I didn't want to strictly name drop anyone in my initial post but I think I know someone who wouldn't care, 8Wayfunz got a bit of heat from some people for this take:
Considering the results they've had in tourneys I wouldn't consider them a low level player by any means, it's not an uncommon take either I shouldn't need evidence to show you how many pro players feel about CaS.
I would've liked to use someone from my region but somehow I feel you would say it wouldn't count because we're not a high tier region or some nonsense like that.
. . .
I don't know why you're trying to turn this into a
Skill issue no matter what how good of a player you are you can't sidestep the issues CaS causes that's a fact. Also thank you for trying to insult my skill with this line of thought that would
really convince me you're in the right.
So in other words,
no you can't find a pro player supporting your position, since you keep insisting you can but consistently fail to. This time you instead chose someone with a hot-take on Twitter that doesn't even align with your point in the slightest: he's bitching about CaS
entirely
on aesthetic grounds and not at all supporting your whingy points about this feature supposedly breaking the mechanics of the game, even indirectly.
So I'll ask one more time: can you point to one actual known-name member of the community who has actually placed (or at least made a decent showing) in a major tournament, who actually has gone on the record anywhere, at any time, to any degree, to say that CaS is a major issue that a serious player would be frustrated with on ranked? No, they don't have to be from any particular region: anyone, anywhere, speaking at any time, provided 1)
they are recognizably someone known to the SCVI tournament scene and 2)
they are actually supporting your position on the issue in question. And don't try to hide behind some silly "Well, I wouldn't want to put someone else's name forward" kind of excuse. Seriously? What tournament player would give one loose stool if you shared their opinion here, especially if they had already publicly volunteered that opinion?
Spoiler: no you can't, or you would have done so by now. But I'm still about to get several paragraphs worth of awkward efforts to the avoid the point, a quote that isn't remotely relevant to the question at hand, and more and more attitude and needlessly emotional sense of offense because I won't treat your word as gospel that this a major issue, when it's very clearly a "your mileage will vary" matter of opinion and I (forgive me) think there's something to be taken from the fact that I hear about this more from lower-to-mid-level players and not at all from the highest levels of the competitive scene.
I choose to view that as relevant information. Not the end of the story, mind you, but it still very much says something about how much of an issue CaS really is. Because (all other factors being equal)
less experienced players are more likely to find things to make excuses for their losses than more experienced players, and if they hone in on one particular thing over time,
that can become an outright cognitive bias with a lot of emotion and ego invested in believing it's the case and insisting that it absolutely must be so. This isn't news and shouldn't be a surprise to you. We all see it with various features with the release of every game.
So when a complaint mostly comes from lower (or higher) levels of the skill ladder, it does (in my personal opinion) provide some indirect evidence for how likely that complaint is to reflect a legitimately noteworthy issue, versus something that is being exaggerated. I'm not going to go just on my opinion of how the game feels to me personally, because then I'm stuck in a trap of subjectivity--even if I think my opinion is very well-reasoned and based on the evidence. I'm going to look to the larger community for opinions as well, and I'm going to weight the opinions of the more experienced and skilled players the highest. Why is that confusing or controversial to you?
That's just my opinion and you're gonna have to just live with that, unless you can provide me with some degree of evidence that this is something that pros also feel so strongly about. And Just to be clear,
I'm open to having my mind changed, honestly. But my observations since the launch of the game is that these complaints come unilaterally from lower down the player skill hierarchy, and
you aren't presenting anything here so far that changes that impression. Not one quote from a highly positioned competitive player who has complained about this thing you insist is breaking the ranked experience. Just a lot of noise from 8WR randos. And hey, that's not an insult: I'm a 8WR rando! I've been playing these games since the first Soul Edge/Soul Blade cabinets hit the arcades, but I'd get trashed in the present day tournament scene, and I'm very aware of that: I couldn't even begin to compete.
Nowhere did I insult your personal skill level--why would I? I don't have any firsthand knowledge of your skill and it's irrelevant to the point. All I said was that your argument that CaS in ranked is an issue for players with good match-up knowledge doesn't logically track to me, because however you feel about it being added, it absolutely is a kind of match-up knowledge.
CaS punishes game knowledge because of the inconsistencies they cause, if you spend hours labbing out a single character only for a move to whiff because it was CaS that is frustrating, you're forced to learn a new matchup on the fly and any knowledge you've gained on how to fight that character can prove to be useless or worse outright cause you to get punished. Expecting players to lab out 2-6 variants of the some moveset when the game hasn't been balanced around them is ridiculous, that's also ignoring the bugs that can occur with different moveset heights that can make a moveset broken or make them unplayable.
Ok, so maybe we can get on the same page here. Because you're moving towards the points I was trying to emphasize for you before, which is that this feature isn't per se an issue: the question is whether 1) the devs are asking too much of their average player in adding another layer to the matchup knowledge in an already kind of demanding game, specially given they don't share the frame data. I agree: that is a big ask. 2) whether their balancing actually accounts for these variations. I agree: that's an open question.
I agree with these points, and why wouldn't I, since I was the one to bring them up in the first place? The point is though, that this doesn't automatically make CaS in ranked an issue. The issue is not so much of whether or not the devs erred in adding CaS to ranked so much as whether they did so without the proper resources to exercise the requisite level of quality control.
To say that the inconsistencies within CaS are “features and new matchup variables” is as close to a strawman as someone can get with this.
Crash, that's not what a strawman argument is. A strawman argument is when you misrepresent your rhetorical opponent's position in order to create an easier target to knock down. By definition, you cannot present a strawman argument when you are presenting your own position. But, moving on to the substance of your post:
Even worse is to go out of your way and basically just say “Oh just adapt and git gud, it’s fine."
I'd say that's an exaggeration of my position, at best. I've gone out of my way to point out that this comes down to implementation and balance. I have no problem (in theory) with people saying "Look, PS barely has the resources to balance the base roster reliably--I feel like they will never get this right." But that's not the kind of nuanced complaint I hear whenever this topic comes up.
I don't even have a firm opinion that CaS shouldn't be removed from ranked, I just have an allergy to weak arguments, and some people here get so worked up about this topic, to a level where I feel it needs to be supported by better evidence of the issue than I have seen. If you go back and look at my initial post on this topic this go-around, you'll find my position is pretty middle of the road from the outset (I'm gonna guess it might have been the same when y'all started arguing with jrasta as well). I don't think the opinion that CaS should be removed from ranked is an unreasonable one necessarily: it's the emotional strength of the opinion, relative to to the evidence, that strikes me as odd. And that emotion-over-evidence ratio dovetails into and combines with the segment of the fanbase that I hear it coming from to make me feel like the issue is just highly exaggerated at the least.
if you’re continuing to live in an echo chamber of your own farts
Yeah, that's not how the term "echo chamber" works either. And echo chamber is when people surround themselves only with those who share their opinion and reinforce one-another's selection biases. If I have an echo chamber, it's you guys: aside from the very rare occasion when I see a very old friend and we bust out the dreamcast or the PS2, the only time I ever talk about Soulcalibur these days is here. And clearly the community here does not have any one single opinion on any issue under the sun, let alone this one!
and not even bothering to listen to what the more competitive side of SC speaks up about it
On the contrary, this is precisely what I am getting at: what do competitive players think about this issue? I suppose you might argue that the average 8WRer is a part of the competitive scene, at least compared to average blue ocean casual. But, no offense, I've heard every opinion from every regular here on this subject 45,000 times, give or take. And, combined with my own experiences on ranked, it has left me with the feeling that CaS probably doesn't need to be in ranked, but that relative to the benefits of the players it pulls in, the issues are small and highly exaggerated by the emotions of mid-tier players, like you and I. If I heard just one pro player rant about it with 1/100th the howling-at-the-moon ferocity I see from some people here, it might shift my opinion slightly. But, after more than four years, I'm still waiting.
