Week 11: Nearly Two Decades of Change, for the... Better?

In watching Run it Back: The Road to Socal Regionals, I found it interesting how some of the Street Fighter veterans bring up the different environment in which they competed in the nineties, as opposed to the environment for Street Fighter players today. Many aspects of the game scene have changed since then, a lot of which can be attributed to the humongous affect of the Internet for communication and online play.

One particular difference between the community of the nineties and the community today is the players' openness toward one another in terms of discussing strategies and combos. These days, successful players will frequently contribute character-specific tips and tricks on forums; and in fact, many will record gameplay and/or combo videos, and actually publish them on sites like Youtube. This is a stark contrast to a decade and a half ago, when top players kept much to themselves, guarding their hard-earned, self-discovered combos as if they were industrial secrets.

I definitely think that today's open attitude toward discussing strategies and moves is a better environment to be in from a player's point of view--especially for beginner players. The path to becoming a top-tiered player is still just as much of a climb as it was in the nineties, but today's climbers have the luxury of ascending an already-paved, clearly marked path that is guaranteed to take them at least near the peak. Fifteen years ago, the same path was an unknown trail in complete wilderness, and players trying to make it to the top had no real assurance that the trail they were following was in fact taking them anywhere.

That said, though, I cannot deny that the same open environment detracts just a bit from the excitement of tournament play when compared with the old days. Today, most top players are expected to have more or less the same toolbox of moves, combos, and strategies; very few bother to try unexplored territory when it's so easy to follow in previous champions' footsteps. The thrill of seeing two opponents unleash never-before-seen moves against one another is very seldom there anymore. The early champions certainly had a harder climb, but it was much, much more rewarding for them when they did finally make it to the top.

The explosive growth of online gaming was another significant catalyst of change in the fighting game scene. These days, it's almost trivial to find many new players to test your skills against and to keep your game senses sharp; but the tradeoff here is that you very rarely have the chance to play someone repeatedly, and almost never do you get to know your opponents whom you "meet" across the Internet. The Wednesday Night Fights setup seems like a great idea to bring back a semblance of the arcade days of old, in which players met in person regularly and competed against each other, forming rivalries that led to fierce competition which made both sides inherently stronger. The group system appears to be quite an ingenious format for providing new entrants and the not-so-good players some isolation from veterans so that they stand a reasonable chance of "winning;" for the players who are able to prove their worth, so to speak, they are promoted to the upper tier where they can then go head-to-head against the strongest opponents at the scene.

Week 10: Game Balance

In general, I would have to say that I agree with Maj's remarks regarding a well-balanced game: it's enough to have 4 or 5 "good," tournament-worthy characters in a game, and realistically, the task of ensuring that a significantly larger number of characters are evenly balanced is essentially impossible. At best, game developers might try to manage a large number of characters by making sure that each character has good chance of winning against a subset of the other characters, but this model runs the risk of degenerating the entire game into a rock-paper-scissors battle of choosing the "right" character for a given match. Keeping a small number of characters universally balanced against each seems to be the most viable approach by far.

On the other hand, I wouldn't go so far as to call non top-tier characters "irrelevant." While it might be true that they won't have much of an effect in tournament-level play, weaker or poorly balanced characters play an important role in casual play; and it's the casual play that serves as the gateway for most new players to get into the game. Without the lower-tier characters, it becomes harder for seasoned veterans of the game to give themselves a fair handicap when introducing the game to their friends, colleagues, or spectators.