Tekken Revolution, as I mentioned last week,
is Namco's F2P twist on the Tekken series. Instead of leveling
individual
characters, your account levels as a whole. As the "level" increases,
you gain Skill Points to boost the stats of your
characters. Dependent on your overall playstyle, you can theoretically
adjust your characters to best suit your strengths or potentially cover
your weaknesses. Revolution also has a much smaller character roster, so
the game becomes a lot easier to learn by osmosis. It's a great step in
the direction of picking up newer players but it's not without its
faults. The unlock system (or lack thereof): By
far the #1 problem with Revolution is that the bonus characters (Alisa,
Bryan, Leo, Steve and now Jin and Xiaoyu) are randomly unlocked using
the Gift Point system. This is pretty bad news for character specialist
and loyalists who tend to stick with a single character and basically
refuse to play the game unless they have them. It truly is a compounding
problem because of how in-depth and difficult the game can be. Players
find a character they like, invest a ton of time learning them
(sometimes over the course of years), then find out that their character
is in the game and whoops, they just hit 30k Gift Points and their
character didn't unlock.120,000 points - 6th character For instance I'm currently the max rank with nearly 300 wins and I've still yet to unlock Leo, the one character I did
want to unlock of the original four but have yet to hit the 60,000
goal. Now that Jin and Xiaoyu have been unlocked, instead of a
guaranteed Leo unlock at 60k I'm now down to a 33% chance. That's not to
say I wouldn't play Jin but there's still the 33% chance I'll hit worse
case scenario and get Ling and have to wait another 300 games before my
next character, which of course by then may unlock another two
characters. Now
not all is lost. Namco currently has a promotion going to unlock
characters quicker. Unfortunately it's through buying micro-transaction
coins and using them to play Ranked Match, two things I'm not currently
interested in. Rank is a double edged sword: Which brings me to my next point, having a rank cap slows down the need
to play the game but also lowers my desire to play the game. Every time
the cap has been raised, I play until rank cap and then stop playing
Ranked Matches because Player Matches have near equal reward for far
less risk. At first I thought Player Matches gave a fraction of the
Experience and Gift Points (namely 10 gift and 20 exp) but playing
higher or similar ranks gives about the same, although I'm not 100% sure
because I rarely fight someone near rank in Player Match. I theorize
this is the reason that some players actually exclusively play outside
of Ranked Matches because if they're level 1, they're raking in the
points since everyone is higher ranked than them. Secondly
it's really, really hard for me to find a Player Match because of my
rank. Regardless of me picking characters with lower or sans stat
boosts, people see the rank and level and immediately kick me or leave.
Actually due to the weird chat system in Tekken, the last message sent
will be visible to the chat once the game ends and I'll almost 100% type
some filler such as "damn", "lol", or "ouch" so I don't get immediately
booted or raged out against. It's important to restate that I don't
noob stomp in these situations, I'll pick my low level characters to
make the match more even. The point being I just want to play and would
really love if my rank didn't get in the way. I've also never received
so much trash talk in my life, players constantly sending hate mail,
insulting me when I lose while using secondary characters with stats
equal to a level 0/1, voice chat smack talk, people pulling the plug
mid-match, and people raging out at the character screen. The sooner stat nullification is introduced in Player Matches, the happier everyone will be, at least I hope so. Invincible attacks: Now
the idea of invincible attacks isn't bad and I'm not against
them as a whole, I just dislike the idea that they're not built (somewhat) equally. As
best as I can tell (without any real scientific testing) invincible
attacks are vulnerable during the first two frames, completely
invulnerable during their animation, and then finally vulnerable on
the impact frame. Therefore it's possible to trade with an opponent if
your attack hits exactly when theirs does or the active frames of
your attack are still active during their impact frame, e.g. "meaty"
attacks. This is the
cause of the first major discrepancy, the slower an attack is, the more
effective it is as an invulnerable attack. This is due to less of its animation being spent on vulnerable frames and more spent being
invulnerable. For instance below I'm comparing the fastest invulnerable
attack to the slowest one, Paul's d+1+2 vs Law's b+3+4, respectively.
Paul's d+1+2 is i12, therefore it's totally invulnerable for 75% of
its animation, whereas Law's b+3+4 is i29 and totally invulnerable for
almost 90% of its animation. Now obviously there would be a point of
diminishing returns where an attack would be too slow to act as
an invulnerable attack, e.g. whiffed attacks would recover in time to
block and launch the invulnerable attack, but for now it seems that
about i26-i30 might be the sweet spot for Special Arts. Law's b+3+4 (i29) invulnerability chart The
second issue is that the newly made "Special Arts" were moves real
moves before being converted, had different properties on NH/CH, and
many were already highly evasive. For instance, using the prior two
examples, Paul's d+1+2 isn't very evasive but it is very fast and is
often used to cause advantageous trades for W! and combo. Law's b+3+4 in
TTT2 is very evasive, highly regarded as the most evasive "back swing" attack in the game, and W!/KND on NH/CH. So while the system works for those attacks, there are moves that were hit hard by the change to becoming invulnerable attacks.All the Special Arts currently in Revolution (as they appear in TTT2) I used three major criteria to determine how the moves from TTT2 translated to Revolution: 1)
How much worse on block the attacks are now. Since all Special Arts are
universally launch punishable on block, IIRC -25 on block,
some moves are much worse off now. Inversely many converted attacks were already launch punishable on block, so becoming more launch punishable isn't really that bad a change. 2)
How much the properties changed on NH/CH. In Revolution, Special Arts
all universally KND/W! on NH/CH, but in TTT2 certain attacks did not
KND/W! and instead would be +frames on hit or launch on CH. Obviously an
upgrade from +frames to KND/W! is an improvement, while losing
launching or stun properties is (for the most part) a huge downgrade. 3)
Finally, what role the moves were originally designed to fill. Most of
the Special Arts chosen for Revolution are "Back Swing/Sway" style
attacks that were originally designed to evade pressure while being
punishable on block, but quite a few in TR were meant to be used as
punishers. Unfortunately, now, improperly punishing will be death on
block for a select few characters. So of the 14
characters currently available in Revolution, only 3 are theoretically
better off when compared to TTT2. Of the remaining 11, only 3 are about
even with a "win some, lose some" approach. That leaves 8 of the 14 that
are worse off due to the invulnerable Special Art changes of TR. Potential solutions to my problems with Revolution: The
problem with the Gift Point system is that it's totally random and
there's a decently high chance you won't receive the character you want
most. It would be a major improvement if you were allowed to pick one
character for every 25,000 gift points reached and leave the 30,000
benchmark still unlock other characters randomly. That would give you three
random characters and one guaranteed character by the time you reached
30,000 points, potentially increasing the retention rate of certain
players. Regarding rank in Player Matches, Namco has
made some good strides. They've already announced that they will be
adding the ability to disable stats in Player Matches so a level 1 could
equally compete against a level 50. What I'd really like to see
is if they could dynamically scale stats versus the opponent's level.
For instance a player could set their preferred stat distribution (let's
say 2-1-1) and if their level was lower than their opponent's, the
player's stats would automatically scale to match. So instead of it
being a level 1 vs 50 becoming a level 1 vs 1, it could be a level 50 vs
50 instead. Unfortunately invincible attacks wouldn't
be a quick fix as there's so much wrong with it might be better off
just leaving them alone. Although I'd like to see a consistent decision
of only
choosing character attacks that already KND/W!, instead of just hand
picking attacks that look or act evasively, regardless of their TTT2
properties. This should cause a more balanced selection of Special Art
where no character has too much an advantage during the conversion from
TTT2 to TR. Disclaimer: Please remember that I'm writing this as the beginning of July and somethings and/or everything may have changed by a later date |
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