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.