How can the competitive community adapt, learn, and grow if every month you change a character drastically. If it is game breaking fine, However let the community adapt and learn the matchups. Sometimes you take away the fun things people like about a character and it isn’t broken. I understand when releasing a character per month things slip but please sooner than later announce their will be no more changes. It kind of put off players from learning a character because it is always changed. It makes it hard for new players to jump in too. I love the game and appreciate your work but some things are ok to leave alone. Let the game rock and mature. That was one of the best things about season 1. Even though it was broken, players adapted and found strategies around everything so please let the community figure out the balance at some point.
wtf the balance patch for this patsh was very tame…nothing drastic was changed
It wasn’t drastic but some things affected more players than others. Just saying it would be nice to just let the community learn to adapt to a situation.
Well… not sure how to approach this post so I’ll just pick out any angle here.
I haven’t seen any major changes since the release of Season 3, everything thus far are subtle and address anything irregular in a character. Like Spinal losing his skulls on a teched throw or lowering his plus frames so his heavy manuals aren’t insanely easy anymore.
Along with that note, this is path 3.1 - obviously we as a community are still growing on the new additions and the team is responding to the feedback given.
Double Helix did a fair job at balance changes, but from my perspective, Jago was absurd and easily dominated most matches. This contradicts the idea of “approach on balance” if there really wasn’t one in Season 1.
Final note, we all are still getting used to the new tech and that happens to include the devs who are paying mind to who needs to be toned up/down. So, I’m a bit confused as to the premise of your post of IG approaching a balancing system that was never really there before.Sort of seems counter-intuitive don’t you think?
I’m so happy about the shadow jago nerfs.
Gimme a break. Barely anything changed for this game on this patch. and about 6 patches before the big Season 3 overhaul too.
This game doesn’t change every month like MKX. It’s mostly bug fixes with every patch. If they tweak a move for a character to make things better, go for it. IG doesn’t make broad sweeping changes each month.
Seriously, dude
Ah yes, the double helix approach where an unbreakable opener loop won Evo.
Unless it’s TJ combo. They re-invent him all the time. Frustrating.
Oh god… the Sadira flashbacks.
What exactly are the details of that sadira glitch?
Basically in season one, Sadira was able to jump cancel her Demon Blade (the spinning one) opener infinitely, completely ignoring the combo system because the game registers each hit a opener. When there is enough KV, quickly preform a one-chance break and end it with shadow Recluse.
That was pretty much one of the main strategies for Sadira players in tournaments til it got patched.
Please… Everyone go back and watch evo 2014, and compare and contrast that with evo 2015. The difference is night and day.
DH is awesome, amazing even, but IG has literally taken what DH started to the next level. KI has not become an NRS game over night. The last patch was primarily bug fixes, and a few normalizations that kind of needed to happen.
FYI: even in sfv’s month 1 update (sfv being the apparent paragon of the FGC) they changed a few things, and I suspect they will “normalize” a few other things in like 2 days when Guile drops.
Evo 2014 I fell asleep. If it wasn’t for IG re balancing the game the way it is, I would have never picked up KI after watching that.
How about we don’t do that.
do you have any footage of this? I’ve been looking and can’t find it.
S3 has been smooth so far I think. The first patch is almost all important bug fixes (I consider something like Rash’s boot cancel a bug fix, clearly unintended behavior). They made a few balance changes (Tusk opener normals, Shago dark catastrophe), but it’s really very few. The game we are playing in 3.1, bug fixes aside, is 99.9% the same game as before.
The correct answer is, IMO, somewhere in between MKX’s frequent, game-changing, character re-defining patches and DH’s “let it rock, despite clearly being bad for the game” approach. Sometimes communities will find solutions to “bad for the game” behavior, but often times they won’t and they’ll just drop the game. When you’re a smaller game in the community, you can’t afford to take that chance and have your entire project crumble because you were stubborn to fix something.
I think IG in later S2 did pretty good. Hisako, Cinder, and Aria were pretty much unchanged from launch, save bug fixes, until S3 rebalance. Only thing that comes to mind was them changing Cinder’s inferno (which sounded like a bug fix, but did affect his balance). They spent the first few months changing a lot about TJ, Maya, and Kan-Ra because they were really new to it and I think it became clear (to us, and to them) that they made some mistakes. Given the very unique situation surrounding the developer change for S2, I’m willing to cut them a bit of slack here.
I don’t suspect we will see anywhere near that level of tinkering in S3 moving forward. I think it’ll be bug fixes each patch, maybe 2 or 3 characters get a single change that doesn’t redefine them but does slightly tweak balance, and that’s it.
I also think KI’s game systems are super chaotic and hard to balance. If this was a SF game, you wouldn’t need to do as much tweaking because the characters are, for the most part, relatively simple. But because you throw super wacky, new archetypes against each other in a game like KI, sometimes things need some tweaking. I’m more forgiving of KI’s balance patches because of this than I would be if SFV made the same number of adjustments.
Search YouTube for Killer Instinct Evo 2014 Grand Finals. This pops up. You will find the loop in here.
I tend to agree when you consider all of the literally unbreakable stuff Sadira could do. It was a fun time to be a Sadira main. Nothing like eating 70% + of somebody’s life bar and they can’t do anything about it. Yeah… S1 was balanced. 
NOT!