Birdie’s light Revenger catches me all the time online, and it’s 35 frames! Here’s a best-case breakdown of the latency involved:
Monitor = 0
Brook adaptor/stick delay = 0
Primed reaction time (mine) = 12
Input delay = 8
Online delay = 3
Total = 23
If you’ve a CRT and one of the fastest sticks you can knock off the top two, and you might have amazing visual reactions of 10 when you’re eyeing for the Revenger. Online delay’s 3 at the very best?
And the worst-case scenario:
Monitor = 1
Brook adaptor/stick delay = 1
Unprimed reaction time (mine) = 17
Input delay = 8
Online delay = 8
Total = 35
8 frames is probably quite common against Wi-Fi users, and it’s that plus the inherent input delay that tips the scales. Reduce them both to 4 and I’d have 4 frames to input a 4-frame punish. In this example, only a sharp reaction affords me a 3f jab, and 3f DPs require additional time for their inputs.
In my case, absolutely. Online play’s all that I - and many others - have. It’s pretty annoying when you give yourself 1-in-2 odds of a dash and preemptively check it, only for the Revenger to sail over your poke; Riddick versus the Necromonger. When you can’t establish mindgames with punishes, it feels like everything becomes a lucky dip in the other player’s favour, and they become even harder to read if they’re smart enough to avoid obvious patterns. Because they now have reads on you, but unless they get careless, you’ve none - that you can prove with punishes - on them.
All you can do is say ‘Stop doing that! It’s not legit!’ to your telly. Except it is legit.
I’ll tell you why players don’t like this game, and 37 pages of posts so I doubt I’m saying anything new, but there’s no crutches in this game. No Dp FADC, no focus attack in neutral, no HKD into vortex/wash rinse repeat offense, no crouch tech, no ultra, etc… The list literally goes on. SF4 hid player weakness, so now those same players are getting exposed and they don’t like it. Chun top tier? Ok, a fraud playing Chun is still a fraud. A fraud playing Seth, Cammy, Viper, or Akuma? That’s a top player right there.
You can say the combo system is weak but combo monsters aren’t the lifeblood of the scene. Blame the content, fine, grinding for colors is ass. Blame the servers, eeeeh SFV servers are certainly not the worst, in fact far from. Love when guys like CD Maní say SFV servers are unplayable, but forgot that the MKX servers were cheeks for nearly a year. Also where are these guys coming from who are saying this game has no tech? There’s certainly been plenty and Jav1ts Twitter is proof of that.
Sfv frustrates me because it narrowed the skill gap. Partly because it’s vanilla and as tech and knowledge expands so will the skill gap.
Partly because the extra input lag makes the game slightly less rewarding for knowledge as it’s harder to make use of it in punishes and recognising situations fast.
Partly because the risk/reward of jumping in is skewed. As the damage went up from sfiv, so did the potential jump in combo damage but anti air damage in general, didn’t.
And partly because damage is high and rounds are shortened. It takes less openings to take a round which allows chance to play a bigger part than it should. The better player has more chance to shine in a longer set. If all damage was halved by 50%, rounds would be twice as long and the skilled player would win more consistently which I think makes for a better game.
A skill gap is better for beginners and advanced players alike. It may not be as much short term fun for casual weekenders though.
Eventhubs recently had a poll asking what should change. Readers unanimously said damage should stay the same. Sorry but they’re all idiots. The longer the rounds, the better the game and the more reward there is for thinking.
I couldn’t disagree with this more. Low damage allows bad play to make it into a game. High damage forces better play because it allows for fewer mistakes.
Low damage allows slower players more time to get acquainted with a round, but why throw slower players any kind of bone… That just makes the game watered down by slower bad players.
This is exactly the flawed line of thinking im talking about and I hope capcom is smart enough not to fall for it. First of all the ‘slower’ players you say are rewarded by a longer set, are the ones who analyse and read their opponents better and counter more intelligently. It’s called adaptation and it’s what daigo is known for and yes it should be rewarded. Your ‘slower’ player that wins if the game is longer , is the better , smarter player. The player that can only win if it’s a short set, is the one who relies moreso on surprise, randomness and auutopilot to overwhelm without time to be fully downloaded. To me , these are the bad players.
Scaled damage doesn’t let frauds make more bad decisions, it lets everyone make more bad decisions. This is crucial to understand. Sfv moreso than even sfiv, is a game of numbers and risk vs reward as xian has talked about, it’s about playing the percentages in your favour and gaining reads. You make decisions based on trying to limit your opponent’s options and read them in order to give yourself higher odds in each situation. It is obvious that these odds slightly in your favour will show more obviously the longer the set or rounds. If the set or rounds are short, the risk is enlarged that even if you play so that the game is 60/40 in your favour, 3 decisions can still go against you and you end up with 0/100 actuality. To expand the point, if a round lasted an hour , the decision record would almost certainly match the 60/40 odds in your favour every time. It’s simple odds and statistics common knowledge.
Longer rounds don’t allow frauds to get away with anything, in fact it allows them to get away with less as they will be read and countered. Shorter rounds with less openings because of higher damage, allow frauds to get away with more. Everyone makes mistakes. Even daigo, and when less is known about the opponent , more mistakes are made. In shorter rounds with high damage, daigo has more chance of losing to a lucky jump or two. In longer rounds, smarter play wins out even if they made a lucky guess or two.
You guys are talking about frauds making mistakes and bad play being rewarded, but you’re not breaking it down analytically, bad play and frauds are rewarded more by the very thing you are defending.
I could write some big, long, thought out post but I’ve had this conversation before.
What is considered the more skilled game:
Penny ante poker.
Or no limit poker?
Low damage games reward players that are more analytical and allow them to make more mistakes.
Higher damage games reward the player with more game knowledge and turn every tool into a threat.
Bad players think fighting games are only about “reads” fighting games are about speed of reactions, critical thinking, reads, game knowledge, fighting well under pressure, and many other things. The want to break a game down into reads only is the siren call of the bad player. It sucks much of the fun out of games and doesn’t allow a player to mess with his opponents mind as effectively as higher damage games go.
Not being familiar with poker variants let me put another analogy on the table, in two hands of blackjack which player wins, the card counter or the random gambler? Either. The card counter stacks odds in their favour with skill but two hands isn’t enough to show the odds advantage. Which one is more skilled?
I completely agree with your second last paragraph, fighting games are about all of those things.
But you say high damage rewards game knowledge, and it does, but in most cases the ‘slower’ player has as much if not more game knowledge and uses their tools just as effectively. Game knowledge to do big damage isn’t advanced knowledge in sfv. If two players have equal reactions and equal knowledge of damage and combos, but one is far greater in all other fighting game skills and knowledge, that player has the advantage regardless of length, but the chance that advantage will show in the result diminishes the shorter the set. That’s just fact right? If a round lasts 2 seconds it’s a one guess game. If it lasts 2 hours, the better player will end up dominating every time. That comes down to my original point- skill gap. It is wider , if the game is longer. I don’t understand how anyone can really argue against that. If any game or sport allows more time for all various skills and knowledge and reactions to come into play more times, the better team or player will win more consistently.
All this suggests to me is that different games cater to different skillsets. I don’t think it proves that high damage makes a game MORE skillful, or vice versa .
Personally I think a highly diverse roster can provide the best of both worlds, since you can have some characters suitable for reactive, analytical players (generally with lower damage output) and some characters suitable for proactive, aggressive players (generally with higher damage output). I don’t like it when a game’s mechanics determine your playstyle in advance, at least not to the degree that it happens in SFV.
Some games emphasize some of those elements more than others, though. SFV is a particularly read-heavy game for reasons that this thread has already discussed to death, such as input lag, crush counters, poor walk speed, etc. I think that makes the high damage a lot more frustrating than it would be otherwise.
I usually don’t do this. I don’t quote post people because I don’t like arguing with simpletons in a fashion that takes actual time away from me. I find you to be a person of intellect though so I will take this to the quote wars style of posting
my answer here is likely to not be what youd would expect. I’m all for simple and even hyperbolic analogies… they are fun and cut right to the heart of the matter. however I find your analogy too flawed. you are asking who the better player is…
the cheater or the non cheater…
I think that says it all as far as what I think of that analogy. how about we use a slightly better one:
in the world card counting championships (which probably don’t exist, but lets not bother with that) the players have to be able to count into a 10 deck stack of cards (500 cards) there is no allowance for getting cards wrong.
so how do we judge this competition?
easy. the player that correctly memorizes the cards the FASTEST. wins.
in sports and basically any competition, speed is valued over being slow. even in chess.
the first unofficial chess world master was paul morphy. paul was a very fast player and could calculate positions very quickly. there was a european player, i forget what his name was, but I think it was howard Staunton. howard was a fantastic chess player. by all accounts one of the best players in the world. he ducked matches with morphy for quite a long time, but in the end they finally agreed to play.
there was 1 problem though… howard would sometimes… and I’m not being hyperbolic here… take up to 14 hours to make a move. compared to morphys less than 5 minute average which went down to somewhere around 30 seconds when playing against Staunton… since morphy just had up to 14 hours to come to a conclusion in minutes that would take howard 14 hours to come to.
now… had howard defeated morphy… do you really think that he would have been the better player taking ALL that time? (howard lost decisively)
consequently because of matches like these, chess rules were changed. now players would have 2 hours to make 40 moves (iirc) even if 1 player was technically leading the game, if they went over the time limit, they lost.
speed was now a factor in chess. and it proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the fastest players were also (surprise) the best players.
this thinking that you have that slower players “know as much as the other faster guy” is quite simply wrong. the faster guy is faster because HE ALREADY KNOWS THE ANSWERS. He KNOWS how far backwards you will move when you move backwards. He KNOWS when and from where you like to jump from because he knows the matchup. He KNOWS how long it will take a player of your skill to crack under pressure since hes played hundreds of players of your approximate skill level using the character that you use.
in oldschool streetfighter I could tell within a 90% accuracy, playing against people for the first time, how good they were and whether I could hope to win… in the first 1-3 seconds of the round. I could tell by how they moved. there was a dance that every player that was any good at all played when first playing a player for the first time, did. This was an unspoken thing. no one taught me this… I learned it at the arcades.
What if someone didn’t do the dance? that was the easiest and fastest way to tell that they were bad. Even the highest level of player would do the dance. He had nothing to fear in showing you he knew how to play since he was better. He also wanted to know what level you were on so he could more easily base his coming strategy and decisions on your perceived level.
I myself was a slightly higher than midlevel player. I could destroy people that didn’t dance well. I knew they danced shit cause the spacing that they danced at was shit. that was my BIG TELL. Their spacing.
you might now ask why i didn’t just dance like a high level player… the answer was of course “because I cant” the dance was reactive and based on spacing. the faster you reacted to a players spacing and kept your own, the higher level you were. the worse your spacing was and slower you reacted to your opponents movement… the worse a player you were. It got slightly deeper than that but not really.
this is in direct refutation to what you seem to think… that it takes huge amounts of time to read opponents… it really doesn’t. you will of course gain more and more in depth knowledge as you play a player… but the dance should give you more than enough information… if you are actually good. the dance still applies but because of lowered damage it applies less now.
Point being, good players make reads quicker.
.
I just demonstrated why this thinking is false. If the slower player actually used their tools just as effectively as the other guy…
THEY WOULDNT BE SLOW.
.
Agreed, but reaction time and meter management still come into play as does stage position, timer, number of rounds… the faster players make better use of these things than do the slower players.
Wrong. there is a timer in the game and matches aren’t first to 10 for a reason. Damage changes the meta. the same way a guy might win a first to 10 but lose a first to 3, well, he should have made his meta stronger in the first to 3. first to 10 isn’t tourney time so it doesn’t matter.
In the current meta of low damage except for meter dumps, players are allowed to get away with various mistakes for less damage as long as their opponent doesn’t have a lot of meter stocked. this results in many first rounds being randomish, more so than when both players are stocked with huge damage potential. which SHOWS how low damage affects a meta… players play more like idiots the lower the damage goes in a game. and the 'well then its easier to beat them, right?" argument doesn’t hold up, because THE GAME becomes dumbed down as a result. Bad players stay bad and good players have to play mind numbingly long games against them to secure a win that was never in doubt. This is no good for either player.
I demonstrated how that is false, above. Like I said previously, you are thinking to analytically. 1 guess?
there is so much more to read than that in 2 seconds of neutral. And not knowing this, kinda shows a persons lower skill level. people will beat you and you will never know the read they have on you because the “True” mixups in streetfighter aren’t low/throw or high/low, they are this spacing or that, this timing or that. your moves can be perfectly unpredictable, but if your spacing and timing ARE predictable then it doesn’t matter. and the bets players read timing and spacing faster and more accurately than other players.
Not true and there is a limit to this. If more time is needed to say who is the better player… how much time is enough? first to 5? first to 10? first to 100? “Hey you beat me in this first to 50, but man if it had been first to 100 I would have gotten that read and beaten you”
??? that makes no sense. The better player is better the instant they touch the controller. you are worried about analytical reads when the TRUE reads are more about spacing and timing than move selection and spacing and timing are way waaaaay harder to mask than move selection.
TLDR
good players don’t need lots of games to read each other, the actual reads come very quickly and are different from what you think. Higher damage supports the BETTER player as then he can use his opponents movements against them faster, giving his opponents less time to read him, than in a lower damage game.
I’ll make this a bit easier than others will. SF5 damage is fine, its everything else that’s sort of borked. If SF5 was a game where taking random hits was legitimately scary, then this game would play completely different. As is trying to get in isn’t that scary since you can more or less count on anti airs not dealing all that much damage to dissuade you from jump. On top of that a lot of dashes are near unreactable so just waltzing in with a couple of dashes isn’t out of the ordinary.
when people are in the neutral (fuck I hate this term, same with “midrange” nondescriptive horse shit) the tools are kind of bleh. The thing is that the better player is going to do better regardless. On the other hand the way the characters are made hurt mid to low level players more since you can’t trust the visuals in this game all that much. The number of times people have walked into a normal of mine that doesn’t hit them is baffling.
