Remind me why floorhugging is good?#918

I get that the whole game is balanced around it at this point, but why does it need to exist in the first place? For the moves it keeps in check, why not just make them bad? Why not just make tilts and jabs bad at low %? Balance it through endlag, they could use it anyways. It really does not feel good to play against the lagless move on most characters and feel the only answer is to hold down and guess. Those moves could just not be lagless. It would be more intuitive for low-level players if it wasn’t that big of a factor. Ex. Shine, all projectiles into pressure, Jabs at large, Maypul, Cape, Clairen Dtilt, etc. It also doesn’t really feel good to be at close range and be spamming those moves and it working. Sure, people might learn to deal with them at higher levels, but is anyone having fun?

I need to make a really big, full post on Floorhug, but one thing I do feel needs to be emphasized about it is this:

Even if a mechanic has ways to play around it (In Flug’s case, Grabs are effective, Strongs and Spikes break it, Upwards-hitting moves break it easier, spacing yourself or doing deep aerial > Shield can help avoid counterattacks, etc.)… even IF there are countermeasures to a mechanic, it does not necessarily mean it’s good game design.

Just as some examples… Sm4sh, there are ways to play around the insane framedata of airdodges and rolls, but it’s not good game design. Ultimate, there are ways to play against Kazuya’s EWGF, but it’s not good game design. Melee, there are ways to play around Puff camping ledge, but it’s not good game design.

I argue that this is also the case for Floorhug in Rivals 2 here, too. There are absolutely ways you can play around it, but I am quite heavily of the opinion that it’s not good game design. It really does need to be re-examined as a mechanic, even if part of the game overall is balanced around it.

• John Numbers

One thing that’s rarely brought up is that even options that “beat” floorhug are either conditional on your next move or are only “wins” in the sense that they aren’t losing to it. Spikes beat floorhug, but realistically your next option has to be grab or else you lose anyway. Strongs and well-spaced fast moves don’t outright lose to floorhug, but they still don’t launch like they usually would, and often are laggy enough that the getup chase turns into a free neutral reset instead of advantage. Grabs (and command grabs) are one of the only things that beat it outright, and those are also able to beat shields, which makes them the go-to option unless you want to risk getting reversaled.

I have been preaching this for years now: what we have is not counter play to FH its “negation play”. Just to be clear i am only talking about “pure” FH in this post where you are otherwise not actionable because you are in endlag, startup etc. CC+FH is a completely different story.
When you FH you only have two choices FH or not FH (yes, the not FH choice is a bit more complex because you could use any other DI direction but at the lower percent band thats mostly neglectable). So what you need to do is weighing the risk/reward for taking the next hit and if you want to FH or not. So lets look at the 5 possible scenarios one by one:

1 attacker uses FHble move and you don’t FH

In this scenario you don’t take the extra 25% damage (which in reality is 1-3 damage) and you most likely will eat a full combo thats easily worth 40-50 damage and depending on the percent band can lead to a kil confirm. Very bad outcome for you.

2 attacker usesFHble move and you FH

here you take the 25% extra damage but nothing else. depending on the scenario you you might even get your own offensive going or get at least a reset to neutral. you traded 1-3 extra damage against not getting caught in a 40 damage combo and might even get your own combo going. This is a very good outcome for you.

3 Attacker uses move that beats FH and you don’t FH

you don’t take extra damage and depending on the actual move might be caught in a combo or tech chase situation. this is a bad outcome for you. But we must also consider, that these options are almost always slow and telegraphed so more often than not the attack might not even have enough time to chose this option.

4 Attacker suses move that beats FH and FH

you will take 25% extra damage and given the heavy hitting nature of moves that beat FH it might actually be 2-4 damage this time. You either flinch (bad) or get knocked down but then you can attempt to amsa tech. on a flinch you might eat a full combo on the knock down you might get caught in a tech chase or escape to neutral if amsa tech. So its a bad outcome for you but not much worse than # 3 actually, if you are good at amsa tech its actually better more often than not. Additionally the fact that the outcome of the hit is different if you FH or not its also a mix up so if the attacker anticipates the wrong thing you might mess up their punish

5 attacker goes for grab

there is no difference if you FH or not. your always off bad in either scenario.

So as you can see, there is no real downside to FH. you are never actually off worse than without it. You are just in a different bad spot if your opponent chooses an anti FH move. But you don’t get completely blown up. Thats why its only negation play not counter play. On the other hand a successful FH attempt nets so much reward. the disbalance is simply insane.
And i am well aware that this is a drastic simplification. there are several edge cases and specific scenarios the play out differently. But this simplification still covers around 80% of the scenarios. So i must agree with the above posts: its horribly bad game design.

IntelligentNitrogen904 flinch stun (caused by spikes and some other moves) disables floorhug, so you can follow up with any reasonably fast move without worry after a spike

I like floorhugging. I find it really angaging and fun and kinda hype. Not everyone universally hates floorhugging, and just because you’re not a fan of the mechanic doesn’t mean other people aren’t and that it’s bad game design. It breaks the mould and goes against preconceptions built up by other games, but it’s not an objectively bad mechanic as a lot of people seem to phrase it as. It’s also not objectively a good one either. Its a mechanic that is fun for some and unfun for others

@Watchdogg
so far, there were two surveys on reddit with several hundert participants and both had the clear result that the mayority does not like FH.
This would be fine in itself if the game was successful. You correctly said that some people like it and some don’t. but when your game is failing and a controversal mechanic is hated by mutch more people than liked (even after all this time that is, where many people already left because of that mechanic) then it should be a no brainer what you need to do, right?

https://dragdown.wiki/wiki/RoA2/System_Mechanics/Hitting_the_Opponent

The point about flinch brings up a good point that might have been said, but even if you do win with something that puts into flinch, you have to grab off of it most of the time (SDI works, which FH depends on, but I didn’t know DI doesn’t), limiting your advantage state.
The game was modeled around being beginner friendly but then has an unintuitive and uninteresting mechanic at its core, serving as a knowledge check. Even as someone who does it, my issue becomes when it puts you into another messy mixup that’s difficult to navigate input, unreactable, etc. It tries to be too much like other games while trying to be beginner friendly and kind of fails at both? I think I’m not the first to say that. Ult is a good example of beginner friendly mechanics, and why it’s relatively resistant to fading.

When using a mechanic is optimal in every scenario it’s available, that mechanic should be reworked.

Clearest example is L-Canceling in Melee: in no scenario would you want to intentionally not L-Cancel. Modern platform fighters understand this and don’t include it. Another is the general concept of airblocking in 2D fighters, where if you aren’t holding back after you leave the ground, it’s player error.

These mechanics don’t provide a meaningful decision for the player to make. Floorhugging out of endlag or other inactionable states is almost always optimal and follows the same principle. Plus, having to press down every time you’re in a punishable state is a particularly obnoxious input demand, even moreso than L-Canceling.

A similar mechanic that was done right is our friend Crouch Cancel. When you CC, you had to choose between several different mutually exclusive options, each with their own advantages and drawbacks.

Attempts were made to fix this aspect of FH, most notably the increase in damage taken, but that didn’t change the risk/reward enough to turn it into a real decision rather than a mechanical skill check.

I think this game would be infinitely better if FH got completely removed. I would be alright with CC staying but I would honestly like to see it not work for so long.

CC does everything that FH is allegedly made to do, but it actually has commitment to it (as in you actively have to be crouching to use CC). Meanwhile with FH which apparently is to stop mindless offense from spamming fast moves. But in actuallity FH allows people to spam mindless defense since they can be doing any action and just hold down as a backup and then proceed to punish attackers for landing majority of their moves. Which leads to why majority of the time you have players spamming grab or a spike.

I stand by that FH feels like a mechanic that was awkwardly slapped on only at an attempt to bring in the Melee/PM crowd. We all know there is no way this mechanic would be in Rivals 2 if it didn’t accidentally exist in Melee (and PM by extension). But I believe there is basically nobody that is playing Melee just because it has FH in it. Melee has the excuse of it existing how it does, cannot be changed.
It’s infinitely more frustrating in Rivals 2 because the devs actively wanted this in the game. Tacking on more frustration that in doing so they killed off their own solutions from Rivals 1 which were more interactive and fun solutions than FH.

At the end of it all FH is so unfun to have to play around.
In this second Floorhug survey that went around recently it (as of writing this) has 220 responses, and only 43 people voted that it felt fun to use. As well only 42 people voted for “It feels fun to counter”. People in favor of FH can try and preach how much depth it adds to the game, but if majority of people don’t find it fun to have then what’s the point of having it. There are far more sources than just this survey where people say they don’t like FH.

FH without a doubt is by far the most common reason people have dropped this game ever since the betas. There are countless reddit posts and steam reviews that say this. It’s hard for me to not think that this game would only be in a far better place in many ways if this mechanic was axed long ago. Back before a ton of people quit the game because of this. I am very certain there are many people who would give this game a try again if that happens.

The “Fun For All” update peaking at 2600 players shows that there are many people willilng to play this game who aren’t in the ~600 daily players. But my assumption is those people try the new update to see the new character (or in this case the casual stages and items as well) and then bounce. Since the game’s core largely stays unchanged and isn’t being adjusted to make the game itself fun to keep them around. If the base game is undesirable for those people then I don’t see how some items and bigger stages would make them stick suddenly. Which is what I think ironically the “Fun For All” update completely missed the point of. Which that is making the game more fun.

SneakyController939 im like the No. 6 floorhugging hater in this community but I have had a moment of “understanding” to some extent that makes me want to reply to what you said and share some more thoughts.

I do not buy for a single second that FH makes people think in the slightest. Hold down and mash grab.

I disagree. I was recently playing a series of like 30 games with another player that had a good understanding of floorhugging. It was Fleet (me) vs Galvan (them) if i recall correctly. We were both just… playing around floorhugging. Anytime I didn’t, they punished. Any time they didn’t, I punished. After a few games we simply weren’t doing things that were floorhuggable and (outside of the edgeguarding loop) the game FINALLY made sense to me. I don’t know if this experience is unique, but for me, a floorhug hater, it finally clicked. If everyone is following the rules of floorhugging, and only using moves when they aren’t floorhuggable, then the game flows well.

I have seen Zeke and other people describe this to some extent… you “unlock” your moves as the opponent increases in percentage and you use them then. It’s like a “script” you follow to some extent. If you follow the script, and your opponent follows the script the game flows.

Examples:

• a Zetterburn that follows the script only uses shine as a mixup because they assume the opponent will floorhug punish the shine otherwise.
• a Fleet that follows the script, will never go for multi uptilt strings because they would assume the opponent would floorhug punish.
• Any player that’s following the script doesn’t mash jab -> tilt except as a mixup because they expect they will be punished.

If both players follow the script, the game works. Whether or not this is the case can boil down to two questions:

• do you know the script?
  nominally, this was addressed with the floorhugging tutorials.
  in reality, this requires memorizing a bunch of tumble percents listed only on a community maintained wiki.

• can you follow the script?
  nominally, this is addressed with practice. additionally, this was addressed with the autofloorhugging update. the goal was to make floorhugging easier to do.
  in reality, downholding became the name of the game.

These points can, unfortunately, be addressed with “git gud.” Floorhugging probably needs better animations to make it clear how central it is to this game, but were you to do that, and everyone gets good and and internalizes the mechanic as core to the game, and acts accordingly then, things feel okay.

However… this leads to the obvious problem: What if one or both players doesn’t follow the script? Well, everything falls apart. Forsburn’s smash attacks, Zetter shine, Clairen, all of these things are degenerate and feel terrible, unless youre following the script. The general speed of all of the characters, how you’re supposed to move, all of it… if you aren’t floorhugging, it all feels degenerate. A player who floorhugs well playing someone who doesn’t is almost as bad as a player who knows how to shield playing someone who doesnt. This leads to what i will call the first practical problem with floorhugging:

If you’re not floorhugging, the game feels broken.

Floorhugging is as key a defensive techinque to this game as shielding is, but it is MUCH MUCH less obvious that you need to be doing it. For players coming from other games, it is WEIRD to have to floorhug this much. It is WEIRD that it is so central to the games core. Sure, it’s a design decision you are allowed to make when making your game, but it is WEIRD for it to be this central to the game without it being more critically highlighted with both animations, tutorials, feedback in general. The advanced tutorial is a great start but simply isn’t sufficient imo. This is a problem with both new players approaching Rivals 2 as their first platform fighter AND veterans from other platfighters trying the game for the first time.

New players just feel like every character is way too powerful and constantly complain about them. You say “look just floorhug” and they go “floor-what?” “it’s like crouch cancelling…” “crouch-what?” and then you have to remember that they are just learning what shielding is. In that world, adding an extra, opaque, defensive mechanic on top that’s necessary for the game to feel balanced adds an additional hurdle that can cause new players to just quit without ever understanding what was supposed to happen.

Veteran players from other games see the mechanic and go “wtf, why can you hit out of hitstun?” to which the answer is “oh its a part of the game thats core to its balance.” SOME veterans will engage wth the mechanic at that point, but many will (and have) feel “that’s stupid” and bounce off without bothering to try it.

cont’d

Underlying all of this is the fact that the current floorhugging implementation feels like a series of bandaids achieved through iteration on frustrations rather than an intentional, well thought out mechanic. It’s like almost a combobreaker, almost a heavy-hit/light-hit system, almost a lot of things, but not CLEARLY anything. The rules are difficult to articulate, and as far as I’m aware, not written in their totality anywhere.

This leads to the second practical problem with floorhugging:

Floorhugging is unintuitive.

These first two problems combine into a third much worse problem: what incentive is there to learn the script, when the experience of the game without the script is so bad? What incentive is there for people to master this mechanic when the experience before that mastery is so bad?

Finally, I think the most important thing to question is the necessity of floorhugging in creating this “script” at all. This gets back to SupportiveDoughnut481 ‘s original question of why floorhugging needs to be present in the first place. Couldn’t we achieve the same result through redesigning other aspects of moves? Don’t %-based knockback and hitstun and endlag already provide the tools necessary to fashion a decent script? Personally, I would say yes. I think all of the real benefits of floorhugging could have been achieved through other methods and that the insistance that floorhugging was the ONLY way to solve the balance problems of moves is unimaginative and incorrect. Now, I would accept that it was an available and easy route that solved a lot of the obvious problems, but it wasn’t, and isn’t necessary or the best solution.

This leads to my third practical problem with floorhugging:

Floorhugging is unnecessary to achieve the intended design goals of the game.

So all this to say: Floorhugging does actually make you think more about the game and it does add nuance. It just doesn’t do so in a way that couldnt be better implemented by properly rebalancing moves or a better implementation of floorhugging itself. It’s mediocre conceptually.

@SophisticatedDiagram426
I am gonna add in that your “revelation” came to me shortly after launch. I really tried to like, understand and master FH after they insisted on keeping it during the betas despite the pushback. I believed the “you simply don’t understand yet” narrative because i gave them the benefit of the doubt. And i also found out and experienced what you did: if both follow the script the game works. But after a few days i realized, that this is the worst possible outcome. The game plays like a script. Its extremely flowcharty, it always has a very selected few best options for every percent range. its so much less about coming up with clever creative ways to surprise your opponent or simply hard read them and so much more about doing the same optimal thing over and over with the main factor of improvement being perfecting the execution of things.
In many ways rivals 2 is an anti fighting game to me. It throws all the things about fighting games that are considered good and fun out of the window for having this scripted gameplay. Its a dumb mans fighting game. Where as fighting games shoudl be about outsmarting your opponent, but here you are nevery really fighting your opponent, you are fighting the char and the system.
the most frustrating part of this is that if bother players deliberatly don’t follow the script, the game becomes insanely fun and creative. Sure there is some degenrate shit that would need to get patched out, but is crazy fun if both players ignore FH.

Another important part of your post is the “unlocking” of moves. This is a correct observation but is also a terrible bad thing. We are already dealing with a very limited move set in a plat fighter and now we limit them even more in the early game? And when we open up more moves its not like we have many good options, we simply get new much better options that make the old ones obsolete. Its completely degenrate and terrible design. And its actually far from what Melee did. in melee you have sakurai angles, meaning if a move does not launch you at all it cannot be FHed (ASDI down in melee). So there are moves that counter FH early percent, because they simply do not launch at all and then later become susceptible to FH when they do launch but thats when other moves start to beat FH. its still not a great system but already much better than what we have. Giving moves different applications at different percent is a very underdeveloped concept in Rivals 2.

I also agree with your notion that FH was the easy fix. It allowed them to skip the very time intensive and tideous process of balancing out each move against all the other moves in the game (thats something AAA fighting games like SF6 actually do and thats why these big studios still only release 4-5 chars per year despite having hundreds of people working on the game, because it is a very hard and complex process to add a new char to a game and make sure all this works as expected). Its a shortcut to keep the content stream of new chars flowing but at the sacrafice of the core gameplay. And if it was communicated like this, i think more people could accept it.

And finally in response to the “FH makes you think” posts: no it does not. Per default you should always hold down when otherwise unactionable. As i laid out in detail before, you are never really off much worse when you attempt to FH a move that beats it and you get great benefit when you FH a move that does not counter it. Additionally most moves that do counter it are very telegraphed so its always better to hold down per default and then let go on reaction. Which is the text book definition of an input tax.

So no matter how i twist and turn it, i can’t find anything good about FH. all the things people mention as pros for the mechanic are actually bad things in disguise if you think one step further. thats why i am 100% convinced it never was about people needing to get good to understand and appreciate FH, it is the other way round: people need to make the mental leap to where the people criticizing FH already are to understand why they don’t like it.

I don’t mean to drown out the very-eloquently-made points above, but I do want to point out that I feel the devs already have a good solution at their disposal to address the problems that FH set out to solve; Whifflag and Drift DI, from Rivals 1. I know the devs at one point said that, prior to the initial release of the game, they had experimented with both mechanics extensively, and they didn’t quite fit with the scope of Rivals 2, but… I want to go to bat for them so hear me out.

Whifflag is probably less important in this discussion, but making it so moves are more committal, and especially only on whiff, would absolutely help add to that whole ‘you need to be more thoughtful with the usage of your moves’ element that FH seeks to inject into the game. How players would need to be more thoughtful would differ between the two mechanics, but it would still get the point across. Of course, there are a number of ways to go about encouraging more thoughtful play, but Whifflag, I feel, would be a decent place to start from, since there’s already a precedent for it, being in the previous game and all.

Meanwhile, Drift DI, I believe, is a mechanic the devs absolutely should revisit, even outside of the FH discussion, because it’s just That Good. However, under the scope of how it compares to FH, both mechanics introduce an element of allowing the defender to ‘fight back’ against an attacker who successfully got their hit. The main difference is that, compared to FH, which near-instantly wrenches momentum away from the attacker unless they choose very specific options that might not always be available depending on how much time they have to whiff-punish something, DDI only gives a defender the chance to simply diffuse the attacker’s momentum with solid guesswork and mixups. The main point is that, for FH, it’s on the attacker to do really specific stuff in order to keep their momentum, while for DDI, it’s on the defender to choose the right options, in order to stop the momentum. But if we’re talking about the situation where an attacker successfully gets a hit, only the latter has that push-and-pull element that a game mechanic should have.

Now, on top of everything listed above, there’s also just a separate, really simple solution, though it depends on the EXACT specific goals FH sets out to achieve, so this might not fit perfectly, but… why not just make it so only specific moves are able to be FH’d? A lot of people mention that the game would become extremely toxic without FH, because of the presence of certain moves. So… why not make it so these toxic moves - the very ones that FH as a mechanic seeks to curtail - like Zetterburn Shine, or Clairen Dtilt, or whatever is causing problems, be the ones that can be FH’d specifically, instead of making it a system-wide mechanic that impacts nearly every move in the game? It could potentially be a solution that very much keeps the spirit of what FH wants to do, while having it be much more engaging to interact with. It’s something that could be considered, anyway.

cont’d…

To close all of this, I do still really hope that the devs are still taking any level of consideration towards Floorhug as a game mechanic. I’ve got nearly two decades of platform fighters under my belt, and I played this game pretty actively for well over a year, and gassed it up to as many Smash friends as I possibly could, but… I tried. I tried, I tried, I tried really hard to work with FH for a really long time, or at the very least, overlook it, but this mechanic has caused me such an unbelievable amount of frustration. I understand back-and-forth how it works, and worked it into my playstyle just fine, but FH really does feel like a poorly-implemented mechanic that’s just… not satisfying to engage with, and it drags down the overall experience of the game. When playing, I almost never feel like I outwitted the opponent with sharp play when I belligerently whiff punishable moves and get away with it, and I DEFINITELY don’t feel that way when the opponent does it to me.

This one mechanic is the sole reason why I had to put the game down as of a few months ago, and I haven’t touched it since then. And I know of a non-insignificant number of Smash players in the NY scene alone who have cited Floorhug specifically as one of the biggest reasons why they stopped playing, as well. And it’s really a shame, because I absolutely LOVE this game to death otherwise; especially what it stands for in the field of platfighters, but I just… can’t bring myself to play it any further. I want this game to do well, and I just feel that that isn’t going to happen as long as Floorhug continues to exist in its current state in Rivals 2. All that said, if something ever does happen, down the line, to properly shake up the status quo that is currently being set by Floorhug, I will be more than happy to come back and play this game on a near-daily basis once more, and continue going to bat for it in the Court of Public Opinion of Platfighters, but, until then.

• omg stop anonymizing me lmao it’s John Numbers again

What @AthleticInsurance868 (John Numbers) said is exactly how I feel and alluded to in my post.

Whiff Lag and Drift DI in my opinion are far better thought out and fun mechanics than Floorhug. When I play Rivals 1 all the mechanics mesh together that create a unique and fun gameplay experience. Whereas playing Rivals 2 often feels a lot less satisfying largely because FH creating and awkward unfun game feel.

Whiff Lag allows people who use their moves with intent to remain how they are. But at the same time it punishes you for missing your move (which this game desperately needs with how little lag almost everything has currently), or players who would try and spam their fast moves with otherwise no repercussions.

Drift DI unlike FH allows moves to be fun to hit and work correctly, but at the same time allows the defender to still have say in an engagement.
It also fixes the problem of moves having very samey out comes since there are far more positions the defender can end up in because of how Drift DI works (in Rivals 1). Which creates more creative combos since as the attacker you have to react to where they may choose to drift to ontop of the intial DI angle. Which naturally leads to potentially using an unorthodox punish. Due to that a far more interesting visual experience is created since players are moving around the screen much more instead of being glued to the ground constantly.

I’ve previously heard some people say “Drift DI is unintuitive for a new player” yet clearly FH has been massively unintuitive for countless players. It is instantly more natural to want to hold in if you’re being sent off stage for example. We’ve all heard the meme “Mario Kart DI” and it literally leans into that instinctive concept.
Compared to holding down to make moves not work. FH is riddled with information and misinformation online where if you don’t know how it works it can be hard to even parse it as a mechanic.
Meanwhile Drift DI on the surface is a lot more simple to grasp the idea of what it is and how to use it without having to read a wiki. Especially with DI being a very intuitive mechanic as well this not much different from that.
Yes Drift DI can get you killed early if you don’t know what you’re doing. But the same can is true for regular DI, and nobody has problems with regular DI existing.

(Slightly off-topic but a recent hot topic is La Reina and her unfun up-air scenarios. The very first time I fought La Reina and experienced all that my initial thought was “La Reina is probably way more fun to fight in Rivals 1 because Drift DI would fix this situation”.)

Meanwhile FH ends up with moves largely not working which feels bad for the attacker which leads down the rabbit hole of very flowcharty 1 note gameplay. Since even over 100% you can still have a jab not work. People try to justify “you are unlocking your moves with FH existing”, but if moves still don’t work well into 100% then there is a huge issue.

It was a huge slap in the face when they added in that mechanic where your maximum DI angle increases upon being hit with the same move consecutively. This is literally watered down Drift DI that from my experience seems to be not that effective. By the time this mechanic becomes strong enough to get you out of a scenario, you’ve already taken a ton of damage. Meanwhile your opponent was allowed to spam their one move this whole time without having to change up their gameplan.
This mechanic just like FH feels like it exists as a series of band-aids, instead of actually making a meaningful change to fix the root problem.