War Has Changed: Pick a Mid-Tier 

Steve Fox has been good since Tekken 4. No cap. Best advice right here

theories are going to have to start being made and seriously be considered when choosing a main lmfao like we could already have it down for arc sys if they release a horny character or a swordsman you might be sittin on top of patches for a while

@@kyokusada4825 Tekken is a different beast though, the Tekken devs seem terrified of pissing off the tekken boomers who want everything to be the same

@@user-bkey my theory for Guilty Gear I think is to pick the characters with Daisuke's favorite theme lol

Meanwhile Heihachi waited 6+ patches to become viable, as Harada's main. There is little you can do to protect yourself in the FGC

Absolutely based.

Dan Hibiki all day!

@@MadMax22 Gadoken!!

RIP XX Eddie

THIS DUDE SPITTIN

i love grapplers too much to respect your opinion

@Byron Martin "coin flip bs" yeah bruh, tf you think a mixup is

And they deserve it

people play sloppy as hell and then complain someone did the funny thing after rolling out a red carpet meanwhile actual ToDs will exist out of neutral and they won't complain about that

I need this in David Hayter's voice

@Vachder This comment deserves all the up votes. "Imagine if it's a game like Guilty Gear, not STRIVE!" Never change Obama...🤣🤣 Seriously though. If you want to give yourself the best chance in tournament. It is a solid philosophy. Once your midtier character is considered "fair" by the community. Everything is gravy.

FG Devs have been running a long psy-op and we buffoons have just been eating it up for years...

To begin with, we're not what you'd call "casuals". Over the past 35 years, a kind of consciousness formed layer by layer in the crucible of the FGC. It's not unlike the way life started in the oceans four billion years ago. The FGC was our primordial soup, a base of evolution. We are formless. We are the very "equality" that fighting game scrubs have clamored for so often. How can anybody hope to eliminate us? As long as people crying for balance exist, so will we. Cut the crap! If you're immortal, why would you force us into a constant cycle of balance? Don't be silly. Don't you know that our plans have your interests -- not ours -- in mind? The mapping of fairness in fighting games was completed early this decade. As a result, the evolutionary log of the competitive fighting game community lay open to us. We started with just releasing new versions of the game, and in the end, we succeeded in creating simple balance patches themselves. But there are things not covered by balance. Playstyle feel. Difficulty. Character traits. False ideas of fairness. True viability doesn't effect the character outside of the high-level area. Are those something that should not be passed on? Should all those be left at the mercy of the high-level realm? We've always kept records of things unrelated to competitive viability. Through storytelling, character design, sound effects, from voice actors to animation quality... But not all the non-competitive traits were accepted by later generations. A small percentage of the whole was selected and processed, then passed on. Not unlike competitive viability, really. But in the current, balance-focused world, character feel is accumulating every second, preserved in all its triteness. Never fading, always accessible. Focus on visual appeal, character archetype, story relevance. All this preserved in an unfiltered state, growing at an alarming rate. It will only slow down profits in the end, reduce the rate of competitive appeal. You seem to think that our plan is one of manipulating the FGC. Are you telling me it's not!? You're being silly! What we propose to do is not to control character appeal, but to create balance. The new casual appeal furthers human flaws and selectively rewards the regression of the competitive scene. Just look at the strange juxtapositions of character selection and fairness around you. Ridiculous levels of ease in order to effortlessly rise up the competitive food chain. Viability of some characters are given more respect than the viability of others. Although there are low-tiers suffering in relative non-viability, huge buffs are made to protect certain top-tiers. Everyone grows up being told the same thing. "Git gud." "But whine when a character beats you with a tool you don't know about!" "Anyone can succeed at the game." "Just git gud and you'll make it." But it's obvious from the start that only a few can succeed... You exercise your right to "fairness" and this is the result. All rhetoric to avoid execution and protect each other from hurt. The untested truths spun by different interests continue to churn and accumulate in the sandbox of ease of use and balance. Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds, leaking whatever kind of "balance" suits them into the growing cesspool of the fighting game community at large. The different ideas of fairness neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right. Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulfed in "balance." And this is the way the fighting game community ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper. We're trying to stop that from happening. It's our responsibility as rulers. Just as in genetics, unnecessary information and memory must be filtered out to stimulate the evolution of the competitive scene. Who else could wade through the sea of saltiness you people produce, retrieve proper critiques of fairness and even interpret their meaning for later generations? That's what it means to create context. I'll decide for myself what balance is! But is that even your own idea? Or something fighting game pros told you? That's the proof of your incompetence, right there. You lack the qualifications to play fighting games competitively. That's not true! I have the right -- Does something like a "fighting game fan" exist inside of you? That which you call a "fighting game fan" serves as nothing more than a mask to cover your own being. In this era of ready-made 'balance', "fighting game fan" is just something used to preserve those small achievements that you occasionally remember... Another possibility is that "fighting game fan" is a concept you conveniently borrowed under the logic that it would endow you with some sense of strength... That's crap! Is it? Would you prefer that someone else tell you? Alright then. "You're simply the best! And you got there all by yourself!" Oh, what happened? Do you feel lost? Why not try a bit of soul-searching? Ironic that although "balance" is something that you yourself fashioned, every time something goes wrong, you turn around and place the blame on something else. In denial, you simply resort to looking for another, more convenient "balance" in order to make yourself feel better. Leaving behind in an instant the so-called "balance" you once embraced. Should someone like that be able to decide what is "balance"? You've done nothing but abuse your freedom. You don't deserve to be free! We're not the ones smothering the world. You are. The age of patches has given even more power to the individual. Too much power for an immature brand of players. Building balanced involves figuring out what should and shouldn't be balanced. All this, you used to struggle with. Now, we balance for you. You want to control fighting game balance? Fighting game meta? Of course. Anything can be quantified nowadays. That's what this exercise was designed to prove. The SPFGP Plan... stands for Selection for Proper Fighting Game Players. Edit: The copypasta got extended to include the beginning part. Enjoy!

@@InfernoCleric384 *slow clap*

*laughs in churned butter

A character so popular and horny that devs refuse to nerf them? So that's why sexy Goldlewis is so strong right now.

*laughs in Lab Coat 21, Juri, Chun-li and Lili*

Playing grapplers isn't about winning, it's about sending a message. And that message is **"POTEMKIN BUSTAAAAAAAAAAAAA"**

@@SolidFakenaw, everyone gotta play grapplers

Anji bros on their way to terrorize the ladder after fighting through God's toughest battles

Zamasu coming from the depths of bottom tier to reign divine death upon everyone:

Sfv nash seasons 2-4?

Did they make his execution easier, or did I finally get better?

@@Robstafarian I'd definitely say Akira is easier in 5FS compared to 4FT but that's just across the whole cast.

he's so cool

@@Hazard_sys Nice, I cannot get 4FT to run in Demul without Aoi's and Shun's models breaking the game.

Outstanding move, lol.

The weight of this so true though...

hard as fuck

How the fuck has Camille not been meaningfully nerfed or fallen out of favor in top lane. Is she the Zato of top lane? That champion is clearly fucking absurd and at minimum A tier in nearly every meta. Her and Gangplank (though GP has more tough times if we go back to the early days) seem to avoid getting neutered.

I feel like riot does the exact opposite on release. Stuff that should have never left pbe goes live and then they "level them" after the honeymoon period.

hes a beast lmao

Even Kula on release was potent for a mid tier. I think the nerfs on her later would be more on damage than her newfound extensions. Krohnen may lose a few confirms but he'll still have that DP which was also part of his design on release. Betty been fine. She was a safe pick on release and her stability kept her useful after the patch.

Yeah we have nearly the same team. I've been playing Kula/Krohnen(Sometimes Shun'ei)/K' almost since release. Then the buffs came and two out of three of these picks are wild now. Not complaining but I know soon I'll be back to being one of the only Kula/Krohnens online in my area.

The Gen of SF4, or the Ginyu of DBZF. The weirder the character, the better. They will receive buff after buff and nobody will care because they do not get played anyway

Fucking Angel in KOF No one plays her but she is goddamn crazy good, will probably never get nerfed

spittin. Ky went back to being a mid tier for like two patches before going "im dippin" and getting buffed to the high heavens

Zato in XRD used to be top tier till he got gutted like a pig in a slaughterhouse.

Puppets are super gamble actually whenever Zato is top tier next version he gets nerfed he was top tier in X and Rev1 and bottom tier in AC and Rev2 same with Carl in BlazBlue they are either super good or super bad

That literally only happens in strive and we don't know if that won't change, puppet characters have been rebalanced throughout FG history and some like rev2 zato until they are absolute trash

ino got nerfed pretty bad last patch tbh

Honestly I think you're right. Which is probably why picking mid-tier is better, at the very least if nerfs do come around it won't be egregious (unless the devs really hate that character, or fgc Twitter).

Byleth was mid tier? I felt like she was always a low high at least.

to be fair smash is unique. In that Sakurai basically does what he wants... it's partly why the Tekken Team works specifically on balancing and Bug fixing. Sakurai cares very little about the competitive tier lists and the Twitter chatter around his game.

@@BinBintheRiceCake Byleth is still high-mid if only because there are so many other characters that do what they do better and it's pushes them down. Like why pick byleth when you can choose Palu or pythra or lucina

I'm not paying a 120 for a singular entity.

a lot of player feedback is just sheeple echoing the words of their favourite player anyway

No balance changes for 2 years is a good way to kill a game. I played TFH for a while, that game had balance patches every 15 or so months and that was too slow for most of the playerbase and the online population suffered massively because of it. Game got stale and people got tired of losing to the same shit over and over again. Lots of really obvious issues with the game not getting fixed because of how long it was in between actual changes. And that was a small game with a passionate and niche audience where the long wait between patches could be justified by the small dev team, there's no way that shit would fly with a bigger game that had a larger dev team working on it and a community that's more willing to bitch about stuff they don't like. Beyond that, the nature of fighting game releases has changed. Even 10 or so years ago, new fighting games would usually get an Arcade release 6 months to sometimes even several years before the "official" home console release where they could figure out the mechanics and balance the game before the masses got to play it. These days, games get one or two betas before release and then it's out there. These days, outside of games that don't change much from previous entries, most fighting games are released in a rough state with the plan being to fix the game later. There really aren't any games being put out these days that are released in a state where they can be left alone for 2 years and have things be fine. Then there's DLC. What happens if a new character comes out and they're extremely over/underpowered? You just let them rock for over a year? Imagine if it took 18 months for Leroy or Labcoat 21 to be nerfed.

unlikely they'll slow patch culture anytime soon. if a popular game gets a new patch, it's basically free marketing and puts the game back in gaming news headlines. that's why if you want a game to maintain consistent success, you gotta keep the consumer constantly thinking about it in some small way so they're willing to keep playing it. it's probably one of the reasons fighting games suffer in the mainstream now that I think about it. if a fighting game is too slow with their patches, people forget about it, so to hold things over they release new characters or something to keep people thinking about getting steamrolled by more ram buffs.

@@AchedSphinx “You have to understand that balance is not just about the competitive side, it’s about sales.” -Markman

lookin forward to it

Def less of a thing these days, unfortunately

That was the reason I got into fgs.

Devs be like: But buff is buff!

This worked out well for me in MK9. I played Quan Xhi and because he was so rare i got so many wins because if it.

Then you play strong players who lab every matchup and realise how much dogshit your character really is, lol.

Thanks for coming through man

Ramlethal in Xrd is actually fun and interesting character with drawbacks compared to braindead gorilla in Strive.