Dealing with frustration a a beginner

Classic Fighting Games Ultra Street Fighter IV
1

Hey guys. I’ve been playing SF4 since vanilla, but never really playing it the right way. I recently decided to relearn the game from the ground up, reading everything I could about SF fundamentals and practicing in training mode as much as possible. I feel that I’ve gotten at least a little bit better and I know that I understand the game a lot more.

While I spend 90% of my time practicing blocking, anti-airing, combos and setups in training mode, I use the other 10% percent to just play matches with guys on my friends lists or local. However when I start playing I basically throw out everything I learned, and I think that it’s mainly me getting frustrated with what may be happening (lag, missed inputs, dropped combos, or a match-up that I know nothing about) and end up regressing into bad habits.

I’m sure that this happens more often than when learning the game. My question is: what do you guys do to get past this stage in the learning cycle? How did you keep your head when you get frustrated while learning?

SN: my gamer tag is TerraZero. I’d love to get some matches in with anyone who’d be willing to point out mistakes that I’m making or anything. I’m just doing everything I can think of to get better.

2

Also, I have been playing Cammy, so if you guys could approach the topic from the perspective of a Cammy main, that’d be really helpful.

3

Honestly, the best thing I can say is practice practice practice, sleep, then practice some more. I was like that too up until either SSF4 or AE, then I decided that I wanted to learn how to do things that I thought I couldn’t do. I watched videos, read forums, and spent a lot of time in training. Of course that all went out the window when I ran matches online. But after practicing combos or setups for so long in training, they got committed to muscle memory and I found myself just doing them in real matches. At first I messed up a lot online, so I would practice more, and before you know it they just start to click and your doing them without knowing it.

What I realized after though is that when I was learning new stuff and trying to apply it online or in a match, I was over thinking things. When I over-thought I failed. But after doing the same things over and over I spent less time thinking about the setups or combos and just did them.

Then I was able to focus on the meta game or yomi.

4

what Ar3s said. <3

also dont get discouraged. everyone started at 0 (almost) and worked their way up.

  1. dont take it seriously. its a game. we play it for fun.
  2. practice practice practice. things will come to you naturally in a fight (muscle memory)
  3. take breaks between sessions. generally speaking my performance drastically drop after 10 or 7 matches straight :confused: (maybe because of old age? and concentration.?)

for me personally i learned Cammy from playing online and this forum :sweat:

5

The main thing about learning stuff is i feel you will have some steep diminishing returns with the more your try to learn stuff in a small period.

Now i just learn 1 thing before i go to sleep, practice it the next day a bit, then a bit more the next day, then i will try to apply it. you get what i mean

When i only cared about learning how to anti air and play footsies it was so easy to absorb stuff as it is all easy to learn hard to master, but when you start leaning stuff unique to your char or execution reliant (eg 1 framers).

I have started learning cammy as an alt among a couple so i may not be a main but i can offer some advice.

you need to be focusing on your footsies heavily and that only can be developed by playing games, you have a sick walkspeed and good normals so knowing your spacing for normals and your spacing for meaty spiral arrows is very useful

In training mode however you need to learn all of your setups off of knockdowns
make sure you know what you can do off: 2 Hit heavy spiral arrow, Forward throw, back throw, sweep, hooligan, U1, and ultra 1 Juggle

Before you know all of that just focus on 2 basic combos cr lk cr lp cr mk xx HK SA and cr FP cr mk HK SA for punishes.

When you can hit those 2 combos 90% of the time and know all of your setups by heart [if you miss them its ok as long as you know ALL of your options]. start exploring more damaging combos and the char specific combos and setups.

But really dont focus on much else other than fundamentals which you need to play people to learn (footsies, Anti airing, Zoning) and you setups off of knockdowns (especially untechables) as whatever you learn in the training room will transfer directly to setups off of knockdowns. Lastly you just need to learn the bigger combos that require more execution but that is the last thing that matters. If you are comfortable with 1 framers go for it but i assume your are not.

Hope it helps

6

I found all of my frustration disappeared when I just started playing in locals.

7

something that can be helpful is setting up a 2 slot endless lobby and just running matches with a friend with certain guidlines you need to abide by. rules that both of you honestly try your best to follow such as " no jumping" or " no reversals without meter" or “AA every single jump in even if you think youll get trade”. The point to these things are that while you may not apply all of them during actual matches, you will have 1), built a ground game, 2) learn how to intelligently use reversals, and 3) work your AA reactions up to par so that when you see someone jump towards, youll already have that AA reaction ability. I know that some people may not agree with things like this, but it helped me early on. other rulesets you can try out:

only use normals
no projectiles
no divekicks

and im sure there are a lot you can think of on your own. even if the ruleset is something that you wouldnt really do in a match, such as no divekicks, it has the goal of teaching you how to use cammys up close normals more effectively and to learn how to pressure with no meter essentially. as long as the ruleset has an underlying purpose, its worth something, in my opinion.

also, dont take online so serious. especially ranked. people get excited and do literally anything they can to win, and if you follow suit, you will be learning nothing in the end. if you really want to TRAIN, go into endless. it is better than ranked in virtually every aspect. no worry about points (shouldnt be something to think about in the first place), no worries about not finding a certain player again as you can play in a room as long as you want, and you get to genuinely WORK on certain aspects. you can single them out with no consequence for losing a match. if youre on PC, id be more than happy to play with you.

lastly, you will grow as a player infinitely more at locals or offline get togethers, than you will by strictly playing online. of course there are exceptions to this rule, but in general, offline will help you learn much more at a faster rate.

hope some of this advice helps

8

I’m no high level player myself but I can share some philosophy…

In real life martial arts training I remember reading something that made a lot of sense to me… That we train techniques and situations not so that we always know what to do, but so the 10% of all training that is more deeply absorbed will come out subconsciously in the moment. The rest of a SF fight is improvisation/intuition, and thinking (which is slower.) So don’t always expect to be putting everything into practice right away. Sometimes it’s good enough to be aware and be working on it in training.

Personally I get frustrated If I lose due to silly mistakes or poor reactions and beat myself up about it. I always remind myself that losing = learning more than if i’d won. The funny thing is, when i started out I expected to lose 100% of the time (and I did) so it never mattered. Now that i’m used to a lot more wins it makes poor mistakes harder to take. So silly to care when you think about it :confused:

9

Well you’ve got more then enough replies but I’ll add my ten cent.

I actually do the exact same thing you do, I started to main Ibuki (who I’m currently thinking of changing because my god dropping vortex makes me mad) and for all the combos I had learnt, I went into the match and stayed away with kunais, and basically tried to punish anything and everything with TC10 (which is silly). And after playing around 50 matches with my friend that night, I went back into the training room and just did 1 combo, over. and over. and over. and over again. Then i went and watched a few replays of myself (because as always when you watch you can pretty much tell what the other dudes gonna do half the time and you know how to punish it, but when you play its completely different) and I found an instance where i could punish that with my combo. Next day I was fine, and played ibuki quite well. My recent change has come from understanding how to start a combo, realize it’s not hitting (being blocked) and ending it safe instead of autopiloting into a neckbreaker from muscle memory.

So I don’t think it’s frustration because lets be honest, you’d stop playing if you were Mangry. Whats causing it is just the lack of experience playing with that character in a Real match, not against a training dummy. My friend has this problem on SFxT. When we’re in the breifing room he can do all of his combos like the back of his hand. never drops one. constantly doing it. We get into a match and he’ll just outright punish someone with a Jab. and leave it at that, I don’t know if it’s the feeling of pressure, or the desire of wanting to win but he plays a lot differently when he picks paul and just wings it lol.

It’s more likely nerves then frustration, My advice, just grind out like 10/30 matches online, win or lose everyone, but DON’T~~~~~

1.Care about the match. No mashing Ultra on wake up bcz i ar mangry, If it’s because the guy keeps jumping at you All. Day. Every. Time. feel free to teach him not to.

2.Play to win, instead play as if you’re watching someone play and attempting to learn from it, and take time to make decisions. Okay you see him Shroyuken and by the time you say to yourself “Yeah i can punish this” he’s already on the ground blocking but do that enough and your hands will go “Okay master time to punish”

Weirdly enough Street fighter gets a lot more annoying when you Actually try to train and play it, when you don’t you don’t care because you know nothing. When you do and you drop a combo it hurts, especially when you lose because of it.

Oh and on a side note, how do you actually feel playing Cammy? I’ve noticed that characters for me come down to feeling. When I first started playing characters, characters i played like Ibuki/Ryu/Dan/Gief/Balrog just felt right, they didn’t feel confusing and i wasn’t sat there doing nothing (all be it barely punishing). But characters like Makoto/Fei Long/Guile/Cammy/Rufus When I play them it feels wrong. And that’s where most of my frustration comes from. If I play Fei and I know I’m supposed to cr.lp into rekka and Every time i get a chance to punish i just constantly mash lightpunch and then realize I can’t special cancel from a chain. It pisses me off, Or playing Cammy and having a good 2/3 combos down but not understanding how to get in because everything I do just feels unsafe and wrong. Understanding that it was the characters that were doing that to me helped a bit aswell.

Anyway, I think i added more then my Ten Cent. Hopefully all the replies have helped you in some way :slight_smile:

10

First of all, thanks for the replies. I really appreciate all the help. :slight_smile:

It’s been a few weeks since I posted this, and I can safely report that the frustration has deeply subsided. A lot of you guys basically echoed the same sentiment: play to learn and not to win. Once I really accepted that, it became much easier to just focus on improving and not on winning the match, and the frustration went away as a result. My wife is actually okay with sitting in the room while I play now! Lol. I still have a lot of work to do, but I’m starting to see the fruits of my labor, and that’s a great feeling.

That said, to the guy who said his frustration went away when he stopped playing online and started just playing locally, I completely understand and wish that I could do the same.

Thanks again, everyone.

11

What system are you on? I could use some mirror match training.

12

I play on 360. Gamer tag is the same as the name.

Not sure how much I’ll help with the matchup since I’m not very good, but I’m trying to get better. :-/

13

i mean the only real way to get better is to lose now when your losing your obtaining knowledge maybe you did an uppercut & it cost you the fight maybe your not punishing hard enough with your combos or maybe you lack spacing in order to get better you have to play a smarter opponent now wht i mean by that is play a couple dudes in your area & ask them what do you think i’m doing wrong/right it also helps if you can watch replays of your matches whether you lose or win you can learn alot from watching the footage it’s hard to like really teach somebody a fighting game especially AE or street fighter in general due to online lag & the use of online tactics which only really work online play some better people online won’t make you better think of rank matches as data where you know you lose to a A+ ryu & you can play him in an set ft7 or so this way your able to get a feel for the match-up as well as being able to have the ability to mix-up your tactics & try new things in similar situations example instead of punishing ryu’s heavy dp with an ultra with cammy you might wanna go for her ex dive kick into cr.hp into cr.mk heavy spiral arrow combo i would like to play with you but you don’t have a 360 so i can’t really help you out any further hope this long essay helped lol<br>

14

I’m down to run some sets with you and help you out. Got a headset? makes feedback easier.

15

^Yeah I do. My 360 Gamertag is in the OP.

16

terra i added u bruh i’ma play u sometime i main cammy so if you need help learning her or how to fight against her let me know my gt is OG Swiizy