Is it good fighting game design if the worse player can random out the more skilled on with few lucky guesses?

Is it good fighting game design if the worse player can random out the more skilled on with few lucky guesses?

Attached: harada-on-healthbars.png (472x1037, 834.8K)

That's why you do longer sets

It's not random, lucky, or guesses if a player wins a match. The better player did not hedge their bets properly or respect their opponent's options.
Lower skill ≠ cannot win against higher skill. It's just less likely. The best player in the world still loses to worse players.

Just dump healthbars, lets get a new Bushido Blade.

You can hedge your bets properly and still lose

Very few games would ever let you randomly win matches. But giving a few chances to even things out if they do make good decisions is fair. With T7 for example if you just won a lucky exchange you still need to combo off it. If you go crazy with a raw RA you might even things up, but they'll have rage soon too and now you need to win clean. Things are shifting too much into the big crazy comeback territory but it mostly makes sense right now.

Plus some good players do play in a way where they make high risk decisions regularly, opposed to slower safe players. You can get SFxT situations where talking health is so much work and regen is way too high. Which creates really boring games.

That would actually make random wins a fair possibility

No matter how good you are, you can't still literally read your opponent's mind, just make educated guesses what they are going to do. So in a game with simultaneous decision making, there's always an element of luck. And this element of luck is greater if there are easily enforceable high reward 50/50's or if the healthbars are shorter.

frick grapplers to heck

>With T7 for example if you just won a lucky exchange you still need to combo off it.
Most combos in T7 are trivially easy though, so the fact that you have to do the combo is more often than not irrelevant.

The design of the game should be such that there are different kinds of skills, and different situations that occur in the game will reward their use differently
If a player is worse in every way then they will never win unless the game has literal rng. However, if they're 80% worse they can still win 20% of the time. Just because the other player is twice as good as you doesn't mean you don't have your own advantages that if you can manage to leverage you can use to win some portion of your games. That's not randomness, that's how competition works. Even in Chess the better player can't win 100% of their matches against people that are even remotely close to their skill level.

The same applies both ways though, and someone with a more extensive knowledge of the game can attempt to avoid situations where they are put in certain mix ups. If they can force you into a situation where you have to take a mix up they were playing better than you. That isn't luck, that is your failings giving them the edge.

Plus a 50/50 mix up doesn't mean each results in as much damage. Usually one of the routes will do much less damage. This is especially apparent in SFV where take the throw was taken to all new heights.

That kind of "chance for the worse player to win" is fine, since it's just about individual's variance in performance or maybe being relatively weak against specific kind of player or matchup or whatever. However, that's not what is achieved with low healthbars, which do in fact increase the randomness of the outcome.

Then clearly, in that moment, you were the worse player. If your skill is that close that bad guesses cost you the match, then you were the loser in that moment.
You can make the same argument for sports having unpredictable elements of physics generating random occurences that are favorable. If you are trapped in multiple 50/50s, than your opponent was able to apply their gameplan better than you. You played worse in that moment.

That doesn't change the fact that it's much easier to do so in certain games compared to others. There are clearly design decisions that minimize the random aspect in fighting games. Tekken 7 for instance is deliberately designed to force unpredictable outcomes with how explosive it is and how little legacy skills like movement and neutral matter.

You are no longer describing luck then, you a describing a player with knowledge who is being rewarded for application. Optimal damage combos are harder and even if we pretend no combo in Tekken is hard positioning is still very important for what you can do. If they are doing optimal damage off every exchange then that is a skill they should be rewarded for

Whoops. Meant for

>If they can force you into a situation where you have to take a mix up they were playing better than you. That isn't luck, that is your failings giving them the edge.
Depends on how the game is designed how much of a luck factor there is in being able to force a 50/50.

And it doesn't change the fact that the better player won in that moment by securing their strategy and gameplan while denying yours. You have at least two round to get your shit running and stop your opponents.
Tekken 3 kills you off single confirms, it's like some divekick shit, but there is still elements of skill even if the victories can have a random quality to them at times.

easiest way of explaining this is you can expect but not predict 5 loop throws in a row

Unless it introduces actual randomness, not really
All it does is reduce the number of opportunities to leverage skill, the ratio of better player successes to worse player successes stays the same, just the sample size per round is smaller. Which is why games like tekken use ft3 instead of ft2.

Okay, but that isn't true for any of the notable current fighters. I get this thread is just a T7 butthurt thread and those webms will be posted shortly. But no high level play is still waddle around like you are having a stroke pressing safe stuff. Even very aggressive games like SFV and DBFZ are not all luck, in fact putting someone in a 50/50 is itself an application of something that player learnt. If you make bad reads, you played worse. If you corned yourself, you made bad moves. You can't be accidentally put in a 50/50

Good fighting game design is striving to eliminate random aspects such as this though. The fact that skill is more relevant than luck is just the bare minimum for a fighting game.

Getting to 50/50s isn't random. There are staging elements required to get to that point based in neutral and footsies. You can start to argue insane things from this point:
>Neutral is just waggling back and forth and hitting mk for a random victory.

No they aren't. Good fighting games strive to be entertaining and fun while also being reasonably fair. I can't think of a single fighting game that didn't have significant guessing factors and 50/50s.

>Okay, but that isn't true for any of the notable current fighters.
It's not binary true/false issue, but a question of degree. Chances are current fighters are not the same in this regard, but that's not the point. Worrying thing is that a leading fighting game developer thinks the luck factor is a good thing.
>If you make bad reads, you played worse. If you corned yourself, you made bad moves. You can't be accidentally put in a 50/50
In the long run if you keep guessing wrong more than your opponent, yes you are making worse guesses. But when it comes to individual guesses, the smarter choice given the information the player has can turn out to be the wrong one. Just like it's the smarter guess that a result of a dice throw is greater than 1 rather than exactly 1, even if after you throw it turned out to be the wrong guess.
>You can't be accidentally put in a 50/50
You are practically always guessing in a game with simultaneous choice making so obviously you can. We just tend to call it guessing and "mix-ups" only when the outcome of an individual guess is a moderately big deal (and also when there are less options).
The fact is that depending how its designed, a fighting game can be closer or further away from pure RPS, and therefore closer or further away from a very luck based game.

Forcing guesses is a reward for outplaying your opponent. Too many modern games award you free comeback chances with baked in comeback mechanics and it's inherently bad game design to "make it easier for lower ranked players to beat higher ranks" like Harada was saying. It sacrifices the experience for the players for fake spectator hype.

No-one wants a complete stomp as it isn't fun for both parties. I don't see anything wrong with lower ranked people getting some wins but ultimately losing a first to 5 against someone better.

Entertaining is subjective. Merit-based fg skill is not. Losers don't get to change the rules of a game. End of debate.

>why can't all fighting games be mechanical situations of total efficiency, wtf is this real life???

You clearly don't play. It doesn't feel good to win when you feel like you just got awarded a chance to make your opponent guess wrong, and it obviously feels much worse to lose in such a way. Fair skill-based competition is the most important thing about fighting games. If you're that much worse than your opponent, losing 5-0 is nothing but fair. Change that and it jeopardizes the feeling of getting good, actively ruining what makes fighting games unique.

>Getting to 50/50s isn't random.
What I said that depending on how the game is designed, there can be smaller or greater luck factor in enforcing the 50/50. I obviously didn't say it's ever completely random, not in any fighting game that I know of. If whether you can force a 50/50 has such a little luck factor, might as well skip the 50/50 part and give the player a guaranteed reward - if you wanted to make the game as fair and skill based as possible. But I don't think that's how it actually works, in both forcing the 50/50 and and guessing on the 50/50 it's a mix of skill and luck.

>Free comeback mechanics
You still have to outplay your opponent to capitalize on those mechanics. What it really means is more hinges on decisions as a round closes out, and you can't sleep on an opponent just because you have a life lead, because something bad might happen to you. The same players consistently win in these games at top end.

It seems like you can't hack the game. If you don't like it, okay something else instead of sulking.

>guessing right on offensive mixups doesn't feel good
Maybe if you play a retard character like Bryan who can put out high-reward guesses at no risk with free mid launchers and big low pokes

I've fought a lot with skill gap in fighting games and whether it's fun doesn't depend really on my chance to win, but whether I get to do stuff at all. I can be on a long ass loss streak and still have fun, as long as the other player doesn't completely suffocate me. While I've been shitting on Harada for this comment, in this regard I think Tekken 7 is pretty good. The better player often wins with patience rather than rush down, in contrast to momentum heavy games like Blazblue where I've had zero fun in playing with significant skill gap.

Explain the luck elements in greater detail.

You have to guess in a lot of games so I don't understand what you mean.

>Losers don't get to change the rules of a game
That is exactly what you're trying to do with your complaining about "muh random," when people are shown to form effective ranking hierarchies where the same people win consistently.

Luck is skill. If you lost then you were not the better player.

if you only play tekken it's obvious you'd think guessing is what's fun about fgs