The Great Player Vs Character Debate: SCV Edition

In SCV is it more about the PLAYER or the CHARACTER?

  • It's always more about the PLAYER.

    Votes: 36 57.1%

  • The CHARACTER used always plays a bigger factor.

    Votes: 4 6.3%

  • It can be EITHER depending on the character matchup.

    Votes: 23 36.5%
  • Total voters
    63
SuckingMaw said:
Depends on who you mean.

There are certainly high level players who have hit that point, but not the entire community.
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I meant high level players, not the community.

Then here's my followup: does that mean that at high level play, the character you main is the largest deciding factor?

For example, is LostProvidence only able to beat Heaton's Siegfried if he were to from Viola? (This is purely hypothetical; please ignore my lack of Viola/Sieg match up knowledge or lack of pro player knowledge)
 
Leonyx said:
Then here's my followup: does that mean that at high level play, the character you main is the largest deciding factor?
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Well, one might say that high level play is the absence of knowledge and execution barriers affecting a match, which means it all comes down to plain old player choices and all that implies, with the mental game of baiting, yomi and situational decisions.

Given that; what a character becomes at this level is a "margin of error" cushion for player choices. A better character can allow a character to fend off wrong choices better, and thus winning is more likely with a higher-tiered character.
 
HRD said:
whos DEX?

I have no idea who you guys are arguing with. Since I dont see ANY posts by DEX at all.......

hint hint
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I farted in your wife's mouth. She tried to finger my butthole but I reminded her I'm not you...

(I haven't drank in a while and then slammed some crown royal. You know I'm being an ass now. Good times!)
 
JDub said:
I farted in your wife's mouth. She tried to finger my butthole but I reminded her I'm not you...

(I haven't drank in a while and then slammed some crown royal. You know I'm being an ass now. Good times!)
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you aint never had a "swirly"???? Oh man you have no idea what your missing. Just be sure and tell my wife to NOT go past the first knuckle. She can get carried away
 
Well this discussion dissolved with the quickness.
I remember not that long ago we had many people writing up petitions to Namco-Bandai for a new BALANCE patch. Unless I'm missing something, player skill level can't be patched out so... yeah.
 
Speaking of balance patching, Viola still needs fixed to the point where tournaments don't have to have restrictions on her. "no backthrow infinite", "no certain combo's/strings", etc.

I'm glad I don't use a character where using tactics that the game allows feels like unfair cheating. Because learning effective strategies and not being able to use them legitimately would really, really piss me off.

I say either ban the bitch, or fix her already. Self imposed rules/restrictions are BS. I'm all or nothin' on this one.

This is not singling out LP, just Viola in general. She's the only character that's truly "broken" to the point where something needs to be done.

Also, can we get a standard CAS formula for DJ already? Make it free so everyone has it, or give people a list of the exact specifications they need to have a standardized hitbox. Who gets to decide what's standard? I would say no one else but PS themselves.

Because as it is, DJ is a useless character in the roster. No one uses him, no one cares. I mean shit, almost a year into the game's life and still missing frame data for DJ? WTF??? I mean shit, it's not like he's super broken/god tier or anything. Making him CAS only was the dumbest thing ever IMO.

Can someone give me a good reason WHY these 2 issues have NOT been patched?

Sorry to change the subject guys.
 
I don't jive with how people are saying that at high levels the character strength is more of a factor. Someone said something about if you programmed two robots to play alpha pat and dampierre the alpha pat would win most of the time. Do yall know what a tautology is? If you keep the player constant and take it out of the equation, of course the difference between characters will be apparent. Likewise, if you have two players play the same character, and take the character difference out of the equation, of course the player difference will be apparent. This don't prove shit.

also
damn-I-Suck said:
I used to have a good friend local who was near my level of SC, before sc5 came out. He started off with NM, and me Sieg. It didn't take him very long to give me a run for my money, and it became very stressful to beat him.

Anyways, he got frustrated with losing consistently, and switched to Ivy. On his day 3 or 4 Ivy, I couldn't beat him anymore. He just stuffed and countered everything I did. I was literally reduced to turtling, grabbing, 1k's, and not much else.

This guy was exceptionally brilliant with natural talent. I had a huge edge in experience, though. I give the guy mad props for learning so fast.

So what did I do? I learned Cassandra. It quickly became apparent that she was a higher tier than Sieg. It took about a week before the tables completely turned around and now HE couldn't beat me anymore. He was particularly salty over 236B wall spam, which I'm not even sure was best thing I could do in that situation, but it still annoyed him and I felt like a whore doing it.
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To me I read this as:
"Both me and my friend started off playing as Rock. My friend switched to Paper and I couldn't beat him. So then I switched to Scissors, which beat paper, so therefore Scissors are definitely higher tier than Rock" Kappa
 
SuckingMaw said:
Well, one might say that high level play is the absence of knowledge and execution barriers affecting a match, which means it all comes down to plain old player choices and all that implies, with the mental game of baiting, yomi and situational decisions.

Given that; what a character becomes at this level is a "margin of error" cushion for player choices. A better character can allow a character to fend off wrong choices better, and thus winning is more likely with a higher-tiered character.
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Okay, so then...tiers are basically a chart of who has the highest margin of error? Viola is high tier because she has a great margin of error, and Raphael is low tier because of his small margin of error (I could believe this, as a Raph main)?

What you seem to imply from your statements, is that the choices players make during gameplay are relatively ineffective compared to a player's character choice at high level play. And from my understanding, at high level play, a player's ability to make successful choices determines his or her skill level. I would have thought that a player's skill level would make more of a difference.
 
Leonyx said:
Okay, so then...tiers are basically a chart of who has the highest margin of error? Viola is high tier because she has a great margin of error, and Raphael is low tier because of his small margin of error (I could believe this, as a Raph main)?
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That would be one way of interpreting it. There is more to it than that; but those are nuances which add up to the margin-of-error conclusion.

What you seem to imply from your statements, is that the choices players make during gameplay are relatively ineffective compared to a player's character choice at high level play. And from my understanding, at high level play, a player's ability to make successful choices determines his or her skill level. I would have thought that a player's skill level would make more of a difference.
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Well there is basically an inflection point while learning the game. Think of it like two intersecting lines. As players get better at the game; their pool of knowledge become similar to each others. As they grow further, the skills they derive from that pool of knowledge become similar to each other. That is the player-skill line.

I choose "similar" because it is not exactly the same. There is still room for style and EFFECTIVE variance (that only exists at high level and cannot exist at low level), but at the same time the pool of "different-yet-effective" choices is less, and thus mathematically comparable to the differences in character effectiveness. That is the character-ability line.

Player choice is always a factor- you can make a string of wrong decisions at high level play for the right reasons, it's just statistically less probable the better you get. Much like poker, it's almost impossible to quantify all the variables of a given game, so you have to take your best guess; however in the long run you are more likely to win with better cards.

As you get better, the character matters more, but not more than the player. When you get to the point where character strengths are comparable to player choices in how much they effect the game, you've hit the high level inflection point. I'd say at high level it's 50% the character and 50% the player. At lower levels, the knowledge gap means it could be the player or the character, it all depends on the situation.
 
Maw, what factors come into play for determining a character's tier placement? Imagine two characters: a slow, unsafe character who does high damage and a long ranged poking character that specializes at block punishing and whiff punishing but does low damage. How do you put these two characters, with different strenghts and weaknesses, on equal grounds so that you can say one of them has a higher margin of error than the other?
 
Phragonist said:
To me I read this as:
"Both me and my friend started off playing as Rock. My friend switched to Paper and I couldn't beat him. So then I switched to Scissors, which beat paper, so therefore Scissors are definitely higher tier than Rock" Kappa
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While this certainly sounds logical and reasonable, especially with different match-ups, there is a little more behind that. Being able to get more consistent damage from safer, faster moves definitely helped.

OF course, this could all be moot because it's quite possible that the character switch was beneficial to my particular playstyle.

A question I have to the high level players is how significant this "effective Variance" that Idle mentions is in terms of success. Does it all simply boil down to knowledge and execution? Or does that individual style become the key defining factor in the differences between players?
 
Delloso said:
Maw, what factors come into play for determining a character's tier placement? Imagine two characters: a slow, unsafe character who does high damage and a long ranged poking character that specializes at block punishing and whiff punishing but does low damage. How do you put these two characters, with different strenghts and weaknesses, on equal grounds so that you can say one of them has a higher margin of error than the other?
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This is much too general an example, but one thing to consider is this:

The individual strengths a character has do not matter if the game engine does not reward them. You ever wonder why you don't see many Astaroths at top level play? He seems extremely good doesn't he? High damage comeback factor and whatnot? So why is it that you rarely see them place super high, even in the hands of amazing players?

damn-I-Suck said:
A question I have to the high level players is how significant this "effective Variance" that Idle mentions is in terms of success. Does it all simply boil down to knowledge and execution? Or does that individual style become the key defining factor in the differences between players?
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Individual style niches that can win can only be carved out at high level play. It requires a large amount of knowledge, and being particular to how to apply it and in what situations, and still as reasonably effective of a choice as another player playing the same character might make.

An EXTREMELY SIMPLE example: Something-Unique and Xeph both play Pyrrha. After they hit an AA, Xeph might opt to press the advantage with a 44A to cut off step and represent a threat with his frame advantage, looking for a CH he has set up, whereas SU is more likely to use that advantage to backdash safely to her optimal 3B range and look for whiffs.

This is not to say that they will ALWAYS choose these choices; but their particular playstyle inclines them to, and the rewards for both of them are relatively equal, but with different vectors of getting there.
 
SCV allows the CPU to fight itself. I've watched a lot of these matches (sadly) and the gap between a high tier and a mid tier is immense. The CPU with the higher tier char is going to win at least 90% of the time. I don't want to get into talking about specific match-ups and just who really is high, mid and low tier. my point is that if you eliminate the human factor, what we think is a small difference in character strength becomes a massive difference in wins and losses.
sure beats me if this is important, like WTF do we care what a CPU can do.
 
roxysmash said:
SCV allows the CPU to fight itself. I've watched a lot of these matches (sadly) and the gap between a high tier and a mid tier is immense. The CPU with the higher tier char is going to win at least 90% of the time. I don't want to get into talking about specific match-ups and just who really is high, mid and low tier. my point is that if you eliminate the human factor, what we think is a small difference in character strength becomes a massive difference in wins and losses.
sure beats me if this is important, like WTF do we care what a CPU can do.
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Not saying i disagree with this but the CPU in SCV doesn't play the chars to their fullest potential. The amount of gimmicks you can use against it is immense.
 
LOL, After re-reading the OP, seems like Oofmatic just wanted people to agree with him to justify his claim that whatever tactics he was using weren't CHEAP. In a way he's right. Calling something you have trouble with cheap is just a way to vent frustration, not to be taken seriously. But yeah, I don't think Oof really wanted a debate at all.

Y'all go ahead on with the black-holing of this thread, lol.
 
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