Fighting Games Weekly | July 14-20 | Bracket Resets Full of Tears (of Joy?)

Finally around a reliable internet source and not using my garbage phone so I can type a bit more.

First off, this was probably the best EVO I've been to yet. Everything from quarterfinals of USF4 being consistently insane (I was in the same pool that had fchamp and daigo, so I was right there to see it in person). Top 8 for honestly every game being fantastic (other than Tekken and Injustice, not as a knock on them but rather that I didn't see them and can't judge fairly) was obviously great too. I had a blast watching everything from smash on with Xiao Hai and Lap Chi while betting on some matches (won some money off mr kof2014 evo champ by betting on Wong to win Marve haha). And then I'm there's my own performance which I'm absolutely stoked about.

I realize my pool was an easy one but getting out in winner's bracket at EVO is pretty exciting for me. Ever since pools were announced I had made comments that I felt I could get out in winner's, and my confidence was justified. I'm not an arrogant player, and I know I lucked out by not having one of the hundreds of tournament winning players in my pool but I'm still a nobody and I managed to pull off something that the very vast majority of people never get to do at EVO. It's hard not to feel happy.

The best part about it, though, was when I saw Tuboware was in my pool I decided to grind out the blanka match. There were some things I had learned from a local player that, had I not known beforehand (blocked up ball can't be ultra 1'd by Chun for example) I may have lost. So I think part of this comes down to just proper prep and really understanding the matchup.

Anyways, enough about my own matches. The rest of the weekend included some really great things like meeting a bunch of people from here (Smedwicks, MasterMilk, Skilletor, Q, Shouta, Rentahamster, pass, a whole bunch of others I'm forgetting right now and I'm sorry for not remembering names!) while it was great to meet up with others I knew from before (soakrates, Rotanibor (congrats on vampire second place btw!), Quadratic and more).

It was also just awesome seeing faces of people I've met over the years of traveling to and from LA.

I also made the excellent life decision of eating at Ramsay's BURGR which was awesome all around. I made the awful life decision of eating at a Guy Fieri restaurant and it was as dire as I had expected!

All in I couldn't ask for much better of an EVO other than if Momochi or Sako had won the whole thing. I'm riding off these good feelings right now though, so I apologize if I was too verbose or rambling too much on here.
 
Master Milk said:
If Chris, Champ and Justin aren't playing each other, the match is too low level for me to really enjoy. Granted, I do still like watching Chris steamroll people with Morrigan, but even that has its limits
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There are quite a few players who are getting to their level though. Flux, Cloud, Paradigm, RayRay, Coach Steve, Apology man and a horde of playets from the west, east and south are catching up.
 
Omega Rex said:
That's cool.

not sure how I'm supposed to respond being that it has nothing to do with what I said, but good for MTG
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You said "random has no place in a competitive video game" and I said "well, it's not a video game, but M:TG is competitive and is based entirely around random card draws."

I woud assume that from that you could see that I am saying "well, Magic: The Gathering is a competitive game and is a relevent example to bring up as it's quite similar to a video game."

How about I replace Magic with Hearthstone?

Let me re-write my post for you:

Hearthstone is a competitive game and it's a game based around random card drawing.

Unless you're saying it's not a truely competitive game because it has randomness in it. But given that "competitive" means "relating to or characterized by competition" according to a quick Google dictionary search, and I walked past a pretty big Hearthstone tournament at Dreamhack Summer (and have played in quite a few TGC tournaments over the years), I would say that TGCs are pretty competitive.

You can have a competitive game which has random elements. I would say that Magic and other TGCs being based on random card draws is part of their core gameplay design - it's not like tripping which was just a random "fuck you" addition by the devs. If you didn't have random card draws in TGCs, and players just set their decks so they drew cards in a set order, the game would be very, very boring and not terribly deep.
 
WarRock said:
I've never played VF but have a blast watching it. The flashes indicating counter hits make it specially easy to follow and understand what the players are going for. On the other hand, I can't stand Tekken, that looks dull as heck.
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Yeah tekken can be boring to look at if you don't understand what the players are going for. Plus some matches turn to just poke fests since players will do anything to not get launched.

But I do find that even low level tekken is a tense experience to play. There's so many (too many) variables in action from moment to moment that I would find I forgot to breathe during some matches.

But definitely wouldn't subject someone to viewing a tekken tournament with me unless the player is JFJ or some insanely skilled Koreans.
 
Huw_Dawson said:
You said "random has no place in a competitive video game" and I said "well, it's not a video game, but M:TG is competitive and is based entirely around random card draws."

I woud assume that from that you could see that I am saying "well, Magic: The Gathering is a competitive game and is a relevent example to bring up as it's quite similar to a video game."

How about I replace Magic with Hearthstone?

Let me re-write my post for you:

Hearthstone is a competitive game and it's a game based around random card drawing.

Unless you're saying it's not a truely competitive game because it has randomness in it. But given that "competitive" means "relating to or characterized by competition" according to a quick Google dictionary search, and I walked past a pretty big Hearthstone tournament at Dreamhack Summer (and have played in quite a few TGC tournaments over the years), I would say that TGCs are pretty competitive.

You can have a competitive game which has random elements.
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"X does not belong in Y" does not mean "Y is not Y if it has X in it".

Example:
"Dead ants to not belong in my pie" does not mean "This pie is not a pie because it has ants in it".
 
djplaeskool said:
The more I think about it, the more of a threat Ice Storm seems.
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Ice Storm has always been a huge threat in the game and has always been Storm's best tool. The difference before was that Justin prioritized using meter with Wolverine on point (mostly dumping it on Berserker Charge pressure) which meant less overall meter for Storm to work with.

Storm on point also means Justin can bring in Wolverine while the other character is locked down with Hail Storm. He wasn't able to do it in GF but that was certainly one of the cards he had in his back pocket to pull out.
 
Karsticles said:
"X does not belong in Y" does not mean "Y is not Y if it has X in it".

Example:
"Dead ants to not belong in my pie" does not mean "This pie is not a pie because it has ants in it".
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That's entirely true, but TCGs demonstrate that you can have randomness as a core gameplay mechanic and have a highly competitive game - randomness can belong in a competitive game. To simply say "randomness bad, non-random good" is over-simplistic and removes a lot of tools from a game designer's toolbox.

Suppose we have two decks, one of which has an amazing counter card in it which will greatly swing the tide in the favour of the player of that deck. Being able to organise your deck would mean you could place that amazing counter card in the best possible location in the deck so that you'll draw it when you know, say, you'll certainly have enough mana to cast it, your opponent will not have had time to set something up to stop it, or something else.

The entire game would end up being a game about building the most mathematically efficient deck orders, with maybe some mindgames. There would be many games that would be outright decided at the deck order phase, especially if the game had one-turn-kill decks. That would be a very different kind of game to how TGCs acutally work.
 
irfaanator said:
the closest we can get to randomness in a fighting game is probably street fighter 2.
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I don't know about that. Samourai Shodown had some crazy random sword damage and stun, that shit was scary as hell, but strangely it was what made the game incredibly fun and tense.

Too bad they "fixed" that in the sequel.
 
Evo was really great this year. Didn't get to see much Tekken, Injustice, or KI, but every game had really great top 8 action. Smash and Blazblue were especially nuts
 
Hyun Sai said:
I don't know about that. Samourai Shodown had some crazy random sword damage and stun, that shit was scary as hell, but strangely it was what made the game incredibly fun and tense.

Too bad they "fixed" that in the sequel.
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Don't forget Tekken Revolution with its critical hits on certain moves.
 
Hyun Sai said:
I don't know about that. Samourai Shodown had some crazy random sword damage and stun, that shit was scary as hell, but strangely it was what made the game incredibly fun and tense.

Too bad they "fixed" that in the sequel.
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SCV has random "clean hits" as well on some moves.
 
Hyun Sai said:
I don't know about that. Samourai Shodown had some crazy random sword damage and stun, that shit was scary as hell, but strangely it was what made the game incredibly fun and tense.

Too bad they "fixed" that in the sequel.
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ah havent played much of sam sho so I didn't know
 
Karsticles said:
I would totally watch a 30+ minute video analysis of how the hell JWong got in with Storm against Morrigan over and over again while FChamp can't touch her with Magneto.
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it's equal parts luck, genius and mistakes on chris g's part. an extremely large part of it is justin's akuma assist calling. he manages to continually chase and lock down morrigan so she can't get astral started, even if justin doesn't get mixups off of the lockdown. almost every single time chris tries to call missiles justin's akuma either hits doom before he gets any missiles out, comes close or locks down morrigan so justin gets a chance to attack her before she can take advantage of them.

look for yourself at the sequences that lead to morrigan getting hit.

match 1:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujghZEpcFkM#t=5s
start of match into chris g dropping a conversion and getting hit for no reason (while jumping up)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujghZEpcFkM#t=56s
chris raw tags to morrigan, justin chases. insane movement and assist calling lets justin lock down morrigan and hit her with an uncrossup j.s while she tries to jump to escape.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujghZEpcFkM#t=1m24s
justin wong is magic

match 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujghZEpcFkM#t=2m41s
justin's akuma calls and maneuvering are unreal in this match. he gets a ton of hits that don't convert and manages to continually stay in until morrigan manages to astral up by getting missiles out successfully. but then justin stalls it and catches chris doing a dumb thing by not covering missiles right and hailstorms doom. chris tries to astral thinking he'll be safe but hailstorm recovers megafast and justin punishes him for it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujghZEpcFkM#t=4m10s
she doesn't actually get hit here but justin manages to avoid mostly getting hit with akuma and glancer morrigan with a fb or two at the same time. this shit is amazing:


match 3:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujghZEpcFkM#t=5m55s
failure to convert here, but same ridiculous as hell maneuvering

match 4:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujghZEpcFkM#t=7m24s
justin's storm is fucking unreal here. i don't have words but literally everything he does here to get that hit is brilliant minus the missed grab and missed airdash input (the random j.m he does early on)

edit:
ultimately justin's incredibly solid play with storm's movement and assist calling made it so he was playing an entirely different game than the wolverine/akuma vs. morrigan matchup and it panned out extremely well for him. his mastery over that character's spacing alongside assist calling let him make it look like like morrigan was a significantly worse character than she really is. that's how good his storm is.
 
I think the whole argument about randomness comes down to 'negative randomness' has no place in games? Where as 'positive randomness' is most of the time okay?

Sounded good in my head at least.
 
Negaduck said:
I think the whole argument about randomness comes down to 'negative randomness' has no place in games? Where as 'positive randomness' is most of the time okay?

Sounded good in my head at least.
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Yeah, that was the point I was going for. Or, at the very least, we need to distinguish between two kinds of randomness. Tripping and Hsien-ko item stun are not the same kinds of things.
 
Negaduck said:
I think the whole argument about randomness comes down to 'negative randomness' has no place in games? Where as 'positive randomness' is most of the time okay?

Sounded good in my head at least.
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In fighting games though positive randomness for one player usually means negative for the other.
 
oh yeah. also champ literally had matches won vs both justin and chris like 5 times over and choked them all away.

that shit was depressing because his play was 100% the best out of those 3 besides those. nerves/wong factor/chris jitters are fuckin' real
 
Yeah, the distinction between negative and positive in a zero-sum context is spurious. What benefits one player hurts the other. What hurts one player benefits the other.
 
FChmap definitely choked in those two matches big time.

Them EVO nerves combined with Wong factor and ChrisG jitters.... too much for him.
 
vulva said:
In fighting games though positive randomness for one player usually means negative for the other.
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But in the case of tripping it's a negative for the player that gets it. Rather than a 10 as Mr game n watch where its positive for him

I suppose to further narrow it down its positive randomness where the player that gets the random effect gets a reward rather than punished (tripping in this case).
 
Seyavesh said:
oh yeah. also champ literally had matches won vs both justin and chris like 5 times over and choked them all away.

that shit was depressing because his play was 100% the best out of those 3 besides those. nerves/wong factor/chris jitters are fuckin' real
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I seriously felt the blues for him in his match with Chris G. The HARDEST read I've ever seen in top level Marvel when he called the hard tag from Morrigan to Vergil in Game 5, threw a dark matter and sniped vergil into a near full confirm but got the c.L too late only for Vergil to wake up S and take it.
 
I kinda wanted champ to lose since I thought chris g/wong deserved to be champ this year so I was pretty glad that he mis inputted chaotic flame as dark dimension and lost
 
Why was it only in Marvel where dropping stuff and making stupid decisions was such a big part of the finals.
Seemed like in every other game, people had their junk together for the most part. There were drops in everything, but nowhere near the amount throughout Marvel's top 8.
 
Azure J said:
I seriously felt the blues for him in his match with Chris G. The HARDEST read I've ever seen in top level Marvel when he called the hard tag from Morrigan to Vergil in Game 5, threw a dark matter and sniped vergil into a near full confirm but got the c.L too late only for Vergil to wake up S and take it.
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That was the realest "THIS IS THE GAME WE PLAY" moment I have ever seen.

I didn't know if I should have cried or laugh at that point. I was watching with a friend of mine who isn't really hardcore into competitive fighting games. Like he knows terms like OS, and shit not not really in depth. He just started to crack up so hard, and I had the "damnmmm if you only knew what really just happened" face.
 
Busaiku said:
Why was it only in Marvel where dropping stuff and making stupid decisions was such a big part of the finals.
Seemed like in every other game, people had their junk together for the most part. There were drops in everything, but nowhere near the amount throughout Marvel's top 8.
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Nah, Evo stage nerves were in Blazblue and SF4 as well.
 
Curry-Hakase said:
Hasn't he had plenty? The amount of tournaments he's attended in recent years really pales in comparison to like Tokido.
Not to mention Tokido is high level and competitive in practically every game he touches.
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I'm pretty sure he has a wife while tokido doesn't? And isn't he older than tokido
 
vulva said:
In fighting games though positive randomness for one player usually means negative for the other.
Click to expand...

Hitokage said:
Yeah, the distinction between negative and positive in a zero-sum context is spurious. What benefits one player hurts the other. What hurts one player benefits the other.
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If you read my post, the distinction between positive and negative isn't benefits vs. banes. It's earned effects vs. unearned effects. It's a really important distinction to make.

Azure J said:
I seriously felt the blues for him in his match with Chris G. The HARDEST read I've ever seen in top level Marvel when he called the hard tag from Morrigan to Vergil in Game 5, threw a dark matter and sniped vergil into a near full confirm but got the c.L too late only for Vergil to wake up S and take it.
Click to expand...

WesternHeretic said:
That was the realest "THIS IS THE GAME WE PLAY" moment I have ever seen.

I didn't know if I should have cried or laugh at that point. I was watching with a friend of mine who isn't really hardcore into competitive fighting games. Like he knows terms like OS, and shit not not really in depth. He just started to crack up so hard, and I had the "damnmmm if you only knew what really just happened" face.
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I wished this out of my memories. It really was that painful.

Hitokage said:
Which is a positive for the opponent, who can either now start an offense or was just saved from being attacked.
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Right, but the point is that the opponent didn't do anything to earn that trip. Hsien-ko does perform an action to earn her stun: she has to hit you with an item. The tripping is triggered merely by the game existing, and cannot be stopped.
 
edit:
@Karst
Earned or unearned doesn't really matter. If my opponent earns a hit on me and happens to deal more hit stun allowing for an easier link off a possibly difficult combo or something similar to that, it means that I've had my own odds of not having that combo completed and getting an escape dropped. I understand how you're trying to look at it, but ultimately it will lead to benefits vs banes.


Negaduck said:
But in the case of tripping it's a negative for the player that gets it. Rather than a 10 as Mr game n watch where its positive for him

I suppose to further narrow it down its positive randomness where the player that gets the random effect gets a reward rather than punished (tripping in this case).
Click to expand...

That, unfortunately, still doesn't work in terms of fairness. If I'm playing against you in street fighter and you get any sort of random buff not based on an intentional decision within the game, then that gives you a legitimately unfair advantage. Unfair in the sense that there was no justified decision in the process.

Using tripping as an example again, while it's possible I could trip there's a chance that I won't and you will which benefits me. In that specific moment I might be thankful for tripping as it saved me. No matter how you cut it random effects are always negative to someone.
 
Hitokage said:
Nah, Evo stage nerves were in Blazblue and SF4 as well.
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To the extent of Marvel? Not really.
Some of those drops were stuff you'd see in pools.

I think Super Smash Bros Melee was the best in this regard though.
It seemed to me like everyone was playing their best.
 
Busaiku said:
Why was it only in Marvel where dropping stuff and making stupid decisions was such a big part of the finals.
Seemed like in every other game, people had their junk together for the most part. There were drops in everything, but nowhere near the amount throughout Marvel's top 8.
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it's because of how marvel works that you notice it

it's not necessarily that drops are 'more common' insomuch as drops are more obvious because the outcome of not dropping is steamrolling the shit out of the opponent while the outcome of dropping a conversion or combo can be the opponent steamrolling the shit out of you

in addition to that, marvel has a much more chaotic/varied environment in terms of possibilities so there is less control in terms of being able to perform conversions off those situations (but you better go for it because of the above stated)

the losers side of top 8 was mega sloppy though, i agree. literally everyone there was dropping combos all day. even flocker was dropping his shit hard
 
Busaiku said:
To the extent of Marvel? Not really.
Some of those drops were stuff you'd see in pools.
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Dogura had several chances to close it out and ended up having the bracket reset and losing. Nerves got to him so many times, it seemed close to 5 games where nerves overtook him, after he convincingly was able to beat his opponent before. Justin/Chris/FChamp all go toe to toe in games. Those were good guesses along with chokes but they went both ways for all 3 players. Dogura and Garireo looked like it was all just chokes on Dogura's end.
 
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