Rocky Marciano wrote:
Mikkel wrote:I see an awful lot of fights going the distance. Should I turn up the punching power a bit ?
Since Fatny was not around yesterday and multiplayer of OB3D refuses to work for me, I had no other option left than to go against my own decision and boxed good amount of matches against everyone online minus those who decided to duck me - nothing new under the sun. I wanted to play some OB so go and bash me for that if you want haters!

Anyway to get to the point I got used to these current settings relatively fast and now have a good and clear understanding on what causes this issue on hand.
There is nothing wrong with punching power. Power punches do a good amount of damage as it is. Basically enough to floor someone down for good if you set it up right. This being said you can absolutely hammer someone with good solid combinations (not just spamming) and make both of his health bars go red at the same time and NOT end up with stamina advantage. This is one part of the issue. Either punches you land should do more stamina damage, in which case fight would be more likely to end up before full time in the long run due to your opponent not being able to recover from damage received, OR punching power meter should go down slightly slower, which would make it more likely for you to end the fight on the spot in a situation like this. Actual damage caused by individual punches (with full punching power meter or close to that) should not be increased. Also both stamina damage increase and slowing down the decrease rate of punching power should not me implemented at the same time as this would create whole new set of problems and spamming would become "the thing to do".
The amount of stamina you use, when you perform your attacks, should not be lowered as this would lead to people spamming moves like crazy with no remorse and lessen skill needed to succeed.
Another major reason why lot of fights go to the distance is this this backwards leaning jab. It does WAY more damage than it should do. Top of that it is really good way to defend, which it in fact should be. However these two things added together make it something quite overpowered and something LOT of people abuse and take advantage of. You have a great defense, which also happens to deal lot of damage (a big no no IMHO) and works as a nice attack.
At the moment this backwards leaning jab has advantage of REACH while doing lot of damage - and not even relatively speaking. Your opponent can hit you with leaning jab WAY before any of your punches can land on him. In fact his leaning jab will stop you on your track so you will not land anything. Since it does LOT of damage, has reach advantage and stops you on your track, is the best defense and this and that... (in other words since it is TOTALLY OVERPOWERED) you can not try to close in as it is totally losing deal for you. There is no point whatsoever to try to close in and attack. You will end up losing lot of health as a result of few of those lean jabs, which will give your opponent the advantage in health, points and stamina. Only option to left it to WAIT till opponent stops doing it, which exact moment is in in fact the moment you can land something great - against those people who use lean back and forth a lot and frequently. While this works great in theory in reality it is not that viable solution. This is because some people stay leaned back for virtually entire rounds and if not they at least stay leaned back for most of the round and only stop doing it when their opponent is nowhere near or just refuse to stop doing it if opponent is nowhere near in general. In general it does not matter how it is used (highly advanced use of leanback jab combos not included) as the other fighter can just start using it too and in the end the end result is always the same, which is time is wasted while nothing really happens.
In the old days people would use it as defense when they were hurt and it was a good one. You could choose to try to close the gap for the kill and in the process take a risk of getting tagged by those leaning jabs, which could both (possibly but not necessarily) stop your advance and score a nice amount of points but not hurt you seriously. So in a close fight with you managing to hurt your opponent you were in position of having to make a choice of risking losing valuable points by going after the KO. It was a worthy tradeoff. It was not possible for anyone to rely completely on backwards leaning jab. If you did that, you would end up losing as there were some ways around it for skilled players. Ways that for the most part no longer exist due to multiple different changes to the game.
At the moment there is no such tradeoff. It is a lose - lose situation to you so best option is to just waste some time while waiting opponent to stop. Basically leaning jab has become both the ultimate form of defense AND the ultimate form of counter punching. Not only that but in a way it has also become ultimate form of offense too. Highly advanced use of backwards leaning jab has always been to include one or two of those punches in your combos. Since a single leaning jab now does noticeably damage those combos have become quite destructive, which has lead to people mostly relying on those combos at expense of other possible punching combinations. You even see some people go forwards spamming the backwards leaning jab, which is just an example how ridiculously "stupid" that move has become.
Basically since leaning jab is so super effective now it is being used as a primary defense, primary way to attack (lean backward jab combos), primary way to counter and just a method to set up other punches while not actually performing the jab from leaning position, as opponent is forced to take into account that a jab might be performed from that leaning position. As a result of this there is less diversity.
Just my two cents to this topic.
ps. I have forgotten passwords to all my accounts but one so I can only log on one of the Smashing Machine accounts (which I have been using) or make a new Rocky Marciano account. This is FYI to those who keep asking me to log on one of the Rocky Marciano accounts of mine.