Complexity, Depth and Skill: Good Games?

Complexity = depth = skill (= a better game, right?)

Now this is something I essentially agree with (and the linked article is well worth reading), however the trouble is the mistakes that many people make are:

1. complexity = execution complexity

and/or that

2. complexity = the sheer number of options, disregarding their viability

Both of these can actually be ‘meaningless rules’, and so do not actually necessarily increase complexity and depth, and I’ll go on to explain why. This is going to be a rather rambley article and I’m purposefully going to labour a few points here, as I get pretty fed up with the amount of misconceptions I see about this regularly.

Execution Skill does not always equal complexity & depth

I’ve just made two Vs Fighting games; Remy Fighter 2 and Remy Fighter 4. In RF2 all the attacks, blocks and moves work in identical fashion to, well, Street Fighter 2, in fact, its identical to SF2 HDR in every way really, except I put Remy from 3rd Strike into the game too (but you can forget about him, as he’s still badly balanced and low tier anyway). But in RF4, it’s an identical game, except that I’ve changed all the execution requirements. To do any crouching MK or HK sweep, you now need to do a quarter-circle backward + kick, otherwise the attack will have no damaging hitboxes. All hurricane-kick motions are now down-to-back-to-up to perform. To do any fireball you need to do a 180 rotation. To do every jumping attack you need to use a QCF and the attack button whilst in the air, otherwise you just jump. Super moves require a half-circle back, half-circle forward, then x3 of the relevant P or K attack button. If you don’t hit all 3 attack buttons within the allowable frames though, the move fails to execute but it drains all your super bar.

Ok I could go on adding more layers to this silly example, but hopefully by now you’re getting the idea.

Now at the very top levels of play, which has more complexity, and more depth and so is perhaps the ‘better’ game?

They are both absolutely identical games once both players have the pure execution mastery to do all those additional requirements to perform the moves – and none of these are so difficult to perform that they couldn’t be done reliably by the best fighting game players – so they have the exact same moves, characters, and character balance (or lack thereof). Remy Fighter 4 will take a lot more practice of the execution to get good at, and at anything lower than ‘mastery’ level of skill the different risk/reward ratios of different moves due to the difficulty of execution & the penalties for failure will change the game. But by the time you get to the very top of skill at the game? If you’re playing as Ryu you’ll still have the exact same move options as you did before in every single situation, and your opponent will have the exact same counters, it’s just that you’ll just both be having to flash your hands around that stick like crazy to perform the same moves in Remy Fighter 4.

Now, because it’s harder to do the moves there will be certainly be a greater difference between the top and the bottom players at RF4 than at RF2, so surely that makes RF4 the deeper and better game?

To me, these are exactly the same games in terms of complexity & depth – it’s just one of them takes a lot more execution ’skill/depth/complexity’ to play. But this execution skill isn’t the only thing that’s going on in the game. It isn’t the only form of skill, and in fact, as players get better at the execution skills, they become increasingly meaningless in this kind of game.

Which is more complex and deep & requires more skill to play, Chess or Street Fighter 2? Clearly the idea that execution skill is the major component in determining the overall depth of a game is not always true.

Sheer number of rules does always mean depth & complexity

So what about Street Fighter II and Street Fighter III? Street Fighter III certainly has far more execution complexity and skill required to play it. It also has way more ‘rules’ in terms of the number of options available to the players.  19 characters vs 16. Each character has a choice of three Super Arts rather than a single super move. Most characters in SF3 have far more special moves. Almost every special move can be “EX’d” and powered up, then of course you’ve got new subsystems of taunting, universal overheads, variable jumps, kara throws, and the big one, parrying. This is a lot of new rules! So if ”each new rule interacts with the existing rules in new and increasingly complicated ways, creating an ever-widening realm of possibilities which the player is called upon to grasp. The better he grasps them the more capable he becomes in using them to his advantage, and thus the more skillfully he can play”, why then does this ever-widening realm of possiblities, end up looking like this a whole lot of the time at the top-level of play:

From 2005…

From 2008…

How can all these rules and systems boil down to Chun Li vs Chun Li (with a few Kens and Yuns), using a tiny amount of the available characters & moves & options? It’s because the vast majority of those other options are so sub-optimal that they’ve all become essentially meaningless rules – most of the moves and characters have become redundant. The new rule of parrying itself, rather than interacting to create new complexities arguably actually compresses the decision tree in the game, making other mental parts of the game less complex. So whilst the execution complexity rises due to parrying, the decision complexity is actually a lot lower – the game starting to revolve almost entirely around a poke/parry/meter-gaining/kara-throw game.

So just neither adding more rules and more execution skills to a game necessarily means more depth. To go with another hypothetical example for anyone not familiar with Street Fighter III, I’ve also just made Dud or Arrive, a 3d Vs Fighting game. It has three moves, block, throw, and attack, all of which are done with a single button press, which create a simple (slightly weighted) rock/paper/scissors guessing game. It’s not exactly a deep game but it does reward the player who can guess correctly more often, and also has better timing and positional skills. Even so, a first time player could quite likely beat an ‘expert’. So in my sequel, Dud or Arrive 2, I add a new special kind of attack, the headbutt. Performed with a Forward-Back-Forward -> Attack&Throw command. Headbutt beats blocks, other attacks, and throws! The game now requires a lot more execution skill than single button presses, yet it’s also less complex and deep overall, as to play the game well, it’s simply a matter of doing headbutts as constantly & perfectly as possible. I’ve just made three different moves redundant for the sake of one that’s harder to execute. There’s no guessing game anymore; however the experts at that headbutt command who can do it almost instantaneously over and over without a mistake (and if you think it’s too easy, you could make the headbutt command as hard to do as you like) will be the unbeatable masters at this game.

Executor! Execution Barrier Upgrade Complete

National Fighting League?

 

As you add too much execution complexity to a game, instead of adding real depth, you actually end up creating more of an execution barrier at times; meaning that the game just ends up with an increasingly elite and smaller crowd as you up the complexity more and more. This is exactly what happened with Vs Fighting games over the years in many ways. But hang on, Street Fighter’s for EVERYONE right? Well, as much respect as I have for Seth Killian, I think some of this is rubbish that really needs to be debunked. “You don’t have to be any particular height/weight/strength to win”. True, but I actually think that top Fighting game players (or any top video game players) actually have a lot more in common with the top sportsmen & women than people give them credit for. Maybe their own specialised talents and skills aren’t so immediately obvious, being more mental and reaction based, but make no mistake they are there. Claiming they are not in some way, does top players a huge disservice. 

It’s certainly appears far ‘easier’ to get to the top in the Street Fighter world than in the NFL, as the innate talent requirement is probably lower, and there are certainly less barriers to entry in terms of cost and organisation, but I also wonder about how much of the ‘ease to get to the top’ idea about video games is more simply down to the lack of structured competition and lack of really dedicated players.  Are the mental/dextrous twitch-demon freaks like say, Daigo Umehara, THAT much more common than the physical freaks of the NFL? (or tennis, or any major sport). Or is it just that the NFL has a far greater money, far greater organisation, and thus greater sifting of society at large to locate and reward the freaks that fit it’s bill of requirements? If I start running a 10 million pound tournament every year for Street Fighter IV, don’t you think they’ll be a few more “Daigos” springing up, and lesser gifted players won’t stand a chance. Can anyone really become a top tournament level SF player? Even if everyone was given equal time & experiences & a theoretical level of dedication, the physical dexterity & mental skills required are just too much for most. And this is ignoring the fact some people will get RSI or have other far more debilitating physical handicaps.

If I take a random sample of 100 people who’ve never touched a videogame before in their life, and give them all 20 hours to play Remy Fighter 4 on their own, even if they all use that time in exactly the same way and have exactly the same mental dedication, attitude,  and drive to succeed at it – I’ll throw them another 10 million pound tournament as an encouragement, it’d still be fully expected that some will still be more naturally gifted at the game than others, and thus will win more, purely due to faster reaction times and better execution skills. There won’t be some even distribution of results with almost every player ends up with a 50% win/loss against these wholly ‘in all other ways equal’ opponents.

10,000 Fists in the air

And if we replay this experimental ‘100 noobs’ tournament for both my mythical Remy Fighter 2 and Remy Fighter 4 games described earlier, I would expect that actually, different players may well come out on top. Why is this? And this is the crux of this for me. The reason is that different skills are being tested more in these two very similar games. In RF4 the person who’s dextrous enough to actually perform their attacks effectively will almost always win. However in RF2 more players are able to perform the moves correctly, and so suddenly their choice of moves and use of the moves becomes more important – tactical skills start to come into play far more in RF2, and perhaps even some strategic skills, or even yomi?

I still don’t believe either game is really ‘deeper’, I think it really comes down to a matter of taste and perspective, and the aim of the game in general. What skill tests do you focus your game on? I could make an update to Starcraft called Starcraft: NavanWar. NavanWar has no hotkeys and every unit must be manually selected and clicked every single time make it fire an attack. To me, the game isn’t any deeper, in fact it’s probably far less so now that it almost completely rewards the very few players that have the execution speed and skills to even muster any kind of organised attack or defense.

In any game there are physical & dexterity execution components. It could be, to all practical intents and purposes, none, like chess, or it could be incredibly high, like an NFL Quarterback. It could be somewhere in between like Street Fighter, with low physical skills, but high mental/dexterity ones.  Where video games pitch themselves along the execution line I think is really important in both single player and multiplayer titles. Not only does it change the mix of skills being tested, but also the accessibility to players. Whereas complexity is always a good thing, the nature of that complexity matters, and neither simply increasing (or decreasing) the execution complexity, nor the sheer number of non-meaningful options necessarily increases the overall complexity=depth=skill of a game.

Control Freak

“Been playing HL2 as I fancy going through it again. I’m enjoying it, but still find it weird on the XBOX controller. Things which are piss easy on the mouse can be a real bugger on the controller” – Navan Daughn

Valve need to get their heads screwed on for console conversions

When does a controller become part of the game? Pretty much always! However the degree to which it affects the game experience really varies wildly from case to case. I think Navan now understands some of my complaints with regards to The Orange Box much better, having tried it on a twin stick pad. And having played through Half Life 1 myself on a mouse, I already wish I’d got The Orange Box on the PC rather than for the 360. I’m having the same problem with Left 4 Dead as well. Apart from the small concession of a quick-turn button the game is completely designed for mouse & keyboard control rather than for twin stick on a gamepad, and I felt the game really suffered. Now with the Left 4 Dead 2 demo out, I’ve been able to directly compare it on the 360 vs the PC; and there was no contest at all, the game handled far more easily on a mouse, and due to the design of the game this made it actually much more fun to play in many ways. It leaves me frustrated with both versions because many more of my friends are on 360, and I’d much rather play over XBox Live, in the comfort of my front room, with my preferred twin sticks; yet the game feels so much nicer to control on the PC with a mouse and keyboard. So basically I won’t be 100% satisfied with either version. I realised what I really want is a proper “Left 4 Dead 360″ version that changes the game control mechanics enough so that control on a twin stick pad becomes viable & fun and doesn’t feel like you’re stuggling to replicate a mouse. Halo, Gears and many other titles all do this fine, so it can be done.

Some people may say it’s a simple case of “always play a game on it’s default intended controller”, which held more weight with arcade conversions, but it’s still not exactly clear cut. Should Street Fighter 2 HD Remix be played on an 360 or PS3 pad since those are the systems it was released for? Ok, it’s clearly a update of an original joystick game though – so fine, use a joystick. But what about the differences between different joysticks? Isn’t it a bit of an unfair advantage in the game to be using a high quality controller vs someone that isn’t? For Street Fighter IV, shouldn’t I always be using button bindings and turbo auto fire? These things are built into the game options and the official controller! On the PC it gets even more murky, with WoW Macro keyboards, gaming mice with extra button bindings and on and on. Where do you draw the line between cheating and ‘playing to win’ when it comes to your choice of controller? Should you even be allowed to reconfigure your button layout on Halo on the 360? That sounds ridiculous I know, but it shows how difficult it is to draw the line without some kind of organisation of the metagame rules around the video game itself. For Street Fighter, I play to the standard I’ll be held to at whatever offline tournament I want to enter, but if I wasn’t competing in organised offline events, what then?

Auto-fire is probably the biggest controller issue on competitive 360 games, and it affects everything from Street Fighter to FPS titles. There are some quite simple solutions to either designing the game so it won’t be an issue, or detecting it as cheating online. But sadly games developers don’t appear to care, putting in pistols that ‘fire as fast as you can press the button’ which is foolishly naive in an online competitive game, and making the aforementioned official controllers with auto-fire built in. It’s there so you can test combos out in training mode? Yeh right. And the line just gets blurrier all the time – it is already possible to use a keyboard and mouse on a 360 if you are willing to go to enough trouble with things like this XPFS 4.0 Speed.

Another game I love, Virtual On was recently re-released in an upgraded version on the 360 on XBLA, and I was initally overjoyed. But it requires such a specialised controller to play properly I’ve completely avoided it until one comes available. My friend Ollie Barder covered the history of Virtua Ron (as I affectionately refer to it sometimes) and it’s controller issues on the 360 here. However, luckily, fan pressure has meant that a twin-stick controller for the 360 was eventually announced. It’s still not out at the time of writing, but is imminent, and can be previewed at Hori’s site. Of course the problem is whether I’ll ever be able to get hold of one in the UK, and at what price, and then will the game’s netcode make it worthwhile to even play, let alone shell out for another controller?

I don’t really have any answers here, with the current state of play, other than to raise this point as yet another murky area of gaming that developers of competitive games, and conversions of games, really ought to pay much more attention to. However especially on platforms like the PC, it might be a case that there’s very little they can do to control the issue however. All this, and I haven’t even touched on WiiMotes or Natal yet!

Balancing Match

Earlier I looked at the concept I attempted to coin ‘Versus Flow‘ in video games. Here’s my continued thoughts on that & how to improve things.

Don’t Give Up, Challenge Again

So what can you do to try to fix the matchmaking? Well, much like getting good at anything; the first step is to at least try! Flawed as they are, at least SF4 and Halolz are starting along the right track, it’s just that overall it’s taking videogames a ridiculously long time to get anywhere, given that this is something that’s been needed since the dawn of competitive gaming, and has been ripe for any game to utilise for as long as we’ve had internet enabled games.

I’ll use a primary example of Vs Fighting games, as those are my favourite. You need to start with a decent skill rating system like those in VF5 or HDR, ie: one based on results and not experience (although experience might be used to count for a very small portion of your rating), but use it based on the character you select, not an average overall score. Just because I’m pretty decent with DeeJay, it doesn’t mean I’m anywhere near that good with Ryu. However your ‘best character rating’ could be used to give a default ‘base’ rating with a character you hadn’t played before eg. you’d start at half your best character’s rating until you actually played a more games with different characters to assist the game in ‘finding’ your skill level based on results. You could potentially go even further than a character based rating, and use a character matchup based rating. eg. I’m pretty familiar with the Dee Jay vs Ryu match, but I’m really not good or familiar with playing Dee Jay vs Dictator.

Then, here’s how a network battle options menu ought to look:

Online Game Type: Single Vs Match, Repeated Vs Match, Best of Three Vs Match, Group/Lobby Match etc. Whatever relevant modes that game allowed. Maybe even allow a player to try and play all types depending on what is available with a priority setting for whatever the player prefers.

Priority: Skill Match, Connection Match, Equal, possibly even a Zone/Attitude Match (more on this below).

Ping Limit: Set the highest ping time you want to play from Any, down to 10ms or something ridiculous (good luck!). Turn this into a number of stars of connection or whatever for simplicity. Or Best/Good/Average/Any banding.

Skill Upper Limit: Set how much higher ranked than you your opponents can be, this could be banded rather than actual points for simplicity.

Skill Lower Limit: Set how much lower ranked than you your opponents can be.  Again this could be banded, and might not even be needed at all. Certainly if it was, it could be limited to not very much easier, or tied to your upper limit, so you can just choose how far varied rankings you play against.

All of this could be further simplified for players who didn’t want to worry about ‘under the hood’ mechanics, just let them pick “I only want to play Good/Average/Any net connections” and “I want online Vs matches to be Easy/Normal/Hard/Any”. Oh and you’d probably need to put in warning messages like “you may not find matches for a long time” if people set it on certain silly options – like a low rated player only wanting easier opponents, if you even chose to allow this (perhaps not).

Then I’d pick the character I want to play as.. and we’re off. No, not staring at a ‘waiting for opponent’ screen – I’m playing vs the CPU, or training mode, or ideally, whatever the heck you wanted to do in that game, or even a different game if the gaming platform could allow it. But my ‘Request to Fight’ would be out there, on the network, looking for another request to match with, and when they find each other via XBL dedicated matching  servers etc, bam – “Here Comes a New Challenger”. You could still quit at this point if necessary (your Mum just called!), but the game wouldn’t even show you your opponents name, character, connection or actual ranking until the match began. And once the fight begins, if you quit or disconnect – you’d lose and your opponent would win. After the match your ratings would be recalculated appropriately – perhaps given lesser weighting to the result, the further the match was from your preferred settings.

Hopefully the online code would also have some method for dealing with other forms of ‘cheating’ other than the simple to deal with quitting – including things like auto-fire, lag switches – whatever the actual known exploits are in the game. Almost all of these would be detectable over time.

All of this would totally change the idea of “Ranked Match”; which arguably emulates entering a tournament against all comers and figuring out ‘who’s the best’ instead to a “Balanced Match”; attempting to match equally skilled players. Online versus shouldn’t be about the ‘n00b pwnage’! I’d even rename it Balanced Match if I could do, and hopefully at least put a hinderance on the ’rank-whoring’ obsession with Leaderboards & how to cheat them. To me a leaderboard for the vast majority of players should be the byproduct of play, not the goal of play.

Now, it might sound overly complicated or difficult to code the features in my online battle menu, but all of these features already exist in one form or another in various games, they just haven’t ever been put together in any game that also has good netcode and a good rating system.

There’s certainly hope of all of this being put together at some point. The most progress seems to be coming on the ‘Attitude Match’ mentioned above. Impulse (a PC digital download service from Stardock similar to Valve’s Steam) will attempt to match players based on game ownership and their self-defined gaming priorities, which is a bit like a far more advanced version of XBox Live’s “Zones” for a player – which I’ve only ever seen a single game (Marble Blast Ultra) even make use of – probably because they are just too limited to be of much use. Social gaming applications like Raptr might also eventually become an aid to matchmaking – even Facebook itself (& its games) could use all of this – you can see the early signs that they are starting to look into it’s relationship with gaming when you read interviews like this one, and see the start of it’s integration with XBox Live (even though it’s really basic at this time).

 

With regards to actual skill matching, it appears Blizzard have some fantastic ideas for Starcraft II:

“The old experience of playing through single-player, getting online, getting your ass handed to you,and then saying “I don’t want to play anymore” is not something we’re after. We want to have more friendly experiences for new players.”

It seems like they really want to make Starcraft II multiplayer far more accessible:

“Sigaty talks about how long it took him to feel like he could win at Warcraft III. “It took 10 games… I knew it would get to that point, but I think, 10 games, that’s ridiculous. If you play three, get your ass handed to you, then you walk away, you say yeah, I think the online thing’s not for me.”

Pardo, and Battle.net, have the answer. Over and above improved matchmaking algorithms, searches, and the persistent player profiles that should prevent “smurfing” (experienced players creating new accounts to take noobs unawares), there’s an ambitious and clever new ladder and tournament system that aims to give players of all skill levels the kind of thrill experienced at the top end of competition – “the competitive arena for everyone”, Pardo calls it. “Ladder play doesn’t have to be for hardcore gamers only.”

There will be seven levels of competition in StarCraft II – five regular bands from Copper to Platinum, book-ended by the e-sports Pro League at the top, and the Practice League at the bottom. Practice League will feature a slowed game speed and maps custom-designed to prevent the rush tactics that can be panic-inducing and off-putting to a new player.”

It sounds like exactly the same things I’m talking about, just translated to the RTS genre, doesn’t it? But all competitive games should be doing this. Even if Starcraft II actually ends up more like this:

Even Capcom appears to have some decent ideas for Super Street Fighter IV, as they are talking about having rating points based per-character, and also matchmaking in team vs team battles to try to create equal teams. Now they just need to put these features in a better fighting game with better netcode (like, say HDR ).

Overall, once again, it’s down to ‘e-sports’ to take their cues from real sports. There’s usually multiple paths available to a sportsman to get a varied skill level of competition. But video games don’t have much available between “casual games with your mates” to “take on the best in the world”; but they easily could, and should do. In many ways this is recovering another lost part of local arcade culture; where you vied to be the ‘best in your arcade’, as that was all you really knew about. Your local arcade catchment area was the equivalent to an amateur sunday league at a sport in some ways, but the options that are available with online matchmaking could actually be signigicantly better than this.

Coming next in this series – my thoughts on how to improve measuring actual skill at games to get good ratings, and also training modes in games and how to allow players to improve their skills better.

Versus Flow

“In theory I love playing online with people on Versus but I get frustrated because I suck so badly at it, with my reaction time, that I just die constantly, and after a while of no joy whatsoever, it loses it’s fun factor.” -DeeGruenEinzige

The game designer’s job of setting the right difficulty and challenge level when it comes to the technical execution required to play a game (as previously discussed here) and the overall “solo” experience in a game is one thing, but for multiplayer competitive ‘versus’ style games it’s a different beast entirely. Here, to a reasonable extent I believe, you can measure the challenge, and hence the ability for a player to experience an enjoyable state of ‘flow’ depending on the person (or team) that they are competing against, and measuring their ‘chance to win’, based on their skill level versus the skill level of the competition. When there is a huge disparity in skill level, and one team or player is easily beating the other, then clearly there is little chance for either team or player to experience flow. Conversely where both players are of a similar skill level, and both would ‘on paper’ have a 50% chance to win, and are winning around that rate upon repeated competitive play, then you’ve got the potential for a really fun game where all players are in the ‘flow zone’.

Now of course, the game’s mechanics still play a part in the flow experience, and you can only go so far with this. A gamer’s taste in games will also come into play. It’s unlikely that even two equally skilled players winning 50% of the time are going to get to a heightened state of flow from repeated games of noughts and crosses (that’s tic-tac-toe for our American readers!), paper-rock-scissors (jun-ken-pon), or even a perfect 50/50 game of ‘flip the coin’ (unless they love alea and really enjoy winning by luck). And conversely many players wouldn’t enjoy a drawn out game of chess, even if it was against someone of exactly the same skill. The vast majority of gamers don’t appear to enjoy competitive play whatsoever. But we can assume for the sake of this article that we’ve got a game that both the players or teams of players enjoy playing, or potentially would enjoy playing.

The Only Test is Your Skill: Face Him Straight!

Now getting the game difficulty and game mechanics right for ‘flow’ in a single-player experience is a really difficult task. So much has been written on that topic already elsewhere. The big problem is matching the challenges in the game to every individual player’s skills, which of course, vary widely. And their tastes in the level of challenge and type of challenge they want (if any at all!) also varies. So you get solutions such as different difficulty settings, the ability to save your game, or as I’ve already discussed as an example setting the difficulty of moves within a game. However getting the potential for ‘versus flow’ right ie: the difficulty setting of versus mode, is actually a very simple goal, no matter the type of game: You simply need to match up two players (or teams of players) of relatively equal skill. Yet this is exactly where video games fall down.

I’ve referenced this issue a multitude of times here on Agoners, and I’m continually astounded that not even a single game has ever really tried to address this fully. I see this as the vital missing component in so many games.

Imagine if you could play a game of Street Fighter (any version!) and have a good chance of fighting against someone very close to your skill level with the character you selected to play. I cannot fathom that anyone would not find that more fun than the current situation; where it’s effectively totally random who you get to play, outside of creating your own game invites. On Street Fighter 2 HDR Ranked Match or a random Player Match lobby, you’re as likely to fight against Joe Noob, who can barely block an attack, as you are to fight against an Evo champion like Afro Legends - and I have first hand experience of both. Now of course your subsequent rating change, win or lose, will attempt to reflect the level of your competition – and HDR has one of the very few decent skill rating systems out there (provided all players have played enough games, you always play your best character(s) in ranked, and don’t get idiots playing you with rubbish ping times, or Akuma players…). But I feel the aim of an online matchmaking system ought to be to provide fun for the players first, and a realistic ranking or rating system second. But of course the rating system itself does become critical if you use it to matchmake. Street Fighter IV is also a total failure in this regard. Whilst it’s “Championship Mode” patch at least gave players the chance to get a match against a similarly skilled opponent with it’s grade point system, the system of grading players itself was so flawed, with far too wide levelling and grinding potential, that this actually did nothing but add a a slightly improved, but still only very small chance of a good versus match. Probably the only fighting game that even comes close to decent matchmaking is Virtua Fighter 5 – but only if people use the ‘find players close to my level’ option; which many do not, given that not enough players with good ping-times are play the game.

I can't believe I only stumbled across halolz.com thanks to writing this article - great site, click image for more!

When it comes to another staple competitive genre – FPS’s – things are arguably even worse. Almost every game I’ve played that could be a helluva lot of fun with good matchmaking eg. Left 4 Dead Versus Mode or Team Fortress 2, has no actual attempt at matchmaking at all. And adding vastly to the complexity is the fact that determining the skill of teams is a far more difficult task than ascertaining a single player’s ability. But what amazes me is that these games don’t even try.

I’ve often held up Halo 3 as one of the exemplars of good matching, with it’s in-depth experience point and grading system and seemingly excellent matchmaking system. However I’ve played a lot more of it since Halo 3 ODST came out, and very quickly huge cracks started to appear to me. There’s a lot of them, but they all generally fall under the umbrella of the major problem being that players are not realistically ranked on the actual skills that matter in the game. For example, map knowledge plays a huge part, whether in a team game or a free-for-all. However the matchmaking works on the assumption that you are equally knowledgeable on all maps in the game… not so much fun when you’ve never had a DLC map-pack, and just got ODST and hence are experiencing a multitude of new maps for the first time.

Jumpers for goalposts

I could go into a lot more depth about the problems in virtually all current games across any genre, this is just a sample that I am familiar with. But the point is that hopefully it’s obvious that it is a problem. If you analogise video games to real sports, the current situation is like asking a soccer team to have to play against anyone from the Premiership, through to a bottom division, to a bunch of kids kicking the ball around in the park, whenever they want to play a match. Most versus modes on games don’t even attempt to offer anything like Easy mode or Hard mode, or even a Normal; it’s just totally random, or more likely VERY HARD all the time, if you’re not an expert experienced player. How many of those players out there who don’t appear to enjoy playing competitive games, like the quote at the start of this article, might do, if they felt they had a chance for a ‘equal match’. Next time in this series I’ll look at some possibilities for solving it, and better ways of doing things.

Challenge me Angel!

Challenge me angel ?? :-S

Do you really want to mess with me punk? Well, do ya?

Despite how I describe myself as being a fiero-seeking nutjob sometimes the challenge just seems too much, or too far away from my core interest in a game, even for me. For example, as part of my practice for Street Fighter 2 HD Remix, I’ve watched youtube videos of the best players in the world fighting with DeeJay & read about them and even from them on forums like shoryuken. And I see and read about things that I just can’t seem to do reliably, no matter how much I try. The biggest stumbling block for me is the execution of combos & blockstrings, which whilst not always that important to SF2, can be in certain matches for DeeJay. It’s a bit like how I’d describe watching any match of Street Fighter 4 in some ways [link to the future here ^_^], in that the best DeeJay players always hit that huge combo in that one chance they get to land it in a match, or can repeat a blockstring over and over if it’s effective to do so. It’s pretty much the opposite to me, as I have to play around the fact I will more than likely miss a big combo if only given a single attempt and a small opening to get it – and I actually quite deliberately work around this weakness in my play style and strategy in some ways. However it definitely limits my ability to play at a really high level – and with blockstrings it’s much worse than just missing a combo. In matchups where I need them a lot – eg. vs Dictator, I struggle with the whole matchup and am generally a lot worse because of it. Despite hours and hours spent in training mode on combos & stringing moves together, whereas I can at least do every combo in SF2 with my chosen character (unlike many other fighting games!), it always seems forever out of my grasp to become consistent at them. Now having this never attainably execution plateau is sometimes inspiring, but equally sometimes I wonder; what’s the point? What’s the point of learning every setup and situation & mindgame (which I find amazing fun, because it’s interactive & opponent dependant, not rote-learning of facts; like a map or course layout), when I get into the perfect situation I want to be in – I miss the exact move or combo I’ve just spent the whole round setting up.

I sometimes wonder if I ought to attempt to find the character in a fighting game that requires “the least physical dexterity to use”. My ideal character would therefore be the one with the least combos, least difficult moves – anything that’s a motion special I find much harder than a charge move, and I am quite bad at direction-held normals where they have to be applied in very small reaction windows, least important to time a perfect safe-jump / cross up / or reversal? ie: A character that is most dependant on mind-games (yomi) & knowledge. I’m not sure who this character would be in SF2, perhaps Blanka? But it’s so matchup dependant in SF2. And I would bet that this theoretical character in any fighting game is very probably low tier. It sometimes makes me think I really ought to go and play a good competitive turn-based game instead, such as Kongai or Magic the Gathering; and of course, sometimes I do. This is especially a problem when I’m playing when mentally or physically tired, and I’ve even suffered from serious issues with RSI in the past (thankfully joysticks never really cause me this, although I do get ‘button basher’s forearm’ at times ).

The crazy thing for me is that when HDR was announced I set myself my own personal goal for how good I thought I could get at Street Fighter 2…

Now whilst I’ve not yet signed away my soul to the Spirit of a Fighter, I’ve already surpassed my personal goal to become the greatest jazz player in Yorkshire… Perhaps I set my sights too low, and sometimes I wonder should I even be trying to aim higher? Yet of course, much of the time, it’s great fun, and that good old fiero when I do manage to punch above my weight isn’t half addictive for someone like me

I do believe that the mastery of execution needed to play fighting games well is a big part of the ‘flow‘ that fans of this kind of game can achieve whilst playing. What I mean by this is that when the execution of moves is within their grasp, not too hard and not too easy, the player is put into the flow portion by just this aspect of the game; and they’ll probably have a lot of other enjoyment factors for them going on as well. The trouble is that the vast majority of gamers – at least when exposed to real competitive play on fighting games – are quickly placed into the Anxiety area on the graphic to the left – although I’d prefer to rename the feeling caused as frustration or despair. I believe one of the main reasons I enjoy it so much is that SF2 HDR hits my “flow zone” far more than any other fighting game, during competitive play, precisely because so many other fighting games are just too hard, too fast and too complex (in terms of the dexterity needed to use their mechanics) for me.

Unfortunately it seems that much of the fighting game community – and even the developers of these games – are oblivious to just how much of a challenge even so-called simpler or ‘easy’ games like HDR really are. As fighting games have developed over time, rather than a focus on balance and viable strategic options or tactical styles for players, games have generally just increased the complexity of the execution needed to master them. But then again, you could argue these developers really are feeding their own community, since even today you still hear cries from the ignorant about the so-called ‘dumbing down’ of SF2 in HDR purely due to the handful of motions & timings that were made easier. I take completely the opposite view and I think any nod towards greater accessibility is actually a really good idea for the genre. And the really daft thing is, when it comes to SF2 at least, that at the very top levels of play everyone can execute everything with very high %’s of success. So making moves ‘easier’ for lower level players, really doesn’t change the top-level game at all, it just allows more players access to it. If some players move into the “control/relaxation” zone when it comes to performing moves on a fighting game, I think that’s a really small concern, in fact the game arguable works best at that point. It amazes me that even fighting game fans at times seem not to realise there’s still so much more going on in these games than simply performing combos and special moves! How ‘flow’ can be found equally well, if not far more in the rest of the gameplay inherent in fighting games is something I’ll also go into in future.

So really, maybe HDR is still the ideal fighting game for me when it comes to the mastery of execution, since I’m getting put very close to a ‘flow’ zone every time I get a chance for a crossup combo with DeeJay. “Alright Rikky, bust out da’ jackknife!.. kick”

The Spectator Spectre

I recently had an interesting discussion about an article at Tap Repeatedly, and one of the things that fell out of it is how difficult it is to even watch high level play at a fighting game and really understand what’s going on. SRK’s Ponder also wrote a really accurate and amusing rant about this fact, albeit from a different perspective, but many of his points apply to anyone watching a video game.

These are some of the underlying reasons why I believe fighting games don’t currently make good spectator sports for the majority of people. This applies to video games in general, in fact many types of game, especially those with a first-person perspective even suffer far more problems than fighting games do in this department. Whilst the “but I can do all of that!” factor mentioned by Ponder might even help get players interested in playing a game (albeit not to a high level), I’m not sure it’s necessarily a selling point in getting people to watch them. Of course even for the layest-of-laymen watching video game tournament footage there’s the usual “see who wins & loses” and the natural drama associated with any competition – it’s why one of my friends enjoyed watching hours of live EVO footage, even though he himself only knows the basics of these games and can’t even pull off hadoukens with much consistency. It’s just that in many of the popular televised ‘real’ sports the visible signs of what’s going on tend to be more obvious. Most of them have the “wow, I can’t do that!” factor. People are also traditionally more impressed with obvious physical skills than the more mental ones that many video games test; witness the failure of attempts to televise chess, as interesting as I personally found it. I feel this is likely the root cause of the traditional scrub’s love of combos as a measure of ’skill’ as well, as it’s an obvious relatively ‘physical’ dexterity test they can clearly observe happening, or not happening. Fighting games are also simply so fast that observing the real nuances, even if they can be fully understood and correctly interpreted by the viewer, is incredibly hard to see at full-speed. I’ve recently been watching some videos of high-level play at SSFT2 and HDR to try and improve my game, and I end up clicking rewind and watching the same sequence over and over again to spot what really happened and why. It’s hard to even pick the right timestamp to wind back to though at times, because the game is just so darn fast. And someone new to the game won’t even get much out of that rewinding as they’ll just “see the same thing” again.

Let's get ready for some real hard-hittin' action

This is where an insightful and entertaining commentator needs to step in, and much like ‘real’ sports on TV, offer insights into the ‘what & why’ that the viewer can’t otherwise see. John Madden coming out of retirement to commentate on Street Fighter?  “And y’see what you see here is he throws out that big ol’ Shin Shoryuken and BOOM!!” *telestrates large red blob explosive hit effect all over the screen*. EVO made a great start at this, I suspect my friend wouldn’t have watched more than 5 minutes without the commentary team, and many Japanese tournaments do the same. But it’s still very basic and e-sports are playing catch up to real sports badly at this – we need slow-motion replays, telestrating, different angle shots, observation views, stats-tracking and all the other things you see in televised sports today. Of course the handy thing about video games is that, being run in software, all of these types of things can easily be done within the program itself. You don’t need some advanced graphical overlay calculated by multiple cameras to put something like a visible First Down marker on the televised version of a e-sports NFL football field, you don’t even need five kinds of alchemy and wizardry orenchanted magical yellow ants to get these kinds of features- all the graphical and statistical technology is already there. However such post-game analysis tools are ironically still in their infancy and completely under-utilised. Bungie.net post-game reports are a nice start on the stats front, but no other game has managed anything close to it, and most games don’t even offer a simple capture & replay option – most people need to hook up additional PC video capture equipment to even get to this point. Even new games like SF4 are hugely dissappointing, only offering some rudimentary playback facilities as part of their game. Again, Halo 3’s replay features are forging ahead far more with this kind of thing. Shame it’s an FPS!

You can probably already hear the Zerg about to swarm this article. A fantastic example of a lot of this in action is Starcraft in South Korea. Here they have a lot of advantages the rest of the world doesn’t for the most part and, whilst some aspects mentioned may be cultural traits, most of these must have been slowly developed over time rather than just appearing overnight. There is a widespread understanding about the game, appreciation of the skills needed to play, experienced (& I’d assume dedicated and entertaining) commentators, one standard game to play (not dozens of different versions of essentially the same game), and of course not to mention, money involved. But I believe a lot more games in other countries could potentially develop in this way if games developers were serious about it and actually even tried to develop for these things. For example I expect the replay functionality that was added very late into Starcraft’s life (as a free patch nonetheless) was likely a big part of Blizzard supporting the Korean scene. It added a huge amount to the game for even a low-level player like me too. Hopefully Starcraft 2 is going to take the lead on things like this, and I expect it will, as the fantastic battle reports shown so far are already showing signs of a whole host of features for commentators and post-game analysis.

Video games are easily popular enough to warrant some becoming true e-sports and having the money come from the spectator interest; it just needs the right vision, the right kind of game – fighting games being one of the closest we have right now, and the right backing for a developer to say “why not my game?”. It’s much easier than televising chess! A lot of factors involved in Korean Starcraft may be just down to dumb luck, timing, culture and community; but at least devs could make a start by putting the building blocks in place to facilitate more successes like it.

The Ironic Review Review

Castle Crashers; it's a fun party game. But is that worth 5 stars?

With the new summer dashboard update for the XBox 360, it’s interesting to note they’ve finally added one of the features I’d suggested a while ago – some kind of game review ratings system on XBox Live. Whilst the feature is still far from the way I would’ve implemented it, it’s a nice start. There is an obvious immediate flaw, as many have pointed out, that you can “Rate” any content without even buying it or even downloading a demo. I also noticed you could ‘Rate’ non-downloadable games that were in your disk drive; but there doesn’t seem to be any way for anyone else to see those ratings yet.

I actually don’t see the ‘rate it without playing it’ as an especially a huge issue really, far bigger problems are the natural bias of these type of user reviews, and the fact you can only see the median average score. Many people get very attached to games they enjoy & the classic ‘fanboy review’ problem is an obvious one – or even ‘hater reviews’ too. It’s why I’d much rather see the ratings of a trusted friend, or group of friends, than these “aggregated figures”. People are far more inclined to both to even leave a review for a game they really love or really hate, and I’ve noticed the vast majority of games I looked at so far had an average score of over 4 stars, and the worst rated games I saw were still over 3!

Absolutely top-tier at everything

However when I came to try to ‘review’ a few games myself, it made me consider that it really is a difficult task to apply fairly & come out with a simplistic score. What really matters when it comes to a game? Does quality count more than quantity? How do you really classify quantity? How do you ‘finish’ a game anyway? When you’ve finished all the levels, when you’ve got all the Achievements? When you’re ranked#1 in the world? Do you take the price of a title into account… but again, prices change over time with discounts and 2nd-hand games etc. What about the community and online features surrounding a game? This is something that is starting to matter almost more than the game itself for me at times. For example King of Fighters 98 Ultimate Match. If I was reviewing that as an offline title, I’d be leaning towards a 4 or a 5 star rating as I find it a lot of fun, although I’m not sure about the character balance at this point. However these days, it’s poor netcode renders it a pale shadow of an online fighting game compared to a game with good netcode and a good lobby system like SSF2T HD Remix. But should KOF98UM get marked down for that? For me, the netcode matters a vast amount, but if I had a huge group of skilled offline players available to play with it wouldn’t nearly so much. How can a review reflect your own community situation which may differ from others? There’s also the main fact that most reviewers, especially professional reviewers review games far too quickly for my liking. Until I really know all the ins & outs & true depths of the game, I can’t honestly say. For many games this takes years of play, not only by yourself, but by a larger community. But how many games do I even have time to play to this degree? Only a small handful. For example, for the first year or so of it’s release, I absolutely loved Street Fighter 3 3rd Strike. However today, when it’s character balance has proven to be very lacking, it’s a game I don’t rate so highly for my own tastes. So I tend to look at things on a very long term view. A true classic game ought to stand the test of time & still be great even today (and provided you overlook character balance, SF3 3s still passes that test anyway!). What about ongoing support? When Starcraft or Team Fortress 2 receives a patch that improves the game, doesn’t that require a re-review?

In the end I feel almost all games reviews are pretty lacking, and very few are even transparent about the criteria they use for a review score. I think they work ok for the big generic ‘play through this once’ type of games that fill the ‘mainstream’ (at least for gamer hobbyists), & as a general comparison between similar titles, and to see what’s “got hype”. But for games where you want to take your play to another level, especially competitive multiplayer titles which form the staple of many agoners’ gaming diets, all you can really get even from even a ‘good’ review is limited factual information about display rates and netcode etc. For example I’ve cancelled my pre-order of KOF12, with great disappointment, based on reviews universally complaining about it’s netcode, but I’ve ignored most of the taste-based comments about its gameplay engine, as for me, there’s really no review I can trust out there online. I’d have to go to a specialist website like shoryuken and trawl the forums to find players who seem to be my type of player to listen to, but much more likely I’ll simply have to play it enough for myself to really find out. Because outside of anyone who’s played this a huge amount in Far Eastern arcades; no-one really knows yet. The basic problem with reviewing a game is that it’s interactive entertainment. Whilst the ‘observer’ is a huge piece of the puzzle when any kind of entertainment or art is reviewed, with games, the player’s own conceptions, knowledge, emotions & attitude are all magnified that much more due to their actual interaction with the piece.

With all this said, I did review one game. Adding to the fanboy review problem myself, I gave SSF2T HD Remix a glowing 5 stars. I did this simply because based on any criteria imaginable, this is probably as close to a perfect game as I’ve ever seen. So I feel it’s a ’safe’ one to review. Almost every other game I find myself leaning towards a score rating yet wanting to write a “but…” caveat.

Overall, I’d give the XBox Live game reviewing system my highest ever review score: one turd.

How ironic.

Confessions of a Whore

“If you have something to confess, do it now. Give yourself some peace“.

Last night I Achievement Whored.

Well, sort of, as we’ll see… however more accurately I helped out a friend by setting up his attempt to ‘glitch’ Left 4 Dead to allow him to get an Achievement that is very difficult to unlock under normal play conditions. I actually only agreed to do this, because this particular glitch would only affect him – only he’d get the Achievement, and I wouldn’t. Which was exactly what I wanted, because if I unlocked this Achievement I would only find any satisfaction in it by doing it under proper play conditions – so I actively want to leave it locked as a potential goal for another time.

As I discussed the Achievements of L4D more with him, it was obvious there was quite a few “workaround” ways to get many of the Achievements on this game. Glitches like this were pretty complicated, but there were the far more obvious ones like putting it on the easiest difficulty setting, specifically playing solo, or with a group of 4, or the classic the ‘2nd controller’ offline ‘multiplayer’ mode. My friend was quite willing to use any or all of these techniques in The Quest for the Holy Unlock.

However, to defend my friend, as he’s not exactly an iWin controller-using baboon, he specifically didn’t ruin anyone else’s play session in his self-admitted Achievement Whoring, in fact, he explained he doesn’t like playing online competitive or even co-operative  games at all in general – due the the problem of most ‘pick up group’ players being total dickshits – a problem I do sympathise with entirely. So he actually chooses to get even the “Versus” mode Achievements via ‘exploits’ in only offline play where he can.

I came to the firmer conclusion that as I’d already suspected, and like so many games, L4D has some very poorly conceived Achievements.  So it won’t really interest me to try and get some of them at all because of this failure in the game’s design. However, it got me thinking further; why does my “Whoring” friend do it? Whereas I see this gamerscore meta-game as one not worth playing, except in particular circumstances, for the reasons explained in my previous take on Achievements (and also covered in an excellent post on Not Rocket Science too), my friend here was actively engaged in this meta-game and clearly deriving fun from it. I got the sense that he enjoyed for the feeling of completeness he got from getting the Achievements – even via any ‘unintended’ means necessary. Regardless of the method it still made him feel like he’d ‘finished’ the game (or finished a greater portion of). When I asked him about it more, this seemed to fit. He’s the type of player, of which I know many, that generally just plays any game through once, just to ’see the story’ and finish the game, and won’t care if he does it on easy mode or whatever as he doesn’t really necessary want the challenge or the potential frustration along with it. As for collecting achievements he said he mostly did it on a whim, as if it was almost an unconcious decision – and that he doesn’t do it for most games. But for certain games, like L4D, he’d decided he wanted to try to get as many Achievements as he possibly could – and any he was frustrated by not being able to get via ‘normal play’ he was happy to try and unlock via any other method, not for the gamerscore but just because he wanted to and he could. To me this was more the stance of a “collector”, and although surely not mutually exclusive, it does seem to be somewhat different than the ‘badge of honour’ (or skill or knowledge if you like) motivation that is more typical of the Achievement ‘hunter’. Which, when it results in ‘boosting’ play, I see as merely a cheaters perversion of  my own attitude to Achievements. Ie: potentially fun sub-goals and also records of what I consider real fun accomplishments in a game – hence why I refuse to take any measures to shortcut the fun I find in working towards those records.

Hmm, wrong image search...

Once the L4D unlock glitch had been ‘acheived’ though, I started having a quick play on the free demo of Ikaruga. It is on offer to Gold members this week for the paltry sum of 400 MSP, which is only about 3 pounds. I commented at the time in XBL chat that it seems almost rude not to buy it for such a cheap price as it’s a pretty good game that once-upon-a-time I had been totally hyped about… however that’s exactly the issue with it for me. I had it on the Dreamcast, I played it on the Dreamcast, and I still have a Dreamcast hooked up, right there next to my XBox 360 (albeit on an SD-TV as the DC’s lower resolution tends to look better). So really, why was I even  seriously considering spending extra cash on this game, that I could play for no additional cost, and could’ve played ‘for free’ at any point before now too?

Was it just for the higher fidelity graphics? Was it just for the online multiplayer, or the convenience of having it on my “main” console (& TV).. ? Perhaps… but when I found myself actually opening up the Achievements list to decide whether to buy the game or not it hit me. Had I unwittingly turned into some lesser varient of an Achievement Whore myself.. ? Was I really considering spending money just to get some gamerscore? With some relief as I analysed myself, I realised this wasn’t the case.

The main reason I cared about the Achievements was to see if they would give me a new viable “goal” that would make me want to re-play the game again, but the other more surprising reason to me, was that the Achievements, and the online nature of my XBL account itself, were also providing a means for me to to potentially be able to show my respect for the game & it’s developers in a very tangible fashion. If I bought & played the game it would show on my gamercard online on things like this blog and social networks. XBL Friends would see me playing the game. Ikaruga! It’s friggin’ hardcore Treasure shmup! Or if I unlocked an Achievement, I would be able to post it to my facebook newsfeed, and friends would see I was playing this game. I could easily display my liking for Treasure, others might see it and comment, ask what it is, or choose to play the game co-operatively with me or challenge my scores and the like…. I realised it was all of this that was actually the deciding factor in getting the game and playing it again. I don’t know what this says about my style of play – I suspect nothing really. The fact that such non-game features feature into my buying & playing decisions probably says more about me as a person than a gamer really – and just how much I like games in general!

Starcraft 2 101

So far, this blog has been significantly lacking in strategy game posts. Whilst I’d list it as my second favourite genre overall, in general the time investment is prohibitive for me; so I am usually only interested in playing the very very best on offer. And naturally, for real-time strategy (RTS), that means Starcraft – nothing else even comes close to it.  I’ve tried all sorts of other RTS games, but none of them have  ever adequately answered the question “In what way is this any improvement over Starcraft?”. Even the company that made it, Blozzard, have been unable to equal their own achievement – notably flopping completely in my eyes with Warcraft 3, a decent game, but like so many RTS’s before and after it, one which is burnt to a cinder when focused through the withering lens of a comparison against Starcraft. Only the best passes the Captain ZergsEye!

Worse still, Blozzard are also now seeing fit to squander most of their resources on the ridiculously tedious World of Warcrap. This sorry state of affairs makes me almost of a mind to disown my own Uncle (who, as many know, works for Blozzard).

Luckily for any agoners out there, sometimes hope is all we have:

Whilst Blozzard could mess this up, like Warcraft 3, I actually believe they won’t.

And my confidence is entirely thanks to South Korea! Starcraft 1 still has such a huge influence, with immense pro-gaming and e-sport following that Blozzard must use SC2 to build on this even further if it is to be seen as a success. In case you don’t realise it, Starcraft still has two television channels dedicated to progaming matches in S.Korea. Blozzard also seem to have been saying all the right things during the development of the game, with such idiotic ideas as the Mothergoose being a ‘Highlander’ unit hopefully falling by the wayside. They even posted a fascinating battle report recently, which I was really impressed with.

Now my internal hypeometer for this game would be off the charts already, but I’m surpressing it because I don’t really expect to see anything more than perhaps a beta test in 2009 and that’s only if we’re lucky. As many know, Blozzard are happy to delay the release for as long as they feel is necessary. And since Starcraft 2 has the potential to have the kind impact on competitive agoner style gaming that Warcrap has had on carebear chatroom-jockey gaming, they will do well to take their time to get it right.

In the meantime Starcraft 1 still goes on strong. For example this University course has even started over in the States:

Games design luminary David Sirlin is actually attending the course and has been writing up some really interesting commentary over at his own site sirlin.net.

Oddly my own interest in Starcraft is actually, if not unique, certainly a niche interest. Whilst all of the serious play on Starcraft is in competitions of 1 vs 1 or team vs team games, I generally find I prefer other games for that kind of battle – ie: Vs Fighting games. But Starcraft (and hopefully Starcraft 2) really excelled for me for large multi-player ‘free for all’ games of at least 4 players – and the more the better. That’s how I played 99% of my games of Starcraft. However there are a few inherent problems with this – and these are the reasons you’ll never get this kind of game played with ‘pick up groups’ online. To make it fun, fair and competitive it requires all the players to agree to some of ‘house rules’ that the game interface simply had no way of offering.

1. No alliances allowed, ever.

2. No private messaging.

Basically, the problem with Starcraft is that there was no way to stop collusive teamwork in a large free for all game, but this was our best attempt at it. I doubt there will ever be any way to effectively do this online but it would be nice from my point of view if they would at least try. But I suspect it will always be limited to doing this with friends who want this style of game and don’t even want to try to cheat.

What makes this style of Starcraft play amazingly fascinating for me is that it changes the value on almost all aspects of units and strategies in Starcraft. For example; slow but effective wars of attrition often become as important as ‘rush tactics’. Many of the units that are generally derided for 1v1 play, we have found were even used en-masse by players in this style of game. Not a single strategy I’ve ever read online has ever been 100% applicable to a big multiplayer free for all, so it meant that all players would always have to apply things in their own way and come up with new ideas. Psychological tactics, instinctual timing of attacks, ‘mix ups’ and yomi are all vastly heightened over normal Starcraft play – especially since we played as an ongoing series of games with mostly the same players each time. Interestingly this style of play even offers much more of a place for a weaker, slower, non-competitive, or simply new player to partake. Even though they may be very unlikely to win the game overall, everyone would have much more of an opportunity to learn the units and attempt to survive for as long as possible than in a 1v1 game. Even a hopelessly weaker opponent would generally cost a relatively stronger player at least a measure of resources to overcome – so it even became a strategic matter for stronger players in the game. Did they try and overwhelm a weaker opponent at a low relative cost – and deciding when was the best time to do that – or, did they, knowing that player was unlikely to be a threat in the long run, focus their attention on the other ‘big guns’. The other huge reason to play this kind of game is that all the units became viable in almost all games, and it was not at all rare for us to see 200 unit limits reached (and even surpassed by those tricksy cheating Protoss), and utterly immense bloodbath battles taking place – the likes of which even god has never seen… but we did, frequently

So anyway, here’s hoping to a revival of all of that one day, Starcraft 1 or 2… For truth, justice, and the Korean way!

The Tiers of Time

I’m guessing that most readers of this blog will be familiar with a tier listing for a game with matchups and a choice of characters or races with different ability sets. Admittedly this is mainly only fighting games where I’ve seen this kind of thing happen, but it could be doable for other games too, for example, you could theoretically try to ‘tier’ the various different Civs for games of Civilization Revolutions, or tier the different characters in Sega Superstars Tennis or many other sports games.

But in case you aren’t familiar at all, the basic idea is to take the very best player(s) with that given character & game, and have them rate their chances against each other character in the game in a theoretical matchup of ‘players of equal skill’ – in this case, meaning the very best player(s) with that other character also. This rating is generally given as a score out of 10, which is also sometimes seen as a rough guide to the number of wins out of 10 matches that would demonstrate the players are of equal skills were they to win that amount. The “points scores” are then added up, to give the theoretical ‘best characters’ in the game, and the weaker ones, and these are often clumped together into groups of characters that are at a similar points score, and these groups are called names like Top/Average/Low etc; hence the use of the name tiers. Please note there is usually plenty of disagreement about the definitions of how to do these points scores, and naturally, even if that can be agreed, things are argued often and tier listings can change over time as new techniques and information come to light about a game. Where the two top players disagree, eg: the top Ryu thinks Ryu is a 6-4 over Guile, but the top Guile player thinks Guile is a 5-5 even match with Ryu, the scores are usually then averaged, so the score will be shown as a 5.5 advantage to Ryu in the table, or +0.5 for Ryu, -0.5 for Guile.

 

No-one has really tried to put together a SSF2T HDR tier listing yet, partly due to there being no major tournaments with it yet, and also due to the unfortunate bugs in the game, but the latest one for Super Turbo can be found here:

http://curryallergy.blogspot.com/2008/11/super-turbo-new-arcadia-diagram.html

Or pop over to Eventhubs (linked on our side bar) and you can find a lot of decent reasonably up-to-date tier lists, eg. Super Turbo, SF4 Arcade, and SF3 3S.

 

Now one thing people tend to forget is that even the tier score listing can give a very poor idea of who’s the ‘best character’ to pick, as the final score is unweighted, and thus assumes all characters are played equally, which is of course not the case. In a tournament setting, how the character fairs against the other (at least perceived) top-tier characters is going to matter more, or for XBL or online play in general, how the character deals with the more popular online characters (such as the shotokan scrubs) or the more lag-friendly characters (such as Dic, Claw and Blanka) may also matter more. So you have to take all of that into account depending on the situation as much as, or even more than the raw number. Again, as I am sure most readers are familiar with, this is what’s known as a metagame.

In a relatively unknown metagame, or in a knock-out type of situation, such as some tournament formats, then a characters ‘worst’ matchup can matter as much as, if not more than their overall scoring. As also commented very accurately on the New Arcadia link above by NH2, this is what makes Dictator a much better character than his raw numbers, as his worst matchup is still only a ‘3′, meaning you have  at least a reasonable chance against an unknown field in all matchups. 

For a personal example, both of these factors contribute to why I am now maining, and doing better with Deejay than Guile these days, as I find he is better ‘vs the field’ in the XBL metagame, and especially, has fewer nightmare matchups for me. It’s really only vs Brouki (& maybe Dhalsim) when I feel I have very little chance to win with Deejay.

 

Even if one understands a metagame though, people still get confused with tier lists and what they really mean. Often new players confuse it with characters they find are easy to play with and/or learn. I find a good example on HDR is Bwanka, especially online. He’s got a huge throw range, an un-techable throw, some really high priority jumping attacks, a fairly easy crossup, is generally good at aggressive rush-down style of play that’s more effective in lag, and super-fast specials that become almost impossible to react to in heavy lag; basically, overall he is a very easy character to play with to an average level, and generally gets better online, hence why he is known as Bwanka to me . I’d even like to use my own play as a good example! I really don’t have a clue what I am doing with Bwanka. I’m such a ‘n00b’ I don’t even know how to perform all his moves; the hop-about move is a mystery to me still, as I never really play him seriously ever, yet, using Street Fighter basics, I can get generally decent results with Bwanka despite my huge lack of skill & knowledge with him. I’m equally as weak a player with say, Boxer or Dhalsim, yet I don’t do nearly as well with them as I do with Bwanka. Sometimes this ease of play at a low or intermediate play level, is indicative of the same situations at high level play, but here in this example, it really isn’t true, as Blanka is generally low-tier overall, yet Boxer and Dhalsim are right at the top. They just have a much steeper learning curve, in my opinion. Blanka maybe relatively easy to play at an average level, but conversely he’s actually really difficult to master and win with at the very very top.

 

But this brings up another interesting point or ‘problem’ with tier listings like this. They only apply at the very top only. For example Guile is listed as a 6-4 advantage vs Blanka. If I remember correctly, Muteki Guile (probably the best Guile player in the world) actually rated it as an 8-2 advantage to Guile himself. Now at this ‘uber-top-pro level‘, having watched some of their games, I can actually easily believe this score is honestly reflective of what he experiences. 

The trouble is that tier listing won’t mean much for your regular or even perhaps a very very good player in some cases. For example, for me, an above-average Guile (well, perhaps not, but I was at least good enough for top 300 in the first few weeks of HDR, when I was maining Guile almost the whole time in ranked – before the ratings bug hit), playing against an equally skilled above average Blanka is a nightmare. Even though I don’t think I’m good enough to accurately rate it as a 10 point score, I’d certainly rate it as a ‘large disadvantage’ to Guile, so I’d put it as low as a 2-8 probably. Part of the ‘proof’ is when I switch to another character that I am generally weaker with, know less about, yet find I do better & win more easily against the very same Blanka player.  

What you’d really need to express this issue into figures, is multiple tier listings based on the skill level of the players involved. This would enable you to see how a character’s tier changes as your skill level progresses, effectively demonstrating a characters learning curve, rather than only showing how good that character is at the very peak of that learning curve, which very few people will attain. 

To do this you’d need an accurate measure of the players skill – the closest thing we have to this would be a players ranked skill score with a particular character. A game would  then need to collect all the stats of who won against who, along with that players ’skill rating’, and then only using results where players were of comparable skill to compare to create a matchup chart and thus the tiers. Put that data onto graphs and charts; and you’d be able to see actual learning curves, matchups vs skill rating, and ‘top end’ character ability displayed graphically. Perhaps it’s only me, but personally I’d find that kind of thing absolutely fascinating!  

 

About the current state of play (and data) with tiers in general though, I’ll leave you with this final thought which summarises parts of this article into a great post from Chaghatai, from Capcom Unity, (with corrections and emphasis added):

The difference between the people is likely* to be greater than the advantage or disadvantage imparted in a matchup. And in any case those listings assume both players know all the counters and counter counters inside out for that matchup.

Amateurs as a group and usually as individuals are more inconsistent than pros. So what for a pro makes a real difference, to an amature, they may not notice the difference at all.

It’s like expensive golf clubs – indespensible for a pro, but most amateurs wouldn’t notice the effect on their game.

People, don’t worry about your matchups too much, just have fun.

“But Otochun says this match is a disadvantage….”

Are you Otochun? Is your opponent Daigo?

No?

Then don’t worry about it.

Tiers are real in a sense and can be interesting tools to analyze a tournament or whatever, but on a day to day basis, they’re nothing to get overly hung up on.

* I’d personally note this depends a lot on the game itself! I find HDR to be pretty good, and certainly much better in this regard than Super Turbo, due to the rebalancing attempted.  

 

Of course, if you believe M’s infostation, you can pretty much disregard this article. An M-tier listing is very simple, since every character will either win or lose to each other character; it’d obviously be a 50/50 chance.