So what you are saying is that people who hate flipouts… flipped out?
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People hate changing. You have a bunch of people who were used to exploiting certain matchups and playing a certain way in S2 that haven’t bothered to learn and grow with the S3 changes. Now people are beating them with flip outs and instead of doing stuff like holding up, they just complain.
As far as the pros complaining, it’s just an extension of what the esports competitors always complain about. Flip outs (at least to some degree) allow the offensive character to set up a mixup situation where it pulls back the curtain and requires the defender to guess what they’re going to do. High level competitors always prefer that the game leave them with lots of low risk decisions so that their skill at managing those many decision points will consistently allow them to beat their opponents. When a high risk situation appears they don’t like it. They typically express this by talking about randomness and guessing as if it isn’t a huge part of fighting games.
Keep in mind, though, that the competetive crowd has ALWAYS hated counterbreakers and to a lesser extent combo breakers. They are free to like what they want and I’m not criticizing their opinions. But for me this just demonstrates that they have always wanted a different game than the one in front of them.
As an aside, everyone in competetive fighting games is always mad about the last move that hit them. If you had recordings of me while playing you would hear me say all kinds of dumb ■■■■. So I am happy to put “things streamers say in the heat of the moment” off to the side. But I don’t double down on my scrubby whining when I have a chance to rationally discuss the game. I think a lot of these guys get frustrated, say stuff in stream and then instead of reevaluating with a clear head later when challenged on it they double down and it becomes their “position” that they now seek to defend.
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They hated combo breakers? Why they even bother with KI?
Maybe they thought it wouldn’t affect the game much and they could play it safe like Street Fighter. I’ve noticed over the years a lot of people prefer new games to be very similar to the old games they are used to, and the second a mechanic pops up that changes the fundamental feel of the game, they basically start bashing it and start musing about how “this game should be more like that game” etc. It probably didn’t help that KI does have some similarities to SF, if you look past the crazier stuff like the combo system and breaker mechanics, which probably made them think their safe tactics from SF would survive this game uncontested.
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S3 is, by far, the least yolo version of KI. It’s not close.
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The devs added far more to characters than they took away, and the things they removed or replaced made sense even if they weren’t as fun. I don’t like dagger assault either, but Maya’s old dagger ender without the massive damage would be pointless too. What counts is the most is that Maya is a much more solid and less gimmicky character in S3 overall.
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I respect your opinion on this.
However, these are the kind of responses that drive people away from the game, and not even attempt to try it.
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One more time for the people in the back.
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As the opening post said, the contents of article wasn’t surprising. Since I started playing in Season 2, I fell in love with Season 3. Maybe I would have felt differently if I was around for season 1, which seems to be the case for most of the critics.
Seasonal/DLC characters seem to be norm right now, but veteran players dropped KI because they didn’t want to learn how to fight against new characters, or their character was altered in a recent update. Seeing that they were coming from an era where all DLC characters were dropped at once (SF4: AE, SFxT), and character updates happened once per year rather than every few months, I could understand their point of view. Learning the animations to break the combos of new characters in KI takes time that few non-KI veteran players were willing to invest. Anyone that wanted to make KI their ‘sidegame’ quickly got left behind.
Anyway, now that the game is ‘complete’, we all can do our part to share our love of the game in 2018.
I do think it is definitely the case that players like Justin (typically not lab monsters) dropped KI once it kind of became clear he was going to have to invest some training mode time to keep up with the game, rather than just use his raw talent to win. I don’t mean that as an insult either, just that he decided his time was better spent elsewhere, since he really isn’t much of a lab monster in any game he plays.
I’m not sure playing both S1 and S2 automatically means you dislike S3… certainly, many people who like S3 were around for the whole game’s life. It probably depends on a lot of factors, including whether your character got changed a lot or not much, or whether you like your game extremely degenerate or a little more toned down. Both S1 and S2 were particularly degenerate (S2 more so, I think) but some people like that. S3 is a bit more measured, although still full of dirt. If you’re a person like Sleep who saw them nerf fairly degenerate Kan-Ra and Arbiter, and you were one of the main people having success with them, maybe it feels a little personal. I would like to think those people can understand some nerfs need to happen for the betterment of the game, but maybe they don’t see it the same way.
KI did change quite a bit between seasons, but I’d argue most characters remained fairly constant in a given season. I’d say that, barring a few exceptions, most characters got changed in a serious, “I need to learn a new strategy” way only once per season (so, once per year, roughly). It certainly changes more than a game like, say, SFV, but it changed less than almost every other game that saw frequent patching IMO, and the changes were often overblown and didn’t require a PhD in KI to keep up with. And even when a game like SFV sees seasonal changes, you’ll never escape this feeling of overnerfed/overbuffed, as has been evident ever since SF4 started seeing patches. So IMO it just requires that the playerbase take the changes in stride, even if you don’t agree with all of them – it helps a lot that the KI team is very forthcoming with why they make every change. It’s a lot harder with a game like SFV, where changes are often made with no justification.
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Interesting…
I was always Interested in KI since I saw the demo on Xbox One Global Media Briefing thing-a-ma-bob. But I didn’t jump in until Season 3… and I mean way late into Season 3. Eagle was already out and played atleast once at a major by the time I realised my Instinct to Kill.
That being said… I have been sort if tracking KI up until that point and I did notice some changes in the game’s mechanics. For one the pace of matches seems to be much faster in Season 3… probably due to the Flip outs and people going for Resets more often.
I personally think the fact that The Developers are willing to make drastic changes to one game is pretty cool, completely regardless of whether these changes are even good.
But thats just me, and my attitude comes from having to deal with other Fighting Game series that don’t even make changes across 5 Games. LoL… if theres something you don’t like about Street Fighter V right now then don’t hold your Breath… 15 years can go by before someone at Capcom will be like: “You know… maybe we should alter the way this thing works.”
In fact there should be one more change. If Microsoft isn’t willing to fork out to continue making More KI then they should let the IP go. Preferably to someone who’s got no vested interest in only sticking to a single Platform…
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KI S3 is largely faster than previous seasons, yeah, but to me it’s mostly because combo breakers cause flipout. Combo breakers are very common in KI, so when you speed up how fast a breaker resolves, you really speed up a large portion of the game. Flipouts as a mixup do add some pace to the game but I think it’s not really that much.
Seriously, go back and watch some footage of KI S1 on Youtube and check out how slow the game is because of hard knockdown combo breakers. Despite that game being degenerate, interactions often took a long time to resolve because damage in neutral was so low and every breaker caused a 3-4 second pause in the action.
In other ways it’s slightly slower than past seasons though, largely because there are more viable zoners in the game now (Gargos, Kilgore, Eagle) and the “melt your health bar” characters from S2 (Wulf, Spinal, Sadira, others) saw some nerfs. And despite the claims of others that say KI S3 has gimmicky characters, I think there are a pretty good selection of grounded, slow-ish characters (Kim, Raam, Tusk, Shin Hisako) to go along with some fast paced characters (Rash, Mira). So games are both faster paced but also slightly slower in neutral. It’s a different flavor of KI but one I think is good and fun.
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Yeah, I tend to agree that increased match pace in S3 is largely a result of flipout breakers. Even S2’s soft knockdown breakers slowed the game quite a bit, whereas now, immediately after the guy screams “COMBO BREAKER!” you’re back in the fire. S3 doesn’t really have any breaks in the action in a lot of fights.
The community has forked out $50K at the start of this year with the Kilgore Community Fund, and there was no detailed plan on what events will receive prize bonuses, and how much is allocated to the Tournament Organizer to run the event. For all we know, the remainder of the fund is being allocated for KIWC 2018, thus the reason there was no live stream of NEC 18 yesterday 
.
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To be honest, despite that I have no intention of engaging them anymore, I’ve made it a point to keep tabs on key trolls. Some of them have gotten uncomfortably close to going so far as doxing, as I’m sure you’re fully aware, to make sure the community and decision-makers behind KI hear their nonsensical rants. It’s sad, really.
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Lol kinda