Solune said:
Bingo. I've said it many times before as well. You play to win, you don't play it just to play it. So if you want to win LEARN. THE FUCKING. GAME But alas it falls on deaf ears and mashing fingers.
I think what he may have been referring to is a concept about how to design fighters with long lasting markets. It's something the creator of Tekken put pretty nicely in an interview when asked to explain the collapse of the fighting game genre 10 years ago.
He pretty much stated that these game all eventually turn into a game of skill that becomes, as more time goes by, something that can reach incredible heights. Because of this however fighting games were becoming something that quite quickly were becoming something that newer audiences were intimidated to get into. In Street Fighter 3 he mentions that around 80% of its user base was quite quickly made up of only elite players.
It meant that the match quality was incredibly high, but it was too high to welcome any newcomers to either those particular games short periods after their launch or for that matter to welcome any newcomers who hadn't tried out fighters before.
It was simply too intimidating to play a game where twenty out of twenty matches you lost and all of them badly. This is why Tekken used the rage system. It allowed for some ridiculous shit but high level players could work past it. The thing was though they could easily lose to gimmicks that allowed scrubby comebacks to happen and thats what he wanted. Some kind of hook to keep giving the newcomers hope so that the foundation of players for the game was actually large enough to see the genre remain sustainable.
Lets face it...we were on life support by the hardcore community for years because these games were mainly not going to allow for any tools that allow anything other than pure strategy to win.
Now though every game has a comeback gimmick to grow the fanbase and to keep the games marketable to new audiences long after launch because no matter how good the communities have gotten they still might pull of that comeback using these tools.
Mega Crash, Focus Attacks, Insanely powerful hypers with range and of course X-factor all reflect this. And it works, too.
Fighting games are now approachable because of gimmicks like this that give them a strong enough foundation of players to keep them financially viable products. Plus it doesn't take too many scrubby wins from players via x-factor or sentinel before they start losing again and realize they should start paying attention and learning what these more advanced guys are doing. Hell a lot of players give tips in lobbies and tell people their mistakes during matches or just how they setup stuff to try to grow the competition out there and make friends.
X-factor is a great tool for keeping this game hot to large markets. Besides those of us who are leveling up will always be on top of this stuff and anytime we lose to scrubby X-factor stuff it just teaches us to train up how to play our defense better. Sometimes you gotta know when to run and pure offense won't stop an Xfactor lvl 3 dude with arthur from hitting you with the rape of "For the Princess".
I think X-factor could use some serious damn tweaking in several areas, but we should stop and realize that without shit like this...well...we'd be back to dwindling communities as a lot of player's games leveled so high it ran off other competitors and all newcomers from these games. Without that crowd we aren't big enough to yield consistent numbers to publishers.
Just thought we could use the business side of this explained so people don't tear each other apart too much. I do still think X-factor needs some tweaking though, but I can understand if they leave ridiculous no skill tools like one or two overly high bonuses in just to lure in the crowds once or twice. I won't like it but it makes me able to accept why you would leave it.
