Soul Calibur VI: General discussion

Dear Namco,

I'm writing you this letter in regards to your balance patches for sc6. The game hasn't even been out for 6 months yet, yet there have been 3 balance patches. I always advocate a 'wait and see' approach. This game should have been out for 6 months before ANY balance patches were made, but instead you hastily patched away. Bugs should be fixed immediately, but balance needs to wait. Why? Well because it takes a long time, even for the elite's, to fully discover all the possibilities, heck sometimes new tech is discovered years after release. What seems like a broken character now may not be in the long run after anti-character tech gets discovered and shared around. The other way you went wrong was to listen to casuals, like myself, about balance. Casuals don't know the game at the deepest level, will cry about how broken Nightmare is (when he's mid at best) because they don't know basic defense. And one last thing, this notion of 'balancing online and offline play' makes no sense. Everyone knows that playing online is kinda bullshit and no one expects anything different. Fighting games should ONLY be balanced around offline because that's where tournaments take place. Online is meant for fun only when you don't have a human player right next to you.
 
Why? I think it opens up new possibilities when switching things up with Talim. Not big, but still good.
Because I think you should commit to a super or use it in a combo. She already has RE cancelling and myriad transitions. Idk about the blockstun but if the second hit guard breaks or gets close to guard breaking, I guess she gets Wind Fury BB as a lethal hit.
 
Casuals don't know the game at the deepest level, will cry about how broken Nightmare is (when he's mid at best) because they don't know basic defense.

I knew Nightmare would be fine after the last patch because Keev won a Major with him last Sunday.


Siegfried is going to be fine in Patch 1.11.
 
Dear Namco,

I'm writing you this letter in regards to your balance patches for sc6. The game hasn't even been out for 6 months yet, yet there have been 3 balance patches. I always advocate a 'wait and see' approach. This game should have been out for 6 months before ANY balance patches were made, but instead you hastily patched away. Bugs should be fixed immediately, but balance needs to wait. Why? Well because it takes a long time, even for the elite's, to fully discover all the possibilities, heck sometimes new tech is discovered years after release. What seems like a broken character now may not be in the long run after anti-character tech gets discovered and shared around. The other way you went wrong was to listen to casuals, like myself, about balance. Casuals don't know the game at the deepest level, will cry about how broken Nightmare is (when he's mid at best) because they don't know basic defense. And one last thing, this notion of 'balancing online and offline play' makes no sense. Everyone knows that playing online is kinda bullshit and no one expects anything different. Fighting games should ONLY be balanced around offline because that's where tournaments take place. Online is meant for fun only when you don't have a human player right next to you.

If they really wanted to balance online imo they should have started removing CaS made characters from Rank.
 
Another patch already? And generally full of buffs left and right, just going apeshit on everything. What the hell are they doing to this game. No way in hell are they able to thoroughly test the full ramifications of these changes between such short intervals.
 
I made a comical Soul Calibur video with a focus on Astaroth. There aren't too many highly edited Soul Calibur videos so I do hope y'alll enjoy this one. Also V1.11 updates is awsooooooommmmeeeee
Alternative guide to being the ultimate astaroth for beginners.png
The Alternative guide to being the Ultimate Astaroth for Beginners.
 
I think they're most focused on the health and popularity of online, which means they're mostly hitting stuff that people find frustrating. Yeah, that's going to be a super-obnoxious way to patch from the perspective of pretty much anyone interested enough to read this forum, but the devs don't get a second chance to sell continuing DLC and support the game if the casual online dies. A lot of these changes are pretty understandable from that perspective even if they're on the knee-jerk side. They'll keep adjusting and hopefully walk back overreactions with time.
 
Thanks, you're awesome. I'm still annoyed about 1(B) but the hitbox was also increased so I'm going to see if it leads to a different mixup than what I was normally doing on ranked. It should also hit a little better when someone's completely on the ground, I guess.

On another note, 2B's changes to Angler are cool. Her backstep wasn't reduced but her side walk was. She's still good and I'm gonna still practice with her.

If I'm wrong and 6BB can now be sidestepped, then it would still be a buff in the sense that the 6BB/6BA mixup will become more viable, but also a nerf because 6BB would become more risky for Ivy if it doesn't jail. Some characters might be able to get ring outs or lethal hits more easily if they sidestep. Anyway, I'm also annoyed at some of the Raphael nerfs because some of them aren't necessary. Fortunately, most of his strong tools were left untouched. I feel that they overdid it a bit with this patch. Aside from fixing bug and whiffing issues, only small balance adjustments were necessary for most of the cast. Only Tira needed a lot of changes.

HE is right... consider according to him prep is +12 ON BLOCK go on listen to him he know the game so well XD.

I already admitted that I made a mistake. Only one mistake did I make, it doesn't change anything else I said and iPrep is still + on block (but less than +12). That pales in comparison to all the nonsense you wrote about Raphael. I hate it when people constantly spread false information while claiming it's the truth. Stop infecting other people with your ignorance.
 
If I'm wrong and 6BB can now be sidestepped, then it would still be a buff in the sense that the 6BB/6BA mixup will become more viable, but also a nerf because 6BB would become more risky for Ivy if it doesn't jail. Some characters might be able to get ring outs or lethal hits more easily if they sidestep. Anyway, I'm also annoyed at some of the Raphael nerfs because some of them aren't necessary. Fortunately, most of his strong tools were left untouched. I feel that they overdid it a bit with this patch. Aside from fixing bug and whiffing issues, only small balance adjustments were necessary for most of the cast. Only Tira needed a lot of changes.
If you got PS4, you wanna help me test it?
 
I think they're most focused on the health and popularity of online, which means they're mostly hitting stuff that people find frustrating. Yeah, that's going to be a super-obnoxious way to patch from the perspective of pretty much anyone interested enough to read this forum, but the devs don't get a second chance to sell continuing DLC and support the game if the casual online dies. A lot of these changes are pretty understandable from that perspective even if they're on the knee-jerk side. They'll keep adjusting and hopefully walk back overreactions with time.

Yeah, this pretty much perfectly summarizes my perspectives. I am deeply concerned about them attempting to adjust the balance of a competitive fighter to accommodate for online play. I think it is the same kind of questionable call inspired by an effort to capture the wider market as were the tonal and thematic shifts in V that were so poorly received, and the decision to include reversal edge in VI (easily a top three worst design call in the franchise, and only uncertain for the top spot because of VC in III and the way meter works in V, particularly with regard to GI). You can only stretch towards accommodating the beginning or casual player so far before you debase the product as a work of lasting popularity that goes to strengthen the perceived value of the brand as a whole.

Companies (even those who do extensive market research) sometimes forget how much their serial games depend upon word-of-mouth support from the community of players situated within the particular genre, and this franchise has been having an identity crisis since Soul Calibur III's botched initial release on the console, more than 13 years ago. What they continue to get right has been able to sustain enthusiasm for series loyalists, but it seems like just about every major tweak they have made to the formula in the last two games has been for the express purpose of capturing a wider market and making the game feel more familiar and accessible to Random Joe, even where it means departing from the unique qualities that define this series. And in my opinion, balancing the game towards online play (and specifically those people who can't even be bothered to plug in their LAN cable, let's be honest) is a bridge too far. There's no way to implement that change such that it improves balance for online without having it harm balance when the game is played under optimal performance conditions, and that's a very sad, disheartening thing to see when you have stuck with a series for well more than two decades, and taken your lumps over the course of many tens of thousands of matches, accepting humiliating defeats because you were in awe of the precision and depth the game demanded and yet simultaneously, how this formula allowed for the truly dedicated to thrive in its player pool ecosystem.

And look, I had to accept a long time ago that I would never, no matter how long I played the game, reach the lofty position of being in the top tier of players. In fact, if I'm perfectly honest, after at least 22 years now playing these games, I doubt I'll ever break into the top few percent of players again. I have a busy career and home life, both filled with serious commitments upon which people put a high level of reliance. I can never put the time in to one these games necessary to compete at the level demanded in tourneys (or even near those levels) these days, even if I had the baseline level of reflexes to play against these kids (who represent a more rarefied level of fundamental skill at the pro level, due to the much larger pool of players they come from these days). But even with that dubious return of position in that player base after decades of dedication and thousands of valuable hours of my life committed, I don't want the game adjusted such that they flatten out the nuances that allow for the high level of differentiation among players, just to accommodate me and boot strap me back into competition. You wouldn't move the goals for footy matches closer together just to make the task of running back and forth less onerous for those intimidated by the level of activity; it's counter-intuitive in the extreme, and there are better ways to help players enjoy themselves even as they begin to develop the requisite skills necessary to compete--methods that do not involve subverting the basic format of the game itself. And it's a little maddening that Namco uses Soul Calibur as a test bed for the mentality of forgiving mechanics and player handicaps are better, when historically the most popular games in the genre are not known for being particularly user friendly to beginners, and even their own design approach for their flagship fighter, Tekken, clearly eschews that philosophy.

But that diatribe done, at the end of the day, the market context that Corbeau identifies has to be taken account of. There's only so much time to capture a market for this game and try to make it profitable to move it towards the kind of serialized content format they clearly very much want to try with it (and which we would all benefit from ultimately, with greatly expanded content, albeit for a steeper price). I very much want that experiment to succeed, and yet I am afraid that Namco is playing a dangerous game with this franchise that has slowly led to steeper and steeper compromises that threaten to undermine the core faith of gamers that they turn to this series for a competitive, deep experience. And while I'd like to believe that the methodology Corbeau identifies (flatten the learning curve long enough to make the casual sales necessary to make the game truly profitable, then slowly adapt the game back to competitive form once they are no longer buying--and those that did are a little more capable or have simply stopped playing), I think that balancing act is very risky in terms of timing and liable to break the image of the series in the meantime. I also question how much of the trouble they've had keeping Soul Calibur popular in recent time is actually a direct consequence of their experimenting with courting the casual crowd previously, and that series is now on a downward spiral as a consequence. In other words, each time the choices they make in regard to simplifying things seem perfectly reasonable, but each time they have to go a little further with those tactics, because they've been hemorrhaging rep with the hardcore fighter crowd and have to seek the influx of yet more casuals to compensate, in a kind of infinite egress towards the scrub. But at the end of the day, I want a second season pass, and the market and consumer expectations (however much they were created by Namco or by trends outside their control) are what they are, so.... ~sigh~
 
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Dear Namco,

I'm writing you this letter in regards to your balance patches for sc6. The game hasn't even been out for 6 months yet, yet there have been 3 balance patches. I always advocate a 'wait and see' approach. This game should have been out for 6 months before ANY balance patches were made, but instead you hastily patched away. Bugs should be fixed immediately, but balance needs to wait. Why? Well because it takes a long time, even for the elite's, to fully discover all the possibilities, heck sometimes new tech is discovered years after release. What seems like a broken character now may not be in the long run after anti-character tech gets discovered and shared around. The other way you went wrong was to listen to casuals, like myself, about balance. Casuals don't know the game at the deepest level, will cry about how broken Nightmare is (when he's mid at best) because they don't know basic defense. And one last thing, this notion of 'balancing online and offline play' makes no sense. Everyone knows that playing online is kinda bullshit and no one expects anything different. Fighting games should ONLY be balanced around offline because that's where tournaments take place. Online is meant for fun only when you don't have a human player right next to you.
Well said man. Unfortunately I don’t think Namco is going to see this unless you share it to Okubo’s twitter.
If I'm wrong and 6BB can now be sidestepped, then it would still be a buff in the sense that the 6BB/6BA mixup will become more viable, but also a nerf because 6BB would become more risky for Ivy if it doesn't jail. Some characters might be able to get ring outs or lethal hits more easily if they sidestep. Anyway, I'm also annoyed at some of the Raphael nerfs because some of them aren't necessary. Fortunately, most of his strong tools were left untouched. I feel that they overdid it a bit with this patch. Aside from fixing bug and whiffing issues, only small balance adjustments were necessary for most of the cast. Only Tira needed a lot of changes.
They honestly went overboard on a lot of things in this patch, and not just Raphael.
 
Yeah, this pretty much perfectly summarizes my perspectives. I am deeply concerned about them attempting to adjust the balance of a competitive fighter to accommodate for online play. I think it is the same kind of questionable call inspired by an effort to capture the wider market as were the tonal and thematic shifts in V that were so poorly received, and the decision to include reversal edge in VI (easily a top three worst design call in the franchise, and only uncertain for the top spot because of VC in III and the way meter works in V, particularly with regard to GI). You can only stretch towards accommodating the beginning or casual player so far before you debase the product as a work of lasting popularity that goes to strengthen the perceived value of the brand as a whole.

Companies (even those who do extensive market research) sometimes forget how much their serial games depend upon word-of-mouth support from the community of players situated within the particular genre, and this franchise has been having an identity crisis since Soul Calibur III's botched initial release on the console, more than 13 years ago. What they continue to get right has been able to sustain enthusiasm for series loyalists, but it seems like just about every major tweak they have made to the formula in the last two games has been for the express purpose of capturing a wider market and making the game feel more familiar and accessible to Random Joe, even where it means departing from the unique qualities that define this series. And in my opinion, balancing the game towards online play (and specifically those people who can't even be bothered to plug in their LAN cable, let's be honest) is a bridge too far. There's no way to implement that change such that it improves balance for online without having it harm balance when the game is played under optimal performance conditions, and that's a very sad, disheartening thing to see when you have stuck with a series for well more than two decades, and taken your lumps over the course of many tens of thousands of matches, accepting humiliating defeats because you were in awe of the precision and depth the game demanded and yet simultaneously, how this formula allowed for the truly dedicated to thrive in its player pool ecosystem.

And look, I had to accept a long time ago that I would never, no matter how long I played the game, reach the lofty position of being in the top tier of players. In fact, if I'm perfectly honest, after at least 22 years now playing these games, I doubt I'll ever break into the top few percent of players again. I have a busy career and home life, both filled with serious commitments upon which people put a high level of reliance. I can never put the time in to one these games necessary to compete at the level demanded in tourneys (or even near those levels) these days, even if I had the baseline level of reflexes to play against these kids (who represent a more rarefied level of fundamental skill at the pro level, due to the much larger pool of players they come from these days). But even with that dubious return of position in that player base after decades of dedication and thousands of valuable hours of my life committed, I don't want the game adjusted such that they flatten out the nuances that allow for the high level of differentiation among players, just to accommodate me and boot strap me back into competition. You wouldn't move the goals for footy matches closer together just to make the task of running back and forth less onerous for those intimidated by the level of activity; it's counter-intuitive in the extreme, and there are better ways to help players enjoy themselves even as they begin to develop the requisite skills necessary to compete--methods that do not involve subverting the basic format of the game itself. And it's a little maddening that Namco uses Soul Calibur as a test bed for the mentality of forgiving mechanics and player handicaps are better, when historically the most popular games in the genre are not known for being particularly user friendly to beginners, and even their own design approach for their flagship fighter, Tekken, clearly eschews that philosophy.

But that diatribe done, at the end of the day, the market context that Corbeau identifies has to be taken account of. There's only so much time to capture a market for this game and try to make it profitable to move it towards the kind of serialized content format they clearly very much want to try with it (and which we would all benefit from ultimately, with greatly expanded content, albeit for a steeper price). I very much want that experiment to succeed, and yet I am afraid that Namco is playing a dangerous game with this franchise that has slowly led to steeper and steeper compromises that threaten to undermine the core faith of gamers that they turn to this series for a competitive, deep experience. And while I'd like to believe that the methodology Corbeau identifies (flatten the learning curve long enough to make the casual sales necessary to make the game truly profitable, then slowly adapt the game back to competitive form once they are no longer buying--and those that did are a little more capable or have simply stopped playing), I think that balancing act is very risky in terms of timing and liable to break the image of the series in the meantime. I also question how much of the trouble they've had keeping Soul Calibur popular in recent time is actually a direct consequence of their experimenting with courting the casual crowd previously, and that series is now on a downward spiral as a consequence. In other words, each time the choices they make in regard to simplifying things seem perfectly reasonable, but each time they have to go a little further with those tactics, because they've been hemorrhaging rep with the hardcore fighter crowd and have to seek the influx of yet more casuals to compensate, in a kind of infinite egress towards the scrub. But at the end of the day, I want a second season pass, and the market and consumer expectations (however much they were created by Namco or by trends outside their control) are what they are, so.... ~sigh~

bro can you pls like spoil your speeches, its like you are writing a novel on this forum or something.
 
bro can you pls like spoil your speeches, its like you are writing a novel on this forum or something.

Yeah, you do realize that it took you longer to write that post than it was ever going to take you to just scroll past every one of my posts that you're going to see in your entire life? I mean, I have come to understand that this particular forum has awful lot of people on it from the twitter generation, but you do realize that people are still allowed to take to take more than 140 characters to express themselves if they feel like it, without feeling the need to hide their thoughts in embedded structures for the convenience of a super-entitled, low-attention span class of person who for some reason has a visceral reaction compelling them towards the need to complain at the sight of--egads!?--four consecutive whole paragraphs of text? ...that they could easily scroll past ...or avoid altogether by simply using the ignore function if they find my style of posting too taxing on their eyes?

Novel nothing--there are people here who I can only presume would have a panic attack if they opened a book on a substantive topic, and whose minds would melt if they took a wrong turn into a library... Seriously man, I don't like being brusque like this, but, holy god people today feel entitled to complain about things that have absolutely zero consequence for them. Seriously, please just ignore me if you find me verbose--I encourage it. I'd rather my thoughts were out there for whoever does have the inclination to read them, and those who don't...well, your loss, but you have every tool you will ever need at your disposal to not have to deal with those .05 seconds stolen from your life to scroll past my thoughts.
 
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Can’t tell you how many times the jank from CaS can screw you over in Ranked lmao.

Really? I reckon I've played not quite a thousand matches so far and I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen objects large enough to have any chance of throwing my perception of the hitboxes off, and of those, not one was the kind of huge cube/apple nonsense of someone clearly trying to leverage the situation to game an advantage. Am I an outlier here? How often is it happening to you?
 
The new balances changes are pretty severe for some characters that would definitely see a drop on their effectiveness. There are also some changes I disagree with (Kilik’s AAA and BBB cannot be ducked or stepped respectfully now). Along with some minor changes that will adjust how players play certain characters (Groh’s amazing guard damage from AVN isn’t nearly effective). Overall the best changes I do like is fixing the weird and frequent whiffs of attacks that should have hit. Those playing Cervantes, Groh, Nightmare, Tira, and others should know what I’m talking about.

Azwel, Raphael, both got a severe drubbing. It’s probably no surprise that Namco believed these two to be amongst the strongest characters in the game.

Significant improvements to Tira and Astaroth. Although a lot of Astaroth’s fixes look more like quality improvements to make him better (but not dominating), Tira’s improvements look to pull her completely out of bottom tier material. We’ll have to see just how far she’ll go with these.

Odd changes here and there. Siegfried Bass Hold A doesn’t knockdown anymore is a really strange change. 1A changes to Siegfried seem to be a fix for online, but similar changes to Nightmare didn’t happen. Voldo likewise seem to have some changes specifically designed because serious matchup issues. Finally buffs and tweaks to Ivy seem like they aren’t quite sure how to address some stuff. The ring out change is nice, but they have to be aware of Ivy’s strong success in tournaments and incredible combo damage. Tweaking an unblockable from SC2 that rarely sees use doesn’t seem like the best change.
 
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