KoFXV and “Minimum Interactions”
Before we start, I want to point out that if you’re a fighting game player, especially a good one, most of this will be functionally useless to you. The information I present here and the consequences of that information are something that most experienced players will more or less have a feel for. What we’re going to be doing here is thinking about fighting game statistics that have already existed for a long time, in this case combo damage and meter expenditure, and reorganizing them into what I’m going to call Minimum Interactions and Touches to Kill. This is sort of analogous to how you can rearrange yards in american football into the concept of expected points: all football players and fans know that not all yards gained are equal, and expected points attempts to recategorize yards gained based on their relevance and meaning to actual game outcome, giving us means of differentiating between players or teams of similar raw statistical output. That’s what I’m trying to do with the ideas I’m going to introduce here. More importantly, as opposed to the field of sports analytics, I don’t have any expectation that anybody will find this useful or insightful except for me given that, once again, most players who know what they’re doing have a feel for these concepts already even if they’ve never given it a name. If you do find it useful: that’s great. Admittedly, I’m mostly doing this for my own entertainment, a sort of journaling the way I think about the game.
As part of the most recent King of Fighters XV patch the developers made a small systemic change that has huge consequences in the metagame.
I don’t know when this system became standardized in the series, but at least since I started playing with KoFXIII in the early 2010s, each character has 1000 health and from there, a certain set of rules follows: crouching and standing light kicks (B button) do 30 damage, crouching and standing light punches (A button) do 25 damage, every close heavy punch © does 70 damage, and most close heavy kicks (D) or sweeps do 80 damage, with standing and jumping blowback attacks (CD) doing 80 damage. Counterhits add 25% damage, meaning counterhit CDs do 100 damage and so on.
However, in this new balance patch, crouching light kicks, have now been nerfed from 30 to 15 damage, creating a new damage floor for unscaled attacks in the neutral game. This change is pretty long overdue since the actual rewards you can achieve from hitting a crouching light kick have only been ticking upward. Just as a case example we can use Kyo. In 98 Slugfest, where he is one of the exalted S-tier characters, Kyo’s best confirms off of 2B are either 2B, 2A, light DP or 2B, 2A, super, the latter of which is famously pretty difficult. In KoFXIII he can not only easily chain three light normals together, but he can also confirm them into his full rekka series which leads to a safejump, or even confirm to HD mode. Ultimately the nerf is pretty light since it basically just halves the amount of damage done at the beginning of the combo and doesn’t affect the scaling of the rest of the combo, but it’s still nice to see since it re-emphasizes the heavier rewards of getting a clean hop-in.
As a result of this change, King of Fighters now has a new floor for what I would in full term as “minimum clean interactions” but which I’m going to simplify to “minimum interactions.” What is a minimum interaction? For our purposes, a minimum interaction is the lowest amount of damage that can be inflicted in neutral as the result of a clean hit. I think this is a particularly notable concept for King of Fighters especially because KoF in particular is very averse to chip damage as a means of getting things done. If you’re a fireball character, you don’t get any significant work done by getting your opponent to block a fireball the way you might if you were playing Old Sagat in Super Turbo or Morrigan in UMvC3, you get your work done by hitting people with correctly placed and timed fireballs, and then punishing the options they use to evade the fireball. As such, you can view King of Fighters as a system designed around getting clean hits, ranging from singular air-to-air hits to full jumping hitconfirms to the minimum interaction itself, a random 2B you got clipped by during a scramble.
Using this thinking, I want to codify a concept I’ve been thinking about for years, largely for my own enlightenment: Minimum Interactions Reduced, or “MIR” for short, maybe I can come up with something catchier for this. If you’d like, you can also think of this as something along the lines of “Minimum Clean Hits Reduced Per Combo.” Under such a type of thinking, a health total of 1000 HP can be thought of as 67 Minimum Interactions.
An extremely common mistake amongst especially beginner players is that you simply must hit for as much damage as you possibly can every time you get a clean hit, which most people grow out of quickly since it tends to leave you with zero bar against the opponent’s second or third character. However, this applies in even more subtle ways than simply “don’t cash out every time you get a hit.” In my opinion, how much meter you’re willing to expend on a given hit should be informed by a few things, one of the most important in my opinion being efficiency.
I started theorizing about this back in the XIII days when I realized that for me, a difference of 100 damage per combo was probably what you wanted to aim for when adding more resources to the combo, because 100 damage is the damage of a throw. If the damage between two combos of similar resources was less than a difference of 100 damage, I would tend to prefer the combo that used less resources even if it had less damage (especially if the lower resource combo created better oki,) since if I still needed a throw on the back end of the combo to end the round, the difference doesn’t matter all that much.
I think I was onto something, but I probably should’ve been a little more specific and microscopic to focus on how many 2Bs I wanted to not have to hit after a combo, not how many throws, if you get what I’m saying. Since the idea of minimum interactions is that 15 acts as something of a “whole unit,” a number you cannot reach below in the neutral game (excluding chip damage, as discussed), we’re going to be reducing every decimal to a whole number, even ones that theoretically “round up,” since rounding up would make a minimum interaction disappear in the accounting, a concept we’ll return to in a second.
A good case study for this concept is everyone’s favorite boomer shoto, Ryo Sakazaki, as his MIR expands greatly when additional resources are added to the combo. Let’s investigate how much extra damage Ryo adds when you add meter to his combos, and for completeness we’ll do this from both light routes and heavy jump ins.
Let’s note that minimum interactions are, more or less, whole numbers. A decimal of a minimal interaction means nothing, even if it’s most of a minimal interaction, because you still have to make contact with another minimum interaction for the rest of that damage to come off the board. As such, a “combo” that does between 15 and 29 damage is still only worth 1 MIR, and the combo needs to hit 30 damage for it to now score 2 MIR. We’re also going to be doing combos out of the corner so that as few variants are involved as possible. The vast majority of KoF is played outside of the corner, and as such it makes a lot of sense to think of the damage you’re going to be doing from midscreen and not the damage you’ll be doing with corner carry or by starting in the corner, or at the very least it makes sense to not be considering those things right now as we think about this concept.
Route A: 2B, 2A, 214B — 116 damage — 7 MIR
https://twitter.com/DuranteP_94/status/1535803923721621504
Route B: 2B, 2A, 214BD, 623A, 214B — 259 damage — 17 MIR
https://twitter.com/DuranteP_94/status/1535804402383978497
Route C: 2B, 2A, 214BD, 623A, 623C — 262 damage — 17 MIR
https://twitter.com/DuranteP_94/status/1535804704990433280
By adding one half meter, more than half of which is built back over the combo, we’ve added 150 damage, which can be broken down as 10 crouching light kicks, or, as we’ve now defined it, 10 “minimum interactions.” This is a pretty great return on investment no mater how you slice it. A more traditional way of thinking about this, which is still entirely valid, is to notice that we’ve gone from 11% damage to 25% damage by spending a net .2 bars. This is part of why virtually nobody is using meterless routes in KoFXV if they have any meter to spare, the opportunity cost of not using half a bar is often staggering.
I must admit that at this point I’ve already written far more words than I expected to have to to explain this idea, so I’m going to demonstrate something real quick and then we’re going to take a quick look at why minimum interactions can be a useful way of thinking and then take a break for a little bit.
In just about any situation, I prefer Route B over Route C, primarily because the okizeme is better. Right after 214B, Ryo recovers quickly enough that he can do a few things to bait and punish a reversal, one of my favorites being to simply input his mid/high parry, 6B, immediately, and then punish. (Apologies for the poor editing on the clip.)
https://twitter.com/DuranteP_94/status/1535805044305457153
Assuming a situation where you’ve trained the opponent into not reversing after the 214B, Ryo is now in a position to get some ambiguous jump-in stuff to continue his offense. Ending in heavy DP by comparison does give a fraction more meter, but not only does it recover more slowly, it leaves you further out.
https://twitter.com/DuranteP_94/status/1535805145371488256
214B doesn’t exactly give you a silly safe jump for free, but by comparison the situation is vastly more favorable unless for whatever reason you’d prefer for neutral to be completely reset, a feeling I’m inclined to call objectively incorrect from a tactical standpoint.
On the other hand, ending in heavy DP does give you more damage. Except here’s the thing: it kinda doesn’t. This is the primary reason I wanted to introduce this concept of minimum interactions. Both of these combos do within 15 damage of each other. Assuming that either combo wouldn’t kill, you’re going to need an equal number of minimum interactions after that combo to kill your opponent’s character and win the round. As such, we can use this concept of minimum interactions to view these combos as being equivalent in terms of their real impact on a match.
There are, I will say,four really important things to consider when choosing a combo you intend to do with your next hit: your ability to execute that combo in real time, how much meter that combo builds or costs, the okizeme situation after the combo, and the amount of damage that combo does. From a practical standpoint Route C is equally easy to execute as one that ends in 214B, so we can scratch that. Route B and Route C both ultimately cost around .2 meter, so we can toss that unless we want to be really pedantic about meter resources specifically. Now we only have damage and okizeme to consider. From a damage perspective, one of these combos does, in fact, objectively do more damage than the other, but since both combos reduce the same number of minimum interactions as the other, we can also go ahead and scratch that one as well. As a result, when choosing between these two routes, the question becomes which route gives us better okizeme, and by narrowing it down to that degree, we can see that ending in 214B is, for all intents and purposes, objectively a better move than ending with heavy DP.
I hope that any of that demonstrated why I became fascinated with this concept I made up. Believe it or not, I actually have a lot more on this coming down the pipe.
