Can this game become bigger?

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Hello everyone.

I am new to the KI scene, coming from a semi-professional career in Street Fighter IV. Internationally I am known as the “world’s best Dan player”; interpret that in any way you want. I played SFIV since 2009 so I have developed pretty good fundamentals since then. Now with SFV out, I am playing that game instead but it doesn’t really feed my hunger for execution - my passion.

I am also a streamer.

In the latest months I’ve gotten more and more hype for Killer Instinct. Not only because the game itself is awesome, but because the people behind its development seem ten times as serious and committing than Capcom the boobie-fixated money milkers who makes the best netcodes. clears throat

Now, I am generally a very respected player in the FGC, and I believe I have very good chances in achieving high viewer numbers on my stream. I also have a very well-thought-out overlay if I may say so myself, although I’m planning on making the game window slighty bigger asap to make it all a bit more clean. Anyway, a lot of Street Fighter players who originated from the SFIV scene are unhappy with how SFV turned out (too little execution) as well as how little Capcom seem to care for their customers, and I believe there are many in that range who would love playing KI if they were given more reason to play it. Problem is, so few are playing KI, so it doesn’t really feel like “it’s worth it” because the scene is so small, it’s on Xbone/Win10, and very very few offline tournaments.

Although, if the game was to be given more spotlight, I believe there are chances to make the game much bigger. More and more people are probably going to be using Win10 in the future because of the DirectX12 or whatever (actually Idk, someone told me this). Furthermore, it’s now easier than ever to purchase converters (from Brook) so if you prefer for instance playstation pads, it’s not hard to use one on an Xbone.

So how will KI be given more spotlight? Well first of all I am going to try my best to keep my viewers in my channel when I switch from SFV to KI, and show more and more people how awesome the game is.

But… there are other factors I can’t control…

GRAPHICS

There is something “slightly wrong” with the graphics. Don’t get me wrong, the game is fuggin gorgeous, but I believe the style of graphics makes it very hard for most outsiders to see/understand what’s going on in the game. In my opinion the problem is that the characters don’t really stand out from the backgrounds enough. Even though the animations and designs and everything are extremely well-made, everything tends to “blend together”, and it becomes even more this way if the stream resolution isn’t top-quality. Pixelated KI-footage has a hard time to catch the outside viewers’ interest I believe, which isn’t the case with SF because its graphics style is more clear somehow.

I am not sure what the solution would be… I’m not going to say “Just cellshade the characters”, that would probably not look good. But maybe like, a slight colour adjustment on the background to let the characters shine a bit more? I’m sure there are lots of things you could try, but then again I’m no graphical artist.

Bottom-line: I believe the graphics need some kind of adjustment to make a stronger visual discrepancy between the characters and the backgrounds to make it easier for outside viewers to grasp the game.

AUDIO

For the most part, audio in KI is great. However there is one thing that always bugged me; the hit-sounds. The “Ph-ph-ph-ph-ph!” To me, the sounds from blockstun are more satisfying than the sounds from hits. Like, if I’m in Practice Mode, I can actually stand and pressure my dummy with blockstrings and feel like “Aaahh this feels awesome”, and then when I actually do combos, the hit sounds feel… hollow? Like, they’re too weak to me. I’m sure it’s partly preferential, but I strongly believe an adjustment to the hit sounds would be a good thing for the future of KI.

Because sound effects do a lot more than you think. Games can give you that addictive feeling like when you “just want to keep hitting stuff more and more”… and when there are good, filling, embodying sound effects, I believe the chances for achieving this addictive effect is much higher. I feel like it should feel MORE satisfying for instance when I connect a shadow move; not just… “ph-ph-ph-ph-ph”… It might sound silly, but I think this is a legit consideration.

Bottom-line: The sounds from hits need some kind of adjustment to make them feel a bit more “embodying” and less hollow, to achieve stronger feelings of satisfaction in the players.

I studied game design by the way. :slight_smile:

I have no idea if anyone will care at all about this post… but I feel like I have to say all this anyway because it would be a waste to just let it swash in my brain for no use.

So, thoughs?

Feel free to stop by my channel! - https://www.twitch.tv/ixion_90

Thank you Iron Galaxy for working on this splendid game!

:sunglasses:

EDIT:
Oh! And I’m planning on running a Killer Instinct “series”, on my channel. In order to learn the appearances of all the autodoubles and manuals, and also for showcasing the entire game for my audience, I am going to divide it all into parts. I will dedicate every session entirely to one character, and I will use them all in the order they are displayed in the character select screen. I might be using the same character for more than one session from time to time to achieve a certain amount of points with every one of them. So, first session will be something like “Killer Instinct Revival - Part 1 - Sabrewulf” or whoever’s on the top left, can’t remember now.

Will start this as soon as possible, maybe tonight. :slight_smile:

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Awesome thoughts. Well detailed for IG to take notes.

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Hello Ixion! Welcome to the KI community! I did recognized you when you posted. Nice to meet you. You are fun to watch in Street Fighter, and the other games you play. Your Dan play actually made me practice Dan to the best of my ability, and helped me develop some good fundamentals during my time with SF4.

But Again, welcome!

If you don’t mind, I will share my opinions and ask questions and see if we can get some discussion going on this thread.

Well, we did get a whole new lighting change. Maybe it may be the lighting that is making it seem like that? As far as I know, Street Fighter doesn’t have a lighting system like KI, (last time I checked) so the characters may tend to blend in at specific spots in the stage. Who knows? Maybe we will get something in the future that might help.

The audio I have not much to say. The audio is great, and really pumps you up during the fight. I do understand with the hit sounds though. It seems like hitting with a heavy move doesn’t give that big smack, like other games do, but I’m ok with the sounds. Maybe it’s something we can ask the Devs. They are very cool to talk to. The community/Developer interaction is something very few companies do, and they do take what we say into consideration, so asking them directly wouldn’t hurt.

I talk to people about KI regularly. Even people that play fighting games regularly, like Street Fighter, Tekken, Street Fighter and so on. I get some questions about the Combo system, to the graphics and such. But the one question I get about KI the most is:

“Killer Instinct? What’s that?”

Or

“Killer instinct came back? When?”

It seems like this game just isn’t very well known in the FGC. Not as well known as something like Street Fighter and other games. We need this game to be shown and grow a lot. There have been lots of threads asking about this, and how to improve our numbers in Offline Tournaments and grow in other places. More people streaming would help tons! I see sometimes around noon, there are only 5 streams on with KI for example, but when I look at Street Fighter V, and see it’s got well over (roughly) 45+ streams going on, it kinda seems like people are more interested in that.

Anything helps though! We have been growing in a lot, with more streamers playing, and us helping to get the word out. We just need to spread the word, and show how awesome this game is!

Nice discussion you started, and hope it gets seen by more people!

Also, I hope you grow with us as a community, and enjoy your time here! :slight_smile:

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Hi there,
Welcome to the forum. I appreciate what you’re saying and I’ll challenge/argue against your points to keep the discussion going. However, due to the fact that I play this game with no sight whatsoever, I can’t really speak on the graphics. As for the audio, Have you tried adjusting your settings? A lot of players turn their music up too loud and whilst it means that you can hear the music more clearly, it also masks a large amount of the fine details that have been put into the game (for things like characters’ movement etc).

I believe your ideas about audio are preferencial and due to your street fighter background. In SF, the game is, at the majority of times, slower paced and thus each hit has a chance to stand out;, as can be seen in this playthrough of vanilla sf4

This video showing a Jago VS Tusk match, as an archive taken from a ranked match, serves to show the phenomenon described above where the music masks most of the fight detail (though it can work for replays like this to keep the hype of the match going to an extent). However, though it taken from season 2, this Shadow Jago VS Fulgore match, without music shows that the game does have quite an impactful set of sounds (this doesn’t even show the level 4 enders either which are even more powerful in terms of how they hit sound wise though they are only cosmetic). It has also, I believe, been expressed by the developers that were they to change up the sound design of the game too much, it would make the strengths of the moves too easy to recognise via audio alone.

I’d be happy to play a set with you and discuss this in more detail and I could even attempt to give you examples of certain audio details that you might not be aware of in the audio design of the game.

I want to see the game grow so even if the devs don’t act on your changes, just having you stream the game is helpful.

Thanks for taking the time to post.

I hope this post didn’t come off as frustrated or anything, just that the idea of cHope this post didn’t come off as frustrated or anything, just I think the audio doesn’t need changing to come into line with Street Fighter’s ideas of having every strength of hit sound completely different, as was the case in SF4 and most likely SF5.

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I’ve been thinking about this topic a lot I think the ways to make killer larger would be advertisements like tv commercial and youtube commercial so more people can see it. Season 3 like season 1 should get the retail release with everything to get the people who like physically owning their stuff. Try to have like on stream after something big it seams to work I rarely ever seen ki views at majors or regular go over 10,000 but at some tournament it must of came after smash( channel was listed under smash) and 11-12 thousand watching. Maybe I’m wrong maybe ki does get more views than that. Ki needs to no more on social media so people know what’s going on.

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@INDIxion, I’m all for getting more people involved, so I’m glad to hear that you have an interest in doing so by using your own stream. I’ve had some personal concerns about the game’s popularity too, simply because if you go to the Xbox Games store and look at the top free games, KI is right above Project Spark - and Project Spark recently announced its own death throes, since you will no longer be able to download any new player-made games or upload any of your own. In other words, their servers are going offline. I can only assume that this was because it didn’t get enough support from its player-base, and if KI is only right above it, how long could it possibly last? It’s nice to see the devs doing everything they can, with new content, a new platform, community fundraisers, additional product-ties, etc. But how long can that last? The answer is simple, of course - only as long as we want it to. Don’t get me wrong - I don’t like to be a negative nancy, of sorts. I know we’re still supporting the game in a lot of ways - the money we raised for Shadow Jago was no small amount, by any means. It still begs the question though - was it a large amount from a small group of people, or was it a small amount from a large group of people? I don’t really know, and I’m certain that they’re not going to tell us. Still, I remain hopeful, because as of right now, KI still remains my favorite game, and since I love it so much, I’ll take any and all help that I can get to keep it alive. Aganos has lived for a long time, so why can’t KI? :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

As far as the graphics go, I’m not too bothered by it, but then again, I’m probably biased because I’ve been used to it for so long. You mention that the characters don’t stand out from the background. I honestly don’t think that’s a bad thing, though - it means they look like they actually belong there. I can understand how it might be harder for you, coming from a drastically different graphics engine, but it doesn’t take long to get used to it in my experience - coming off of Injustice: Gods Among Us, it took me almost 2 whole months to get used to it, but I think that’s actually longer than most players usually take, so take that with a grain of salt.

As far as the sound goes, I don’t think it sounds very realistic either, but then again, what about KI exactly is realistic? We’ve got dinosaurs, and skeletons, and demons, and… Well, you get the idea. It’d be kind of hard to make realistic, unique sound effects for everything, which I think is why we have this uniform set of sounds specifically for the kinds of hits that the characters take. Also, as @SightlessKombat has already said, it’s very useful for players without sight - they can actually use them to identify the kind of attacks and act or react accordingly (with a bit of practice, of course). This is a good thing! You probably know more about this kind of thing than I, since you’re apparently a highlight of the FG community, but I haven’t heard of that kind of thing too often (or you for that matter, to be frank - no offense).

All in all though, as far as both graphics and sound goes, I’m simply going to say this: stick around; you’ll get used to it. It’s not as bad as you might think. Just let it sink in, then use it all to your advantage. Seriously though - spending time in practice mode to learn the ADs over time, really helps your eyes aclimate, especially with how fast the game is compared to some of the other FGs out there - I literally just stared at the characters in practice mode, as I performed each move in sequence, one by one, trying to learn and perfect the combo strings, using the unique combo system. Doing the same with your ears simply by listening as you play does the same thing, I find, especially if you’re using and listening for specific sound queues, like when your KV meter is almost full. :wink:

Fight my Aganos some time! I’d love to pit your fundamentals and talent against my experience and raw training! :smiley:

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@SightlessKombat Hi there! I assume you are blindgamer from twitch? :slight_smile: if not then I apologize.

Good points, although I have played KI in the dojo and in Practice Mode quite a lot and it’s pretty quiet there so I have a pretty clear idea of the sound effects in my opinion. :slight_smile: There ARE some badass sound effects absolutely but overall I believe it is not quite enough to catch the interest of outsiders. Or rather, not enough to make newcomers come back to the game after having tried it out. When it comes to attracting the newcomers, what stands in the way are the graphics, I believe. I will continue my thoughts about this down below in my answer to Galactic Geek!

And yes for sure it would be very much fun to run a few sets with you man. :slight_smile:

@GalacticGeek Hello!

Nice to see a KI lover. :wink:

I think you have misunderstood me somewhat… When it comes to the graphics and the sounds, I can definitely get used to it. It’s no problem. The problem IS though; that the people from the outside scene (mainly SF since that’s the main FG game) will be like “What the hell is this, you can’t see anything!” when they watch KI footage. Furthermore, when (or if) they would try Killer Instinct out just once, I don’t believe the sound effects for hits are satisfying enough to create that addicting feeling when you really really want to get back and play it the next day.

Although, I have given my statements about the sound effects another thought and I understand that the current sounds are important for the combo breaking. However: how about a compromise… Why not do something new with the hit sounds on shadow moves? These moves are already reactable when they start (because there’s a startup sound, right?) and there are no different strengths so it won’t really matter what they sound like when you’re going to break them. I strongly believe something is needed sound-wise to create that overwhelming “WOOOOOW”-feeling, and doing that for shadow moves could really be worth a shot. SFV has Crush Counters for example - THOSE create badass feelings of satisfaction and makes you want to come back to the game. KI needs something like this, to raise its “addictibility factor.” :stuck_out_tongue:

When it comes to the graphics I stick to my point: the characters don’t stand out enough. Yes it does make it look like they belong in the world, BUT it makes the game look too messy for the gamers coming from the other scenes. And along with that, they will not understand what’s going on in the game, and they will eventually stop caring unless they are really dedicated to KI somehow like Maximilian or me. This is what I believe, but of course I could be wrong. But just -something-. A slight colour change to the background maybe, maybe some kind of lighting on the characters. I don’t know. Just something that makes the game look less messy… And this is not for me personally! I am totally fine with playing the game the way it is now, I would keep playing it forever… I am just saying that the game’s popularity suffers from the fact that outside viewers get too confused by looking at it, and therefore won’t bother upgrading to Win10 et.c. to try it out.

What you say about Project Spark is really troublesome… I would really not like KI to face the same destiny!

I’ll get the revival going, starting this monday!
About 20:00 C.E.T.!

:open_mouth:

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Ok I’m playing some KI now and I can certainly see there is some pretty good lighting on the characters… :open_mouth: Getting a little hesitant about my entire statement.

Hmm. Let’s say these things wouldn’t be enough for the survival of KI, what else can we do besides more streaming?

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Well, for starters, ask people who don’t know about it or who haven’t played it to give it a try and tell them what makes it great and sets it apart from other FGs. For example, it’s a free game for 1 (technically speaking - and the only free FG that I’m aware of). Also, there’s the combo system - it consistently promotes 2-way interaction a heck of a lot more than other FGs do. It’s fast-paced. It has many unique characters that you won’t find anywhere in other FGs. It’s easy to learn (especially with the all-new CAM), but incredibly hard to master. It goes infinitely deep into the mind games. There’s new content virtually every month. There’s product placement (like action figures? Get a free character color!). There’s customization. One of the deepest training modes available. A great entry into the genre. Great devs. A great community. An avid tournament scene that’s growing by the year…

…I could go on, but I think you get the idea. :wink:

As for your reply above to me about graphics and sound, while I understand what you’re saying, I think you’re kind of jumping the gun a bit. I read it and I see a lot that is merely your opinion rather than actual fact, and you say a lot of “this WILL happen” kind of thing, when you really have no basis or evidence to the contrary.

Try to think of things logically, you know, like Spock. :slight_smile:

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Absolutely, I am trying to get the word out as much as I can. :slight_smile:

Some people might be getting a bit annoyed by my KI ranting haha…

I’m not sure what you mean with that “this WILL happen” reference. :confused: I think I quite clearly stated that most things are what I believe would make a better future for KI. But for sure there are other things needed to get people to play it… I just wish the game felt a bit less confusing when you watch it as a newcomer.

Let’s chew on all this for a while all right. :no_mouth:

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To be clear, this is not an attack against you - these are simply quotes from your own post to merely demonstrate and help you understand what I mean about the whole “this will happen” statement that I made. Please read them from the bottom up to coincide with your post - I think you’ll notice that they’re all in absolute terms… :wink:

Also, I do recognize that you also said “I believe” a lot. I noticed it even moreso the 2nd time reading your post trying to find the above quotes. Sadly, though, that just makes your post even more odd, and IMO, even contradictory in a way.

Regardless, keep on talkin’ about the game! :wink:

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Okay. Hmm. Well, I tried to express some opinions that I thought could benefit the future of the game… It was not my intention to come across as some smarty-pants know-it-all who can tell the reason behind everything and predict what would happen if my suggestions came through. I will for sure keep talking about the game but now I feel kinda sad tbh.

Stay ultra.

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Hey, stop describing me! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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It’s a common misconception. However, as you can see from this exhibition video we are in fact two separate individuals. :slight_smile:

Also, in terms of audio, a couple of other videos from my channel might interest you.

First there’s this edit of the same match with different music
Then there’s this video without music, which shows the sound design in grater detail

Finally, there’s this an edit that I tried to make seem like arcade footage, partially proving your point that a large amount of the impact is contained in frequency ranges that were filtered out in the process of the edit. However, could’ve just been that I turned the music up too much in post production.

As a compromise, it might be interesting to have a classic sound scheme where the sounds are designed specifically to have a more 90s vibe (it could be unlocked later in the game so that people don’t accidentally get stuck with it and get confused)

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Glad you’re enjoying KI so far Ixion. :slight_smile:

A few points:

First, I actually agree with you on the graphics. When Season 3 was launched, they did an overhaul of all the lighting in the game. The stages (mostly) look very good now, but one of the side effects of this is that the game got a lot darker, and the characters blend into the background a lot more than they used to. On some stages it’s unplayable for me.

One of the ways to help fix this is to raise your brightness setting in the options a few ticks… I had to do this to continue playing the game. It’s not a great solution and it won’t solve the problem for people who are watching streams that have the default brightness, but it might help a bit. KI struggles more than any other fighter when watched on stream because it is so busy that the video compression kills the quality unless you can somehow watch high res at 60fps. This is made worse by the new, darker graphics IMO.

On the topic of “how do we get more FGC people to play KI,” well… that’s a pretty good question. Wish I knew the answer. In the past, it being on Xbox only definitely had a huge, huge impact on that. It’s on PC now, but Windows 10 is still a barrier for many. I would love to see it on Windows 7/8.1, but we’re pretty sure that will never happen… if not for the Windows 10 + Xbox partnership, this game would have never come to PC at all, so we have to take what we can get there.

I find it interesting because so many people in the FGC claimed that they really wanted to try KI when Season 3 launched, including famous FGC names. Justin and PR Rog stated they were going to give KI a shot again, Tokido said KI was going to be his main game going into Evo this year, but all of them seem to be very busy with SFV right now. I can’t claim to know what they’re doing in their spare time, but it does look like they’ve all put KI aside to focus on SFV. And to be honest, it’s hard to blame them. Despite how terribly Capcom treats its fans and player base, and how absolutely shite SFV is outside of the gameplay itself, that’s where all the players are, and that’s where all the money and fame is.

SFV is also a relatively easy game to pick up and play; the skills they are good at (footsies, basic mixups) are so ingrained in them that they are naturals at SFV. KI requires some pretty serious work to even understand what the characters can do, let alone fight against them and build your own muscle memory. And even though it’s a fun and good game, it’s possible it’s just too much effort for them when they could rather do what they’re already good at without having to do deep study into the engine. I mean, Justin is winning SFV tournaments and he’s not even doing optimal Karin combos most of the time. If he’s so good at the skills SFV rewards the most, so good that he doesn’t even have to optimize the other areas of his game to be literally the best player in America, I can see why he doesn’t want to play any other game.

So how do you convince people in this situation that KI is worth their time, when they have to keep their sponsors happy by doing well in “the only game that matters”, SFV?

KI also has this weird self-fulfilling prophecy problem about it. Its online is very good, so people would rather just play online than travel to tournaments. Because of this, you tend to see low registration numbers at tournaments, and people think the game is dead, so they don’t sign up and go. Even Ultradavid said on twitter a few days ago that he was surprised at how few people signed up to play KI at CEO this year (it’s the lowest registrant game as of now), despite so many people saying they were gonna play KI. Did they all just hate the game? Probably not. Are all of them having the time of their life with SFV? I dunno, I doubt it. It’s probably mostly that SFV is the path of least resistance.

I wish it was different too, but marketing KI to non-KI players has proven to be hard ever since the game came out, and even people who like the game (or, at least, SAY they like it) tend to end up just playing other stuff instead.

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Wasnt Marvel v Capcom 3 the same - serious work (which is SFV btw too) and still all those players played it and registered for.

Imo it will and always be the combo breaker mechanic that turns a lot of people off and the recent counter breaker change (including the too late Lockout symbol) does not help with that - regardless if they are right or wrong. On top of that since s3 there is a lot of unreactable stuff added with flipouts and such. And tbh the twitch numbers are getting really really low.

I dont know where this game goes but even a pretty frequent streamer like Heero NL got turned off by the amount of unreacable stuff/bs in the game.

Btw that is not my opinion cause i have fun in s3 for the most part. Its just sad to see a lot of good players stop playing KI.

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Marvel 3 is a really different beast IMO for a few reasons. 1) It came at a much different time in the FGC culture, where SF4 had made a huge revival and people were ready for a new game that featured Capcom characters. 2) There was a dedicated playerbase of Marvel 2 fans that were going to put serious effort into Marvel 3, even if it was a really bad game. So there was this huge number of players who were dedicated to pushing through the barriers of Marvel 3 at all costs that KI doesn’t really have. There aren’t a ton of competitive FGC players who care about the KI universe like they care about Marvel/Capcom universes, and it was on a system they didn’t own.

<shrug> Maybe it’s not for everyone, I dunno. I think the impact of the breaker system is the lowest its ever been in S3, and Justin (seemed to) like S1 a lot, when the impact of a successful breaker was at its highest. In fact, he lost his Evo losers finals match in 2014 to the Glacius unblockable after combo breaker, lol.

Anyway, I don’t think the combo breaker system is the main reason that most of the people who wanted to play S3 of KI are not playing it. The people who dislike it probably never wanted to play it in the first place. I’m mostly trying to figure out what happened to all the people who said “yeah, can’t wait for S3 of KI” and then aren’t playing it when it comes out. Did SFV really take all of them, despite Capcom royally messing up the launch of that game and continuously ■■■■■■■ off a lot of fans? Is the allure of SFV just that strong in the FGC?

This is interesting to me because most of the counter breaker “glitches” are stuff that has always been in the game. Maybe the delayed lockout X adds to the frustration (I think it does). Maybe the new characters have the delayed hitstun problem more than the old characters (I have no proof of this). I understand it’s frustrating to miss a counter breaker but… it’s always been in the game, no?

That said I think there are a few things the devs could do to fix the frustrations. I really hope they find some time to tackle these problems, because the increase in player happiness will be high.

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Regardless if you are right or wrong - the reason why i brought this up is that PR Balrog, Fchamp, ChrisG, Justin Wong and even some Japanese pros like Nemo have put in the time to learn that game - so putting in work is no reason for these players to not play KI. Thats why i have put that up.

tbh he played S1 basically without doing counter breaker and always has gone for Short no chance or one chance to break combos. He played wulf at his very basic high level using nothing but neutral and footsies - S1 allowed this due to one chance to break into 30%+ damage. Imo the breaker impact was less in S1 than in S3 or S2 cause you had one chance to break into shadow ender stuff and all juggles were unbreakable. Sadira had a lot unbreakable Stuff too and Glacius had safe counter breakers. So there was a lot of safety in S1 and imo that was why a lot of those Pros have been playing.

As to why they did not came back - imo SFV is just plain perfect for competitive play. Capcom did everything right - the game is easy to pick up but to play at the highest level you need mad neutral game skills (which require tons of serious work) and a good defense. If you are good at this you destroy everyone below your skill - KI on the other hand has so much guessing in offense, in defense, in breaking, in counter breaking, in doing reversals, in doing shadow counters (yes doing one after a jumpin is also a guess) and so on. These games are so different and competitive wise i can understand why the Pros stick with SFV - the players are there, the money is there and a honest game is there.

But regardless of our discussion they did not came back to KI and imo they will never. And tbh i miss Justin playing Wulf, PR Balrog playing Orchid, FChamp playing Glacius :frowning:

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Yes, I didn’t mean to suggest that these top players are unwilling to play games that involve hard work. Just that the landscape of the FGC was way different in 2010-2011 to what it is today, and that it’s easier to put a lot of work into a game if you already care a lot about the characters (like most people do for MvC games). KI characters are largely cool, but for most they are cool in the way a Blazblue character is cool. They look cool while fighting, but that’s it… there is no attachment to the lore or history.

Also, for like 3 or 4 years there, Marvel 3 had almost as many entrants as SF games did at most majors, so it wasn’t an “underdog game” like KI is. It was a big ticket game so it attracted all the big ticket players, even if it was hard.

I agree with Justin playing the game safely, there’s no doubt about that. And I do agree there were less successful breakers in S1, because of the high amount of safe counter breakers, manuals that made the breaker game very hard, etc. But if a breaker did occur, you were in pretty big trouble, so in that sense, it was actually more random than I think you’re suggesting. The defense had to guess, and they would randomly get locked out (for no penalty, usually, because you are always doing one chance), or they would guess correctly and you would eat ■■■■ for it.

In S3 it’s different… breakers occur a bit more frequently, but you’ll never be in a bad situation if they occur. Which is more stable? You’re only broken 20% of the time but each of those 20% is really brutal, or you’re broken 30% of the time, but you’re always fine? If I was Justin, I think I would really prefer S3’s system, right? It means my neutral game is going to be rewarded way more, I don’t have to throw away a bunch of damage to an ambiguous jump or an unblockable after a breaker.

Yes, I can understand and agree that SFV has an extremely high reward for successful neutral game. If that is your definition of a “fair” or “honest” fighting game, then definitely you will like SFV a lot. I also will agree that KI has some variance in it… the offense is so crazy that you need to make some predictions, and the defense is also pretty crazy (combo breakers, shadow counters). I don’t think that some small variance makes a bad fighting game (and KI clearly doesn’t have enough variance to stop the same players winning every tournament), but perhaps some people will disagree with me there.

But I do kind of disagree that defense in SFV is not about guessing. Shimmy is a pure guess, for instance. You can try to set up baits and make your shimmy more successful, but to me this isn’t any different than smart offense in KI. The pressure game in SFV is also about smart guessing (no reactions or “honest” play here, it’s about reading tendencies of your opponents, knowing the frame data, and taking a guess).

If you would suggest that it’s easier to play patiently in SFV, then I would definitely agree with you. But I just wanted to say that every fighting game has (a lot of!) guessing, including SFV. Good players will even guess in footsies… especially in SFV, because of the 8f of lag almost forcing more guesses on the opponent. And certainly, they will be forced to guess, repeatedly and often, during the pressure game. But like some other people, I don’t immediately think guessing is bad (in fact, I think it’s necessary for a good game).

Yes, I agree the money and players are there. Because many of these people are sponsored, clearly they will spend their efforts where the most money and players are. I don’t fault them for that. And yes, I also liked watching those guys play, and I think you’re right that they won’t come back, even if they like the game and want to play. There’s just too much pressure to play SFV exclusively.

Sorry, this ended up longer than I thought it would be.

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Of course SFV has guessing (i never said something different) but you can directly influence the amount of guessing from or against you in playing a good neutral game. The thing is every guess that is in SFV is also in KI + all the ones i posted. Of course you guess a reversal, you guess a shimmy, you guess a throw.

But i hardly disagree with the smart guessing in offense. It is no guessing when i know my frame data and when i hitconfirm the specials or even supers of a freakin cr.mk (like Momochi did yesterday) and confirm the normals in neutral. And that was freaking tense. Doing frametraps is only guessing if the opponent has a invincible reversal. SFV is a honest fight game with the option to minimize guessing to the nescessary and i am sure a lot of pro players would tend to agree.

And this is not to make KI look bad or something - it was just one reason why a lot of players seem to like SFV. Thats why i like SFV but i also like KI but in KI i dont really care if i lose. I get hit by hard to block shago divekicks, dash through dp, teleport stuff from fulgore, left right dash through from sabrewulf, flipout into non cross or crossup slide by omen and so on - and there is literally nothing i can do to avoid that except guessing (and since even the best players get hit by that stuff i dont really feel that i can do much about it except trying to break the combo).