As a side note I have been playing fighters competitively since the original Japanese version of TVC.
One of my longtime friends has been playing fighters for almost a year now, I have been teaching him stuff in vanilla Marvel 3 (for a total of about 4-5 months) and we were both hella hype for Ultimate.
From time to time he gets pretty salty after I beat him. I even tell him how to get around situations, I have spent almost 10-15 hours with him in training mode trying to teach him combos. I have seen him progress a lot since he first started, he just needs to learn to stop patterns, block, and work on combos.
He plays on an Xbox pad and I even told him I would buy him a stick if he wanted. Usually he just says “I don’t know…maybe sticks are so weird.” I even suggest characters and show him things with those characters and break them down for him.
In vanilla he played Sent/Haggar/Akuma. I’m no top player but I’ve told him time and time again how his team doesn’t have that much synergy. I have even suggested characters for him and let him borrow my Vanilla strategy guide to get some ideas of characters or combos.
I went over to his place Tuesday and we played a lot of matches, but in the end he was super salty because I kept teleporting in with Vergil against his Phoenix Wright. Normally that’s no big deal, but today he told me he’s done with fighters.
What can I do or say to convince someone not to quit playing a game?
Just call your friend a pussy!
honestly, it’d be a good idea to let him play people at his level. Maybe your just way to far ahead of him? At the end of the day you should have t convince someone to play a videogame, if it isn’t in them then thats all there is to it.
Cannot teach an old dog new tricks.
If one isn’t willing to learn, there’s really no point.
You did your part in tutoring him for those months.
Unless you’re a bad teacher, I dunno, maybe fighters aren’t for him.
That’s kinda pointless. That’s like preventing a fire by leaving a lit cigarette by the curtains. If he doesn’t want to play, then don’t force him into.
If he lacks the motivation to continue playing fighting games, in addition to the fact that he clearly is putting no effort into leveling up his game, then maybe he should quit. To improve at a fighting game takes a certain willingness to beat the other guy, which eventually evolves into him having to actively think about why he’s losing and ways he can remedy that and start to get better at the game. But it sounds to me like he’s never really had the passion to take it beyond an extremely casual level.
You can lead a horse to water but you cant make him drink. Whether you believe he could benefit from increasing his game or not is not going to change his level of commitment. Like Demons/Dark souls, some games just try peoples patience more than others. Competitive gaming, or any competition really, isnt for everyone. They kind of have to have that drive and initiative to overcome obstacles on their own without motivation if they actually intend to overcome it. Trying to push this too hard with him might even strain your friendship. Best advice I could give on this matter would be to find another game you two can play that hes good enough at to be confident and happy when playing with you. Just take him for what he is, a good gaming buddy, and try not to focus on trying to make a competitive padowan learner out of him.
an alternative might be to go a little easier on him from time to time? I know this is a bad way to think when trying to improve someones game… but sometimes people need a little confidence boost. keep him interested and feeling like he is making improvement. I dont mean throw games to stupid shit, but if you can just decimate him with some 50 hit combo or something, try to make it a 25 hit combo instead lol in other words, just punish lightly, and graduate as his skill improves.
I have a close friend that is a bit of a competition gamer, and hes the one who got me into SF again. He decimates me most rounds, even when i was brand new. Was all just a gas to him lol but he would lighten up from time to time and not be so aggressive with linking combos into supers and all that and we would just have fun. Last night i played with him again and he damn near crapped himself as he couldnt keep up. Coming from hardly ever winning a game against him even when he was playing “lax”, last night I actually won more games than he did when he was trying at his hardest. If he just trumped me every round while we were starting out id have given up after a week. Its nice to experience a hard win every now and then when you are new to keep your spirits up.
I wonder when the newbie forum turned into a psych help hotline?
So learn how to play the game? Hate to say it, but that doesn’t strike me as much progress at all. I find the biggest hurdle to learning, well anything, is whether you think that the effort is worth. I’m sure many people would say learning piano is a valuable skill but no matter how many ranch bacon cheeseburgers you put on the keys I don’t really care to put in the effort. Actually I would. But that’s a bad example - the point still stands lol. If he doesn’t want to put in the effort then there’s no sense in maintaining the fascade. You’ll just end up being ‘that guy’ who spent too much time on the game and is trying to force it on other people
An alternative explaination is that if you’re the only person he play and you clown his ass then its probably not very fun for him. In which case I would suggest you find other people to play. EVERYONE gets some joy out of winning, but if you ‘improve’ but cannot see the improvement because you’re playing a guy who does ToD combos with Dante its discouraging. Also its annoying to lose to your friends all the time. This is why being part of a scene is so helpful, there’s all walks of life/skills/and abilities and where you stand if much clearer instead of just ‘perpetual loser’
…which basically sums up what everyone else said so there you go. Go forth and Freud on his ass!
My brother is the same way. I’ve really turned him off fighting games after giving him some very sound and consistent whippings in 3S, MvC2 & MvC3. People get frustrated and its easy to see why they may lose their “gaming stamina” after getting whipped over and over and over again. It takes a particular bull-headedness to get into the heavily heavily skill based gaming genre, and some people just aren’t cut out for it.
Alternatively, you could take it easy on him when you play against one another and maybe throw a match or two. If you really do just want to play fighting games with your friend you don’t necessarily have to crush him underfoot every time you play. Give him some victories so he can at least taste a win here or there, it’s not like you’re playing for cash or something. Experiment with new tactics, combos and team setups against him rather than running your A-game.
But again, some people just don’t like to throw themselves at something repeatedly and lack that stubborn factor to keep on point with the genre. You can either acknowledge that and let him have some games off you, or you can continue to mercilessly crush him and add another victim of the “fighting fury” to the ever-growing pit of skull-fucked skulls.
He said he was done with fighters because you beat him, right? I’ve done that, gotten thrashed and felt like I didn’t want to bother with the game anymore, go on with my life. If he at all cares about the game, that salt should subside and he’ll try again, as long as he hasn’t already broken or sold the game by now.
To your main question, it sounds like you’re both adults. As such, there’s not much more you could or should do, you’ve done more than enough. If he’s not going to keep playing after learning how to play and putting in this amount of time, that’s what he wants and that has very little to do with your desires, considering fighting games are purely for entertainment purposes on a casual level.
Find someone else for him to play. (If you showed him how a lot of what he knows hes probably not going to beat you since you know what he knows and what he doesn’t.)
if you want him to play you have to go let him use who he likes., works the synergy of whatever team he wants to use. THE BURDEN IS ON YOU TO MAKE HIS CHARACTER OR TEAM GOOD. lot of cases of me getting beginners into a game have involved me getting fairly acquainted with character I never would have touched otherwise.
Giving someone a book and telling them to figure it out will make people quit.
I’ve been writing an article recently on all of the things I’ve figured out trying to get new player into fighting games in the last 10 years.
