Imagine you wanted to get into chess. Ridiculous, I know, but humour me.

Maybe you go to lichess.org and go through the tutorial. You learn what the rules are and how all the pieces move. Eventually you finish your lessons on castling and en passant, then you start playing some games against the computer. You might even invite a friend or go online and play with other people.

You soon run into a wall and get motivated to actually improve. You start studying openings and learning about center control in your free time. YouTube and Twitch start recommending you chess channels, and you begin to enjoy spectating, and might follow players you find insightful. You may even grind 10,000 games and 20,000 checkmate puzzles and hit 1900 elo.

By this point, you’re probably a year or two into your journey and you’re having a great time. The game is in a stable competitive orbit, and you feel like your skill, and all of the work you’ve put into achieving it, is being rewarded. Your rating has slowly but surely been rising and you’re looking forward to going to your next local tournament.

Imagine your horror when you arrive at the tournament and find out that the board is now 9x9 squares and zero-indexed. Pawns now move diagonally and your dark-squared bishop now moves like a kinsho. Your queenside knight is also missing and in its place is a new piece called the joker, which can move twice per turn onto any square on the board. You also need to pay $10 otherwise you can’t use the joker. Welcome to live-service fighting games.

You ask them why they changed the rules. They tell you that it’s boring to play the same game over and over again, and boring to watch the same people win all the time. They also say it’s very hard and expensive to maintain the game so they need to keep making changes so that they can charge you for it. Sounds pretty silly, doesn’t it? Yet somehow this logic is eaten up when it comes to fighting games.

The point of a fighting game is to play over and over again. Look at how many people get upset when fighting games come out in the current year and still don’t have a rematch option. It’s not an RPG that you play through to the end and never look back at. It has ultimate replay value. You want to keep playing because 1. it’s fun, and 2. you want to get better.

If the rules of the game keep changing, then someone who picked the game up yesterday is just as good as you despite all of your practice until that point. It completely disrespects the player’s effort and time, because now you have to do your homework all over again as well. It doesn’t breed better players either, because now you don’t need to learn how to deal with that broken move or character; you can just wait for it to get nerfed. This is the meta play, so why bother?

Complaining about the same people or characters winning repeatedly is also completely asinine. They are the best, so why should they not be winning? If you need to break your opponents’ legs because you can’t beat them in a race then perhaps the race is not what you should be primarily concerned with.

Watching the same top players / characters is also only boring if you have two brain cells left and they’re trying to kill each other. Even if there are favourites to win, appreciating how they get to that win is part of the spectating experience. The fact that there are favourites at all is what makes upsets exciting. If you just want to bet on red and spin the roulette then you can play Smash.

Let’s be honest, the only reason this is happening is money. Video games are a business and the goal is to turn a profit. They’ve figured out that they don’t need to make good games to make money anymore. They can just make barely functional games (tbh even this is dubious at this point), add a new stage or character every month, and change the frame data without rhyme or reason. Then they just need to ensure there’s five cutscenes per round so they can say esports, and the execs are now happy.

Stop paying money for this shit, and stop playing it.

Stop whining for buffs and nerfs and bimbos from Final Fantasy and himbos from Yakuza.

Come join me in Tag 2 and P4U2 until someone makes a good fighting game and promises not to touch it once they’re done.

See also: Tatami Video Game Blues