A Broken Spirit :(

A friend of mine is considering quitting fighting games altogether.

He’s been playing Street Fighter 4 online and offline for over a year now, and he feels that he will never be good at fighting games. I tried to tell him that the process takes a lot of time and patience, and that losing is all about the learn process, but he doesn’t listen. He has no patience, gets mad every time he loses, and no confidence in his abilities.

But yesterday, while he was playing online, he was getting beat bad by a bunch of players. Then during one match, he simply put his controller down, and let the other guy beat him. No moves, didn’t say a word, nothing. It went to a point where the other guy continuously taunted him to attack, but to no avail. After the other guy left the online room, my pal shut off the PS3, and had this distant look in his face, like his fighting spirit was completely shattered beyond repair. That’s when he told me he was thinking of quitting.

So, how do I stop this from happening?
How do I teach this guy patience, and help him gain confidence in his abilities?
I figured if I could do that, maybe he’ll come back.

You don’t dude. You’re wasting your time if you’re trying to get someone who doesn’t have the motivation to persevere through failure and doesn’t wanna strive to get better. Focus on you homie. Your heart is in the right place, but focus on you.

i feel im in the same boat with him. ive been playing competitive fighting games since 03 and i dont feel my games getting better any time soon. i get the critiques and when i work them into my game i’m still losing to bs that ive been losing to.

Hes either going to keep putting in the work, or quit. I was exactly like your friend, but i said fuck it and kept putting in the work.

Cool story, bro. :tup:

If the man wants to accept defeat, he can accept defeat and take from it as he will.
If the man wants to give up, let the man give up and that will be that.
If the man wants to keep fighting, he has to realize that the path is hard and rough.

There’s nothing out there telling him he “can’t”, except for himself. If he can’t understand that and help himself up from that, what more can you do? Not saying it’s wasted effort but if he has that attitude and maintains that, maybe this isn’t meant for him.

Let him cool off, I think he is just really slumped out.
Sure, your friend know basics. Is he using them correctly? If like random scrubs beat you with the most random tactic, it just means you let your skill drop to their level…There is no reason for you to feel that you are better and drop the stuff you know.
What I might have said seems irrelevant, but most of the time I get beat by random people is because I feel like they are not worth trying over. That mentality is WRONG! You should play your hardest and never let things be free…
If your friend loves the game, he will be back…but if he really really hate it . Then there is nothing you can do to bring him back, but he is lucky to have a partner to play with and he really takes that for granted.

SF4 isn’t as rewarding of a game to “master” as other fighting games. Tell him to try other characters, and if that doesn’t work, tell him to try another game with a bit more freedom of movement, more options and fewer dice rolls. Strategy in SF4 is currently paper-thin and simply isn’t concrete. The only real solid method of winning in SF4 is to play defensively; very defensively and counter.

By the way, which character does he use?

I’d say, take a break from it, when u give your mind time to let it seek in, you’ll find that the break made you better. Also the time away helps you unlearn bad habits. Also tell him to try a new main.

The courage to tread a thorny trail should be the goal of every martial arts master or serious player. Yeah, something like that.

As long as you’re doing his work for him, why not just play in his stead?

All this “if he’s blah blah blah” stuff is bullshit. Anyone who can’t empathize with him is just another retard who’s all too pleased to just lame out all day while fantasizing that it makes them good. No amount of patience can counter the endless stream of Ryutards, and i hate to break it to you mouth-breathing cockblasters but eating wakeup SRKs from people who just got their last 5 wakeup SRKs baited and punished isn’t that great for building confidence. LOL at all you scrubs acting like he’s not GANGSTA HURD enough because he’s realized how gay online can be.

The problem is that there are large windows where the mechanics punish you for trying to get better, and it doesn’t make for a very good incentive to keep trying to implement more advanced tactics and get better when the results say that doing so makes you worse than braindead mashers and tierwhores.

Oh, and you’re a self-absorbed douche, too. I can’t imagine that’s terribly inspiring to deal with. Maybe if you were more interesting to play against yourself, or a better teacher, he’d be more enthused.

Buy him a copy of Halo. He’s done.

lol, been there done that.

I have a double misfortune of picking the shit tier characters AND not being very good at fighting games in general. I’ve broken controllers. I’ve emo’d out and sat there letting online random’s finish me off without touching the controller. I’m still here and I’m still playing. Just last night, I got worked over 0-5 vs someone who picked random every time. Dude was just better than me. There are a lot of people better than me. It’s a fact of life that anyone interested in anything competitive needs to accept. There are people better than you.

Either he gets back on the horse and rides, or he goes and finds something else to do with his time. Not much more to say.

edit: oh yea, the flipside… There are people worse than you too… find them and beat them… it helps the confidence sometimes :rofl:

I am the same way I get impatience quick and if i am getting beat super bad i put the stick down and just let them fuck me up for free cause thats about what they were doing in the fist place. But everyday I come back and love playing the game. He just needs to realize its a game and its for fun. The more you down your self and think about the weak parts of your game the more you will lose, just like me. when you keep your head high and dont worry about losses you always do better.

that comment about baiting 5 wake up srks only to eat a 6th one when he has a slimer of health and you thinking “he only has that much health left and i jus punished 5 srks in a row…hes not goin to do it” only to eat the 6th one fadc ultra ftl is so true. I would even cope with the lag if it wasnt for shit like this.

on your friend i honestly think he jus needs to dig deeper, see why he is losing and try to stop losing to that. Its called playing to learn. everyone has to do it and its the only way u can possible get better. If it aint a tournament or w/e i think he should jus play to learn rather than to win, you pick up so much more things with that mindset imo(of course, he should still be trying to win). I doubt he will quit. no one quits because they lost(at least in my experience)

Did your friend take up fighting games on his own or at your insistence? Because if it was the latter, you’re probably doing more harm than good telling him to stick in it. He sounds like he’s just slumping, and that happens to everybody, but don’t guilt-trip him into staying in it when what he really needs is a break. He’ll only have less fun getting beat if he thinks he’s doing it out of some sense of obligation. Let him take a break for however long he wants (yes, that includes indefinitely) and see if he cools off a bit. If he comes back, he’ll come back because his enjoyment of the game outweighs his frustration at losing, rather than because he doesn’t want his friend thinking he’s a bitch. He has to want it, not you, and if he really doesn’t want it, then you’ve got no right to push it on him. That only makes things worse.

And yeah, I kinda agree with Jagger. Online is really one of the fastest ways to get sick of ANY game that you want to play seriously. On top of the lag issues, you don’t feel any connection to the people on the other end, you’re just gloryholing with some other bored fuck who you’ll likely never play again. There’s not an ounce of respect involved on either end, winner or loser, unless you know the guy personally. The winner will laugh at the anonymous loser’s incompetence, and the loser will hate the SHIT out of the smug anonymous fuck who beat him, as well as being pissed at himself for LOSING to said nameless fuck and his nameless fuck gimmicks.

For these games in particular, it is MUCH more rewarding to seek out people in your area for ranbats, practice sessions, small tourneys and the like, because you can always chill with the people who beat you (or who YOU beat) afterwards. It cultivates respect in both directions, and it softens the blow of losing. It’s a very helpful reminder of the importance of the human element in these games, and it really helps you to remember that there are more important things in life than winning at a videogame. You also level up MUCH faster by playing with other people, because the game feels less like a chore and more like, well, a game. As long as you’ve at least practiced your punishment and BnBs so that you can do those on autopilot off a clean look, you have a lot more time to concentrate on learning footsies and spacing and the like, which are much harder and more frustrating to duplicate in practice mode or learn online. Me, I still lose every other match I play, but I have a lot of fun doing it AND I am actually improving at a fairly good pace. Suggest this to him, but again, you cannot force him, or you know for DAMN sure he’ll never want to play again.

See, here we have part of the problem. How bad does this guy actually want to play these games? Is he even that interested to begin with, or was he kinda dragged into it? Using language like “you’ve gotta (verb) him” really doesn’t help my impression of what’s really the problem here, which is that a guy who doesn’t really want it feels pressured into grinding. And what it all really comes down to is that there should be no shame or video-game deficiency associated with not really wanting to play fighting games.

These games are not for everyone, but that’s not really a sign of weakness so much as it is personal preference and natural talent. Me, I’d be lost in a game like Starcraft because so much of it is resource management and thinking ten moves ahead (versus SF’s three), and I’m sure I could easily find somebody who’s aces at Starcraft but is garbage in SF because of the different dexterity requirements that I have (more or less) met. I’m not really a worse person for sucking at his game, and neither is he for sucking at mine. If your boy isn’t feeling SF, don’t put on airs like you have to save him from certain scrubdom. There are far worse character deficiencies a man can have than sucking at Street Fighter. Let him retire with dignity if that’s what he really wants; there is NOTHING stopping him from changing his mind and coming back later.

Yeah if he didn’t like it from the beginning he won’t like it in the end. He’s pretty much all but a done case for liking fighting games. He’s not used to a game that eventually rewards you if you lose a lot. Especially considering he has little to no other background from SF games to relate the game to. It’s not like he can say “well I liked to play the other SF games better”. If he just got started with SFIV and he’s acting like that…all of the other games are harder so he’s pretty much left with shit. People get mad sometimes but when you get people like him that literally just give up and stop pressing buttons…that’s a sign of someone who needs to go back to Halo.

That’s the problem with video games. Most of them reward you instantly with almost little to no work. That’s really why SFIV was made the way it was so your friend would have at least some incentive to continue trying as long as he got off a random shoryu or an Ultra. The problem is SFIV and other fighting games are still harder and more mind intensive than pretty much any other console game on the market. These new kids on the block growing up on instant gratification games where you get to see victory whether you’re new or been playing for 5 years just won’t get it.

Like Jagger said though…you’re also not really putting him in an environment where he can really level himself up any ways. At least make sure he’s playing in 4 to 5 bar connections only if you’re really trying to teach him by playing online. Other than that…he’s gotta man up. No other way to go about it.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…

There is always Ninja Gaiden if you lose alot.
Though tell him ask for opinions from other members if not you and try it out. If his way isn’t working, what are the chances that yours will?