Necrobumping the thread to discuss the viability of this game in PvP.
As a small portion of Gaf may know, DissidiaForums, beyond its pure reference aspect for guides and so forth, also aims at providing a competitive online scene for Dissidia, ever since the first installment. However, it didn't unfold without several complications which remain present as for today. They can be summed up into a simple problematic:
is it preferable to shape the metagame as per according to what the majority of players wants it to be like or, in contrary, let it alone and play the game as per according to what the devs intended it to be?
Dissidia 013's meta has been shaped by ins and outs between these two patterns. To put it in a nutshell, the first tournament (Dissidence) banned all RPG elements (equips, accessories, summons...) of the game to give it the same feel as any "common" fighter. Then came Ninja's Playground, a team tournament which did allow RPG elements this time around, but with a few set of restrictions (like a preset coefficient not to surpass as for booster accessories). And then came Get Salty which, as its name implies, allowed -almost- everything in the game, to see how broken it can get.
After Get Salty, the general consensus was that the meta needed to be standardized, to provide the fairest competitive environment as possible: same equipments for all characters, some restrictions ability-wise, no summons, etc. The ruleset was called KAoS and this is how the forum rolled by for like... eight months (February to October 2010). It has known many revisions and alterations (KAoS 1.0, Ragnarök...);
the tiers list was based on KAoS 1.5. However, the 2.0 iteration caused quite a hiatus by banning a single, yet crucial, ability: Snooze & Loose, which resulted in making the game even more campy than what it used to be. I don't exactly recall the whole debacle, but at the point the tournament banning SnL was done, everyone changed their mind regarding rulesets: there was no room to let players' biases get into the meta, the game was better off being let as it is in all cases and, because of that, the tiers list was "no longer relevant". As such, the very last DFF tournament was another Get Salty ("Get Salty 2") and the consensus turned to be to never ever replicate KAoS for Dissidia 012.
As a grand novelty in the PvP department, DDFF had two in-game rulesets: Official and Off.(Skill). The latter was quickly left apart for "ruining the damage-scale" so that Official was determined as the competitive ruleset, settled with such impregnation that a step aside from said ruleset is now considered as a blasphemy. Several people still don't enjoy the game through Official, yet a single attempt at changing it so slightly always leads to a shitstorm: last one to date arose when
the question of banning summons has been approached. Many veterans, refusing the idea the game can be altered whatsoever, decided to jump ship. It's not dramatizing to admit this so called "competitive scene" is now represented by
ten people at the very most and that as I'm writing these lines, the forum is ten times more hyped for
the Triple Triad inbuilt forum game which has just been announced than they will ever be for any future Dissidia tournament. That is deceptive.
Although, and that's quite the gist of it,
Dissidia may be trash on the competitive scale, it remains fairly popular online. It's not hard to find someone to play with during evenings if you're American, it has its dedicated lobby on Adhoc Party (D1) and an IRC for match-makings: it may be despised by pure competitors, yet it remains appreciated by casuals. Still, some of the later were interested in competitive action so that a special form of tournaments was created:
customs tournaments, wherein Official isn't the ruleset by default but just another choice for people to vote for (three or more rulesets are presented and the one getting the most votes is in use for the custom tournament).
If anything, these tournaments were meant to be trivia, as their data (results, etc.) isn't kept on track by the forum and yet, oh well, I guess numbers pretty much speak by themselves:
twenty persons joined Fusion (aka the last custom) while
eight persons partook into the last "serious" tournament, said tournament which didn't even have half of its matches completed because of people dropping-out. From a personal point of view, customs tournaments make the concern of holding an actual competitive scene for Dissidia seem like a complete non-issue. Some Joes called them "back-steps from the original meta" as expected, but it's an allegation I've never really minded. I'm happy to see them flourishing and I do hope the next one will gather as much interest as Fusion did.
My post may have conveyed this whole story as a simple forum drama, but I do believe that actually is the reflection of deeper matters which I wished to tackle:
- Can a metagame be shaped solely by a community rather than as per according to the devs' intent?
- Is it legit to consider this game in the scope of strict competitive standards considering that, even if it remains a fighter, it wasn't apparently designed for whatsoever form of competition?
I'm well-aware this game is already old for many out there but still, any comments or suggestions, be it from people who solely played Dissidia or who are accustomed to fighters in general, would be appreciated.
