Wow, that Iron Galaxy part really was eye opening. They really did what the hell they set out to do, find a solution and make a very reasonable balance change, while even giving the players the extra treat of pulling the curtain and explaining the thought process. Gets hated anyway.
The moral of the story actually is that players have no fucking clue how to balance a game. I REALLY wish more folks would watch that Iron Galaxy section of this vid because, as a dev myself, it nearly brought tears to my eyes to see someone on tape finally say what I've been trying to tell people for literal DECADES. The internet as a whole almost never actually understands what the real problem is when it comes to game balance and, more often than not, it takes weeks or months to actually diagnose what the problem really is (like he said).
That depend on the game and the type of player you're referring. Speed runners are a different breed, they will make the entire dev team/QA look like a complete joke for how much they break the game. However, no average player play like them. So it both side have no clue.
There is a popular saying, i think maybe coined by Mark Rosewater of MtG. "Players a GREAT at identifying certain problems, but TERRIBLE at identifying causes or solutions"
Iron Galaxy, the same people that nerfed Sabrewulf because of two people? Good take and all from that guy, but still didn't care for that and I like those guys.
The core problem with fighting games is that no matter how hard you try there are two things you just can't control 1- a player's hurt ego 2- the fact that a top tiers will always exist and any balance changes would just change who's the top tier
Exactly, it is all just a cycle. It doesn't matter who is buffed or nerfed. In the end, there will always be a top tier, who it is is the only thing that changed, and we would be back to Square One.
@@nyxranobody3690 Even without the stones Thanos has done some incredible feats. Like actually taking on Ghost Rider who (at his full power) is clearly stronger than Dante in any way. But even with those feats Thanos would be slightly lower than Dante.
As a UX designer (not in video games). The customer always, always want to fix the symptom and don't want to hear about fixing the problem. It's infuriating sometimes. But to run a bussiness you also have to thow a bone to the customer otherwise they will eventually stop paying. I sympathise with the developers. It is a hard task to both balance the game in a "correct" way and pleasing the customer at the same time.
This is why a lot of competitive game companies end up just taking the road of cyclical balancing where they just purposely let things be OP for a while before nerfing it and then making something else OP
It's very different in the video games landscape though, in your case you work for a company and they pay you 100% of the money you get from your service. They are the only client you have, you can't lose them so you better treat them well. In a fighting game, your source of money is way more complicated, you're selling products that people buy and pay you once, plus there are sponsorship deals, licensing, etc etc. Your only worry is to keep the scene going, there isn't a single entity to please. One lesson game devs learn about competitive games is that there will always be people complaining, and the amount of complaining isn't necessarily tied to the health of the scene.
@@rafaelbordoni516 Not sure what point you think you're making or trying to contradict but it's not addressing the one we are. Users of B2C and B2B services complain all of the time. They are not that different (we do experience fewer death threats though). The point is designing an experience is nowhere near as easy as the users/players, who have a very limited few of what the work entails, believe it is. It's addressing the Dunning Krueger. "Your only worry is to keep the scene going, there isn't a single entity to please" Keeping the 'scene going' is a challenge of all design, we don't just one and done and it's a huge misconception to believe that is the case.
Same thing with MVCI Dante happened with Labcoat 21 in DBFZ. When she dropped, she was far and away the most powerful character in the game, and then the next patch absolutely eviscerated her with tons of nerfs, and she was STILL the best character in the game, just by a much narrower margin. It wasn't until the NEXT balance patch that she was brought down to the same level as the rest of the roster.
That Jago story is really interesting. I think a lot of players of video games in general forget that there is no job or college course or degree that is ABOUT game balance. This isnt even fighting game exclusive. As someone who loves so many multiplayer video games, that Jago example is felt in games like Overwatch or League or and competitive multiplayer game.
For me everyone should trate a game as an ecosystem: No person will know how it will function until someone carefully study how it works. If you introduce a very strange organism to that ecosystem, like a big balance pach or a strong DLC charcter, you problably will ruin the natural order in it, and will problably miss the illness you where trying to fix because you give it the wrong medicine thinking it was another cause for that problem.
Never seen that KI developer video before. That man is smart, most gamers never know what they want but as a developer you need to figure out what gamers need rather than want.
I want Keits to balance all my fighting games. I love the level of thought and analysis he and his team put into making changes, especially when they could explain why they were making changes so it didn't just feel random "oh cause we felt like it"
I agree with the 2 take aways from all this: Knee jerk reactions to things are typically a bad idea, especially when a lot of moving parts are involved. Loud people complaining aren't always right when it comes to figuring out what the solution and fix is. The Iron Galaxy segment pretty much sums it up. Players definitely found a problem, but they had no clue what was actually the culprit, regardless of what they thought. Usually, when players bring up problems, the solutions they suggest are extremely surface level and don't tend to address the root problem affecting the system as a whole. Devs need time to study the issue, see if players find a way around it that "solves" it, and then implement the right fix that will properly address things. It takes a good dev to do that; there are plenty of devs that have no idea what they are doing. With that said, you can't just shotgun out a change because a group of people were large enough and loud enough.
Your comment has made me realize that balancing a game is a lot like assuming the role of detective: The playerbase finds a crime and then pins the blame on whatever they dislike most (in Jago's case, it was his healing). Rather than crumble under the volume of the mob's voice and its accusations, game developers should instead find the true culprit. If a character's move should be theoretically balanced but performs poorly in practice, it may just be that it doesn't have the support it needs to do what it was meant to (i.e. Jiren's slow command grab in DBFZ being made more powerful indirectly by buffing other aspects of the character).
@@jasonalen7459 That's about it. Of course players only pin the blame on the first thing they notice, they don't spend more time thinking about it. When you feel sick and go to a doctor you don't just want a pill that blends out the pain, you want the doctor to figure out what illness you actually have because you can't tell yourself. But when playing games the players think differently. They don't feel any problems on themself, and very often they think of themselfs as experts of this game because they are somewhat good at it. But being good at playing and being good at programming are two different thing that many players just won't get.
Still remember a Ken Lobb interview in one of the big magazines about KI2/Gold back in the day. The topic was about the absence of Riptor, Thunder and Cinder. He basically said you could either have more characters and an unbalanced game, or fewer characters and a balanced game.
Harada said effectively the same thing once when talking about Tekken. How it was one of the biggest frustrations making fighting games, because it's the two things that players want the most yet they completely work against each other.
I've always preferred the former. I couldn't care less about competitive play. I play with who I want and consider the most fun to use. About 80 percent of the time, they are *far* from the best. However, that doesn't mean I don't understand or care about balancing.
On the topic of KI, I remember something I heard a lot in film class, which is that audiences are great at identifying a problem, but terrible at identifying a cure. Another good example similar to Jago is Jiren from DBFZ. He was super low-tier, and a lot of people blamed it on his 5H being a slow command grab. Now, he's super good despite his 5H being barely any faster, but his combo and stagger game is much stronger so the 5H is a lot more threatening.
Dont forget that people cried manon was broken. They really had her in top 5, she was considered on par with jp. Now i often see her as bottom 3, if not the worst.
Yeah as a casual fighting game fan watching all of these games from afar, I admire the restraint Capcom has had with just letting things play out and not changing things so suddenly. I remember when Juri was too good and I literally had a friend call me cheap for play Honda in the beginning. I'm not saying it's a perfect answer, but I'm interested to see how everyone feels next year.
That's just the natural progression of grapplers. They're "broken" until people figure out their strike/throw. once that's figured out, they rocket to bottom 3 because they just do NOT have the tools the rest of the cast has specifically to compensate for their grabs being strong.
Yeah out of all of them street fighter is low key balancing the best rn. They’re not listening to the crying players and are actually giving the game time to breathe. I thought guile was the best character for the first month of the game, now I think it’s Ken. Many people said Manon was busted then they figured out her drive rush and neutral in general is weak and she has a lot of bad matchups. People were screaming “nerf juri,” now you barely see her in tournament anymore. The game is changing by itself that in my opinion is a sign of good balancing. Because they aren’t patching anything huge and changing the mechanics of the game yet the players are now experimenting and seeing potential in every character. There really isn’t a huge difference between ryu and Luke outside of better frames and oki. Yet there are pro players choosing to play ryu. I think if they took the mk route and instantly just nerfed the shit out of something without waiting for that thing to change (which is ironic considering everyone was saying sareena was the best kameo upon release then people figured out her shit and realised she was and that someone like cyrax is better) there game would be a lot more balanced.
This is pretty typical for new games, especially new Street Fighter games. Every single time Cammy is placed solidly midtier on release and skyrockets to top 5 within a couple months.
@@Prodbyjah464 I think as usual, people don't realize the depth of everything and this is why SF6's approach is actually great. People don't get that Juri can have a terrible time against zoners like Guile. She doesn't have many tools to get around projectiles. Hers goes along the ground and can't cancel out the opponent's fireball, and even her dive kick needs to be a read instead of reaction, which is very risky. If she wasn't INSANELY agile she'd get even more destroyed in a lot of matchups. Ever since maining her I fear Guile more than ever. She needs half-screen dash > throw and fullscreen DR because even those are dangerous against a skilled and aware opponent.
The whole "super strong DLC character" thing will ALWAYS bring me back to Blazblue when we got Kokonoe 1.0. She had so much crazy shit that people nicknamed her "Brokenoe". She got nerfed and was still pretty good. And the funniest thing about it, is we'd been begging for her to become playable for YEARS.
Same, never picked based off anything but If I like them or they look cool, though for mk1 I actually ended up picking top tier for the first time, not the kameos though thank god
For me is a concern as I try not to use a Top Tier unless is really some of my all time favorites like Noob Saibot, Kabal, Jade or Smoke.. Thankfully in the last 2 games none of them has been considered top 5 maybe except Kabal but he was execution heavy in MK11.
As someone who’s worked in software (not video game) QA: it’s so true that you can never fully anticipate how someone will use your product. You can run so many manual tests, automated tests, usability studies, accessibility studies… it simply won’t be enough because someone out there is always either way smarter or way dumber than you
"Developers have to find the disease instead of listening to people crying about the symptoms" Overwatch could have learned so much from this instead of panic nerfing and buffing everything.
I'm a Melty Blood AACC fan (something you may be able to tell by my pfp) and this game I think is one of the craziest fighting games in terms of content because of how massive the roster is. 93 characters and counting, because there are 31 unique characters and each character has 3 distinct style choices, labeled Crescent, Half, and Full Moon. This is one of my favorite things about it. It is really interesting how lots of characters in that game have their 3 choices not too different from each other in terms of power (Shiki Ryougi and Shiki Nanaya for example), while other characters are totally different (such as C-Roa and C-Seifuku Akiha, who are orders of magnitude more powerful than the other versions of themselves, mainly C-Roa.) But, the most impressive thing about it is how relatively fair the game is despite having to juggle balancing 93 characters. There are only a few bottom-of-the-barrel character versions, as in less than 10 of 93 (Though F-NAC is admittedly unusably bad) while there are really only two characters who are memed about for being disgustingly good, the aforementioned C-Roa alongside F-Hime. Despite this, almost any character is viable if you practice, and there's also plenty of reasons not to play the best version of any character. Even with how crazy good C-Roa is, I personally play H-Roa because C-Roa is ridiculously reliant on optimal inputs while H-Roa is much more manageable while still being high mid tier. All in all, I think its one of the best fighting games due to its sheer diversity of characters while still retaining a good balance, which is hard enough with like 20 characters, and this game has more than 4 times that.
no matter how talented and dedicated your QA team and Testers/developers are they simply won't be able to stress test, experiment and push the boundaries of the game to figure out how it'll be played and what is and isn't good like 10.000+ players can. It's simply a numbers game. When your game gets into the hands of that many people, new stuff that the devs simply couldn't foresee will be discovered.
NRS had pro players on their QA / test team. You mean to say nobody played once against baraka / cyrax or raiden / cyrax or anybody / cyrax and didn’t say wait a second, this is super silly guys? It’s hard for me to buy that. It’s boring as hell to watch / play against string on block into cyrax into plus frames and then into another one of those sequences Dying endlessly by literal chip should set off people who play casually or competitive. Then again mk1 released with an endless amount of bugs so maybe it was not even looked at
Yup, you can literally see the top 8 of every major tournament, and the variety of characters is astounding. Even in top 32 is rare to see the same character more than twice. Just this past weekend we had two majors (one in JP and other in the US), and the top 8 for both of them were: Pyra/Mythra, Steve, Mr. Game and Watch, Sonic, Yoshi, Ryu, Fox, Shulk, Min Min, Incineroar, Corrin, Roy, Rosalina, Peach and Rob x2. Two top 8's, two different countries, and only one character repeated (Rob). Obviously the game isn't perfect, but it's still incredible how well balanced it is for the amount of characters it has.
I like his take about why DLCs are potentially that good. Like people have this weird (but not completely unfounded) idea that DLCs that have been super good because they want to convince people to buy them, which I feel does not make sense. So I agree with Max that the main reason why that tends to happen are because devs want to add more stuff, have new ideas etc. And I've always believed that since there's a significant gap between making the first 20-30 characters for the base game, and the individual characters that get released in a span of 5 or so years, with gaps between one another. And by then you would develop a different design philosophy, you'd develop a different balancing philosophy, you'd develop new ideas you wanna try to squeeze in. Because making DLC characters for FGs is almost like making characters for a new fighting game, yet not quite there yet.
Yeah, I've noticed that DLC characters aren't necessarily better, they just have more complex/numerous tools on average since the Devs have cool ideas they want to implement. (Same reason new characters are usually more complex than returning ones on average unless you alter/improve the returning character's moveset.) It's just that having more complex/numerous tools means that there are more ways for them to be good, which then usually means they are stronger.
Amazing Video! All your content has been an amazing way to get into the fighting game community. It's always welcoming -- easy to understand even for beginners -- but full of depth -- sometimes I watch vids like this twice through just to catch even more of the points you're making and digest them. Entertaining and educational in equal measure. Really means a lot to have someone as positive and passionate making content for people like us. Keep it up!
Masahiro Sakurai touches a little bit on Balancing in His Shoryuken video. I'll let you watch it, but he touches on how he thought he should've made Ryu's input commands stronger than what they currently are compared to the normal inputs
Dota 2 is my main game and I'm always in awe when I read the patch notes because it definitely feels like they take more of a "find the disease" approach to things. You see stuff like a .1 mana per second nerf on someone change them from top tier to bottom. Or a +1 starting armor become a meme about a char who traditionally had 0... but it has a HUGE gameplay feel. Or if a group of heroes seem particularly strong Ice Frog will nerf an item (that they were all using) rather than nerfing the heroes... or may add a new item to counter whatever meta they were doing... it's a super interesting and SUPER complex balancing act. And then they just throw caution to the wind it seems at least once a year and do some kind of MASSIVE update that completely redefines everything and suddenly it feels like I have a whole new game to play again!
KOFXV was definitely like that at first, but then when B. Jenet and Krohnen took over they stayed at the top for a fat minute. It took two rounds of nerfs for them to finally be considered just okay now lol. This recent patch the top tiers are a lot more ambiguous though.
You can't always listen to the playerbase when it comes to balance because they'll want something nerfed just because they got owned by it. They don't actually care about balance, they just don't want to get better.
It's wild how balanced a game like Smash Ultimate is with such a large roster. There are some outliers like Ganondorf at the bottom or Steve at the top for example, but it hasn't had another Brawl MK or Smash4 Bayo and tons of characters are competitively viable. If you look at things like the top 8s and 32s of tournaments, they're so varied.
It’s balanced this way because most of the characters are genuinely not very unique or different from one another and the games engine itself does not lend well to a fun competitive game. Ult has some cool stuff but the game is like 80% lame shit
As a Tiny Channel about the mmo Guild Wars 2's Balance (which has excellent combat, but often a limited development bandwidth allocated for their balance team) : It's refreshing to both see someone who's as knowledgeable and passionate about fighting games as Max talk about balance, and refreshing to know that a HUGE STUDIO like NRS can make both good calls as well as just as baffling decisions as GW2! It turns out studios are studios and nobody's perfect. Certainly not me! 😄
I've been playing Marvel Snap lately and really appreciate the transparency of the patch notes. They'll state their vision for a card and admit that they aren't sure how to achieve it, so they're over-/under-tuning a card temporarily to see what happens. They've also admitted that some synergies/playstyles were just completely overlooked by their internal teams. I don't think fighting games can take this exact approach, but it's nice for devs to speak to us like they're people who have ideas and make mistakes.
@@ddubblegaming3263Kazuya can be zoned out but the risk reward is still in his favor. If he gets you, you're dead. If Steve gets you you're also dead AND he can zone you out. It's crazy.
Both are literally the worst designed Smash characters in history. Sure, Smash 4 Bayonetta and Brawl Meta Knight were also way over-tuned, but Kazuya and Steve are just straight up horribly made.
@@MasterSprintersan1I think kazuya is extremely poorly designed But steve I'll defend because they somehow managed to translate a lot of his own series's design into a fighting game character's kit, it's just that a lot of the laughably broken tech he has was discovered AFTER ult's development cycle, which is a damn shame
Week one every one cried about Sareena being OP with double blades… turns out you can just duck it… lol how people cry first without actually going into training mode to find a solution.
I’ll be very interested in what the launch week of T8 is going to be like as well, especially since this is actually the first Tekken game in the franchise I’ll be playing at launch, so it’ll be fun experiencing all of the highs and lows of it all.
I'm worried about Asuka in Guilty Gear. Because Strive hasn't exactly been known for nerfing characters, but Asuka is to the point where he is almost unplayable to fight against if in the right hands. So they're either going to nerf him and make him unplayable or basically ignore him and keep him this broken
@@ExternalEclips305"real fighting game fans would feel like shit"💀 like gobou isn't a real fighting game fan lol. Asuka is a cool character that people have been asking for. (Before you ask, no I don't play asuka, I play zato lol)
@@ExternalEclips305Hi, it’s me, the One True Scotsman, here to tell you that Asuka being in GG is great and something that fans have been wanting for a long time because he’s so integral to the lore. Fighting games have had long range mage type characters for years now, he’s nothing new.
@@massgunner4152 Anime fighting games design unique characters that don't reminisce past/recent character playing style. Which is why they always come off as broken because balance wasn't even the factor when it come to character design.
I remember reading a balancing dev said their views are 1) Perfect balance is impossible, that's something you have to accept 2) No matter what, you should strive to ensure Garbage and God Tiers are empty. No one should be that bad and none that good. 3) No character should have better than a 6-4 match up. Meaning if two equally skilled players play 10 matches, at most the player with the character advantage should at best win 6 and lose 4.
As a game designer, (not fighting games but still experienced) 1 and 2 are spot on, while 3, in practice contradicts with your rule one, as intended balance is a type of perfect balance, and balancing for matchups instead of game feel, fun, and character individuality, often just makes the problems worse, as characters in similar archetypes to those with bad matchup spreads will also benefit from those changes.
@@yummmemonty7450 That's a fair point. I wouldn't be surprised if that's not something strictly followed and more just a "Hey, if this matchup is too skewed maybe you should reevaluate both characters and see what makes one too strong and the other too weak." But yeah, I agree with you point 3 is a bit weird, but I can get what his intent was in saying it.
Point 3 limits your character design scope. Characters like Dhalsim and Gief are gonna have extreme matchups because they're extreme character archetypes. Haggar vs Magneto in UMvC3 comes to mind as the absolute extreme of this.
One example i find interesting was the development of a brawl mod called project plus (plays like melee with some vets having a 90% identical moveset) Right when they released mewtwo and roy, mewtwo was the best character in the game, but interestingly enough, the dev team addressed something completely different. They realized that by trying to make everyone balanced and using melee fox as the balancing point, they made most of their characters not fun to fight and mewtwo was one of the most frustrating characters due to having broken range, combos, and recovery. In addition, they ignored the philosophy melee had where being offstage meant that you were highly likely to be edgeguard. This made character that had near guaranteed combos, early kill moves, and recoveries that made smash ultimate sora blush. The game wasn't fun for a lot of people after they were done trying out all the surface level stuff. The dev team spent a full year changing the game's balance to reward more skillful play and clever ways to recover instead of having them autopilot their way back to stage. I think this was the best decision they made and while the game will always have its own problems, at least they god rid of one of their biggest ones.
"Hey guys, I actually come from the early 90s and was magically transported to this time! Just wanna say as a fellow video game player the future is DA BOMB!! I love fighting games! Gotta tell me what's fresh these days??" *"Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat!!"*
Still watching the video, I'm dying to see what kind Hell will be unleashed when League of Legend's Fighting game finally comes out. Fighting game + League players = Be afraid.
Look, listen and be amazed by TitanFalls Main Philosphy when it came to deaigning it. " No ONE player or character is Over Powered, if EVERYONE is over powered." Becomes intense sure but fun intense. Peraonally to the KI dev, " You can be proclaimed pros, influencers over the game. But you are not THE DEVELOPERS. WE hear you, we will listen but we will not be bullied into making the game unfun to a more casual playerbase"
Going hard on modifying Dante and leaving him on the exact same place, while my character that obviously needs help is left untouched is not good balancing.
There's one thing about balancing that you also have to keep in mind, and that's the core of a charatcer. Sometimes the idea and kit of a charatcer is naturally better or worse than others, just from the way they were conceived. The question then comes that how much can you change a character before you lose their core identity? If you go too far, you then lose the identity of that character and frustrate people as that's not what they signed up for.
Balancing Pretty much any game is a nightmare and there’s so many factors to take in it can be overwhelming what matters is not rushing your balancing decisions and that each step towards better balance is also a step towards a more fun experience.
Similar balancing stories can be found in a lot of strategy games too, Garen and Sniper (from LoL and DotA 2, respectively) are both beginner's trap characters that have had their share of OP seasons specifically because of that presumption hiding how powerful their buffs actually were over time. Sniper in particular ended up dumpstering an entire tournament overnight with a series of initial meme picks before getting picked/banned every single game (patch 6.83 and TI 2014), leading to him getting nerfed HARD the following season.
It's interesting in terms of general game balance too. Since I play MMOGs, there are lots of people who only complain because the have put in hundreds of hours into one class and can only see the balance in terms of how everything relates to their character. Clearly, the devs need to have a clear vision of what their game is and also never to just agree to everything the community says, because it can be so lopsided.
what's happening (happened?) in sf6 is what I like the call the Melee Effect. If you look at the first tier lists for melee, you see top tier characters initially in low tier spots. It wasn't until the player base itself figured out how to use some of the characters more optimally and how to exploit other character's weaknesses
No more is the signal to noise harder to dig through than the internet, with so many ways for people to project and expect everyone to listen to their caterwauling. So I appreciate when the devs take time, study, learn, and wait for the dust to truly settle instead of knee-jerk react to the baying of livestock that is the Keyboard Developers and the Gamers™.
Smash Ultimate actually had a really interesting approach to balance coming out of Smash 4. Almost universally, the best moves were nerfed and the worst moves were buffed. It didn't matter what character those moves were on or how important those moves were to the character's gameplan. That approach shrunk the power gap and expanded the options for characters that previously relied on 3 good moves to carry their otherwise terrible kit. It was pretty genius for a first draft, even if there were a lot of kinks that needed to be worked out.
The thing I appreciate the most about the MvCI Dante nerf is that in my local scene it got to a point where people were picking up Dante just because he was that good (obviously to win) and as a Dante loyalist, it bothered me a little bit. But after the patch the only people that were still playing Dante had played him from the beginning.
Maximilian Dood: SF6 meta has been figured out Brian F: SF6 meta is still changing (he made a video about this one or two weeks ago) Thinking about meta is pointless, people play characters because they like them or because they are top tier. If people use them more, more championships will be won by these characters. Happy to be proven wrong with a winning divided by usage of character.
If you only play the characters you like, you never have to worry about balance patches. Chasing the meta is a waste of time since it often changes, and as such it isn’t something to really concern yourself with if you aren’t a professional.
And that's the reason why I'm more of a half-casual player. I may try to fight in competitive styles with friends and sometimes online, but I don't try keeping up with the top players. I just wanna have fun with my character and don't care much about losing.
I don’t know about the slower approach to content, but I honestly like SF6’s more restrained approach to balance. Ken and JP are clearly dominant, but the best players in the world are winning without them. The system is so complex and rich that people can quickly develop new strategies to challenge old ones. That’s good balance. I just hope the Ken and JP players are ready to adjust after Akuma drops.
Many people were also angry that NRS didn't nerf Johnny. But i believe it's not that simple to balance him. Because if you nerf his frames he's gonna be trash but have a good parry. If they nerf the parry Johnny is gonna be way less fun. I think Johnny needs a really well thought out balance changes that don't make him garbage which will take time OR just leave him as he is because he's really fun.
Your notes on Dante reminded me Khronen in the patch before the last one. Him & B. Jenet got double knee-capped, and they were still the best 2 characters in the game, the gap just got smaller.
The general rule should be if you can’t get it balanced just give everyone dirty stuff. Fighting games are way more fun when characters are overpowered or a little broken as opposed to boring and not strong enough.
To understand how hard it is, just theory craft your own game in your head. You start with Character A, who is perfectly average in every way, and your game is 100% purely balanced as you can only do mirror matches. Then you add character B, who is stronger, but slower, so when balanced against A he hits left often, but when he does he deals more. A little math and some averaging and you still have a real solid balanced game. Then comes character C, this time you think a zoner would be cool, they have more range than your staple character, A, so A takes more hits trying to get in, so C deals less damage. Again, you manage to achieve decent balance... But wait, when you test C vs B, B is just too slow to really get in at all, and loses a ton, so then what? Maybe you reduce C's hp to create balance with B, but then you've just thrown off the perfect balance you've made with A, uh oh! Etc. And that's rudimental with only 3 characters, a real full game is quite the beast.
Felt killer instincts did it the best possible way most players cannot tell what’s the main reason a character is so op, if they just listened to the community with jago he’d still be as op as he was in the beginning
Shotgun to the knee approach with SF6 would legitimately destroy that game. I still believe that balance patch next year should have little to no nerfs and all buffs (unless Ed or Akuma are game breaking in some way) as much as I hate fighting Ken and Cammy they do NOT need nerfs and neither does JP. The way that game is right now they really just need to bring low tiers up, not even to top tier status but just up from where they are. Characters like Lily, Gief and AKI especially. The game is just near pristine right now and they really should just keep that, taking away will just muddy the enjoyment that is there right now, thoughtfully adding will only enhance it.
Not a fighting game, but waiting out to hear the problem instead of patching it quickly reminds me of the Corpse dilemma back in Darkest Dungeons. And months later when they eventually gave an option to 'fix' the problem, less than (I think) 5% of players toggled the patch.
This is funny. I wasn't in chat at the time of this, but I was watching KoF 15 on TNS channel, and I was talking with chat about how much crazy change the meta for KoF 15 went through. After the first meta team (Vanessa Terry Ralf) you get somewhere around Rock, B Jenet, and Khronen, with Rock just being simply the best character in the game, and a plethora of other characters being really good to use. At the moment, you can't use the restroom without Iori handing you the roll of toilet paper next to you. He's in every team.
Although not a fighting game, I'm part of an MMO that has both a PVE and PVP balancing issue. And the last 10 minutes is a REALLY good explanation of what devs have to deal with. 1: Developers don't know how their games are going to be played -> This is important. They know the main mechanics and general concepts, and how THEY would use it. But so many different people means people are going to play it different, including what is considered the most optimal way, and resulting in ways that are unexpected. They also don't look at what's the most optimal way to play, but what's enjoyable to play. People just want optimal. Even me, someone who works on the game, plays different from the thousands of other people who play the game/same character as me. 2: Spacing out balance patches means stuff gets to sit and cook for a bit with the changes. You don't change something and then immediately do more changes. That just means something gets overtuned as a result, and creates more problems. 3: 15:50 onward is the perfect example of the Dev vs Player idea of balance. Players look at the issues/symptoms, Devs look for the reason/disease. And you can't rely on the players for the cure. If you have a headache, you'd suggest an Aspirin. But what if that headache is being caused by something else? The Aspirin eventually becomes a placebo and the problem continues to exist. Then it goes from headache to joint pain. Or tingling in the fingers/toes. Or constantly being tired...and eventually you just get a character who's bad at everything instead of being good at something. It sucks to have to wait such a long time for a change, but you're better off waiting for the root cause to be addressed, not the symptom. A gut reaction patch to bug/hot fix a major issue is one thing. A gut reaction patch to nerf/buff something hurts the game more in the long run.
Keith said it best. Sometimes people cry way way way too much instead of trying to adapt and that's why some people hate casuals (not all of them). Though lately some PROs been on their feelings about the games. Sometimes you need to let the game run to see how it performs and then you can take some notes and find a way to fix it but not listen to everything a salty player says.
So many devs and people forget that all kinds of data matters. Reach, damage, combo-ability, start up frames, end lag frames, set-ups, baits, movement speed etc etc. The best way is to make like a big chart of all these stats overall and check missing acts of weak characters and why strong ones are strong. We all know Sol's 50/50 pressure into a counter punish which made it even stronger. Because it wsn't a normal 50/50. It was a counter 50/50 if you failed the check. Just frame trapped into command grabs lol. And that is without his insane combo damage from the stronger counter combo starters he would get. Just insanity.
@@Carlitonsp1I agree, but Ngl, I do feel like all the characters are playable, but there always gonna be those Character that play the game better than most
@@Carlitonsp1 Don't know where you've been looking but they dropped off hella after the last few updates. Pretty much since update 2.1 those two have pretty much just seen a big drop off some of the most used characters right now have been Terry and Ralph and even Orochi Yashiro
Something that bothered me about NRS first balance patch is that they decided to nerf some of the top tiers (Raiden, Baraka, Cyrax and what not), but still Johnny Cage remained untouched and he is still one of the scariest characters in the game to fight against But, the characters that needed the most help remained also untouched or made even worse. You can say that Scorpion got nerfed in a way, his air combos are a bit harder to do and they do less damage, and Sub-Zero which needs a couple buffs also remained untouched in his frame data and damage scaling...
I know its not considered a fighting game by many, but the amount of times For Honor devs have nerfed a character to then buff them later on because they are over nerfed. They are the perfect example of nerfing the symptoms more than the disease IMO.
It is still relevant that with happy chaos the way they approached him with balance changes was to nerf the cheapest tactic’s damage but keep the rest of it consistent and or buffed with the normals or his steady aim now having cancel shortcuts. It soft forced people to use normal strings to do good damage rather than 5D,Draw, gun x5, super
If they're mechanically better then I think they can compensate with less health and/or damage, slow sown their frames. Anything to compensate so they're not fastest, strongest, highest health with most useful moveset.
In theory? Sure. In application? Not so much. No amount of individual skill is going to make up for your opponent having better tools than you do. Tier lists exist for a reason. Low/bottom tier isn't necessarily bad. They just don't have the tools a top/high tier does.
@@dylancross1039 I didn't say tier placement doesn't matter at all. In some games, it matters more than others, but overall, player skill does matter more. I mean, as a DK main, if I tried my hand at Steve, I wouldn't know a dirt block from a diamond pickaxe.
My favorite DLC balance story is Pokken Tournament DX where they released exactly 2 new characters (along with 2 support sets) through DLC: Aegislash and Blastoise. Aegislash on release was undeniably the #1 best character in the game. In the next patch, he was toned down just enough to where people actually still debate to this day whether he's still the best character or just top 3. Blastoise released afterward and has been known as the definitive bottom tier of the game. Blastoise didn't get any fancy balance changes, but obviously everyone tried to make him work, and actually to some success... just enough to argue "Is he the worst, or maybe bottom 3?" Complete balance between the DLC.
As soon as I saw this, I immediately thought of killer instinct. Their balancing around the mid to late season 2 were great. Especially when they fixed my boi fulgore.
17:20 The problem about looking for the disease is that you leave a festering wound open for possibly months at a time. People would rather have a band aid then a cure than just have a late cure. Looking for the root issue is good, leaving the base issue open is terrible and that's what makes people mad.
watching this 8 months on n it's cool hearing max say sf6 meta was figured out bc it changed so much. yeah, ken n luke n jp were all high tier for the majority of s1 but the season was so well balanced that the who's top 10 included every character in the game at one point. ppl moved juri from top3 to not even top 10 and then UMA won capcom cup. japan thought cammy, chun, and deejay were busted. v few american pros played those characters. blanka's mixups went from scary to downright oppressive. and ed, rashid and aki all took a significant amount of time to really solidify their gameplan and we're still finding new stuff with those characters to this day. not every game can take the balance approach sf6 did (game was delayed twice so they got quite a bit of dev time making tht perfect launch patch), but it's great to watch metas develop n evolve without constant patching.
I honestly wish people took the appropriate approach when looking into a fighting and that is pick who looks interesting and cool to you as a person versus on this character is easy or I wanna feel good and feel like I know how to play so I’m going to pick the easiest character to learn or pick the most broken. It’s like super frustrating especially when I come across someone he thinks they are playing good and they play me and get upset and they are losing and using the easiest characters in the game. I main liu kang by the way. But anyway, love your content Max. You are the father of fighting games for me 😂🔥💯👍🏾
Wow, that Iron Galaxy part really was eye opening. They really did what the hell they set out to do, find a solution and make a very reasonable balance change, while even giving the players the extra treat of pulling the curtain and explaining the thought process.
Gets hated anyway.
That was really cool to hear. I like how they fixed that issue
The moral of the story actually is that players have no fucking clue how to balance a game. I REALLY wish more folks would watch that Iron Galaxy section of this vid because, as a dev myself, it nearly brought tears to my eyes to see someone on tape finally say what I've been trying to tell people for literal DECADES. The internet as a whole almost never actually understands what the real problem is when it comes to game balance and, more often than not, it takes weeks or months to actually diagnose what the problem really is (like he said).
That depend on the game and the type of player you're referring. Speed runners are a different breed, they will make the entire dev team/QA look like a complete joke for how much they break the game. However, no average player play like them. So it both side have no clue.
There is a popular saying, i think maybe coined by Mark Rosewater of MtG. "Players a GREAT at identifying certain problems, but TERRIBLE at identifying causes or solutions"
@@Underground3 Being able to break the game, doesn't mean they necessarily know how to fix it.
Iron Galaxy, the same people that nerfed Sabrewulf because of two people?
Good take and all from that guy, but still didn't care for that and I like those guys.
I don't feel like we needed 5 months of Raiden and Baraka deleting 50% HP of their opponents everytime they sneeze on their general direction
The core problem with fighting games is that no matter how hard you try there are two things you just can't control
1- a player's hurt ego
2- the fact that a top tiers will always exist and any balance changes would just change who's the top tier
Exactly, it is all just a cycle. It doesn't matter who is buffed or nerfed. In the end, there will always be a top tier, who it is is the only thing that changed, and we would be back to Square One.
Lore accurate Dante air comboing the shit outta Thanos is such a beautiful idea to me, nice stones bro now check this SPINNY MOVE
I would say that lore accurate Dante would still lose to lore accurate Thanos, but he is way cooler.
@@unskilledgamer3642with stones yes without stones Thanos is in the grave
@@nyxranobody3690 Even without the stones Thanos has done some incredible feats. Like actually taking on Ghost Rider who (at his full power) is clearly stronger than Dante in any way.
But even with those feats Thanos would be slightly lower than Dante.
To be fair feats really stop mattering against ghost rider since marvel writers just LOVE to turn off his powers if they don't want him to win
As a UX designer (not in video games). The customer always, always want to fix the symptom and don't want to hear about fixing the problem. It's infuriating sometimes. But to run a bussiness you also have to thow a bone to the customer otherwise they will eventually stop paying.
I sympathise with the developers. It is a hard task to both balance the game in a "correct" way and pleasing the customer at the same time.
Same here. You work in design/research you learn how to read between the lines and not take user/player complaints at face value.
Customers do not know what the fuck they want. :^)
This is why a lot of competitive game companies end up just taking the road of cyclical balancing where they just purposely let things be OP for a while before nerfing it and then making something else OP
It's very different in the video games landscape though, in your case you work for a company and they pay you 100% of the money you get from your service. They are the only client you have, you can't lose them so you better treat them well. In a fighting game, your source of money is way more complicated, you're selling products that people buy and pay you once, plus there are sponsorship deals, licensing, etc etc. Your only worry is to keep the scene going, there isn't a single entity to please. One lesson game devs learn about competitive games is that there will always be people complaining, and the amount of complaining isn't necessarily tied to the health of the scene.
@@rafaelbordoni516 Not sure what point you think you're making or trying to contradict but it's not addressing the one we are. Users of B2C and B2B services complain all of the time. They are not that different (we do experience fewer death threats though). The point is designing an experience is nowhere near as easy as the users/players, who have a very limited few of what the work entails, believe it is. It's addressing the Dunning Krueger.
"Your only worry is to keep the scene going, there isn't a single entity to please" Keeping the 'scene going' is a challenge of all design, we don't just one and done and it's a huge misconception to believe that is the case.
Negatives aside, I appreciate my health bar not exploding every time Baraka looks my way
What healthbar? - baraka
*Baraka laugh from that one interaction against Johnny Cage*
Chip damage is like 200 damage.
Yea a character with mix doing 50% per touch is fucking insane games still mad fun tho
“I’d rather explode than have T A R K A T” - Baraka, probably
Same thing with MVCI Dante happened with Labcoat 21 in DBFZ. When she dropped, she was far and away the most powerful character in the game, and then the next patch absolutely eviscerated her with tons of nerfs, and she was STILL the best character in the game, just by a much narrower margin. It wasn't until the NEXT balance patch that she was brought down to the same level as the rest of the roster.
There is no way someone thought of the 21 percent nerf and expected her to be fair
I can hear all the kid buu mains laughing maniacally 😂
Funny that she was originally the final boss... I guess having to wrangle THE HUNGER was holding her back A LOT!
That Jago story is really interesting. I think a lot of players of video games in general forget that there is no job or college course or degree that is ABOUT game balance. This isnt even fighting game exclusive. As someone who loves so many multiplayer video games, that Jago example is felt in games like Overwatch or League or and competitive multiplayer game.
For me everyone should trate a game as an ecosystem: No person will know how it will function until someone carefully study how it works. If you introduce a very strange organism to that ecosystem, like a big balance pach or a strong DLC charcter, you problably will ruin the natural order in it, and will problably miss the illness you where trying to fix because you give it the wrong medicine thinking it was another cause for that problem.
Perfect analogy
yeah the ecosystem is the perfect word for game balancing. great idea!
Mk is trash dnt waste time
Happy Chaos: Hello there...
That's just tourneyfaq speak for "I don't like new things".
Never seen that KI developer video before. That man is smart, most gamers never know what they want but as a developer you need to figure out what gamers need rather than want.
There needs to be multiple devs like him on every team
I want Keits to balance all my fighting games. I love the level of thought and analysis he and his team put into making changes, especially when they could explain why they were making changes so it didn't just feel random "oh cause we felt like it"
I agree with the 2 take aways from all this:
Knee jerk reactions to things are typically a bad idea, especially when a lot of moving parts are involved.
Loud people complaining aren't always right when it comes to figuring out what the solution and fix is.
The Iron Galaxy segment pretty much sums it up. Players definitely found a problem, but they had no clue what was actually the culprit, regardless of what they thought. Usually, when players bring up problems, the solutions they suggest are extremely surface level and don't tend to address the root problem affecting the system as a whole. Devs need time to study the issue, see if players find a way around it that "solves" it, and then implement the right fix that will properly address things. It takes a good dev to do that; there are plenty of devs that have no idea what they are doing. With that said, you can't just shotgun out a change because a group of people were large enough and loud enough.
Your comment has made me realize that balancing a game is a lot like assuming the role of detective: The playerbase finds a crime and then pins the blame on whatever they dislike most (in Jago's case, it was his healing). Rather than crumble under the volume of the mob's voice and its accusations, game developers should instead find the true culprit. If a character's move should be theoretically balanced but performs poorly in practice, it may just be that it doesn't have the support it needs to do what it was meant to (i.e. Jiren's slow command grab in DBFZ being made more powerful indirectly by buffing other aspects of the character).
@@jasonalen7459 That's about it. Of course players only pin the blame on the first thing they notice, they don't spend more time thinking about it.
When you feel sick and go to a doctor you don't just want a pill that blends out the pain, you want the doctor to figure out what illness you actually have because you can't tell yourself.
But when playing games the players think differently. They don't feel any problems on themself, and very often they think of themselfs as experts of this game because they are somewhat good at it. But being good at playing and being good at programming are two different thing that many players just won't get.
The true balance are the friends you make along the way 🤗
The one piece is real!
Damn man 😢
I need no friends on my way to the top.
As Nogla once said to Marcel: “You Bitch”
Right in the feels, man. 😢
Still remember a Ken Lobb interview in one of the big magazines about KI2/Gold back in the day. The topic was about the absence of Riptor, Thunder and Cinder. He basically said you could either have more characters and an unbalanced game, or fewer characters and a balanced game.
Harada said effectively the same thing once when talking about Tekken. How it was one of the biggest frustrations making fighting games, because it's the two things that players want the most yet they completely work against each other.
I've always preferred the former. I couldn't care less about competitive play. I play with who I want and consider the most fun to use. About 80 percent of the time, they are *far* from the best.
However, that doesn't mean I don't understand or care about balancing.
On the topic of KI, I remember something I heard a lot in film class, which is that audiences are great at identifying a problem, but terrible at identifying a cure. Another good example similar to Jago is Jiren from DBFZ. He was super low-tier, and a lot of people blamed it on his 5H being a slow command grab. Now, he's super good despite his 5H being barely any faster, but his combo and stagger game is much stronger so the 5H is a lot more threatening.
Dont forget that people cried manon was broken. They really had her in top 5, she was considered on par with jp. Now i often see her as bottom 3, if not the worst.
Yeah as a casual fighting game fan watching all of these games from afar, I admire the restraint Capcom has had with just letting things play out and not changing things so suddenly. I remember when Juri was too good and I literally had a friend call me cheap for play Honda in the beginning. I'm not saying it's a perfect answer, but I'm interested to see how everyone feels next year.
That's just the natural progression of grapplers. They're "broken" until people figure out their strike/throw. once that's figured out, they rocket to bottom 3 because they just do NOT have the tools the rest of the cast has specifically to compensate for their grabs being strong.
Yeah out of all of them street fighter is low key balancing the best rn. They’re not listening to the crying players and are actually giving the game time to breathe. I thought guile was the best character for the first month of the game, now I think it’s Ken. Many people said Manon was busted then they figured out her drive rush and neutral in general is weak and she has a lot of bad matchups. People were screaming “nerf juri,” now you barely see her in tournament anymore. The game is changing by itself that in my opinion is a sign of good balancing. Because they aren’t patching anything huge and changing the mechanics of the game yet the players are now experimenting and seeing potential in every character. There really isn’t a huge difference between ryu and Luke outside of better frames and oki. Yet there are pro players choosing to play ryu. I think if they took the mk route and instantly just nerfed the shit out of something without waiting for that thing to change (which is ironic considering everyone was saying sareena was the best kameo upon release then people figured out her shit and realised she was and that someone like cyrax is better) there game would be a lot more balanced.
This is pretty typical for new games, especially new Street Fighter games. Every single time Cammy is placed solidly midtier on release and skyrockets to top 5 within a couple months.
@@Prodbyjah464 I think as usual, people don't realize the depth of everything and this is why SF6's approach is actually great. People don't get that Juri can have a terrible time against zoners like Guile. She doesn't have many tools to get around projectiles. Hers goes along the ground and can't cancel out the opponent's fireball, and even her dive kick needs to be a read instead of reaction, which is very risky. If she wasn't INSANELY agile she'd get even more destroyed in a lot of matchups. Ever since maining her I fear Guile more than ever. She needs half-screen dash > throw and fullscreen DR because even those are dangerous against a skilled and aware opponent.
The whole "super strong DLC character" thing will ALWAYS bring me back to Blazblue when we got Kokonoe 1.0. She had so much crazy shit that people nicknamed her "Brokenoe". She got nerfed and was still pretty good. And the funniest thing about it, is we'd been begging for her to become playable for YEARS.
Should I expect a meteor to fall?
--Rachel Alucard, on Kokonoe's arrival (before getting Astral Finished)
I pick the character I like and connect with and then get as good as I can with them. Top tier is never a concern for me picking my character.
It shouldn’t be unless you compete. I don’t understand why I have to only play Baraka Raiden and Johnny
Same, never picked based off anything but If I like them or they look cool, though for mk1 I actually ended up picking top tier for the first time, not the kameos though thank god
Valid
@@j.b.595 the big advantage of having friends to play with. You can enjoy those games without competing for the meta online.
For me is a concern as I try not to use a Top Tier unless is really some of my all time favorites like Noob Saibot, Kabal, Jade or Smoke.. Thankfully in the last 2 games none of them has been considered top 5 maybe except Kabal but he was execution heavy in MK11.
As someone who’s worked in software (not video game) QA: it’s so true that you can never fully anticipate how someone will use your product. You can run so many manual tests, automated tests, usability studies, accessibility studies… it simply won’t be enough because someone out there is always either way smarter or way dumber than you
And when we're talking about 5 million people using your product(MK for example) then you will for sure have a lot of both :D
"Developers have to find the disease instead of listening to people crying about the symptoms"
Overwatch could have learned so much from this instead of panic nerfing and buffing everything.
I'm a Melty Blood AACC fan (something you may be able to tell by my pfp) and this game I think is one of the craziest fighting games in terms of content because of how massive the roster is. 93 characters and counting, because there are 31 unique characters and each character has 3 distinct style choices, labeled Crescent, Half, and Full Moon. This is one of my favorite things about it. It is really interesting how lots of characters in that game have their 3 choices not too different from each other in terms of power (Shiki Ryougi and Shiki Nanaya for example), while other characters are totally different (such as C-Roa and C-Seifuku Akiha, who are orders of magnitude more powerful than the other versions of themselves, mainly C-Roa.)
But, the most impressive thing about it is how relatively fair the game is despite having to juggle balancing 93 characters. There are only a few bottom-of-the-barrel character versions, as in less than 10 of 93 (Though F-NAC is admittedly unusably bad) while there are really only two characters who are memed about for being disgustingly good, the aforementioned C-Roa alongside F-Hime. Despite this, almost any character is viable if you practice, and there's also plenty of reasons not to play the best version of any character. Even with how crazy good C-Roa is, I personally play H-Roa because C-Roa is ridiculously reliant on optimal inputs while H-Roa is much more manageable while still being high mid tier. All in all, I think its one of the best fighting games due to its sheer diversity of characters while still retaining a good balance, which is hard enough with like 20 characters, and this game has more than 4 times that.
Buff zangief in MK1
no way man, Zangief with Jago kameo is so fucking broken you gotta be outta your mind, especially since his final smash is so busted right now
I love how the thumbnail has all these cool characters. Then there’s Minecraft Steve.
So the KI team learned what Harada learned years ago........"Don't ask me for SHIIIIIT!" .
no matter how talented and dedicated your QA team and Testers/developers are they simply won't be able to stress test, experiment and push the boundaries of the game to figure out how it'll be played and what is and isn't good like 10.000+ players can. It's simply a numbers game. When your game gets into the hands of that many people, new stuff that the devs simply couldn't foresee will be discovered.
Idk why ppl don't understand this. No matter how much testing goes they won't find everything
NRS had pro players on their QA / test team. You mean to say nobody played once against baraka / cyrax or raiden / cyrax or anybody / cyrax and didn’t say wait a second, this is super silly guys?
It’s hard for me to buy that. It’s boring as hell to watch / play against string on block into cyrax into plus frames and then into another one of those sequences
Dying endlessly by literal chip should set off people who play casually or competitive.
Then again mk1 released with an endless amount of bugs so maybe it was not even looked at
Special mention should be given to Smash Ultimate, to where last I heard, every character has about a 50% win rate. That's some pretty insane balance.
That is seriously impressive
Yup, you can literally see the top 8 of every major tournament, and the variety of characters is astounding.
Even in top 32 is rare to see the same character more than twice.
Just this past weekend we had two majors (one in JP and other in the US), and the top 8 for both of them were: Pyra/Mythra, Steve, Mr. Game and Watch, Sonic, Yoshi, Ryu, Fox, Shulk, Min Min, Incineroar, Corrin, Roy, Rosalina, Peach and Rob x2.
Two top 8's, two different countries, and only one character repeated (Rob).
Obviously the game isn't perfect, but it's still incredible how well balanced it is for the amount of characters it has.
Outside of Steve, smash ultimate is one of the most balanced fighting games of all time
But Smash isn’t a fighting game :)
@@zaneheaston8254bait :)
I like his take about why DLCs are potentially that good. Like people have this weird (but not completely unfounded) idea that DLCs that have been super good because they want to convince people to buy them, which I feel does not make sense. So I agree with Max that the main reason why that tends to happen are because devs want to add more stuff, have new ideas etc. And I've always believed that since there's a significant gap between making the first 20-30 characters for the base game, and the individual characters that get released in a span of 5 or so years, with gaps between one another. And by then you would develop a different design philosophy, you'd develop a different balancing philosophy, you'd develop new ideas you wanna try to squeeze in. Because making DLC characters for FGs is almost like making characters for a new fighting game, yet not quite there yet.
Yeah, I've noticed that DLC characters aren't necessarily better, they just have more complex/numerous tools on average since the Devs have cool ideas they want to implement. (Same reason new characters are usually more complex than returning ones on average unless you alter/improve the returning character's moveset.)
It's just that having more complex/numerous tools means that there are more ways for them to be good, which then usually means they are stronger.
Amazing Video! All your content has been an amazing way to get into the fighting game community. It's always welcoming -- easy to understand even for beginners -- but full of depth -- sometimes I watch vids like this twice through just to catch even more of the points you're making and digest them. Entertaining and educational in equal measure. Really means a lot to have someone as positive and passionate making content for people like us. Keep it up!
Masahiro Sakurai touches a little bit on Balancing in His Shoryuken video. I'll let you watch it, but he touches on how he thought he should've made Ryu's input commands stronger than what they currently are compared to the normal inputs
I enjoyed your half Arnold Schwarzenegger half surfer frat boy accent at 9:22
That KI interview is goated. I wish you had linked it in the description so I could watch the full thing later.
Dota 2 is my main game and I'm always in awe when I read the patch notes because it definitely feels like they take more of a "find the disease" approach to things. You see stuff like a .1 mana per second nerf on someone change them from top tier to bottom. Or a +1 starting armor become a meme about a char who traditionally had 0... but it has a HUGE gameplay feel. Or if a group of heroes seem particularly strong Ice Frog will nerf an item (that they were all using) rather than nerfing the heroes... or may add a new item to counter whatever meta they were doing... it's a super interesting and SUPER complex balancing act. And then they just throw caution to the wind it seems at least once a year and do some kind of MASSIVE update that completely redefines everything and suddenly it feels like I have a whole new game to play again!
KOFXV was definitely like that at first, but then when B. Jenet and Krohnen took over they stayed at the top for a fat minute. It took two rounds of nerfs for them to finally be considered just okay now lol. This recent patch the top tiers are a lot more ambiguous though.
You can't always listen to the playerbase when it comes to balance because they'll want something nerfed just because they got owned by it. They don't actually care about balance, they just don't want to get better.
100% facts
It's wild how balanced a game like Smash Ultimate is with such a large roster. There are some outliers like Ganondorf at the bottom or Steve at the top for example, but it hasn't had another Brawl MK or Smash4 Bayo and tons of characters are competitively viable. If you look at things like the top 8s and 32s of tournaments, they're so varied.
It’s balanced this way because most of the characters are genuinely not very unique or different from one another and the games engine itself does not lend well to a fun competitive game. Ult has some cool stuff but the game is like 80% lame shit
As a Tiny Channel about the mmo Guild Wars 2's Balance (which has excellent combat, but often a limited development bandwidth allocated for their balance team) : It's refreshing to both see someone who's as knowledgeable and passionate about fighting games as Max talk about balance, and refreshing to know that a HUGE STUDIO like NRS can make both good calls as well as just as baffling decisions as GW2! It turns out studios are studios and nobody's perfect. Certainly not me! 😄
I've been playing Marvel Snap lately and really appreciate the transparency of the patch notes. They'll state their vision for a card and admit that they aren't sure how to achieve it, so they're over-/under-tuning a card temporarily to see what happens. They've also admitted that some synergies/playstyles were just completely overlooked by their internal teams. I don't think fighting games can take this exact approach, but it's nice for devs to speak to us like they're people who have ideas and make mistakes.
thats the new ish marvel card game right?
@@kR-qj7rw yep!
Seeing Steve in the thumbnail had me laughing, Bro is an unstoppable force in Smash along with Kazuya. 😂
Ironically a good zone lowkey bullies Kazuya. STEVE though? Ridiculous
@@ddubblegaming3263Kazuya can be zoned out but the risk reward is still in his favor. If he gets you, you're dead. If Steve gets you you're also dead AND he can zone you out. It's crazy.
Both are literally the worst designed Smash characters in history. Sure, Smash 4 Bayonetta and Brawl Meta Knight were also way over-tuned, but Kazuya and Steve are just straight up horribly made.
I would rather fight Steve than Kazuya. Kazuya is a menace.
@@MasterSprintersan1I think kazuya is extremely poorly designed
But steve I'll defend because they somehow managed to translate a lot of his own series's design into a fighting game character's kit, it's just that a lot of the laughably broken tech he has was discovered AFTER ult's development cycle, which is a damn shame
Week one every one cried about Sareena being OP with double blades… turns out you can just duck it… lol how people cry first without actually going into training mode to find a solution.
I’ll be very interested in what the launch week of T8 is going to be like as well, especially since this is actually the first Tekken game in the franchise I’ll be playing at launch, so it’ll be fun experiencing all of the highs and lows of it all.
I'm worried about Asuka in Guilty Gear. Because Strive hasn't exactly been known for nerfing characters, but Asuka is to the point where he is almost unplayable to fight against if in the right hands. So they're either going to nerf him and make him unplayable or basically ignore him and keep him this broken
@@ExternalEclips305"real fighting game fans would feel like shit"💀 like gobou isn't a real fighting game fan lol. Asuka is a cool character that people have been asking for.
(Before you ask, no I don't play asuka, I play zato lol)
@@ExternalEclips305Hi, it’s me, the One True Scotsman, here to tell you that Asuka being in GG is great and something that fans have been wanting for a long time because he’s so integral to the lore. Fighting games have had long range mage type characters for years now, he’s nothing new.
What wrong with Asuka? You don't like dealing with pot of greed or Exodia in turn one.
Now that i think of it there seems to be a pattern of anime fighting games with poor balance patches.
@@massgunner4152 Anime fighting games design unique characters that don't reminisce past/recent character playing style. Which is why they always come off as broken because balance wasn't even the factor when it come to character design.
I remember reading a balancing dev said their views are
1) Perfect balance is impossible, that's something you have to accept
2) No matter what, you should strive to ensure Garbage and God Tiers are empty. No one should be that bad and none that good.
3) No character should have better than a 6-4 match up. Meaning if two equally skilled players play 10 matches, at most the player with the character advantage should at best win 6 and lose 4.
Look at ninjakilla mkx Liu Kang wintrate 😂
As a game designer, (not fighting games but still experienced) 1 and 2 are spot on, while 3, in practice contradicts with your rule one, as intended balance is a type of perfect balance, and balancing for matchups instead of game feel, fun, and character individuality, often just makes the problems worse, as characters in similar archetypes to those with bad matchup spreads will also benefit from those changes.
@@yummmemonty7450 That's a fair point. I wouldn't be surprised if that's not something strictly followed and more just a "Hey, if this matchup is too skewed maybe you should reevaluate both characters and see what makes one too strong and the other too weak."
But yeah, I agree with you point 3 is a bit weird, but I can get what his intent was in saying it.
Point 3 limits your character design scope. Characters like Dhalsim and Gief are gonna have extreme matchups because they're extreme character archetypes. Haggar vs Magneto in UMvC3 comes to mind as the absolute extreme of this.
One example i find interesting was the development of a brawl mod called project plus (plays like melee with some vets having a 90% identical moveset) Right when they released mewtwo and roy, mewtwo was the best character in the game, but interestingly enough, the dev team addressed something completely different. They realized that by trying to make everyone balanced and using melee fox as the balancing point, they made most of their characters not fun to fight and mewtwo was one of the most frustrating characters due to having broken range, combos, and recovery. In addition, they ignored the philosophy melee had where being offstage meant that you were highly likely to be edgeguard. This made character that had near guaranteed combos, early kill moves, and recoveries that made smash ultimate sora blush. The game wasn't fun for a lot of people after they were done trying out all the surface level stuff. The dev team spent a full year changing the game's balance to reward more skillful play and clever ways to recover instead of having them autopilot their way back to stage. I think this was the best decision they made and while the game will always have its own problems, at least they god rid of one of their biggest ones.
Always value your point of view. You make some of the best videos on fighting games, wether you are playing them or discussing them.
Max is still teaching me new things in fighting games. Much deserved success max. 😮
"Hey guys, I actually come from the early 90s and was magically transported to this time! Just wanna say as a fellow video game player the future is DA BOMB!! I love fighting games! Gotta tell me what's fresh these days??"
*"Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat!!"*
Still watching the video, I'm dying to see what kind Hell will be unleashed when League of Legend's Fighting game finally comes out.
Fighting game + League players = Be afraid.
If the same community that plays the actual moba shifts over, prepare for a very toxic fighting game lol
If it's *those* kinds of players we're on about, then I think we can safely say they'll drop the game on day 1, regardless of how good it is
@@logantaylor1834league players are very stubborn. They’ll stick with it out of spite
Source: Me, a league player
Nah, im pretty sure none of those league players know how to do a quarter circle. They'll leave quickly.
@@pinksywedarnoc8017ok but you don't know how to freeze a wave (also there are no motion inputs in Project L)
Look, listen and be amazed by TitanFalls Main Philosphy when it came to deaigning it. " No ONE player or character is Over Powered, if EVERYONE is over powered." Becomes intense sure but fun intense. Peraonally to the KI dev, " You can be proclaimed pros, influencers over the game. But you are not THE DEVELOPERS. WE hear you, we will listen but we will not be bullied into making the game unfun to a more casual playerbase"
That Keits clip always makes me second-guess specific nerfs (or buffs!) I'd want to see
Going hard on modifying Dante and leaving him on the exact same place, while my character that obviously needs help is left untouched is not good balancing.
There's one thing about balancing that you also have to keep in mind, and that's the core of a charatcer. Sometimes the idea and kit of a charatcer is naturally better or worse than others, just from the way they were conceived. The question then comes that how much can you change a character before you lose their core identity? If you go too far, you then lose the identity of that character and frustrate people as that's not what they signed up for.
This reminds me of the Core A-Gaming "Why we should buff instead of nerf" video.
Balancing Pretty much any game is a nightmare and there’s so many factors to take in it can be overwhelming what matters is not rushing your balancing decisions and that each step towards better balance is also a step towards a more fun experience.
Similar balancing stories can be found in a lot of strategy games too, Garen and Sniper (from LoL and DotA 2, respectively) are both beginner's trap characters that have had their share of OP seasons specifically because of that presumption hiding how powerful their buffs actually were over time.
Sniper in particular ended up dumpstering an entire tournament overnight with a series of initial meme picks before getting picked/banned every single game (patch 6.83 and TI 2014), leading to him getting nerfed HARD the following season.
Ive never seen such an uproar of people so upset 😂😂 I love the patch
The ending video is a really good messages to gamedevs of any game with a competitive element in general.
Love the balance of gameplay and education that comes from this channel. That segment from Iron Galaxy was awesome.
Scorpion in Injustice 1, despite being nerfed heavily, still was fun to play imo.
It's interesting in terms of general game balance too. Since I play MMOGs, there are lots of people who only complain because the have put in hundreds of hours into one class and can only see the balance in terms of how everything relates to their character. Clearly, the devs need to have a clear vision of what their game is and also never to just agree to everything the community says, because it can be so lopsided.
what's happening (happened?) in sf6 is what I like the call the Melee Effect. If you look at the first tier lists for melee, you see top tier characters initially in low tier spots. It wasn't until the player base itself figured out how to use some of the characters more optimally and how to exploit other character's weaknesses
No more is the signal to noise harder to dig through than the internet, with so many ways for people to project and expect everyone to listen to their caterwauling. So I appreciate when the devs take time, study, learn, and wait for the dust to truly settle instead of knee-jerk react to the baying of livestock that is the Keyboard Developers and the Gamers™.
Smash Ultimate actually had a really interesting approach to balance coming out of Smash 4. Almost universally, the best moves were nerfed and the worst moves were buffed. It didn't matter what character those moves were on or how important those moves were to the character's gameplan. That approach shrunk the power gap and expanded the options for characters that previously relied on 3 good moves to carry their otherwise terrible kit. It was pretty genius for a first draft, even if there were a lot of kinks that needed to be worked out.
I play who I can. I don't care how "good" they are. If I can play them, I will.
The thing I appreciate the most about the MvCI Dante nerf is that in my local scene it got to a point where people were picking up Dante just because he was that good (obviously to win) and as a Dante loyalist, it bothered me a little bit. But after the patch the only people that were still playing Dante had played him from the beginning.
Maximilian Dood: SF6 meta has been figured out
Brian F: SF6 meta is still changing (he made a video about this one or two weeks ago)
Thinking about meta is pointless, people play characters because they like them or because they are top tier. If people use them more, more championships will be won by these characters. Happy to be proven wrong with a winning divided by usage of character.
This was really interesting thanks max and vs gamers.
I'm surprised that Smash Ultimate Kazuya didn't come up when Max started talking about the DLC anomaly.
If you only play the characters you like, you never have to worry about balance patches. Chasing the meta is a waste of time since it often changes, and as such it isn’t something to really concern yourself with if you aren’t a professional.
And that's the reason why I'm more of a half-casual player. I may try to fight in competitive styles with friends and sometimes online, but I don't try keeping up with the top players. I just wanna have fun with my character and don't care much about losing.
I really can't enjoy fighting games if not playing them competitively and yet I never cared (and Im secure I'll never care) about meta
I don’t know about the slower approach to content, but I honestly like SF6’s more restrained approach to balance. Ken and JP are clearly dominant, but the best players in the world are winning without them. The system is so complex and rich that people can quickly develop new strategies to challenge old ones. That’s good balance. I just hope the Ken and JP players are ready to adjust after Akuma drops.
😂😂😂
Many people were also angry that NRS didn't nerf Johnny. But i believe it's not that simple to balance him. Because if you nerf his frames he's gonna be trash but have a good parry. If they nerf the parry Johnny is gonna be way less fun. I think Johnny needs a really well thought out balance changes that don't make him garbage which will take time OR just leave him as he is because he's really fun.
Your notes on Dante reminded me Khronen in the patch before the last one. Him & B. Jenet got double knee-capped, and they were still the best 2 characters in the game, the gap just got smaller.
The general rule should be if you can’t get it balanced just give everyone dirty stuff. Fighting games are way more fun when characters are overpowered or a little broken as opposed to boring and not strong enough.
WOW, this in an insanely good deep dive!
The audience dont write the story, you do
To understand how hard it is, just theory craft your own game in your head.
You start with Character A, who is perfectly average in every way, and your game is 100% purely balanced as you can only do mirror matches.
Then you add character B, who is stronger, but slower, so when balanced against A he hits left often, but when he does he deals more. A little math and some averaging and you still have a real solid balanced game.
Then comes character C, this time you think a zoner would be cool, they have more range than your staple character, A, so A takes more hits trying to get in, so C deals less damage. Again, you manage to achieve decent balance... But wait, when you test C vs B, B is just too slow to really get in at all, and loses a ton, so then what? Maybe you reduce C's hp to create balance with B, but then you've just thrown off the perfect balance you've made with A, uh oh! Etc.
And that's rudimental with only 3 characters, a real full game is quite the beast.
Incredibly interesting video and topic!!! Please do more of these!
Felt killer instincts did it the best possible way most players cannot tell what’s the main reason a character is so op, if they just listened to the community with jago he’d still be as op as he was in the beginning
Shotgun to the knee approach with SF6 would legitimately destroy that game. I still believe that balance patch next year should have little to no nerfs and all buffs (unless Ed or Akuma are game breaking in some way) as much as I hate fighting Ken and Cammy they do NOT need nerfs and neither does JP. The way that game is right now they really just need to bring low tiers up, not even to top tier status but just up from where they are. Characters like Lily, Gief and AKI especially.
The game is just near pristine right now and they really should just keep that, taking away will just muddy the enjoyment that is there right now, thoughtfully adding will only enhance it.
Not a fighting game, but waiting out to hear the problem instead of patching it quickly reminds me of the Corpse dilemma back in Darkest Dungeons. And months later when they eventually gave an option to 'fix' the problem, less than (I think) 5% of players toggled the patch.
This is funny. I wasn't in chat at the time of this, but I was watching KoF 15 on TNS channel, and I was talking with chat about how much crazy change the meta for KoF 15 went through. After the first meta team (Vanessa Terry Ralf) you get somewhere around Rock, B Jenet, and Khronen, with Rock just being simply the best character in the game, and a plethora of other characters being really good to use. At the moment, you can't use the restroom without Iori handing you the roll of toilet paper next to you. He's in every team.
Sounds about right for KOF, Iori has always been a solid character
Although not a fighting game, I'm part of an MMO that has both a PVE and PVP balancing issue. And the last 10 minutes is a REALLY good explanation of what devs have to deal with.
1: Developers don't know how their games are going to be played -> This is important. They know the main mechanics and general concepts, and how THEY would use it. But so many different people means people are going to play it different, including what is considered the most optimal way, and resulting in ways that are unexpected. They also don't look at what's the most optimal way to play, but what's enjoyable to play. People just want optimal. Even me, someone who works on the game, plays different from the thousands of other people who play the game/same character as me.
2: Spacing out balance patches means stuff gets to sit and cook for a bit with the changes. You don't change something and then immediately do more changes. That just means something gets overtuned as a result, and creates more problems.
3: 15:50 onward is the perfect example of the Dev vs Player idea of balance. Players look at the issues/symptoms, Devs look for the reason/disease. And you can't rely on the players for the cure. If you have a headache, you'd suggest an Aspirin. But what if that headache is being caused by something else? The Aspirin eventually becomes a placebo and the problem continues to exist. Then it goes from headache to joint pain. Or tingling in the fingers/toes. Or constantly being tired...and eventually you just get a character who's bad at everything instead of being good at something. It sucks to have to wait such a long time for a change, but you're better off waiting for the root cause to be addressed, not the symptom.
A gut reaction patch to bug/hot fix a major issue is one thing. A gut reaction patch to nerf/buff something hurts the game more in the long run.
Keith said it best. Sometimes people cry way way way too much instead of trying to adapt and that's why some people hate casuals (not all of them). Though lately some PROs been on their feelings about the games. Sometimes you need to let the game run to see how it performs and then you can take some notes and find a way to fix it but not listen to everything a salty player says.
So many devs and people forget that all kinds of data matters.
Reach, damage, combo-ability, start up frames, end lag frames, set-ups, baits, movement speed etc etc.
The best way is to make like a big chart of all these stats overall and check missing acts of weak characters and why strong ones are strong.
We all know Sol's 50/50 pressure into a counter punish which made it even stronger. Because it wsn't a normal 50/50. It was a counter 50/50 if you failed the check.
Just frame trapped into command grabs lol. And that is without his insane combo damage from the stronger counter combo starters he would get. Just insanity.
KOF xv seems to be doing fine with balancing and pleasing the playerbase.
After 16 months of Khronen & B. Jenet dominance.
No just No…
@@Carlitonsp1I agree, but Ngl, I do feel like all the characters are playable, but there always gonna be those Character that play the game better than most
@@Carlitonsp1 Don't know where you've been looking but they dropped off hella after the last few updates. Pretty much since update 2.1 those two have pretty much just seen a big drop off some of the most used characters right now have been Terry and Ralph and even Orochi Yashiro
@@A_mir0_0 Yes just yes
Thats how e-sports ruin every multiplayer game, desperation for meta, abuse, readjust then repeat like a endless loop of game balancing disease
Max this is a great vid, which you have made many of them, but the sf ex ost playing over the MK1 music drove me nuts
Something that bothered me about NRS first balance patch is that they decided to nerf some of the top tiers (Raiden, Baraka, Cyrax and what not), but still Johnny Cage remained untouched and he is still one of the scariest characters in the game to fight against
But, the characters that needed the most help remained also untouched or made even worse. You can say that Scorpion got nerfed in a way, his air combos are a bit harder to do and they do less damage, and Sub-Zero which needs a couple buffs also remained untouched in his frame data and damage scaling...
I know its not considered a fighting game by many, but the amount of times For Honor devs have nerfed a character to then buff them later on because they are over nerfed. They are the perfect example of nerfing the symptoms more than the disease IMO.
It is still relevant that with happy chaos the way they approached him with balance changes was to nerf the cheapest tactic’s damage but keep the rest of it consistent and or buffed with the normals or his steady aim now having cancel shortcuts. It soft forced people to use normal strings to do good damage rather than 5D,Draw, gun x5, super
Inevitably, some characters will be mechanically better than others in any fighting game, but player skill matters more than tier placement.
If they're mechanically better then I think they can compensate with less health and/or damage, slow sown their frames. Anything to compensate so they're not fastest, strongest, highest health with most useful moveset.
In theory? Sure. In application? Not so much. No amount of individual skill is going to make up for your opponent having better tools than you do. Tier lists exist for a reason. Low/bottom tier isn't necessarily bad. They just don't have the tools a top/high tier does.
@@dylancross1039 I didn't say tier placement doesn't matter at all. In some games, it matters more than others, but overall, player skill does matter more. I mean, as a DK main, if I tried my hand at Steve, I wouldn't know a dirt block from a diamond pickaxe.
My favorite DLC balance story is Pokken Tournament DX where they released exactly 2 new characters (along with 2 support sets) through DLC: Aegislash and Blastoise.
Aegislash on release was undeniably the #1 best character in the game. In the next patch, he was toned down just enough to where people actually still debate to this day whether he's still the best character or just top 3.
Blastoise released afterward and has been known as the definitive bottom tier of the game. Blastoise didn't get any fancy balance changes, but obviously everyone tried to make him work, and actually to some success... just enough to argue "Is he the worst, or maybe bottom 3?"
Complete balance between the DLC.
minecraft steve being in the thumbnail is proof we're in the best timeline
As soon as I saw this, I immediately thought of killer instinct. Their balancing around the mid to late season 2 were great. Especially when they fixed my boi fulgore.
17:20
The problem about looking for the disease is that you leave a festering wound open for possibly months at a time. People would rather have a band aid then a cure than just have a late cure. Looking for the root issue is good, leaving the base issue open is terrible and that's what makes people mad.
I like how when you said "DLC character" and my first thought was Leroy😂
watching this 8 months on n it's cool hearing max say sf6 meta was figured out bc it changed so much. yeah, ken n luke n jp were all high tier for the majority of s1 but the season was so well balanced that the who's top 10 included every character in the game at one point. ppl moved juri from top3 to not even top 10 and then UMA won capcom cup. japan thought cammy, chun, and deejay were busted. v few american pros played those characters. blanka's mixups went from scary to downright oppressive. and ed, rashid and aki all took a significant amount of time to really solidify their gameplan and we're still finding new stuff with those characters to this day.
not every game can take the balance approach sf6 did (game was delayed twice so they got quite a bit of dev time making tht perfect launch patch), but it's great to watch metas develop n evolve without constant patching.
Always love to see leeroy nightmare being mentioned
Customers usually don’t know what they want. Good video, Max!!
I love the fact that steve is next to cyrax in the thumbnail. Makes it all so surreal 🤣🤣🥺
I honestly wish people took the appropriate approach when looking into a fighting and that is pick who looks interesting and cool to you as a person versus on this character is easy or I wanna feel good and feel like I know how to play so I’m going to pick the easiest character to learn or pick the most broken. It’s like super frustrating especially when I come across someone he thinks they are playing good and they play me and get upset and they are losing and using the easiest characters in the game. I main liu kang by the way. But anyway, love your content Max. You are the father of fighting games for me 😂🔥💯👍🏾