Mikey~ CrackPr0n · @PyronIkari
9th Nov 2017 from TwitLonger
That shitty kof article.
The article is basically a long version of the excuses people give to why they don’t want to play a game or why a game sucks and their game is better. It’s just a surface level bull shit reasoning with no actual depth or reasoning to them.
To state kof is difficult! There’s four jumps... which are all easy to do and if you have any kind of basic control in movement in any game you can learn it in seconds. Commands no different, if you can do a 360 or 720 or guiles sommersault Super, etc etc. and character supers didn’t stop people in cvs2.
So let’s get to why kof isn’t well received.
Because people don’t want it to be and that was the first impression given back in the 90s. The mentality continued. Xiii and xiv was presented the same way, and this is 100% the communities fault.
In the mid 90s, snk games were the poverty games because they weren’t the popular game. The appeal was too anime to most with flamboyant kyo, “gay” Benimaru. Iori looked like some goth loser. These are real quotes I heard all the time by top players. Snk designs appealed to people that liked anime and turned off a lot of people in the 90s. This is why even in America, it was predominantly Asians and Mexicans that played it. Mexico grew up with dragon ball, saint seiya, and many other anime on their TVs. Designs like this were cool to them.
This will sound familiar if you were an anime player in the late 90s and early 2000s. People shit on anime games because they looked “faggy” and they were for pedophiles who liked cartoon porn(this still lingers around today.)
Even though the fighting game community was tiny, there was a huge stigma to play snk games. Even though many top players dabbled around in snk games, none of them took it seriously. Even though some liked snk games, they weren’t the popular game, they were the game you played inbetween games while you waited for your turn in sf. So despite there only being like 32 people entering sf tournaments, there was definitely a hierarchy of “play sf, the big boys game if you want to be cool, don’t play shitty add snk games.”
It was like this in every single major arcade. That’s where the stereotypes began. Mexicans and Asians played kof and the big boys played sf. Shgl, Camelot, svgl, mgl, arcade infinity, Japan arcade, that little arcade in San Gabriel, UCLA, Westwood arcade, every arcade I went to it was like this.
So the kof community did something incredibly stupid, especially during xiii. They turned it into an elitist attitude. “Our game is better it’s super difficult and that’s why capcoms players don’t play it. We are superior look at how hard this shit is!” This turned off new players, not because the game is actually difficult but because the community leaders were a bunch of elitist asshole on top of their game being less popular and already stigmatized.
When kofxiii came out on console, Atlus streamed an event at Super arcade. I commentated a large amount of it explaining mechanics and basics. My cohost was “theanswer”. And he would constantly make the game sound like no one should play it. “This character is really good but he is really difficult to play and if you can’t do super complicated impossible combos you shouldn’t play him. This other character isn’t good, don’t play him, he’s not worth playing. Oh that combo is really hard to do and you have to do 40 precise inputs. Only top players can use this character.” And I kept trying to make the game sound fun and accessible but he just shit on everything.
Hi, remember kof xiv tournaments when it first came out, and everyone memes how broken nakoruru was? When they acted like the game was broken and hard and tried to act like it was superior for this? That turned off hella people and just strengthened the stigma “man people are right this game isn’t popular for a reason, it’s broken and stupid.”
The reputation mattered more than the actual game. And to reflect this I want to point out two things. A game’s popularity has nothing to do with how popular it is in the fgc. And that difficulty means absolutely nothing about how popular it is.
Tekken is considered one of the most difficult games to play. Tons of precise movement, and the amount of knowledge required on top of that can be intimidating to someone trying to be competitive.
Tekken outsells street fighter every single time. But the tekken competitive scene is a fraction of street fighters.
People buying the game playing it, having fun do not see “how difficult the game is.” Tekken is way more popular than street fighter and if you argue that you are a fool. It’s not about the actual game mechanics or difficulty, it’s about the perspective the person has of what it is. If you tell someone over and over again don’t play this game it’s too difficult for you and they have never played it, they will never want to play it.
Anime games, virtual fighter, tekken, kof, anything not the major mainstream games carry this weight of having a reputation of being something so people will never play it.
Smash is arguably one of the most difficult games to play, and it’s insanely popular. It doesn’t have that negative perspective attached to it other than by certain people. And guess what, most of those people have never played it.
So without naming names, kof does poorly because the “leaders” of kof shit on their own fucking community. They do everything they can to make their game elite and discourage new people, whether they realize it or not.
When have you heard top street fighter players bragging about how difficult the game is and how you have to be a master to even learn basics? When did a collective of all the top players in a community go “eh we don’t want to go to a tournament because we’d rather just stay at home and play against each other.” Because they don’t want to lose to someone outside of their clique(Reynald, me kof etc, and then nerdjosh and Reynald early xiv).
They wanted to be seen as on top and the kings of the community and going out and playing when they were at the top made them lose face as kings(hint they were never Kings.)
This goes back to the 90s as well. At Shgl, the answer would constantly shit on new players and make them feel stupid for playing the game, like they hadn’t earned the right to play his game.
Kof isn’t popular and was never popular in the states because of labels, and a community that took those labels as a badge of honor shitting on anyone that didn’t want to fall into their miserable pile of self contained elitism.
Every time one of these issues came up in the big fgc, strert fighter 3, even 2i and 3s which were both really poorly received at the start, it didn’t shit in itself. Cvs 1 wasn’t well received, but it was still played, encouraged and welcoming. People all over shitting in sfv, and this is the first time that a rift is being created where people are trying to discourage people for even liking it.
Right now if you like a game you are being shamed for liking it. Everyone is defensive as fuck and everyone is attacking each other and trying to be superior.
Capcoms games have a big enough community to where the effects won’t hurt them too much. Same with smash. Every other game though... they’re kinda fucked. If people want communities to grow they need to make their game appealing to people. Remove labels and jokes. Because what makes a community grow, and what makes a community not grow isn’t the quality of the game... it’s the fucking community. Kof has had one of the shittiest.