[AC+R BUG] Abusing button macros to get negative edge inputs during every single frame

[Essay]

Do we allow players to use turbo controllers? No? Well, why would this be any different?

Well, if you hold turbo with Baiken and your guard counter fails to come out, you're risking getting counter-hit. Hold a macro and try it and at worst you do nothing! The turbo setting on most popular sticks doesn't repeat at 1/60 of a second either.... Clearly turbo is the lesser of two evils, and should be unbanned while we're at it!

Seriously though, I agree completely. It's in line with using turbo. A turbo-allowed tournament would be just as disadvantageous to a PS3 pad-player, as a macro-bug-allowed tournament would be towards the GG fanatic who custom-built his stick to the 5-button configuration with the respect button off to the side.

[brett_]

I don't know about your local GG scene, but a player from mine is going as far as moving to Kyoto next week where he fully intends to try and compete at A-cho. He is interested in this because this is an international game, with an international standard and community. He shouldn't have to play one game when visiting Japan and a completely different one when in Canada. Anything but a full ban on this macro risks fragmenting the community and de-standardizing the experience.

Tell him to contact me if he's serious, I can introduce him to some GG players via twitter etc.

[Mumm-Ra]

Why not just set Dust on R1/RB and Hard Slash on Circle/B? Do you need macros still?

[ElvenShadow]

Lol I just tested out that justice shit. Banned for sure! At the VERY least, justice macros are banned. Seriously though... Just map HS to a shoulder button and D to face button. Problem solved.

[qwerty]

Five years ago, this wouldn't have even been a discussion. Most people would have immediately recognized the game breaking ramifications of this and agreed to ban macros. Pad players would've had to learn to live without macros (as I did for my first year or so of playing Guilty Gear), but the community would have been better off for it.

I don't want to sound like I'm pulling the old man card (I'm still too young for that :P), but goddamn has this community become spoiled in recent years.

Ask yourselves: if this game had negedge autofire in the arcade version, do you think it'd be the same game it is today?

As an aside, it really isn't that hard to FRC on pad without a macro. I should know, since I learned the game on pad, and currently practice +R on my Vita daily. I can do most things I can do on stick with minimal practice.

[Klaige]

Quite honestly i'm not even sure why this is a discussion. This is an unintended consequence of the macro, and is pretty much the definition of a "tool assisted" technique. A legit player shouldn't even want to use this bug because it trivializes the point of playing competitive fighting games: to best your opponent in a game of skill.

This is a common sense issue, common sense says if you allow this, you have opened the pandora's box for all sorts of programmable controllers, or other tool assisted abilities to go into the fray. We all know this was never an intended use of the macros in guilty gear, so let's keep it simple, use our brains, and ban it already.

[Doren2k]

I ain't playin in tourneys if they allow this gay shit. Da gawd has spoken lol

[Nehle]

I would like to repeat: if you think making it so that people can more consistently do things that they already can do is broken, the game was broken in the first place.

About the only thing banworthy so far is the Justice glitch, and that's because it seems like you can get more missiles on the screen than performing the glitch without the macro. I don't know if that's actually been confirmed or not yet, though.

It's not about doing it more consistently, it's about doing it without effort or commitment

[Dusk Thanatos]

It's not about doing it more consistently, it's about doing it without effort or commitment

Thinking less effort is bad is called entitlement. You're isolating your community and turning away new blood like that. You're just going to look like a bunch of old fogeys screaming at these kids that they should learn to do something the hard way, based on some bizarre ideal they have no reason to accept. This situation is oddly analogous to what I tell people about playing on stick. If you want to go to JP, live the dream, and play in an arcade, you've gotta learn stick. But if you're not worried about that, there's no compelling reason to switch off pad if you're doing fine with it. In this case, if you want to go play in arcades, you should learn to do it the hard way, but if you don't plan on doing that, you can save yourself some trouble, and just learn with the macro.

There's actually no less commitment, just less chance of error. It's lowering the execution barrier to time things. It's already the case that, say, if you hit a button too early in blockstun, nothing happens. (I tested this, just for the sake of understanding the ramifications of this glitch.) If you mash DP H over and over, there's actually less chance of getting hit than you might think. Additionally, the special still comes out whenever you finish your input, as Ama has repeatedly pointed out; you still have to time it. And, furthermore, if the motion makes you stop blocking, you've still got to stop blocking to do the input, so if you accidentally start inputting the DP too late (while you're no longer in the blockstun of the last move), you'll still just get hit when your opponent continues their blockstring.

Really, what I get out of this thread is that nobody here actually wants to see this glitch banned because they think it breaks the game in the sense that the game will become unplayable, outside of the Justice glitch (which is still possible without the macro). I see almost every post complaining that people can now do things easier, that this simplicity is offensive, and anything that makes their precious game easier should be banned. I love GG, but for christsakes, just deal with it. Running the game through a grinder and exploiting everything there is just part of playing to win. New Millias being able to TK Bad Moon easily isn't going to wreck your game. The major thing that separates good players and bad players is still decisions. Keep your senses of superiority alive by beating scrubs into the ground instead of spending days in training.

Also, because Sirlin is always appropriate:

The scrub has still more crutches. He talks a great deal about “skill” and how he has skill whereas other players—very much including the ones who beat him flat out—do not have skill. The confusion here is what “skill” actually is. In Street Fighter, scrubs often cling to combos as a measure of skill. A combo is a sequence of moves that is unblockable if the first move hits. Combos can be very elaborate and very difficult to pull off. But single moves can also take “skill,” according to the scrub. The “dragon punch” or “uppercut” in Street Fighter is performed by holding the joystick toward the opponent, then down, then diagonally down and toward as the player presses a punch button. This movement must be completed within a fraction of a second, and though there is leeway, it must be executed fairly accurately. Ask any scrub and they will tell you that a dragon punch is a “skill move.”

I once played a scrub who was actually quite good. That is, he knew the rules of the game well, he knew the character matchups well, and he knew what to do in most situations. But his web of mental rules kept him from truly playing to win. He cried cheap as I beat him with “no skill moves” while he performed many difficult dragon punches. He cried cheap when I threw him five times in a row asking, “Is that all you know how to do? Throw?” I gave him the best advice he could ever hear. I told him, “Play to win, not to do ‘difficult moves.’” This was a big moment in that scrub’s life. He could either ignore his losses and continue living in his mental prison or analyze why he lost, shed his rules, and reach the next level of play.

I’ve never been to a tournament where there was a prize for the winner and another prize for the player who did many difficult moves. I’ve also never seen a prize for a player who played “in an innovative way.” (Though chess tournaments do sometimes have prizes for “brilliancies,” moves that are strokes of genius.) Many scrubs have strong ties to “innovation.” They say, “That guy didn’t do anything new, so he is no good.” Or “person X invented that technique and person Y just stole it.” Well, person Y might be one hundred times better than person X, but that doesn’t seem to matter to the scrub. When person Y wins the tournament and person X is a forgotten footnote, what will the scrub say? That person Y has “no skill” of course.

You can gain some standing in a gaming community by playing in an innovative way, but that should not be the ultimate goal. Innovation is merely one of many tools that may or may not help you reach victory. The goal is to play as excellently as possible. The goal is to win.

[Eshi]

expecting to be able to use in-game functionality isn't "entitlement". can we please stop with the strawman arguments? or at the very least reread this thread: http://www.dustloop.com/forums/showthread.php?16422-Xrd-and-growing-the-GG-community

With that said, I agree that macros should be banned. Its abuse is essentially better than Turbo (which is banned everywhere) and it's not detectable for characters other than Justice. I feel bad for pad players who use macros because there is no reason other than this bug to ban them.

[AMB Bakery]

Justice glitch (which is still possible without the macro)

Without the macro, you can only get two of the same bomb if you FRC it or if you press the pause button. It's not humanly possible otherwise to release and press the corresponding button in 1 frame, much less do it every single time without fail.

The problem with the Justice glitch is not just two of the same bomb, it's a stream of bombs that are nigh insurmountable unless you're Sol (grand viper), Chipp (teleport), or I-no (horizontal chemical love). Even then, those examples have their counters or are distance-dependent in the case of Sol and I-no. Not to mention the stream of bombs gives you meter that you can keep as long as you walk forward a couple of pixels every so often.

[Klaige]

Thanatos, no one out there can do these things on the first possibly frame consistently, that's not even an argument. That kind of accuracy is only possible in a tool-assited situation, which is exactly what this glitch is and that's why it needs to be gone. This isn't about making something easier or more access-able, and it definitely is not about keeping arbitrary difficulty for the sake of difficulty. It's about having completely unintended tool-assisted situation that have no place in the game at all. You're acting like keeping out an obviously abusive glitch that can be applied in a shitload of areas of the game is elitest, and it's not. It's about making sure the outcome of the match is determined by the skill and ability of the two players to play the actual game, not to play the game while abusing an unintended tool-assisted option.

[Dacidbro]

I'm literally not reading what people are typing, but I responded with 3 paragraphs

Are you seriously a person? This glitch is patently game breaking and you know it, shut up.

my brief 2c would be the glitch needs to be banned somehow, either the glitch itself or by banning macros. One takes way more policing, so I would vote banning macros, but that does make some people's lives harder.

[TheRealBobMan]

I asked a friend a few things about this last night but already forgot one point. Let's say you're using this bug with Justice. If you hold down the macro button (we'll go with PKS), do your normals and other moves come out when tapping the corresponding button, or are they still unuseable since you're technically already holding down PKS? If Justice gets to keep nukes on screen and still use her normals that's probably enough. I might not be too worried about Justice (though I might support a ban if she still has her great normals and special moves while nukes are out), but I don't want to play against a May that has multiple dolphin hoops out and still has access to her moves. I have some Justice experience, but my May experience hits a little closer to home. It was already a hard matchup in AC, and thinking about that machup (or even the improved +R matchup) with May having her normals and dolphin hoops controlling space is exactly the kind of matchup specific problem I mentioned earlier.

Then again, May/I-No was like a 7:3 and I didn't complain much before. For now I'd tell people to suck it up and try to figure out a way to beat these tricks. Justice is still new, and I doubt anyone here has played a decent Justice that used this trick, rather than just experimenting for a match or two against someone by mashing 2 while holding a macro button. Bans are pretty serious, so I would think people would test things a bit more thoroughly before going nuts? I'm definitely going to ask my friend to mess around and help me test this since he subs Justice now, but we're both really busy (he started school and I'm getting a bunch of overtime).

"It's not humanly possible otherwise to release and press the corresponding button in 1 frame, much less do it every single time without fail."

While it's extremely difficult, I don't want to see people say it's impossible unless there's a way to prove it's impossible. Especially not this soon after a bug like this has been discovered. Someone already bought up that Bridget bug that Ruu or whoever uses, which is some kind of evidence saying that it is possible.

Also, can we please stop with the "this is broken because you're dumb / it's obviously broken" posts? Some people are making really good arguments for a ban, and those posts aren't helping them.

[Tari]

Just here to point out that the Bridget glitch is not a 1-frame input. I'm not quite sure what the input window for the glitch in AC+ is, but it's definitely not a 1-frame input.

It's also not something that has to be inputted every-other-frame, which I believe some people are discussing in this thread.

I'm keeping my hands out of this argument, though.

[M.Song]

pretty sure the bridget's hs yoyo in AC is 3 frames

besides when you do bridget's glitch its a lot easier to do it with 1 button as opposed to two or three

also on stick there are techniques you can use to make it a lot easier than doing it with punch or kick

you also rarely ever see in match bridget players doing the c.s - yoyo glitch loop and more often see it used from yoyo hold to bears

also dunno if this is relevant but nobody ever made a fuss about banning the bridget yoyo glitch because it was in arcade AC

[Dusk Thanatos]

What I'm getting out of this thread is that a strangely large amount of top players think human error is an integral part of the game. I can't help but disagree on that. If I can't do something, it's my job to grind and fix that, no matter how hard it is. Difficulty in timing or execution isn't a balancing factor, or something the devs can use to balance; it's just extra hurdles to separate out people who can and can't perform those tricks. It's a way for one player to show they've spent more time, or put more effort into the game. It's not something that breaks the gameplay balance, because the ultimate balance is always based on the top level of play anyways, where people can do that shit. (Yes, as I said, even Woshige drops combos -- but if Millia's combos on Jam are really hard, say, that doesn't suddenly make the matchup worse, or affect the matchup rating.) So, this glitch shouldn't affect the actual balance of the game (barring Justice shit). It does affect the hurdles I mentioned earlier. I don't see that as a problem.

Secondarily, I want to remind everyone what this glitch does (on everyone other than Justice, anyways): you can now perform a special by inputting a motion alone, instead of inputting a motion and pressing a button. That, to me, does not sound like a big deal. It removes hurdles and lowers the execution barrier, but nothing changes about the game balance.

[Rhannmah]

What I'm getting out of this thread is that a strangely large amount of top players think human error is an integral part of the game

Human error is the whole basis of fighting games. It's the entirety of what fighting games are about.

[Klaige]

You are completely missing the point that motions and inputs are part of what balances a character and their moves. If venom could suddenly do his charge moves with QCF motions the entire properties of his moves and play would have to be re-worked because it would open a boatload of unintended consequences for his gameplan. This is exactly the kind of slippery slope this macro glitch allows, you are completely changing the fundamentals of inputs and moves, and while it doesn't have THAT big of a impact on all the cast it does create unintended consequences and unfair advantages for characters that they are clearly never meant to have. You cannot argue to me in any shape way or form that Justice is meant to have 2 of the same missile on screen, or that she should be able to frame perfect launch every single new one while holding the others.

Hell i'll even post an easy counter argument for you, Anji has his double butterfly glitch, it's actually very similar in it's base nature. He obviously wasn't intended to have 2 butterflies on screen with his original design, but guess what, to execute it he has to do a frame perfect input. In theory you should always go for this, especially in the corner because it makes escaping butterfly oki infinitely more difficult, but there's an inherent risk, if you go for it and mess up you sacrifice your entire oki opportunity. That risk makes it balance itself out.... why? Because of the fucking execution involved. Now with this macro glitch i can literally sit and mash on the motion and eliminate a ton of that risk, even though the window varies depending on the character.

It's not even bad players or scrubs i worry about with these things, it's top level players who can get the absolute most out of the ability to now completely circumvent execution, and in this case circumvent an entire intended design of the move (i.e. justice have 2 of the same missile on screen).

You keep arguing that execution barriers and hurdles serve no purpose, that they are just this arbitrary things that we should be rid of forever because end game balance should handle everything. I'm sorry but you are flat out wrong. What you are basically saying is you want a contest of wits based entirely on decision making and that the only potential error should be if you made the wrong decision: Basically what you are saying is you want to play chess.

If you want to add in more and more tools to make these obviously unintended techniques easier then where is the line? Why don't we just get to the point where we just have the character do exactly what we THINK at that given moment, and completely remove the execution barrier entirely? You know the reason why, because it takes away from the entire fundamental premise of playing a fighting game. I am in total agreement that arbitrary execution for the sake of making execution THE THING in your game is a flawed design, but that's not what this is about, at all. This is a pandora's box that has absolutely no reason to be opened. If you're too lazy to work on execution a little bit then fighting games probably aren't for you. Human error IS a part of fighting games. Whether it be missing a reversal timing, dropping a combo, or simply making a poor decision, fighting games without human error would be pointless because at that point you simply take the best character in the game and watch them never ever lose.

You are taking a philosophy towards making fighting games more accessible (i.e. sirlins thoughts on motions and inputs), and broadening it to a point that defeats the entire fundamental purpose. It's not about one glitch breaking the entire gameplay balance, because regardless of how strong it is, that's unlikely, it's about starting a trend you can't stop, and that's steering the game to a point where execution becomes irrelevant. I promise you if you could actually play a game in that way (you can't) you'd lose interest quickly.

Execution is part of fighting games, deal with it or play Chess. Letting in a tool-assisted method to circumvent a completely intended restriction does not make the game better or more accessible. It cheapens the play at high level.

[Dacidbro]

Secondarily, I want to remind everyone what this glitch does (on everyone other than Justice, anyways): you can now perform a special by inputting a motion alone, instead of inputting a motion and pressing a button. That, to me, does not sound like a big deal. It removes hurdles and lowers the execution barrier, but nothing changes about the game balance.

The entire point of this thread is that the glitch breaks the game on Justice

Why would we stop talking about Justice

[Dusk Thanatos]

I'm not saying those barriers serve no purpose. They stratify players. They do separate the wheat from the chaff. I do, however, think the act of separating out players that can and players that can't isn't relevant to the balance of the game itself. I think it -is- relevant to the balance between players. That, however, isn't something that breaks the game. It changes the relations of the players, but does not change the game.

I have repeatedly mentioned an exception for the Justice glitch. That's slopping programming from ArcSys on the negative edge on the missiles. I don't think that was intended, but unintended things do crop up. Abusing it the way you can with the macro may well be impossible without macros, though I do believe double missile, in and of itself, is possible without macros. If it is, arcade will probably have to deal with it sooner or later, and we'll see how that pans out.

I want to go over this specific counter, though.

Hell i'll even post an easy counter argument for you, Anji has his double butterfly glitch, it's actually very similar in it's base nature. He obviously wasn't intended to have 2 butterflies on screen with his original design, but guess what, to execute it he has to do a frame perfect input. In theory you should always go for this, especially in the corner because it makes escaping butterfly oki infinitely more difficult, but there's an inherent risk, if you go for it and mess up you sacrifice your entire oki opportunity. That risk makes it balance itself out.... why? Because of the fucking execution involved. Now with this macro glitch i can literally sit and mash on the motion and eliminate a ton of that risk, even though the window varies depending on the character.

Unless you're insinuating it's impossible to get this right with enough accuracy that you feel comfortable doing double butterfly every time, this argument doesn't make sense. The only thing stopping double butterfly from being input with high accuracy is the player. The risk does not come from the difficulty of the input; the risk comes from the player's inability to consistently perform that input. The player could conceivably fix this and get it right every time. If the player does it right every time, there is no risk. If there's no risk, there's no balance of the kind you mention. The only way your argument is sensible is if getting double butterfly consistently is impossible, but there's plenty of evidence from other games to suggest that getting frame perfect inputs with high accuracy is possible. As a result, I can't accept this argument.

The entire point of this thread is that the glitch breaks the game on Justice

Why would we stop talking about Justice

No one knew about the Justice glitch at the time this thread was made. The Justice glitch isn't the only reason being offered for a macro ban.

[Dacidbro]

Okay, lets go step by step then.

Should macros be banned if Justice glitch exists? Yes, because Justice's gameplay is clearly not balanced for that to exist and it makes the character very stupid.

Should macros be banned if Justice glitch doesn't exist? Probably, because turbos have always been banned and this is doing more than a turbo does (for some characters), but an argument could at least be made that no one character is benefiting much more than others for it. Probably fair to add in that there will be disgruntled pad players as a result of the ban, so that's a con.

Then we get into all your craziness about how execution doesn't matter. It's an irrelevant side topic, but if execution doesn't matter why aren't scripts allowed? I'll just program buttons on my stick to do my combos or difficult neutral game tricks for me, is that ok?

[Klaige]

You can not accept it all you want, and yes it is impossible because the timing changes based on character size, how far away they are, their wakeup timing and a plethora of various other variables. It's a just frame timing on a moving target and the human eye isn't accurate enough to discern when a character is 1 pixel further away from them compared to last time which changes the target frame to a raw guess. No, it's not possible to do consistently, in fact it's why you only see even TOP LEVEL players try it on potemkin, because his hitbox is so wide that the timing is almost always exactly the same. Saying the risk doesnt come from the difficulty of the input but from the players inability to do it is fucking semantics and you know it, that's the same thing. You act like because something CAN be done consistently that makes it valid to offer up the ability to allow a tool-assited input into the equation. That's an absolutely awful precedent to set. So if i go practice double butterfly for the next 5 years and get it to where i can do that say 75% of the time, that should now be available to everyone via a tool-assist? Do you realize how absolutely stupid that sounds?

You want to trivialize the part of the game where people practice inputs, they practice techniques and add that to their decision making process. This is the basic principle of fighting games, you can't have it both ways and say execution is relevant to one type of balance and not the other. You are basically grasping at straws because you have some strange viewpoint that people who put time into execution shouldn't be rewarded for it, and while i get what you are trying to say, that simply practicing execution is not practicing the decision making part of the game, it's still a very valid part of fighting games themselves. No one just sits and practices raw execution with no decision making and succeeds, it takes the entire package. If you want raw execution but no decision making play rythm games. If you want all decision making and no execution, play Chess. The unique combination of the two is what makes fighting games (and other competitive games for that matter) a unique and fun experience.

You can't have your cake and eat it to, this one glitch alone offers up the ability for tool-assisted options everywhere because you don't think execution gaps between players are relevant to game balance, and you are very misguided in that view. Thankfully you are not the final vote on the subject and any TO with a lick of common sense will realize this is a can of worms that doesn't need opened and take care of it.

[Dusk Thanatos]

At no point have I said that execution doesn't matter. I have, however, said that execution is irrelevant to the balance of the game. What execution -is- relevant to is the relationship between players, as a player that makes good decisions and has good execution will win more often than one that makes equally good decisions but has poor execution. That's the gist of my outlook on execution, and I do think execution has a purpose: stratifying players is incredibly important for competitive games of any kind. That stratification is how you reward players for practice. You can even see me discussing this a while ago in a different thread:

I keep execution in the equation -somewhere- to make sure players that want to devote time to the game get rewarded, and also to make sure that there's enough "secret tech" to support a high level of play. (Supporting a high level of play also involves making sure there's arcane, useful knowledge, but that's a different bit altogether.) No one is going to keep playing your game if they can get beat by just any scrub who walks up to the machine, and no one wants to keep playing a game if there's nothing for them to learn or get better at.

That being said, to respond directly to Dacid, the only thing that I feel can be considered a reasonable standard for what to allow and not allow, in terms of execution aids, is the game itself. This isn't controversial. It's the stance everyone in this topic has taken, so far as I have seen. However, I'm privileging the PS3 version of +R over the arcade version, since that's the one we all have in front of us (unless you're fortunate enough to be in Japan near an arcade). I can't find it reasonable to privilege the arcade version if most people playing the game in the Dustloop community will never come near it, and most of the new blood won't even know there are differences, or understand why this macro glitch is preventing them from using the macros built into the game. -That- seems to be controversial in this topic, but that is my opinion.

[Dacidbro]

I would much faster take the more skillful parallel if it existed, and in this case it does (And was clearly the intended version. The macro glitch is quite apparently not ArcSys' goal here judging from some of the results). Prioritizing the Arcade version's intent makes way more sense.