Critical Burst Sit-Down stuns - your rationale for these being good is that the opponent cannot recover from them, i.e. damage is guaranteed. I have a SERIOUS problem with this concerning risk reward. Imo either an option should be highly risky and highly rewarding, or little risk and carrying little reward, and so on with options on a scale. It's OK to make some options better or worse than others, e.g. by making some characters have less risky and more rewarding options at a certain range or given a sufficient advantage, because this allows you to create more diverse characters and allows players to devise more interesting strategies. But giving characters options that are very high reward and very low risk, that can be used in a lot of situations, is in my opinion really really bad.
For example, SCV can be a pretty fun game, but I have a problem with certain attacks that have so many strong properties that literally the best thing for you to do is use them as often as possible, i.e. to spam them to death. Within the context of the game, there are certain attacks that are most if not all of: fast, safe or even + on block, hard to evade, long range, and lead to a very high damage combo. The problem with these attacks is that the best players will spam them, because their risk/reward ratio is so skewed that it is exactly the right thing to do in many many situations.
To me it looks like these stuns and CB attacks meet that criteria. Attacks that lead to guaranteed damage must be balanced to avoid them being spammable. If every time you put me in a stun, I have to guess "will he do CB or not" and then I guess wrong, and 70% of my health bar is gone as a result of one wrong guess, I just don't think that's gonna make a fun game. Same with sit down stuns, if they guarantee a huge combo, then of course you will want to do these over and over again.
From a competitive point of view, there is absolutely nothing wrong with using the same attacks over and over. If you are unable to adapt to someone using the same moves or options everyting, then that is your problem, not theirs, not the developers. To quote Sirlin "Play to win, not to do "difficult" moves".
I would have no problem with these options if actually making them happen was a very difficult and risky thing to do. But otherwise, I really don't see how it can be a good thing. Getting hit by one attack and then watching your opponent do the same 70% combo you've seen 3000 times before is just not fun.
Some of the best, deepest, most competitive fighters ever to hit the tournament circuit, ones that have been played for decades on one, allow you to do this and more.
Guard Breaks and NH launchers - similar issue to the one before. Basically it's to avoid spam being the main gameplay option. If an attack launches on NH, or causes a guard burst with guaranteed follow-ups, I would at least like it to be very slow, very unsafe, or have terrible range, or a combination of those things.
There are exceptions to the spam rule. For example. SCIV Astaroth was very much designed to be able to spam Bullrush. It was inherent to the design of the character, a big monster who appeared to be a ranged monster, but could also be devastating charging in to close range, attempting to grab his opponent. It made him a unique and interesting character who played very differently to the rest of the cast, and his style created a unique set of mind games for that match-up. And importantly, Bullrush didn't lead to a 35%+ combo on hit.
Another example is Ryu fireball. This attack is slow, does little damage and is extremely risky, but is a fullscreen attack that does chip damage on block and is a perfect zoning / mindgame tool. Again the design of the character makes the move spammable while still making the match-up interesting.
In Super Turbo, this match-up is interesting precisely because Ryu shuts down almost half the cast, once he gets that fireball trap running, it's pretty hard to get out. It's interesting because it forces players to learn to use whatever tools their character has to get in and beat Ryu. For example, Blanka almost has zero chance of getting in, but in the hands of a good Blanka player, once he does get in, they can still wreck shop.
But if DOA5 characters have GB and launch options like you described, leading to solid damage, and carry little risk or too much application, we're just gonna see them spammed, without any sort of real strategy being present behind them other than going for max damage. I can't see how this could be a good thing.
This happens in every fighting game that's played competitively. People will always use the best options available to them. Taking those out or trying to make everything a "best option" simply leads to a game where randomness is rewarded, which is terrible from a competitive point of view. The only valid reasons to drop a max damage combo are to either reset to get past damage/hitstun scaling or to set your opponent up in a position where they'll end up eating even more damage (vortex).
Football (soccer) is a fun game. CoD and Mario Kart are fun games. Not everybody likes them, but they are tremendously successful games, primarily because they are fun for everyone to play. Any software developers that start making games just for the hardcore community are going to die a horrible death. Games are meant to be fun, they have to be fun. Changes to the system that just make the game simply less fun to play for most people will cripple DOA from the start. If loads of people play the game and love it, a few will have the talent, time and dedication to take it to a pro level, but you have to start with a good game to begin with. Football or chess of CoD would be nothing if you had to be a grand master to get any enjoyment out of the game. And with DOA competing with existing franchises in a market (FG) that isn't all that popular anyway, I think it is supremely important to make sure that old fans, existing fans and potential new fans are catered to as best as possible, and that hardcore adjustments are made in tamdem with these primary goals.
Hmm way too long like I thought, I might post this on FSD as I'm not sure SCV players who second as DOA fans will really want to read all this...
The casual gamer cares nothing about how the game plays at high levels. They'll simply buy the game because of "lolbewbs." Appealing to the FGC means that the game finally gets to develop the competitive scene that it has needed for so long.
EDIT:
On the roster thing, Bryan (DrDogg) works for IGN, so we can assume that TN may have told them certain things that us regular folk aren't supposed to know yet.
The specific situation I was referring to is with Akira. Against a wall his 2P+K leaves him at +12. However, the only attack I can connect is his normal P, which is i10. If I use an 11- or 12-frame attack, it can be blocked. That doesn't make sense. If all I can get is an i10 attack, then it should state that I'm at +10, not +12. Again, basic math.
The i11 should connect, the i12 should not. The only reason the i11 would miss is if the hit frame to reach the opponent's hurt box is on the 13th frame of the animation, meaning the first hit frame didn't reach the opponent's hurtbox.
An i11 attack is 11 frames of initial startup frames, you know this. It's not until the 12th frame of animation is a hit box registered. That's why the i12 would not be guaranteed and would be blockable as the 13th frame of animation is the first hit frame so that's appearing at the moment the opponent is able to guard for their first frame.
