hmm, lets do a tier list on characters from UMK3 and we may have an answer.

Let's not.

Kabal is the best in UMK3, there is no questioning it...it is fact.

"Kabal is the safest character in the game = the best, low risk/high reward. "

the risk you take depends highly on your opponent's skills, and the reward depends mainly on your own skills. so it's definitely not a proven fact that Kabal beats all the others "so much skilled "players.


" you don't understand that mathematics has something to do with which character is better. It's about Kabal being able to force other characters into risk situations he can capitalize on faster and better than any other character. Not combo damage, not personal ability, it is the characters' usefulness in itself."

and can you tell me what worths Kabal in bad hands? you definitely can't deny that it's the player in fact who gives or not all his power to Kabal.
and there are not sufficiently important differences of effectiveness between characters like Kabal or human smoke to allow you to say "even the average Kabal player can make it against very good human smoke players".
I sometimes wander if you really read what I write, because I'm pretty sure you haven't understood the concept of the optimal strategy. one for all, there is NONE optimal strategy in the umk3 game, even if you're playing with your "Kabal god ". to be clear, that means that chance will always play a part (and it can be decisive between 2 good players) ,unlikely to games like marienbad or some other mathematical games.

whatever you can think about the chance in the mk games Matt, but it's also the "what will he think I will think" that matters and when I say : the mk games are a bit like "paper, scissors, stone" , it's not only true but decisive between the same skilled players.
when the match is well balanced, the player who is about to win is always more vulnerable (probably because of the psychological pressure, and that is especially true during the tournaments).
if you don't want to see that, you still won't understand yet why you have lost against me.
I also play these mk games from the very beginning, so I don't have any lessons to receive from you or from any others (maybe about the glitches, but since I'm not interested in having a yellow jade or a pink shang tsung, I really don't care about that crap).

well, if Konqrr the perrot look at our matches, I suggest him to do it better. Matt, you're talking about "lucky outrageous wins" when these wins are mines, but I guess that your very own wins are "terrific" ones, is that right ? it really seems to me like the excuse of a bad loser since you even had the advantage of the ping ! so don't push it ...
I'm sorry if it doesn't please you but I'm better than you. in fact until now, I haven't met mk players even just as good as me, I kick everyone's asses in Europe and in England, and make some good european players better. I also beat mostly of the amercian players even with a handicap.
so Konqrr, unless you're better than sin, I don't even need to play with you to know wheither you're sufficiently well placed to "judge" my matches against him.

Mike, I'm afraid you have forgotten to precise something : when we were playing each other I still was using the keyboard*, (and I even don't talk anymore about my handicap related to the servers in which we were playing) and even like that, it was balanced so we know what it means.


* like during my very first matches against sin besides


pierre

You continually post things that are ONLY related to people's individual skills, when I'm talking about the character Kabal, out of the hands of a person, when you break down his character alone vs all the other characters, in terms of strengths and weaknesses. I'm not talking about people using Kabal, I'm talking about Kabal the character's fundamental design. I don't know what it's going to take to get you to understand that.

When it comes down to it, this is how you think about it. Any character has a chance vs any character depending on players individual skills. So by saying a shitty Kabal cannot beat the best Sheeva in the world, that might be true, but it's not dealing with both character at their highest potential.

The best Kabal player in the world will always beat the best Human Smoke player if they both play the characters at their best. In order for Human Smoke to be effective you MUST abuse his teleport punch for manueverability, but a good Kabal player will take advantage of that. If you rush down the Human Smoke player, he HAS to move in order to not be chipped to death, and a good Kabal players knows how to abuse the spin any time the Smoke player flinches in circumstances where he cannot counter, nor block a spin, it's not arguable man. Under your terms, you simply haven't played the right Kabal, under the rest of the competitive MK world's terms, you're just not good enough to understand.

Matt

I keep doing the difference between the "really used " abilities and the "inherent potential" of a character to try to show you that sentences like "The best Kabal player in the world will always beat the best Human Smoke player if they both play the characters at their best." don't mean anything since you simply can't check it ... who can say he plays a character at his best ?? even the conceptors of the game would agree with me, since many combos that they even couldn't imagine were discovered.... if you want to deal with concepts, you have to keep in mind that you only will face "played" kabals and "played" characters, and never a theorical mysterious kabal ... you can't dissociate artificially the potential from the result because then, how will you compare kabal's power and h.smoke's power if you can't experiment it? you will see that it's impossible
unless you begin to check it , and therefore playing with them to see if the reality follow your idea....
you just can't escape the fact that you have to play with the characters if you want to compare them, so you can't in no way just use a theorical knowledge about the moves and possibilities to draw conclusions about the gameplay (you have to play and to check it ! )... I hope you have understood now.

now one more precision: what I have written and the idea of a class of more effective characters in the game are not necessarly contradictory, like for example if some characters look like each other very much : indeed everyone will agree that human smoke is better than scorpion, since he has all his moves plus some other things..so unless it's obvious like this case, you can't compare characters if they present too many differences.
so you just can say "kabal is the most effective character" if you think that way, but you can't write things like "if played at his best" cause it's a concept, and in no way checkable without playing.

now that we're ok on this (at least I hope) , I always think that the most "effective"character is h.smoke and not kabal. However we can end this endless thread and have a concrete result if you agree to do what I have suggested you (playing 10/15 matches with thrower or moe, and you always will pick kabal and the other guy always will take h.smoke, and then you tell us here about the results...and I'm ready to thrust you about the result, so you can see I even don't doubt about your intellectual honestness) . but the fact that you do like you haven't heard definitely makes me think I'm right .

oh, a last thing, please stop saying crap like "you're not good enough to understand " because 1) it's a bit unpleasant for me 2) from your matches with me, nothing allow you to think that way, since there is nothing you can do and not me 3) in fact even someone who can't play very well umk3 can understand what I'm talking about, so understanding my post has nothing to do with your personal abilities in the game (at least for my two first paragraphs), it's just about logic and common sense.

pierre

Oh Lord.

Don't waste your breath Maffa dude,apparently nobody's allowed to disagree with MK2KUNG,god forbid.I agree with you though maffa,it all depends on who counters who with who,sometimes different players are better with certain characters and succeed in doing so,this guy simply does not want to hear that.

You can believe whatever your naive world wants you to, but in the real world (when it comes to this game at least) Kabal is the best character and there's nothing you, or anyone else can do to change that. Your personal opinion is not required. Obey Kabal. When you have two shit players against eachother, of course they have a chance of beating anyone with anyone, when you have two of the best players in the world going at it at an arcade machine in a tournament, if one of them has to resort to Kabal, they will, and that Kabal will win. Kabal not winning tournaments is only due to respect between players simply "not picking" him because winning with Kabal doesn't prove anything, if that doesn't get you to understand the reasoning behind Kabal being the best, nothing will.

This discussion ends now on my part, before it gets any more pages.

Matt

Mods, please close this ridiculous thread.

LOL,WOW,someones a tad bit conceded!!!!!!!!!!LOL,just wow,Kabals your god too right???

MK3 - Kabal, Sub-Zero (Sub-Zero gets a mention mostly because of the ice clone, in UMK3 they changed it so that if a player was against you the clone would disapear and that really hurt Sub-Zero's game)
UMK3 - Kabal (even tho they lowerd the damage of his botton link combos he still remained almost as dangerous)
MKT - Kabal, Noob-Saibot ( I mention Noob because of his disabler move which was crazy fast and had very fast recovery time, also his teleport was pretty good, anyone Joe Nobody could get a 50% combo with him very easily)
MK4 - Tanya (broken broken)
MKG - Sektor and Kitana (broken as hell)

Let me try and explain this Kabal thing in lamo. We aren't saying it's impossible to defeat Kabal were saying that a skilled player using Kabal is more then likely going to win because he is the best character in the game. It's like taking your Ford Focus to a race against a Dodge Viper. Which car would you put your money on?

Yeah guys you gotta think of the Kabal thing in theoretical scientific terms. If there was like a controlled scientific experiment on UMK3, it would reveal that Kabal is the best character. There are random variables such as differences in player skill or someone having an "off" day or whatever. But the controlled experiment would eliminate those variables (through experimental repetition and a control group and all that) and mathematically determine the most useful player. Not to say those variables don't affect real-world play, because they do. But in the hands of two theoretical ideal players, this lab experiment would show that Kabal wins.

Just think about basic geometry stuff that you learn in school. You'll learn about a "line." The geometric "line" has no starting point or end point. You don't actually encounter such a figure in real life, it's just a theoretical concept to help you measure real-world things and look at problems on a theoretical level.

Busta that is so far beyond how they look at games it's not even funny, lol, but it does explain things very well.

Matt

Like i said from the get-go its all about opinions people,some of us either agree or disagree,its that simple,there is no wrong or right in this case,its not a case of he murdered her,hes guilty ,hes not,that case has a right from wrong,this is a mere videogame opinion,and anyone who thinks that their opinions are better are just losers,you can't state oh this is a fact,but yet in reality it's an opinion based merely on your success.

Unless you literally buy the arcade machine rip it apart,go through all of the programming,break down every little detail,every little nick nack,and actually do all of that and then some,and come back and have a report layed out for me and everyone to else to carefully anaylize,then talk to me......just because you succeed online in Kallierma or whatever its called ,i forgot,and beat up 10 guys means nothing,do it on a real online server system like xbox with like 90-100,000 people then brag.

when you guys say "if a computer could do it ", you have to know that even if it is of course possible to program the computer to play vs itself , you will not be allowed to draw any conclusions about the "best " character of the game : indeed there are 2 points to develop :

1) if the program is sufficiently complicated (like the programs of the mk games for example), there can appear random phenomenons during the execution of the program, which will cause an important unpredictability about the result , that's indeed somewhat related to the chaos theory, if there is a slight difference between the initials conditions, we can have very different results, as well as quite surprising ones : for example, in some videogames, after a moment, the characters can take a very weird and stupid behaviour (like facing in the opposite direction of your opponent, or just always giving punches in the void), we all have already met things like that, in fact that kind of "buggs" come of the program itself of course, but since the cause is impossible (or at least very hard) to identify, there is a high unpredictibality about the behaviour of the computer, and that is a problem if you want to be very accurate in order to determine the best character of the game. but yes, we can reasonably reduce that problem if we do a sufficiently high number of tests, since a "bugged" behaviour is less frequent than a normal one ...so if we do very many matches, we can partially resolve that problem, however it will always remain inaccuracies about the fully justified of the result, since an advantage (for example a very effective move against a human player) can become a disadvantage if used by the computer and vice versa : I take for example the case of the invisibility move of smoke or reptile in umk3, of course even if this move is very useful against a human player, it's totally useless against the computer (and can even make the things harder for you ) , since the computer doesn't need to see you, it just computes your new position at each second.

but the main point is the following one :

2) we can't teach a computer to create very specific strategies by itself (I take the example of the kung lao's infinite combo, which is of course missing of the umk3 computer's kung lao fighting style) so it depends already on what we can put as given to the computer, and that always can change cause human players can improve, so the results of the computer's matches are simply not reliable.
moreover, there is a clue about the non existence of a hierarchy between the characters : there is no transitivity about the results, I mean if A beats B, and if B beats C, then A can lose against C , (with A, B, C are being controlled by the computer) ...so it's just like I say from the start, the only existing hierarchy is the one between the players, and not between the characters.
moreover, who can pretend " I play this character at his best ", impossible to say ! so we even can't have the optimal strategy for one character, so we even don't have the program we want to implement ! when MK2kung repeats endlessly that Kabal rules (probably because it's the opinion of a better player than him, the Lex guy ) he badly forgets that none character can be played at his best and that it depends in fact on so many factors.

Bustauppa, you may have forgotten something ,

you say :

"There are random variables such as differences in player skill or someone having an "off" day or whatever. But the controlled experiment would eliminate those variables (through experimental repetition and a control group and all that) and mathematically determine the most useful player. Not to say those variables don't affect real-world play, because they do. But in the hands of two theoretical ideal players, this lab experiment would show that Kabal wins. "

in fact, a theorical ideal player can't do any moves, since there is no optimal strategy in umk3 and therefore each move is potentially an error , it means each move always can be used in some way to be countered. I just mean it's impossible to create/implemente the best of a character, since we can't have it.
we just can say "when I play with him/her, I win more often" or "that character is really effective against that another one" or "that one is really powerful, he has high damage combos", but if you go like "this one is the best character in the game", then you just say something that can't be checked and that is conceptually wrong. I don't know how I can be easier to understand .... Matt I don't know how long it will take to make you understand that, but I hope it will be quick now.
Make sure you have understood before disagree please.

pierre

Opinions are for people that don't know or can't handle the truth.

whatever some of you can think about it , but my 2 points in my previous post are irrefutable. I can even say that only human beings are able to discover the real effectiveness of the moves in the game, for example like I said before, the invisibility move doesn't mean anything for the computer, and it's however a very important move..so the computer can't deal with all of the possibilities in the game.
Moreover, the computer has really an artificial/weird way of playing ( I just will take this example : in mk2, when you try to sweep your opponent , the computer is able to throw you, even from an impossible distance for a human player) so that doesn't reflect at all what we can really do in the game. so the idea of programmed characters to play against each other is even useless. I can't repeat enough that the computer can't think of all the possibilities and has a too artificial game, because of that, none conclusions based on it can be drawn.
the point is: you're very good or not with a character. and that's all.


pierre

I can see what you're getting at, but none of us are talking about the AI here. CPU vs CPU matches won't prove anything, no one's trying to argue that.

??? but then if you agree with me that CPU vs CPU matches won't prove anything, then it's just impossible to prove kabal's superiority since if you ask 2 players to play against each other, the result can depend on too many factors like chance and skills.....so you just agree with me when I say no one can prove arbitrary sentences like "the best kabal in the world can outplay every other characters at their best "

pierre

Nickodermus only a loser would say something like that,but i guess your born like that ,your from Canada,so im really not surprised,Your like a little baby,always expecting mommy to wipe your ass for you,Always asking help from America,you guys put in your 2 cents about war,but yet you want our help all the time..and are not willing to fight..how ironic

Farewell to this forum,talk all the shit you guys want,because im not coming back to these forums,with people who think they are the UMK3 gods,hardly!!!

The only logical person in here is Maffa,dude,good luck man arguing with these know it alls,they think that their opinions are facts,above everyone elses,huh,really...I agree with you maffa,its all about match ups,bottom line!!!!

BustaUppa wrote:

"I can see what you're getting at, but none of us are talking about the AI here. CPU vs CPU matches won't prove anything, no one's trying to argue that. "

you're sure? then, read this excerpt from one of Matt's previous posts:

"If you programmed two computers to play Kabal perfectly and any other character perfectly against eachother, Kabal will either always win, or both characters will duck and block and never move."

you see, he was trying to convince me of the superiority of Kabal by saying that a "perfect kabal" programmed could beat any other characters, no matter if they are "perfectly" programmed too.
that's just why I was talking about the AI . I wanted to bring you that information because I don't want you to believe I disgress.

pierre

Post a counter strategy that would let Human Smoke beat Kabal, and I will explain to you why it won't work. This will prove if you know Kabal well enough to be able to even suggest he is not the best character in the game.

Matt

Ha ha... I love the flame attempt. I don't know what me being canadian has to do with the fact that you're too bull headed to listen to the people that know this game best. I've never claimed to be a UMK3 god in fact I'm past my prime when it comes to the game. As for the rest of your pissy attack on Canada, I'm not gonna dignify that with a response since it's obvious that you're ignorant to what's really happening in the world.

Its ok nikodermus,if Canada gets attacked,i'll bet 1million bucks that you guys will come asking the USA for help like always,i know my shit about MK,i have been an mk fan since it all began,it was only as much a flame as your opinion comment concerning the whole aspect of the truth,towards me pal.All that comment says is that you cannot respect other peoples opinions,obviously you have your own belief that "opinions are for people that can't handle the truth"however if that were actually true,then this world would be pretty darn boring,perhaps things are different in canada.If no one had any opinions then their would be nothing to live for,opinions lead to ideas,ideas lead to experiments,experiments lead to facts,and facts lead to life,so according to you,you should be very happy if the whole world was like that movie "Equilibrium"If you have not seen it,pick it up,your love it.The whole world druged to be kept 100% emotionless,so that theirs no war,thus the whole world controlled by one mind behind this idea,yeah that seems like a great idea,so instead of the world having emotions and individual opinions,the world will be controlled by one individual psychotic individual by making it a law to have the whole world live emotionless forever.LOL

I thought you where leaving ???