Centrally Unplanned

I largely play old fighting games that were released as set-in-stone editions, and are immutable. While the perception of characters and the knowledge of playing with and against them might change, their properties will stay exactly the way they are until the end of time. I don't think people appreciate how positive this is to the attitude of playing one of these games.

Testament is an absurdly strong character in Guilty Gear XX: Accent Core +R. They will continue to be strong forever. You basically never see people in the community bitching about Testament, or complaining about this. And why would they? That's the game. The game is like this forever. You can either adapt, learn the counterplay, analyze top sets to see how strong players deal with Testament's tools, maybe learn a stronger character with a stronger Testament matchup, or you can play a different game. That's just how it is. Nothing to be done but to adapt or leave.

I think, personally, that this is incredibly good for the experience of playing a game like this. There's nothing to bitch about, no hate to be given. This is how the game works. We're here to play the game. There's no point overselling a character's strengths or weaknesses online, like prayers to deities who might be listening, hoping for a nerf or buff. Sometimes a game might be unbalanced. Sometimes that's okay if the game is still fun to play. Zappa's incredibly strong, sure, but you'll get laughed out of the room if you get mad at someone for playing them. The Zappa we have is the Zappa we'll have forever. You can learn the matchup, practice and adapt, or you can find a different fighting game.

The flipside of this, is that if you play a character, whether that be a high tier, or a mid tier, or a low tier, that's the character you're getting forever. Your character will never receive a nerf that guts them, nor a buff that leaves you the most hated person in any tournament. There's a certain jovial atmosphere around players of bad characters, not one of prayers to the devs to change or fix them, but one of acceptance. This is the character we have. They're base properties aren't getting any better. Let's see if we can't make them work? On the flipside, if you pick a strong character, they're not going to be hit by a massive nerf leaving them unusable. Characters aren't going to have the properties of moves altered, making you relearn every combo. Your character is yours. All there is is to make the most of it.

And this isn't even touching on the fact that, in many cases, a game being unbalanced can be a good thing! Melee is an intoxicating spectator sport for a lot of reasons, but chief among them is that such a large percentage of the cast is just unusably bad, making any appearance of the bottom half of the cast exciting and novel. Who gives a shit about what Zain's doing, there's a Game & Watch in top 64, let's watch them! You also see this prominently in +R with Bridget, who's always an extremely exciting character to see in action. It's great! It gets the crowds going! It's not always a bad thing for characters to be bad, as long as you let the player base accept this and don't lead them on!

honestly I think there's a lot that e-sports could take from Melee. Love or hate the game, it is uniquely capable of hyping up crowds in no small part due to the pro wrestling style personas that the top players have always played up for the cameras and the focus on players as larger than life characters, on top of the game having very distinct character brackets that make any deviation thrilling and enrapturing to watch, and I think e-sports could benefit as a viewer experience by- I am dragged off stage by a hooked cain

I contrast, in my head, my experience of playing Luigi in Melee, a fun experience of trying to make this piece of shit work, having a pretty good time with it, with trying to play Testament in Strive, on paper a much better character relative to the cast. The anxiety of every balance patch coming out, seeing if this time Testament is going to be allowed to be good. Of getting moves reworked and having to relearn entire combo trees. Of getting nerfed, despite already being the worst in the game. I think about the way that every dispute over character balance is projected loudly, because there are often developers listening. Oftentimes it feels like the community response to a character being strong, or a matchup being uneven, isn't an opportunity to adapt, learn counterplay, maybe pick up a secondary, but to hope and pray for them to get less strong overnight. The cast gets homogenized in an attempt to make wide scale balance updates easier.

But all of this is just contextual - highly competitive players typically arent complacent at all for example, they are trying to win! And an unpatched game is only fun if the "unbalance" is itself balanced, right? Smash Melee works great because the skill ceiling is so high that player skill > character choice amoung the top tiers; and Fox, Marth, Shiek, etc are all close enough in power that it doesn't matter too much. But that is not how Smash Brawl is! That game sucks competitively for many reasons, but one of them was that Meta Knight was leagues better than any other character, and invalidated completely the majority of the cast. That game 100% needed to be patched. Smash Ultimate is going through a lesser-but-similar thing as Steve is just broken in a not-fun way, and tournaments are experimenting with character bans - a patch by another name.

The sequel was made by a different company if I recall correctly, and so they didn't really know what they were doing with the code base? And thus when they added Sailor Saturn to game (since she wasn't playable in the original), when they coded her they, uh, failed to make some of her attacks blockable due to buggy code. Which for the Sailor Guardian of Death is pretty thematic! But not that fun to play against, to say the least.

Though it does mean the tier lists get to have fun with the S rank labeling:

I should clarify that I was simplifying in my post - Sailor Saturn *is* broken, but the main reason people play the original is due to a laundry list of changes that just made the game more buggy, less balanced, and less fun to play. Actually, in the original game Sailor Uranus is so strong she is banned from play as well! But that is an easy fix - once you ban her, the other characters are all viable and you get a great, high-skill-ceiling set of matchups, and in fact community tier lists generally have the rest of the cast all in 1-2 tiers.

do New Yorkers really live like this? are you people really rolling around in open street garbage and screeching in terror at the idea of rubbish bins?

But the author's beliefs are irrelevant - you can always find someone who believes anything. There is no relevant constituency that is pro trash; this initiative in NYC has been widely popular, and any dissent is only picayune debates over costs and implementation. However, an online news site can generate a ton of clicks by pretending that the perennial punching bag that is New York Liberals actually contains such a constituency! So they picked a nut and packaged it just right, so you would reblog it for laughs.

"I'm not saying you're self censoring. I'm sure you believe everything you're saying. But what I'm saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting."

It's not that the author is lying for a laugh (they may or may not be), but they've been selected for reasons largely unrelated.

I largely play old fighting games that were released as set-in-stone editions, and are immutable. While the perception of characters and the knowledge of playing with and against them might change, their properties will stay exactly the way they are until the end of time. I don't think people appreciate how positive this is to the attitude of playing one of these games.

Testament is an absurdly strong character in Guilty Gear XX: Accent Core +R. They will continue to be strong forever. You basically never see people in the community bitching about Testament, or complaining about this. And why would they? That's the game. The game is like this forever. You can either adapt, learn the counterplay, analyze top sets to see how strong players deal with Testament's tools, maybe learn a stronger character with a stronger Testament matchup, or you can play a different game. That's just how it is. Nothing to be done but to adapt or leave.

I think, personally, that this is incredibly good for the experience of playing a game like this. There's nothing to bitch about, no hate to be given. This is how the game works. We're here to play the game. There's no point overselling a character's strengths or weaknesses online, like prayers to deities who might be listening, hoping for a nerf or buff. Sometimes a game might be unbalanced. Sometimes that's okay if the game is still fun to play. Zappa's incredibly strong, sure, but you'll get laughed out of the room if you get mad at someone for playing them. The Zappa we have is the Zappa we'll have forever. You can learn the matchup, practice and adapt, or you can find a different fighting game.

The flipside of this, is that if you play a character, whether that be a high tier, or a mid tier, or a low tier, that's the character you're getting forever. Your character will never receive a nerf that guts them, nor a buff that leaves you the most hated person in any tournament. There's a certain jovial atmosphere around players of bad characters, not one of prayers to the devs to change or fix them, but one of acceptance. This is the character we have. They're base properties aren't getting any better. Let's see if we can't make them work? On the flipside, if you pick a strong character, they're not going to be hit by a massive nerf leaving them unusable. Characters aren't going to have the properties of moves altered, making you relearn every combo. Your character is yours. All there is is to make the most of it.

And this isn't even touching on the fact that, in many cases, a game being unbalanced can be a good thing! Melee is an intoxicating spectator sport for a lot of reasons, but chief among them is that such a large percentage of the cast is just unusably bad, making any appearance of the bottom half of the cast exciting and novel. Who gives a shit about what Zain's doing, there's a Game & Watch in top 64, let's watch them! You also see this prominently in +R with Bridget, who's always an extremely exciting character to see in action. It's great! It gets the crowds going! It's not always a bad thing for characters to be bad, as long as you let the player base accept this and don't lead them on!

honestly I think there's a lot that e-sports could take from Melee. Love or hate the game, it is uniquely capable of hyping up crowds in no small part due to the pro wrestling style personas that the top players have always played up for the cameras and the focus on players as larger than life characters, on top of the game having very distinct character brackets that make any deviation thrilling and enrapturing to watch, and I think e-sports could benefit as a viewer experience by- I am dragged off stage by a hooked cain

I contrast, in my head, my experience of playing Luigi in Melee, a fun experience of trying to make this piece of shit work, having a pretty good time with it, with trying to play Testament in Strive, on paper a much better character relative to the cast. The anxiety of every balance patch coming out, seeing if this time Testament is going to be allowed to be good. Of getting moves reworked and having to relearn entire combo trees. Of getting nerfed, despite already being the worst in the game. I think about the way that every dispute over character balance is projected loudly, because there are often developers listening. Oftentimes it feels like the community response to a character being strong, or a matchup being uneven, isn't an opportunity to adapt, learn counterplay, maybe pick up a secondary, but to hope and pray for them to get less strong overnight. The cast gets homogenized in an attempt to make wide scale balance updates easier.

But all of this is just contextual - highly competitive players typically arent complacent at all for example, they are trying to win! And an unpatched game is only fun if the "unbalance" is itself balanced, right? Smash Melee works great because the skill ceiling is so high that player skill > character choice amoung the top tiers; and Fox, Marth, Shiek, etc are all close enough in power that it doesn't matter too much. But that is not how Smash Brawl is! That game sucks competitively for many reasons, but one of them was that Meta Knight was leagues better than any other character, and invalidated completely the majority of the cast. That game 100% needed to be patched. Smash Ultimate is going through a lesser-but-similar thing as Steve is just broken in a not-fun way, and tournaments are experimenting with character bans - a patch by another name.

do New Yorkers really live like this? are you people really rolling around in open street garbage and screeching in terror at the idea of rubbish bins?

But the author's beliefs are irrelevant - you can always find someone who believes anything. There is no relevant constituency that is pro trash; this initiative in NYC has been widely popular, and any dissent is only picayune debates over costs and implementation. However, an online news site can generate a ton of clicks by pretending that the perennial punching bag that is New York Liberals actually contains such a constituency! So they picked a nut and packaged it just right, so you would reblog it for laughs.

do New Yorkers really live like this? are you people really rolling around in open street garbage and screeching in terror at the idea of rubbish bins?

But the author's beliefs are irrelevant - you can always find someone who believes anything. There is no relevant constituency that is pro trash; this initiative in NYC has been widely popular, and any dissent is only picayune debates over costs and implementation. However, an online news site can generate a ton of clicks by pretending that the perennial punching bag that is New York Liberals actually contains such a constituency! So they picked a nut and packaged it just right, so you would reblog it for laughs.

my experiences are universal and provide an undeniable framework for understanding all of reality