Thread by @HBJohnXuandou

This is a story trending right now about how Golf is being totally fucked up by players who are really strong and can hit the fuck out of a ball super hard, breaking the design of the courses, which were supposed to favor careful, accurate shots.

https://twitter.com/WiredUK/status/1380111542109278213

It's a problem because the courses were made to accommodate what was assumed to be the furthest a person could reasonably hit the ball. There's this huge lake here that is way too large to hit across, so you've got to hit around the lake.

But then someone does hit across it.

Course designers have no answer to players with massive power swings other than to make courses physically larger and take up more land mass, which is pretty infeasible in most cases because golf courses are massive. This also makes older courses unplayable.

There is of course, one other option. That option being to put rules into effect that equipment isn't allowed to be capable of hitting the ball that far. New high tech clubs would basically be banned from competitive play because they're too good.

So why am I talking about this? Well particularly it's that second option to balance golf. And it's an argument that gets used for other sports and places of competition as well. The idea of banning equipment because it's too good. You might remember this argument in the FGC!

This was a huge debate when the Hit Box first came out. Initially everyone thought the Hit Box was terrible, because of course it is, it's just a keyboard and keyboards are terrible. Why are keyboards terrible? Well no keyboard player ever won anything, so they must be.

Eventually, people started learning how the fucking thing works at all to any capacity, which was more than their previous amount of knowledge. That amount being the total collective of fuckall. This also started players looking at how inputs work in FGs more than not at all.

Obviously, this leads into the now infamous double blocking bug that existed in unpatched Marvel vs Capcom 3. Which, by the way, contrary to popular urban legend, was not actually possible on a Hit Box at any point in time. Not a real one, anyways.

Double blocking was a clear and obvious problem that would have ruined competitive play were it to be left alone, but the discussion wasn't about the bug, it was about the Hit Box. The controller was too good. It needed to be removed from competitive play because it'll ruin it.

Nevermind how this bug was also possible on stock pads with no modifications whatsoever, or that most sticks at the time could be modded to do it easily (and in fact was discovered on a Madcatz TE), the issue was this new broken controller that will ruin fighting games.

Many times in the life of the Hit Box, sport comparisons were brought up as previous examples of equipment that was too good being disallowed from use, and Golf was and still is the biggest example for that argument. Look, Golf bans broken clubs, we should ban broken controllers!

However, amongst these silly apples and oranges comparisons, no one ever considered that other thing I talked about at the very start of this thread. Did you forget? The first problem with power golfers:

The course designer's only answer is to make the physical course bigger.

You see, what everyone always fails to mention or maybe just realize in these comparisons is that Golf is a real world activity that needs to be played with real space and needs real land and real grass and real water and takes real maintenance.

A video game on the other hand, can be altered digitally forever into eternity with minimal effort and no demand for finite resources. Broken clubs can only be solved with insane amounts of money on top of an already insane amount of money needed to build a course to begin with.

If a controller is "broken," the game can just be patched to fix it so it isn't broken anymore. And as shown with MvC3, it was. Double blocking was patched. The input issue was solved on all controllers. Crisis averted with minimal effort or fanfare.

So what's the actual point of all this? Who even cares about this comparison or the history of controllers or golf clubs?

Well the actual point is to pose this question.

What does it even matter if a controller is too good? Why is that actually a problem?

We still see these arguments today about innovations or gimmicks with controllers being shunned as being too broken, having too many buttons isn't fair, being able to do things easily is cheating. But why, though? As long as every input is done manually, who cares?

If being able to do things faster or easier than the developers realized leads to things they didn't plan for that breaks the game in a way that isn't enjoyable or makes the game competitively obsolete, they can just patch the problem so it isn't a problem anymore.

What does it matter if the Gafro Box can do really easy Sonic Booms? Does that ruin competitive play? Even if for the sake of argument it did, is the problem actually the controller or is it that Sonic Boom is too good of a tool that needs to be patched?

I have never understood the logic behind blaming the controller for doing what the game allows, and for some reason this idea is pretty rampant in some groups of the FGC. If the game allows it, the problem is with the game, not the controller.

So why is it even an issue if a controller has 12 face buttons as well as a joystick? What does it matter if pressing left and right at the same time has a specific priority to it? Is it really game ruining to be able to do what you want consistently?

The idea that controllers will ruin competitive play in the face of the scientific revelation of infinite unyielding patching has always felt like old men yelling at clouds. Anything that could be a problem can just as easily be corrected.

This is also to say that these weird ideas about what controllers can do also gets us to a place where our controllers are just better and better realize what our abilities in the games are, which leads to better competitive, and I fail to see how this is somehow a negative.

Not to mention that all sorts of controller types and features and designs means that accessibility of play is greater than it could be with rigid designs of what is deemed fair as dictated by community standards of 1695 where arcades ruled the day and you didn't have a choice.

As an addendum, this is not me justifying macros or turbo, we all agree that artifical/automated inputs are bad. Having 3 right buttons is not a turbo or a macro though. If all inputs are done by the player manually with no assistance, it should be fair game, because it is.