patrick miller writes about videogames

Wise words from Big Worm. Who knew that a quote from Friday would turn out to be a great starting point for a post on microtransactions in game design? (For that matter, do people who like video games even watch Friday?)

First off: if you are reading this and you genuinely think that you will never ever have fun playing a free to play game, go away. There are many ways to sell games and many ways to build them, and there is no One Right Way to do either one. So stuff it.

Now: It’s true that lots of f2p feels soulless and exploitative. Some of this is due to mismanaged expectations, and some of this is due to designers that, at least from my perspective, seem to have a poor understanding of a person’s emotional reaction to buying stuff. They may have mastered an impressive set of psychological tools designed to extract money out of people, but that won’t necessarily make said people feel good about spending that money.

This is, I think, why so many mobile and social games are about monetizing the “whales” (and encouraging high virality in order to better find those whales) and f2p PC games like Planetside 2 and MechWarrior Online have to be a little more “honest” because they’re dealing with an audience that is slightly more savvy to psychological manipulation within games (and have plenty of other games to go to if they find the f2p aspects distasteful).

A quick note: By “mismanaged expectations,” I mean that some people are simply appalled by the idea of having a game that explicitly includes money in the design. These people are either very, very naive, or they are ideologically opposed to f2p, and shareware, and subscriptions, and arcade games—and bowling, mini golf, etc. Don’t expect to win these people over with words. (Instead, design a game they want to pay for.)

The fact is, spending money is an emotionally nuanced activity. Yes, everyone hates seeing their account numbers go down and their bill numbers go up, but that is possibly the most superficial emotion we could possible evoke from a transaction, and really, it gets us no closer to learning how to make people feel good for spending money on our games. So I thought I’d discuss some of the things I enjoy spending money on, and the things I don’t enjoy spending money on, in order to perhaps discern potential design hooks that would enable us to design microtransaction-based games that don’t constantly make us feel like we’re getting fucked. (Avid readers may recall that I touched upon this earlier in a column for Game Developer, but I didn’t really get to go in detail.) 

I like spending money on: Upgrades. I like buying new stuff for my car, or my computer; new parts to improve performance, accessories to make them more useful or convenient, and so forth. I like the feeling of testing my upgraded machine to see how much better it performed, or the novelty of using a new toy with an older tool for the first few times. I like having an older, inferior part left over to use in something else, if I want to, like lend it to a friend in need or use it on a spare rig. Part of the fun of buying a new thing is being freed up to reuse the old thing.

MechWarrior Online was particularly good with this because you maintain a hangar full of ‘Mechs, and there were plenty of good reasons to own and maintain a full stable—different variants of a chassis to grind masteries, different combat roles, and so on. So when you replaced a default part with a better part, you could choose to use that default part in a different ‘Mech. Considering most f2p games won’t let you trade items directly with another player (because, presumably, any time a player gets a part from someone other that you, you potentially lost money), this is a pretty good way to still maintain an illusion of “ownership” with virtual goods.

This can apply to consumables, within reason; I like buying healthy food because it’s good for me and is basically an “upgrade” for myself (one which is, like a good upgrade, actually reflected in my body’s quality-of-user-experience) and once it’s gone, its advantage still lasts, which makes me feel good about buying it.

I don’t like spending money on: Paid advantages. One of the reasons MechWarrior Online did it well was because the more-expensive parts often offered higher performance but at higher costs; an upgraded laser might do the same damage and weigh less, but take up more physical space than its default counterpart and cost more to repair if damaged. It strikes the right balance between upgrade and side-grade that makes it a compelling, but balanced purchase instead of pay-to-win.

Also, it’s totally viable to buy these expensive parts without using real money currency, even though some of them cost as much as an entirely new ‘Mech. I didn’t crunch the numbers, but I never felt like any single piece equipment was out of reach with just in-game earned currency alone—just that everything that I wanted, in total, would be too much work to earn without spending a few bucks or spending more time playing the game than I’d like. This really makes it feel like I am electing to spend money instead of grinding, that I’m choosing to expedite my progress instead of do work.

This is, I suppose, is also true if I spend money for a thing that would take 90 years to grind, but knowing that no one would realistically grind for that makes not work so well. Make it so that the things I can only buy with real money simply say to other people, “I liked this game enough to spend money on something,” not “I want to win enough to spend money to win.” Evoking the former feeling builds my sense of investment in a game; the latter cheapens my sense of accomplishment from doing well at a game.

I like spending money on: A good deal. Everyone loves a sale, because it makes us feel like just by virtue of the fact that we are in this store or on this website at a particular time, we have performed a magic trick that makes our hard-earned dollars stretch further. Of course, the flip side of this magic trick is that we end up spending more of those hard-earned dollars than we otherwise would have. This is nothing new to monetization designers; plenty of f2p games use rotating sales and discounts as a way of convincing us to buy stuff.

I imagine that some monetization designers get a bit wary at the thought of discounting too often, for fear that it’ll cause players to wait to purchase a particular virtual good until it’s on sale. This seems silly to me! With real-world goods, we exact a certain tax on people who want the convenience of having exactly what they want, when they want it, and reward people who are willing to wait with a discount. We do this because vendors that have a lot of inventory basically have their money tied up in products that aren’t making them money until their sold, which is no good for them, so they’ll discount the old stock in order to make space and free up budget for the new stuff—even if it means lower profits (or even a loss) on the old stuff.

Likewise, there are some players who are willing to buy your stuff at its normal price in order to have it when they want it, and some who will only buy when they get a deal—because they like the feeling of getting a deal, or because it’s now in their price range, or perhaps a little bit of both. Sales basically give you a chance to engage people who value your in-game stuff at different price points without affecting the long-term perceived value of the product, netting you buyers you might not have otherwise attracted (especially thanks to the impulse buy appeal of a time-limited sale, like a daily deal). And since you’re selling virtual goods that cost you nothing to reproduce and don’t decrease in value over time, I really don’t see any reason not to regularly put things on sale.

I don’t like spending money on: Manufactured inconveniences. I am inclined to point out is that putting something on sale will help persuade me to buy something only if I already want to buy it but cannot (for whatever reason). That is to say, if you try to sell me something that I already don’t want, you won’t have any more luck by cutting the price. And if I think your microtransactions are exploitative or manipulative, I won’t bite. (Even if it’s on sale.) I’ll probably play as a free rider until I run into a squeeze that’s just too painful, and then I’ll quit.

I like spending money on: Bundles.From Extra Value Meals to Humble Indie Bundles, I like buying me a group of things that are each cheaper because my total spend overall is higher than it would have otherwise been. I think the Humble Bundles are a particularly good example because they typically feature a few flagship items that are, for most people, the reason to buy the bundle, and then extra stuff which could be nice to have but that you wouldn’t necessarily go out of your way to buy.

Essentially, the trick to getting me to buy a bundle is to include one or two things that I really want, a few other things which would be nice to have, and a price that basically convinces me to spend a few extra bucks on something I don’t want enough to buy on its own. And it makes me feel good because it’s a sale, plus I get to feel both indulgent and thrifty, because I’m buying stuff I don’t feel like I need enough to purchase at full price (indulgence) and getting a good deal (thrifty).

I don’t like spending money on: Stuff I want in inconvenient amounts. Don’t make me spend more money than I want to simply because what I want is not priced in some arbitrary quantity. Subtract even more points if I will always end up with an annoying amount of leftover money after any given transaction, or if the dollars-to-game-currency isn’t 1:1 (if I have to do math to figure out how much real money I’m spending, then fuck you).

I like spending money on: Side bets. I like betting on the outcome of games, whether it’s a game I’m playing on or a game I’m watching. Even putting a dollar on the line makes things disproportionately more entertaining and engaging. Heck, playing fighting games in the arcade has a minor amount of money at stake—the 50c required to continue vs. not having to pay money to play your next game—and that was enough to make people get All Kinds Of Real over it.

Of course, you want people to put money into your game, not pull it out—so don’t let them take it out. People can bet with your real-money in-game currency, and then use that currency to buy other things in-game (or make more bets). They may not be paying with their money, but they’re paying with someone’s, and that’s what matters to you, right?

I don’t like spending money on: Lotteries, raffles, or any kind of luck-based gambling, really. If I wanted to bet real money on a game of chance, I’d play online poker. I hate things that require me to pay money for a chance to win big money big prizes. This applies to luck-of-the-draw card packs (I’m looking at you, Tekken Card Tournament); I hate that I can buy a more favorable random number generator for packs of cards by spending more money.  

I like spending money on: People (or animals) that are important to me. Whenever it’s financially feasible, I like to do nice things for people—paying for a meal or a drink for a friend, buying toys for my cats, whatever my girlfriend wants, etc. 

It’s worth pointing out that when someone does something nice for me, I am inclined to pay that back or forward (say, someone senior buys me lunch, so I buy lunch for someone junior to me), so I end up personally spending more money than I otherwise would, due solely to the feeling of being a Nice Person Who Does Nice Things For People. In other words, I suspect this might let you increase each player’s overall spend just by letting them be nice to each other.

This is a problem, I think, with online games that don’t allow players to trade items with each other. On one hand, yes, it means every transaction should be one that made you money. On the other hand, one of the nice things of owning something is being able to still extract value when you don’t want it any more—by giving it or selling it to someone else, for example. What’s more, I’ll be more engaged with the community if I am buying/selling/trading/donating stuff to people in that community—in other words, if I see it as something I can extract value from.

I don’t like spending money on: Taxes, fees, tolls, parking. (In other words, people/animals/things that are not directly important to me.) I hate having to pay for parking, because I pay for a car, and insurance for the car, and gas to make that car go—I don’t want to pay for the privilege of putting it in a certain place for some time because the entire damn point of a car is that it puts me in a certain place for some time. 

Likewise, I don’t want to pay for game time, access, stamina, or any other stupid gating systems. I am playing your game because I want to play your game; if you’re going to charge me for the privilege of playing your game whenever I want and for as long as I want, might as well just make it a one-time-payment game and call it a day.

The one exception to this is arcade games, and that is specifically because I am rewarded for being good at your game by being allowed to play the game at a cheaper dollars-per-minute rate than people who suck at your game. This gives me a financial incentive to get good at your game, which can be pretty powerful.

Of course, the hard part is that the set of “people who care about getting good at video games enough to spend significant amounts of money on them” is much smaller than the set of “people who like playing video games enough to spend money on them in general,” so skill incentives end up shrinking your overall viable market. So you end up with stupid time gates that penalize players who like playing your game. In a weird sense, it’s almost a disincentive to get good at the game, since that would require me to play more often (and thus spend more money).

I like spending money on: Admission to events/entertainment. I like spending money that leads to good experiences which build memories—traveling to new places, admission to zoos and parks, concerts, films, etc. Basically, if I like your game enough, I’ll be willing to pay to play it, so you might not have to make it free to play to begin with!

I don’t like spending money on: Admission to events that then demand I spend money. I don’t like spending money on things that simply get me into the building to buy more things—like bougie food events, for example. It might be worth it if whatever I can buy is then priced at a significant discount (see Costco memberships), but then this becomes part of an overall cost-benefit analysis with little additional emotional content to further sell your game.

Which is (at long last!) the point of this post, I suppose. Designing monetization into games can be simply an exercise in psychological manipulation (banking on people with addictive tendencies who are easily manipulated and compelled to over-spend), or it can be a chance to take advantage of people’s real-world emotional connection to money as, essentially, bonus game content—albeit “emotional content” instead of designed game content.

Putting our money where our hearts are

Asking people to spend money is a shortcut to all kinds of potential real-world emotional reactions—reactions that can be challenging to evoke simply with game design or narrative alone. (Bet a dollar with a friend on something competitive and see for yourself.) The thing is that if you don’t design your monetization hooks with a little bit of empathy and human understanding in mind, you’re going to end up creating a weirdly crass, almost psychopathic game which evokes mostly negative emotions (“No, I don’t want to give you money, stop asking”) when you could be taking advantage of certain positive emotional associations people have with money, instead. Microtransactions could actually be something which makes your game more fun, not less, which is good for everyone involved.

—patrick miller

I’m still recovering from NorCal Regionals and way too burnt out on fighting games to play anything, so I might as well write about ‘em. I’m going to stick to mostly what happened in Marvel, and save a writeup about my own personal performance for a later post.

NCR Storylines

I’m going to focus mostly on Marvel for the rest of this writeup, but I wanted to make one note about AE: Infiltration is still the guy to beat, but Xian really put him on notice. I’m not sufficiently on top of my AE knowledge to know if that’s because Xian is just leveling up that fast or if it has to do with Gen being kind of a hard character to practice against, but Xian definitely held it down against him (lost 3-2 in winner’s finals, reset the bracket in grand finals 3-0, then lost the last set 3-1). I did get the impression that by the end of the last GF set, Infiltration more or less had Xian downloaded — Xian seemed to be making more mistakes and getting read much more — but overall I was really impressed by Xian. Chris G’s Sakura is looking vicious, too. Now on to the Marvel stuff.

Chris G is on track to be the new Justin Wong. Each time I find myself rooting for Justin to win a game, I always think it’s kind of funny, because it wasn’t so long ago that everyone rooted against him because he won pretty much every MVC2 major (7 total Evo 1st place finishes if you include B5). Yet people see Chris G dominate UMVC3 for a little under a year and start complaining that he’s broken the game and sucked the hype out. Trust me, Chris G is still nowhere near Justin’s peak domination level, though he’s working on it in Marvel and apparently sharpening up his AE skills as well. However, NCR was probably Chris G’s hardest tournament run in a long, long time; he notoriously lost to Senor Taxi’s Chris/Spencer/Dante team, then played fairly close sets with Apologyman, Justin Wong, KaneBlueRiver, and Ranmasama.

On the other hand, apparently Chris G hasn’t bothered to practice on a PS3 (he was bitching on Twitter about how he lost to SenorTaxi due to lag interfering with his Morrigan unfly stuff) up until now. So while some very solid players are starting to turn up the heat on Chris G, there is the remote chance that he might just have to spend some quality lab time on a PS3 before resuming his dominator streak. I don’t think that’s quite the case, though. I pondered a while back about anti-MorriDoom stuff, and I think it’s mostly consistent with what I’m seeing.

Note that one key difference between Chris G and peak MVC2 Justin Wong is that Justin Wong was a dominant champion, but never a “heel”. Consider Chris G the Brock Lesnar to Justin Wong’s Fedor Emelianenko; Justin was typically a classy player in victory and defeat, even when the crowd got nasty (and it did get nasty). Chris G has acted like an ass on multiple occasions, most recently by calling SRK co-founder Mr. Wizard a “faggot” on Twitter after Wizard mocked him for blaming his loss to Senor Taxi on the PS3. (He did delete the tweet shortly afterwards, so there’s that.)

Marvel has had plenty of Boys Behaving Badly before, but rarely are they also the same guys who are also winning those tournaments left and right. From the perspective of sheer entertainment, I think it’s excellent, but I get the feeling it might be a little bit more real than pro wrestling, and that’s what worries me. The fighting game community still has a rather rough reputation when it comes to gender and sexuality issues, and I think that a little rep management might be in order. Also, while I didn’t watch the stream commentary, a friend of mine told me that commentator Andry “Magus1234” Kane more or less excused it due to emotions or something while commentating, which, if true, is fucked up and shouldn’t happen again. If we’re going to be a responsible community, the last thing we need is to publicly excuse shameful behavior.

The Marvel metagame seems to be shaping up into, roughly:

Conventional top tier teams, aka NorCal Special (think anything with Mag/Doom or Doom/Vergil) beat unconventional teams, MorriDoomVergil beats conventional top tier teams, and (certain) unconventional teams have a decent shot at taking MorriDoomVergil out.

As Senor Taxi so aptly demonstrated, Chris can cause problems for Morrigan, especially when paired up with Dante’s Jam Session assist, which is handy for eating up fireballs and hidden missiles. ApologyMan’s Skrull mixups basically give him a random shot at hitting Morrigan, which gets him a dead Morrigan and a high-level Frank West. Ranmasama even put on a pretty good show with Haggar, Dormammu, and Magneto (IIRC) which worked better than it probably should have (mostly due to Dormammu, I suspect).

Thing is, the folks who play these characters need to get to the point where they can play against Chris G, which means learning to make your way up the bracket past so many Magneto/Dooms and Doom/Vergils and Wolverines and Zeros, each of whom have an easier time. But we’re starting to see more diverse teams placing highly, or at least highly enough to get a shot at the big boys, so I think this is happening, and at a pretty quick pace. It’s easier to get practice against good Magneto/Doom/Vergils than it is to get practice against a good Chris or MODOK, certainly.

Meanwhile, the guys who are really good at playing the conventional top tiers need to start seriously stepping up their game as far as picking teams with a better shot against Morrigan. I know it’s hard — each hour you spend working on an anti-Chris-G team is an hour you’re not spending on the team you need to get to top 8 to play him in the first place — but this really, really needs to happen.

Here is The Deal: If you have Doom on your team, you are probably wasting a character slot against MorriDoom. Missiles is really hard to use against MorriDoom because he’s out for so long that he’s going to take a shit-ton of damage from fireballs and shell kicks. Plasma Beam is slightly better but doesn’t really seem to open up many opportunities unless you’re playing Wolverine and hoping to win in the first 10 seconds. Once Doom’s on point, he’s basically going to die unless you get a lucky poke or foot dive. Really, the only other reason to have him on your team is a TAC infinite, which just isn’t worth it. The hard part about Chris’s MorriDoom is getting the first hit, and once you get that hit, you really don’t want to give him the opportunity to counter out of the TAC or risk leaving Morrigan alive because you dropped the infinite (which just about everyone who went for the infinite did, at some point).

Dante, by comparison, has a more useful assist against MorriDoom (Jam Session can work to hold Morrigan in one place to make it easier to mix her up, and it should eat a decent amount of missiles and a soul fist or two as well) and is marginally more mobile than Doom thanks to teleports. He also has a decent TAC infinite, if you simply must go for it. I’m willing to bet than if every NorCal player had chosen to pick Dante instead of Doom for their Doom shells, Chris G would be sweating bullets by the time he got to top 8 just from all the extra work he’d have to do.

Phoenix is also Not Worth It against Morrigan. Not only does Chris G apparently have a bunch of Soul Steal setups to thwart your Dark Phoenix plans, but once you get her out it’s still hard for her to not run into a single soul fist, hidden missile, or spiral sword. For every game you win with Dark Phoenix, you’ll lose ten because she got snapped in/ran into an errant projectile/you couldn’t use meter.

In conclusion, the best possible team you could play against Chris G would be Chris/Dante/Vergil. Which, rather conveniently, would be nicknamed Chris May Cry. My god, it’s been staring us in the face this whole time.

The last Marvel takeaway is that, really, other than Chris G’s consistency thus far, Marvel is still anyone’s game. Filipino Champ — last year’s Evo winner, remember — didn’t make it into top 8 in a NorCal tournament. He lost against KaneBlueRiver (picking a Ghost Rider team which is genuinely supposed to counter Hulk) and then found himself going up against PR Rog in loser’s (he was sent there by Neo). Evo’s 2nd place finisher Infrit didn’t make it into top 16. Even fellow Oakland player SolidAbyss managed to send Noel Brown to losers in pools (in Noel’s first match, no less).

This bodes well for the future of Marvel, I think. Right now, everyone should be focused on taking out Chris G, ripping MorriDoom apart, and learning to deal with Vergil the same way people eventually learned how to deal with Cable in MVC2. Once that happens, the competitive scene is ripe to explode with a whole bunch of killers going after each other.

—patrick miller

Got this comment from my Gamasutra blog repost:

Having come from way, way outside the modern arena of “games journalism,” let me add one thing. It’s unbelievably rare in any journalistic vertical for its reporters to have a decades-long tenure.

Sports, travel, politics, crime, name it. Most, almost all, of the players work a span, then move on or up or out. The day of the old-timer who knows everyone and every tidbit and can dial the governor or CEO or Crime Boss by memory is long gone. I worked with a few of those guys when I was young. They, too, thought they toiled at thankless jobs where they were underpaid and overstressed.

Your challenges are not new. People will come and go. Get married. Need higher income. Sell out to corporate. It’s the circle of life in entry-level media positions. Those jobs will never really pay well, they never have, they are gateways to other opportunities.

I hadn’t ever thought about journalism as basically “finishing school for Real Jobs,” but that sounds like it would pretty much explain why attrition is so high; the market doesn’t value journalism skills highly enough to retain many talented people, so if you’re good at what you do, you end up “graduating” to a Big Boy Job.

Which explains a lot, I think. 

(To all the people who started following me on tumblr after writing that last games journalism bit: Hi! I usually just write things about fighting games here.)

One of my more significant revelations to come from studying Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu for the last 9-odd years is that each successive skill level (as delineated by belt rank, for example) is typically separated from the one before it by an understanding of increasingly smaller and more subtle concepts.

That is to say, the difference between a white belt and a blue belt is the latter’s understanding of very large movements (say, a general, if shallow, understanding of a wide range of sweeps, submissions, guard passes etc.); a purple belt has a wider range of knowledge than the blue belt plus perhaps a deeper understanding of a few specific moves or positions; a brown belt understands that you have to hold your hand just so at this particular timing; a black belt understands that if you grab this part of the gi first, most people will turn this way, which lets you grab this other part of the gi at just the right timing.

When I get my butt kicked at the gym, it’s not due to my opponent’s elite strength training regimen, conditioning, or elaborate arsenal of exotic attacks; it’s that they see what’s going on at a smaller level than I do. They understand that a single technique in Jiu-Jitsu is actually a combination of several sub-techniques, each broken up into micro-movements that leave the user open to this and that and the other, even if the user isn’t aware of it. Training with a great black belt is like fighting with someone who sees you in terms of your component atoms and understands what you’re doing better than you do.

I think this differentiation extends itself to Street Fighter, as well. We all play the game with the same superficial indicators available to us; we know what character the opponent is playing, how much health and super meter he has, where he is on the screen, etc. But great players are playing with an understanding of the game that extends far deeper than that; an understanding of different aspects and resources that aren’t always so explicit.

I am trying to identify these things, slowly (mostly by playing Ryu in ST and AE); I think top players are good at reading “tension,” for lack of a better word, which I would explain by analogy as “That feeling that makes you want to jump over fireballs your opponent hasn’t thrown yet.” I think top players have a very highly-cultivated sense of pattern recognition that lets them “download” opponents very quickly by running them through a series of what are basically psychological tests to see how the opponent reacts to, say, getting thrown four times in a row. Canabalt creator Adam Saltsman tweeted the other day that fighting games teach us empathy, but in a totally psychopathic way; that’s a brilliant way of describing it.

But these are all rather higher-order concepts that I am still working on; “controlling space” is a concept that is a bit more grounded, so I shall start with that.

Space in 2D fighters

To begin with, space in 2D fighting games is a known quantity; our characters work as extensions of our wills, and we duel by extending their hitboxes into each other’s hurtboxes. We play this game inside a 2D rectangle, of sorts. At any given time, we can see exactly where the opponent is (well, except in Marvel). The goal of a fighting game is to use your resources (super meter, health bar, moveset, etc.) to make the opponent lose his health bar before you use yours.

Your characters’ respective position in space is fully observable, but the implications that has on your options are not always so explicit. When you’re in the corner, you can’t retreat backwards. Retreating backwards is the equivalent of a get-out-of-jail-free card, or perhaps folding before the flop in poker; you see a disadvantageous situation in front of you, and you choose to sacrifice some screen space in exchange for a chance to escape the situation and otherwise reset the terms of engagement. Once you’re in the corner, you can’t do that; your opponent can decide to engage at whichever range they deem ideal for their playstyle and the character matchup. Maybe they decide they just want to park themselves at a range where it’s safe to chuck fireballs; tough shit, you’ll just have to deal with it.

(As exemplified by this Daigo video that nothingxs passed my way a while back; it’s beautiful!) 

<iframe width=”480” height=”360” src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/P0sT92Pt0wc” frameborder=”0” allowfullscreen></iframe>

Once you’re in the corner, you can’t backdash out of throw or poke range; you can’t jump back to avoid a fireball; you can’t walk back to bait the poke and then counterpoke. You basically have to win an exchange of some sort in order to fight your way out of the corner, unless you’re playing a character with some kind of runaway move like a teleport (which will still probably cost you some damage). All Daigo has to do is stand there and let you make bad decisions that waste your health meter, and he’ll win, because that’s what happens when he puts you in the corner.

This, by itself, is not a particularly new line of thinking; we all know how much it sucks to get stuck in the corner. If we start thinking of our screen positioning as a resource, however, it might change the way we play our game. For starters, we can start thinking of whether we have won or lost an exchange not just in terms of resources spent and damage dealt, but also our respective positioning gain or loss at the end of the exchange.

Tracking space control in AE

In ST, fireballs are used to control space very directly; some characters’ fireballs are so fast and oppressive that you’re practically playing a bullet-hell shooter game just dodging them in order to get to a place where you can start to do damage. In AE, for the most part, fireballs aren’t nearly as powerful because they’re much more punishable. So instead of using fireballs to directly control our opponent’s movement, we can use them to improve our screen positioning.

For example: If I throw a fireball from 1/2 screen and walk behind it, I can count the screen space I’ve gained as a net gain overall; I was able to walk that much closer to you, and you will probably decide to back up further and reset the terms of engagement (instead of being stuck at a frame disadvantage from blocking the fireball while I’ve moved up to a range that makes me comfortable). Once that engagement is resolved, we’ll be the same distance we were pre-fireball, except your back will be that much closer to the corner and you’ll have taken a very small amount of chip damage, and I’ll have spent nothing to get there. Fireballs don’t have to hit you or bait a jump in order to be worthwhile. If you decided instead to focus attack to absorb the fireball and dash forward, you’ll have chosen a more aggressive option that aims to retain your screen control, but at the risk of potentially eating the damage of the fireball if you lose the next exchange. 

Maybe you find that each time you go in to throw, they tech it successfully — but then they’ll backdash or step back to reset the momentum. Take a step forward to match them, and you’ve come out ahead overall, if ever-so-slightly.

Of course, screen position can be a very volatile resource; one cross-up, and you’ll have basically exchanged your screen positioning counter’s value for that of your opponent’s. This is one reason why you shouldn’t always go for a crossup, even if it’s your most highly-rewarding option off a knockdown — if you cross them up in the corner and they win the interaction, you’re now in the corner! If you have them on the Street Fighter equivalent of their 20 yard line, and you cross them up, you’re now on your own 20 yard line. With some characters, their potential mixup options off the crossup might make that worth it, but as you draw closer and closer to the corner, it could make more sense to stick to safer methods of pushing them back, with the eventual goal of getting to that sweet spot where every option they have ends in damage and getting pushed back into the corner. It’s kind of the Street Fighter version of being a “ring general” in boxing, essentially; you’re willing to sacrifice short-term damage output for the chance to get into a more advantageous position in the long run.

Why this matters

What’s the big deal? Why shift focus away from, say, drilling combos, improving reaction speeds, learning new matchups or setups or all the other things you could possibly be working on in your quest to become a better fighting game player?

Basically, it’s because learning how to pay attention to this kind of thing informs your footsies, your decision-making process, your ability to read your opponent, and so on. For example:

Footsies: If you want to push your opponent into the corner, you can walk forward and poke with the intent of forcing your opponent backwards. If you notice that your opponent is overly aggressive with trying to push you into the corner, you can step back and counter-poke to punish them. Ryu’s crouching mk basically translates into “Hey, guess what, opponent: You’re not walking forward right now.”

Decision-making: See the crossup example from before. What makes you decide whether you want to go for a crossup after knockdown or not? Screen spacing can help inform your mixups.

Reads: If I’m pushing you into the corner, I know that you’re going to be more likely to try and take bigger risks to get out of it, and I can be more conservative when you’re in the corner as a result. Once I’ve punished you for a taking a risk, I can really start to turn the heat up on aggression because you’ll probably feel demoralized about staying in the corner for so long. (Unless I know you know that I know that etc. etc.)

Ultimately, the goal of any fighting game player is to construct a working mental model of the game that drastically simplifies the game’s possibility space. In any given frame, I could decide to do THIS or THAT or THIS OTHER THING, and if you try to predict your opponent’s moves and punish based on the possibility space of Every Potential Action In The Game, you’re going to lose. Tracking player positions and treating them as yet another resource (that can confer potential advantages/disadvantages) is one of those things that lets you get one step closer to the end goal of, well, reading your opponent’s mind.

Space control in MAHVEL, BAYBEE

I’ve actually been thinking about this a lot in terms of UMVC3, because I’m trying to figure out how screen control and footsies translate into Marvel thinking — the idea being that, as with Street Fighter, screen control and footsies are very much a thing in Marvel, but they take a different form, and if I don’t feel like I’m using that part of my brain in Marvel, it’s probably because I am missing something important about the game,not because “footsies” don’t exist.

Specifically, I’ve been trying to think about how to play Zero’s neutral game. He is fast and has potent mixup tools, but he’s not really a rushdown character because he isn’t as confusing or hard to block as, say, Magneto or Wolverine. After all, he doesn’t have nearly as many good throw setups, and he can’t move nearly as safely as Mags and Wolvie can, so against a top player he can’t stay on top of you 100% of the time. He has okay zoning tools, especially with the right assist (I play him with Doom-missiles and Vergil-rapid slash), so he can control space okay but he can’t really turn it into significant full-screen damage like Chris and Dormammu can, and once he’s under pressure he basically has to hope that he can get out of danger with a charged buster or die in one combo.

Lately, I’ve started to think about Zero in similar terms as Ryu; his optimal range is probably at about a half-screen distance, from which he can go in and rush down or stick around and control space, depending on the immediate situation of the match. But my goal isn’t necessarily just to land the big combo, it’s to slowly-but-surely push forward, using my assists to keep pushing them backwards. This is something Justin Wong is really good at; he’ll call assists that basically function as the Marvel equivalent of AE Ryu’s fireball, and his point character only has to make sure the assist doesn’t die and follow him in to start setting stuff up.

When I call Doom, Zero’s job is to make sure both he and Doom stay alive long enough for missiles to start coming down on the opponent, at which point Zero is free to push in forward and hopefully land a hit (or at least push them back closer to the corner). When I call Vergil, Zero’s job is to make sure Vergil doesn’t die by punishing any attempts to hit Vergil out of rapid slash (probably with a hadangeki or charged buster). Vergil pushes the opponent back pretty far on hit or block, so as long as Zero can keep both characters alive, it should be a pretty easy positional gain. Once the assist has resolved, you charge your buster and wait for the next opportunity to call the assist. If the opponent decides to attack you after your assist is out on the field, odds are pretty good they’ll run into one of your assists, your charged buster, or a random lightning—each of which can convert into a kill combo. If I get them in the corner, I’m free to keep pelting them with Doom missiles and mixing them up however I like without letting them out of the corner, and then once I’ve killed the first character, I have free 50/50 mixups into kill combos on the next two. It’s the same mentality as AE Ryu, only with assists instead of fireballs and lightning/buster/c.M instead of pokes and dragon punches. This hasn’t led in a dramatic improvement in results—not yet, anyway—but it has given me a mental framework for playing Zero that seems a bit more sensible than “rush down or zone, just don’t get hit”.

—patrick miller

Yesterday a few folks started talking again about fixing games journalism, so I figure now is a good time to jump back into the topic with the long-promised third part of this blog series that I’ve been doing. If you haven’t read the first two bits, you can find ‘em here and here. I’m going to get into the part where I talk about what journalists/editors and would-be journalists/editors can do to futureproof their skillset a bit, but it’ll take a while to get there, so bear with me.

The story thus far

The conversation started with Ben Kuchera’s article on ad-blocking and how depending on advertisements (as measured in cost per thousand pageviews) encourages crappy stuff that gets lots of clicks, like slide shows of sexy cosplayers. Materially, I don’t think Ben said a whole lot that I didn’t say in my first blog post, but what’s interesting to me is that he identifies pretty much the same system (the relationship between bad content and financial success) and spins it differently; I say that the need for pageviews exerts downward pressure on quality, while he thinks of clickbait stuff as essentially subsidizing good content, which is why his headline is about “cosplay galleries leading to better reporting.”

In response, Rock Paper Shotgun’s John Walker wrote a piece about how they don’t worry about advertising at all, and just cover what they want to cover. Which sounds nice, especially when he says:

Looking at our most popular stories, they’re the ones that are based on our own original journalism, whether they’re our having sourced interviews or information from developers that other sites haven’t got, self-sourced news stories on topical matters, particularly well written reviews of popular games, or carefully researched editorials. 

That sounds real nice! I have a hard time taking it seriously because when I open up RPS, I see a whole bunch of stuff that doesn’t personally interest me. I suspect that RPS has done a great job finding a niche and owning it (more on that later) and I certainly have read a few things over there that I like (mostly Cara Ellison’s stuff), but in this respect I don’t think Walker is having the same conversation that Kuchera is having, or else RPS’s front page would be full of original dev interviews, well-written reviews of popular games, or carefully researched editorials, and not mostly news tidbits about obscure PC games (which is fine, and RPS does it very well, but it doesn’t interest me in the slightest).

Another response came from Twisted Metal creator David Jaffe, who suggested that the games community get together and start a $175k Kickstarter to fund a single games journalist that the internet had deemed The Best, which probably came from a well-meaning place but honestly he just kind of came off like a total dick, especially when he said that he simply can’t stand Leigh Alexander. Frankly, while I had fun making fun of this on Twitter, I think he did correctly acknowledge the problem — ad-reliance makes games journalism worse — but his solution sounds rather wacky. (As does his ball-parked salary of $125k as “a nice salary”; that’s a FIVE HUNDRED AND NINETY NINE US DOLLARS moment if there ever was one.)

Also worth noting is this post on Why Dan Lyons Left The Media Business, which isn’t about games but still very relevant — and probably easier to read because he lays it out pretty clearly without all the emotional baggage of video game stuff.

Common responses to fixing games journalism

Between Kuchera and Jaffe’s respective posts, my Twitter feed blew up for a good two hours or so with people kind of shouting into the ether about what needed fixing in games journalism, which in turn elicited two common threads of responses that I am compelled to deal with before getting to The Fun Stuff.

“Just Work Hard”: The first one came from a handful of folks who said something along the lines of “just do good work and it’ll work out” or its rather dickish cousin, “Well, I just do good work and it works out for me.” These thoughts were often combined with implications that the people who were talking about how broken games journalism was were doing so instead of doing good work and should really just hush up already because everything is OK.

Frankly, I think this set of responses is pretty dumb. It doesn’t actually engage with the conversation itself so much as just dismiss it entirely. First off, “just do good work” sounds patronizing and clueless to me, since it implies that the people who are speaking up about broken games journalism aren’t already doing so. Second, the whole damn problem is that Doing Good Work isn’t rewarded in the current system unless you happen to be in one of a handful of anointed positions that apparently don’t have to rewrite press releases or post slideshows of cosplay hotties. The problem isn’t that there aren’t any pubs that don’t reward good work, it’s that there aren’t enough of them to sustain the amount of good writers we’re developing. Perhaps you mean well by telling us to “just do good work,” but I don’t think the people involved in this conversation are looking for advice for How To Claw Your Way To The Top so much as trying to figure out How Everyone Worth A Damn Can Do Good Work Without Having To First Claw Our Way To The Top.

The one exception to this group is Eurogamer’s Simon Parkin, who managed to communicate this sentiment in a totally humble way which kind of downplayed his own success, which is really amazing and just makes everyone love him more. I mean, holy shit, it’s hard not to be professionally jealous of a guy who wrote a bomb-ass story on the relationship between the gun industry and the games industry, or who got a profile of Notch in the New Yorker, and yet there you have it.

“The problem isn’t low pay, the problem is that games journalists suck”: I also think this set of responses is pretty dumb. If you don’t pay good money, you won’t attract talented people, and you won’t hang on to them long enough to make them good at what they do. If your business doesn’t benefit from having people who can do good writing and reporting, then you have no incentive to pay good money. Yes, there are a lot of awful, awful games journalists out there; if there were loads of full-time jobs in games journalism out there that paid salaries comparable with, say, sales/marketing/PR/project management/administration/etc., you’d see more competition for those jobs and attract a higher caliber of employee. But you don’t, so you end up with people getting into the biz and then leaving once they realize they’d actually like to make some decent fucking money. If you think you’re awesome and do awesome work and just think everyone else should just step up their game and do the same, guess what: You’re probably getting paid just as much as everyone else is, and that’s not something you should be proud of.

Building the future games journalist

Now on to the fun part, where I talk about what I think games journalists will have to do to futureproof their skillsets a bit. (Seeing as how I found out last week that my magazine is folding, you can imagine that this is something that has been on my mind a lot.)

The fact is that games journalism is changing radically, just as video games are changing radically. Most of us probably grew up reading magazines like Electronic Gaming Monthly, GamePro, and Nintendo Power. Then the Internet came out, and we read ShackNews, GameSpot, and Blue’s News, and then Kotaku and Joystiq and all the other games blogs. Now we’re seeing a drastic reduction in mainstream games publications, as 1UP, GamePro, Nintendo Power etc. have fallen by the wayside, because we simply don’t need this kind of games publication any more — certainly not in this quantity, anyway. 

When it comes to the standard trinity for games reporting (news, reviews, previews), you can get the first two through content aggregators, communities, or social feeds like Reddit, Twitter, and NeoGAF, and the latter straight from the developers and publishers themselves. Which means that while people might end up visiting GameSpot or IGN to read a review, it won’t be a destination site, and they probably won’t retain a visitor’s attention past the review itself, which simply isn’t enough to sustain the traffic needs of a modern megalithic games site.

Basically, the games journalist of yesteryear is a middleman between the consumer and the industry, and with the Internet, that middleman is growing less and less necessary. So: If you got into this game to do the kind of work that you saw other people doing in GamePro or for 1UP, bad news: The world doesn’t need that any more. (Well, except in mobile games, which is still relatively unexplored terrain save for sites like PocketGamer, and will probably see some growth yet in this area due to the sheer volume of mobile games.) That doesn’t mean that we don’t need people to write about games, but it does mean that the manner in which you write about games may be different than what you initially expected. I’m going to list a few people who kick ass in a few unique ways that might help you draw inspiration for developing your own career.

Leigh Alexander: Leigh is easily one of the most talented people I’ve had the pleasure of working with. If careers were built with an Final Fantasy Tactics-esque Job Class system, Leigh would be one of those classes that is basically like an endgame version of a well-rounded combat class — if “standard games journalist” would be an FFT Knight, Leigh would be the “Sword Saint” like T.G. Cid. She manages to be rigorous, thoughtful, and fast with her news coverage, razor-sharp with her interviews, and very evocative with her game criticism. She has also done an excellent job owning several topics that mainstream games pubs were slow to touch upon, from issues of gender and sexuality in games to everything artsy to Twine games and the interactive fiction revolution, essentially setting her apart from the pack as an arbiter of cool.

Perhaps most impressive is the way she has hustled with her work to build her personal brand. When you click on a Leigh Alexander article, you click on it for Leigh Alexander — the publication she’s writing this specific piece for is an afterthought. It’s what she writes about and how she writes it, not who she writes it for. Basically, she has her own portable personal audience that follows her, and that is a huge asset for any writer. Seriously, this lady can sell you on an exchange of emails for 25c/word, and that’s fucking crazy.

Rod “Slasher” Breslau: Slasher has carved out a reputation for himself as The eSports Guy, thanks mostly to years and years of relentless hustle (and a lot of self-promotion). He’s always on yet another livestreamed show or podcast, or doing another interview, or engaging prominent eSports folks on Twitter or Reddit. Compared to some of the other folks on this list, he isn’t known for being a particularly evocative or thoughtful writer, but he’s a goddamned bloodhound when it comes to news, breaking stories based largely off of his encyclopedic knowledge of the eSports word and his insatiable desire for scoops.

Perhaps more than anyone else on this list, Slasher understands that when it comes to sports, news is made, not found, and considering eSports is a rather hard niche to break into, he’s done a fantastic job establishing himself as the scene-journalist-cum-pundit. He appears to be downright unafraid to put himself out there again and again, which has made his work better and improved his exposure. My take is that eSports coverage is going to continue to grow bigger and bigger, and he’ll be in a prime position to lead it. 

Sean “Day[9]” Plott: There are the folks who read GamePro as preparation for their future career, and then there are a few special folks who read Tips & Tricks. Day[9] is practically a Starcraft 2 professor, and he and the rest of his crew have begun to assemble a god-damn media empire built around his daily live streaming Starcraft 2 strategy show, the Day[9] Daily. 

Most games journalists kind of grow out of valuing the skill of video games; for Day[9], it’s practically the only thing that matters. Like Slasher, he specializes in competitive games, but from a different angle; where Slasher is a pundit/journalist, Day[9] is part tutor, part live commentator. Like Slasher, Day[9] has an infallible willingness to put himself out there day after day, and he’s downright excellent on camera — the guy is hilarious. Day[9]’s outgoing, bombastic personality is a tremendous part of his appeal.

Interestingly enough, Day[9] isn’t a journalist. He doesn’t do reporting, he doesn’t really write, and he doesn’t break stories — and due to the nature of his content, that doesn’t change his audience’s perception of his content’s quality in the least, because there’s nothing about sponsorship opportunities or payment that would change, say, the efficacy of a 2-Barracks gasless fast expand build in Terran vs. Zerg matchups. When Kingdoms of Amalur came out, he took a day off from doing Starcraft stuff to work with 38 Studios on live-streaming a full day of preview stuff, including an interview with R.A. Salvatore. Since he doesn’t produce journalism, he can open himself up to sponsorship opportunities traditional publications simply can’t.

John “TotalBiscuit” Bain: TotalBiscuit is another streaming video guy who came up podcasting on World of Warcraft and then later commentating Starcraft 2, but he has since leveraged that into more mainstream success through his YouTube channel. Instrumental to his success is, again, his personality; he is a self-described “grumpy British man” whose videos often alternate between taking the piss out of triple-A monotony and owning coverage of cheap indie titles that often get passed up by major games outlets. 

Like Day[9], TotalBiscuit isn’t a journalist so much as a “personality,” which means he’s not obliged to pass up on sponsorship opportunities (he had a fairly close promotional relationship with Sony Online Entertainment for Planetside 2, if I’m not mistaken). Seeing as how his main export is his opinion, you would think that taking sponsorships would cause people to see his content as biased and paid for (since, well, it is) — which seems especially antithetical to his cynical, tell-it-like-it-is reputation. However, this doesn’t seem to be the case; I suspect that since he’s just one guy, and not a Faceless Media Brand, people are more inclined to trust that he would only take sponsorships in products that he himself believes in, and since his content ultimately falls under “entertainment” instead of “hard information,” his audience doesn’t really care. It’s almost like grassroots marketing, really.

Patrick Klepek: I list Patrick Klepek here because I am not a regular reader of Giant Bomb and his seems to be the one whose work I read the most, but I think this could mostly apply to the rest of them, too. Certainly, Klepek is an excellent reporter; thorough, thoughtful, and very capable of finding the additional details and followthrough that make his stories own a topic even if he isn’t the first one to file. His profile on child fighting game phenom Noah “The Prodigy” Solis, for example, is an excellent example; plenty of people saw Noah’s story play out on the EVO livestream or in person, but only Klepek followed through with a full-on profile including an interview with his family. He is unafraid to be personal with his work, too, which does a lot to help his audience connect with him.

But clearly, being an excellent writer/reporter isn’t enough to make it on this list. What Klepek and the rest of Giant Bomb have done is offer a largely personality-driven take on video games that has attracted a devoutly loyal audience and made them indispensable. CBSi can’t get rid of anyone on the GB team without highly damaging the brand and pissing off the audience, which I imagine is pretty darn good for job security. But the audience is particularly important for Giant Bomb because, unlike many web publications, GB doesn’t rely exclusively ads to fund the site. For $5/month or $50/year, you can become a GB subscriber, which nixes all ads, gives you access to exclusive content, and unlocks their HD video library on mobile and media streaming devices.

I suspect that few people actually subscribe because they simply must have these things. Rather, GB has given their audience a way to support them directly, and it appears to be pretty darn successful, because each time I write something about games journalism, Klepek tweets it and I end up on a Twitter message chain with a million Giant Bomb subscribers being like “WE LOVE YOU PATRICK (KLEPEK, NOT MILLER) AND THIS ARTICLE THAT YOU TWEETED IS THE REASON WHY I SUBSCRIBE TO GB”. Clearly, they must be doing something right, and I really think that the best hope for games writing to pay for itself is to find ways to connect with the reader directly, instead of selling their eyeballs to advertisers. After all, if you don’t value your own work enough to sell it for a price, advertisers aren’t going to value it either.

The new, new, new games journalism

There is still a place in this world for people to write words, take pictures, and record videos about video games. For some of those people, it will make sense to call yourself a journalist, and for some of those people, it won’t. Rather than cling to a dying model of games journalism — one which, really, we outgrew a long time ago — it’s worth taking a look at the people who are doing great work out there, and finding out how you, too, can join in.

Our world is changing. Simply being well-informed about the world of video games isn’t enough. We do not need so many reviewers or news writers, and if that is all you do, you will probably not be doing that for much longer unless you’re the goddamn best at it. You will find that you want to buy a house and support a family; you will find that your intelligence is insulted by the work you’re doing; you will find that there are no jobs left for you to do. So sulk for a moment and lick your wounds — that’s sure as hell what I’ve been doing — and then find out what really drives you to connect with people and video games. You may find that “journalist” is a word that has more to do with how you see yourself and less to do with what you actually enjoy doing.

—patrick miller

I had kind of a strange revelation yesterday while messing around in UMVC3 training mode. Man, the human body is amazing.

I have been a Zero player since vanilla MVC3, but I didn’t really take the game seriously until after Evo last year, and when I decided to take it seriously, I started learning how to do lightning loops. Since last July, I’ve been practicing lightning loops for an average of about 2-3 hours a week trying to get them down. I can do them on the 2P side just fine (when the opponent is in the left-hand corner); the 1P side continues to elude me.

Having different execution consistency on different sides is not unusual for complicated combos, especially for ones centered around dragon punch motions (see Sakura and Bison’s A-groove custom combos in CVS2). Performing consistent, time-sensitive repetitions of dragon punch motions without getting a fireball input is hard, because the two inputs overlap; if you do non-stop fireballs and non-stop dragon punches, the input reader will see more or less the same thing (except for when the punch button is pressed). Also, consider that the dragon punch input requires your hand to push forward, pull down, push down-forward (1P side) and the inverse on the 2P side; it’s a far more complicated move than a sonic boom or a fireball.

To add to all that, the lightning loop is a really hard combo to troubleshoot. Not only are you doing repeated dragon punch moves, you’re actually doing Zero’s air DP just an inch or two off the ground (called “tiger kneeing” in reference to Sagat’s original tiger knee input, which was down, down-forward, forward, up-forward + kick). And Zero has a LOT of moves, so depending on how you mess up the input, you could end up with a grounded dragon punch, a grounded fireball, an air fireball (dive kick feint), or a super-jump L instead of the air DP that you want. If you do the air DP too early (before the previous air DP has finished hitting) you’ll get a divekick feint; do the air DP too late, and they’ll fall to the ground and recover.

Anyway, I have spent the last nine months or so troubleshooting my lightning loop. For a while, I had it down reasonably consistently, and then I lost it without quite knowing how. I switched to PS3 in order to practice for Evo, and that set me back quite a bit. I’ve taken a look at a whole bunch of smaller factors — the timing on the Mega Buster shot that starts the combo, the specific input I’m using to perform the DP, whether to return the stick to a neutral state or not, etc., etc. Finally, after a solid 2-hour session (!), I figured it out. I figured out what I was doing on the 2P side, but not on the 1P side. I was keeping my eye on the ball.

Well, in this case, the “ball” was my Wolverine training dummy. When I looked at Zero and worried about timing the jump correctly or pressing the button at JUST the right time, I dropped the combo. When I looked at Wolverine, my hands just took care of everything on their own. It might sound silly, but as long as I stared at Wolverine, the combo went off without a problem. One simple change led to me improving my finish rate on that combo from maybe 10% to 70%. The human body is an amazing thing.

—patrick miller

So the news is out, I guess; Game Developer will be dead and buried as of the end of June this year. In retrospect, I feel a bit foolish about writing that RIP 1UP bit from a few months ago; I had every indication that the magazine was doing fine, up until just 24 hours ago.

The morbid thing about closing a print publication is that we’ll still be working at it for a few more months to ship the last few issues, so even though everyone else has already said their goodbyes, I’ll be continuing to say mine for the next two months. But for now, suffice it to say this:

I’ve spent this entire day basically staring at Twitter while the news spread across the Internet. When you work in print, you accept that feedback will be relatively sparse (no one writes letters to the editor any more) so it was good, if sad, to see the respect and sympathy and well-wishes literally cascade down my TweetDeck display.

For one year, I had the perfect job—the one that I would have wanted when I was five years old if I had known it had existed. As frustrated as I am that it is leaving me, I consider myself beyond lucky to have had that opportunity in the first place. You never know how good you have it until it’s gone.

-patrick miller

spent some time in the lab today testing some stuff out. i don’t know how to do morrigan’s flight cancel fireballs, so i just tested it with her spamming ground fireballs and calling doom.

chris’s magnum will go through one morrigan fireball and hit or neutralize two. at superjump height, he could potentially hit doom and maybe morrigan, but it depends how much crap is filling the screen space between him and morridoom. a better chris player than i (i don’t play chris) could probably find a way to capitalize off some magnum damage to further punish an assist. however, chris’s mobility is ass and the magnum takes such a long time to start up that it’s definitely a long shot (har har). perhaps a smart assist would complement him nicely.

i also tried messing around with some rocket raccoon stuff because i thought log trap might work for anti-morridoom stuff since it seems to cover the area that both doom and morrigan hang out in (happy birthday!). not sure how many fireballs it can eat (it can eat at least one and keep going, think a missile + fireball or two fireballs will stuff it though). the range on log trap is surprisingly good; it’ll hit from pretty far out, and since doom is around forever you can call him pretty late and still connect with it.

once you get the happy birthday with the log trap, the confirm isn’t too bad, though positioning can get a bit wonky since you’re catching them off the wall bounce. pretty much any of zero’s normals can readily confirm into a corner carry -> lightning loop, which should be able to kill no problem. the trick is to avoid the missiles on the way down; i had more luck doing this at midscreen, since zero’s normal horizontal movement is enough to adequately dodge the missiles, than i did in the corner (where the missiles would stuff me). even if you can’t convert, though, at least your zero is all up in dat ass instead of on the other side of the screen.

it seems that the trick to calling assists against morrigan fireball spam is mostly just to walk forward really slowly. i was using zero’s shitty dash (where he just kinda lumbers forward) and then tapping down to cancel the dash and down-back to block as soon as i got close to a fireball to slowly make my way into log trap range. when you call the assist, he’ll pop out right in front of where you were standing when you call him, so you need to call him, then dash forward and block the incoming fireball to keep him out long enough to finish the log trap. fortunately, the guy is tiny, so it doesn’t seem like protecting him is terribly hard. (makes me think calling modok’s shield assist might not be a bad idea against morridoom, either. maybe chris can take advantage of that.)

one thing i hadn’t quite appreciated before is that the opponent’s A1 and A2 icons (near the life bar) go dark when he calls an assist. i’m trying to train myself to respond to that so i can call raccoon on reaction to a doom call and minimize the risk of getting hit by missiles. so far it seems doable. at least, more doable than trying to do it with my normal team.

posted this on selectbutton, thought y’all might like it.

The Morridoom Problem is really interwoven into Marvel’s design, and in a fucked-up way, it’s kind of connected to how marvel is relatively balanced (compared to mvc2, that is). 

first off, each character in UMVC3 is ridiculously rich in terms of playstyle, options, overall utility, and potential options for team synergy compared to MVC2. each character in MVC2 simply had fewer useful buttons, moves, assists, supers etc. compared to UMVC3’s cast. 

second, for most of any given player’s marvel career, you’re going to be spending your time using teams, not characters. (unless you’re a zero player.) the best way to play any given character on your team depends on the assists you’re using, the character’s position in your team, and how your team is designed to allocate resources to that character — and that’s not even taking your opponent’s team/assist selection into account! assuming you’re using a reasonably well-designed optimized team, you have so much potential tech available — tech that needs to be discovered in hours of training mode and casuals and matchup practice — that you’re almost always better off learning your team’s matchup-specific tech than you are swapping your team around.

there is always more work you can do on your team to make it more powerful, and for the most part, if you pick a good team, you shouldn’t lose at the character select screen. and once you get to top 8 levels of play, you should be able to outplay anyone who counterpicks you by knowing the matchup better and outplaying them. in other words, Chris G is going to have more matchup experience playing morridoom against a counterpick than you’re going to have playing the counterpick against Chris G’s morridoom. Look at what happened to Champ’s Hawkeye team, for example. 

if champ, flocker, or PR rog want to beat Chris G at evo 2013, they first need to find someone who can play a Chris G-level morridoom, and then find a counterpick and learn that team. And THEN they need to keep building on the team that they use to Chris G, or else they’ll get peaced out by any number of potential killers just waiting for one of the top players to get complacent. what’s more, with literally every other dominant team we’ve seen in marvel so far, the answer is to outplay that team, not to counterpick (see Phoenix, Wesker, etc). or just accept that your game is going to built around killing morrigan in the first ten seconds, snapping vergil in, and killing him with the incoming mixup, and go all in on the first ten seconds (wolverine and maybe zero could do this).