The Guilty Gear macro glitch

A recent discovery in Guilty Gear XX Accent Core and its subsequent iterations has generated a flurry of discussion, argument, and overall bad posting, rendering reasonable people cowering in horror at the cesspit a certain thread on Dustloop has become. The gist of the glitch is this: pressing any button bound to a macro command gives you a negative-edge input of that macro for every frame you're holding the button.

Some quick terminology background: A macro is, in general, one key or input that performs several inputs when pressed. Most fighting games include certain multiple-button macros to make inputs feasible on a default game pad that are otherwise designed for an arcade stick, and Guilty Gear is no exception. You can set any button to perform P+K, P+K+S, etc. Pad players typically bind these to the unused shoulder buttons. Negative-edge is a ridiculous term that refers to a game registering an input when you release a button, as opposed to or in addition to when you press a button. So the way the glitch works is that, in effect, pressing and holding a macro button gives you the macro input every frame for as long as you're holding it. For whatever reason, this doesn't work in training mode.

Since as I mentioned in a previous blog post, Guilty Gear does not have a repeating input buffer (or if it does, it's only one frame or so), this new glitch opens up a world of new input opportunities that were not present before. You effectively now have a limited, infinitely-long repeating input buffer, capable of performing any command that you can coax the macro system into executing for you. You can abuse button priority to make P+K give you commands off of P, for example.

Naturally, this poses some problems. Although both arcade stick and pad players get eight buttons to work with, the Guilty Gear input layout makes using at least one of them kind of awkward, and arcade stick layouts aren't particularly conducive to pressing the far right two buttons. Of course in practice this wouldn't really much of an issue; complaining about input difficulty on stick is laughable. Just man up and learn to press the other buttons.

Notably this would make the game more attractive to play on pad, potentially more attractive than stick, and for a certain set of fighting game players who seek to emulate the arcade experience as much as possible, this seems like a slap in the face. There is a defensible argument that, originally being arcade games, playing a fighting game in a way more faithful to the arcade experience should never be a disadvantage. But ask any Tekken player and they'll tell you that pad is the preferred input method of the community, so again there's precedent to just suck it up and play on pad or take the extra difficulty. Though I fear for the TOs who will have to deal with all the sudden pausing issues as people start bringing all their wireless controllers--I would not blame a TO fearful for his own sanity who banned macros to avoid this exact scenario.

So with the control issues out of the way, perhaps the most compelling argument against the glitch is in gameplay. Having access to a (limited) repeating input buffer can radically alter how the game is played. Imagine trivial reversal windows to beat out blockstrings, or this Justice stupidity:

There are a fair number of other things that can turn into problems, too. So what do we do about it? Here, the "suck it up" answer isn't as obvious. An assumption of input difficulty is built into the game, and certain things are balanced around it. Certainly slashbacks would be stupidly powerful if it weren't for their unreliable execution--you don't need to worry about the miss penalty if it's trivial to never miss. So you can have two major lines of thought that support banning the use of macros (the only feasible way to ban the use of the glitch): making impossible something that isn't possible in the actual arcade game out of purity concerns, and preventing radically negative gameplay effects.

The first argument isn't really justifiable from a pragmatic perspective. Only a handful of Americans will ever play the game on an actual arcade board, so it's not a problem to be able to do something the arcade can't. Console tournaments in Japan, on the other hand, have a stronger position from this argument.

The second argument is the actual crux of the issue, and the pivotal question on whether macros should be banned. Is it worth it to prevent what negative gameplay effects may exist, when doing so makes playing on pad impossible? A fairly large number of players do use pad exclusively (even top players, if not in this game--see SKD). Now I don't have the gameplay knowledge or the community knowledge to know the answer to this question. But, if macros are banned, then new players, who almost exclusively use pad, will be completely alienated. Which leaves only one source of growth for the community: siphoning players from other fighting games, who already own sticks. Is it worth it to restrict growth like that? Of course, the game is old, maybe the only new blood entering the scene is already from the rest of the community, so most new players do actually use sticks.

And is "preventing negative gameplay effects" a goal worth pursuing? One of the golden rules used in fighting games is that the game's default settings go, and the game lives or dies on its own merits. Now I come from a Super Smash Bros. Melee background, I have absolutely no philosophical objection to rewriting the rules to make a more compelling game. It's stupid to let stupidity stand when it can be dealt with--though a significant difficulty of that is in making a standard, which in this case is trivial. So yes, it absolutely is a goal worth pursuing.

Which leads me to my final conclusion: in the absence of total absurdity, let the glitch rock. Unless something absolutely horrifyingly broken is found that cannot be otherwise dealt with, alienating an entire group of players and potential players is dumb. The game's community is small enough as it is, we should be working to make it as inclusive as possible so we can keep playing with more people. We don't need to worry about "arcade purity"--most of us will never see a Guilty Gear cabinet in our lives. Stick players can either learn to use the other three buttons (or two if you really need to keep Respect bound for some reason) or intentionally not take the option. People learned how to plink, we can learn how to actually use a couple more buttons.

The only reason I can see banning macros being worth it is if the glitch turns you into Meta Knight, or something equally broken. Apparently Baiken can do something that might be just that oppressive, so we'll see.