Fighting Games

How to Improve at Mind Games

Celia WagarLeave a comment

How can someone become good at playing mind games with their opponent in fighting games?

By practicing it deliberately.

See Also: How to Read a Book: Reads in Competitive Games

Specifically you should watch your opponent’s patterns. What do they keep doing and how can you exploit that? Watch what they do in each situation, get a feeling for their tempo and reaction time. If their reaction time is better than yours, then you need to beat them by acting on the tempo. If they do not adhere to the tempo, then you need to figure out by how much, and either act first to interrupt their options, or act second to punish them.

Watch for common player behaviors and keep a mental record of those. One example of this is, as Marth, I like to run through my opponent, then run cancel with a crouch, and fsmash back at the opponent I passed by. This is because when you run through, many people think they’re safe and do an option out of shield. However this is not foolproof. Players with good reaction time can grab me out of shield before I run through them. Players who are smart can recognize my pattern and either jump out of shield earlier, or hold onto their shield so my fsmash does nothing. At which point the correct response from me is to notice they are doing this and instead do run through, cactaur dash (run cancel and dash opposite direction), grab, because I’ve conditioned them to stay in shield.

Think about how everything you do conditions a response from your opponent and other things you can do instead that beat that response. If you do something that is exploitable, change it up in expectation of your opponent catching on. Watch what you do before you do an action, because that might give it away. Similarly watch for that in your opponent.

Getting good at mindgames is about studying other people, and finding 50/50 scenarios.

Also read this guide.
http://sonichurricane.com/?page_id=1702

Here’s 3 other guides on it as it applies specifically to smash bros (though you can extend these lessons outside of those games too)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=273tHua4wGc

And here’s a paper on people’s patterns in Rock Paper Scissors and a basic guide to winning:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1404.5199v1.pdf
(The short is, winners tend to stick with their choice more often, losers tend to switch more often, and continue switching to unused options.)

Think about what the opponent is actually doing. Remember their responses to scenarios, and keep updating to do the thing that will beat their current pattern. If you have found a pattern that keeps winning, keep doing it, or if it’s just a pure mixup, switch after 2-3 reps, because that’s when your opponent is likely to switch, unless they’re bad and don’t understand the counterplay of the different options.

Of course also look for scenarios in which you can cover all or most of your opponent’s options on reaction and just setplay them. Then you don’t need to guess.

The beauty of competitive games is that there’s a complicated web of counters to different options in different scenarios, with one covering many in many cases, and different ones changing in utility based on the scenario. But to exploit these, you really need to think and pay attention, or you’ll get played.

Don’t Get Mad, Get Good.

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What do you think of Spherax’ salty rage quit on Rising Thunder? Does he have somewhat of a valid point beside how bitch he sounds?

This was the MOST HILARIOUS FUCKING THING EVER when it happened. I even told the guy on his twitter to neutral jump the fucking fireballs. Rising thunder was a game that made neutral jumps over fireballs REALLY FUCKING GOOD too! Because all moves were on cooldown, if you neutral jumped a fireball, not only were you not allowed to shoot another until it went offscreen, they had to wait for the whole cooldown to finish!

It also lead to interesting things like if your opponent wasted an anti-air, then you could jump in all you wanted without fear until the cooldown finished.

Also I loved how Chel in that game could cancel sweeps into fireballs. Almost no game does that except Super Turbo.

Like the ironic thing about his whining was, he was playing the best character in the game, Crow. Crow had absolutely ridiculous okizeme pressure, and pressure in general. If he got in close, he could attack, cancel to short ring toss, jump over, crossup, attack high or low, then ring toss again, and so on, then confirm into a combo, into super. Crow was some cool shit, but also evil shit.

In short, No. He does not have a point. All of his whining is completely invalid. He is a bad player who has trouble with a simple low-level playstyle. Chel was not overpowered or broken. Ryu is not overpowered in SF4. Dude got beaten, claims the other player is bad and using a broken character to salvage his ego. It’s as simple as that.

When you get beaten, you need to acknowledge WHY you are getting beaten. You need to understand the faults in YOURSELF. It doesn’t matter if your opponent is using a broken character, you can pick that character too. It doesn’t matter if your opponent is a scrub. You’re a worse scrub for losing to them and being salty about it. If you cannot purge yourself of this mindset then you cannot improve. Developing a mindset like this makes you worse against players you should be beating the most easily.

I played a friend recently who played EXACTLY like this. He’d shoryuken out of everything I did to him after blocking the first hit, be mashing shoryuken in the middle of all my combos in case I dropped. This is a scrubby terrible behavior. I was tired at the time and fucking livid that he was seriously pulling this dumb shit when I was in a mindset where my ability to adapt was slowed down. So I began tapping him once, letting him shoryuken, and doing the crush counter combo. I then did something I don’t do often in SFV and switched characters. I chose a bunch of random characters I never play and beat him with almost all of them (rip zangief). I was annoyed, but I controlled myself enough to not lose to an opponent doing a basic (but bad) strategy.

Zoning is interesting. There’s a lot of ways to zone well, and a lot of ways to get around zoning. If you can’t figure all this out, if you can’t see what’s interesting about it, you’re in a bad mental place.

Understanding Framedata: Combos, Traps, and Turns

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Many beginners to fighting games, including myself, get intimidated by frame data. They look at it like this huge spreadsheet of numbers that they think they have to memorize. I originally didn’t get framedata, but wanted to understand how combos were built, how people discovered them, and thought, “will I just have to memorize all this framedata to get it?” It took me a while for it to click. In reality, yeah people pick up a lot of framedata incidentally, but almost no one seriously memorizes all the framedata. People really only look for a few things, which moves are unsafe, which moves set up combos, which can follow up combos, and whether each move is plus or minus on block. Continue reading →

Gitting Gud with Scrub Tier Characters

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Can’t a person get good enough with a mid-to-low tier character in a fighting game and compete on par with those who excel with higher tiered characters? Like how you say Fox is the most demanding and powerful character in Melee but we see people like Gimpyfish with Bowser or AMSA with Yoshi?

It depends. Gimpyfish can’t compete on a national or international level because bowser honestly sucks. Amsa can because yoshi has potential beyond his tiering.

The thing with mid and low tiers is they thrive on people not knowing the matchup. A person can become really good with those characters and maybe take higher level players by surprise with them, but this advantage fades as they come into contact more. Leffen was originally a yoshi main, but moved to fox not because there was a deliberate tier advantage, but because he wanted to prove he was the best without any sort of gimmick. He wanted to hit people honestly and fairly with the character everyone has the most experience fighting. Amsa had a good run against the gods initially, then fell off as everyone got used to the matchup and his style of play, but he recovered as he genuinely improved more, but hasn’t reached the heights he originally did since. Continue reading →

High Tier Abuse

Celia Wagar4 Comments

Do you have a main in Guilty Gear?

Not really. I don’t play the game as much as I’d like. I sort of faff around with Sol, Ky, Slayer, Bridget, and Ramlethal. Ramlethal was nerfed bad and I don’t play her anymore. I hope Bridget returns because I actually played him unlike a lot of memers. I tried developing a Leo briefly but never played anyone with him.

I play multiple characters in every fighting game except Melee and SFV, where I only play Marth and Cammy. I just can’t make any other character work for me in those games.

You admitted that you only play one character in Melee and SFV because you can’t win otherwise. Could it be that your support of imbalance and only playing one character is self-serving rationalization?

I don’t support imbalance. I just think small viable casts are okay, as long as that cast is fairly balanced amongst themselves. Also, I sometimes play Bowser in Melee and beat them. I once beat someone’s Jigglypuff in bracket with Bowser. That’s a 10-0 matchup. I also narrowly won a small round robin Melee tournament, then beat the two next best players with Bowser as they played Fox. I’m no stranger to playing low tiers for fun, and being moderately successful at it. Continue reading →

Are High Execution Top Tiers Fair?

Celia WagarLeave a comment

How do you feel about characters like Crimson Viper who are purposely powerful but have a high execution barrier? I hear people who hate her say that execution doesn’t matter in high level play and that she isnt balanced just cause she’s hard to play.

I’ve been dealing with Fox my whole life.

I think that just because a character is hard to execute with isn’t an excuse for making them better than the rest of the cast. There’s certainly something to be said for having a reward for execution, but eventually in a game’s life, someone will overcome that execution hurdle and the tables will turn, and that character will dominate.

Having a character like that be the best character in the game is tolerable. If you’re going to have a top tier, it might as well be the hardest characters in the game to play. However ideally you want to prevent any one character from dominating over others.

So basically, it makes sense to give characters a bit more for doing something tricky, like 360s on grapplers, however this shouldn’t be used as a license to make all the high execution characters top tier and super strong. Continue reading →

Is Street Fighter Made Obsolete by Smash?

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Have traditional fighting games been rendered obsolete by Smash? How would you convince someone who thinks like that to try out, say, SF? Someone who thinks SF is the same thing every match.

Not a chance in hell. I’ve been meaning to make a post/video on the differences between Street Fighter and Smash Bros. The games emphasize totally different things. They have different forms of blocking, hitstun, combos, damage, moves, movement, knockdown, footsies, zoning.

In my opinion a lot of it stems from 1 really innocuous core change. In Smash Bros, you are allowed to grab someone during hitstun or blockstun. In Street Fighter, you are not. A basic issue that came up during the first version of Street Fighter 2, and Smash 64 was, if people are allowed to get advantage on block, then they can throw instantly, and that’s a guard breaker. So in SF2 World Warrior, you could jump in at someone, hit them with a roundhouse on their block, then just throw them. Easy unblockables. Similar stuff is possible in Smash 64, like shieldbreak combos, and unblockables off higher shield stun aerials. Continue reading →

Issues/Joys of Parrying

Celia Wagar2 Comments

I’ve been thinking over parrying a bit passively and here’s some more thoughts on it.

The issue with parrying is that it is its own system by itself, which can beat anything the game throws at you.

In games where parries can beat any attack, the only system you need to learn is parrying. Parrying in most games has no element of spacing, only the element of timing, so you tend to lose out on a lot of the dynamic spacing challenges that go on in a game, reducing the game to just a timing challenge. A tough timing challenge, but just a timing challenge. Continue reading →

Games Ruined by Bad Balance

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Can you name some games (single player and/or competitive) that you feel were ruined by poor balance?

I can’t think of any multiplayer games that are that way, except maybe TF2? An Arena shooter would get hurt by that too, but I don’t think any current arena shooter has a balance problem. Balance in those games affects the number of viable elements of play within a single game, bad balance effectively makes them simpler games to play overall, it doesn’t just excise certain characters.

As for a single player game, Nier. Absolutely Nier. Nier was fucked in the ass by balance. Nothing is balanced in Nier. Weapons aren’t balanced, attacks aren’t balanced, spells aren’t balanced, companions aren’t balanced. Dodging and blocking aren’t balanced. The only things in the game that are balanced are the standard attack combo, dark blast, dark lance, and dark hand. Continue reading →