Sigma

It should still consume a small amount of meter (somewhere around a -p- worth.) I like the way the rebalance is going now. Ease up the damage a bit without nerfing the fun (Eddie guage recharge time.) The j.K buff will also hopefully help to make him a little more well-rounded at the expense of overall touch-of-death potential. I think hits removing the pool would have been enough without the meter use addition, but if the changes go through as they are, I don't really have any significant complaints.

If you know the D, 6P, 5H, Summon unblockable, it's basically the same thing but with fuzzy overhead instead of the low airdash j.S j.H. Same inputs from there, with an extra Shadow Gallery in the middle. I guess the difficulty is subjective though. That particular UB setup type is harder than the basic ones, at least. The only issue I can see is it's hard to confirm if you connected the second or third overhead hit or not before going into SG. If you get a Mawaru hit or the j.K somehow, it's not that much of a stretch. Still safe even if you misjudge it, you just end up losing a -P- worth of meter. Too bad SG isn't overhead. The loop is kind of meter heavy. Just keep in mind you generate 0-Full Burst on the opponent by about the second rep. Just about right before the second drill set if you go straight from Dust.

It's definitely very playable in most cases now. Better than it was at launch as well. The false 4 bar connections still annoy me, however. Frame-delay preview would be much more useful. So far my typical experience has been: 1-2F in-state 2-3F Midwest to East Coast 4-5F to California The JP matches I accidentally walked into were around 6-7F, but I would hope nobody in the US expects a solid connection across the Pacific.

The higher framerate capture would only really be a suggestion if the camera you already had happened to have a HFR capture option, just due to the difficulty syncing capture with a CRT as you mentioned. Nice to have someone actually investigating the frame delay. I'm interested to see the Xrd results; from a stick delay perspective as well.

What kind of display is that? Is the 'half-screen' transition between frames due to the refresh of the display or the camera's sensor? Have you considered using a high-precision timer next to the display along with a higher framerate capture as opposed to using the camera frames as reference? Wouldn't the PC #R and Naomi AC versions be technically lagless if the input can only be registered on the next frame and the input display shows it registering at frame +1? Not disagreeing with your findings, just curious what methods you used.

Just got the patch this morning, though I didn't check yesterday. Seems to have fixed all the delay issues I was having. Getting 1-3F typical after 1.03. Hopefully that's the end of the issues.

2 more frames than what version of AC? It really doesn't feel like that, and until I see any actual tests, I wouldn't trust anything anyone says. The typical input lag of ASW games (and most games) is 2F with vertical sync enabled. This is the case with Naomi GG games and BB on the Taito Type X2. It appears to be exactly the same on the Ringedge 2 as well. I'll assume that's what you mean by the 'natural' delay. 360 ports of arcade games seem to not run vertical sync, and have lower but inconsistent frame delay compared to the native arcade versions. If the comparison is to the 360 version of AC, it's invalid. Also clearing up the actual cause of the higher frame delay in matches: JP and NA versions are using different netplay patch versions.

That's the thing though. The 'poor' connections people have are poor because they lack bandwidth. Games generally need miniscule amounts of bandwidth, especially fighters, and there isn't a connection today that wouldn't support it. What matters is latency, and that should not be an issue in this country at all. In fact, many data center hops have already been very close to the theoretical minimum ping for years now. I would guess that the people I was connecting to had a latency of no more than 15ms based on their location. Some of them are people I 100% know I have low ping to after doing direct tests. The US internet infrastructure is not the culprit. The only case this will matter is from East Coast to West Coast, and even that should never be more than 4F. The real issue seems to be the netcode in the JP version not syncing up with the NA version right now. Aksys said that while they have deployed the new netcode patch for NA versions, ASW has not yet implemented the same patch for JP. So there's the issue right there. We have two slightly different netcodes trying to communicate with one another, and even JP>JP version might be running into issues.

Was having 4F (random bits of 5F) delay against a local player on netplay. Asked them and found that they are using NA Xrd while I have been using JP. Both are PS3. Are people having issues with NA PS4 > NA PS3? Expecting my stick/copy in soon, so I'm hoping not... As a side note, I constantly monitor my latency in real-time to many different major hubs. There is no reason I should be getting 5F to anyone from Midwest to the East Coast, and did not before the newer patches.

Joining PS3 lobbies or filtering matchfinder by same console only can help. It still does not seem to be as responsive as it as pre-patch based on my experience playing the same people before and after. My guess is that they changed the frame delay calculation to be a bit more consistent (staying at a single delay factor for longer) and set it incorrectly when they got to the PS3 version. I'm surprised that they have not issued an official statement yet, but perhaps that is due to the holidays. It's simply too obvious an issue to not be acknowledged. In the process of moving over to PS4 myself, but am waiting on a stick. If the issue still remains by then, I'll test both out and report back.

The only thing that NAT is going to have an impact on is whether you can connect properly and have access to certain services. If you're already connecting to matches just fine, but are lagging, NAT will not do anything really. It's an all or nothing kind of thing.

I've always had manual setting wired connection set up for PS3 specifically to avoid issues. I even tried direct modem connection for a while to see if there was any possibility of an issue. No. Changing your network settings will not fix what is going on now. Frame delay display was not 'fixed' either. Lobbies are now timing out, people are are dropping matches left and right (others as well), and 12F is definitely 12F. The vast majority of matches were very playable for 2 weeks, and then immediately after the patch I'm lucky to even be able to connect properly. It's 100% ASW's fault on this one. I had a couple of playable matches on this patch as well, but those are the exception to the rule now. Those saying otherwise are likely just PS4-PS4 after all the PS3 players gave up trying.

Is the huge static (12F typical) frame delay a PS3-only thing right now? It would seem to be the cause since a lobby labled "12F kicked" had PS4 players only. In general, it seemed that the only ones bothering to try to play online were those listed as using the PS4 version. There's no question that something was terribly broken with the latest patch. It's completely different now.

Personally, I have definitely witnessed framerate drops in performance mode local play. It's very rare, and I could not say what causes it exactly, but it has happened. Overdrive animations are obvious. I'm talking about general gameplay. Again, it's stars aligning rare, but within the realm of possibility. Think 1 second of significant drop per 50+ hours. Certainly not enough to justify standardizing PS4 GG until more people have sticks for it, though.

Character resolution could differ from the background if they are rendered as a different layer. The UI at least is noticeably different from the actual rendered content. I wouldn't be surprised if 3D resolution drops below 720. What I find unusual is how action on screen can sometimes cause the game to appear blurred on the PS3. It seems to be either some sort of output compression (which would strike me as odd since most of the processing would be taken up by the shaders, not the raw pixels) or a dynamic resolution change to help preserve framerate. PS3 version is passable, but you can definitely see the hardware showing its age. That and it seems like UI overlays (input history, lobby notifications, etc.) can have a negative effect on performance.

I'm not sure I get most of the test 3 changes. Basically... Overheads are still overhead? Is that what we're getting at here? :P

It's the reason his dash is slower.

It looks like the only choice outside of Arc changing something is for us to find something retarded to break the game with once again, since Carl isn't going to be a valid character to play normally as he is right now. :P I think now is a good time to form a contingency plan in case Carl remains the same. I'll be moving down the hat-awesomeness tier list, so it looks like Hazama is up.

Indeed. I had a nice full guard crush (from neutral) block string going, now it's all ruined thanks to a few of the changes. Carl's combo damage is going to be way underpowered as it is. Like Dan underpowered. Why does Carl need to blow up Nirvana just to match other characters' bnb combos?

I mean overcompensating in terms of nerfs. As for the projectile, it's good to have, but it seems to (along with the other changes) reduce emphasis on actually fighting while actively using nirvana, which is what they should have been trying to increase. I don't look forward to having people park her in the corner and just use the projectiles for links. Aren't any Japanese Carl players speaking up about this?

I figure Arc's reasoning must go something like this: Carl started off really terrible in CT and the players made him awesome, so if we make him even worse now, he'll balance out. There is no other explanation. With the changes as they are, it seems like they're making Carl less technical and less interesting, while overcompensating wildly for an infinite he doesn't have anymore. If this goes through as it is, it will be a sad day.

I just realized something. Guess what this means? Air dash quick drop gets nerfed as well.

I really can't believe the direction they've taken with Carl. The 5B and j.2C nerfs completely eliminate my non-loop gameplay. The changes don't come even close to making up for the loss of the loop, in fact, he's worse now than he would have been if they just took out the loop and left everything else the same. Arc just completely castrated Carl.

Ahhh, must have missed the corner part. The two look the same in notation. Yeah, with that particular positioning it's inescapable.

Unless someone else has discovered something, I'm pretty sure the whiff loop is escapable by everyone but Tager if you time the throw escape late enough. On a seperate note, I'll post a mixup setup I have grown fond of recently: You can do a tricky to predict double overhead from sandwich if you don't allecan 2C at the proper height. The easiest way is 2a, j.2C, j.A, j.B. What will happen is Carl will pop up just a tiny bit from the blocked j.2C, causing fuzzy guard and allowing you to very quickly do another air move when they may expect you to allecan and go low. Nirvana will sometimes end up on the same side of the opponent as you if you keep D released. So for me it usually goes: (sandwich pressure)>2a, j.2C, j.A, j.B, land, 2B, 3C > IAD teleport loop setup.