[ZombieRommel]

First off, hi there.

I see AHolbert and ZHunter have already addressed most of the OP, but I feel personally compelled to respond as well.

I'll be the first to admit I haven't been as active on OS as I was on the original forums. You could say that I've been a little demoralized that the trolls, in a sense, triumphed. I enjoyed Yari's posts and the guy self-banned himself from the old forum. I enjoyed the atmosphere and the regulars from the old forum aside from the trolls.

So I've been slower to acclimate here since I see our departure from the old forums as a kind of displacement, a forced exodus that none of us really wanted. Don't get me wrong. I like it here. Most of the posts I've seen have been constructive and (gasp) coherent. The mods have been very welcoming and awesome to us.

As far as our roles in the game dev process and what we actually did, it's frankly too much to list, and I don't say that in some kind of hyperbolic, self-congratulatory way. Everyone contributed. Basically, the game was REALLY imbalanced when we got there. You could body flurry someone across the cage like Tekken and they couldn't block it. Some tactics were USELESS (jabs and straights). The ground momentum feature was pretty much entirely a product of conversations ZHunter and Solid had with GPD. The strike intercept was largely a product of a conversation between me, GPD, and Brian Hayes. The moveset adjustments via the patches were largely a product of our input, and more are coming. Aholbert has given a ton of input toward AI refinement that is still ongoing. Many of the perks you see in-game are a result of our input (not all, but some).

Some of the stuff we wanted, the devs either decided against or couldn't do because of limited resources. MTS wanted lots of stuff in that would've required brand new mocap. I personally wanted normal clock as default instead of accelerated for example, but a dev explained that they had done research and most people preferred accelerated. We honestly wanted the straight to be more powerful than it is right now. Each buff to the straight was extremely incremental, which is understandable, and ultimately the straight is in a good place, but it's not where we really wanted it.

Point being, it's not like we are in there giving the devs marching orders, pointing fingers and telling them what to do, all while we dine on endless free pizza. We're bouncing ideas off them and creating reasoned arguments for why certain elements of the game should change in one direction or another -- much as we did in our forum posts. They can (and do) offer reasoned counter-arguments. Compromises are often made. To hold the Game Changers 100% responsible is frankly stupid. And to be honest, holding the devs 100% responsible for the game is also stupid because they have a limited budget, timeline, and hardware spec to work with.