Dissidia Duodecim Final Fantasy continues Squeenix's tradition of stupid titles

[Nique]

Oh man. Competitive gaming is like, one of those things that sounds amazing on paper but in practice is just awful and full of awful people.

[EVILNess]

Originally Posted by POS Industries

*play Dissidia online for the first time in ages*
"Equips or no?"
"BH"
"...What the hell did you people do to this game while I was gone?!"

So yeah, rebalance the sequel so that this sort of bullshit doesn't happen, Square. kthxbai!

The thing is that people will do this regardless.

[Krylo]

The problem isn't the competitive scene.

It's carebears pretending to be competitive players. Those dudes are carebears.

Actual competitive players are the cut throat tweak the system in whatever way you can to edge out as much of an advantage as possible types. They'd never rule against using gear, because they'd want to be the ones benefiting from pregame strategies.

[mudah.swf]

Dissidia didn't even have a scene outside of that one forum anyway. AFAIK it was never taken seriously by anyone other than the posters on that board. Everyone else messed around with it for laughs and went back to Street Fighter or whatever, most likely because Dissidia was probably really shitty when played like that, and I can see why.

As for gear, traditional fighting game players would argue against ANYTHING other than pure player skill in a competitive fighting game, because the emphasis should be on the player's knowledge of the characters and their opponents rather than how long they've spent grinding out Ryu's hadoken or whatever. Dissidia isn't the most serious business fighting game but it gets played competitively because people will try to play ANYTHING even slightly competitive in a serious business, competitive way, because they can. Shit, there are tournaments for Naruto fighting games. It doesn't matter how boring the game becomes when you strip away the frills like equips and stats and whatnot, people will try having tournaments for it anyway.

As an aside in my limited experience of competitive fighting game IRL i've met nothing BUT cool, non-awful people. It's not all bad.

[Krylo]

Setting up gear is part of 'pure player skill'. It's stupid and carebearish to say otherwise.

It's the equivalent of saying that, "It's totally ok to completely utilize every single trick and exploit in the system, so long as it's only the ones I'M comfortable with."

Which is basically exactly the same thing as saying, "Don't do anything I'm not good enough to handle."

Edit: There's a salient argument about the random items in Brawl or whatever, because they are entirely random. There's no skill based in picking them up. But anyone who has played any kind of RPG and spent even the slightest amount of time and effort toward 'twinking' a character can tell you that setting up gear is, indeed, a skill in and of itself. It's not twitch based, and purely analytical, but that doesn't make it less valid. Any more than analyzing the benefits of a weapons payload for a strike force is any more or less valid than the skill of the members at actually using those firearms.

[mudah.swf]

I think we're coming from different perspectives here. It would be really difficult to argue about this because we both have entirely different views on what constitutes a real "competitive" game and all that entails. I absolutely hate the idea of levelling and stat builds and gear in a multiplayer, competitive game. I don't want to have to invest 40 hours in getting my gear and stats just right before I can actually play the game against other people, and then getting yelled at because I don't have the build that's hot right now. Not coincidentially, if I'm playing an RPG or something I don't play it against other people. Even where something like Pokemon is concerned, I don't bother playing with other people very often because I hate the idea of having to tediously grind my pokermen to an acceptable standard.

Whereas you seem to have an entirely different opinion on the subject so any argument will just be us going around in circles, I'm sure you could throw countless words at me about how stats and gear are a hugely important skill and that I'm just a huge fucking scrub for thinking otherwise.

Also I don't think random items are bad so I don't know why you brought that up. Adapting to situations is a skill in itself, and fighting games themselves have had tons of randomness and bullshit in the past.

[Krylo]

Because the last fighting game people tried to get 'competitive' about and complained about similar mechanics altering the flow of a battle too quickly and removing player skill was the smash brothers games and their random items. I agree with you that dealing with them is, itself, a skill that should be honored, but the argument against that is much more salient than the argument against allowing gear to top tier Dissidia players, or worse forcing them to wear the gear you dictate.

Also: Having games/tournaments in which there is no gear for people who don't want to go through the trouble of getting it is perfectly fine.

What's not fine is pretending like you're balancing the game out by removing that instead of just facilitating people being able to get into a tournament without bothering with that/facilitating people who don't want to do the number crunching to maximize their abilities.

What's even LESS fine is coming up with gear that everyone must have and forcing everyone to be max level at the same time.

That's basically the worst of both worlds, and what's going on if you check the thread POS linked.

To be short about it, I don't care how you like to play, or how you do play. What I do care about is the idea it doesn't take player effort and strategizing to set up a gear build isn't as valid a skill as the twitch portions and its proliferation resulting in ridiculous and confusing tournament rules that no one in their right mind should ever consider abiding by.

Edit: Also, it's not the grinding and getting them that's a skill. It's putting them together in the most effective combination with a summon. It's not like there's just one set of gear at end game and one set of accessories. There's different builds that have to be selected for maximum effectiveness with your character, your personal play style with that character, and effectiveness against your opponent's character and gear set. The very argument these people like to use to justify their ridiculous rule sets proves this. It CAN change the course of a battle, or it CAN give an unfair advantage. It doesn't say it DOES, meaning you need to gear up right and use the right summons at the right times in battle to pull a flip. Compare to the rather famous SF tournament vid of a dude getting beaten down by chun-li only to release his super at just the right time and completely reverse the flow of the battle. Same thing, but you have to equip the summon first. FURTHER, they still expect you to have all this gear (full imp set, drop this, drop that), so it's not like they're worried about the time investment giving you an advantage. They're worried about the build you select giving one.

The grinding and getting shit in the first place is totally a drag and I agree with you there's no skill to it and it's stupid and pointless.

[POS Industries]

You also have to bear in mind that the "grinding for equipment" argument isn't even valid because it takes even longer to grind battles in order to "master" all the abilities that you intend to use for each character, which allows them to cost less skill points to equip therefore allowing you to equip more abilities. So, no matter what, the argument that whoever did the most grinding has the advantage of a more powerful character comes into play no matter what you do.

At the end of the day, the fact is that this is basically Pokemon with twitch combat, and if this the game people want to play competitively, then that's the game they need to fucking play.

Personally, I've always been okay with banning one time use items like incenses and resins, but not because they give an unfair advantage so much as that they are so easily obtained that, if they were allowed, everyone would basically have to equip them to compete. And since you can load up a character with those things and conceivably set yourself up to insta-kill your opponent the moment the match starts, the idea of everyone just one-shotting each other in every match sounds horrendous and kills the game's playability.

[mudah.swf]

I read that thread that POS linked, saw the massive ruleset that the OP had written out and now I'm astounded that people actually play Dissidia competitively. IMO if a game needs that many fucking rules to be competitive, it's a shit competitive game. Bear in mind that I come from a fighting game background and the rules for tournament-played games mostly consist of "no turbo, best of 3, good luck".

I would definitely say this backing has coloured pretty much all of my views in this little argument that I've kicked off. There's no stats, no gear and no levels to worry about, everything is available immediately and there's no need to change any settings to get a fun, deep game out of the experience.

Krylo my personal issue with gear being skilful is that I have difficulty seeing how it's skilful to look up a gear recommendation on a wiki and set yourself up with that. But I admittedly have little experience with MMOs as all the ones I've played have bored me to tears in a few days; I suppose I am totally ignorant on the subject. Please educate me as to why I'm totally wrong and building a proper build requires more effort than looking shit up on a wiki, I'm all ears.

[Krylo]

Because looking shit up on a wiki only gives you a base.

I mean, yeah, to use WoW, ok you want to build a DPS Shaman build you can go to Elitist Jerks and steal one of their builds, but honestly, as good as Elitist Jerks are, it's going to be subpar.

Because you aren't the dude that made it. Statistically speaking it's going to be completely solid, but you're going to have different rotations, be comfortable with different things, and just generally handle your character differently. Maybe you'd be better off splitting off an extra few points in restro for more healing/survivability with the way you play, instead of going full on DPS like they suggest.

And that's in WoW where it's gear >>>>> build >>> play style.

Get to a twitch based game and you have to accommodate your own playstyle even more. What works for someone with an aggressive play style will, emphatically, not work for someone with a defensive play style.

Further, in a tournament setting of 'fight a dude, fight another dude in an hour/the next day/whatever' you have other things to take into consideration.

What's his playstyle? Is he a turtle? Would I be better served fighting his form of turtling by turtling back or by loading up on as much offensive power as I can to break past it? Is he an aggressive player? If he is, can I keep up with him being equally aggressive or should I try for something that will take the edge off his punches?

You can't just grab a cookie cutter build in a game that involves twitch play and expect to do well. Doing so, to use a comparison you yourself used, would be tantamount to tossing out a squirtle every fight, regardless of whether you're up against flame type, rock type, or electric type. It's a poor move at least a good portion of the time, if not all the time.

Hell, you can't even really get away with it in a game that DOESN'T include twitch play and expect to do well unless you put in the time to learn that build as well as the person that created it.

That's not to say wikis and discussion sites aren't as useful as hell, because they'll illuminate a lot of the nuances of how abilities work without you having to go through all that experimentation yourself, but at the end of the day it's up to you to put the numbers together in a way that works for you if you want to be top tier.