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Pocket Rumble Thread

I wasn't particularly interested to begin with but I'm quite worried about it now.

I guess it is aiming for an audience.... and that audience probably isn't me.
 
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The audience isn't going to be the competitive ones. This is like something from a namco anime fighting game.
 
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As much as I like the game, and I do like the game because my brother doesn't want to git gud and learn how to qcf and dp, these changes are really questionable and probably not thought through very well, especially the health changes.

BrandX+ said:
The audience isn't going to be the competitive ones. This is like something from a namco fighting game.
u fkn wot m8
 
Yomabudd_y said:
As much as I like the game, and I do like the game because my brother doesn't want to git gud and learn how to qcf and dp, these changes are really questionable and probably not thought through very well, especially the health changes.


u fkn wot m8

Sorry I meant anything that isn't Tekken or Soul Calibur.
 
*does a thumbs down* *makes a farting noise*
Welp, all interest I had is gone.
 
Well hey, I threw $1,000 at them to put @Hopscawtch in this game as a boss character, which also grants me access to play the preview builds.

So I guess I'll report stuff whenever I get my hands on it?
 
Verdant Brave said:
Well hey, I threw $1,000 at them to put @Hopscawtch in this game as a boss character, which also grants me access to play the preview builds.

So I guess I'll report stuff whenever I get my hands on it?

I went with the tier under that, so I still get in the alpha, but no boss character for me. (wouldn't know who to pick anyway).

I'm hoping they'll take feedback from the preview builds they send out to the high tier backers as well as throughout the closed beta.

I really don't want this to tank just because they go in too hard with simplifying everything.
 
Well, I won't bunk it till I've tried it. Who knows? Maybe we'll all be surprised.
 
Well, one thing they definitely need to do is to make sure they remove the crouch-tech OS (if they haven't already), especially if they're going to ditch ground overheads altogether.
At the very least, everyone should be able to low/throw on the ground because making down-back a god option doesn't sit well with me.

And I reeeeeally don't like how they removed throw whiff animations. The whole 2f startup from the heavy is fine, but if you input 6/4+H within throw range, you should get a throw animation (remove more OS's please).
 
That new health system sounds awful. Aside from the obvious issue of a 12-hit combo being a ToD, it seems like your optimal max damage counterhit combo starter will probably be standing jab so you get the max number of hits in with your chain. And everyone's standing jab is the exact same, just to make things more homogeneous. Having no chip damage whatsoever could reduce zoning to 3rd Strike status too.

I hope they figure out how to solve these issues before release.
 
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I honestly really dislike the lack of chip damage as well. I like when you can't die from chip damage (UNIEL does this) but no chip damage at all sounds eh.

I sort of regret backing this game now, which is too bad because I was really looking forward to it. Also tweeted at them. Thread here.

I'm sure if I brought up the whole "12 hit combo = death" thing they would probably talk about how they made it 3/5 rounds, but honestly that still isnt fun if I'm losing 40-50% of my health on a jump in.
 
Try it like this:
If indeed you can die in one hit, and it's 3/5 rounds, the game is basically Marvel 3 just with your characters divided into rounds. Or Divekick. Giving me more chances to lose an entire round in one touch is not fun.
And the opponent's health comes back each time.

Additionally, if every hit does 1 point of damage there is no reason to use H over L at neutral or as a punish. L is faster, probably safer, can possibly chain to more Ls...whereas in other games, you want to use L when you aren't sure and H when you are sure. It makes mashing L the actual most effective tactic for all reasons.
 
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BrandX+ said:
The audience isn't going to be the competitive ones. This is like something from a namco fighting game.
uhh
 
There are ways to make information easier to understand without messing with the system mechanics.

The reception to this seems to be mostly negative, so I'm sure they will take another look at the changes. Most of the backers were probably fighting game players. Here's hoping, because there's a lot of stuff I really love about this project.
 
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I'm extremely peeved about these changes, being a backer. There's simplifying, and then there's making it ridiculously homogenized. Hope they take most of the negative feedback to heart.
 
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I wish they would put a feature where the player can freely put how many hits for them to lose. Like an adjustable health bar.
 
Hey, someone on Twitter linked me to this thread. I'm Christian, the programmer and co-designer, so I'll quickly go over some of the concerns:

A normal jump-in combo can take up to 5 hits. This means 2 full combos and some stray hits to kill. Lots of internal play testing and some local FGC meetups is pretty much all the data we have on if that feels good or not, so this may change, but it feels like the appropriate amount of damage for a game more akin to SF2. Rounds are now best out of 5 to calm down how unlucky you could potentially get, which also feels better with the new character swapping system (you can now swap to any character after you lose a round, not just a pre-chosen back up character).

Things can get crazy with corner juggles and meter stuff, but even still nothing up to this point (the 2 finished characters and some unfinished dudes) has exceeded 8 hits. To even get anything past like 4 in a corner juggle is not practical at all. I'm pretty confident that even if the 12-health system goes away the combos are going to remain this short, it's part of the core design philosophy.

Heavies are crazy useful because they have ridiculous range, short startup (comparatively to heavies in other games), super good priority, long hitstun, and safe on block. I don't believe heavies have to be defined by "the normals that do better dmg." By making them the same dmg it just highlights even further how good they are as a footsies tool. Now that all specials cancel from all normals, heavies feel immensely powerful so I don't feel like they will be overshadowed by the light poke. You get rewarded with extra dmg by getting the poke but you SHOULD be rewarded with extra dmg if you ever get close enough to pull off a poke with shit priority and slower startup than throw. Pokes will always be your go to punish starter, regardless of what character you are playing, and it was that way BEFORE we made pokes all the same framedata/attackboxdata. Yeah you hit confirm all day into your super, but because we only have one character with a traditional super and we have super short combos to begin with it didn't feel necessary to add dmg scaling back in.

No chip dmg doesn't seem to be an issue yet, with Tenchi throwing out fireballs to be blocked gives him a lot of meter and his super is deadly. We'll see once we implement June more how important that will be. I have a system for chip that still works with the new health if we have to back down on chip, but I'd really prefer not to have any chip at this point.

The "down-back is too good" complaint just isn't valid at all. Throws have great range and a short tech window, and even if that weren't the case both finished characters have ways of jumping into air normals that only take as much startup as our old standing overheads took. I understand there is only so much information we have given out at this point, but this is very obvious once you sit down and play the game.

Also Mike Z I tried your 100%-50% alpha idea on the flickering stuff last night but it just looks solid the entire time. I tried to make the alpha way lower when it's supposed to be "gone" but then it looked terrible on my 30fps capture of it. Thanks for the suggestion, though.

P.S.
Mike Z we'll send you a build sometime soon if you are interested.
 
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Coldredblue said:
I wish they would put a feature where the player can freely put how many hits for them to lose. Like an adjustable health bar.
On this note, couldn't they just let the player see how much health (in %) the opponent has left. EX if I know that my jump in combo with j.h does 23% and they're at 18%, I can immediately see in my head what I need to do to win the round. They really could just display the information this way instead of simplifying the system mechanics for the sake info display.

At the very least I hope that they give the players more health and give L and H attacks varying damage.
 
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Mike_Z said:
If your goal is to teach people how fighting games work, this is exactly backward.

If you couldn't move in the game at all, I would agree that's a problem. Range inherently makes punishing things a complex choice that requires extensive knowledge about your character, outside of stuff that has so much recovery so you can just walk up from anywhere and start poking.

EDIT:
Also I misspoke in my previous post a little, sub11 will most likely NOT be starting a combo with a poke to get the maximum amount of dmg. What I meant was your go to NORMAL for punishes. Specials can change that up drastically.
 
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PocketRumbleDev said:
Heavies are crazy useful because [snip] safe on block.
This, too, is pretty much exactly backward from genre standards. I understand that it CAN be that way because you aren't rewarded with damage, but ask yourself if it SHOULD be...

PocketRumbleDev said:
If you couldn't move in the game at all, I would agree that's a problem. Range inherently makes punishing things a complex choice that requires extensive knowledge about your character, outside of stuff that has so much recovery so you can just walk up from anywhere and start poking.
Except that in games with different damage values and damage scaling (not to mention counterhit damage bonuses or hitstun bonuses or whatever else various games do), you want to start punishes with heavier attacks whenever possible. Of course movement and range matters, that's a duh...but even in situations where you can land heavies there's no incentive to start punishes with them at ALL if they do the same damage as lights and don't offer any additional advantages on hit. This is like...one of the most important things to learn about fighting games, in that I see people starting punishes with regular combo starters all the time and costing themselves damage, so it's weird to have it backward in your game if the aim is to be an introduction type thing. Maybe that's not the case...?
 
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What if instead of splitting the lifebar literally into 12 pieces, you sectioned it like KOF13 does, and normalised damage for everyone (like most lights in KOF do 30 and most heavies do 70 with a few exceptions) so it becomes easier to do the math to know how much life they have and how much you need to kill while still having the concepts of damage scaling (is damage scaling even in the alpha version of the game?) and making players focus on using heavies for punishment purposes? It's definitely not "He has one point left I hit him with anything and he'll die" style easy math but it's decently close to it.

EDIT: Also for lifebars, you could also try having the life appear in numbers in a corner right below the life bar of the person getting hit and fading away when the combo is over so it's easier to know what kinds of hits will kill them at that point.
 
@PocketRumbleDev I really love with your design goals of simplifying the fighting game genre down but your eclectic design choices don't help that goal, and like Mike said if you don't obey the keystones of the genre you won't succeed in teaching people how to play fighting games.

There's a lot of simplification I just don't understand, I get having the set health with big blocky numbers, but at least make your normals do their own amounts of damage. You can even just keep what you have but light attacks do 1 damage mediums do 2 and heavy attacks do 3. It's like cross tekken's standardized normals on crack. The game's going to end up with two players tiptoeing back and forth jabbing randomly. Why would I be afraid of a sweep if it only does a twelfth of my total life? Then there's stuff that should be simplified but isn't like the down forward/back for specials, why not just have a third button or only use haduken motions like in persona? If the answer to that is because the neo geo only has 2 buttons that's not a good enough reason. I know you're planning on porting it to the neo geo but 99% of people are not going to play this on that system so you shouldn't base your design choices around that. 3 or even 4 buttons is not an unreasonable number to expect people to use, especially given that 4 face buttons is the current golden standard on pads.

Hopefully you open the closed beta sooner then later because I think you'll find that when many people are playing the problems will really show themselves.
 
Mike_Z said:
but even in situations where you can land heavies there's no incentive to start punishes with them at ALL if they do the same damage as lights and don't offer any additional advantages on hit.

If it's the only thing that will connect fast enough from your range, that's the move you do. You do them all the time at the moment to punish Tenchi's antler charge. In a mirror match you get 2 points of dmg and a knockdown (heavy -> antler charge). if they were really right up in your face for any reason you would just do the poke opener and then do the same thing for 3 points to get an extra poke for that incorrect read and incorrect spacing (getting 2 pokes is pretty impractical outside of jump-ins). Why would you ever need more incentive than range?


Mike_Z said:
Maybe that's not the case...?

The goal is to highlight the "being able to read your opponent" aspect of fighting games. The deeper you are in and the more recovery they have, the more dmg you do. It shouldn't become a complex problem (in our super simplified fighter) when you have so much more interesting elements in the neutral footsies game. The algorithm of optimal play is complex enough without knowing what to properly open your punish with (and ONLY the situation where they are up in your face). There's an optimal punish opener with your character no matter what, so it just seems really inconsequential if they all open up the same way for this ONE particular situation (range always makes punishes inherently complex).

You get some nice nuance here and there, and it undoubtedly makes the game more complex, but that "more punishment potential on heavies" system just becomes a huge memorization of matchups and how many positive frames you get for ONE MOVE versus EVERY MOVE from THE ENTIRE CAST. If pokes are standard and your optimal opener (or your optimal opener is something with equal/shorter startup like a throw or a buffered super) you have IMMENSELY simplified what you have to remember for punishes. You slowly learn the big chart of frame advantage (either by looking it up or by playing a lot) for one character and then you've learned your optimal punish opener for all characters (punish combos still vary widely from character to character even with identical openers).

At the moment, neither of us think this is an important thing to be teaching people, the reduction in memorization is such a massive advantage that I think the game benefits a lot from it. That being said, we could maybe be persuaded to make pokes an EQUAL to heavy for openers, but that just means there is no difference between range x and (x*2), you get the same dmg potential, and that's bad. Right now the difference between x and (x*2) is 1 more point of dmg because you can poke twice, reinforcing the simple rule of "being in closer rewards you more dmg." You throw out heavies way more than you throw out pokes in the neutral game because of all the other various advantages it has over poke. However, this may be worth it because you may be getting too much of an advantage for being close that it becomes unbalanced with how much dmg you get off of everything else. That's something we'll probably learn more in the beta with more characters than right now.

So I guess in this particular instance we have completely thrown out 2 traditional traits of heavies (not safe on block/more raw dmg) to highlight our massive emphasis on footsies and give you way more interesting options for that element of the game. Balancing a heavy by just giving it strong data in all elements other than dmg value is much more interesting and fun.
 
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It was my understanding that Pocket rumble was meant as a bridge between casual and competitive players, but if you don't teach people about fundamental things like punishes you're going to fall short. Lowering complexity is good when you're talking about inputs and systems but by oversimplifying normals and footsies you're going to end up with a game that neither teaches new players nor attracts experienced ones.
 
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If you guys mean to resignify it that much then just dont call it a Heavy attack, using A and B or 1 and 2 might be more appropriate for what seems to be your goal with normals in the game.
 
Grangach said:
It was my understanding that Pocket rumble was meant as a bridge between casual and competitive players, but if you don't teach people about fundamental things like punishes you're going to fall short. Lowering complexity is good when you're talking about inputs and systems but by oversimplifying normals and footsies you're going to end up with a game that neither teaches new players nor attracts experienced ones.

Typically punishing with a light instead of a heavy is a fundamental that will negatively effect newcomers? idk I don't think people will be all of a sudden unable to adapt to other fighters because they "learned it wrong" it PR. Punishes still exist in PR the same way they do in other games, you just make your decision purely via range values and not dmg/frameadvantage/range values.

CaioLugon said:
If you guys mean to resignify it that much then just dont call it a Heavy attack, using A and B or 1 and 2 might be more appropriate for what seems to be your goal with normals in the game.

Yeah, that might be a good idea. To most people "light and heavy" just means "fast/short and slow/big" which is still true for our game, but it's misleading for various other reasons mentioned in this thread to people who have played fighting games at any sort of competitive level.
 
The mental calculation of dmg/frameadvantage/range is the important part that you're ignoring, and it's an important part of fighting games, it's part of what makes them dynamic.
 
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Speaking from the perspective of a backer I did not fully expect the game to emulate all traditions of previous fighting games as that's not what it set out to do from the beginning. The emphasis seems to be on minimizing the technical barrier of fighting games to provide more of an emphasis on situational decision making (punishing an opponent for being negative on block) as opposed to making optimal decision making in a situation with multiple solutions (punishing an opponent for being on block and using an optimized counter-hit combo as opposed to a standard bnb).

I feel as though the genre of fighters is large enough where both philosophies can exist (and be fun and engaging for different reasons) but this game is just starting out so I think we should wait to really apply our judgment once the alpha comes out. I'm happy that at least the developers are open to our feedback and are willing to meet us with our concerns to find a solution. Looking forward, I think keeping an open dialogue like we did with SG will go a long way to make for a really dynamic game!
 
Grangach said:
The mental calculation of dmg/frameadvantage/range is the important part that you're ignoring, and it's an important part of fighting games, it's part of what makes them dynamic.

idk man, the combo system is still dynamic without differing combo openers at really short ranges. I'm starting to get the impression you are trying to discuss something else (12 point health or 1-point-equals-1-dmg) and not really the whole combo opener thing. I'm sorry if we gave you the wrong impression about the game, but we are willing to cut or drastically alter things right now to minimize some crazy amounts of memorization (for high level play) and emphasize footsies more. Heavies (or B moves I guess I should call them now) can be way more powerful as a spacing tool when you don't crank up the dmg on them.

ArkBat said:
Speaking from the perspective of a backer I did not fully expect the game to emulate all traditions of previous fighting games as that's not what it set out to do from the beginning. The emphasis seems to be on minimizing the technical barrier of fighting games to provide more of an emphasis on situational decision making (punishing an opponent for being negative on block) as opposed to making optimal decision making in a situation with multiple solutions (punishing an opponent for being on block and using an optimized counter-hit combo as opposed to a standard bnb).

I feel as though the genre of fighters is large enough where both philosophies can exist (and be fun and engaging for different reasons) but this game is just starting out so I think we should wait to really apply our judgment once the alpha comes out. I'm happy that at least the developers are open to our feedback and are willing to meet us with our concerns to find a solution. Looking forward, I think keeping an open dialogue like we did with SG will go a long way to make for a really dynamic game!

I think it's important for me to mention that almost everything discussed here could be nothing like how the game actually turns out post-beta. When people are putting hours into the beta online and really figuring the game out and giving us feedback, we'll be taking those players feedback VERY seriously and the whole game could turn into more of an anime fighter or something by the end of the beta. We are willing to shape the game into pretty much anything as long as it attempts to follow the core philosophy of being easy on the execution and memorization. If it becomes more complex in areas where it doesn't necessarily need to be to appeal to most of the high level players, we'll make those changes. There are definitely some problems with Early-Access games on Steam, but I think our game is going to benefit massively from it.
 
PocketRumbleDev said:
Heavies (or B moves I guess I should call them now) can be way more powerful as a spacing tool when you don't crank up the dmg on them.
They can be equally effective if you also give them more damage, though. That statement is nonsensical.

PocketRumbleDev said:
footsies
I don't think you're using the term correctly. This stuff COMES from variety. Everyone having the same pokes does not add variety.
Removing standing overheads does not add variety. Adding back throw OS's (from a safe-on-block move, no less!) does not add variety. Etc.

PocketRumbleDev said:
we'll be taking those players feedback VERY seriously
To be blunt - I don't know if I believe you, given your reactions to posts here.
 
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Mike_Z said:
They can be equally effective if you also give them more damage, though. That statement is nonsensical.

sure you can, but it won't be particularly interesting if they do more dmg than other normals AND are safe on block AND can special cancel AND has insane range, because that's all you'll do. I didn't think I had to be so literal when I explained that, I just meant you can't give a heavy the properties we gave it and also do more dmg without breaking the entire balance of normals.

Mike_Z said:
I don't think you're using the term correctly. This stuff COMES from variety. Everyone having the same pokes does not add variety.
Removing standing overheads does not add variety. Adding back throw OS's (from a safe-on-block move, no less!) does not add variety. Etc.

Everyone having the same poke drastically reduces memorization for punishes, highlighting the important of learning footsies over memorizing combo strings. A small amount of variety on poke startups/ranges is not the kind of variety you need when you have 3 other normals specifically designed to be more useful spacing tools due to their dmg reduction.

removing standing overheads was a result of the speed increase of the game making insta-overheads with j.H more of a thing. Why have standing overheads when literally j.H in someones face has the same startup with some extra low-invuln frames a couple frames in?

Adding throw OS is something we are still experimenting with, but yeah it might be too powerful when the move that comes out is safe-on-block. As of right now it hasn't created any super obvious problems but I could see us adding in a whiff if that becomes too absurd.

Mike_Z said:
To be blunt - I don't know if I believe you, given your reactions to posts here.

I explained why we made our decisions for the current build because someone on twitter asked me to, I never said they were necessarily better than anything else. Universal punish openers inherently lower the amount of memorization is what most of these posts boil down to, and that's true (but maybe not necessarily good). Also the game isn't made by just me so that's not very fair to the game itself.

Also almost everything you complained about in our first email was fixed a few weeks after you gave us your impressions! Not sure where this "I don't believe you" mentality came from, I discussed things with you exactly the way I am now, open to discussing issues that arise from our system but highly critical/skeptical of genre standards (I'll only include them if they are actually worth including mechanically).
 
@PocketRumbleDev

Based on everything I've heard here from you and from others, I side with you. I like your core philosophy and I agree with your statements on range. Dhalsim being the prototypical example of jabs not really working well against him at neutral because he has so much range at neutral. Jabs being great against him when you are upclose which seems to be your design philosophy. I also agree that the closer the punish the stronger the punish. Once again dhalsim being the prototypical example, in A3 when he gets a guard break from range, the most he usually gets is a standing fierce punish. Compared to other characters that are more likely to break when close that get full super punishes or custom combo punishes.


And even though you didn't say this, I do actually believe in your homogenisation style of development. Even our precious skullgirls hasn't been able to escape homogenisation in many aspects and its forced me to realize that homogenisation can actually still lead to a varied game.

I look at it like the greatest mirror of all time: Ryu versus Ryu. It's the greatest mirror of all time, and likely one of the ONLY good mirrors to fight. I'd go into why that is, but it's pretty obvious (multiple options from all spacings)

Homogenisation doesn't affect the Ryu mirror at all as far as interesting strategies or bad footsies (like 2 keepaway sim players is a horrendous mirror... Kinda like guile be guile or blanka v blanka with ball on ball action.


But I'm pretty sure that when you say footsies, you are kinda thinking in the spirit of the Ryu mirror. At least that's what I got from what you are saying. Idk if you have or will succeed, but it's a very interesting take and very close to how I would TRY to design a game as well.

My primary concern is stagnation of strategies at this point. Idk how that is addressed in your game as I've seen little video of it, but with ggpo support and an emphasis on things I agree with, I am excited to try your game out.


Also, I wouldn't get bent out of shape when people disagree, we all have differing fighting game backgrounds and many of us like different things. Afterall few fighters are identical in application and certainly not in fundamentals, even from things like A2 to A3 and 3s compared to cvs2 to umvc3 which are all made by the same company. Anywho I wish you luck and I have support for any fighting game dev especially a grassroots one.
 
Dime_x said:
@PocketRumbleDev
Also, I wouldn't get bent out of shape when people disagree

I hope it doesn't come off that way! This kind of discussion can ultimately lead to better designed mechanics, so I really like to thoroughly respond to criticism of the design in hopes that it will lead to a suggestion that ends up being a superior alternative. You can see the differences between the first Kickstarter, second Kickstarter, and this newest update that we change things constantly and drastically when we find things that appear to fit the game better.
 
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My biggest issue is I don't want everyone to feel "same-ish". Sure some characters have special attributes like a hop and everyone will have mostly different specials, but if it comes down to everyone doing A > B > C for almost every situation, then the game begins to start getting boring, especially when everyone has the exact same frame data on their normals and damage output.

I have never in my life heard anyone, expert or complete newb/casual to fighting games, every have any sort of difficulty discerning any of the issues you guys are trying to solve by "normalizing" them. The average person is smart enough to recognize why two attacks may differ from each other and why they should pick one attack over another. This game already has very few buttons to attack with and super simplified inputs, I think asking people to pick between 2 options for an ideal punish is hardly demanding on your memorization abilities. If anything, it's almost insulting that you think people can't even do that much on their own.

If an attack is short and quick, people can usually tell it's going to be a weaker attack, typically leading to lesser damage. If an attack is beefier and has more startup, people feel like there's more weight behind it and will deal more damage. Why do you feel like you need to over-simplify this when everything else about the game is made so simple to do already? I don't want to variety lost from the game because unnecessary simplifications were made.

On a side note, looking at the alpha build video, I'm not so keen on the short rounds leading to 3/5 matches. The constant break between the rounds halts the action too often. Why not increase the number of health points?
 
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RemiKz said:
My biggest issue is I don't want everyone to feel "same-ish". Sure some characters have special attributes like a hop and everyone will have mostly different specials, but if it comes down to everyone doing A > B > C for almost every situation, then the game begins to start getting boring, especially when everyone has the exact same frame data on their normals and damage output.

Frame data is different on everything other than poke. Here are the normals of the two finished characters:

Tenchi LowA: sort of like a normal shoto c.MK
Naomi LowA: sort of like Cody's slide c.MK, but with more distance/range. This can also be cancelled from StandA to get closer in your combo for a more devastating special ender (with the lightning kicks equivalent)

Tenchi StandA: huge range, big attackbox, big priority
Naomi StandA: shorter range, still a kinda big attackbox, same priority, come out way faster. Only move with long enough hitstun to combo into your teleport knockdown (ending a combo with a knockdown is a huge deal for Naomi, because she gains meter by charging and has a hop for crazy oki).

Tenchi LowB: sort of like a normal shoto sweep, but comes out faster and has even bigger range, you can also special cancel from it like older games.
Naomi LowB: sort of like a normal shoto c.HP uppercut, but comes out slightly faster, hits low on the first frame, and puts them in a juggle state (and because you can special cancel, you can immediately cancel that into a a special that air resets them with neutral advantage on land if you want the extra point of dmg over the knockdown).

These characters don't feel the same at all because the scenarios you would ideally execute one of Tenchi's normals does not carry over at all for the equivalent input on Naomi (excluding standA of course, which tends to be VERY similar across the cast in most games anyway). A > B > C isn't going to be the everyone's best combo, you'll just want to start with A with everyone if you are given a chance to.

RemiKz said:
This game already has very few buttons to attack with and super simplified inputs, I think asking people to pick between 2 options for an ideal punish is hardly demanding on your memorization abilities. If anything, it's almost insulting that you think people can't even do that much on their own.

You have the choice of like 4 options for ideal punishes all the time, it's based on the range of the opener and your distance from the player.

RemiKz said:
If an attack is short and quick, people can usually tell it's going to be a weaker attack, typically leading to lesser damage. If an attack is beefier and has more startup, people feel like there's more weight behind it and will deal more damage. Why do you feel like you need to over-simplify this when everything else about the game is made so simple to do already? I don't want to variety lost from the game because unnecessary simplifications were made.

Heavies have plenty about them that feel heavy without them taking more dmg. SFX/VFX/hitstun/startup/active/recovery/range/priority/knockdown/pushback/pushup/cancels, if you ignore extra dmg on them you can modify heavies to be ludicrously good spacing tools rather than mostly risky punish openers. If you put extra dmg on heavies with the properties we have on them now, you would literally do nothing but stand heavy all day and there would be no benefit to getting in deep. I do agree though with what someone said earlier that we should stop calling them heavies and instead call them B normals or something if they stay the way they are now. I'd disagree that variety is lost, because now all of your normals have been engineered as various spacing tools ONLY, not as "this move is stronger so you should inherently get more dmg," which is a pretty boring way to design a move and limits just how strong the rest of the properties can be. This reminds me a lot of the discussion on equal health for characters, and even Skullgirls gave everyone equal health, because there are just way more interesting ways to design characters when you don't fall into the trap of just thinking "big guys have more health." The equivalent thought for normals is "heavy attacks do more dmg." Also we actually DO have moves that do different dmg, we just engineer them around having more hits in them (Naomi lightning kicks punch thing, Tenchi's flash kick antler thing, Naomi's LowB juggle, etc).

RemiKz said:
On a side note, looking at the alpha build video, I'm not so keen on the short rounds leading to 3/5 matches. The constant break between the rounds halts the action too often. Why not increase the number of health points?

3/5 is in there for the eventual backup-character mechanic mostly, although more rounds does inherently help make sure the more skilled player wins. We might go back to 2/3 because 3/5 breaks the pace too much, but the rounds length of ~25-30 seconds keeps things high tension at all times like SF2, and that's something everybody here really likes, so that probably won't be changing soon even if the rounds change.
 
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