No Cow, in the 90's you just bought the game again....that's totally better. Mind you games were like $70-80 back then too...i'll spare you the history lesson but it was far worse back then than it is now.
No it wasn't because when the game came out again it was a long time till it did. This forced players to find workarounds to the exploits and create strategies to counteract them. And 90% of the fighters we had back then on consoles only came to us after a long time of being in the arcades, which was the ideal testing ground. Most of the time the home versions would have slight updates that would fix the problems that the arcades suffered from. And in some cases they end up releasing an update to the arcade to have a similar experience. It obviously costs them more money to do that, but the mentality was a lot more different back then.
This whole broken tier concept and complete giving up on a game just because some character is BROKEN is a result of this new whiny generation that most of the time has no basis to what they are talking about. You cant decide shit like that in an early lifespan of a game because the workarounds havent been discovered yet !
Then you look at a company like Capcom, and you look at a game called SSF4 AE. They said to everyone in their face that "they were creating an out of balance game to make it more fun!" That of course came back and bit them right back in the ass, and they had to make what we all know as SSF4 Apology Edition ver. 2012. But, it was too late then because they already turned off enough people and indirectly forced them to acctually seek a more fun experience in other games. Vanilla SF4 was slightly broken with Sagat, but not THAT broken because it was the unintentional brokenness that was similar to the 90's! In fact, there were more tournaments won with other characters than with Sagat because everyone had an anti-Sagat strategy. SSF4 came out and the balance was even better, but now Fei Long and Cammy were the new top tier and people had to figure out ways to beat THEM. (for the record, Fei Long and Cammy were already that good in sf4 but they were only discovered as such later in the games life cycle which is why they kinda skipped the balances of SSF4).
However, this cycle of back and forth balancing happened from year-year minimum .. not month-month (excluding AE's short life span of 6 months, but that was entirely their fault for experimenting on us). its a Really shitty feeling when your character changes up all the time, and it really messes up a lot of the setups that you had. Creating new stuff every few weeks is NOT my idea of fun, its frustrating especially if you play competitively because you can't just go back and re-learn everything every 5 minutes, its shit!
I prefer a game that's as balanced as they can possibly make it and really put all their final focus on achieving that before anything. If something slips out of the balance then it wouldn't be too bad if they did their job right and we would just have to figure out workarounds. Bugs however, are a different story and those should be fixed as instantly as possible for the sake of the game.
