Well, not “everyone” thinks it’s an issue at all, but let’s follow the “do something” train to its logical conclusion, as I believe that is where your frustration in this thread seems to lie. I agree that teabagging is generally done online in the spirit of being ■■■■■■■■ so let’s try to unpack that for a minute.
First of all, let’s define the problem. Teabagging is the repeated pressing of down, so that should be a fairly simple, “know it when I see it” type of thing, right? Maybe…but how many down presses does it take per second before it is a “true” teabag? What about buffering? If I have a meter and you’re Glacius, there’s a decent chance I’m teabagging the living daylights out of the ground at midscreen, because I’m buffering shadow ORZ to punish any hail/shatter I see. So should we change our definition to stipulate “it’s only teabagging if done over the opponent? Perhaps…but if I do a hard knockdown where I’m guesstimating your wakeup timing (say, to cross up your DP input with a heavy TK-ORZ), it’s also not uncommon to see some teabagging as I buffer, but wait for the get-up animation. Sometimes I buffer to make it look like a command grab is coming, but meaty low instead. The repeated crouching was a red herring to make you think a special was coming. In none of these instances do I mean anything insulting to my opponent - I just want to play the game and hit them.
So within game, the definition of what a teabag even is is much fuzzier than it appears at first blush. So let’s just assume that the biggest issue with it is between rounds, and instead focus our corrective effort there instead. KI has post-round positioning as a balance affecting mechanic, meaning we begin from a place where that positioning capacity has to exist. So our fix must preserve the ability to get in on Glacius or back away as Kan-Ra before the announcer yells “Fight”. So left, right, and up motions must be preserved and represented on the screen. Would you have the developer disallow down inputs altogether? Does that mean that I can no longer buffer a command grab or shatter or DP to come out first frame after “Fight”? So instead of ignoring the down input, how about we instead just remove visual cues of it - stock the motion in our input buffer, but simply always show the character standing (or walking, dashing, etc). Ok, so we’ve now solved our teabagging problem, but we’ve also made it so that I as the opposing player have an entirely different set of visual cues that I must respond to to have an idea of what my opponent wants to try. Is Glacius just stutter-stepping backward because he’s bored, or is each micro-walk hiding a down input for a hail or a cold shoulder? Trying to hide the input to prevent ■■■■■■■ behavior in this case also has the side effect of obscuring legitimate cues and tells that affect actual game progression. Post-game movement is probably the easiest fix in that the game could theoretically simply kill all inputs after a lifebar is reduced to zero, but “easy” is a pretty relative term in coding parlance - a program built in installments like KI tends to have unforeseen connections between disparate components that means small fixes to one thing can cascade negatively across the entire program. But still, this fix could probably be made to work with a bit of effort, and wouldn’t impact game balance at all.
So with these fixes in mind, could a new KI be made with neutral start conditions between rounds and no post-game movement? Sure. But the former tangibly changes round-start balance, and so isn’t a change that should be made lightly or as a knee jerk reaction within the current game - Glacius and Kan-Ra and even Gargos are better characters if the opponent is forced to begin the fight at midrange, and that has to be assessed holistically. And even then, in our hypothetical game where neutral position is enforced and there is no extraneous movement permitted after the fight, if I really want to sit on top of you on HKD and furiously mash down (this time with intent to be an ■■■, as opposed to buffering or baiting), the opportunity is manifestly there. I’ve changed game balance to some extent, and still a player can be a raging douche if they feel so inclined. Our down/sec rule isn’t savvy enough to distinguish between legitimate buffering or mindgames and being a douche, so that’s not workable and will needlessly catch people who are simply trying to play an effective game and react to things. If you try to split the difference and say only cardinal direction down is flagged, well, I can teabag with down+forward just as easily as down.
This very long post is really just trying to make the point that any fix has costs and downstream effects, some of which are not immediately appparent. Some materially change balance and MU’s, some affect the meta and reaction games, and some likely generate some non-trivial number of false positives if implemented. So all of that, and jerk player 347 still has the capacity to be a jerk, whether by taunting, taunt cancelling, literal griefing in certain MU’s, dropping combos on purpose, winning with only DP’s, just to come off the top of the head. We have changed game balance and meta and probably banned a couple people who didn’t deserve it, and the dedicated player can still (pretty easily I might add) find a way to show his condescension.
As @BigBadAndy said, I wish players would be nicer, particularly to newbies. But I also don’t think it’s a worthwhile use of developer time to try and eliminate all potential outlets for douchery within the game. There are a lot of ways to show contempt for one’s opponent, and personally I’d rather they spent that time fixing bugs and thinking of cool new mechanics.
