured out because how computers play the game is very different then how they did 10 years ago although i admit that may be stretching it although lets way a few more years to give a final verdict.
Denying easy learning tools for players doesnt prevent games from being figured out because they arent going to be, they are just going to make it difficult for new players to pick up the game after a few years once people have already gotten lots of practice.... at least in my opinion. i totally understand the excitement of constant evolution when a new game comes out and all the techniques that constantly get evolved but i feel devs should help players learn their games as it can really only help its commerical succes IMO. not saying you are for or against this
and part of what led to DK being optimized so late in the game's life is the modern training tools built by the community (plus the ability to queue up in slippi and practice against humans whenever). a lack of info to work with can just lead to people picking whatever's obviously busted on day 1 and being unstoppable forever, since there isn't any good way to practice counterplay and bring some more variety into the game
Back in Tekken 6 days we didn't even have a record function in training mode. I remember Aris begging Harada to include it in Tekken Tag 2 and they finally caved in and acted as if it were some groundbreaking feature in 2012. Then continuing the desire to gatekeep info when they charged for frame data in T7.
Thankfully in T8 they've done a complete 180 and have included some of the best quality of life features to learn the game I've seen in any fighting game.
Games being solved and metas being developed are inevitable, but you can't deny it's a magical time when people are let loose on a new thing and no one knows how anything works yet. When Splatoon was a new thing it was so interesting playing with people that had no clue what was good and what was bad, and it was so different from other shooters you couldn't reliably transfer over skills from that....fast-forward a few years though and you see the same handful of weapons and tactics. Game is still fun, but that launch window was something special.
King and Pengu in the same thumbnail is crazy 💀
Flanked by Scooby and Shaggy no less, the aura is palpable
6:05 I'd like to note that there were actually indirect adjustments to Ed with the Drive Reversal changes. Mainly making it -6, meaning he got nerfed as he doesn't have a 6 frame medium. And he is still one of the best characters in the game now.
Imagine the chaos that would break when the first guy found out that Drive Rush and Counter Hit give extra Frame Advantage because Capcom didn't tell us. For at least a very little bit, people would probably think that the only advantage gained on Counter Hit would be the pseudo Crush Counter effects on certain Punish Counter buttons.
If I didn't know that Guile's Forward Medium Punch Overhead could link into Crouch Jab on Drive Rush/Counter Hit, I would have a much harder time dealing with a crouching opponent. Ryu can't do Forward Heavy Punch into Heavy DP without extra advantage either which was the easiest Street Fighter 4 combo I found when learning the game on 3DS. So many almost combos or almost links that are so hype to watch might not have even been found yet without a datamine of the game or a legion of Mew2King level grinders in Training Mode.
People just like the fantasy of being the person who breaks a thing with their gigachad brain, instead of putting in the reps to actually play the meta successfully. Which includes playing off meta stuff to check meta options, or just because it's more fun.
The big diference is in fighting games the player has way more influence over the final deed in the game itself than in most other genres, because the sheer amount of variables is too high, the amount of possible combinations is even higher, and the proximity between said variables, in time and space, is too close. The raw numbers are important, of course, that's why top tier characters exist, but the mere data gets massively changed by the filter of the player choices, fluctuating and multipying every single frame.
That's why you can get a moment 37 in fighting games.
Honestly if a dev is scared of giving too much info to the players it means he isn't confident in the game balance being able to support an advanced meta. Interesting decisions should still be there even if the theoretical optimal play has been figured out, also good game have more than one catch all solutions to problems
As a very casual off and on TFT player, I really hate not knowing whats going on. For me, the experimentation phase Mort is trying to enforce feels like bashing my head into a brick wall; if anything, having someone coaching me or looking up stats and guides helps me "experience content" more than blindly stumbling my way into a top 4 I didnt earn.
yeah that's what happen when you just blindly follow some guide without knowing how people arrive at that conclusione, you lose the ability to discover the fun on your own
@@PepperoniPapaya I'm not 'blindly' following the guide, I'm using it to get better at the game so I can understand the pieces of the giant puzzle without having to spend hours and hours of my life ramming puzzle pieces together in a pitch dark room. Did someone who crashed 25 times learning to ride a bike without help "discover the fun" more than someone who had help and only crashed 5 times as a result?
@@CaptinSpyke Wtf you mean pitch dark room? The only stat you don't have is average placement/winrate data of augments. Basically every actual stat in the game is visible or findable online, from damage per auto, to spell damage, to what items you can build. The only thing you don't get to see as much of is the meta (which is still possible since we still get to see items/champions placements)
Learn what the champions and traits do in the set, and put those two neurons in your noggin to work on what works well together with what augments. You can still copy meta comps from tft academy.
@@CaptinSpyke well you can still have your guides and help. Nothing the devs can do to take that away. They're just getting rid of the app that says choose this because someone else already made the decision for you.
Popular =/= good
I'm not a fan of how self reinforcing statistics are.
one thing i learned from playing a lot of games, is truly enjoying a game means you enjoy playing against the top tiers of that game, or the meta that revolves around them
I enjoy conversations like this that show a contrast between different communities and devs, and brings out people to reflect on how they go about learning a game.
I think it helps to consider how "solvable" a game is based on mechanical complexity. Pokemon has been played competitively for over 25 years, in varying capacities, yet even to this day older generations that were lacking in mechanics or options (particularly gens 1 and 2) are still nowhere near being solved and see changes to their metagame over time. Obviously this is, in some part, due to players not actively being given all the information possible by the devs, but the increase in information over time is still important. Plus, as a spectator and as a player, I enjoy seeing games at their best; it's kind of wack looking back at SF4 footage, for instance, and knowing that a mild amount of top level play is just matchup checking each other because the game didn't offer as much info, and information just didn't spread as quickly.
tl;dr your game will never be solved even you think things have generally settled and/or there's still a solid idea of where characters rank
I think the big problem isn't people *working towards* gaining and sharing knowledge hard and fast, it's that they just reach this endopint so early now where it's like "yep, game's over, it's Completely Solved now, you just play these characters and do these tactics and the rest of the entire game's life will just be everyone doing that and mastering these extremely specific boring options and nothing else, until the next patch where it'll be solved again within 12 hours" like it's so utterly soul-draining. Let us have fun. Let us explore. Let us KEEP learning (i.e. with how much I adore people coming out of nowhere with insane stuff from a character everyone else just 'forgot about' even in an old patchless game like Melee), not just... throw our hands up after a few days every time.
I strongly dislike the "patches as content" approach to competitive games. It makes memorization a more important part of the game, which i find unenjoyable. It also prevents games from getting into late-stage optimizations which i think are the most fun and interesting parts of competitive games.
I'm so happy fighting games have resisted this design trend as much as they have.
Solved games can still be fun
I AGREE so much, Sajam, that devs and SOME players are terrified of certain competitive games being solved at the highest level and the variety of gameplay being dry and almost TOO similar between them.
Cause then that style of play becomes the norm. There’s too much copy and paste in fighting games these days. Once you know the frame data, there’s no real reason to experiment.
People who worry about shit like this are usually just bored and are finding excuses to not play the game.
Currently frothing at the mouth looking forward to playing Vanilla World of Warcraft this thursday--A 20 year old game that people have written literal dissertations on.
People still play in different ways. Because its fun, because it's interesting, and because good games are complex enough that finding the exact optimal solution to every problem is impossible. Old, ostensibly solved games are fun. They're a different experience, but the framing of "solving" a game as a bad thing is just fundamentally misunderstanding one of the appeals of games imo.
Excluding frame data in fighting games, I think we should all go into games mostly blind, whether its a multiplayer game like TFT with a ton of options or a story driven game where dialogue options can have an impact on the story. We shouldn't be afraid of losing some imaginary points or getting a bad ending. Journey before destination and all that.
Part of me wants to dabble with the idea of a weekly/monthly proc-gen or roguelike-adjacent fighting game for this reason.
I mean, there's a lot of reasons. A deeper single-player experience, entry point for new players who don't want to just hit the wall with experienced players. And then a game that experienced players can play "fresh" every so often, in some ways.
But really, WE are the problem. We started playing chess on a checkerboard, and gaming companies had to learn to roll with that.
I'm not sure how you could say, randomise stuff like frame data since you have to animate frames. Maybe other stuff like physics, combo scaling, speed, effects, recovery could be switched.
You could have multiple *variations* of normals... like trading range for windup/cooldown... and part of the generation is just choosing which ones go with which characters.
You can also have a set of universal mechanics, and change which few of them are activated at a time across the cast, and/or if you add one additional character-specific mechanic to each character.
Then it's just finding a good lineup size and per-archetype (since FG characters conveniently fit into those now)...
I think fear of being solved is less about the competitive integrity of a game and more that for a lot of players, especially within ecosystems that cater to it, really enjoy novelty. Call of Duty and TFT are both HEAVILY designed around encouraging you to do lots of different things and see lots of different interactions. Augments exist in the first place to make it harder to force powerful comps. Call of Duty rewards you for using every single weapon, scope, and killstreak to encourage players to stay in a constant state of inexperience as long as possible. Thus the player bases that have formed around them are there in large part because of that focus on novelty.
Removing information just seems like it artificially increases the skill floor for intermediate players lol
Been playing a lot of new games lately. A majority are indie games on the genre vampire survivors invented. For me to go from the wow and Diablo player who always looks up builds and am accustomed to that, playing a game that hasn't been updated to the point of balance and seeing what items are just dominant, what spells are the best etc, has been so fun.
I played battle aces this weekend, a competitive rts but in a very fast arcade style. I couldn't help but notice how much more comfortable I was with a game where we don't even know what's good yet. It was a very fun time.
I still love mastery, that's what drew me to eSports. I do not mind a solved game. But I'm learning to find more joy in the game before I can look up ideal builds or combos etc.
I agree with the idea of protecting that sense of discovery in a new game but doing that by hiding frame data feels wrong to me. It's like when bethesda games have difficulty settings that just turn enemies into big HP bags. Sure, you made the game _harder_ but not in a way that's _interesting._
My Brother in Christ, I play chess and TF2, so am used to playing 1,000 year old solved games.
And somehow new stuff still gets found in chess once in a while, even though so much of the start and ending of matches is completely mapped out.
@@pedroscoponi4905 chess is not a solved game you ignored the giant ocean of possibilities that is the mid-game that no human could possibly solve.
Computers can play chess perfectly but that's just because they look forward and suss out every possible permutation.
@@no_nameyouknowIt's much more solved than any other multiplayer game to exist (besides extremely simple games like Tic Tac Toe)
I think it comes down to how often a player feels like every match or round plays out the same way. I'll admit that in Tekken 8 there can be some times where I feel like I've fought 5 of the same heihachi in a row. Meanwhile in VF5 every player is very different in how they play, and the character depth allows this freedom of expression. I'm hoping that VF6 knows how important keeping every round exciting is, by making sure each round feels different. In a fighting game, there should be no two matches that ever feel the same. I think that's the ideal.
I mostly have to deal with this in TCGs, and yeah, I don't envy the devs who have to both keep things fresh and let players get enough value from their cards before they have to craft/buy/trade a new deck because their old one is obsolete. Having multiple formats certainly helps, but sometimes (especially with digital card games) your deck literally dies as soon as a new expansion hits. At least you might get a partial refund by reducing it...
Chess has been "solved" for hundreds of years, but that doesn't stop people from enjoying it at an incredibly high level of skill
Chess has never been solved, what? Like some endgames have been solved, and some openings are objectively better for one player than the other, but there is no perfect play anyone is actually aware of at the moment. Even bots don't have a perfect script, they just run 100 simulations a second to estimate the best possible move given as many futures as possible
@@hanavolta9785 They're not saying there's only one solution to win. They're saying that people are worried there's enough objectively better moves found that it makes the game less fun and less interesting. Chess is studied enough to have a ton of better moves found vs other moves, but people play it anyway because chess is fun and still challenging. It doesn't ruin the game.
Chess is not solved. Solved means with a certain opening you could force a win or draw. There is no current opening that can guarantee that outcome. However, there are endgame that have been completely solved.
@@hanavolta9785 I think MtG (magic the gathering) might be to blame for this weird/inaccurate usage of the word "solved". It's used there to indicate a stagnant metagame, where the best decks and interactions are all identified. The TFT devs took a lot of design cues from mtg and started using the same terms. It definitely doesn't mean solved in the same way tic tac toe or checkers are solved (single optimal lines of play), but it is something close, where the degrees of freedom are significantly reduced because the bad options have all been ground into the dirt.
Knowing to not push the a/h pawn as your first move and all the myriad heuristics like that are part of what makes chess "solved" in this sense of the word.
@@hanavolta9785 For high-level play, you're right; and the same could be said for many retro FGs. But for your casual audience, Fool's Mate (or a simple counter to it) is an entire meta.
Honestly, I think the data in TFT is more comparable to macros in fighting games. The issue is that strategy and evaluating options is the skill being tested by TFT, and in fighting games that is an aspect but not the primary skill tested. If you used a tool like macros to remove execution, the best players would still be the best, but it would take away execution and actually remove an aspect of gameplay
For me it is just about a balance of updates. I would say it is different though, going back to a game that is "finished", as I do with mvc3 all the time, cause I don't expect updates to be there, so it changes how I look at the game. For something like sf6, the stale nature sticks out more, because it is (semi) actively being supported, and I would expect more meaningful updates. That terry update should've mattered a lot more, than it really ended up being.
With TFT and other such games of adjacent subgenres, it's easy to understand where the fear is coming from. These games are, through some convoluted evolution, ultimately derived from strategy and role-playing games, you know, genres where one of the defining features is simulating a bunch of actions and interactions, and facilitating and inspiring storytelling, through crunching numbers. A traditional strategy and/or role-playing game is a numbers game, through and through, and anything with a lineage like that is susceptible to being solved to the point where some potential sources of fun are optimised out of the game, in a way that isn't quite compatible and comparable with what always began life as action games like fighting games, even if those also involve numbers at the heart of it. So one way for developers to combat this in both singleplayer and multiplayer settings is obfuscate the numbers from the players' view in some way, or come up with other ways to delay the players' development, like switching the numbers around in updates. Heck, even in the singleplayer space, I haven't played the series personally but from what I hear, one of the main draws of Square Enix's SaGa RPGs is that a lot of the interlocking number-crunching systems that make the games tick are not revealed to the player at all, which makes the initial experience of playing one of discovery and stumbling into success or failure by accident. Some people are into that over the more blatant "did you raise your stats high enough by leveling up?" questions contemporaries ask of the players.
That fear of having the game solved makes a lot of sense when execution isn't really a thing, and you have virtually infinite time for every decision you make. You just get to that point much faster if you give people the tools to crunch the numbers and pick the optimal path most of the time.
Even if I don’t play KI, this is why I will always respect Keits
DId boots get the job??
Harada is full of crap lmao
All of that is just mental gymnastics to justify charging for it, like that "TK7 is 3" nonsense, or Daisuke Ishiwatari going "Guilty Gear is too fast for rollback"
They're just mouthpieces, their jobs are sugarcoating and damage control, they'll just say whatever
It might be obvious in hindsight, but I genuinely believe they themselves thought that was the truth.
Curious the look on their faces when we showed them that wasn't how it worked.
@@leithaziz2716 I don't think they're that naive
Harada said that he's watching Project L closely, to see how they will pull off the F2P model
If Riot does it, and it works, but Bamco says no, then he'll probably say "we do not consider Riot's results to be satisfactory" or something
Same with rollback conversions of games, those cost a ton of money, and publishers probably aren't willing to shoulder that cost on a 10 year old game, so directors have to say that rollback is actually bad
I JUST tried tft for the first time last night, I thought I clicked on the wrong video
In what setting are TFT players supposed to do this "experimentation"? Ranked mode? Do they not see how some players will be naturally reluctant to do that?
One shouldn't be too afraid to lose some imaginary points to experiment a bit.
What? People were calling Akuma ass for a hot minute 😂 they were acting like Ken was way better than Akuma could ever be
Boot-tie :D
Did King already solve Tekken 8? Damn
Thought you were UltraDavid for years.
Im too quick
🤴🏻✨🎮
fyi everything strive bedman does is plus. Please don’t mash
Super disappointed in 6’s lack of updates. It’s gotten pretty stale, especially since the most recent character didn’t make much of an impression.
Hello Sajam. I hope you are well and that your toes are beautifully buttered.
Congrats on your engagement!
the contrast between different player personas is intersting, but it's a bit of a shame games nowadays being a big hub for all the player personas creates silo'd groups imo. It's unavoidable, but like, I'm in games to enjoy navigating the fog of the unknown and some players are not. We technically all go under the same umbrella, but it's so much easier for some player relationships to be defined by these silos.
Oh this issue is a huge deal breaker for the top 2% of the playerbase, it's a nightmare this patch is unplayable this comp is so broken. Meanwhile my reply is "I dunno, it's pretty neat in gold/plat, I got a few top 4s with the bottom comp of the set".
To me the funniest example of "people not knowing how good a character actually is" is Steve in Smash Ultimate. A lot of people thought he was pretty meh at first. Funny how things turn out.
worth noting fighting games only get solved so fast and knowing frame data matters so much more because of generous input buffers. they make the game easier to get into, but they also make it much easier to play perfectly.
old games with no input buffer add a sort of instability where players can't act perfectly on the first frame, so there's much more room for plays that are 'incorrect' based on the frame data
i get why input buffers are standard now, but if you want a game that never feels solved there's a reason super turbo, vampire saviour, mvc2 etc still get played despite being very deeply understood
notification gang represent
yeah bro I'm so glad the devs got scared of us solving Tekken 7 so they changed the game to be completely different (derogatory) compared to the previous 30 years.
They couldn't even copy the games that actually know how to implement a meter, nah bro we got this here's a full stick of butter every turn so you can watch the exact same cutscenes a minimum of 6 times per match (rage art not included). It's actually a problem how accessible games are because even slop can succeed (even slop much worse than T8 like the recent MKs). Back in the day there was no twitter, JP devs were hermits on mountains and the only people who cared about the games were those serious enough to go out and meet others irl to play, meaning if the game was unfun it would simply fail. Simpler times, better times.
StarCraft 2 is solved to hell and back but still fun to watch and intense to play.