As a person who plays primarily online, something I don’t quite understand is the issues offline players have online. I know it’s undeniable that certain things online work that would never offline (double shorys are my favorite, so are whiffed punishes and unregistered tech-OSs), but I hear a lot about how people have problems with links, combos, and cross ups. When I switched between SF4 360 to SSF4 PS3 to SF4 PC to SSF4 360, it took me about two games to adjust before I could pull off any combo I was capable of doing in the best conditions.
Are people not using the arcade-mode fight request feature? My brain has no problem doing combos or option selects between on or offline. The only issue I actually have to think to fix is doing the tech-OS half a second earlier or double tapping so that it registers.
Someone also said that the window of reaction is shorter offline. I’d disagree: online, everything needs to come out a little earlier on reaction (like punishing Chunli’s Hazan-shu) or needs to be predicted. It seems like it’s just a slightly more demanding game to me in terms of skill.
I have a question to raise about this. Using my university’s internet connection, I get less than 10ms to most servers in the UK. My home connection usually gets 60-90ms. This is what it seems like to me - shoddy consumer-level internet structure, that sends your signal through higher latency paths than buisness or public service ISPs.
But I’m not an internet technician. I just know that it’s not as simple as drawing a line from you to your opponent. How often is it that two people playing in New York are being connected via a server in New Jersey, I wonder?
EDIT: For the record - online play isn’t competetive. It’s a passable starter drug and you can use the basics you get there offline to get better - but it will never win you a tournament.
Indeed, business-class connections have QoS guarantees and often have better routing as well. Consumer-class connections are oversold (it’s a fact of life) and routed less efficiently. But, you pay for what you get. Business-class 'net connections are many times more expensive than consumer-class.
For NYC it’s pretty unlikely as all the major parties have hubs in NYC. But in general, yeah, the further you are from your destination the more wildly your routing can bounce around.
Doing well online does not necessarly mean you’re a good player unless you’re always playing good players, but it does contribute into making you play better, overally speaking. Online might not be the optimal way to play, but it does have its merits, and for some it’s the best competitive scene they’ll ever have access to.
You seem to forget there are online tournaments as well.
Thanks for that, I appreciate someone confirming my suspicion. Fingers crossed that the situation improves over the next few years - the current consumer level infrastructure is passable at best and it’s hardly fair in a world where the internet is transforming our lives for only the people who can afford buisness connections to do much of the stuff that the internet is capable of.
I know there are online tournaments - but the fact is that when you’re playing a game with a major uncontrollable variable that directly affects the game (lag) and you don’t have some arbitrary way of equalising connections (server tick, SC2’s 30ms latency floor) then you’re going to have an environment where there is a skill cap lower than you’ll see offline, major balance changes due to “lag tactics” and so on. Raiden in MK is a great example of a character that is better online than off - his superman is plain godlike online, and can be spammed to high heaven. Add in matchup-specific knowledge that requires timing, for example, and you’re looking at a different metagame online than off - and I think that means you’re not going to see a players “true skill” online, nor an environment as competetive as offline.
10ms from here to the UK? Sorry, Not possible.What you might be seeing is some intermediary caching device like a riverbed reporting back inaccurate results. There is also quality of service put in place to make things like voice more “guaranteed”
The speed of light is the speed of light no matter how you slice it. Its somewhere about every 150miles adds about 1ms of latency accounting for the fact that light is not moving “in a vacuum”.
This is not to say that router performance is not a factor at all. Yes, extra routing hops and overloaded equipment will also increase round trip time… but this is not the original point if was arguing…its that people keep incorrectly harping about America’s LACK of a fiber infrastructure on why the internet sucks and that is totally false.
Why were my posts deleted in this thread? To reiterate in shorter terms, online = paynus.
edit: Oh nope, I’m just retarded.
There’s no doubt he’s a good player that has played online. Sure, maybe some of that online experience has contributed to him becoming a good player I don’t deny that. But it’s kinda a bad thing when your only argument is ‘look at WK,’ for a few reasons. Firstly, the character he plays relies less on the subtle aspects of the game and relies far more on mix ups which are much more online friendly because they feed of your skill to read and predict rather to react. Try getting good at reactionary footsies only playing online, it’s just not going to happen. The difference between being able to whiff punish certain pokes on reaction or not can literally be the added few frames of lag. Hit confirms that require incredibly quick reaction become impossible as well. Dive kicks at certain heights are able to be reacted to with an AA offline, and at the same height not able to be reacted to online. Walk up, or dash in throws become a lot better, because it’s much harder to react to it with a tech or poke. In short, the game becomes something else online, it gets shifted into a game where you have to play guessing games much more. SF is less like an SF game when it’s played online.
Really, back in vanilla SF4 I saw a bunch of videos of him a local events and stuff, that would really surprise me. Regardless, he has 1000’s of offline matches, and experience with some of the best players in the US. Either way, this is really pretty irrelevant considering what I say above.
WHAT!? No, dude. He plays Viper. Viper and Ibuki have THE WORST time online with any lag. Abel is a mixup character, too, but he’s successful online because he doesn’t have to worry about SJCs and shit. Viper’s FFF is typically almost impossible online with any lag, if you want it to combo. Using WK as an example is perfect, when you realize the shit he has to put up with and get used to.
Funny, I haven’t played Viper in over a year and when I randomly pick her I can still to FFF online. That shit stopped being difficult a long time ago for anybody above toddler level execution. Execution isn’t even an issue unless your getting dropped inputs. You might be mentally thrown off by the fact that your shit is coming out a little later (happens to me), but if you do your combo in the same rhythm it will come out all the same. Why are you even bringing up execution here lol, as if the ability to hit links and do FFF has ANY real indication of your skill level or knowledge of the game.
I didn’t say THAT was making him good. I said it’s a difference when lag is factored in. People are talking about netplay like it’s the worst thing in the world. What I’m saying is that his SKILL whether online or off should not be discounted just because he’s a good live player. For someone to say that his character doesn’t rely on the finer aspects of the game is entirely incorrect as she is one of two characters that has one of the worst times if those finer aspects are thrown off even a little.
THAT’s all I was saying. I can’t do FFF because I don’t play Viper. But I can do 1F link combos like the best of them. I don’t give a shit about his execution. I’m talking about the lag that people are using to discount him and other people’s skill because “online and offline are different games” and shit like that.
If you want to play Abel “properly”, he’s hard online. Step kick to fierce is a 1f link and mandatory for good Abel play (and you usually have to hit-confirm it, because if you don’t, Abel gets put in a really bad spot on fierce xx CoD when blocked). He also has no reversal, so you MUST play defense and react to your opponent’s jumps and setups. If you can’t react, you can’t play Abel well.
Sure, you can roll around like a moron and do random TTs and do okay online. But you won’t be playing him well offline anytime soon doing that.
I just was reading Maj’s Footsies Handbook articles and I couldn’t help but think how impossible or useless most of this information is in an online setting. It’s all about reacting to pokes, punishing pokes, stepping in and out of ranges and countersweeping, etc. This is how people get better at Street Fighter, and practicing this online is basically impossible with any lag. If you can’t punish Ken’s LP SRK, how can you expect to learn footsies?
To me, online is basically a tool for learning what other characters can do. “Oh, that’s hard to block”. “Oh, this range is good for this character” (even with lag, you can usually extract this type of information, even if you can’t do anything about it). “Oh, that combo really hurts”. But it can’t be taken even remotely seriously. It’s very difficult to use it as practice to try out new things (such as footsies), because it just doesn’t work. Plus, everything you teach yourself will not translate to offline play, because all the timings will be different.
Forget about lag. Using raw success to measure skill is an inherently flawed method in any system where you can voluntarily choose your opponents because you don’t have to be as successful as you are skilled to win a lot of matches. A somewhat skilled player who plays entirely unskilled players can have a much more favorable win/loss ratio than an expert who only plays other experts. Elo type systems is a bit better than raw win/loss but even then, you can just get lucky enough to achieve a really high score and subsequently game the scoring system in a similar fashion. Success doesn’t mean anything in regards to ultimate skill; only relative skill between two players.
The best way to truly measure skill using success is to have a setting where players can’t choose their opponents or when to play. This sort of gauntlet exposes them to a wide variety of strategies being executed by people of various skill levels, giving their success some degree of meaning. Few, if any online games chain you down in this fashion for the sake of allowing social interaction and to prevent what’s supposed to be an entertaining game from becoming a tedious chore.
Even if they did, it’s highly possible that there’s a sort of ‘rock’ ‘paper’ ‘scissors’ effect could taint the results in the outcome of matches. A group of roughly equally skilled players are more likely to beat some of their peers than others, due to how the differences in how their play styles interact.
Peer review also works to some extent as players they can recognize what’s constitutes good strategy and solid execution and what doesn’t. However not to the same degree of effectiveness as you need to be sure they’re equivalent or better than the people playing, as better gameplay logistics will be beyond the scope of a lesser skilled player’s ability to judge.
I’m not saying that you can’t grow very skilled by just playing other people online, just that success in and of itself isn’t a wholly indicative factor . Even if we had lagless games allowing the full game to be exhibited in its intended fashion, any single method used to keep score is purely suggestive.