I also dislike tekken’s 1 million moves per character ratio. You have to try each one of them out and test out their properties to see which 3-4 is are the best and then just use those, when they really could’ve just had those 3-4 moves to begin with and left the rest of the crap out. The casual gamers usually have the complaint that playing a fighting game feels like taking a test, and with tekken’s mile long move lists I can definitely sympathize.

I really like Sirlin’s approach to balancing games. Easy to learn, hard to master. Just like chess, a game that’s been played and respected since the middle ages. It’s insane to think that the very people the game pieces were based upon actually played the game themselves. Now that’s longevity. If street fighter can attain even a fraction of that lasting power then I’d say we are a part of something very special indeed.

I was playing some “Super Turbo” as I’ve heard you hardcores call it, and as far as your “donut” casual vs hardcore thing, I could never figure out the special moves in fighting games (much less the “super moves”). I’ll play a hour or more of Samurai Showdown or something and have a full super bar but never know how to use it.

Are the special inputs for fighting games (a genre I don’t particularly enjoy) supposed to be some kind of secret?

For the Super Smash Brothers series (my favorite of the genre!) all the characters have (basically) the same special inputs, and there’s a little “How To Play” demo during the attract mode. What keeps my friends from playing the game is actually all the clutter and difficulty of tracking yourself on the screen.

For the triumph of game design that is Devil May Cry 4 (the video game I’ve spent the most hours playing), there’s the opening tutorial as well as forcing me to choose the special moves I want. What’s left up for me to explore on my own is the insane depth of the combo system.

Am I missing out on some fun when a game like Tekken # shows me an in-game command list? Because otherwise I sorta stand in the corner with a character and try random things to see if something “special” happens. Perhaps it’s more than adequate for novices to button-mash each other to death over and over, and I’m at some step above at since I’m wanting to learn a character’s full moveset.

Ah, now if only I could write better.

*deep breath*

*exhale*

You’re like Bruno Manheim at a nuclear plant asking dark seid to make him king. So you are, the king of fools. As you climb onto your little motor boat of ignorance you will never escape the atomic boom of your stupidity. A tremendous wave that represents the inanity of your arguement will collapse above your head under the weight of its own fallacy. The result will leave you washed out in the radioactive shores of your mind as you receive sweet release from your twisted, corporal form.

So yeah, eat shit and die.

First turn, you lose to top tier. you pick hedge and win. They pick low tier and win. Huzzah, balance! Only not.

Counter picking is not a great way to balance a game, especially polarized counter picks. They can make stuff interesting (honda), but a game designed on counter matches is not an ideally balanced game. You can’t think of fighting game balance in such macro terms, especially since you get only one double blind pick at the beginning of the game.

This sort of balance works in team construction games, like pokemon or star control, but not in fighters.

Not only with the above problem — not everyone counter picks. Going by the Japanese school of thought, it can be better to know your matchups very well rather then counter pick with a less familar character and then get re-counter picked by your opponent into a matchup you don’t know. A high counter picking game forces a player to know and play more characters (as opposed to making it a choice of taste). It also degrades the character selection screen into a game of RPS with more match influence then it should.

The other huge and gaping issue, is that designers do not possess the ability to create a game with such precise counter character. Designers don’t even KNOW who the top and bottom tier characters are going to be. If they could manage this they could instead make a superior game with all matchups with in the 4/6 - 5/5 range.

Balance has to be achieved in game, not on the character select screens. Characters need ot have sufficient options to survive and project them selves while sitll generating interesting move interactions. You need less math in your designs. It doesn’t work that way. Theres too many variables and emergant factors to handle. This is why fighting games are balanced through testing and tweaking, not mathmatics.

Sirlin himself has said he designs with very little math. Not because it’s not his style (He was an MIT Math major), but because it doesn’t work that way. He can also attest to the blood sweat and tears required in the laborous balancing process.

If we were to design a character (i.e., hedge) so that it won vs the top tier just as much as it lost to the low tier, it would completely balance the game.

I’ll use guilty gear as an example:

Potemkin wins vs Slayer 60% of the time

Slayer wins vs Jam 60% of the time

Jam wins vs Potemkin 60% of the time

Essentially speaking, the only way to ensure properly equal payoff matrices for each and every player, regardless of the character they choose would be to ensure that each character has just as many bad matchups as they have good matchup, and by roughly the wame win/loss ratio (for every 60% favorable matchup a char has, they should have a 40% unfavorable matchup).

As a minor quirk, the only way to ensure this (aside from the obvious patching and re-releasing of various versions of the same game) would be to make certain that the availiable number of characters in the game are odd, not even. This makes it easier to balance a character in such a way that half of it’s matchups are favorable and half arent.

Of course, purposely designing a character to have specific matchups favorable and unfavorable is a difficult feat in itself.

You’re suggesting a pretty extreme solution to a problem that only arguably exists, and the worst part is it doesn’t even sound fun.