ShackNews: Did Capcom and the developers pay attention to character tier-lists when developing Super Street Fighter 4?
Seth Killian: They are very aware of those lists. Let me just say, for anyone that doesn't know this, the people at Capcom QA are killer. People are like, "Capcom QA didn't even know about this." Capcom QA knows about almost everything. Not absolutely everything because a million great players playing together will discover things that QA didn't know about. But the QA guys are no joke.
This guy Raoh, who is a Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike player, made a name for himself on the competitive circuit and did very well in Japan. He did very well in EVO here in America. He used to work at Capcom QA and wasn't even in the top 20 players on the QA team.
The QA guys don't enter tournaments so that's why they don't have reputations on the street, but they are unbelievably good at the game. If there was a tournament of all of Capcom QA against players around the world - I don't know how many top players would survive to the finals against the QA guys. It would be a bloodbath.
These guys are extremely good. They are very smart, strong players. So we know Sagat is stronger than a lot of the other characters. There's always going to be winners and losers in any balance chart. Nobody likes to hear that, but that's part of what makes Street Fighter interesting.
Difference in character strength is part of the nature of a SF game. It's something we don't try to avoid. Ultimately, in the current ranking charts, there are a few mismatches, but for the most part I think you'd be hard-pressed to find any other competitive fighting game with a closer balance across all the characters.
