Every time i release a new combo video, especially for SF4 or SSF4, someone comes along to declare that “damage scaling makes it worthless.” I have a number of objections to that claim. First, damage scaling makes sense. Second, damage scaling only matters in combo videos when the author says it matters. Third, combo videos and combos in general are a relatively small piece of the complete fighting game puzzle.
Balancing a dynamic combo system is extremely difficult, partly because players demand substantial character variety. I’d be surprised if even 1% of the damage scaling complainers have ever tried drawing up their own hypothetical combo framework as a thought experiment.
We can all agree that practical touch-of-death combos are generally detrimental to game balance. There need to be fair limits on how badly a single minor mistake can punished. The price of whiffing c.MK should not equal the penalty for whiffing an ultra. Furthermore, characters possessing the best mobility and the most offensive mixups probably shouldn’t have the highest damage potential.
How are such considerations governed without confining players to pre-programmed combos? SF4’s solution is a sharp reduction scale which magnifies the first four or five hits, then blurs out the remainder. This affords designers and testers the luxury of managing a reasonable subset of possible sequences while holding the rest to a combined average of less damage than one hard attack. Thus it becomes much easier to identify which characters can get ahead of the curve, then adjust their damage values and frame data accordingly.