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I'll answer your last question first. And the answer is "A lot of things."
If we want to get away from inflated strike counts, then we need to get away from a block break system that requires 3 strikes to land the 4th.
Which means that blocking in general probably needs to be harder and take more thought. Defense in general does.
I would personally like to see front/side blocking instead of high/low, with blocking + slipping enabled. High/low is very arcadey, encourages body spamming, and makes blocking mixups to the head far too easy.
The reason a lot of players poke out the jab (despite it being easily countered) is because they're trying to create the psychological threat of pressure, break the block, and make the defender panic. If we didn't need jabs to get through a turtle's high block, you'd see people do less jab poking in general.
But I would argue that if you can't deal with jab pressure now, then it's a skill issue, because jab spam has numerous effective counters.
The next element of encouraging more realistic fights is adding a strike range distinction between jabs/straights and hooks. Right now they all share the same range - "punch range". And so this means that you are dealing with speed differentials (which do matter) but not meaningful range differentials. This will help outside fighting, but it will also not necessarily make life any easier for players who already crumble to jab pressure. In any event, we need this, because a lot of subtlety and nuance in the striking is lost because of how the ranges are clumped together.
We need the ability, as the aggressor, to cut off the cage purely via movement. Watch Darren Till or Conor fight and you see them do this all the time. They aggressively head off the cage. They use footwork to cut off angles and use the threat of aggression without needing to actually strike, and they are able to hem in opponents. In UFC3 this isn't possible due to how the locomotion works and how easily defenders can glide off the cage while walking sideways and blocking.
Haptic feedback needs to be disabled in ranked. People abuse the feature to telepathically block strikes, which becomes exceedingly more broken at heavier weight classes where the strikes are slower. Slower startup on strikes means more time for people to react to the haptic feedback and block accordingly.
We need strikes off the clinch break and a total redesign of the clinch system in general. There's more, but I'd be here forever. These are some of my top items.
I'm not sure what level of competition you're playing against as I don't know your gamer tag. In any given season on PS4, I hover between the top 60 and top 20 players. I can break top 10 if I no-life the game really hard and only play as top characters.
Against the pool of players I'm up against (top players), several of them employ some variant of a running style. A lot of them will pick a grappler and try to win through some combination of leg kicks, slip straights, randomly planting to throw fast combos, and doubles from the GA gained from the opponent moving forward.
The reason I consider this style to be cheesy isn't because I don't like it. In Fight Night Champion, I mained Ali for months, jabbed people to death on the outside, and got plenty of hatemail calling me a b*tch. No, the reason the style is cheesy is because it literally doesn't have any kind of hard counter. In FNC, a skillful player could use an inside fighter to cut off the ring and then work my body. The ring corners were sticky, so if I got caught there, they could go to town and I'd enter survival mode. The dashes / lunges enabled offensive players to head off the ring without ever needing to throw a strike. The locomotion allowed for movement-based defensive and offensive strategies to work.
In UFC3, because of how the locomotion works, because of how the camera lags behind the actual locomotion, because of physics bugs that happen when one fighter is walking diagonally backwards (so-called "blowback" or "forcefield" bugs), it is NOT POSSIBLE to cut off the cage.
Defeating pressure in UFC3 is a question of skill. If the aggressor knows what he's doing, it CAN be hard to defend against and I'm not disputing that. BUT, there are PLENTY of tools to defeat aggression and the actual mechanics themselves are tilted toward favoring defense. This is why I keep listing the NUMEROUS penalties for coming forward.
Defeating a RUNNER in UFC3 is NOT a question of skill. The aggressor simply DOES NOT HAVE THE TOOLS necessary to head off the octagon. You are forced to chase. In real fights, we often hear commentators (especially Cruz) say something like "Okay, he's just chasing Fighter X in a straight line. He needs to be cutting off the ring and stepping out to an angle to head off and contain Fighter X."
In UFC3, we CANNOT do that because it is not allowed on a mechanical level. You are forced to chase head-first like an idiot. If the other guy gets aggressive or chooses to stand his ground, then you don't need to worry about this. BUT if the other guy decides to run for the hills, then suddenly you have about 6 core game mechanics tilted strongly against you and there's nothing you can do about it. All you can do is chase head-first like an amateur and hope the other guy screws up. You can throw out kicks, hope they're in range, hope he doesn't abuse haptic feedback to stop and immediately catch or check them.
So to summarize very simply, here is the reality (as I see it) in UFC3: On a casual / moderate skill level, pressure is a LOT more effective than it is at a high skill level. Why? Defense requires more patience and calculation. The aggressor at a casual skill level can mash buttons and have some degree of success.
A point ZHunter brought up to me and that I agree with is that this actually mirrors how a lot of small-town local fight cards happen. You don't see a technical back and forth like you do in the UFC. On small-town MMA cards, one guy often steamrolls the other in what looks like a stomp. Because defense is harder in real life and generally in the game. So at a low level in real life MMA and in the game, people get rolled by aggression. But while defense is harder, it is very effective if mastered in real life and in the game. The tools to stop pressure are in the game, and the mechanics are in fact tilted toward stopping pressure, as I've pointed out numerous times. While offense is easier on a casual level, the tools do not exist to stop defensive strategies at a high level in the game.
Make sense?
The critical point: Aggression is easier to execute, but tools exist to shut down aggression strongly.
Defense is harder, but tools to shut down some forms of defense do not exist in the game.
So at upper levels of play, where everyone is good, being the aggressor becomes extremely dangerous because other players know there are numerous tools to shut it down. They know about forward-moving vulnerability, they know about forward-moving startup. They know they can lunge strikes to get huge punishes. They know they can use an outside slip-straight to counter jabs on a whim at any time.
They also know that the game bugs out if they walk diagonally-backward and block. They know that occasionally, strikes that should reach won't, and forcefield bugs will happen that push the aggressor backward. They know that someone coming forward is ceding a lot of GA and opening themselves up to a takedown. They know that the game doesn't calculate octagon control in the scoring system at all, only damage. They know that the cage corners aren't sticky, so they can just walk sideways and glide for days, sitting on grapple denies. They know that significant strikes, when slipped, cost a LOT of stamina, especially in conjunction with attacking the body.
The reality is that most people on this forum who complain about aggression could be as aggressive as they wanted to be, with any fighter they wanted, and they would lose to Pryoxis 19 times out of 20 as he just sits there with his guard up, slips them, makes them look silly, and comes into round 3 with close to 100% stamina while they have 30%.
Why? Because defensive tools are in the game and good players use them to devastating effect. The devs can't MAKE people use the tools, though. They can only put the tools in the game.
If any of you are consistently getting steamrolled by people who bulldoze forward, it is a skill issue, point blank period. And this is especially true if you are not in the top 50 or so players.
Watch Pryoxis Twitch and Youtube. Watch MartialMind youtube. Watch the sea of aggressive players get WORKED.
Check out the two fights here between Martial and YoungSinatra. YoungSinatra is a hyper aggressive player in the top 100. He was using Gaethje here. Watch Martial's rematch and pay attention to what he does. Patience. Good blocking. Clinches to slow the fight. Teeps to slow the fight. A body attack to zap stamina. Shutting down aggression is extremely doable in the game. ALL the tools are there.
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