I strongly disagree with this logic. The only way to can make even close matchups is to homogenize each character. Sheik ****s on Bowser because of her grab game. How can you fix that? What change can you make to those two characters that aren't going to effect 39 other matchups? So we buff something on Bowser, nerf something on Sheik, okay, now Bowsers matchup with X character is broken as ****, and you have to do something about that. Or lets not nerf anyone and give everyone the tools to not have a strong losing matchup. Well maybe one of the characters moves are so strong on a certain fall speed that they still invalidate that character. But if that character touches them then its a touch of death and we basically have 3.0.
again, this is a false dilemna. There's no reason to believe we have to choose between either of two extremes. You can buff weak characters in meaningful ways that don't take away from their "uniqueness" or w/e, you don't have to go making changes that make all the characters the same or that drastically affect every matchup. Usually when a character has a weakness, like lack movement speed, lack of attack speed, etc, it shows through in all their matchups, and you kill 40 birds with one stone by improving the tools that are important to every matchups. If you have middle of the road characters to deal with, rather than bad ones, that seems to be pretty commonly a result of heavy matchup polarization, and that's usually because the character has stupid tools that hard counter some characters by themselves and lose to other characters' tools. And dealing with it directly rather than trying to tip-toe around unnecessarily sacred degrees of "uniqueness" is better in every way except for players that are relying on abusing their stupid tools anyways. It's not as if you have to totally reduce that tool to garbage; does anyone consider fox's lasers no longer "unique" because they do less damage? Has he lost "uniqueness"? He was the only character that could tack on passive damage like that. And now his tool is worse... he's lost uniqueness? GnW used to be able to throw any number of bacons out with full knockback, now he can only have two out at a time. He used to be able to full hop triple bacon. Has
he lost uniqueness? If ROB only had two airdashes, he would be able to "air dash dance" less, but he'd still be able to do it. Does he lose "uniqueness"? What are you defining as unique, exactly? You've got this weird idea that a character's uniqueness is some how proportional to the power of their unique tools, rather than simply tied to those tools existence.
I think giving everyone similar weight, run speeds, fall speeds or other universal stats, really takes something away from the game.
How?
Also, I never said this was the goal or the plan or w/e. But you have characters who fall behind seriously in these areas, and the way they try to make up for it are inevitably polarizing to their matchup spread of toxic for the enjoyability of the gameplay.
I know I'm not explaining myself well, but I strongly believe you can't completely balance a cast of 41 characters, while having them all be considered competitively viable and no losing matchups. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong but have they ever achieved having a balanced cast of characters in Street Fighter Four? There's a game with insane, insane meta development, and I'm sure there are some strong losing matchups in that game. Honestly if the people behind SF can't do it.
But we can get much much closer than we are.
I think its often on the side of players to overcome a bad matchup. I mean Amsa can work the Sheik vs Yoshi matchup in Melee, which I'm sure at a point was once considered something like 80-20. Sometimes we have to push the metagame further before we can say, "Give my character X to deal with X" cause it might already be there.
The only reason it's "on the side of the players to overcome bad matchups" is because bad matchups exist. Nobody designs a competitive game so that one player gets advantages over another because character select screen. And bad matchups aren't going to stop existing. But the definition will change from 90-10, 80-20, 70-30, to like, 60-40, 55-45. If for some reason drastic meta changes happen, well we still play a changeable game. But the argument "Well, on rare occasion in the past, a good player has shown that ultra ****ty matchups might actually only be
fairly ****ty!" does not invalidate the need to adjust characters for matchups
now that appear to be terrible.
I agree counterpick wars aren't fun, but that's probably where the tier list will end up in PM, characters that overall have strong matchups. In your example you said "learning one character that....beats both" So if you're playing X character that beats my Y character, I'm gonna have to learn a character that goes even or beats your character, and so on and so forth.
you didn't actually understand what I said. "Learning one charcter that beats both" is referring to learning a character without bad matchups. The CP war doesn't go on forever if one player ends it by picking [character with all 50/50s or better]. When that starts happening, and it will happen because the player who starts it benefits and loses nothing, then the meta evolves into top tiers only. That's what happened with melee and it will happen with PM. Because in PM, we're
not at a state of "Well, every character has the same amount of 70:30s and 60:40s as they do 40:60s and 30:70s, so we'll just leave it as-is and leave everything to CPing". We're at a point of some characters having no crippling or relevant bad matchups at all, some characters being polarized like stated in quotes above, and some characters having nearly no relevant good matchups at all.
Nobody is saying or expecting that we just homogenize characters until there are no uneven matchups.
Nobody is saying or expecting that we just homogenize characters until there are no uneven matchups. I am only saying we should trend slightly in the direction. It's not black and white. Think of it as a scale. Just because there's no defined cut-off point yet doesn't mean there's an actual slippery slope.
