Multiple of the same character on a team: What would happen?

[Flotilla]

A lot of people here are probably already familiar with a serious exploit that has popped up in UMVC3 that allows you to have a team with multiples of the same character, or even boss characters. Because Capcom's license to the Marvel franchise has lapsed and is unlikely to be renewed in UMVC3's case, this exploit is likely never going to be fixed.

The topic of allowing multiples of the same character in teams, in training mode or otherwise, has popped up a few times on Skullheart: the official answer from Mike is that it would be impossible to implement officially due to memory limitations. However, this only accounts for official implementation of the feature, and the reasoning against it only applies to consoles: this made me curious if Skullgirls has any significant barriers to prevent unscrupulous people from modifying the game to allow themselves to play doppelganger teams. Since Skullgirls past Robo-Fortune will no longer be patched, the UMVC3 situation had me a little worried that a similar situation could possibly happen with Skullgirls sometime long after anyone at Lab Zero would be able to do anything about it.

Marie used to be playable online through an exploit:

This was "patched" by causing any non-AI player who has Marie on their team to instantly lose. Would a similar failsafe work in the potential case of doppelganger teams, where the game will automatically award a loss to anyone with two of the same character on their team? Is this something that could even possibly be an issue? @Mike_Z

 

[Mike_Z]

I am sooooooooooooo tired of hearing about this, you have no idea.
I ain't writing a second version of all that memory management frame loading junk just to let PC people have a joke feature that NOBODY USED in MvC2.

"The reasoning" applies everywhere since the game uses the same memory architecture everywhere, i.e. it allocates the console amount of memory for assist frames on PC, even though PC has more memory, because it uses the same code. So in theory if you told it to load 3x the same character with the biggest assists and disabled the team validation code it would write to an invalid memory location and crash. (Just tested, yep.)

SG already does team validation - did you pick someone you don't own or who isn't selectable? If so, kill you.
If we let you save a favorite team (it's on the list), some pretty simple data validation would be performed, since it already is performed by the character select screen - is the same character present more than once, or are you trying to choose anyone you're not allowed to choose? If either is true it just wouldn't load the saved team, and if either is true at random times during the match it would instantly kill you, why not.

I'm wondering if you can use the UMvC3 thing to play as Shuma or Jill without owning them. Since you can use it to play as Galactus online I am guessing there is no validation at all...

 

[Cellsai]

I am sooooooooooooo tired of hearing about this, you have no idea.
I ain't writing a second version of all that memory management frame loading junk just to let PC people have a joke feature that NOBODY USED in MvC2.
...
I'm wondering if you can use the UMvC3 thing to play as Shuma or Jill without owning them. Since you can use it to play as Galactus online I am guessing there is no validation at all...

I guess this can function as the official "Point at this thread any time anyone asks about this topic". We'll stick it in an FAQ somewhere.

Re: Jill and Shuma, that is actually a pretty useful thing to test so that future tournaments will be able to play with the now removed forever DLC characters.

 

[Dagwood]

On paper it sounds ridiculous to have 3 Sentinels or something but in reality, teams like MSP and Santhrax were still the best.
Id assume MVC3 or Skullgirls would be the same way.

First people think "Oh damn! 3 sentinels!"
"... Oh wait, i still need a dp assist.. 2 Sents + Commando!"
"... Oh wait now I don't have storm dhc. Back to santhrax!"

 

[DukeMagus]

i'll just let this here to lighten up the mood a little

and someone decided to play with the idea using 3 vergils...

the results are... well...

let's just say that the game is more balanced when there's some forced variety on the team