My only
serious criticism is trying to do this before patch. If there's a patch coming up in the near future that may nullify these changes it makes this whole discussion senseless.
Maybe Bandai Namco will give us a playable Devil Jin character model to use as a universal standard, perhaps they will remove the infinites; who knows what else may change.
I can understand that there may have been some sense of urgency
because it' an infinite; however, if the community was forced to deal with it for an entire tournament season, I don't see how it could have been that big of a deal to begin with.
As I've attempted to say before:
I'm sure someone credible like Xeph could probably vouch for even a day 2 Astaroth having a 6:4 match-up against Viola and being capable of breaking back grabs. When I watched Partisans matchup, yes I was disgusted, but my thought as a Sieg player in that match-up would have been to pick Astaroth, if I knew my opponent was going to use a mechanic like that. Seemingly everyone had a pocket Viola as is, so why not have a pocket counter? 3 completely viable characters help to nullify this issue and counter picks are nothing new to this game. Yes, you might say it promotes broken gameplay, but if Bandai Namco gives a single flying F about their game this is something that will be remedied soon.
That's just my .02 even though Jaxel has already suffered from a bukkake storm of hating. Most importantly I would like to that Jaxel for being responsible and still listening to community thoughts.
TL;DR
This should have been a front page thread called "What Bandai Namco needs to do to keep the Soul Calibur community healthy: proposed changes" and we should have let Bandai Namco do the rest. We should give it a patch before making a declaration of changes.
~Mandy