Xtra_Zero

Agreed on all points except guard bar and dust. I'm not sure what else there is to say about GG's guard bar. It's easily the most elegant guard solution any fighter has ever implemented. It rewards offense without punishing good defense. As for dust, I don't think comboing into dust is a good idea. A long time ago I would have agreed with you, but now I don't like that idea. Melty has something like that, where you can combo almost anything into a launcher, but I just don't see that helping GG. It would just make the cast and combos more homogenous and less situational, which is bad imo. I already think there's something un-elegant about Dusts that needs fixing, but I can't put my finger on exactly what. Making them combo-intoable wouldn't help, imo.

It's a shame Slash never got a US release. It was the best iteration of GG imo, despite Ky's stun edge having silly properties. I enjoyed it more than AC, anyway. It was like a rebalanced Reload + ABA + HOS + more moves + the good stage/music select. It had awesome running fireball detection, and maybe I'm imagining things, but it felt easier to do split-second overdrives and land reversals. I think there is a small group of people who still play Slash, actually.

I don't think it matters how many options a character has out of a situation. What matters is whether the character's BEST option is consistently successful. Therefore, what's important is how many bad situations (situations where char X's best option is poor) character Y has against X and vice versa, and how likely the game is to steer into those, or maybe just THE ONE WORST situation Y has against X and how easily Y can steer the game into it (because optimally you'd try for optimal everything).

I think "rushdown" is most useful when used in the sense "How do you beat character X? Rush that shit down." This doesn't seem to differ too much from our functional definition of pressure except maybe it implies doing so specifically to prevent the other character from escaping? It really just sounds like a way of saying "pressure-driven gameplay."

I always used my thumb for P. I used type A for a while in BB but quickly moved to type B. In BB D made a little more sense on thumb because it was a separate function for many characters, but in GG attacks are attacks, and HS is always a harder hitter than P.

The first playable version of BB showed up at Anime Expo through Aksys (Though Daisuke and Mori were both guests that year). I'm allowed to hope.

I feel like if there's a company that's going to get this right it's going to be ASW. They've been slowly coming up with better and better ways to make their games accessible without compromising strategy and gameplay. It was a nice thought in BB. Beginner mode let you do things right from the start without much knowledge, but it never removed the training wheels. If you learned on beginner mode, you basically screwed yourself long term because that's NOT actually how the game is played. P4U, while imperfect (more due to balance issues than ezmodo controls, imo), was a huge, gigantic leap in the right direction that I wouldn't have believed was possible had I not seen it myself. I have faith in ASW doing the right thing here.

Potemkin heads

When you think about it, "difficult" is just a term for something that the person in question isn't used to doing yet. When you were a kid, walking was difficult. Even when something you've technically never done in your life comes easy the first time, it's because you're accustomed to doing something similar. You could also take it to mean something that someone just doesn't want to do, etc. It's really not a very objective term at all no matter how you look at it.

The I-NO and Millia designs are fantastic, the May one is pretty good, Faust is okay but would be better without the text, Eddie one is decent, Johnny is alright, the rest are too busy/boring imo. My favorite is the I-NO design. The text placement is great, the pose is a nice shape, unique and iconic, and the color borders are very nice and minimal without making the character ambiguous. I do think the Millia design could use a little more minimalism.

I'm not saying hard stuff is bad, I'm saying hard stuff with no strategic value is bad. If you end up being able to SB all multi-hit moves, then multi-hit moves just won't be used on block anymore in those situations. It neutralizes a part of the offensive game not by requiring strategy to use certain moves, but just by making them deprecated on block. The game hasn't quite hit that level yet, but the players who can already SB reliably have a huge advantage over those that cannot. Probably an even bigger advantage than FRCs. 3S was a bit of an extreme comparison, yes. I'm not talking about 3S having problems. I'm talking about SB changing the game toward 3S. I like 3S but I also like GG, and what I'm saying is that SB is an unnecessary addition that removes some good offensive options. As TRBM pointed out, it also creates some. As for seeing things in a vacuum, yes, I am applying those arguments. It started slow in 3S too. I don't think it's completely invalid to compare this way. It's pretty hard to argue back against your other strawman arguments, though.

Do multi-hit attacks really need to be punished that hard if blocked? Were they a problem? Do predictable attacks need to be punished even harder than they already can be? Was punishing predictable stuff ever an issue? Imo slashback is redundant and makes optimal punishes even more of an execution contest. You never ask yourself "Is it a good strategic idea to SB this incoming move?" you ask yourself "Do I have the reflexes to SB this incoming move?" which is not good because once everyone gets those reflexes then the game turns into 3S.

Idk I'm beginning to think Tasofro got lucky with IaMP.

Idk, a long wait just doesn't sound like ASW. I don't think they would have revealed if they didn't already see the light at the end of the tunnel. They already have at least 4 models, they've already demoed a mechanics engine that is almost identical to the one we currently have, they've already settled on and mostly implemented the graphics engine, and the big man himself says that he's looking to trim the fat. Cutting stuff out doesn't take any time at all especially if he's going back to a model that was already used, and it seems so far that little things will likely be the same. I'm guessing that we'll see a #Reload-style base engine with one new, significant engine change (more significant than Slashbacks or Force Breaks). That doesn't take much time at all to plan, all that's left is (a lot of) testing, model creation, music composition, and whatever they decide to implement in terms of single-player content (which may be a lot, actually). I'm betting loketests in October/November and release in January.

I'm betting we see it in arcades this winter. Console port should be easy because Unreal, but we'll see.

Ok so I tried bringing this up a long time ago back when AC started throw breaks, but I didn't get any response. We're already talking about it so might as well. What are your thoughts on throw breaks in GG and the AC change? Personally I think they were an unnecessary addition but the system that's currently implemented is pretty good as far as throw break systems go.

Something similar happened to me, avoiding all fighters until GG, but there's actually a lot of technique and strategy crossover and playing them (SF particularly) can help fill in gaps in your knowledge and make you a better BB/GG player. About 4 years after I started playing GG seriously, I went back and tried SF2 again and holy damn that game is fun now that I know what's going on. There's a reason SSF2T still has regular tournaments. It's still one of the most solid fighters out there even after 20 years or so. Even if you don't like it, imo you're doing yourself a disservice as a player by ignoring it because all fighting games are based off of it. There's no extra fluff in SF2 either, so literally everything you learn playing it can be applied elsewhere. It's something to consider.

I think I understand where you're coming from a bit more now. I believe you're overestimating the extra damage the guard bar gives. Ask any GG player if they'd rather land a hit or have it blocked and the answer will be 100% of the time that they'd rather land the hit, despite the guard bar giving extra potential damage if they don't. Why? Because of all the things the opponent can do to screw up your blockstrings and because each hit that gets blocked pushes you further away so that if you DO land a hit, you have less of a chance to capitalize on it than you would have if you had hit them with the first move. It basically comes down to how important position and spacing are in the game. If you're point blank and have oki advantage, you are in a really good position. Having your opponent block your mixup might crank their guard bar, but it will push you away, making further opportunities to hit them far more difficult. It would be really risky to throw out something that's easy to block just to crank their bar because getting back in 9 times out of 10 is not worth the potential damage increase. In most cases, even if you are successful, your damage increase is going to be something like +15-30% at best. The guard bar depletes faster per hit when it's full too (compared to when it's emptying below neutral), so usually you only get 1 or 2 unscaled hits in. And then there's the fact that the bar returns to neutral instantly if it was below neutral when the opponent recovers, so really the more damaging solution is to just hit the opponent and then reset them. So really you're setting up an unreasonable comparison here. It's not "Blockstring, Combo" vs "Combo" it's "Blockstring, Combo" vs "Combo, Combo" because you're giving up a mixup opportunity and thus a full combo opportunity to crank their bar instead of hit them, and then you're going to lose oki and positioning too before you get that second mixup opportunity. I'd take two combos from neutral guard over one combo with a cranked guard bar any day, even if I didn't have to get back in after the blockstring. In most games, special moves (such as fireballs) give meter even if they whiff. It was pretty silly, but I found it way more engaging than CS's guard primers despite how broken it was.

That's the whole point. You DON'T get any reward if you don't hit the opponent. The blocker escapes scot free! You still have to actually hit them for it to matter, and the opponent having a cranked guard meter doesn't make it any easier to hit them. They still have full power to block. If you compare that to BB, the opposite happens. If you block right in CT, you still lose guard libra and can be guard crushed. In CS, you can still lose guard primers and be guard crushed. In CP, same thing. In GG if you block right you can't get hit, regardless of your meter. Yes, the penalty for getting hit goes up, but if you want to avoid that because you aren't confident enough in your blocking skills you still have options. This has all sorts of other effects too, like creating dire situations where you REALLY want to burst, discouraging turtling without making it entirely unviable, encouraging offense, giving more options for meter use, causing optimal combo variation even off of the same move on the same character in the same spot, and having a visual representation for hitstun decay. All very very good things imo. It's a fucking brilliant mechanic. Also not rewarding players for landing blocked moves is silly. Giving players meter for whiffing moves/landing blocked moves has been a convention since SF2.

But it doesn't matter because a "whole bunch of mids" isn't going to hit in the first place. The guard gauge only matters if you hit.

If the pressure is mindless then the person being pressured won't be hit and it doesn't even come into effect.

This is not really what the guard bar does. You can block all day in GG without issue, and I think that's a great feature. The whole flow of GG's combat is determined by this bar. Even more so than FRCs, imo. I'm fine with extending the FRC window later into the move. Sure. W/e. But giving supers minimum damage I don't like. If you do that, it'd be more optimal to stick supers on the end of combos instead of using them as moves in their own right, which is something I'm not a fan of.

Not necessarily. We don't know what level of control you have over your character during the dust chase. The camera angle changes, yes, but you could still have full control over your character.

They can do whatever the hell else they want to make combos easier, but if they take out my GG guard gauge I'm done. I am totally open to trying anything, removing FRCs even, as hard as that would be to swallow, but don't even think about touching my guard gauge. That is my favorite aspect of GG by far and imo what sets GG apart from other fighters.

Perhaps, but I still dislike the jarring feel of having my combat interrupted by something flashing over the screen, slowing the match down, and ruining my concentration. If they could somehow manage to make it flashy without interrupting gameplay like that I think it'd be way better.