What is your opinion on acting vs reacting?
I am of the strong opinion that sufficient foresight, created by experience, planning, etc, can allow one to see openings which lead to a stronger position. Seizing the initiative in other words. My blogs are all gone explaining reaction times and stuff but in general the further you all are away from each other the more time you have to react depending on the various kwirks of the matchup. The more point blank you are, where many players in CvS2 think they like to be, the more it’s a guess. The knowledgeable though know, that this close, the one who controls is the one who will win–unless they are limited somehow and thus predictable to the defender, who in this case effectively becomes the one looking ahead.
Both have their place of course—acting and reacting. They are intertwined. I think strong players need to master both acting and reacting, but the strongest master seizing the initiative, and if the opening doesn’t exist, to bait out an “expected” response that, to the other player, seems like they’re “acting,” but in reallity they were reacting just like a puppet.
A good example:
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Someone throwing a series of strong frame advantaged, quick recovery moves vs Blanka who is close to but doesn’t have CC, yet can modestly RC ok when not under duress. If you nail him with a +7 or +8 move, that reversal timing for his RC becomes tighter, because Blanka isn’t the one throwing the block string out there with his comfort zone executable RC’s thrown in. He has to “guess” where that 2 or 3 frame window is and properly insert his own 2-3 move window for his own RC.
Ideally, if you can walk up on Blanka with Nakoruru’s walking jabs or O.Iori’s (yes I know he’s not tourney viable, STFU), you aren’t really in danger of his RC Electricity unless this guy is truly on point, meaning he is comfortable with 2 frame +7 or +8 frame advantaged, quick recovering moves and RC’ing through them. -
After he gets CC from the repeated blockings though, he could easily mash CC repeatedly if he wanted to blast through moves like that, though it’s somewhat risky doing such things against some characters in the game, most people do not plan that far ahead in this scenario anyway so it’s a low risk maneuver with the right timing (and a sufficiently fast move to CC into to beat the recovery of Nak’s or Iori’s jab).
In a different light, this could be what the Nak or Iori player is counting on since Blanka may feel truly helpless and try going for the mashable move to break out, and punish, thus robbing the Blanka of the CC.—there are other ways out of this but lets keep it simple for the subject in the title.
The difference between these two scenarios is you can mash the latter, but not the former, though as your skill goes up perhaps you are one of those “truly on point” people who can mash RC’s with 199% consistency in these instances. There are other moves in the game in this scenario that you can mash out invincible moves with of course to “blast through” Nak’s jabs, but they all come with a high price tag for punishment if you did it at the wrong time, though they are arguably easier since you can “buffer” these strings in while in block stun and the game seems more forgiving here, like Ken or Akuma’s jab DP’s or whatever.
I digress?
The point is Blanka would be more comfortable applying these same games towards Nako with his own Frame advantaged moves, and as the player is more at home with Blanka’s moveset, knows exactly when to execute his own RC’d moves especially to counter reprisals that are easy to see coming depending on the player he’s fighting, running Nako’s moveset. He’d be more comfortable acting, so he can easiliy “react” to what he saw coming, especially if his actions limit Nako’s reprisals to a few predictable outcomes.
There are many levels of this, but he must first close the distance on his terms to apply this, just as Nako must close on her terms to apply her own stuff.
In my opinion, knowing the ins and outs of that distanced fighting is key to seizing the initiative, to “seeing the future” and responding quicker to what was expected via training or experience vs the clueless one who knows nothing of this fight and plays completely reactive and instinctively hits back at the earliest opportunity.
Even the turtle is watching, looking for a recognizable pattern to take advantage of and when he see’s the cues, he acts/reacts (however you want to look at it, because in this case it is the same?!?)