Zerite

I make no claim that difficult execution inherently leads to a deeper game, but when properly implemented it creates a wider skill range to play within.

Should is too strong of a word. As far as guilty gear is concerned, making frc's easier would be a bad choice. But you're making this argument too difficult to agree with by saying that fighting games categorically need execution barriers. Also, most popular fighting games are either not as fast, or not as execution intensive as guilty gear. I imagine that you're railing against blazblue, but that is a different game. If it had all the same qualities as guilty gear then they might as well not make a new franchise. There are plenty of execution intensive fighters, like tekken, street fighter and KOF. The only series I can think of that aren't execution intensive are soul calibur and dead or alive. Possibly Virtua fighter as well, but I'm not very familiar with that series. I know the mind games are complex enough to allow for great depth in that game at least. Blazblue is somewhat easy on execution, which just makes the emphasis of the game on solid play. There is less of a skill differentiation between players on average than in guilty gear, but that doesn't make it worse. What made calamity trigger worse than guilty gear isn't the way it deals with execution, but its slow speed, mediocre balance and repetitive gameplay. The gameplay would be less repetitive if the execution was more difficult, by increasing the odds of player error, but making execution harder would not have magically removed the repetitiveness of the game. They appear to have mostly solved this issue in CS, and the reason execution is probably easier is to facilitate online play, more than broader market appeal. And to be honest, most people are not competitive enough to enjoy guilty gear. It takes alot of time and effort to become skilled at the game. This is fine, because the reward for that effort and time is boatloads of fun games, with many WTF and OMG moments. For the average gamer though it is too high of a barrier. There is nothing wrong with a game being too difficult for the average person to thoroughly enjoy: traditional strategy board games are often this way, where beginner play is no where near as enjoyable as skilled play. Also, it's not as though less skilled players could just play with other players that are less skilled. You don't have to frc to play guilty gear, but you have to throw accepted character match-ups and balance out of the window if you don't. Honestly, I find that most players are more frustrated by throws than frcs. I'm better at throwing than many people I play with, and that aggravates them to no end.

Execution difficulty allows players with better execution to have an edge over players whose execution is worse. It creates additional paths for players to outplay other players. It's not all that fighting games are about, and games like SSBB have minimal execution difficulty and are still certainly fighting games and somewhat competitive. The major point of execution difficulty is to increase the number of ways that players can be skilled at a game. It goes from space control and initiating contact to finishing combos and timing intensive space control and contact initiation. The game could be much easier. It could just automatically do the combos for you if you landed a hit. There is nothing wrong with this concept per se. It just reduces the number of ways that one player can be more skilled than another, which for most people is boring. Part of what makes guilty gear interesting to play and watch is that you can observe spectacular execution, and be wowed by it. Also, frc timing is not solely the result of practice. I can hit plenty of frc's on characters that I never practiced frc timing with, just because the frc points follow a sort of logic in their placement.

^ this. Seriously, playing #r online is like playing a poorly designed game. It's very easy to have enough latency to make attacks that you should be able to punish unpunishable, and to make bad blockstrings into S++ blockstrings. For example: when Zappa has the ghosts, you can do a crossup that is typically difficult to block by jumping over your opponent and doing j.H. This becomes a mixup if you jump over them and then airdash backwards or jump over them and then double jump backwards. Also, in #r you can land and mash 2s, as 2s combos into itself like 7 times in #r. You can also throw in other attacks while airborne for a high/low crossup mixup deal. If your opponent gets hit by j.H it causes knockdown. This lets you continue the crossup safely. Online many people have told me that this crossup is impossible to block. It normally is confusing and difficult to block, due to its ambiguity, but that ambiguity combined with lag leads to 10-15 seconds of eating the same move over and over and over and then dying.

There are alot of things that developer's can do to allow for a wide range of skill to be present in a game. One of them is to tax human execution. You can either make optimal plays difficult or nearly impossible to accomplish given a certain amount of time, or you can make it easy to make mistakes. Fighting games typically do both. When you don't do these things you end up with games like soul calibur. Soul calibur isn't an awful game, but it isn't very well suited for competition. This is true for most games that aren't designed to show a wide range of skill.

There are visual cues for most of the frc points. With ky's charge stun edge, it's while the projectile is a circle, before it's released as a cone. Sol's is right as he sticks his sword in the ground for gunflame. Zappa's ghost's are slightly after his hand reaches it's apex, when he would bring it down if he were dancing. Zappa's all about dancing. Baiken's is right as her foot hit's the tatami mat in the air. I could go on. The basic idea is that there is a frame during which you frc, and you can recognize that frame, because it normally is slightly unusual.

Hey pozer, what are the odds on getting any kind of semi-regular event, like a ranbat, going for guilty gear? I know it would be really small, but I would still probably go up to Austin for something like that once or twice a month. What sort problems with holding events like that cause? I'm curious because I still enjoy guilty gear a lot, and want to see some formal competitions for it, and an arcade seems like the perfect place.

Does anyone have a link to the recent acho ranbat vids? Those were awesome, but they already took them down.

So I stopped keeping up with this, nub style. What should I change in the opening post?

MOUCHI <3

http://gro2.blog33.fc2.com/ has a set of about 6 videos from some tournament. I can't make out enough of the moonspeak to tell exactly, but I think it's the GIGO tournament.

I agree with watches. If you're looking into learning to play one of them well and are sort of new I'd recommend Testament over Millia. Millia demands that you as a player have fast, reliable execution and reaction speed and mix your opponent up. Testament just requires that you have reliable execution and can get a read on your opponent. I don't understand why people consider frc's very difficult. I've found that you can reliably do them as long as you figure out what point in the animation of the move the frc is. Zappa's ghost frc is right as his hand first reaches above his head, just before he would his hand in that position. Baiken's air mat frc is right before her foot would hit the mat. Ky's charge stun edge is just as the white orb he summons would turn into the projectile (it took me a while to realize that he summons an orb that turns into charge stun edge). Sol's is right as he sticks his sword in the ground. I found all these just by trying to do them and when I started hitting them in training mode, I would look for the point in the animation just before the frc cancelled the rest of the animation. It's actually pretty easy to hit a point in the animation instead of just having to match the blue flashes (I didn't know that the blue flashes meant anything at first. They aren't that helpful for me).

<3

Alot of old GG players wouldn't have to dump BB because they don't even play it. O.o

Would this be at the next SF4 ranbat?

So my opinion is skewed because I was playing Zappa that whole time. He got better in every version, but any time they go and make eddie testament, and venom better, I'm just going o feel like the game got less balanced. I can at least run under Ky's projectiles, so he was never as difficult to deal with as Eddie in #R or AC.

have you played AC or reload? the variance between eddie and the rest of the cast is much larger than the difference between ky and the rest of the cast in slash.

It's clear from what you just wrote that when you talking about getting into the game, you mean improving enough to beat someone who is not slightly better than you, but much better than you. Yes, this can be very hard in guilty gear. But it's also not what Koja was talking about when everyone started flaming him. Also what you've said about SF makes me think you haven't ever tried to beat someone in it who is much better than you at that game or only play it casually yourself. If both you were terrible, then sure it's not that hard, but this is true in GG also. If the other person is tournament winning caliber and you're new to the game though, then good luck. The execution barrier can be just as high in SF (Viper anyone?) as it often is in GG, and the player skill is still just as big of a barrier.

Making the game more casual friendly just makes the game have less gradations of skill. The short frc window is to allow for players with better execution to have an advantage over players with worse execution. Taking this out just makes the difference between those two levels of execution (which honestly are pretty far apart) less important than it is now. This is without thinking about any balance issues it introduces. Part of the reason GG is such a good game is because of how demanding it is on the player. In many games (soul caliber for example) new players can mash and scrape out wins. In GG, that would have to be some pretty magical mashing. I mean, part of the whole identity of the game is how hard it is to play well, and how well it can be played. The best way to make the game more casual friendly is to include a training mode that is actually effective at training players to be better. They made some attempts at this in previous games with missions(#reload), but those weren't serious or very effective. You know. Something with basic combos programmed into it so that players can try doing a target BnB combo and then be told why it failed. Ie. You seem to have missed the frc timing; you did not jump install quickly enough, you pressed the button too soon, you pressed the button too late, you appear to be pressing more buttons than are necessary more times than necessary, and so on. Non-obvious combos could have tips like 'you should release the buttons for special moves to negative edge them in this combo'. It's very unlikely that the basic combos that were in the game would actually be good, but if players used it, it would give the the experience and execution they need to play well.

As for the post above, there is a lot of ambiguity in the phrase "get into gg". It probably means 'play the game with friends and have fun'. You seem to be coming from a perspective of 'play the game at tournaments and successfully compete'. So which is it? It's not like you make it clear. Also, does it not occur to you that some people have a talent for these sort of games? These games are easy to get into for those people. Final note: FFS, STOP FLAMING NEW PLAYERS. THIS COMMUNITY IS NOT VERY LARGE. KEEP YOUR UNCONSTRUCTIVE, ARGUMENTATIVE THOUGHTS ABOUT OTHER PEOPLES OPINIONS TO YOURSELVES. Seriously, someone else had already addressed his original opinion, his question wasn't directed at you, and he's not being hostile. Get off his nuts.

The reason IB is too good in BB is because of how effective it is in letting you get out of pressure strings(ie. backdash, jump). It's part of the reason why the majority of the best characters in CT were all projectile based, with block strings based off of projectiles (Nu) or pressure strings with ambiguous endings that are often themselves mix-ups (rachel, arakune). Moves don't typically come out fast enough in BB to capitalize off of IB offensively. This makes pressure less effective for most characters, which leaves that portion of the game entirely to the big 3.

ABA was A tier in slash. If you think she was B tier, you forgot how almost no characters could do consistent damage in Slash. Yeah, it was possible to get really pressured by say, Ky or Venom and get crushed, but everyone else was like, oh no HUGE DAMAGE WTF. Also, slash was the most balanced, because the difference between the best character, Ky, and the rest of the cast was the lowest. Or, AC is the most balanced, because the average variance in strength between character's was the lowest. I'm personally going to go with AC, because everyone's got damage.

You know what happens when you get knocked down and you're playing Zappa? Neither do I.

They are certainly usable. Any seimetsu or sanwa buttons would be more responsive, but its certainly not necessary to replace them. They'll degrade faster also, but if that starts to bother you, you can just replace them then.

SF4 players complaining about BB's complexity is like painters saying that sculpting requires too much time. I mean I guess that they could say that, but really it doesn't make sense when you look at either game closely.