Mordax Praetorian
ShinRa Guard
In fighting game terms, a Pro is someone who travels to gaming events, and plays in tournaments for various fighting games, living mostly off of his/her winnings from these events
A Pro plays fighting games according to the rules of the major tournaments that he/she visits, such as EVO and SBO.
The general masses that play Fighting Games casually harbour many assumptions about the sorts of rules used at "respectable tournaments", and as you will find out, all or most of these are wrong
When casual players organise tournaments, they generally start by laying down a series of rules on what is and isn't acceptable to do during matches, with the intention of making the game fairer, preventing sudden swings in matches, and providing a funner experience for everyone
Such events for Dissidia thus far have done things such as banning accessories, equipment and summons entirely, outlawing infinitely long combos, and even placing a ban on EX Mode
"Balance" is something that every casual player strives for when they make their tournament rules, its usually priority number one, but "Balance" is an illusion
The last Fighting game (that I know of) to have a perfect balance was the unreleased "One Must Fall 1" for MS DOS, which consisted of 2 identical characters fighting on a perfectly flat stage
As you add characters with different properties the "Balance" becomes imperfect, with variation inevitably comes the situation where different characters are better at different strategies, and require different strategies to defeat
If Character A is good at the strategy that kills Character B, then Character A will win the match more often
True 50:50 matchups between different characters are incredibly rare, and rightly so, for the joy of mastering different tactics for, and counter-tactics against different characters is the driving force behind the depth of a fighting game
It is the destruction of balance that makes a Fighter worth playing
When considering which character to pick for a tournament, and which characters to practice against, a Pro player will consider both the matchups of the character, and the probability that those characters will appear
A 50:50 matchup (WoL vs WoL)* is perfectly balanced, the match will come entirely down to skill
A 60:40 matchup (Squall vs Sephiroth)* is reletively even, Player B will have to be slightly more skilled than Player A, or try somewhat harder to win the match
A 70:20 matchup (Tidus vs Garland)* is considerably unbalanced, Victory is entirely possible for Player B but he will have to play at a signifigantly higher level than player A
A 90:10 matchup (Terra vs Golbez)* is highly unbalanced, Player B has little chance of victory no matter what the skill of the players
In a simple way, a Pro player has more chance of earning enoigh on a tournament to pay his way if he picks a character with more and stronger positive matchups, and fewer and weaker negative matchups
Having more and stronger good matchups, and fewer and weaker negative matchups, makes a character high tier. A characters position on a tier list will also go up if characters that it has positive matchups against are more common
Tier lists are a Pro player's guide to how his/her choice of characters will affect their chance of success, the gap between the top and bottom of a tier list depends upon the game
Examples:
Guilty Gear XX Accent Core is arguably the most balanced fighting game that has ever featured on the professional circuit
Many many years of tweaking has resulted in a large and diverse selection of characters with matchups that are nearly all better than 60:40
In this game, every single character is competatively viable, and most pros pick their character based on personal preference
Marvel vs Capcom 2 is arguably the least balanced fighting game that has ever featured on the professional circuit
Its riddled with 90:10 matchups and only has any diversity at tournaments because its massive roster of characters inevitably results in a large selection in each tier
So where does Dissidia fall into this scheeme
There are those of us who spend a lot of time analysing the game from various standpoints, we draw and compare conclusions with eachother, we believe that Dissidia contains a broad range of matchup strengths
However those characters with strong bad matchups, also generally seem to have strong good matchups, whether this will result in those characters being competitively viable is another matter entirely
A sure say on matchups and tiers can only come from tournament statistics, and deep analysis of matches between highly skilled players, there isn't enough evidence to say for sure on Dissidia
Matchups are things that are dynamic, they (and thus the positions of characters in the tier list) change over time.
A change in the weight of a matchup could come from the discovery of a new tactic or glitch for a character, or from a realisation among the playerbase that something was not as it seemed before
In this way, the different characters and tactics in common use (the Metagame) change over time as the strength of those characters and tactics goes up and down
Even if a character's matchups never change, they can still become more (or less) common and a higher (or lower) tier, if a character that they have a good (or bad) matchup against becomes more common
A fighting game is really good if even after being played for long enough that every tactic is known, and every matchup is solidly established, the metagame continues to shift based purely on the estimations of its players on which characters will be popular at the next event
This shifting of the Metagame is what keeps a Fighting game fresh and interesting, its why Street Fighter 2 is still played at professional tournaments
Now this brings me to the most important point that I can possibly stress to you:
Excessive Banning Is Bad
As soon as you ban a powerful character/move/tactic/glitch you stop the metagame from moving
Years of experience has told the Pro Fighters that most of the time a new powerful tactic will be counteracted by another tactic found further down the line
The Metagame will shift both when the powerful tactic is found to put the bearer of that tactic at the top, and when the counter is found to put the tactic bearer back down and the bearers of its counter further up
The Metagame has evolved, new characters have taken the forfront, and the game is kept fresh and interesting
Tournament Bannings are only done in the most extreme of cases, as when a powerful tactic is banned, things go back to how they were before its discovery, the metagame will stagnate and players will move away
Dissidia's staple tournament rules so far stem from the import community who played the Japanese version
Back then we decided not to use Accessories, Equipment and Summons because the presence of the Japanese Language and the inability of most players to type or recognise Kanji made it very difficult to know what they were or what they did, or to discuss them properly
This was further pressed by the belief that many of the more powerful items would take months of constant work to obtain, and signifigantly warp the metagame, such RPGesque elements are unwanted in competative events, and so to make the game less RPG and more like a common fighter, we decided to start from nothing
With the English release however, more experimentation is being done into these elements, and a tournaments with no restrictions in these regards seem to be next on the agenda
When it does come to making a banning, there are certain rules that must be followed:
1) That a thing has a powerful affect doesn't make it overpowered
A firm belief in the wider community is that EX-Bursts are broken because they do a lot of damage, but they generally don't consider the difficulty of gaining enough EX and then landing an attack within the time limit, or the finer points of catching someone dashing to a core, or baiting an opponent with a full bar into using it at the wrong time
There are a lot of fine points around EX that add to the tactics of the game, and its not such a superiour victory method that people don't win through other methods anymore
Example:
In Guilty Gear XX Accent Core, every single character has an Instant Death Attack, (in all bar one case) this does not strictly require any sort of resource or any sort of build-up to use, and landing it will immediately win the round
You will almost never see a Pro Guilty Gear player attempt an Instant Death attack, this isn't because of any sort of sense of honour, nor through any sort of banning, infact this has never even been considered
Its because attempting an Instant Death Attack is just so risky, that even the massive rewards aren't worth it
In order to perform an Instant Death Attack, you must go into a special mode, clearly flagging your intent to use it, and if you mess up that one opportunity you take on a huge penalty for the rest of the round
But on the rare occasion that that a Pro player does go into Instant Death Mode, everyone watching on the edge of their seats, the tension in the room rises considerably because someone just decided to risk the whole round on a single attack
Having this powerful option is good for the game, it makes watching the few matches that it appears in more enjoyable, any matches where one is successful go down in history, and its yet another piece that adds its own small amount of depth to the game
2) Lower Tier characters aren't important
Nobody in their right mind has ever proposed banning or restricting anything in Marvel vs Capcom 2 to make its horde of worthless characters more useful
If the characters weren't being used anyway, then a character that has 90:10 matchups against all of them is perfectly acceptbale, and a glitch that only works against these characters is perfectly fine
If a character is so bad that it isn't seen, then it might as well not be a part of the game
3) Play Rules are Bad
Lets abandon all logical thought for a while and pretend that EX Burst really is broken, how do you get rid of it?
The obvious answer is to ban it, so you can use EX Mode, but never Burst, but this leads to a problem, what if you perform an HP attack while in EX Mode and accidently press Square one too many times, you've just opened yourself up to whatever punishment comes with breaking the rule
Bannings are a last resort in competative play, but a Play Rule is the last resort of the last resorts
If it comes down to having to make one of these, then the game probably isn't viable for competative play
However, if it must be done, then a play rule needs to be:
Every character can EX Burst, and have roughly the same ability to dash for cores, so whats the affect on balance here?
Banning something that everyone can do should only be done when backed up by an in-depth analysis that shows exactly how it favors a small set of characters to the point where the rest of the cast cannot compete
If you think a game would be improved by the removal of some element or another, then perhaps it is time to be considering whether you're playing the right game
5) Whether it is an intentional part of the game or not has no baring
Glitches can make a game deeper and more balanced
When the first fighting games came about, the designers probably never expected people to find ways to string moves together in ways that were inescapable, these were the first combos, and likely they were completely unintentional
Example:
In Guilty Gear XX, a glitch was found called Jump Install, where during certain moves a character could "store" a jump and use it later on
Jump Install became an advanced tactic, and when the game was rebalanced for Guilty Gear XX #Reload, the developers had opted to build Jump Install into the game, rather than fix it
Despite being fixed on some moves, Jump Install had appeared on other moves, rather than sticking to their original vision, the developers had used Jump Install to their advantage, and reshuffled it to where it added the most to the game
Dissidia is going down a bad line in this regard, the Universal Tuning version of the game is identical to the US/EU version, but with all custom combos removed, it is reckoned that this has debalanced the game quite considerably while making it more shallow and removing much of the variety between the characters at higher levels of play
-------------------------------------
So where does this leave Dissidia?
It is a near certainty that we will never see it at large professional tournament events, when Pro fighting players look at Dissidia they see yet another gimmiky fanservice game along the lines of the DBZ or Bleach fighters
Dissidia may be deep and interesting, but the pros will never hear our call, its unfamilliar, with characters from non-fighter franchises, non-fighter players raving about how good it is, and its full of RPG elements which is bad
Dissidia is so far under their radar that they will never see it
But when we're hosting our own tournaments, we can learn a lot from how the pros do things, there are a lot of grey areas in Dissidia, arising from the numerous RPG elements, we could get rid of them by using Arcade Mode, but for us its the customisation element that makes it fun
I can forsee that there will be items that need removing (if FF7 had a VS mode you wouldn't allow someone to use Knights of the Round), probably the breakable accessories and Magic Pot for instance, but it remains to be seen
*These matchups are estimates by me, we don't have enough data to say for sure
A Pro plays fighting games according to the rules of the major tournaments that he/she visits, such as EVO and SBO.
The general masses that play Fighting Games casually harbour many assumptions about the sorts of rules used at "respectable tournaments", and as you will find out, all or most of these are wrong
When casual players organise tournaments, they generally start by laying down a series of rules on what is and isn't acceptable to do during matches, with the intention of making the game fairer, preventing sudden swings in matches, and providing a funner experience for everyone
Such events for Dissidia thus far have done things such as banning accessories, equipment and summons entirely, outlawing infinitely long combos, and even placing a ban on EX Mode
"Balance" is something that every casual player strives for when they make their tournament rules, its usually priority number one, but "Balance" is an illusion
The last Fighting game (that I know of) to have a perfect balance was the unreleased "One Must Fall 1" for MS DOS, which consisted of 2 identical characters fighting on a perfectly flat stage
As you add characters with different properties the "Balance" becomes imperfect, with variation inevitably comes the situation where different characters are better at different strategies, and require different strategies to defeat
If Character A is good at the strategy that kills Character B, then Character A will win the match more often
True 50:50 matchups between different characters are incredibly rare, and rightly so, for the joy of mastering different tactics for, and counter-tactics against different characters is the driving force behind the depth of a fighting game
It is the destruction of balance that makes a Fighter worth playing
When considering which character to pick for a tournament, and which characters to practice against, a Pro player will consider both the matchups of the character, and the probability that those characters will appear
A 50:50 matchup (WoL vs WoL)* is perfectly balanced, the match will come entirely down to skill
A 60:40 matchup (Squall vs Sephiroth)* is reletively even, Player B will have to be slightly more skilled than Player A, or try somewhat harder to win the match
A 70:20 matchup (Tidus vs Garland)* is considerably unbalanced, Victory is entirely possible for Player B but he will have to play at a signifigantly higher level than player A
A 90:10 matchup (Terra vs Golbez)* is highly unbalanced, Player B has little chance of victory no matter what the skill of the players
In a simple way, a Pro player has more chance of earning enoigh on a tournament to pay his way if he picks a character with more and stronger positive matchups, and fewer and weaker negative matchups
Having more and stronger good matchups, and fewer and weaker negative matchups, makes a character high tier. A characters position on a tier list will also go up if characters that it has positive matchups against are more common
Tier lists are a Pro player's guide to how his/her choice of characters will affect their chance of success, the gap between the top and bottom of a tier list depends upon the game
Examples:
Guilty Gear XX Accent Core is arguably the most balanced fighting game that has ever featured on the professional circuit
Many many years of tweaking has resulted in a large and diverse selection of characters with matchups that are nearly all better than 60:40
In this game, every single character is competatively viable, and most pros pick their character based on personal preference
Marvel vs Capcom 2 is arguably the least balanced fighting game that has ever featured on the professional circuit
Its riddled with 90:10 matchups and only has any diversity at tournaments because its massive roster of characters inevitably results in a large selection in each tier
So where does Dissidia fall into this scheeme
There are those of us who spend a lot of time analysing the game from various standpoints, we draw and compare conclusions with eachother, we believe that Dissidia contains a broad range of matchup strengths
However those characters with strong bad matchups, also generally seem to have strong good matchups, whether this will result in those characters being competitively viable is another matter entirely
A sure say on matchups and tiers can only come from tournament statistics, and deep analysis of matches between highly skilled players, there isn't enough evidence to say for sure on Dissidia
Matchups are things that are dynamic, they (and thus the positions of characters in the tier list) change over time.
A change in the weight of a matchup could come from the discovery of a new tactic or glitch for a character, or from a realisation among the playerbase that something was not as it seemed before
In this way, the different characters and tactics in common use (the Metagame) change over time as the strength of those characters and tactics goes up and down
Even if a character's matchups never change, they can still become more (or less) common and a higher (or lower) tier, if a character that they have a good (or bad) matchup against becomes more common
A fighting game is really good if even after being played for long enough that every tactic is known, and every matchup is solidly established, the metagame continues to shift based purely on the estimations of its players on which characters will be popular at the next event
This shifting of the Metagame is what keeps a Fighting game fresh and interesting, its why Street Fighter 2 is still played at professional tournaments
Now this brings me to the most important point that I can possibly stress to you:
Excessive Banning Is Bad
As soon as you ban a powerful character/move/tactic/glitch you stop the metagame from moving
Years of experience has told the Pro Fighters that most of the time a new powerful tactic will be counteracted by another tactic found further down the line
The Metagame will shift both when the powerful tactic is found to put the bearer of that tactic at the top, and when the counter is found to put the tactic bearer back down and the bearers of its counter further up
The Metagame has evolved, new characters have taken the forfront, and the game is kept fresh and interesting
Tournament Bannings are only done in the most extreme of cases, as when a powerful tactic is banned, things go back to how they were before its discovery, the metagame will stagnate and players will move away
Dissidia's staple tournament rules so far stem from the import community who played the Japanese version
Back then we decided not to use Accessories, Equipment and Summons because the presence of the Japanese Language and the inability of most players to type or recognise Kanji made it very difficult to know what they were or what they did, or to discuss them properly
This was further pressed by the belief that many of the more powerful items would take months of constant work to obtain, and signifigantly warp the metagame, such RPGesque elements are unwanted in competative events, and so to make the game less RPG and more like a common fighter, we decided to start from nothing
With the English release however, more experimentation is being done into these elements, and a tournaments with no restrictions in these regards seem to be next on the agenda
When it does come to making a banning, there are certain rules that must be followed:
1) That a thing has a powerful affect doesn't make it overpowered
A firm belief in the wider community is that EX-Bursts are broken because they do a lot of damage, but they generally don't consider the difficulty of gaining enough EX and then landing an attack within the time limit, or the finer points of catching someone dashing to a core, or baiting an opponent with a full bar into using it at the wrong time
There are a lot of fine points around EX that add to the tactics of the game, and its not such a superiour victory method that people don't win through other methods anymore
Example:
In Guilty Gear XX Accent Core, every single character has an Instant Death Attack, (in all bar one case) this does not strictly require any sort of resource or any sort of build-up to use, and landing it will immediately win the round
You will almost never see a Pro Guilty Gear player attempt an Instant Death attack, this isn't because of any sort of sense of honour, nor through any sort of banning, infact this has never even been considered
Its because attempting an Instant Death Attack is just so risky, that even the massive rewards aren't worth it
In order to perform an Instant Death Attack, you must go into a special mode, clearly flagging your intent to use it, and if you mess up that one opportunity you take on a huge penalty for the rest of the round
But on the rare occasion that that a Pro player does go into Instant Death Mode, everyone watching on the edge of their seats, the tension in the room rises considerably because someone just decided to risk the whole round on a single attack
Having this powerful option is good for the game, it makes watching the few matches that it appears in more enjoyable, any matches where one is successful go down in history, and its yet another piece that adds its own small amount of depth to the game
2) Lower Tier characters aren't important
Nobody in their right mind has ever proposed banning or restricting anything in Marvel vs Capcom 2 to make its horde of worthless characters more useful
If the characters weren't being used anyway, then a character that has 90:10 matchups against all of them is perfectly acceptbale, and a glitch that only works against these characters is perfectly fine
If a character is so bad that it isn't seen, then it might as well not be a part of the game
3) Play Rules are Bad
Lets abandon all logical thought for a while and pretend that EX Burst really is broken, how do you get rid of it?
The obvious answer is to ban it, so you can use EX Mode, but never Burst, but this leads to a problem, what if you perform an HP attack while in EX Mode and accidently press Square one too many times, you've just opened yourself up to whatever punishment comes with breaking the rule
Bannings are a last resort in competative play, but a Play Rule is the last resort of the last resorts
If it comes down to having to make one of these, then the game probably isn't viable for competative play
However, if it must be done, then a play rule needs to be:
- easy to follow (you can't do it accidently)
- easy to understand (the longer it is and the more complicated it is, the more likely people are to not get it, in this case they are likely to break it without knowing, or not join the event at all)
- easy to spot (a referee must be able to spot a player breaking the rule immediately, they shouldn't have to for example, count the number of times a move has been performed)
- have as little affect on things other than the thing it is fixing as possible
Every character can EX Burst, and have roughly the same ability to dash for cores, so whats the affect on balance here?
Banning something that everyone can do should only be done when backed up by an in-depth analysis that shows exactly how it favors a small set of characters to the point where the rest of the cast cannot compete
If you think a game would be improved by the removal of some element or another, then perhaps it is time to be considering whether you're playing the right game
5) Whether it is an intentional part of the game or not has no baring
Glitches can make a game deeper and more balanced
When the first fighting games came about, the designers probably never expected people to find ways to string moves together in ways that were inescapable, these were the first combos, and likely they were completely unintentional
Example:
In Guilty Gear XX, a glitch was found called Jump Install, where during certain moves a character could "store" a jump and use it later on
Jump Install became an advanced tactic, and when the game was rebalanced for Guilty Gear XX #Reload, the developers had opted to build Jump Install into the game, rather than fix it
Despite being fixed on some moves, Jump Install had appeared on other moves, rather than sticking to their original vision, the developers had used Jump Install to their advantage, and reshuffled it to where it added the most to the game
Dissidia is going down a bad line in this regard, the Universal Tuning version of the game is identical to the US/EU version, but with all custom combos removed, it is reckoned that this has debalanced the game quite considerably while making it more shallow and removing much of the variety between the characters at higher levels of play
-------------------------------------
So where does this leave Dissidia?
It is a near certainty that we will never see it at large professional tournament events, when Pro fighting players look at Dissidia they see yet another gimmiky fanservice game along the lines of the DBZ or Bleach fighters
Dissidia may be deep and interesting, but the pros will never hear our call, its unfamilliar, with characters from non-fighter franchises, non-fighter players raving about how good it is, and its full of RPG elements which is bad
Dissidia is so far under their radar that they will never see it
But when we're hosting our own tournaments, we can learn a lot from how the pros do things, there are a lot of grey areas in Dissidia, arising from the numerous RPG elements, we could get rid of them by using Arcade Mode, but for us its the customisation element that makes it fun
I can forsee that there will be items that need removing (if FF7 had a VS mode you wouldn't allow someone to use Knights of the Round), probably the breakable accessories and Magic Pot for instance, but it remains to be seen
*These matchups are estimates by me, we don't have enough data to say for sure
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