I was reading a thread on Shoryuken that basically complains about SF4 making it way too easy for new players to notch wins.

One point that came up was the mentality people had when playing a game. Back then when a dominating strategy was conceived, top players would do their best to find a way around it. They'd work hard and did whatever it took, even if it meant executing some complex strategy, and the game would develop in that way.

Nowadays, at the very slightest nuance that a strategy might be too good, we call for patches. Why bother changing how we play when we can just bitch to the developers to make a change? Or, we might just even stop playing since we feel that the game has been figured out and stale.

I rag on the DoA series all the time, but honestly, it's really not that bad of a game. The most common complaint is that you can counter of a stun, and because of that, you can "counter everything." That's almost like saying in SF3:3S, you just parry everything and the game is real easy, yet we don't see too many parries at high level competition. In reality, if you guess wrong on a counter, you eat a ton more damage on the follow up, and you can even time it right to re-stun them. It ends up being a really fast paced sequential mind game sequence.

But everyone gave up. "Counters are too dominating," and except for the few top level, everyone has really given up on the game, and we'll never know what would've become of it.

Similarly, let's look at Starcraft. The amount of strategy development in that game in the last few years has been insane. 3 years ago, the trick of stacking mutalisks all at once was discovered.


Even more incredible, this was 9 years after the game was released! And instead of calling for the game to be rebalanced, it was accepted as a viable strategy, and strategies were developed to be able to counter it properly, and no one has skipped a beat. What could've been thought of as a dominant strategy was extensively researched and tested and battle back.

The strange thing is, it seems almost arbitrary as to whether gamers will choose whether or not to accept the strategy as overpowered and just quit straight out, or to hammer through it and create counter-strategies.

Either way, it's something about the next time you play competitively. Is this strategy really THAT dominating? How much work will you do to neutralize it? I can say for sure, that low/mid-level players often point at a system's imbalance, where as the top-level players are usually hard at work and debunk so many of those myths that pervade the scene. For all the flak SF4 Sagat gets, there are very few, if any, top-level tournament winning Sagats in the US...