When I was a child I always dreamed of something like this. A game in where several characters from several games would gather in 1 game and fight it out. Too bad I found it when I was no longer interested in playing fighting games!

But I was still interested in watching the battles, so the first thing I did was finding a site with tons of characters. I downloaded them, one by one, and put them to fight. I reached 64 players (that was a full screen of my screenpack) and watched enough battles to move along. I noticed some of these characters were crappy (as in, what the heck is going on?!) others were overpowered (The character goes berserk and doesn't let the opponent land a hit) others were cheap (the opponent gave them a beating yet they would not be greatly damaged and win with three hits) and others were dumb (they do the same thing over and over and still win.)

Searching for good characters was a pain, so I decided to give up trying to create my Mugen and instead I found a 8GB torrent MUGEN already build, hoping to have some good quality without too much effort. It turned out to not be that good (Most of the space was used by MP3s and it didn't have a single King Of Fighters character ).

I still ran battles to watch them and noticed a high degree of strength difference, that made MUGEN inviable, character A beats character B 100% of the time while B beats C like that, C beats D, D beats E and E beats F. All these characters are in a league of their own and basically don't fit together on the same game. MUGEN should only have three classes, A, B and C, and C should be able to beat A now and then, so some character are extremely weak while others are extremely strong (And the strongest character beats the second strongest 100% of the time too...)

So, that wasn't working. I tried changing the character's stats, upgrading the sucky characters and downgrading the oober ones, but the change was not very noticeable...

I then decided to just download my favorite characters and put them into a game, problem is some of my favorite characters have not been made yet, while others have +50 versions so I have to download them all and keep my favorite versions, but that was taking too much time still. Then one of the characters I liked was overpowered, and it was because of the AI. Then I realized that for watching battles AI was very important (as the default AI is very stupid) and basically all the characters without AI were useless, so I gave up (not before trying to add AI to characters, and failing.)

So, I think MUGEN is a great idea, but until someone takes care of doing some sort of organization, I will stay away from it. (And I'm aware that this post is too long, but what could I do about it.)

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Posted by knuck

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You edit the characters in a way that it's balanced.

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A good way to start is to add a good AI to the good characters that don't have AI, so they can try defending against the characters that have a good AI. Good luck with that



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I'm giving MUGEN another chance, this time using the watch mode to create fights between the characters, and using chess software to give the characters a rating (ELO, meaning I'll be able to predict what character will beat another one without needing to run the battle at all.) Let's see how it turns out.

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As for me, I stopped caring about having the best character version (ie best Ryu) and I downloaded the first ones that I found, and kept them unless they sucked (from my favorite characters.) I've been living in Watch Mode and watching fights of characters that have the same power can be very exciting.

So far, the strongest character is Muscle Power (Rating: 2960) And the weakest one is Dhalsim (Rating 1974).

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