I’m talking about heavy linkers requiring you to hold light or medium button and enders using the heavy button.
I found an old thread here that raises this question and asks for a change. I don’t believe at this point we should change this but with the recent changes in how breakers and counter breakers work I started to wonder, how do the game handles heavy linkers?
They basically fixed a bug where you could counter break after the fact and still get the counter and they added a buffer so you could still counter frame 1 breaks, but how about heavies? How many frames of buffer do I have since I have to spend some of them holding the button?
There is also the problem with new players. More than once here and on Reddit I’ve seen people not knowing how to do heavy linkers because of the hold mechanic.
If we could go back to the drawing board how should this be handled? Is the way it is now the best? (or least bad?). Some moves are always enders, should we resort to only having these moves as enders and making sure every character has at least one “exclusive ender” move? With Combo Assist we kinda of already gave new players a tool to mash buttons and get cool combos, so should we reverse the functionality and have holding the button trigger the ender? It should solve the problem with counter breaker window if there is even a problem.
Idk, when I try to get heavy linkers they actually get broken as mediums/lights since some people guess between the two on the first frame, which means the game doesn’t have the time to register the linker as a heavy. It is kind of annoying when I am trying to do a heavy linker (and I know how) but it gets broken as something else because the game takes a second to realize I am holding the button to be a heavy lol
That’s not the way the game logic works. Because of how rollback operates with buffering, the game won’t check for power level until after you’ve had the entire time to hold the button for a heavy.
Unless there’s a bug, but I think we would have seen that more frequently if there’s one that popped up.
If you have a game that seems like it happened, record it and send us a clip with input turned on.
I feel like that’s happened to me sometimes, but I don’t play with Input on because I like to record matches without it; unfortunately I have had some issues with Replays displaying different events and outcomes than the actual match, which would kind of defeat the purpose of turning Input on and recording a replay instead of a live match.
Since the “wrong breaker” stuff in question isn’t a guaranteed reproducible event, it may not be simple to get a good capture for you, at least for those of us who don’t play with Input on.
This isn’t true. The game checks for light/medium vs heavy linker in a few frames of startup before the linker hits. This is actually the reason that opener->linker will always generate timing lockouts on an opponent mashing breaker. They’re mashing in this brief window before the linker comes out, and get locked out as a result. Im pretty sure that window is also when the game decides “what is this player trying to do - light or heavy linker?”
Take this into practice and set the dummy to break everything on frame zero, and perform different strength variations of opener->linker. You’ll notice that there’s always a brief pause between the opener and the linker, but that the dummy will break on the same frame (frame 0) for all strengths. There’s a buffer window in there where the game is parsing which strength linker you’re doing, and then the first breakable frame occurs at the same place for each strength.
We’ve all had instances of wanting to get light linker but getting heavy, or wanting heavy and getting medium. But that’s the cause of people breaking strength linkers we had no intention of doing, not them breaking before the game “decides” which linker was intended.
You’re not alluding to switching the inputs for enders and heavy linkers around – that is, heavy button for heavy linker, hold for ender – are you? Because that’d probably be pretty bad: players who didn’t know about the “hold for ender” rule would forever be ending their combos too soon by accidentally holding the button for too long, and they’d never know how to get an ender when they want one. Even players well aware of the fact would trigger premature enders pretty often, as they do now with heavy linkers. Accidentally tripping heavy linkers seems like the far less problematic shortcoming to deal with.
The option you noted of having ender-only specials be the only enders has an obviously detrimental effect: players can no longer make meaningful situational decisions about how to end their combos, at least not to the same extent.
wrt counter breakers after heavy linkers: why is this an issue? If you’re planning to counter-break a linker, is it meaningful for it to be a linker of a particular strength?
Maybe it’s just in my head then or something. I just know I played a few where it seemed like my heavy linkers were being broken as mediums literally as soon as I inputed the linker. Is it possible he was breaking the medium auto doubles at the last possible moment before I put in the linker?
I have no idea how to record games or share previous fights but I would like to, I played a game a few days ago with somebody that I wanted to show people because I thought there might have been some cheating going on but idk how to do it.
And since we’ve got Adam in the thread, please feel free to correct any of what I said above - it is all supposition based on what I was able to try out in practice mode. It does make sense to me though, and seems like it should apply reasonably well to mid-combo linker situations as well (where we’re buffering linkers often well before they actually come out).
With regards to OP, I think the current system is probably the best we could reasonably hope to come up with. Holding a button for an ender would lead to a lot more unintentional drops I would think - at least with this system when you want an ender to come out you’re more or less guaranteed to have it come out, and it’s virtually impossible to end a combo unless you mean to.
I would love to be able to just hold the heavy button down after a move to trigger the ender rather than having to hold down the medium buttons for a heavy linker. I never liked that and always found that so awkward. I wonder if this has ever been considered? That idea seems much more intuitive, but I could be missing something.
Could this be implemented as an option?
I did go back and look at a replay where the opponent quit, and if I recall correctly the full match played out and it had me losing
Ah that makes more sense… I just kind of assumed that is what was going on since that was what appeared to be happening in a few matches and I didn’t know how the game did that. It seemed like my linker that was supposed to be a heavy was getting broken as a medium/or light so I assumed that was what was happening. Thanks for clearing that up.
On topic, we’ve had an issue with how heavy linkers were done, since we first came up with the idea back in the DH days. The dilemma was that we were out of button combinations and didn’t want to make 50/50s out of every non-shadow linker in terms of breaking, but we wanted to allow breaking of regular linkers and combo freedom for the players.
The inconsistency has always bothered me personally (we don’t use hold for anything else) but it was the best solution we found at the time.
Unless, as some pointed out, we separated enders into their own moves / inputs and made them unique to the combo. Then we end up with a weird “can only be a linker” with the specials, which is clean, but kinda odd when you think about it.
I would like to know how enders work with breakers. I know the break window starts when you’re at hitstun, so technically after a, let’s say, medium auto-double if I do a heavy linker, while I’m holding the button the opponent is still in hitstun from the medium hit. After the game registers the heavy linker and the animation starts the enemy is probably STILL in hitstun from the medium auto-double, only after the heavy linker becomes active the hitstun for this hit starts and the opponent has to break a heavy.
That means the game has the frames from the previous move hitstun to wait and see if you’re holding a button. Also the game has a buffer inside a combo where you can start inputting the next move and it will come out when the last move ends. How is all that normalized? For medium and heavy auto-doubles I believe there is enough time but how about light auto-doubles and manuals? How does the system makes sure there is enough time for the game to analyze if you’re holding a button without interfering with all other buffers lying around?
Also with the fixed bug of having breakers actually happen when they are registered, how can I input a heavy linker from light manual and still have time to avoid a frame zero breaker activation by buffering a counter?
Have you guys thought about raw button combinations? Like three punches for an ender and three kicks for the other, just raw multiple button presses, no dpad inputs. Going this way any button combination besides punch+kick of the same strength would be valid, like LP+MP, LP+HP, 3P and so on. It could even be normalized, like 3P and 3K is always damage ender, LP+MP or LK+MK always resource ender and so on.
For the record, replay input display has been broken since S1 launch day. It has never worked. I’ve reported it many times in the bug thread and in several separate topics talking about training mode/improvements to the game, but it hasn’t been fixed.
When you watch a replay with input display on, your inputs tend to be correct most of the time, but your opponents inputs are often wildly wrong. In fact, they will often stop working for 15-20 seconds at a time. I’ve seen entire replays where the game shows P2 only pressing 5 total buttons/directions the entire fight, despite P2 acting normally.
The bug is extremely easy to reproduce; just take any replay file you have and watch P2’s inputs. I have never seen a replay with correct inputs.
(This is for replays of online fights, btw… it might be true of local replays too but I haven’t checked that)
I’m actually a big fan of the holding for heavy linkers. I think it gives the game a great feel while playing on a Fightstick. Switching between holding and hitting the buttons has been one of my favorite mechanics.
Holding the button to perform heavy linkers is not elegant, and yeah every single new player I’ve introduced to KI always forgets about heavy linkers due to the disconnect from holding the button.
That being said there aren’t many other alternatives, there are only so many buttons. I much prefer holding the button to doing a complication motion so I think they went with the right decision in the end.
I’m assuming the linker animation is suitably ambiguous in the first few frames to allow the game to resolve this during startup, which is also a period of time when attempting a breaker results in a timing lockout.
This sounds horrible.
For some reason it only occurred to me to mention this whilst reading this post, but it seems worthwhile to mention that heavy linkers aren’t even all that good. They’re breakable on reaction by an experienced player, and all they afford you for going to the trouble is a heavy manual opportunity. Indeed, I’ve typically found in any modeling I’ve done that they’re almost not worth the trouble, that light and medium linkers are where it’s at.
