post like this dont help at all!! in fact its posts like this that contribute to why keits is taking a step back , when anybody can sit comfortably at home on his couch with no relevant training or experience in the fgc feels he is entitled to say a character that keits and ig have poured blood sweat and tears for months into in " poorly designed ". it most make him livid. as some one that has been in the fgc since the 90s we have no idea how good we have it ig and keits. i hope they read my posts and realize that not all of us are ingrates
1 Like
Community: for a multitude of reasons, it’s best I don’t say anything.
Season 3 is buggy: KI is a bit of a buggy game overall. It sucks, but it’s true. I liken it to the fact that they are a) working with another codebase, b) have released more DLC characters for their game than any other game has, in much less time, and c) seem to be understaffed and underfunded. I wish they could patch bugs out more often (as opposed to 2-3 weeks for cert every time), and I wish fewer bugs got in the game in the first place. It just doesn’t seem to be the reality for the team, though. That said, I don’t find S3 particularly more buggy (not counting PC-specific bugs, which weren’t a thing in other seasons) than S2 or S1. S1 had a bug that literally crashed the game whenever Spinal did a teleport. S2 had its fair share of “crucial” bugs that took characters out of action for a month until they were fixed.
Game balance: I appreciate the interest for IG to shake up the roster a bit and give more fun tools. I think they went overboard with a few tools (and I expect by the end of S3, after Evo, that they will go back on a few of these), but I don’t think S3 is poorly balanced compared to other modern fighting games. I’d say SFV has half-ish of their roster that can win a big tournament not counting the early day 1 wild west, and I think KI has more than half. The rest of the post sounds like Kim Wu-specific grievances and I’ll just let the team figure that part out.
As for the team “going back” on design decisions, this is a good thing IMO. It means they are willing to swallow their pride and say X or Y ended up being a bad idea, sorry, we’ll fix it. I wouldn’t be playing this game today if launch TJ and Maya were still in the game. Many of the decisions they went back on were, IMO, smart choices.
Content: Yes, KI is dropping the ball very hard on extra content. It is absolutely stunning to me that they don’t have more announcer packs, costume packs, color packs, etc… fighting gamers are among the most nostalgic group of gamers in the entire medium, and any game that doesn’t leverage that is messing up. The content is relatively easy to make (compared to characters and single player modes) and is just among the least risk + most reward possible. But I’ve yelled this at the top of my lungs in 100 posts for 2 years and I guess they know better. This is one of my biggest pet peeves with KI as a game… its complete inability to harness the FGC’s innate desire to be nostalgic and its love for playing dressup. They have a dozen other games that have proven just how much people love customizing their fighters (as in, selling legacy announcer packs and more colors could, IMO, literally fund another entire season of the game), but I guess they don’t agree.
Guest Charactes: Meh. Sajam’s General RAAM breakdown video has over 30k views. His Mira one (a new KI original character) has about 4k views.
22 Likes
He’s had interactions with lcd on this before. Since LCD actually goes into high detail and doesn’t resort to personal attacks they haven’t been negative interactions. I doubt this will be negative either or that keits will be livid. He can take criticism. Just not when people throw personal shade in with it.
2 Likes
constructive criticism is one thing but to call a whole character " poorly designed " is throwing personal shade imo
i would pay another 40 dollars quickly for more colours and costumes for my characters,
1 Like
Add your name to the increasingly longer list.
KI is even built with DLC in mind! They have customization screens and everything. The cost-to-profit ratio for any game that has ever tried this is through the stratosphere (look at SFIV releasing like 8 or 9 costume packs over its lifespan… people just kept eating it up, and many of those were extremely lazy and phoned in). Make more colors. If there is some reason why you can’t develop colors (some difficulty with the code base? I have no idea), I would make it priority 0 to fix it.
Fighting game announcers are beloved in the genre. They are among the most remembered things in the history of the medium, and KI has an incredibly unique take on the announcer. Youtube videos of CvS2 announcer saying funny stuff have like 500k views on youtube. If you hire as many of these people as possible who aren’t still under contract obligations with competing companies (Alpha 3, CvS2, Soul Calibur guy, 3rd Strike) for two days in a voice recording studio, get them to say all the important KI lines using a twist on how they announced their original game, and sold them for $5 each, you could build a castle on the moon with your profits. Look at how much success Dota has had with crossover announcers. People love that stuff, and it has been proven time and time again that this has incredible value.
10 Likes
Appreciate the thoughtfully reasoned post as always. I don’t agree with much of it, but frankly, I wish others would take the time to approach their issues with the game in this manner.
It’s late, so I’ll just address some of the things that stood out to me.
Game Design/Balance
I personally think S3 is a lot more balanced than either S1 or S2 were - normalization of shadow counters gave characters defensive options that weren’t possible before in many bad MU’s, and wild outliers like S2 Kan-Ra were brought in line. Silly mechanics like Maya’s S2 one chances (that she got off forcing you to block a meaty->string of daggers) were removed, and huge damage swing instincts like Wulf’s and Sadira’s were toned down a bit. Characters generally have to work a bit more for big damage, and I think that’s all to the good.
I think I’d also disagree with your take a out “playing the same game”. KI already had several MU’s and characters where the flow of combat could vary wildly - I think it’s primarily a result of the wildly disparate cast, and (for me anyway) makes the game and it’s neutral play far more interesting. I like that I can’t approach Tusk or Aganos the way I approach Orchid or Fulgore, and I can’t honestly say that S3 really upped that factor very much from S2. MU’s in this game have been crazy for a while now.
To me, this just feels like it’s hardly a dynamic S3 made. S1 degenerated almost completely into one chance shenanigans, and S2 had quite a few of them, including for both of your characters. Orchid’s been a 1-chance->vortex since they introduced her grenade, and we all remember Maya. Kan also had 1-chances (of the level 3 variety) in his stable of shenanigans. I actually agree that promotion of the style isn’t great, but it seems very strange to me to say that S3 has somehow made this problem significantly worse. Most of the characters who were doing 1 chance vortex shenanigans now were doing them before, and S3 doesn’t really have that many characters that rely on them.
Why is there any incentive to play any character who isn’t at the tippy-top of the tier list? I main Hisako, which gives me, what, 3 winning MU’s? 6, if I start getting generous? People play characters for a host of reasons, even when those characters have notable flaws and holes in there game. End of the day, I think the main question is just “is this character viable at high level?” I think KI still answers that question in the affirmative almost across the board, which is something that most games can’t. Sure, you’re going to have to work harder with some characters, but I’ve sure as hell got a better shot of winning EVO with Kim or Hisako than I would’ve with Deejay or Sim.
Content
I’d love to have an online training mode, full stop. I’ve posted to that effect many times, including yesterday. But at the same time, I also know that online training mode will touch a fraction of the users that Shadow Lords and an improved Shadows Lab will. Casuals vastly outnumber the number of people who want to seriously up their game and devote their time to leveling up, and that’s just the way it is. We need IG/MS to add (and keep adding) content that casuals will sink their time into, because that’s the group of gamers that will make KI a commercial success. I won’t begrudge them their priorities on that - you saw how well SFV went over when it tried to ignore that segment of the audience.
Retros aren’t getting “fixed”. It’s time for people to give up on that. That, or track down whoever that guy was who promised people awesome mods of realistic Orchid with the appropriately sized/shaped buttocks. The teams at MS/IG have shown no interest in doing it themselves, and for myself, I’d prefer if they spent their time and energy elsewhere. (I realize this was more of a throwaway line from you, but given how much people still complain about them, I feel like this needed to be said).
100% with you on the DLC costume stuff though. I will throw my money at the TV if ever the devs start coming out with new costumes for my character. 
Guest Characters
As someone who really wasn’t ever into the idea of guest characters, I think they’ve done a good job with them. Anecdotally they seem to have been successful, but without data one way or the other we’ll never really know. I do disagree with the idea however that we should only seek to entice the hardcore FG fans into the KI fold through the use of guests. KI’s community in general is incredibly new, and that speaks to how well the game has interested people who weren’t necessarily big into FG’s before. It’s nice to capture a larger slice of the people who are fighting game fans, but it seems to me that the far better play is if you can get the untold masses who aren’t fighting game fans to fall in love with KI. There are a heck of a lot more of the latter than the former. How successful have they actually been at that? No idea - we’d need to see the data to know that, and I doubt we’ll ever be privy to that. I do think the idea has merit though.
Conclusion
Thanks again for providing your thoughts to this degree - I alway enjoy engaging with your posts on the forums.
12 Likes
we are so lucky to have someone like you in the community to speak the truth . personally i wish tj had a hoody costume like balrog in sf 5 lol
I agree 100% that them recognizing their mistakes is awesome. Apart of that of that is attributed by their short design schedule which I understand. Maya was and still is ridiculous haha The last few times I was streaming I even talked about how bad I felt for what I did to people with Maya in S2 lol. Perhaps what it really comes down to is the decision of it they need to slow some things down or bit or keep the same schedule.
3 Likes
I’m having trouble trying to reconcile the idea that everyone seems to believe that a few pro players who voice their rather toxic opinions on a Twitch chat speak for the community as a whole - why do people believe that’s the case? The community has NOT become toxic, at least no more than any other fanbase or online community. By and large, there are still a lot of great people still here, and in this very website’s forums no less! We shouldn’t let a few bad apples influence or spread to the rest of our beautiful orchard. Our community is doing just fine, and this whole rather dark situation that has occurred very publicly on stream simply needs to be forgotten so we can all move on.
As far as the game itself is concerned, I do believe there should be some things done, such as improvements and bug fixes (along with the aforementioned character-specific dojos, as well as an online training mode), but I don’t think that some of LCD’s beliefs regarding certain characters is necessarily true. For example, I’ve personally seen (at CEO) what TJ and KIm Wu are both capable of in the hands of players who know how to use them effectively - and LCD would’ve seen that too had he gone to Orlando to support the game.
In a way, I kind of have to agree with @llhonestyll, though - I think you can express your displeasure with the game or character in a positive and constructive manner. In LCD’s initial post, I don’t think he did that - he basically just said that certain characters were bad, and I can see how that could easily be taken the wrong way (which is how honesty obviously sees it), despite LCD’s initial remarks at the beginning of his post. He should’ve been more specific IMO. With that in mind, I think the toxic comments from the Twitch stream chat could’ve been handled better by all sides - instead of trashing Keits, for example, they could’ve been offering ideas, suggestions, and overall constructive feedback. Just because someone paid for the game and are a fan of it doesn’t give them the right to trash the people who worked hard on the game. There are proper channels and ways of doing things, like this sub-forum, which Finchomatic and Keits have both already expressed numerous times.
I do question whether the pros think that their opinion matters more than others. IMO, I don’t think it does. Sure, they may have more influence (as evidenced by their numerous streams, tournaments, etc.), but the devs are only going to listen to sensible, logical, and well-thought-out opinions, suggestions, and ideas that go along with what they have in mind for the game that they created, regardless of who’s doing the talking. They’re not going to listen to crazy and demeaning, emotionally-fuelled rants by a minority of pro players.
Speaking of pros, @CrazyLCD, despite the fact that you don’t believe yourself to be a pro, I don’t think that that’s actually up to you. You’re well known in the community, you have influence, you’ve participated in tournaments and done well showing your skill in the process, and you’ve (obviously) given plenty of feedback. Just because it’s not your primary source of income doesn’t mean you’re not a pro. It just means that you’re not a professional, which is something entirely different. While I understand that the prefix may be the same in both the words pro-player and professional, 1 is all about skill and the other is about how you use said skill to get paid to make a living. Whether you like it or not, many people in our community, myself included still consider you a pro-player - and you’re just going to have to deal with that whether you believe it to be true or not yourself.
8 Likes
I agree with 2 or 3 things you said here and that’s about it. Not going to go into specifics because others already have. What I will say is that ive been playing this game since early season1 like a bunch of others have. I’ve met some good people and leveled up in fighting games in general because of KI. I’m no pro. I have no interest in being pro. pro player opinions are NOT the opinions, competitive fighting games should be molded by. Neither are casuals. It should be EVERYBODY and developers doing what they do best, in my opinion. Paulb has literally told me in his stream that my opinion does not matter because I’m not a known player, of course he’ll deny it but I’ve got a few witnesses that most of you know pretty well that can easily confirm it’s what he said to me. With that attitude and mindset why should anyone, let alone a developer, listen to what you have to say? Point is, this isn’t just your game. We all play it. Yes there’s a few odd problems, yes some characters are bit wonky but is KI your first competitive fighter? Have you played marvel? guilty gear? cvs2? I guarantee that “pro” players that have a ton to say about KI wouldn’t every dare learn guilty or marvel. My rants pretty much done but I hope people see that this games issues and non issues, aren’t as black and white as they make it seem. Oh and concerning character balance? Season 3 is the best it’s been in my opinion despite a few oddities that will obviously be fixed later in the season. Looking forward to playing KI for a few more years no matter what and if yours and other folks issues with KI become to much to handle, I wish you good luck in that other game, hope y’all get far.
5 Likes
well said!! u hit the nail on the head!!!
This is my first post since these forums went up back when season 2 was going on and probably will be my last.
I started back on the DH forums as the first person to register on their forums following E3 announcement for KI. I can remember it like it was yesterday.
The one thing I wanted was a reboot of either KI or Primal Rage and I was hype for the release. I was on those forums all day off and on reading peoples thoughts, and hopes for the game etc. Community was tight and its where I was recruited into C88 along with Deviljin, Shinku, and PushaT (RIP).
So before you brand me the bad guy I really did have a passion for KI. I’ve invested a lot of money on multiple KI sticks and a few Razer Atrox sticks and then some.
I agree with GamerLCD on his post concerning KI Season 3. My personal opinion about S3 in a nutshell is that the game comes off lackluster. It was obviously rushed. Not everyone got a new stage, the new combo mechanics were not needed for this game. I understand they wanted to make it a fresh start like S2 but its the wrong approach imo.
Game balance is atrocious and I question the decision making of IG and Keits concerning the balance of the game.I thought there was going to be damage nerfs all over the cast but the new characters end up with the crazy damage making them considerably stronger than S1 and S2.
My main was Wulf from S1 on up. He was indeed in need of fixes..I never considered him nerfed in S2, and still required tweaking in S3, but they went overboard on the nerfs and give him worthless added moves he didn’t need nor does it help.
Its a poor mans dive kick with a horrible hit box. His damage nerf was too much..nerfing his already unsafe overhead was too much. The way they should of went about balance was a few characters at a time with some testers and feedback from community. Going in with all characters changed was a bad move yet again. This was the case in S2 also.
I have spoken to a few top players and they were not happy with the balance decision and changes in this game as well. To think that Jwong and PR Rog were saying they may come back if the game was balanced properly in S3. Looks like thats out the window.
I will indeed be going to Evo this year and competing in KI for the last time. I personally feel I have lost my passion for KI and see myself playing less often than I use to in the past. The community has became split imo. Casuals vs Hardcore. We were more effective as a unit but I guess not all good things can last.
and last No KI is not dead. Not even on life support. It has a good enough community to thrive and you can thank Ultra Arcade and all the players that go out of their way to stream the game regularly for our enjoyment. I will still be lurking watching the competitions on streams.
I know that IG doesn’t really care if people like Rico, Jwong, PaulB quit playing because their mentality is new blood will come in and take over and become the stars and their on point about that, but its not the right way to go about the issue.
Thanks for reading
6 Likes
Bro spinal is omen kryptonite -_-
I do not concur! Lmao
You’re reaching buddy.
I am really getting tired of people throwing around the term “Pro Player” because I see it a lot, most of time used to make vague assumptions. In my entire history with this game or any other fighter have I ever referred to myself as a pro player or even a competitive player. I’ll tell you what I’ve been telling many others which is that I play fighting games for fun and support the ones I truly love to the best of my ability. I show up to the tournaments that I can so I can support and have some fun; by no means does that infer that I’m automatically a pro player. I am a person who plays the game just like you do, your opinion matters just a much as mine no matter what kind of label you put on a person. My thread is all about my personal feedback and you are welcome to post yours about the game as well. My thread isn’t the end all be all written guide to changing KI, but rather what a individual player has to say.
Contrary to popular to belief I am not some little 15 year old kid and have been around the block a few times. I am soon to be 25 and Killer Instinct is not my first fighting game no matter how much people keep assuming that about me and others.
I would love to have been there, but you never sent me a check to cover my $700 plane ticket, $250 hotel costs and food money
I went to just about every major KI tournament last year and already a couple this year, I’ve think I clearly shown my support already. If you want me to be at more events in the future, then by all means sponsor me and I’ll be there. My tag could be GG | LCD 
2 Likes
I think ppl think pro players think they are above certain status quos as consumers. Maybe that’s why they judge your perspective rather than analyse the content of what you said.
We can test that out if youd like. Even bass has hell fighting my omen.
How could we test that?