Considering balrog is a shitty match for blanka up close and does have some issues against hardcore turtles, I’d say he played you perfectly.
honest answer. no.
Generally no, I’m only playing defensively when repeatedly punishing a scrubbier player or if my offense isn’t working at all.
As a charge character it’s obviously easier to wait for the person to come to you, but a lot of charge players assume that turtling and counter attacking is the only way they will be able to land a charge move. Once you learn how to pre-charge and preserve charge through certain moves, you can become a lot more offensive.
The trick to playing a waiter is walk up to them and they will corner them self i do it all the time:china:
I play Rog, and I usually go on the offensive only if relatively safe looking opportunity presents itself, or if I need to secure a life lead. Once I have the advantage I stop attacking and just focus on keeping the other guy out.
Yeah there’s no reason to rush unnecessarily with Rog. He has really good health and damage on his normals. Do your damage and sit back on a health lead. No reason to be a hero with Rog unless you’re dying. SFIV is not a heroes’ game. Don’t be Superman unless you have to. There are plenty characters with better mix ups than Rog but his retarted buttons make up for it. There’s pretty much no character in the game that beats/contends with his buttons (pokes) other than probably Ryu and the other decent shotos and even then their buttons don’t do as much damage so you’ll win on trades.
The only reason his mix up can become serious is just because he can overwhelm you with jabs and other normals that are relatively safe and have crazy priority. Which is not so much of a mix up as it is 3S Chun Li whoring crazy buttons at you. You’ll get hit just because you know if you press buttons unnecessarily you’re probably gonna get comboed. Good blocking and tech throwing is enough to take care of Balrog’s mix up as far not getting hit. It’s just once you try to make your own offense…Rog’s buttons will have you getting hit any ways unless you guess perfectly.
i dont think that theres any reason to rush unnecessarily with any character. almost all specials are punnishable on block, there arent many safe block strings, and most characters have some form of properly spaced anti air.
so why would i have any reason to try to rush an opponent down without first establishing an advantage thru a knockdown. its much safer for me to wait for my opponent to expose himself. if my opponent is unskilled, he will no doubt go jumping around like a dumbass where all i have to do is anti air, or he will throw out random easy to punnish specials. thats not turtling, thats playing smart
if i play someone with more skill, he also knows the risk, and we end up playing footsies until someone gambles and/or guesses correctly. this may look like turtling, but we are both trying to establish position. like boxers spacing each other out with jabs early in a fight, and not just coming out throwing haymakers from the start
Turtling is fine, from beginner play level all the way up to the top with SF4. I personally prefer rushdown oriented characters because I just find them more fun.
My beef is with all these scrubs online who still jump back fireball when I’m up 80% to 20%. At that point its no longer turtling as a play style its just a waste of my fucking time.
Then after something like that they have the balls to send a message like ‘fking turtler omg pussy’
the only time i turtle is vs Blanka, i hate that green &%$&%! :annoy:
Its just strategy. You see it all the time in professional sports. In football and basketball, the team that’s ahead late in the game will work to safely take as much time off the clock as possible. The passing game takes a backseat to running plays, and one player will dribble the ball for as long as possible before even thinking about taking a shot.
It’s not fun to watch in some ways, but its strategy, and often times the best one. Part of the game is figuring out how to deal with it. If your opponent has the life lead and is sitting on down-back, the message is clear - you have to do something. This is the trap your opponent has laid for you - you have to find a way to walk right into it yet defeat them. That’s part of what makes the game fun. Don’t just sit back and think “Man, look at this turtling ho”, think “how can I get past his defense?”
EDIT
There’s a Blanka player on PSN, he’s in the top 100 or 50 or so with a decent amount of GP. I’ve run into him a few times.
His style is to grab a quick life lead, then retreat to the corner and spam electricity. He won’t move unless you do. The first few times I fought him, I lost. And I thought to myself " :bluu: fuckin’ scrublanka turtle whore". But no matter how much I dislike it or whine about it, that’s not going to magically let me beat him. So I could either start avoiding him, keep taking L’s, or figure out what to do about it.
So I had to sit down and think some things through.
– If he gets a life lead, he’s going to sit back and turtle.
Turtling puts me in a bad position - I’m forced to go offensive and be vulnerable to counter-attack. I don’t want to be put in that position. So I need to stay ahead of him in life at all times. Thinking about this also lead me to…
– At the start of the round, he’s going to be very offensive.
He wants to get that life lead, so he’s going to come out swinging. He likes throw a lot, so he’s going to go for jab ball, jump in, or hop into throw.
So now I know that the opening moments of the round are going to be crucial for dictating the pace of the rest of the match. Now I look at what I can and can’t do (I use Chun).
– Round 1 means no meter.
So I can’t EX SBK for anti-air nor can I use EX Legs to deal damage. For AA or dealing damage, I’m going to have to find other means of doing so. This also leads me to…
– Must think about saving meter for round 2.
Regardless of whether I win or lose round 1, I don’t want to start round 2 in the same position. The Blanka player is going to come out of the gates swinging again. I’ve got to save some of the meter I build in round 1 for round 2.
Now I have an idea of what to do. Now I have a gameplan.
The next time I fight him I put this in motion. He starts off round 1 aggressive, as I thought he would. I anticipated his attacks and fought them off, keeping a life lead in the process. At one point, the Blanka player retreats and does his usual strategy. I just sit on down-back. I show him that I’m not going to play his game now, I have no reason to. So he has to come take the fight to me now. I end up winning the round fairly easily.
Round 2. He adjusts and manages to get a life lead on me. Again, I have to think about what I’m going to do here.
– If I do nothing, he’ll run down the clock and win by default.
He knows this. He knows I know. I have to go attack him. In doing so, I make myself vulnerable, but there’s no other way. When I lost the life lead, I fell into the trap, and now I have to fight out of it.
– What can I do?
Kikouken is a maybe at full screen, bad idea from 3/4ths and closer. He can react to mid-range Hasan Shu on reaction. Jumping will result in being up-balled.
So I move forward. Carefully. If Blanka holds his ground, I’m going to catch up. If he moves backwards, this puts him into the corner. The corner will take away a lot of his options. He has a way to get out, but if I can anticipate it, maybe I can do something about it. If I can successfully bait out a horizontal ball, I can punish with ultra.
And so on.
This is all part of the strategy that makes the game more than just throwing random attacks at each other and hoping they connect. If your opponent tries to turtle you, take a moment and figure out how not to get put in that position, or how to get out of it if you are.
its true . . . kinda. That would make you better at that game once you start figuring out your opponent’s little strategy. Sometimes you just gotta try and try . . . and you’ll hit it.
I tend to start the game off by being defensive. I want to see what the other player’s play style is like and I want to build some meter so I can have more options.
If he’s aggressive I’ll stay defensive for the whole game.
If he is very defensive then I’ll walk up to him and take my pokes.
If he is in between I’ll mostly be defensive but switch it up with some aggression.
Typically though I find a lot of people are aggressive so I end up defending a lot. There is no use in walking into random SRKs so I just bait and punish.
This is exactly what I was trying to get across for the last portion of my previous post.
Except for the part where he says it’s a waste of time…
(which most people just probably looked at and thought … tl;dr xD)
I still find those parts fun as well…
Again, for me, the fun is the strategy and getting better… So during those times I’m constantly thinking about strategy, and at the same time trying to keep my guard up, so I’m not bored.
Even when playing against people I’ve beaten many times with no problem, I’m always trying to think of ways to refine my strategy. To beat them even more horribly next time. (that’s actually not the best way to put it since my intention isn’t to be mean or discouraging, It’s just an unfortunate side effect sometimes…
Although that’s never bothered me personally, I don’t know if I mentioned the following here or another thread but:
when I first started A2 and ST on GGPO, I’ve gone through losing streaks of 80 in one sitting– against the same person.
I can only assume they either had the same mindset as me, or they were really nice and were putting up with it so I could get better…
I’ll hold my hands up and say I’m a ‘waiter.’ I play Bison and given his range of moves and the fact that all his specials are charge based I tend to think of him as geared towards defensive play which is great for me because I’ll admit that I have poor dexterity and struggle to time combos (I spend a lot of time using cross-up jHK to sHK or JMK to cMK for easy two hit combos because I fail to nail a double knee press most of the time I want to combo into it) so I just try to bait guys with HP Devil’s Reverse and wait for them to get frustrated/make a mistake before I strike.
Still, that said, it’s depressing how often I get called a ‘pussy’ when I beat other players, especially when they have more GP than me in Championship mode. I don’t pretend to be a great technical fighter. I just try to do what works me and take a win. I don’t understand why other players just shit all over guys just because they’re not being flashy and want to win rather than lose with ‘style.’
I just… don’t get why people have issues with jumpback -> hadoukeners. If you have that kind of life lead just FA through them all get in their face and wreck them. It can’t even be a waste of your time it would take all of 4 seconds to accomplish. People -can’t- be that good at getting away from you consistently like that if you’re putting that kind of life lead on them.
People who are that predictable and sooooooooooooo easy to end the match over.
Turtlers aren’t the people that get to me, that annoy me, it’s the people who constantly rush only to eat -every- anti-air and -every- combo I throw at them. THAT feels more like a waste of time than trying to break someone’s defense.
^ People actually get angry at you you know, when you realize that you can just stand there and anti-air them over and over because their -only- line of thought is “JUMP AT THEM, DO IT AGAIN, JUMP AT THEM, DO IT AGAIN.” I can only imagine their faces are something like a dog, mouth half open tongue hanging out eyebrows up eyes wide open just not at all understanding that it will never, ever work.
Perhaps it’s the people you play, but the people I play with (not online) are people that I know will punish me for a mistake. That’s what most commonly creates turtling. Realizing that most of my options will result in punishment, so the safest thing to do is whip booms at them until they start pushing me hard or until they put themselves in a bad position (like jumping over one at me, which will result in a GHK > EX.fk).
lol, waiters are fucking stupid. I dont care if i get flamed for it. But there is no excuse to sit in the corner and do nothing for an entire match. It is not skillful to only try to out prioritize, or out-wait someone. If you’re in a tournament, maybe, depending on the situation… but online, or casuals… c’mon.
it’s threads like this that make the scrubby noobs online think that its good to wait for random shoryu, instead of elevating their game learning how to get in on people/create openings and actually leveling up.
takes two people to make a timeout happen
if matches are running long and slow, you’re just as guilty as the other guy
It takes two to play the waiting game. How about you attack him next time?
never