Or: Why I feel like fighting game players are allergic to playing their game.

I don’t want death threats. I don’t want to be harassed. But I certainly don’t want to be proven wrong about my dumb off the cuff take about the latest Tekken 8 patch. So I will start by prefacing all of what I have to say with this: the community is probably right. I’m sure the season 3 patch is worse than the previous iterations of the game. Some of the changes do look insane to me. But at the same time I can’t shake a feeling that people are not really playing the patch before coming to their conclusions about it. This is something I’ve felt a lot more in recent online game discourse. Marathon was a great example of it. People were fucking CONVINCED it was going to be a disaster. I can easily recall every geriatric Destiny 2 fan shouting through their megaphones “trust me bro it’s going to be bad. I’ve played a bunch of Destiny 2. I know what makes these games work.” Yeah ok sure. That’s why you buy and play them and Bungie actually makes the games. Now it seems like everyone loves Marathon and it could be an early cult hit in a highly saturated genre. Still no linux support as of writing though so I won’t be able to try it myself anytime soon. Oh well.

I think fighting games are where this situation feels more interesting to me. This is mostly because I genuinely think the people freaking out about this patch are actually playing the game. But are they actually? After all, playing a game is to perceive it. But our perception of something can be manipulated by a whole slew of things. Distractions while playing, swapping out a game’s music for your own, playing in a dark room vs a light room, and — in the case of fighting games — getting tilted, all can have a significant effect on how a game is perceived. I’ll speak for myself here and say that losing to cheap tactics or dumb 50/50s — which are ample in the newest patch — tilts me hard. In my head the game I’m playing should be a game in which I’m winning — since my opponent is playing fucking Alisa and just spamming chainsaw bullshit — but in reality I’m failing beat the cheese. I have a hard time not seeing this disconnect all over the community’s reaction to this patch. I also think it explains why overwhelmingly the community seems to support nerfs over buffs despite the conventional wisdom that buffing is better for a game’s enjoyment than nerfs are.

I generally agree with the support of nerfs in Tekken 8’s case. The power creep has gotten to a pretty crazy level and rushdown feels like it’s way too easy of a path to play the game at a high level. But I don’t buy the community’s explanation that Bandai is just trying to cater to some fictional new Tekken 8 player. That’s fucking stupid. The entire business model of Tekken 8 right now is to get existing players on the hook for season passes which literally line up with these patches. The median rank of a Tekken 8 player right now is Fujin. My assumption is that Bandai thinks these changes will be appealing for people at that skill level. And maybe they will be. Now that irrelevant twink swedish character you like playing so much gets easy rushdown 50/50 mixups. King stays super strong because why on earth would you ever nerf a character with animations as good as his. The upper echelon of Tekken players and all of reddit have decided that this patch is a disaster. But was Bandai even listening to them to begin with? Probably not. I imagine they were looking at play data of the typical Tekken player. Could they still have missed? Yeah totally. But should a single youtube video from someone who makes money from making this type of content convince you of it? Probably not.

People should probably spend some time playing the new patch first before freaking out about it. But that doesn’t sell quite as well as the obligatory “walking away to newer pastures” video that each of these content creators make immediately after the patch notes drop. Mainmanswe made one of these. You know what he was streaming literally the day after posting it? TEKKEN 8! “There’s never been a better time to play classic tekken” says a youtube commenter who won’t do that. The jokes write themselves. This makes me proud to be a melee player. From 2008 on that community has done the work to rid themselves of developer intervention and it’s let them sustain the competitive scene of a family party game for over 20 fucking years.

I wish I had an overall point here but I don’t. All these thoughts just came up because I realized what the tekken community seems to want more than anything else are nerfs. I do think there’s a solid argument that nerfs are necessary right now. And I could probably write an entire essay on why I think the whole “nerfs vs buffs” is a completely false dichotomy. But when an entire community is yelling and acting like it’s joever just from reading the patch notes I can’t help but feel like no one is seriously playing the game and coming to this determination. And even if you are playing the game, are you actually? If you’re too busy getting tilted that’s probably getting in the way of your experience. Maybe it’s the game’s fault, but in the words of the GOAT Armada “Crying about patches, I feel like that’s a very short term solution. Because yes, one of your problems disappeared, but your biggest problem, which is that you SUCK, is still there.”