The Evil Geniuses website has updated with a discussion between the EG team members Justin Wong, Floe and Ricky Ortiz. They discuss the upcoming balance patch to SSF4 AE and how power levels relate to other characters. You can catch a piece of the interview below and the entire discussion here.
fLoE: I’m not really a fan of how fast they’re pumping out these patches. Yeah it’s always good to get new games and new content and stuff but I still wish they would let the current content get flushed out a little more so all of the little things can be found out.
Ricky: I would just like to see the characters that got nerfed for no reason to be put back to normal. To be honest Yun and Yang don’t even need to be changed that much. I feel if a lot of the characters were their previous version they’d have a fighting chance. To me it almost seems like all the changes made were to compensate for the twins which is what makes them so good, because everything that a character had good against them got taken away.
Justin: There will always be cheap overly use abused characters in any fighting game. It’s been a new experience for the fighting game community to receive so many updates and revisions. It seems like a lot of the backlash towards patches comes from the whole concept being new for console and arcade games. It used to be that you dealt with what you had and made the best of the strong characters and tactics. Now, game companies can fix the gross imbalances in console games easily thanks to things like Xbox Live and downloadable content. Patches and updated releases are new ground for fighting games, but it seems like the community is slowly warming up to the idea.
Keep in mind this discussion was done before the balance patches were announced on the dev blog. Submitted by Rafael2487.
i agree with floe, they do pump them out to fast. and you will never balance a game of 39 characters, if around 12 are considered competitive then thats great imo
lol @5 fagalyst...
but to a more serious note. I've raised this issue once already when i first heard of the AE Ver.2012 patch. It is still to early in the game's life to be patching it. AND i GUARANTEE that once the game has been patched this year. People will ALWAYS have something to complain and bicker about; whether this be with certain characters of the game or with the game itself! And what's next when these sort of things start to come in again?.. you guessed it... another "balance patch".. geez!
I personally think that after this balance patch, CAPCOM should leave this game alone completely. Or wait at least a YEAR to go back to the drawing boards and consider rebalancing the game if the need arises! Otherwise, these kind of things will possibly bring about unnecessary tweaking early on in a game's life cycle.
I think after 2012 patch leave it alone Justin said it
Best there will always be overpowered characters everyone needs to quit being Pu**ies and just learn to cope with them fact of life in fighting games, but that will never happen because everyone who want to nerf and buff people just can't seem to get over that hump of getting their As handed to them then complain so I think if they are gonna do this crap then just buff the weaker characters... Doesn't sound to bad but seriously people this need him buff her crap is laughable am I the only one who enjoys busting up powered characters with
Real weak characters so I can talk trash lol
I agree that patching too quickly is a bad thing, but I think AE sort of created mitigating circumstances. Some characters were too dominant and nobody really wants to see the same three or so characters filling the top of tournament brackets etc. The attempt for greater balance in 2012 seems to be mostly through buffing up the lower tier characters too, so I feel pretty good about it. Yun, Fei et al also won't be quite so caustic to the balance of the game anymore either, although I think Yun was hit a little bit too hard. Overall, just going by the balance notes, I think I'll be happier with 2012 as a potential final state for the game. Either way, I'll still love the game and play the balls off it.
Re: the article, I think it would have been better as just an extended interview with the three, rather than a few quotes and an article discussing said quotes.
Heres a perfect example- Sean 3S is the weakest character or pretty much at the bottom of the tier list in 3s but in theory if you didn't complain and trained on some craziness you could parry every attack that came at you so yes he's weak but if you were more skilled you could not even take chip damage with him some characters just have to work harder Sakura not at the top 3rd in GG4 mike ross's Thor clockwork single handedly made strider famous in MVC2 and his doom there are some
Hugo play in japan that is bonkers most all characters have the ability to be viable in the right hands most just don't want to take the time I have never picked a character because they were stronger I pick who I like or think is cool and then I just work with them
Only thing I wished changed with Yun really is that he had a little slower recovery time after doing any attack and finishing animation. Seems like only thing you can do against him is block and move away. I kind of disliked that, aside from that, he's not broken or anything, just has really fast recovery time on many animations.
And Im sure someone is gonna say well look at the tournament results well maybe people shouldn't look at them so much and just learn how to fight the better characters
well justin was right bout just dealing with what you got and learning tactics on beating the best or “broken” characters and bugs when a games first released back in the day. but with the advent of console online patches but now devs have the ability to re-balance and fix issues that sometime despite all there efforts only the fighting game community can find given time and intense scrutiny. not to blindly deny that they don't on occasion try slip one past us (cough cough MVC3) but we know a sham when we see one, well most of us do. All in all patches are like a double edged sword and its here to stay even tho none of my favs were nurfed its just kind of discouraging to get into a game that you know is not, for better or worst the final verion. don't be surprise if capcom takes the kof route and just releases yearly installments for eg. SF 2013,14,15 .....
ok AE2012 should be like last version I mean people will always cry about something I did have the most fun with vanilla than I did in super/ae beating cheap characters are alot more fun than beating a character that is about as good as yours I hope sfxtk has a few cheap characters but I hope they dont patch it for at least a year people need to grow some balls ssf4 turned alot of you guys to b***hes I do think yun/yang/fei just needed a little dmg nerf and all capcom had to do was buff all the weak characters
i need this update man, that bloody yun is giving me a bloody headache he has so many tools drives me mad... i liked the changes they did to the cast for AE baring the top 3 game feels tight as ever... still feel chun is a bit of a bi.t.ch tho lol but yeah im up for this new way of fighting games dont mind weaker chars but its not nice to have a selected few that are OP
Seriously that whole idea of "deal with the broken stuff" is backwards thinking. Back in 1991 there was no place to get information on matchups/hitboxs/combos/etc, capcom had just started the fighting game genre and were learning themselves and also with todays tech devs can always go back and fix things. All those differences should add to a way better experience today and should demand a better product overall. Theres no such thing as a bug/glitch only being know by a small/elite group of players, that type of stuff is now posted with tutorials and becomes common knowledge(ie dhc glitch).
I do agree that the game needs a longer life cycle but the constant patchs is a step in the right direction. Capcoms goal should be to make every character tournament viable and thats very doable.
this game needed a patch. Yun is annoying. Yes, back in the days you had to deal with overpowered chars, but thats not an argument, thats a history lesson. Theres no reason to wait this out. Sure its an even greater feeling if you win against an overpowered character, and of course it ads a lot more exitement to a tournament if a Sakura blows up the competition, but its also a lot more frustrating to loose, even thou you are more skilled and played the better match, and its boring to lack the variety in tournaments. And why learn and explore a broken game? The sooner it getas fixed the sooner we can start exploring a less broken game. I really dont see how thats a bad thing.
While I agree with Justin that there will always be broken characters, I also don't mind the somewhat frequent updates. While MK is probably updating too frequently, if there is an update once or twice a year this just means you have to keep learning and adapting to what is broken; just so long as the broken sh!t is fun to execute.
Personally I feel that fighting game players often marry themselves too much to their character of choice. If you're character is hit with the nerf bat, and you're unwilling or unable to change, then you deserve to loose.
That being said SSFIV pre AE had an uncanny sense of balance not found in virtually any other game. Wouldn't mind if we could find a similar balance in AE 2012.
I agree with Ricky. Capcom nerfed a lot of characters that didn't need nerfs, and often, many of the nerfs were exaggerated.
Fei-long is fine, you still need strategy and patience to win with him. I don't like when people always complain about the best characters. Instead, they should fix other characters like Guile, Rose (give her back her instant ultra 2), El Fuerte, etc...
JWong is the only smart guy these days. Most fighting elite say stupid things like Floe who is against patches and wanted a non-balanced 3S. The scary part is that these players are the main ones Cap and company hear. And they're wrong.
What makes JWong smart is that he understands common problems (C.Viper), history (Players prayed for patches back then), economics (It benefits the game developer in the long run) and the player experience ( yearly or bi-yearly patches help keep a game fresh considering we can discover 90 percent of things within three months now-a-days. Why wait for the other 10 percent?)
Floe's not only wrong, his attitude impedes the natural progress the genre needs to maintain it's growth and gain the same expectations and respect that developers give to shooters and strategy titles. If we maintain this grouchy, "leave my OP character alone" attitude, then developers aren't going to want to deal with us. There's easier audiences to make money off of and we need to understand how lucky we are to be getting new games and patches and support them instead of getting on a soap box and asking for them to go away.
I want my light palm back the way it was in SSF4 for Gouken damnit! I don't care for anything else.
In hindsight, I was a little too hard on Floe. He does want changes but at a slower pace. I don't entirely agree BUT, I think the community as a whole should demand yearly balance changes / new content for these games that have decade-long play cycles. It would be relatively cheap and mean the world to an estimated million-strong community. Easy money and appreciative fans. I think we can all agree there.
Interesting talk, I also like that Capcom works so hard for us. I think at the end of the day, we all need to be appreciative.
Capcom was taking the "cheap" and easy way out by nerfing people, but that's easier than actually making bad characters good. In truth, bad chacters are pretty hard to make good if their design has serious problems (like Hakan for example).
A character like Viper isn't OP, she just has a damn good character design (and her normals are mediocre to boot). Yun is OP, for obvious reasons, same goes for Fei.
Crapcom thinks: Patch$, Color$, New$ Guy$, New$ $tage$, New$ Patch$...
Ono: Relax Crapcom idrector$, I have a new$ idea$ for make more Money$. New$ Pacth$ for any game Relea$ed.
Players: Yeeeeeees, Crapcom love me. I love Crapcom, I´m i.m.be.ci.le guy, take my money beloved Crapcom!!!!
Ridiculous. Another year, more 2 or 3 New$ Patch$ for Im.be.cile "community" players.
Wake up guys.
"fLoE: We spent ten years with virtually nothing to play and now we get new games basically every six months. That’s nothing to complain about."
I agree with this, ...now. Initially, I thought it was just a quick money grab, before I found out about the extra characters. Good to have more fighting games.