Everything has a point of diminishing returns. You probably won’t become one of the very best in the world, but if you can utilize the Pareto principle and identify the 20% of your training that produces 80% of the results, you can save a lot of time in getting to a pretty high level.
Win a tournament or make top 8 with low level players entering? Sure. But top, “top”, player in general? Fuck no.
I’m not sure where willpower factors into looking for shortcuts past grinding games :wonder:
I would say it takes willpower to find those shortcuts and to exploit them in an intelligent and practical way :). I’m assuming it won’t be easy.
I gotta address something. People that are top players now either play games all day now, or played games all day back then. Those that have steady high paying careers and are still top level is probably because they’ve already developed fundamentals through their hours of play as a high school student or as a college student.
If you want to be a top player, you have to develop the fundamentals for it. Learning tech of the week after that is easy.
And that gets back to what I was saying earlier about finding the things that have the greatest effects and focusing on those.
I firmly believe that anyone in the world can place top8 in your average tournament, given that they’re dedicated enough, put in the time, and intelligent enough, to understand how to improve their skill set.
The vast majority of members in the community don’t even possess two of those traits, let alone all there.
Now, you can outplay certain players with less amount of time spent training, if you put effort into your practice. There’s a significant difference between grinding out matches online in your underwear, and really taking the time to understand your strengths, weaknesses, and using a training system to work on those things. I’d rather spend 1 hour practicing basic setups and combos, over 2 hours of hopping online and jumping around like an idiot.
But I think this alone will only make you 90% player. To get that extra 10% requires something more innate. Natural reflexes, ability to think quick on your feet, your ability to adapt, your mental fortitude, and developing that ‘clutch’ factor. You can work on these things to an extent, but I believe there is a natural limit.
Baseball recruiters call this ‘hustle’. The ability to naturally do more than is required, to over-perform your position, and make critical decisions at a time where most people would either give up, or make the wrong decision.
Following section taken from the strevival.com interview section of player, XSPR:
[details=Spoiler]HUSTLE REDUNDANTLY and cultivate SENTE:
Recently, I finally got around to reading a book I’d heard so much about over the years. It’s called The Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks. There’s one part where he talks about “hustle”:
“A baseball manager recognizes a nonphysical talent, hustle, as an essential gift of great players and great teams. It is the characteristic of running faster than necessary, moving sooner than necessary, trying harder than necessary . Hustle provides the cushion, the reserve capacity, that enables a team to cope with routine mishaps, to anticipate and forfend minor calamities.”
The best thing about hustle is, anyone can perform with it. In a physically-demanding sport like baseball, your DNA and my DNA eliminate us from ever getting close to playing in the major leagues. Street Fighter takes much of that physical requirement away and leaves us with things like more of a pure hustle.
There is a lot of very very small, subtle stuff that can add up and make a big difference quickly in a round of Street Fighter to determine which player gets the edge over the other.
I should be careful to mention that hustle does not always apply to Street Fighter in a very very basic sense. John Choi for example recommends a conservative approach, eg block and punish more, instead of taking unreasonable chances. Valle expresses it more concisely: in A2, don’t stand up; in ST, don’t jump. That means, you want the other player to make the first mistake, because it’s far easier to just punish and capitalize on; get him to jump first. But what about at the higher levels, where you’re both aware of the risks, and neither of you are jumping a lot?
That’s where I’d say hustle comes in. When you see a great Blanka player for example, he not only knows when to block, he also knows when to spot the rare opportunities of his own offense. It’s been said that “luck favors the prepared.” When a great blanka player spots that rare opportunity, he is well prepared to take full advantage and do much damage. He’s definitely not “lucky”, but he definitely knows how to make his own luck. Someone once said that playing as Blanka requires three times the amount of a person’s brain CPU cycles than playing as better characters to accomplish the same results. Top players hustle in such a way that they tend to build meter quicker than other players do. They accomplish that but in safe ways, and often redundant ways, just in case the opponent does certain things that are potentially dangerous. E.g. “it turns out, he didn’t need that super meter after all, as he won the round without it”. But is that totally accurate? Having the meter full is a significant threat, in itself, especially for certain characters. Hustling is doing the things that often turn out to be redundant, especially in hindsight.
There is a Japanese word that describes a certain kind of hustle, but “hustle” is probably not the best translation of it. Literally, this word means “first move” in English, and connotes the advantages that come with moving or being in a position to move before your opponent is able to. “Tempo” may be a better translation of it. I learned this Japanese word while playing the board game go. The word is sente.
In go, probably the most valuable skill to cultivate of all is sente. You should do whatever you can to acquire and retain sente for as long as possible. When you have sente, your opponent is playing your game. He is often forced to respond to your threats. If he is responding to your threats, he is not making threats of his own. Ryu vs. Guile is fairly even, and some say Guile has the edge. I’d say that Ryu’s ability to cultivate and exercise sente in his offense is how he out-hustles Guile. In business, it’s often a good idea to satisfy your customers’ needs, but only barely. If you overserve them it can be inefficient. Your threats to your opponent must be enough so that your opponent responds to them, but only just barely that much of a threat and not too much more. Use any leftover momentum (in the form of recovery time or frame advantage) to retain the sente and use it to continue playing your own game, and just keep doing this as long as possible to stretch it out, just like a corner trap.[/details]
Those movies about he people who just all of a sudden touch something and theyre the master over everyone else need to stop being made. Everyone sucks in the beginning, period. Even if they beat a ton of people in a given room, there several in another room who would destroy them.
lol wut? reynald has a fulltime job and a girlfriend he lives with, practices like once a week, and won evo. valle is ten years plus older then some of these dudes, has a wife, kids, and works, and can still get top 8. the examples continue on and on. also character choices, or in the case of marvel, choices, really cuts back on the time it takes you to get good results. you wont be able to rely on character choice forever, but if you know your time is limited in like say umvc3, then mastering like a hulk/haggar/sentinel team might be up your alley. not a great team (also not bad), but quick to learn and easy to see results.
if you have zero experience trying to get to a level of consistently getting top 16 and top 8’s in a tourney is going to take a lot of effort and time initially to get good. so maybe like a minimum 2 to 3 hours a day of practice mode, at least once every 2 weeks to meet up for a gathering (doesnt have to be a tournament) to get some offline real time play, and then you can also use online for some games to help bypass that missed time playing offline because of your own time constraints.
im only half way through the thread, but niggas talking crazy. when i first was going ham on tekken 5 years ago, i worked 40 hours a week from 830 to 5 doing tech support, with a 35 minute drive each way, while also still going out and getting blasted at the bar at least 3-4 times a week until the early am, dating girls, then eventually getting a girlfriend during all of this, and i still went to at least 2 gatherings a week, and put in at least 2 hours when it was just me practicing a night, and when i went to my boys to crack out, we would play from like 6 to 1am. i would literally go home, grab my stick, then head straight to his spot. my homey himself was married with a kid, and him and his wife both worked fulltime. so yeah
so yes, its pretty normal to be able to work a regular 40 hour week, and still have a shit ton of time to put into games if you want to. if youre already intermediate level at whatever game it is you are playing, you just need to clean up your execution and matchup knowledge, then yeah you can put in far less time to get to being an advanced player, then if you were a straight noob. you hear those outrageous hours people put into fg’s because they just love it and its convenient for them to put in that time. its not necessary to play 8 hours a day. anyone who believes that is retarded, and doesnt play fighting games. lol. shits not rocket science
practicing smarter is also over stated a lot in this community, because for those who havent gotten over the basics of just the general pressure of facing someone in a tourney, no matter how smart you practice by yourself, you will still lose. at some point you are going to have to practice everything to get great at a game and be a top player. is it smarter to practice only against top 8 characters because you are unlikely to face a lesser popular character in tourney? not really imo. is it smarter to practice matchups over execution because knowledge is power? not really, because if you are giving away free damage for just matchup knowledge, you are going to lose to top players. a lot of this really depends on the game youre playing too.
for me practice is practice. you will practice different things once you have mastered the basics, and then you just keep it moving as you should. you just keep progressing. very little games that i can think of outside of tekken would really fall into that oh youre not practicing this game smart kind of thing, because the basics really matter in those games, especially movement(back dash canceling, wavedashing if necessary for your character, which way to properly walk a move so you dont get counter hit and can punish, etc…) and breaking throws, time can be severely wasted memorizing movesets and combos that are useless or barely worth remembering
like in marvel you just really need to learn the game and its characters period. i could only see dumb practice being, you cannot follow up after a front throw with doom or plink dash with your characters, but you spend 8 hours a week practicing tac infinites with doom. lol. for the most part, everything is smart practice in that game.
blah, typing too much. yall get the point
Also, if you play multiple fighting games, I think it can help you because theres similarities between the moves, they dont do the same things, but youll get those motions memorized. So learn from all of them and itll help you in every one of them. Like buffering.
Not true… When i was winning all those tournments back in the day I barely ever played video games period. My first year of disablity I won every tournemnt I entered besides evo. I only stopped because I was just to sick to physically travel. I never played for hours a day.
If you aren’t naturally gifted, then you need to put the time in.
What IS natural talent for fighting games anyway?
Ehrgeiz.
On topic:
Don’t play a game because you want to be pro at it, play it because it’s fun.
If you want to bone Sherry, you don’t have to be a pro, everybody can do that.
Just take the blue pill and have fun
its just a buzz phrase, and or something scrubs throw around because they never got as good as their idols (not implying dude who said that is a scrub). if youre stupid, or extremely uncoordinated and do not understand quarter circle forward plus a punch button until your 300th time, doesnt mean you dont have so called natural talent. no one has natural nerves for this fg shit, those are usually just built through their environment growing up a certain way, and experience in this shit. no one hops on sticks and their first time they are doing refly combos and rom. they practice hard to master their hands, reactions, etc…
maybe some people do have specific biological natural talents that they do not even know of, that allowed them to excel a little faster, but overall that statement of natural talent means nothing. noah does not have natural talent because he can play a shitty team (back in 2k11) subpar, in a supremely dumbed down Vs game. jwong doesnt have natural talent, its not like he magically showed up and owned everyone. he sucked before, he practiced a lot and got better.
most people who throw around the buzz phrase natural talent generally do not possess what they think it is, so they obsess on using the phrase to justify their shortcomings rather then face reality that they might just suck at fighting games. all fighting game players at a competitive level go through the phases of hurt wrist (mine were so hurt at a time that i could barely do my job which involved a lot of typing), nerves aka jitters, just sucking and not knowing what to do in certain times, poor reactions, horrible matchup knowledge, etc… out of all the legends and stories to come out of the fgc, i have never heard of someone who people know has never practice a fighting game in their life, and then coming in and owning the best known players in like a weeks time or some crazy shit. players come up quick, but thats always through practice.
This touches on my thoughts on this thread. I’ve never met a top player who was looking to minimize the time they spent practicing. They played like addicts, for better or worse. And they were their own harshest critics. They beat themselves up over losing to someone they thought they should be beating.
Yeah you gotta be borderline masochistic in order to become good at anything.
No pain - no gain.
Only reason why young people seem to get good at shit so fast is because they have an extremely high tolerance for frustration, lots of time and a lot more hunger.
I recently tried to replay the games I played as a kid like Castlevania 1 for the gameboy, Mega Man, Shinobi, Battletoads, Hagane etc. and I couldn’t finish them the way they were intended to be played.
Had to use save states and shit not because I wasn’t able to mechanically do it but because I couldn’t sit through that shit any longer.
If you wanna catch up with pros as a young adult or middle aged man, you gotta put every free minute you have into practice mode, online play, traveling to events, talking to people better than you and doing research and it might not even pay off for you since fighting games are a very poor e-sport if you’re not Daigo or Justin.
You can only do that if you truly love the game and it’s the best thing since sliced bread for you and not just because you want to become famous.
Well, if youre planning on doing tournaments and playing against people in the arcade, you should be trying to be the best. Its a fighting game, competition is what its all about when you leave your hours/apartment.
Probably not. The thing is top players are not only supremely gifted at fighting games, they also put in a ton of time so they can realize their potential. Even if u are as talented as these top guys u won’t be top unless you put the time in. Same like anything else.
Natural ability+Hard work/Time/Experience=Success