Avoiding Inadvertent shoryukens from fireball motions

Alright, I’m well studied on all of the input leniency in SSF4 and MVC3, but one basic thing eludes me in both games, and doesn’t seem to be addressed in any of the input leniency/shortcut guides… from a forward walking state, or any state of forward press, how to consistently transfer to a qcf(fireball) move without a shoryuken-press move coming out? We’ll just use Ryu as an example, though I run into this with all kinds of characters. I’m walking forward, and I decide to throw a fireball, but a dragon punch comes out. Do I “reset” the input by pressing back… down/back, up? Or do I just have to wait a certain amount of frames before attempting a fireball?

I’d also like to know of any differences in MVC and SF, if there are any in this regard.

Let the stick go back to neutral after walking forward then, do the fireball motion.

Walk Forward > Release Stick > Fireball

Figured it was something simple like that… would a backward press function the same way, or does it have to actually stop on neutral? Or would that still result in a srk if executed too quickly? I’m wondering if rolling the stick from forward to back counts as a neutral press, since it passes through neutral, technically, or if even the backwards negates it by itself.

Easy solution: just do a hcf instead of a qcf.

Too bad you cant dash foward qcf x2 without getting an uppercut.

It doesn’t matter which direction you’ll end up pressing (if any at all), as long as you stop holding any of the three forward positions. As soon as you let go of forward - and this includes downforward -, you can start waiting for the buffer to time out. For Ryu, this means an 8-frame wait.

There is no way to break the DP’s input sequence other than waiting. Methods like HCF and going to neutral are just timing aids, and will differ from person to person.

The input leniency is hardcoded onto the moves. Doing stuff like going to neutral, HCF etc won’t change this. It’s all about learning to delay your fireball. I had this problem in SFII as well but I got used to it, just like I did in SFIV. It’s not something that I specifically trained myself to do. It’s just something that came naturally over the time spent playing.

I suppose if you do wanna practice it though you can try practicing dash, fireball and walk forward cr.mk fireball in training mode.

Okay, thanks for the clarification… so it actually just is an 8-frame wait from your last forward press. That helps a lot, thanks.

Even though the input leniency is hardcoded, doing things like hcf will force you to slow down your inputs. It’s similar to whiffing normals to time a safe jump. You can do it without the normal usually, but it’s just an aid.