Dime
The power of BEAT EXTEND
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@Spencer
You have 3 arguments:
1. Slippery slope
2. Unblockables
3. Ostrich head in sand (wait and see, have faith, I don't THINK this mechanic will be bad etc etc etc)
I'm not going to bother with 3 as I don't see it as an argument with any validity. We can chose to ignore anything. That doesn't make ignorance the correct way to deal with anything though, it just means that you are prepared to suffer the consequences of said ignorance, or unprepared, you will still have to suffer the consequences of said ignorance.
1. I don't think slippery slope is a viable argument to denounce A begets B begets C forms of linear logic. Just because someone put a fancy name to something and called it a trope or whatever, doesn't mean that it is all of a sudden an improper form of argument.
Slippery slope can be an improper form argument depending on context, but I don't believe it to be improper in this context. In this context I see it being a logical progression from point A to point B. This isn't a "man creates the wheel therefor man will create a nuclear bomb" argument. Steps aren't being skipped in my original example, but your nuclear war example does skip steps, it skips a whole hell of a lot of steps. You went from chip damage not killing to nuclear war... Not logical, not linear and a huge jump. I get your point and on that level your metaphor works but your metaphor fails in scope, it compares an ant to a tiger and ignores scale and species, as an example. You could see that as semantics, but I dont.
2. Unblockables are not a problem at all fundamentally with the exception of one HUGE thing:
Take a character without unblockables. Lets say that there average damage is 50% of a lifebar on their primary BNB and that they are the baseline for damage in said game.
Now take the unblockable character. That character also does 50% damage on their average BNB. But it also gets an extra 20% damage from an unblockable right after the BNB. To me, this means that the unblockable character actually does 70% damage as a whole for their BNB. I think of true unblockables as the exact same thing as combos so all other things being equal, this is a character who's damage is 20% higher than average. If ALL ELSE IS EQUAL, that means the unblockable character is fundamentally broken. So... What to do?
Well it's obvious. If all else is equal then simply making the unblockable character do less damage is the correct call and if that happens then I don't see the problem with unblockables assuming everything else is balanced such as the unblockable won't set itself up ad infinitum... Which would be dumb.
The one problem that occurs is in cases of "hard to blockables" if you design a hard to blockable character to do less damage because of the hard to blockable add on damage, but then people actually start to block the hard to blockable, then you now have an underpowered character. Which sucks and is dumb.
And if you go in the opposite direction and allow the hard to blockable character to do more damage, then you create a situation where the hard to blockable character is basically overpowered until people learn to block the hard to blockable. Which is balance by execution and is just a horrible way to balance in general.
And that's the problem with unblockables, they are fundamentally bad design unless they are TRUE, can't be blocked unblockables and they occur that way against the entire cast. That way you can balance around them. If they however are unblockable against half the cast and hard to blockable against the other half of the cast, then the characters that it is hard to blockable against become very bad matchups for the hard to blockable character once those players learn to block the setup consistently, because the hard to blockable character won't have the damage it needs in those matchups since it was designed to be a low damage character that needed to use its hard to blockables to amount to the same amount of damage as everyone else.
Chip damage to kill, however is different in that it is generally a one off thing, that EVERY character can do some better than others and is almost ALWAYS some unsafe on block stuff that does the big chip damage. This is like an srk on someone's wakeup or a super on someone's wakeup... It's only ever going to be used when it will kill and therefor balance via damage is almost never a consideration unless that character in itself fundamentally does way more damage in this context than other characters in the game with no trade off for that ability.
To wit:
The difference between unblockables and chip to kill is that unblockables are available at all times featuring the right setup whereas chip to kill is only available when chip will KILL.
So they are 2 different things man. Comparable on some levels but not on the levels that actually matter.
You have 3 arguments:
1. Slippery slope
2. Unblockables
3. Ostrich head in sand (wait and see, have faith, I don't THINK this mechanic will be bad etc etc etc)
I'm not going to bother with 3 as I don't see it as an argument with any validity. We can chose to ignore anything. That doesn't make ignorance the correct way to deal with anything though, it just means that you are prepared to suffer the consequences of said ignorance, or unprepared, you will still have to suffer the consequences of said ignorance.
1. I don't think slippery slope is a viable argument to denounce A begets B begets C forms of linear logic. Just because someone put a fancy name to something and called it a trope or whatever, doesn't mean that it is all of a sudden an improper form of argument.
Slippery slope can be an improper form argument depending on context, but I don't believe it to be improper in this context. In this context I see it being a logical progression from point A to point B. This isn't a "man creates the wheel therefor man will create a nuclear bomb" argument. Steps aren't being skipped in my original example, but your nuclear war example does skip steps, it skips a whole hell of a lot of steps. You went from chip damage not killing to nuclear war... Not logical, not linear and a huge jump. I get your point and on that level your metaphor works but your metaphor fails in scope, it compares an ant to a tiger and ignores scale and species, as an example. You could see that as semantics, but I dont.
2. Unblockables are not a problem at all fundamentally with the exception of one HUGE thing:
Take a character without unblockables. Lets say that there average damage is 50% of a lifebar on their primary BNB and that they are the baseline for damage in said game.
Now take the unblockable character. That character also does 50% damage on their average BNB. But it also gets an extra 20% damage from an unblockable right after the BNB. To me, this means that the unblockable character actually does 70% damage as a whole for their BNB. I think of true unblockables as the exact same thing as combos so all other things being equal, this is a character who's damage is 20% higher than average. If ALL ELSE IS EQUAL, that means the unblockable character is fundamentally broken. So... What to do?
Well it's obvious. If all else is equal then simply making the unblockable character do less damage is the correct call and if that happens then I don't see the problem with unblockables assuming everything else is balanced such as the unblockable won't set itself up ad infinitum... Which would be dumb.
The one problem that occurs is in cases of "hard to blockables" if you design a hard to blockable character to do less damage because of the hard to blockable add on damage, but then people actually start to block the hard to blockable, then you now have an underpowered character. Which sucks and is dumb.
And if you go in the opposite direction and allow the hard to blockable character to do more damage, then you create a situation where the hard to blockable character is basically overpowered until people learn to block the hard to blockable. Which is balance by execution and is just a horrible way to balance in general.
And that's the problem with unblockables, they are fundamentally bad design unless they are TRUE, can't be blocked unblockables and they occur that way against the entire cast. That way you can balance around them. If they however are unblockable against half the cast and hard to blockable against the other half of the cast, then the characters that it is hard to blockable against become very bad matchups for the hard to blockable character once those players learn to block the setup consistently, because the hard to blockable character won't have the damage it needs in those matchups since it was designed to be a low damage character that needed to use its hard to blockables to amount to the same amount of damage as everyone else.
Chip damage to kill, however is different in that it is generally a one off thing, that EVERY character can do some better than others and is almost ALWAYS some unsafe on block stuff that does the big chip damage. This is like an srk on someone's wakeup or a super on someone's wakeup... It's only ever going to be used when it will kill and therefor balance via damage is almost never a consideration unless that character in itself fundamentally does way more damage in this context than other characters in the game with no trade off for that ability.
To wit:
The difference between unblockables and chip to kill is that unblockables are available at all times featuring the right setup whereas chip to kill is only available when chip will KILL.
So they are 2 different things man. Comparable on some levels but not on the levels that actually matter.
