Flipping the (uns)table

Unstable is a process, it keeps moving and will not by any means forever stay in the state that it is at in any given moment in time for too long (until of course, it ceases forever). Now this might seem obvious, but it has a very important long term implication - if something is really deeply super wrong, it will trend towards getting changed, eventually.

Very few things in unstable are immediate, almost by design, the person in charge (ivy) requires ample time to properly sort out through the riff raff for one, and for another, since most big changes are entirely predicated on public sentiment, which namely takes time to fully build up and fester, you can see how even if something seems obvious to any given individual, it’s through the process of unstable and dialogue that it will eventually seep into other peoples minds. The only changes which get made immediately are in response to obviously disfunctional bugs introduced by a patch that had just landed, and I’m sure you can already think of an example, it happened 2 days ago with draw cancel after all.

And yet, some people interact with the system almost entirely in the short term, reacting to (the following is not a caricature) every tiny nerf with “they killed x character, ivy sly please save me!!!” and reacting to every buff with “ok thanks for the buff, now can you please buff x some more and in the meanwhile can you nerf y?”. Reacting to changes in this manner is at best aggravating and at worst, slowly, but very surely, starts seeping into the very fabric of the unstable ethos, until all is left is rancid complainers (even if they mask their complaints with a nice little ribbon of rethoric and the pretense of argument), who act like the world has already ended, even if all that occured in reality is an inherently transient (not nessecarily small, remember to not conflate the two) change.

This also of course plays into unstables propensity to trivialize feeling like the victim of change, amplified through the world’s beloved echo chamber effect. Statisically speaking, theres less cowboy players than ninja + wizard + robot + mutant players combined, and this goes for the whole cast - take anyone and they will have less representation than the rest combined. Now since a predominant chunk of the collective has taken up the aforementioned rancid attitude towards balancing of “my character has never done anything wrong and all the others are fundamentally misconstructed”, then it’s only a natural outcome that changes are, on the aggregate, nerfs , which often gets perceived as an attack (a personal one at that), blows the tangible effect of nerfs way out of proportion and makes you forget to ever look even a bit past your own little walled garden. So, yes, your character got nerfs, but everyone else also did, and the way nerfs are perceived goes both ways - what for you seems like a world ending change, others proposed with the idea that it was a minor setback, and what you propose with the idea of it being a teensy weensy little nerf, most definitely also signals the end of the world for the other side, even if objectively, neither is as impactful as the affected side considers it to be.

So, going back to prorated DI, on release it fucked everyone up across the board, then, in order, mutant got reduced proration on swipe, the next big patch a couple of days later ninja got +1 proration on punch and robot got reduced overflow knocback, so that it doesn’t drop after conc. That is to say, we started correcting for the effects of the change to bring damage values back to where they were initially (which is in part why DI proration is such an ineffective change. It breeds discussion that we could’ve avoided by just not implementing it, and now we need to collectively do even more work on combos, which is probably the most devisive subject possible - neither side never actually knows what they are talking about, because most people (in the best case scenario mind you) understand how to combo and can weigh the implications of chagnes only on one character). This process is still ongoing, what we have right now is not set in stone, and I am almost certain in thinking that someone, and that someone might very well be you, will propose proration changes on cowboy, e.g. pommel +1 proration.

And boy if only I had scrolled down 5 messages before typing this paragraph to see you doing exactly that. To not misconstruct your argument I will of course properly respond. Framing the ninja prt change as a complete overwrite of prorated DI is misinformed - the damage remains comparable (although slightly less) to stable, however the routes themselves have substantively changed, which is nominally the whole point of prorated DI, it wasn’t to nerf damage, it was to make routing more diverse across different starters, so you could even say that the changes on ninja punch did succesfully fulfill this purpose. However, and this is important, prorated DI makes it so that we have to play this complicated push and pull with every move under the sun - not exactly great when we have more pressing issues to get to.

Ultimately, I understand. Yomi is shifting away from the thing you fell in love with towards some unknown future, which is only exhasterbated by the fact that the majority of players discussing on unstable as of present day have only ever known one version of this game, and getting a bit angry with the details of the whole ordeal is only a natural reaction, but it is one that is ultimately not condusive to properly moving this along in the right direction.

Ouija boards work if everyone is pushing only ever so slightly. Flipping over the table will only knock down the board.