ANYBODY PLAYING STREET FIGHTER 4?

bahleted

author=Mitsuhide_The_Vagrant link=topic=3222.msg65547#msg65547 date=1236488460
Isn't Sagat one of the top tier characters for SF4?

He is number one top tier.

Other good characters close to him are Abel, Blanka, Seth, Balrog, and some others. Ryu is very good too and there are some people who are incredible with some of the other characters. It doesn't really matter who the top tiers are, really.

Dunno if I posted here, but I've been playing on live as well. It's pretty fun, so if you guys wanna play that's cool. I need someone to face my Blanka. 8)

Tiers can be pretty useful, especially depending on the game. For example knowledge of tiers is absolutely essential for mastering games like Street Fighter 3rd Strike or Marvel vs. Capcom 2. I'd say overall, the better you intend to get on a game, the more knowledge of tiers and matchups you should have.

Most of the time it's just based on popularity and accesability (a good example being Smash Bros. Brawl's hilarious tier list, but that's put together by a community that, well... Let's not get into that). And how much creedance you take to the notion that balance is impossible. Some games are imbalanced, but others are not.

Most people who stick by tier lists don't realise that a good chunk of the development process for these games is spent on balance. Especially big ones like SF4, which as I said, is becoming well known for how balanced it is (even folks at SRK are saying the tiers don't hold as much water in SF4. Again, Dhalsim vs. Sagat). Competitive folks can talk frame data all day, but the developers that decided the game was good to ship out coded those frames. These people likely know shit we're never gonna know.

This is referring to the fighters with obvious effort put to them, of course.

You seem very open-minded about this. ;)

There are some people I will debate tiers with, and some I won't. Why? Well, it's almost like a religion. People believe the tiers exist, and govern the metagame, and nothing can suede them otherwise. Hell, they'll often get angry if you speak against the mighty Tier. For instance, you've resigned yourself to the idea that, when a fighting game comes around, there are going to be tiers. So there's no point in it. By your own posts, you refuse to believe that a fighter can be balanced.

Me, I gotta see the game. For instance, the original SF2 was as balanced as a see-saw at fat camp after someone drops a cheeseburger on one of the sides. The later KoFs, though, are very well balanced (hell, XI managed to make an SNK boss fair without nerfing him, ala Battle Coliseum's bosses), give-or-take (they do like to throw some ubers in, for fun. Like 2K2UM's EX Geese). Smash Bros. Brawl is an example of a very well balanced game (despite some very annoying tactics some characters can employ), especially with the addition of Stale Move Negation, which prevents spamming and abusing the same move.

Now Bloody Roar, on the other hand, is a very imbalanced series (Uranus can kiss my ass, for one). You wanna tell me Bloody Roar's got tiers, I'm all ears. SF4? As it stands, I'll be g'fawing like a british gentleman.

And it should be mentioned one of the most damning pieces of evidence against tiers is how constantly, and often radically, they change. I understand that players are constantly learning things, but the fact that they are discovering these things, and having their old tier lists made a fool of by these discoveries, really does go to show that the compettive scene doesn't have these games memorized as well as they think they do. Are they good? Oh yes. But too often these people believe they're more of an authority on the game than the developers themselves. And that's not an exagerration, I've seen that mindset. Especially in some communities (i.e. the Smash Bros. folks. Possibly the most obnoxious fighting game fanbase around).

And I'm going by the "official" tier lists, and all that junk. And by official, I mean lists put together by players. Players who are often going by the limited knowledge one has when they didn't program, and spend the better part of a year or two professionally playtesting, the thing.

1. It's possible to get to intimately know a game so well, it rivals that of the people who programmed it. It's happened several times, especially with RPGs and fighters. Capcom even programs their games around the fact that Japanese players often dissect it to death soon after it's release. It definitely happens and it has happened!

A fun example of this; after hacking the game's data and studying the code, Japanese fans of Saga Frontier 1 have successfully bugfixed the game and actually created and put back in the deleted content that was left out of the development phase. They actually remade and improved the game. It's definitely possible!

author=Shmeckie link=topic=3222.msg68050#msg68050 date=1238044812
1. But not as often as you think, and certainly not as often as competitive players think.

Oh of course there are errors, but keep in mind that these results come across by rigorous playtesting, not by egos. It's not like tiers are developed by a bunch of japanese kids laughing at a table. Seriously of this stuff is pretty close to the scientific process when they deduce and test these things.

2. It can also be argued that, after 10 years, the tiers are firmly locked in the mindset of those that hold to them. After a certain point, they become law. Now, as I've said, SF4 is my first Street Fighter, so I can't attest to weather or not Third Strike is actually balanced or not.

Whoops, that explains quite a bit. Well, tiers are usually constantly tested. In the case of Third Strike, tiers are STILL being playtested, but the results are consistently the same. Sometimes Q and Sean switch places or something like that, but the general 'tier list' has been more or less solidified.

Then you've got the fact that these things snowball into self-fufilling prophecies. If certain characters are regarded as solidly better than others, more competitive players are going to use, and swear by them. This starts a cycle of reaffirming each other, certain characters winning more tournaments because no one's using the "low tier" characters, and higher tier characters getting more players examining them closely because they're the ones that "matter," and thuse are the ones the players focus on.

Those are people we like to call scrubs. People that are actually good at fighting games don't do those kind of things.

Competitive types argue that human error makes a balanced fighter impossible, but then how are tiers immune to human error, as well?

They're not, but considering how often they're tested, to challenge a solid theory, you need a solid theory of your own to contest it, rather than just words.

3. At that point, what's the use in making a tier list, other than needing the existance of tiers in that game reaffirmed?!

So people can know all they can about the game. Knowledge is power. It also helps against matchups and strategies against specific characters.

I'm of the belief that, if a game is well-made, that player skill is all that matters.

Of course, but this is idealistic and theoretical.

You seem to be under the impression I'm a novice. I may be new to the Street Fighter franchise, but I've been playing fighting games for a long, long, long time. I've just mostly been an SNK player. Hell, I can pull off Geese's Deadly Rave on cue (though that attack isn't as useful as it used to be...), so it's not like I'm stumbling around, here.

No. I got the impression that you've been playing fighting games for a while, but when you said you were new to SF and you've been playing KoF most of the time, that clued me in. KoF games are more balanced that Street Fighter games. Tiers mean quite a bit in Street Fighter games.

you're calling the notion that skill means everything idealistic.

No, I said that expecting many fighting games where skill means everything and that tiers aren't very important to upper level play is idealistic. There aren't that many of them.

As I said, some people are nigh biblical about the tier lists, and there's no use arguing with these people.

I'm not one of them.

Face it, there's not many players trying to find ways to win tournaments with Q, I'd bet. They're focusing on the upper-ranked characters, because they want to win.

Oh, I've seen it. Sure, there are some Q players who do very well, but from what I've seen (many, many times) lower tier characters by even the best of players usually get beat down by upper tier characters (being played by people of more or less the same skill) in the preliminaries or so.

And lastly, I find the notion that tier lists are less fallable than the game designers, and the balance of the game itself, to be a bit arrogant.

Both are more or less as reliable as the other. It all depends on how well the game was made and how much time was spent on the tiers. Why do you think Street Fighter 2 went through so many revisions?