HDR - Online vs Offline

Classic Fighting Games SSF2T: HD Remix
1

HDR is great because it brought a lot of new players into the scene. And online play is great because it means that you don’t need to live in one of the few hotspots in the world in order to play against good competition. However, in talking with some people, it’s been brought up that there is a lot of talk in the threads on here based on what works well in online play. And that’s great! If you don’t have the desire or resources to travel to tournaments, then that may be enough for you.

This thread is for players who want to take their game to the next level, and compete offline. Certain strategies that may be effective in 50~100+ ping matches, may be countered easily offline, and thus a bad idea to become reliant on. In addition, there are other strategies that often feel too hard to time and space right online, but knowing about them and trying to learn them can boost your offline arsenal.

Depending on where you live, you may only really get solid offline experience against a few characters. Or you may live somewhere where you rarely get a chance to play anyone good offline. Between that and players having different styles (ex. Choi’s Ryu vs Valle’s vs DGV), I figure it would be good for everyone to pool their knowledge outside of the character specific threads to fill in the gaps between the information there vs playing offline.

So, if you have tips about things that you should or shouldn’t be doing offline vs online, share them here! I’ll start with a topic I know pretty well from the opposite side:

E.Honda vs Dhalsim - Full screen footsies
When playing online, Honda can be much more casual about doing random fierce headbutts and bursts of HHS from full screen to ~2/3 screen away. When you do this online, they may block a decent portion of the time, it might catch them by surprise and hit them some of the time, and occasionally they’ll counter your move. But offline, this strategy is much less effective! Against a good Dhalsim who’s not asleep, expect 90% of your headbutts to be countered. HHS will be countered less often, but still more than online. But even when it’s not punished, expect Sim to push you back out right after you do it.

Another tactic to gain ground as Honda is to use LP headbutt to go through fireballs. If you do the headbutt from full~2/3 screen away on reaction to his fireball you may get punished half the time online. Offline, expect to be punished 98% of the time. Don’t use this move to gain ground. Instead, reserve it for times when you are around sweep distance away and psychically predict a fireball. If you guess right, you get a knockdown and can start your mixups. If you guess wrong, you probably won’t get punished, but you might get pushed back a bit after block. So, don’t whore it out there either. But do use it smartly.

The correct way to gain ground from full screen against Dhalsim is to walk forward. However, Sim’s long range MP/HP and MK/HK can punish you for doing that. However, you can often counter his pokes with by randomly pressing cr.LK. I believe st/cr.LP may also work. By adding these quick random pokes between periods of blocking and walking, you can cause Sim to poke less often. If Sim throws a fireball, get good at jumping straight up over them. Then mix up what you do between jumping straight up and doing nothing, straight up MK, and straight up floaty HP. After each of these, mix up between blocking, walking, using cr.LK, and HHS(if buffered during MK or floaty HP). By mixing up what you do, you have a better chance of getting to half screen where it becomes harder for Sim to punish you on reaction.

Sim players: I think I’ve already covered this area from the Sim side in his thread, but feel free to ask if you have any questions about how full screen footsies with Honda.

2

Honda vs. Fei Long

Offline, if I’m fullscreen, I can easily stand fierce honda’s torpedo. Even less than full screen it’s pretty easy. Or flame kick it even. But online, this fails very often. That is actually the difference between winning and losing the entire match. If Honda can randomly torpedo me, he can get a lead (even just one hit is a lead). Then he can do nothing, and I’m at big disadvantage. If instead I have the lead, it opens things up.

Even from within range of my Rekkas, offline I have a fair chance of hitting a torpedo with something, or hitting hands, or blocking a butt splash at least. Online, sometimes honda goes from blocking to suddenly too far into his move for me to be able to react at all. So me attempting to pressure him can get beat by lag before I get going.

This match is the biggest difference in online vs. offline of any matches I play. I think you have to play it offline to really get a sense of how it works. Thankfully, a lot of other matches are much more similar online vs offline than this one.

3

Hawk vs. Ken

Never ever try Typhooning him after his :lp: DP recovery online.

4

It seems like there should be a lot of vs. Honda and vs. Boxer matches that have this propery since those two have the fastest traveling knockdown moves.

5

All I would say is be weary of relying on rushdown a great deal. The game runs slower offline, so people have more time to counter your attacks (for example a Boxer low rush).

6

Cammy vs Ken

This match is difficult for Cammy both offline and online if the Ken knows what they’re doing. Dragon Punch online is going to be slightly harder to punish for Cammy, due to the speed and limited window she has to tag Ken with a standing MK. If the Ken player is zoning well with projectiles, this also makes it difficult to move forward and time a sweep if Ken throws a fireball at point blank range. If you can trade Cammy’s crouching Roundhouse with Ken’s Hadouken, you can cause the character to be uncomfortable with throwing fireballs and this will mask your jump opportunities. The bonus is that Ken does not have a fireball that knocks down, so you don’t have to worry about trading with a Red Fireball that does knock down. Cammy’s crouching MK is probably easier to use online, but it does deny you the immediate knockdown. Cammy’s cross up is very good, so being able to set it up can create pressure that Ken doesn’t normally feel in this match. If the Ken player cannot do reaction dragon punches, you can probably start doing Hooligan Throws, there are other counters Ken has to a Hooligan Throw, so don’t expect this technique to really carry you offline. Hooligan is harder to react to online, but it’s also a gigantic crutch for most Cammy players.

While difficult both online and offline (online much more so, due to speed) you can use Hooligan to go over projectiles and then use the kick follow up to recover quickly and safely build meter. This is a bit harder to do online, but having Super is another way you can deal with Ken’s fireball game, so it’s imperative to learn to perform this and force Ken to recognize that you can blow through fireballs at certain ranges. Anything you can do to make Ken take a risk and stop zoning is important, because if he does knock you down, he can pressure a lot better on wake up with his better Dragon Punch and his knee bash. Cammy will have to block, and you don’t want to be in this guessing game because of how poor this situation can turn out for her.

I just got off work, JV, but I’ll be adding more Cammy/Guile stuff as I get time to.

7

anybody played a cammy player called ‘double polecat’, this guys ping is 40, but he’s from Japan, when you play him it is always incredibly laggy, to the point you cant activly react to anything he does. But I’ve no idea how he gets his ping to appear so low

8

Dictators’s tick throws after a special. That gets counter thrown much more often off-line.

Or the best one yet, walking up half screen and blocking a fireball on reaction. On-line, that can be a big challenge.

9

Gospel right there. I mean versus either Ryu or Ken, I want to control when I enter the air on MY terms, which means I don’t want ot have to jump over fireballs necessarily and since SBF has problems, particularly against Ken’s fireballs 'cause they’re sooooo sllllllloooooooowwwwwww and can literally stay in Cammy’s character model until after her hitboxes reappear from SBF invincibility frames, the ability to walk up and block to cover ground and to put yourself in the spacing you want to be at as opposed to where they want to be at is so important. Online, this is more difficult than offline.

Just goes to show ya how much milliseconds can matter. Walk up and block is a favorite tactic of mine so good on you Fatboy.

10

Here are a few thoughts on Blanka vs. X, not to be taken as expert opinion

Bulldogging is very hard, like Fatboy said. This makes the shotos/chun li even harder than they should be.

vs Chun Li - s.mp her jump l.lk/spinning bird kick is very important in this match. With lag getting the timing down is a nightmare. (s.mp has 2 active frames! For the love of…)

vs Geif - this is a pretty easy match offline, but online all of a sudden green hand into SPD is a good strategy because you don’t have enough time to react with a c.HP/Sweep before you’d getting hugged. Offline you can literaly counter every single one of his moves, and it becomes a game of tricking you into whiffing something/making a mistake. Online its pretty hard to keep him out if the lag is bad enough. (Again, missing with s.Mp will get you killed.)

vs. Ryu - the fake FB is already hard to deal with, online lag makes it even worse

vs. Hawk - if you can’t stand mp his hawkdives you’re going to have problems against the better players. (I’m sensing a pattern here…)

vs. Ken - the stand mp… just kidding. Can anyone say lp SRK spam. If the lag is bad enough you cannot punish this move unless you see it coming, have crazy good reaction time. (I seem to be terrible at both.) If the connection isn’t too bad c.Hp is pretty easy to time.

vs. Cammy - you should be able to upball/back dash her close Hooligan throw attempts on reaction, but online this move is WAY more effective

and for one last little tidbit, vs. Blanka - roll into bite is helped by lag, which is just fine in my book

11

When playing offline I tick throw a lot less, throw less meaties on wake-up, and throw out psychic / random moves less often (since it’s much easier to reversal). As someone else mentioned the trade-off for me is that bulldogging (my favorite tactic against fireballers) is much, much easier.

12

I’ll have to agree that the green hand into SPD by Gief online is way too easy compared to how it would be offline. I lose to average zangief players because of that tactic or that short hop too, but when I played kuni in person that doesn’t really work.

13

Well, the main question I have to ask is: how does HDR deal with lag? Is it similar to GGPO in that it utilizes frameskipping to create that seamless feeling when lag occurs? If so, of course shit is going to feel differently.

14

@SweetJ

“When playing online, Honda can be much more casual about doing random fierce headbutts and bursts of HHS from full screen to ~2/3 screen away.”

I can vouch for that, have done this against Cole and Sabin Sims, 150 & 100 ms w/ them. A lot of time more trade though, but thats bad enough for Sim.

Anything using reaction and precision goes out the window a little online. Yoga Flame trap on Honda in corner, np for Cole since its just rythm (thx god I found out how to get out ^^), punishing Honda super on block > 1 out of X fail.

chun_li1

15

It tries to, but GGPO tends to be better. Although, GGPO is going through some wierd times. Tonight, almost no one could connect with anyone.

16

In Honda vs Ken, both characters are affected by reaction times. In particular, Honda’s reaction super or buttslam against a Ken fireball, and Ken’s reaction shoryuken against a Honda jump-in are strong reaction moves that are harder to do online than offline.

So online, Honda’s jump-ins and Ken’s fireballs are safer to do, and their reaction counters are harder.

Offline, it’s the opposite - reaction shoryuken / Honda super / buttslam are stronger choices, while Honda jump-ins and Ken fireballs, especially against fullmeter Honda, are more risky.

17

Anyone else have trouble safe jumping online? It doesn’t seem like something that online lag would effect that much but I have a heck of a time online but much easier off. Can really affect some match-ups.

18

Even though a lot of people say that they don’t see it, Offline play is just to slow and, i can not play let alone compete in a tournament at all. For some reason the slower game play just messes up my timing really really bad that not only i cant move but, i also can’t combo anything.

So i say online offline just doesn’t play right to me

19

I swear frames are getting dropped, i’ll setup something like that but the attack will whiff and I know i timed it right. Or lag throws off the timing, you can see it in high lag matches since what you are seeing isnt actually correct.

That’s why i hate online, since a match can appear to be fine, until a move gets beat because they suddenly launched into super or their jump ended a little sooner than it should have. At least that’s what I see when I play, but I’m in TN so its almost impossible for me to get a good match with Cali people in HDR.

20

I actually have noticed this when I have played offline in local tournaments as well. It was really jarring how much slower it felt, as we played offline Speed 3. I think this is why (If I’m wrong, please correct me) at Denjin Ranbats in SoCal they play on Speed 4 because Speed 3 just feels a little slow offline. I could be wrong, about that but I don’t think so. But I am with you Mavrick.