Balancing fighting games isn’t easy. Outside of the tools each character has and how they function, fighting game developers have to take all kinds of other things, like match ups and the player’s experience playing / fighting that character, into account when trying to gauge what kinds of buffs and nerfs they need to make.
In a recent interview with Famitsu, Street Fighter 6 director Takayuki Nakayama spoke a bit about the development of balance changes for the game, and surprisingly, he specifically notes that character usage doesn’t factor in as much as you’d think.
As we all know, Capcom keeps track of and posts official stats for Street Fighter 6 over on the game’s website. They’re updated every month with the previous month’s outlook, sharing not only character usage online, skill levels, and control type, but also win rate percentages per fighter.
Every month, we take a close look at what the most recent character usage data looks like to see which world warriors are the most popular in online ranked matches. Relatively speaking, seeing which characters are used most often and how much we’re seeing them in higher ranks like Master and Legend does add pieces to the puzzle of how strong (or not) they are.
However, it doesn’t appear that Capcom sees it this way internally. According to Nakayama, the online character usage stats don’t factor in much when balance changes are being considered, though he does explain that if a character is seeing little play, the team will look at ways of making said character more appealing to players.
Famitsu: “By the way, on the official site you have details like character data displayed. There’s also character usage rates, is this something you look at when you do balance changes?”
Nakayama: “We don’t use it much for our balance changes, but we do have meetings where we talk about ‘This character has a very low playrate, how do we make that go up?’ Of course, that’s not something that has a direct answer and the playrate is just part of the puzzle. In the end, it’s just one data point of many.
“For example, Dhalsim has a low playrate, but that doesn’t mean he’s a ‘weak’ character, right? Conversely, the fact that he’s not played much becomes a strength in itself. So because of this, we barely use that data in our balancing decisions.”
It’s interesting to see Nakayama say that ranked match character usage is “barely used” in balancing decisions, but his explanation does make sense. Dhalsim is a great example to use here as he is often considered a specialist character, and just because he isn’t used a lot online, it doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s weak.
Based on the developer notes provided with the Season 2 balance changes about each character, we do know that a big area of focus for Capcom when making these changes revolves around what each specific character can do relative to what they’re designed to do in battle. An incredibly strong Season 1 character in Luke saw some of his anti-air and poke moves toned down as they were just too oppressive, but to further encourage neutral play, Capcom bolstered up his forward moving normals to make them easier to use.
Also in this interview, Nakayama spoke about the Season 2 set of DLC characters briefly, noting that fans are going to be very surprised by the selections.
Translations in this story provided by Nicholas “MajinTenshinhan” Taylor.