Environment attacks need to be taken out of 'Ranked'

Anyone else agree? I feel it can cause an unfair advantage. Especially on Hall of Justice with that little robot. I know that these attacks are avoidable but I don't think they suit the idea of a 'ranked' match.

I don't know if I agree that they should be taken out entirely of ranked, but maybe offering a separate matchmaking for non environmental Ranked matches alongside the regular would be great.

That works too! I would at least like the option.

Well I know you can turn them off in player matches. Although for the record the first few tournaments have had them enabled. There are only a few places where the environmental stuff is a real big deal like in the port level there are a ton of barrels on the right hand side that have like zero cool down you can sit there and just chuck em'.

You can turn them off in Ranked. The only completely broken one in the game is Watchtower since the thing respawns fast and tracks extremely well, additionally you're relatively safe while getting it. Depending on the character if you don't have an aggressive/fast air or anti air attack there's not a whole lot you can do about it, but the only character in that group that's good is Killer Frost so /shrug

Best thing to do is find a level for whichever character you're playing and manipulate the game to your advantage, for 'light' characters you chiefly want to use a level with fewer, less dangerous interactables. The super generic choice is Atlantis, but Atlantis is also really boring to play on and has no stage transitions so I'm mostly picking Themyscira - Temple, the lion heads track for shit and have limited range, and the fire attack is pretty useful/out of the blue if used correctly.

For Lex I pick Arkham Asylum, starter is jump forward X, only way to avoid it is duck or block which only say 5% of players will do, 25% will try to jump backward and toss the TV you'll interrupt that and negate the environmental, the other 70% will do something stupid and most of those attacks the axe beats.

@fredchuckdave: sounds like good advice, thanks man :)

So you're a "FINAL DESTINATION NO ITEMS FOX ONLY NO DODGING" kind of gamer?

@dochaus: This isn't the same type of game as that, whilst NetherRealm did have environmental attacks in mind during development they also talked a lot about their fighting-games being Tournament friendly. Super Smash Bros. is a party-game first and foremost.

They totally should have an option for that if they don't already. I think that stuff is super rad but it makes sense for some of the hardcore fighting dudes to not want to incorporate that stuff.

you can turn off both environmental attacks and stage transitions if you'd. I tend to not have an issue with it since I do try and pick stages that best suit my main, nightwing. However, I have run into multiple Black Adams and Supermans that will simply fly around and grab every environmental attack and use it along with spamming their ranged attack. I had a superman do this on watchtower and I was VERY close to sending a rage message which I never do. Overall, I don't have an issue and they can be used to your advantage in multiple ways but I would agree that either some stages should be adjusted via nerfs or cooldowns.

Nope Enviroments are part of the game and you should learn how to deal with it. Bane is kind of hard to get in without Venom armor. But if I'm able to throw some big random thing and get a knockdown I can get in and do work.

@humphreys said:

While I personally agree, holy fuck, the internet does not.

At the very least, can we all agree that it was intended to be a party game, and that Super Smash Bros. Melee turned out to be tournament-worthy only because Nintendo sort of fucked up their plan? I mean, Jesus, this is the company that gave us Blue Shells, and all the random shit in Mario Party. How was anyone even remotely surprised when they made Brawl and put in stuff like tripping, and even more stage hazards?

In many ways I think Nintendo were lucky with the balance they had struck in Melee and I agree with you; I think Nintendo always envisioned a party-game, not a highly tuned fighter. People turned the game into something it wasn't meant to be.

@sackmanjones: Despite not really playing cheaply in any way I've received over 40 hate messages over the course of 800 matches or whatever, to go with 7 or 8 positive messages; way more than I've gotten in other games that I'm actually better at and dominate more people in; guess people just get real butthurt in fighting games.

When I play Wonder Woman if I dominate the first round I often switch to her crappy stance for the second round to make things interesting; I've even lost a couple of matches due to this.

Yeah, no, asymmetric interactive stages have no place in a game that wants to be considered tournament-worthy. I'll still probably pick up this game when it hits $20 or is free on PS+.

@starvinggamer: It's not that big of an issue dude, I've won like 25 matches due to environmentals and lost 30, none of the matches were interesting/challenging to begin with, out of ~950 matches online. Just don't pick Watchtower, problem solved.

I don't think I'll ever understand the FGC's quest to make their games less fun. That said the option to turn it off exists if you want to be a wet blanket.

I suppose it depends on your definition of fun. A lot of people define that as seeing crazy shit (such as environmental attacks, fatalities etc.) whether they're the ones doing it or not, some people, though, derive fun simply from winning.

It's not about winning, it's about winning or losing because you deserve it, not because you got randomed out. Would Chess be more fun if your pieces got randomly placed on the board at the beginning of every game? Would Pool be more fun if a random pocket closed every time you hit the cue ball? Would Mario be more fun if 1/10 times when you pushed the jump button, nothing happened?

*reads thread title*

Nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnope.

shouldn't be taken out though they could balance it out by lessening the amount of damage you take from these attacks. The environment attacks can be avoided if timed right.

Both players have to agree to turn off the interactables, which rarely happens. I believe that if you turn them off and you win the toss, they should be off whether the other player agrees or not.

They're somewhat random now only because the game is still new, and people haven't learned the "maps". The interactables will always be located in the same places, which means you'll always know which areas to be wary of. Objects respawning is really dumb though, but even then, the respawn time is (I think) static. One would assume if you played this game enough, these things will stop being random. (I personally still don't like interactables).

What? I bet if you ask the FGC, almost 100% would say the reason they play fighting games is to win. If you ask the rest of the people who play the game I bet a lot of them just want to see Doomsday punch a dude through the core of the earth or whatever the fuck he does. I'm not saying environmental attacks or fair or unfair I'm just saying people enjoy fighting games for different reasons.

@starvinggamer: It's not random at all, as proven by fighting a Very Hard comp; some characters are better at controlling the map than others. You might start on one side or the other but essentially every character has the ability to switch sides or punish in the first actions.

To give you an example if I fight a 4-4 Superman and pick Frost; surprise the Superman turns out to be an air laser spammer and Frost has basically no anti air, he also runs and tries to use every environmental as much as possible. I can do a lot more damage to him if I ever manage to land it, but ultimately if I lose it's because of the intentionality of the other player to be an incompetent moron coupled with my bad decision of trying to make the game more interesting by picking a bad matchup against a bad player using a good character; I could easily have chosen Wonder Woman or Lex and completely annihilated them (which would have been boring granted, but certainly less frustrating) but I did not.

@morbid_coffee said:

No, asymmetric level design and the fact that stage selection is determined by a coin flip means that you will always be placed at an advantage or disadvantage randomly.

@fredchuckdave: A coin flip is, by definition, random. Saying that every character has the ability to switch sides or punish has no bearing on this. Every character has the ability to get a perfect as well, but that wouldn't make it OK for one character to start at full HP and one character to start at 1 HP. The severity may be different, but the core philosophy is the same.

@starvinggamer: The advantage due to lack of symmetry is negligible except on Watchtower, worst case you lose 15% health because you failed to dodge a projectile essentially, repeatedly getting hit by those projectiles afterward is user error. Now if you want to complain that "strong" characters have an unnecessary advantage over light characters due to interactables, that argument actually has some traction. Play the game first before you freak out about asymmetry, almost every stage has some incentive to use either side, and it's not too hard to prevent the opponent from backing up; also corners are quite useful on the attacker's side as with any other fighting game, it simply adds another element of map control.

@starvinggamer: Again, with enough map experience through extended play, even the disadvantage of losing a 50/50 coin flip is negated. If you know what to expect on a stage, it's not random. You just have to overcome your bad matchups by gaining knowledge, in this case a bad character and stage in conjunction.

I also think asymmetric level design is stupid, but that's a bullshit factor, not a randomness factor.

@fredchuckdave: I'm not freaking out, it's just something I'm against personally in competitive fighting games. A 15% health differential can be the difference between a loss and a win.

@churrific: Even with perfect map experience, a disadvantage will always be a disadvantage. Knowing the tools you have against that disadvantage doesn't matter at a high level, because your opponent will know the tools you have too. It's like the Akuma vortex. People don't die to it at a high level because they don't know how to respond, they die to it because Akuma has so many options that most of the time, any response they make is going to be the wrong one. Having the level design fall in your favor means that you have another option and your opponent has another opportunity to guess wrong.

As stage knowledge increases, players are going to learn to pick stages not only for what gives them the best advantage, but puts the enemy at the worst disadvantage. Even if it is as minor as changing a 5-5 matchup to a 5.5-4.5, that's something that is ultimately determined by a coin-flip, which is definitely random.

A player who knows what they're doing will do three times as much damage in a single combo than they would with an environmental attack.

We should ban people from playing Injustice. EVO will pull an Oprah and tell all the good players "You're banned from Injustice! And you're banned from Injustice! And you're banned! You're all banned from Injustice!"

@starvinggamer:

As I said already I've never had a high level match decided by environmentals, predominantly it just makes the match go faster. Good players beat the shit out of you with combos and thoughtful projectile mixups/aerial control, they don't exclusively use the environment and several characters pretty much need the environment to have any chance of getting in on specific characters.

@morbid_coffee:

But what am I gonna do for fruit?

@fredchuckdave: So to clarify, if you played 100 matches against a skilled player where they selected the stage every time, and played another 100 matches against that player where you selected the stage every time, the results would be the same?

That only matters if a match has never ended with a life differential of 1/3 of a combo or less.

@starvinggamer: Your question is loaded, the number of factors that go into a victory are endless and a lot of them are user error based; this isn't a game where you can turtle and respond continuously so it isn't 100% predictable. But leaving aside Watchtower or playing with a character with a good anti air you can entirely negate environmental damage; the skill in jumping and pressing R1 is less than the skill in jumping and executing an AA move I will grant, but usually the amount of punishment you can dish out as a result compensates.

The biggest issue with the game on a wide scale is how blocking works relative to certain jump in combos while you're recovering, so if you do a jump over at the right angle it can be difficult to block it or execute a wakeup attack; only a few people are exploiting this so far but you can make it so your guy takes longer to recover to compensate. This same issue is also why Ares is incredible against any character that doesn't have a fast moving charge or slide, but he isn't very good against those that do so oh well (you have to press forward and anticipate when he decides to tport instead of tossing a projectile, the windup for the tport is negligible so responding on the fly isn't really an option). Basically Ares has an MK teleport but the game doesn't have MK's blocking system; if they put Scorpion in the game with several of his MK mechanics unadjusted he will be completely broken.

@starvinggamer: Oh I see. You're actually talking about the stage select being random, but not the interactables themselves being random (at least from what I gather). Actually, in my eyes, the coin flip for the stage select makes it less random. In other games, while there aren't interactables that can once in awhile overwhelm the fighting like in this game, stage select can still be important in terms of gaining advantages/disadvantages (i.e. how long a stage is, background color, etc.) Most of those games though, only one person gets to select a stage. The random factor comes in hoping to not run into a guy that specifically selects a stage you don't want to fight in. At least here, you get a chance to have a say against everyone, albeit with the coin flip (ironic).

Which means that it IS about winning, if it wasn't then losing, deservedly or not, wouldn't matter. I'd argue that chess could still be fun with random pieces placed on the board, so long as the goal of the players was to feel excitement from trying to conquer/exploit whatever advantage or disadvantage they had been handed at the start of the game, and not simply "to win".

Competetive games are about winning (as is Chess, pool and a lot of single player videogames such as Mario) so they should be fair, but there are quite a few games where "winning" is secondary to "being exciting". Monopoly isn't fair, Trivial Pursuit isn't fair, Cards Against Humanity isn't fair. They can still be pretty fun.

Different folks, different strokes.

@jacksukeru: Again the big thing is that it just isn't "random," it's simply another element of the game; it's not too hard to get familiar with all of the stages though personally I focus on getting better with characters; while most stages favor strong characters you can still utilize them effectively with light/medium (dodge vs bomb) characters and still punish or flat out dodge the environmental attacks. I've seen players with less than 100 matches dodge every environmental I could throw at them, granted they weren't particularly good at the basic fighting but there's definitely an element of skill involved in how you utilize the stage to your advantage.

@fredchuckdave: I think you might have responded to the wrong person.

@jacksukeru: You made comparisons to board games and the like, it's more as though the game had a separate gameplay system that was also skill based, so if you added an intuitive timing minigame into an already challenging game like Vagrant Story did or like getting ripostes in Dark Souls; it's just another piece of the puzzle that isn't chaotic except at first glance. Though for this allusion to hold up the person doing the "riposte" is definitely the one who's countering or evading the environmental attacks, but there's still plenty of advantages to be gained so doing.

@fredchuckdave: Yup, you're definetly talking to the wrong person. I don't care if Injustice is considered fair or random or whatever, that wasn't the point I argued for in my post so there's no point in trying to convince me of anything anyway.

@jacksukeru: Well your point is kind of a meaningless non sequitor in addition to being completely off topic in that case, carry on.

I can't think of a competitive 2D fighting game in recent memory where stages weren't uniform in size. Background color interfering with character visibility is an art issue, and also not present in any tournament-level fighters. Stage select is 100% non-impactful in SFIV, MvC3, KoF13, SFxT, P4A, BB:CS, DK, etc etc etc, so it doesn't matter who gets to choose. Injustice is the only fighting game I can think of where stage select actually determines what attacks you have access to at the beginning of a match. Making it random doesn't make it any less shitty.

Why should part of the game be taken out in what is supposed to be matchmaking that rates your skill? Your skill should be determined with all gameplay variables.

@fredchuckdave: It was off topic yes, because I wanted to contest a claim about the nature of competitive games made in the thread, as well as to present my argument for there being different kinds of games with different goals in their entertainment.

Look, I'm not sure how my comments came across to you, but it really wasn't my intention to "start something" or to act snarky or anything, and I would really prefer it if we could both go our seperate ways without any resentment towards each other.

It's late and I'm not sure if I'm making any sense any longer.

@starvinggamer: Just off the top of my head, MK 9 had vastly different stage lengths. Like a difference range of several tenths of a second of extra walk time from one end to another. I remember there being a big stink about it on testyourmight. Not sure why you'd leave off this game's immediate predecessor and one of the biggest 2D fighting games in recent memory. And I'm not sure why you would be narrowing your parameters to just 2D games, or even just recent 2D games, if we're talking about the principle of stage length affecting gameplay. It applies to all fighting games that are 2d/3d/old/new/smash imo.

Also, I highly disagree with you about background colors interfering with character visibility as being just an art issue. I mean while I agree with you it shouldn't be a factor at tournament level because of experience, if you're deliberately picking a stage to mess with character visibility, that's definitely going out of your way to create a disadvantage to affect gameplay. I trolled my friend by picking that entirely white background in KOF 13 and picked chars wearing white. He couldn't tell the attack angles with which I was coming at him from at all. My other friend trolled me picking that volcanic stage with a red akuma back in vanilla. Made it harder to see his cross-up hurricane kick (at least for me).

I still contend that introducing a voting system, albeit random in itself in injustice, at least increases the odds of you playing on your preferred stage to 50/50. Without it, those odds would be significatly less if you're not the one picking the stage (i.e. more random than it would be without the coin flip).

@jacksukeru:

I don't get angry over arguments on the internet, nor bear anyone any spite for what they say; I'm simply direct and to the point.

@starvinggamer:

MvC3 has several stages that have extremely distracting backgrounds visually which could potentially impact a match; if your threshold is 1 out of 100 matches then that's entirely possible as well; a lot of fighters have that issue. KoF XIII has a few stages like this as well, but the attacks on the characters aren't quite as ridiculously over the top flashy so it's a bit rare. DoA has a variety of stages that are affected directly by stage select as well and while that game has limited traction it is still skill based.

But again Injustice is simply adding another skill based element to the gameplay, that element might be disparate from what you're used to in fighting games; deal with it. It's a new IP so really anything is up for grabs, they could have made Divekick if they wanted to and it could still stand on its own merit, a fighting game being different doesn't inherently make it inferior. Supreme Commander is way different from Starcraft and it is still quite balanced and interesting, the matches might take longer but that doesn't make them illegitimate; the same could be said for Company of Heroes, or hell Warcraft 3; innovation is a good thing. Fighting games have got to be the stalest genre next to Call of Duty.

@fredchuckdave: @churrific: Clearly what I'm saying isn't coming through because we aren't even taking about the same things so let's just leave it at that.