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Fighting Games Weekly | 4/20-26 | Beowulf Wrasslin', Mewtwo Smashin', Netkode Krashin

I remember you leaving for a lot last year, lol.

I wanted to leave during KI but we were only gone like 20 minutes so we sat through a bunch of it. At least the hotel this year should have better (actual) places to eat at

Well there's a McDonald's with free wifi and a pizza place across the street from Baileys (read as: still 10+ minutes of walking from the event) so that's something
 

Skilletor

Member
You hung out in my room a bit on Thursday night playing some sets and then I ran into you at the ArcadeShock line.



The legend himself will indeed be there again this year.

Right! I kept seeing your name and thinking...why does this ring a bell? lol

Hope to see you guys again this year? Getting married the Wednesday before EVO. :)
 

vulva

Member
Right! I kept seeing your name and thinking...why does this ring a bell? lol

Hope to see you guys again this year? Getting married the Wednesday before EVO. :)

We hung out a bit that night too, I was the one who had met your fiance on the shuttle bus over to the hotel. Also we talked about you getting sako doughnuts the morning of finals.

Congrats to you two. Couldn't imagine two nicer people together!
 

Pappasman

Member
I remember you leaving for a lot last year, lol.

I wanted to leave during KI but we were only gone like 20 minutes so we sat through a bunch of it. At least the hotel this year should have better (actual) places to eat at

Last year KI was so loud it gave me a headache but I sat through it lol. I think I stayed in my seat pretty much all Sunday haha. The BB/Melee/Marvel/SF hype pretty much kept me alive.
 
Last year KI was so loud it gave me a headache but I sat through it lol. I think I stayed in my seat pretty much all Sunday haha. The BB/Melee/Marvel/SF hype pretty much kept me alive.

Same with me on KI, that shit was too loud and too bass heavy, you could even hear it outside where they had those grills for hot dogs and burgers set up
 

Skilletor

Member
For sure! I'm up for seeing anyone/everyone from GAF that I can, last year was a blast

And early congratulations! :D

We hung out a bit that night too, I was the one who had met your fiance on the shuttle bus over to the hotel. Also we talked about you getting sako doughnuts the morning of finals.

Congrats to you two. Couldn't imagine two nicer people together!

Thanks. :)

We'll definitely have to get some games in. I don't ever get to play much at EVO.
 

Tik-Tok

Member
There are Communist DLC skins.

K2AkKDV.jpg

That's no Russian..... THATS MAJOR LAZER

 

Tik-Tok

Member
We hung out a bit that night too, I was the one who had met your fiance on the shuttle bus over to the hotel. Also we talked about you getting sako doughnuts the morning of finals.

Congrats to you two. Couldn't imagine two nicer people together!

This guy didn't hang out with me ONCE during EVO. And he's from the same area as me.

Vulva indeed.
 

Kumubou

Member
Everyone* here was ducking me at Evo last year. What, are people afraid of the animeeerrrr or something?

*except alstein, where we were at an IHOP at 2 in the morning with a bunch of other anime FG heads, mainly throwing around stupid quotes from old wrestling promos.
 

vulva

Member
Everyone* here was ducking me at Evo last year. What, are people afraid of the animeeerrrr or something?

*except alstein, where we were at an IHOP at 2 in the morning with a bunch of other anime FG heads, mainly throwing around stupid quotes from old wrestling promos.

sounds like I made the right call ducking you :x
 

thehadou

Neo Member
Shoutouts to thehadou for the random tangent when he saw my handle in combo breaker signups

Anytime. Thanks for making my heart flutter when I thought my Hollywood Call Of Duty buddy had registered for a fighting game tournament. I can only imagine the chuckle you would've had at my face in that moment.
 

thehadou

Neo Member
Hopefully 150 to 200 or even 300. Combo Breaker is kind of a mystery since it's not technically UFGT but hopefully everyone knows it will be good and comes(from talking to friends that does seem to be the case)

FB/Twitter traffic for MKX at Combo Breaker is a bit on the low side but I'm hopeful. Registration is slow leading into the end of April price change (always was with UFGT too though). If the "normal" last week reg flood comes in we should have respectable MKX numbers. We'll know soon.
 
It's always fun to see the "this guy isn't good, all he does is spam" or "this guy isn't good, he just uses the strongest character" comments whenever a fighting game gets the spotlight in mainstream gaming. It's like it's 1996 (or 2009) all over again.
 

fader

Member
[QUOTE="God's Beard!";161283388]I watched Juicebox's footsies video and now I feel really ashamed of myself.

Time to hit a lot of training mode.[/QUOTE]

Juicebox is probably one of the the most underrated content creator in the FGC. a lot of his video's taguht me things that no other video's really does.
 
Stunfest already has 291 players registered for Ultra including Ryan, Luffy, Gagapa, Valmaster, Tokido, Infiltration, Santarouman, RF, Poongko, Dark Jiewa, and Ebi. I know Madcatz and Markman have said Mago and Daigo will also be there and Xian also said he's going too so more players will be added to the 291 player list. Hopefully it reaches at least 400 players.


The German ranking event that happens a week after Stunfest will have Tokido, Poongko, and Ebi as well so Europe will need to step their game up if they just want points in general.
 
Juicebox, in consideration of your second point, is there any particular reason you aren't playing Xrd? I've felt the GG series has been a paragon of this type of design long before I got into it.

That said, I do enjoy the fact that SF rounds can be routinely played at specific ranges - as you said. I appreciate relatively low variance neutral game because it's simple and I find simplicity to be more competitive. I find SF4 and MK9/10 to be current vestiges of some vintage fighting game design, for obvious reasons, and I don't want to see it go away (the former, even with its comeback mechanics).

I don't see a problem.

I don't think it's a problem either. I wouldn't mind a game in that style... My problem is with the incredibly skewed risk/reward ratios in some matchups that make SF4 degenerate.

I don't necessarily want a complicated game, I just want a game that doesn't encourage you to ignore the other player and let you back it up mathematically.

I bought Xrd, but I'm not playing it because I find it to be a highly specific game. Just like with Skullgirls, I like the presentation but don't really enjoy the gameplay.

Hasn't K.Brad retired like 15 times? Probably not the best example.

But in general I don't blame SF4, I blame the skill gap where top American players can rock up and win through simple tactics (Not to mention the problem of "teams/splitting" which set back skill levels for years). The problem just gets highlighted more in SF4 since that is a game that people actually still care about. If you added 1000 pot monsters to KOF then the "top players" would find some simply shit to get them to top 8 and call it a day too.

Outside of the US, results seem pretty consistent to me.

I agree that there is a skill gap problem which will probably never go away. But I disagree that the same problem would exist in the same form in KOF.

In KOF, when you hit certain skill thresholds, "simple shit" no longer works coinsistently. If you watch a good KOF player play various opponents for 2 or 3 games, you can see if they've practiced their anti-airs at different ranges, if they're anticipating their opponent's decisions, and if they know the ins and outs of the fireball game and the up-close game. In short, once you know the systems, you can "see" if someone is skilled at KOF, and it will apply across the board to all matchups relatively equally.

Now let's flip the scenario. In SF4, let's say you're watching a Honda player successfully keep out a Dudley player for 3 games. Do we know if the Honda is "good", or if the Dudley is "bad"? Most good players would say "it depends" and there would be a lot of discussion based on which normals the players chose to use, how aggressive they chose to play, etc. Let's say the Honda used a wakeup ultra 1 and it hit. Was the Dudley "too aggressive" or was the Honda player "scrubby"? There is a massive gray area in SF4 regarding what is generally skillful and what is prudent based on matchups or player psychology. This gray area would be much smaller, or gone entirely, if SF4 allowed multiple options for dealing with any one particular option, because then it would come down to player style and not "well, my character only has one or two possible choices in this moment and neither of them have any psychological effect, so now I have to play 'dumb'".
 

Anne

Member
can you go into more detail?

So I'm going to say some things that probably just make me sound super bitter and will make people feel ways, but whatevers. When Juice says thing like "NA doesn't think abou tthings in these terms", he's right. We don't think of the psych a lot, a lot of people just say "I'll learn this combo and mix up, then I'll win". In SF4, you can't reasonably do that /now/. Back then, any shmuck in America could get top 8 with just having that over people, as long as an Asian wasn't there. In anime, that's still the case. You can get top 4 even at a tournament and you don't even need /good/ combos or set ups, you just need to control your character and guess enough.

A good example in all honewty is SonicFox. In NRS games, he does stupid well and I can't say otherwise. Some of his skillset, however, doesn't exactly make it to anime. When he plays Persona, it borders from shaky to outright disgusting. He rust runs at you and throws out hitboxes and whiffs things, and when he makes you block he does reactable unsafe high/low. It's not how you play that game, and when he runs into competent players he dies. For a bit he did okay thanks to nobody in this country playing Marie (another problem in anime, not having MUs), but now he kinda flounders. Not before he gets top 8 though. A player who can't even properly apply basic game concepts here makes top 8 because he just executes and has played a fighting game before. In UNiEL he does a bit better thanks to Carmine and the nature of that game, but when he runs into strong UNiEL players, he loses at neutral because he just wants to keep running at you.

Speaking of UNiEL, let's talk about 2GB. He's probably hands down the best NA UNiEL player right now. He's invented things with Carmine that Japan has taken and recognized him as the creator. He has an investment in this game and he understands it well. Now go watch Final Round Grand Finals and count the number of shield breaks and just bad decisions. If he plays like that vs one of the strong Japanese players, he will be eaten alive for those habits. Here's the problem though: He will continue doing those habits again and again until people will force him to stop, but nobodt in America is going to do that. He is actually handicapped by the fact he will not get consistent experience playign at a level where that's a problem, so it becomes incredibly difficult to actually address the problem.

This also shows in just whatever results we have. This is why Pops was actually a thing people fought over. Pops did stupid well for a kid and does play better than a lot of people, but he won UFGT because sG was right at the time, there was really nobody there equipped to stop him. That top 8 could've been any random BB player there that could do a combo, and that kid just blasted through it. A lot of the smarter players observed his problems and said "this isn't as good as people think it is", but nobody listened and just hyped him up and patted each other on the back. Fast forward to Evo, where a Japanese player recognized that Pops refuses to block, and just absolutely embarrassed him. Nobody else who was playing him had taught him this is what will happen if he keeps playing like that, and it was super duper brutal what happened. And the worst part is, the take away wasn't "man we all fucked up here and that exposed some problems", it was "he did good enough, but how was he supposed to fight Japan?" Fuck that, that was a failure we have to hold as a country but we won't because that means we have to actually recognize how ass we are and work to fix it. Instead, we can say fuck it and go play Guilty Gear and have it happen again, because at least that way I guess our feelings get less hurt.

All we do is game hop and pat each other on the back for having a stream or tournament, when in reality we're all just selling the games short and not doing much with them. People have fun and feel good, but as far as competition goes, we practically aren't outside of a very select few players. When people start to feel bad or realize their skills are poor, they can just reinvent themselves in the next game and move on. My time with Persona has been rough, simply because the number of players who played from vanilla release to now without dropping it is like maybe 30 serious players max, and only like 5 of us have managed the strength to consider fighting Japan. Working in that environment for the sake of competition isn't actually fun, it's really depressing and hard to get anything done, and then we know it's going nowhere so honestly, why bother? The good players now just kind of keep to themselves and don't care about tournaments, because the comp here is a waste of time and when international comp is here it's impossible to prepare. We try to raise up new players but they get sucked into the other nonsense and don't want to have to work as hard, or have circumstances which prevent it. Idk, I'm going off the rails here.

Anyways it just fucking sucks.

Juicebox is probably one of the the most underrated content creator in the FGC. a lot of his video's taguht me things that no other video's really does.

Every person who's ever asked me how spacing works I just show the footsie video. Thing is I keep showing it to people who've been in FGs for years when elsewhere that's like babies first FG lesson.
 

mbpm1

Member
Juicebox is probably one of the the most underrated content creator in the FGC. a lot of his video's taguht me things that no other video's really does.

I watched the video like an hour ago and tried to apply some of the concepts to a quick session.

It suddenly made sense how it all worked. I knew why/how I was getting outspaced, for a start.
 

Thulius

Member
I just want a game that doesn't encourage you to ignore the other player and let you back it up mathematically.
That's a good way to articulate a problem that I think a lot of players don't fully understand. You hear a lot of people call games like MvC3 "one-player games" and it kind of gets the same idea across, but it doesn't adequately describe what's going on. The issue is that there are too many cases in too many games where the defender has basically no input other than guessing. The offensive plan doesn't vary because it doesn't need to; do X mixup after Y knockdown because there's nothing Z character can do about it.

Obviously there need to be cases where one player has a clear advantage in any competitive game, but once your number of options are reduced to 0 then you may as well not be playing the game any more. Of course there are games with defensive options like burst/guard cancel/pushblock/whatever to help alleviate that issue, but then some games... are SF4.

There's not necessarily anything "wrong" with the SF4 school of design, but it's not too hard to understand why some don't like it.
 
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