Lulu
Well-Known Member
The guaranteed holds you're talking about typically last less than one-third of a second, which is far less time than it takes to roll off the ground or sit through a throw/hold animation. If you are bothered by the fact that you can't hit a button for less than one third of a second, there are far more potent obstacles for you that are presented in any game (DOA included) than the stuns you find so objectionable.
Its not the duration or even the damage that bothers me most (allthough it does annoy me alil).... its the completely one sided nature of it that I find so backwards about a competitive game....
Its like the Combo's in Street Fighter and Tekken..... in Tekken they are much longer and alot more damaging but in Street Fighter they are alot shorter and do less damage not counting Supers and Ultras..... but thet do share one thing in common, the player being compared can't do anything about it, for whatever brief moment you are being comboed you aren't playing the game.... its like scoring a point in tennis by telling the opposing player to step off the court for a second.
And as far as the "competitive" element goes, same thing I've told Argentus: It's about balancing damage packets. Functionally, there's no difference between a juggle that lasts 4 seconds and nets 80 damage than a throw that lasts 4 seconds and nets 80 damage. If you find one more aesthetically favorable, that's fine. But, you can't really argue gameplay-wise that one adds or subtracts from the competitive viability of the game when the other does the opposite. So if these stuns were affecting the competitive nature of the game, the solution would involve fixing all of the functionally similar damage packets, which would get rid of throw/hold animations as well as the environment ones (because the same principle applies to a juggle for X damage vs a wall hit for the same damage).
In my experience anything can be competitive, all you need is a game with a win condition and a lose condition and you can take that broken and unbalanced bad boy straight to Evo and that can be considered "a Competitive Game".... I mean just look at Injustice and Mortal Kombat X....
Regarding throws, the way to avoid being thrown is not altogether different from how you avoid being put into a "guaranteed stun." Both require a premeditated choice (hopefully, unless you just mash and hit buttons entirely at random, but in that case you are in no position to talk about competitive elements of the game at all) that leaves you vulnerable to certain high-damage options that last a certain amount of time while making you immune to others . Neither values or devalues the stun game more or less than the other. If strikes couldn't guarantee similar damage to throws, they would be favored far less and it would tip the stun game you seem to praise into an unbalanced territory where everyone is afraid to attack and afraid to hold.
I think there are more factors to consider when comparing strikes to throws besides damage. I know that ultimately damage is the sole deciding factor in who wins and who loses but still though, they are different. I don't think people are going to stop using strikes if you take off the guarantees.... thats the primary method of attacking even for grapplers.... and if characters didn't have all the necessary throws required to punish stuff then I would agree with the unholdable stun... but they do.... every character has a standing throw and a crouching throw so having a stun that grants them the exact same type of lockout is redundant... if this was like Virtua Fighter where only a few characters could crouch throw then giving them an indefensible stun would make much more sense.
I'm not saying it will be perfect but these things should be explored bit by bit. If nothing goes wrong then they can keep going.