Happy Holidays

So there's no article this week as the author feels that during the holidays one should not be spending ones time reading articles about video games.  Rather one should be spending this time of year with ones family or catching up on ones backlog of video games while ignoring ones family.  See you all next year.

Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Fate of the Worst Fighting Game Mechanic Ever

Wait. Stop. Before you read any further I'd like you to go to the link below and spend a little time getting your ass handed to you at rock-paper-scissors (RPS). First I'd like you to go with the 'Novice' setting and play a few rounds. Then I'd like you to reload the game but this time go with the 'Veteran' setting.

Rock-Paper-Scissors Game

So you're back. Having now likely gotten beaten soundly at rock-paper-scissors. At this point you're likely asking what was the point of that exercise? The point my friends was to use it as an illustration of how lopsided and poorly implemented what is, in my opinion, not only the worst mechanic in 'Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3' but what is also, in my opinion, in the running for worst mechanic is fighting game history in the Team Aerial Combo aka TAC. The TAC mechanic is essentially a skewed game of rock-paper-scissors in which the player initiating it has all of the advantages. Hmmm, I'm not explaining this very well. Let's get some of the technical mumbo-jumbo out of the way:

• TACs are useable in most aerial combos;
• The player initiating the TAC can chose between up, down or sideways (left and right are interchangeable);
• A successful TAC tags in the next character on the players team to continue the combo;
• Upwards TAC grants a damage bonus;
• Downwards TAC gives a full bar of super meter;
• Sideways TAC steals a bar of super meter;
• A TAC can be countered only by matching the directional input the player initiating it selected (i.e. up counters up, down counters down, left or right counters left or right) AND only if the direction is input correctly within 15 frames (~ ¼ of a second);
• If you (somehow) counter a TAC the person initiating it takes a miniscule amount of damage and the combo is broken.

So looking at all of that it should be clear that this mechanic is essentially RPS but worse in that there is only one condition for each situation where you can “win” and two where you can lose whereas in an actual game of rock-paper-scissors you have options where you can win or tie (i.e. not lose). Additionally the window for countering the TACs is incredibly tight such that doing so is, in my experience, more a matter of luck than of skill. Essentially TACs are a RPS mechanic where the attacker has the deck stacked significantly in their favor. So why is this a bad thing? Well there are three reasons that stand out in my mind:

1. TACs add a (significant) random element to the game.
2. They deter players from learning actual combos (you can keep these exchanges going long enough to kill or come damn close to killing most of the characters in the game).
3. The make online play an incredibly poor facsimile of how the game actually plays.

If you've seen them in action items #1 and #2 should be pretty obvious but what's that about #3. Well #3 is the reason I had you play the RPS game linked to above twice. I would say that countering a TAC offline against a human being sitting in the same room as you would be akin to beating the computer on the 'Novice' setting after its studied you for ten rounds. Now countering a TAC online would be more like coming up with a win against the 'Veteran' level computer after its studied you for twenty rounds, i.e. a lucky guess. The reason that you don't (usually) see players going for TACs constantly against offline competition is because of the (slim) chance that they'll get countered and that they'd usually rather go with something that's guaranteed. Online, eh, not so much. Given even the most minimal amounts of latency online (lag screws up the timing for countering) TACs go from a minimal risk with a high reward to no risk with a high reward as they are practically guaranteed combo extension and bonuses and that my friends makes for a terrible mechanic. See you all next week.

Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Minor Improvements

Ok, so a couple of weeks ago when I said that 'Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3' made only one positive change I might have been a bit off. It's actually three. That's the final revised number. Seriously. So you inquisitively and enthusiastically ask what are positive fixes numbers two and three? Well if fixing the matchmaking was positive change number one then positive change number two would be the new connectivity indicator that has been added before a match is confirmed. Previously when you did a ranked match you set your preferences (I recommend 'Same' and 'Same'), hit the OK button and then started praying to whatever deities you believe in for a playable match. Now not so much. Now you get to see a rough estimate of your opponents connection to you before you greenlight playing them.

Names redacted to protect the innocent.

This change is a major boon to online warriors though I'm tempted to dock Capcom points for this positive change as it really is something that should have been in the game from the word 'go' and not something that gets added later after people spend nine months complaining about crappy online play. The ability to screen out people with bad connections is huge plus even if there's a small chance that people will use it to screen their opponents in general (i.e. fishing for easier matches).

For positive change number three we have another feature that should have shipped with the original game and that was omitted due what one can only speculate was a mixture of laziness and indifference in 'Spectator Mode' for player matches/rooms. This is another feature that perplexed people for its absence from 'vanilla' and it seems to be reasonably functional in its 'Ultimate' incarnation. The fact that it works makes the main reason that Capcom gave for not having it in 'vanilla' seem especially hollow (they said it would lag the game too much). Nice try. Well that's it for the positive changes see you all next week.

  

Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Reactionary Whiners

Ok so this week we interrupt you're regularly schedule article to bring you what will hopefully be a marginally well articulated rant. Yes, it's still going to be about 'Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3', you're not getting off that easily. You see there was a large 'UMvC3' tournament this past weekend and the aftermath has been cringe-worthy. The issue that people seem to be having is that of the 26 (or 28, reports conflict) different team configurations that the top 16 players used 23 of those configurations used the same character. For a game that offers a playable roster of 52 characters assembled into whatever 3 character team your heart desires that is stunning lack of diversity. However that's all it is. It isn't indicative of a broken game, broken system (probably) or anything else. It isn't as one message board user cleverly coined the “Weskocalypse” (the character in question is Wesker, duh). It certainly isn't a justification for major, minor or any changes to the character in question. If you're seeing numbers like that in tournaments a year from now that would be indicative of a problem but for a single tournament less than a month after a games release, hardly. So let's look at the “argument” that people have put forward for knee-jerk reactionary nerfing:

I give you the “argument”: Wesker does too much damage too easily.

This statement actually manages to put out two highly flawed ideas at the same time. Firstly from a damage perspective Wesker is maybe (emphasis on 'maybe') in the top 25% of damage dealers in this game. That's a hard hitter but it certainly isn't the tops. With help of meter he's maybe going to pick off the lowest health characters in the game in a single combo but otherwise is going to need to hit the opponents character at least twice for the KO. Now that may sound kind of brutal but that's pretty much the way most of the characters in the game that are considered to be playable are*. So his damage isn't particularly aberrant. Well “What about X-Factor**?” you ask. Well, what? Practically every character in the game can do stupid amounts of damage when using X-Factor. Again not really an issue unique to one character. One could make an argument that the mechanic itself could stand to be toned down but that's not why we're here today.

For the second part of the argument people seem to think that for something to be good it should also be hard to use. This is, as best as I can tell, a call to the nostalgia of older fighting games where often there was a correlation between how good a character was and how hard that character was to use. The thing is that either way it shouldn't matter. What matters in a game where the goal is to reduce the opponents health to zero is the ends not the means. That is to say the individual moves and combos are what matters, not how easy or difficult it is to perform them.

A more correct argument regarding difficulty: A good character that's really easy to play stifles innovation.

This is a valid argument but whether or not it matters is a personal issue. That is to say are you OK with playing a game where a large portion of the roster may never see their full potential because the low hanging fruit is especially low hanging while also being fairly effective? I personally am fine with it at the moment because I really don't expect it to continue. I think that the tournament that's generating all this nerd-rage will eventually be looked back on as a serious outlier with regards to character usage as the prevalence of the character in question drops off. However even if it doesn't happen for whatever reason I'd still be fine with that too as I enjoy the challenge of trying to solve problems rather than having them solved for me (patched).

Another argument regarding difficult: Ease of play matters but only at the most difficult end of the spectrum where it's humanly impossible to execute with the character consistently.

This is, in my opinion, the only valid “ease of use” related argument in that if a character has what would seem to be phenomenally powerful tools relative to the game in which they appear but is, for whatever reason, so hard to use consistently that even the most masterful and dextrous people have issues with them then no matter how powerful they are in theory then they [the character] should be somewhat downgraded. It's worth noting that such characters are exceptionally rare and that there aren't any who fit this description in 'Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3'.

So, let's gather a bit more data before making any mistakes and altering a character that may or may not need it. This already happened once in 'vanilla' and I think in hindsight that the general consensus would be that it was a mistake. I for one would like to see a game given a chance to develop before it gets cut down prematurely by a bunch of reactionary whiners. Here's hoping cooler heads prevail. See you all next week.

*Yes, I realize that this is somewhat of a logical fallacy but people have singled out, in this case, a single character to complain about having already beaten to death the “Damage is too high in general in this game” discussion. When looking at average damage from viable, stable combos Wesker is hardly an outlier.

**In MvC3/UMvC3 X-Factor is a comeback mechanic that grants a significant damage boost. More specifically it grants each character a damage and (usually) a speed boost with the amount of the boost being character dependent and also based on how many members of their team are still alive. It also prevents chip damage, allows players to cancel out of block, to cancel a move and sets the damage scaling minimum absurdly high. It is, thankfully, only useable once per game.