Well, more power to you if that actually sounds like an enjoyable/productive use of your time, but I don't think I'm out on a limb when I say the vast, vast, vast majority of even the hardcore players who enjoy exploring the nuts and bolts at that level of detail would still rather have the absolute figures provided. And its more than just the incredibly laborious process of rinse and repeat experimentation necessary to flush out those details: there's also the fact that a fan-based investigation often arrives at figures that are more than a little imprecise/inaccurate on average, and even when they are correctly recorded, they can end up being codified in a community corpus (such as that which we have here at 8WR for various games) only to have those figures become completely inaccurate as different metas are released, often without people noticing or bothering to correct the out-of-date information.
No, I'm sorry but that is just not a function the community should be providing--not when the company could supply those numbers with several times the accuracy and a hundred times the ease. And there's another level at which the "explanation" for why they don't provide that data reeks of bullshit: if they did provide that data, there would be absolutely nothing stopping those players from ignoring it and continuing to test the frames themselves, if that really was a worthwhile pursuit in and of itself.
But above all, its really the disingeniousness of that official statement that gets to me. I don't buy for a single damn second that Namco's decision not to compile and present this data to its fanbase is even remotely related to an honest belief that the average fan (or even the average hardcore fan) wants to spend their time doing this. There's just no way they actually believe that: it's just a convenient excuse for the fact that they don't want to budget the resources necessary to build that database--even if it would be infinitely easier for their in-house team who built the moves and has ready access to those figures, and would be a tiny expenditure for them, relative to other components of the game. Namco has for years been stripping bonus features from their fighters, Soulcalibur in particular; the last thing they want to do is add one, especially one which would be mostly appreciated only by the hardcore fan and will be ignored by the average consumer.
And honestly, that's a totally fair perspective: they really struggle to sell these games at a volume that justifies their budgets these days, given their increased development costs, and every little bit of man-hours that goes into something like this has to pulled out of some other area of development which might itself have been stripped back in recent games. The new continuing support/multiple season pass sales model should improve that catch-22 situation for them this coming generation, but for this game, already made on a budget, I can see why a frame data database (whether integrated into the in-game movelist or presented separately online) was never going to happen--and again, that's fair enough. But that doesn't stop it from being absolute horseshit nonsense when they try to explain it as "Oh fans want to figure that out themselves and would be upset if we provided it". It's just a very transparent attempt to spin their decision not to provide a feature that is probably going to increasingly be seen as a required element for truly competitive fighters, especially now that industry leaders like Capcom are making a habit of it.
