Hey guys, so I just came back from a long discussion the IRC had on #shinkirou about the balance of UliL. Basically the IRC came together and collectively decided that UliL is too unbalanced to be competitive. Using matchup statistics and examining the movesets of each character, it's more or less understood that all UliL gameplay falls into 3 tier-based categories: high-high matchups, low-low matchups, and high-low matchups.

We didn't look at high-low matchups for very long because we concluded that because of standing wakeup and lack of border escapes, it should be impossible for a low-tier character to ever escape high-tier pressure. Matchup statistics are actually false about these games. Marisa vs Miko is not an 8:2 matchup, it's closer to a 9:1 matchup. Tenco! statistics are taken from all levels of gameplay but assuming both players are extremely familiar with their characters, high tiers losing to low tiers is a complete fluke.

Low-low matchups are characterized by both characters inability to break guard or deal huge damage. Because UliL lacks throws, high-low mixups, charged melee, items, and pushblock is completely free, competitive low-low games should optimally consist of lots of defense and timeouts while fishing for a single combo to win the game with. It isn't quite "touch of death" in the high tier character sense of the word, but the game is somewhat like a touch of death game. Except in this game, you do one combo for 2k damage and then you win 99 seconds later at the end of the round after doing nothing but defending. Although some of these characters do have blockstrings with the potential to crush, we disregard these blockstrings as being viable as all of them require meter (which will never be accumulated as no one gets hit in these games.)

Next we looked at the high-high matchup. The most common matchup on Tenco!'s high ratings is the Marisa mirror. Typically mirror matches are 50-50, but we wanted to find out why certain Marisa players are higher-ranked than others. After watching countless replays, heated discussion and looking at match histories: we found out that the less a Marisa player played against other Marisa's, the higher their rating. It's quite obvious why. The Marisa mirror is basically a forced 50-50 - the one to score the first hit always wins.

Moving on to other "relatively high" tier characters, we've established that they have following qualities: big melee that's almost impossible to punish, high damage combos that end in standing knockdown, and forced guardcrush strings off said standing knockdown,. Forced guardcrushes basically push any hitconfirm into 5k range easily, allowing high tiers to kill any character off 2 hits. So the only thing that matters is how large your melee is. After that it was easy to establish the order of strength for those - Ichirin, Kokoro and Byakuren.