Not every character has a recapture, yet they are pretty common. I’d like recaptures to be something pretty rare, that only one or two characters can do.
I’d like both concepts (unsafe into shadow and recapture) to receive the same treatment. Not something that 70% of the roster can do, but 30% instead.
I’m less worried about how many people have recapture and more worried about whether or not it’s an appropriate tool for that particular character. I think it’s weird that Sabrewulf has a recapture and Sadira doesn’t, but Cinder and Combo’s are fine. Kan-Ra could go either way, in my opinion.
Sabrewulf has a recapture? What is it?
Shadow Leaping Slash - the final hit recaptures into a ground combo.
Hisako can also catch-counter when she has over half Vengeance.
Oh of course… I should have been more clear, I was referring to the whole “use shadow to make it safe” topic.
Wakeup DP is not “their own offense”, it is a YOLO defensive last resort not unlike a combo breaker. The player applying oki pressure is the offense, not the wakeup DP player. Complaining about converting a combo breaker into offense is aptly comparable to complaining about someone converting a wakeup DP into offense: in both cases, the successful offense is being denied their reward.
Scrubby means “in defiance of the mechanical realities of the game for reasons of ‘honour’ and ‘fairness’”. In this case, you are by definition the scrub, because you’re not accepting the mechanical realities of the game, and claiming that the people getting blown up by guess-breaks into instinct are losing to cheap play.
And that’s okay: you have to act scrubby in order to air your grievances about mechanics you feel are unfair. Even Infil is being a bit of a scrub in the other thread in order to talk about characters being “too active” on wakeup. I’m not saying I’m particularly attached to instinct cancelling after a breaker, either. (tbh, I don’t really care.) But stop co-opting words like “scrub” and “scrubby” to mean things that they don’t mean.
Then WHY THE FRIGGEN HELL ARE YOU PLAYING KILLER INSTINCT?!?
But seriously, a player who wins neutral in SF usually wins the opportunity to pressure an opponent either at negative frames or on wakeup. Said neutral winner could proceed to lose in either situation – say, to a DP, or to a throw if they wrongly predict a DP, or even to pressure from the defending player if they’re really wrong in predicting a DP. The emphasis you’re placing on the absolute importance of reward for winning neutral is irrational and unproductive: you’re basically picking up your ball and going home, rather than coming to the negotiating table in good faith.
KI is a game where there isn’t only block and wakeup pressure, but combo pressure as well. You can secure ~15% guaranteed damage by the time you’ve opened a combo, and the expected lifeswing of a combo is probably in the vicinity of 30% (I’m actually planning on modelling this soon), with huge damage on the table for people willing to play the combo game and/or spend meter. If you think that it isn’t acceptable for combo pressure to curtail a neutral win, but you’re fine with losses in block and wakeup pressure doing the same, then KI is introducing a theatre of pressure that you’ll never be able to reconcile with your principles, and you should probably just go play a different game.
I actually don’t. Not everything has to be breakable, the unbreakable stuff just needs to be balanced.
I would argue that almost all uses of instinct cancels (including those you mentioned) are “dirty”, and could be argued against on principle. I’m also fine with keeping them, because a “clean” game doesn’t seem so fun, and kinda runs against the point of KI.
KI is meant to be a game of disgusting oveheads, unreactable safe half-screen specials, projectile rushdown, etc. You couldn’t put Jago or Glacius in SF – and those are two of the funnest characters I’ve ever played, to the point where my KI brain can’t understand what people find fun about Ryu or Dhalsim. If KI toned down the dirt, then plenty of character designs would cease working in essential ways.
Man, when the DH forums went up and I did a skim-through of them, I abruptly realized why developers were typically reluctant to invite fan feedback up to that point. It was like reading Youtube comments there for a while.
I still don’t understand the recapture hate. As far as I can tell, recaptures do two things:
Both of these things seem very innocuous, so I just don’t get the big deal.
Eh… to be fair, the word “scrub” to me is always an insult that stems from in-game play. It tends to mean the person is telling the other player to stop doing something based on some notion of “honour or fairness”. You’ll never find me doing that; I would never tell any other player to stop using their in-game tools because I personally don’t agree with their existence or they’re using something I dislike to beat me.
I think healthy debate on what is good and bad design outside of an actual match context is great, if you admit your biases (which I try to always do, probably because I feel like I have good reason for having them) and come to the discussion table in good faith. There are some things that simply shouldn’t be in fighting games (to take a massively extreme example, a button that literally wins the round from anywhere on the screen); what those are will differ from person to person, and it takes some experience to understand how “extreme” some things are and how vehemently you need to fight against them (which is what some people in the forums are lacking… they’re blowing up relatively minor annoyances way beyond what they deserve), but healthy debate on these is good I think.
Yeah, exactly. People have slowly come to realize that earning a knockdown in most fighting games does not mean they are free to take the rest of your health bar without having to play a mixup they might lose (although they are given the advantage in this mixup), but they still aren’t there with KI’s philosophy on combos yet, despite it being virtually the same thing.
I suppose some players are mad about having to play that game “twice” (winning the knockdown game and then STILL having to win another game), but that’s the price you have to pay for KI’s insanely strong offense (winning the knockdown game is relatively easy, all hits lead to a combo) and the fact that DPs tend to be minor annoyances at best most of the time. KI basically gives you a massive jump start on the knockdown game in order to allow the combo game to exist fairly. That’s why all tools need to be looked at as a whole, rather than just picking the combo game and analyzing it in a vacuum. I maintain that SF4 with combo breaks would be an extremely bad game, because the rest of the game is not built around it, and I think that a lot of detractors of the combo system are still thinking about KI as if it was SF4 (especially people who haven’t played KI before and are discussing it from the outside).
But yes, KI’s combos are basically a continued pressure string, except you are constantly losing damage while you weigh your options; during traditional pressure, you will probably not be losing much damage while blocking and thinking about how and when to interrupt the pressure and make your read. Taking damage via combos while having to make this choice adds a very interesting psychological flair to KI, because people panic when they’re about to die, and you can see the ramifications of this often.
Would very much like to see this. I thought about doing this myself many months ago but never got around to it (I also thought it wouldn’t really be appreciated for the amount of work it would have taken to do, so if you’re in that same boat, you can know that at least I would be quite interested in it).
Can you tell me how to pronounce your online name, and maybe where it came from? For someone who uses English as well as you do, you might have the most confusing/hard-to-remember username on the boards. 
I totally get this, too.
If anything, I guess the mentality I took to that post, was that if the word “scrub” really, truly has to be co-opted for any purpose in this debate, then it should be extended in the most faithful manner possible, i.e. to those crying “cheap!” about a game mechanic, even if they’re not doing so in-game – and whilst I wouldn’t push for that usage outside of the game, when we have people splitting with “healhy debate” and running out the same tired arguments without really modifying them at all in the face of sound counter-arguments, it does start to gain a kind of aptness to it. Further extending it to people stating their objections in good faith (such as yourself) was an attempt to extend an olive-leaf to @DeathBlooms2K8 more than anything else, but I probably shouldn’t’ve taken it in that direction.
Thanks for the (pre-emptive) appreciation! 
The workload isn’t specifically what’s stopping me (although I am lazy, so I suppose that’s a factor). The main hurdles for me have been,
I’m no game theorist, so I’ve had to do some reading up. I’m a CS/math graduate whose last year of study was a pure math (or maths – but I’m indulging American vernacular for the moment) honours year, so I know things about Riemannian geometry and functional analysis, my project area in CF language theory, etc, but I’ve only taken so much as a passing glance at anything game-theoretic. Only recently when I bothered to flip open the big algorithmic game theory book I’d bought for a grad course that got cancelled (and a supervisor I ended up passing up – which is a shame, because he’s really good and I’d have a much deeper understanding of game theory if I’d stuck with him, but then again I didn’t know I’d be trying to model fighting games now 
), did I come to realize that I was actually just dealing with two-player zero-sum games that fed into each other, which are pretty much solved by straightforward linear programming, and the real work is in dynamic programming and maybe coming up with an approximation scheme (which is actually more in my wheelhouse than the pure math stuff – I just went with the latter because my university really doesn’t have a TCS program anymore 
). (Also, I think this answers a question you asked about me waaaaay back in the old forums. Sorry about the delay!)
Obviously I’d want better information about how the system works. How does the game scale damage? Does KV scale? What about PD? Why do certain combos seem to do less damage when the opponent has less health? (I’ve seen it throw off ender levels before. I don’t like it.) It might even be nice to know how damage and KV are represented – fixed vs (ugh) floating point, etc. Then I need to get data about not only how much damage each move deals, but also KV and PD. I could just throw out the idea of modelling it 1-to-1 (which, if I’m to be honest, the way I abstract the combo system into interconnected games isn’t going to be perfect either) and try to just give honest figures to everything for the sake of making the big-picture points I want to make (e.g. the pros are leaving tons of damage on the table!), but I think still lack a credible way of “faking” the systems that I don’t understand, and I’ve been reluctant to frame my way through match footage and take subtle measurements of lifebars, or piece together combo damage data in practice mode and attempt to infer a damage scaling function. This would all be expedited considerably if the devs gave us more data up-front than the (already very generous) amount they provide in practice mode…nudge nudge wink wink 
…but I’m not getting my hopes up for that.
Also due to my detour into pure math, I haven’t written a substantial program in years! It’s pretty shameful, too – there was a point where I was knowledgeable enough about Java to where I was considering building my own toy JVM for kicks, but I kinda started hand-waving a lot of implementationy stuff when I got deeper into computability theory. But I’m looking to go back into software dev now, so actually I should probably take the plunge, build this thing and even add it to my portfolio. There’s just going to be a bunch of annoying work involved in bringing myself up to speed with 5 years of web technology, etc. (I probably want to build out an entire web app for this so that people can plug in data and mess with it.)
Come to think of it, all three of those are subtle variations on “I’m lazy”. 
“Fenrisulvur” was a slur on an Anglicization that I liked of a notorious wolf of Norse mythology, tricked into being bound by gleipnir and fated to grow to gigantic proportions and consume Odin himself at Ragnarok. I picked it when I was more involved in the local Metal scene, because of reasons.
I removed the vowels on an impulse when I set up my Xbox Live account, because someone had stolen my username and I didn’t want to think of a new one in the moment or throw numbers on the end of it. Funnily enough, I think “Fnrslvr” can still be pronounced phonetically the same as “Fenrisulvur” if you look at it the right way.
I’m considering changing it, or maybe just cutting even more letters off, but usernames are such a messy thing to alter, so I might be stuck with it.
Ah. I was close…I’d always thought of it as “Fenris Lover” 
ahah, I missed this gem somehow.
did you realize one of the topics is also why are people who already own an xbox, not playing the game anymore? if somebody plays fighting games on a competitive serious level, he wil have all consoles, most likely.
the money is not the problem, the hardware is not the main problem, but you keep telling yourself that pc will make the game reach sf level popularity, lol.
If you’re having so many problems with the breaker system, how about looking to this topic for some advice?
the questions asked on this topic should help narrow down as to why you keep getting your combos broken and maybe you can find a way to actually prevent it from happening in the first place or at least make it happen much less.
b-b-but I loooooove it 
I don’t have an issue with recaptures either, for the most part. If anything, I find them quite annoying, but not necessarily broken. It takes a modicum of skill and understanding to use them effectively anyways. I find most casual players probably don’t even know it exists or know how to even take advantage of it.
I think the only recapture I never liked was Omen’s standing recapture off of a throw - and I’ve been told that that’s not a true recapture (and was changed in the last update anyways).
I don’t find recaptures to be that annoying really seeing as I can break recaptures most of the time. Except MAYBE T.J Combo.
As easy as recaptures are to break, they make excellent bait for counter-breakers.
In a semi-related note, but unrelated to counter-breakers… Hisako would be a very, very depressed woman without her recapture. That recapture makes a few match-ups more even for her.
Can we still access the Paul B vid?
I feel you missed my point entirely… Sigh
I don’t have a problem with successful combo breaking, I have a problem with successful combo breaking leading to anything that isn’t return to neutral.
