If the way you lost was bullshit that is out of your control and that wouldn’t matter offline or is getting patched out, there is no reason to get mad. It’s like, so what, you couldn’t do anything about that particular thing which won’t matter offline/whenpatched, so you should focus on how you played.
Example: Kazuya infinite, lag spikes
Just chalk it up as an unbalanced or uncontrollable match, who cares if you lose 50 points here or there? SFxT BP Points are a huge joke anyway because they are just cumulative and can be grinded out. I suck and regularly lose to lower players yet hitting A rank this morning was one of the easier things I’ve ever done because the game just doesn’t penalize you enough for losing.
However, when playing online you have to understand that you need to react faster than normal. This means you have less time to block crossups, some moves with a slow startup become a little safer to throw out, and 1-frame links are a little harder. When playing online you are playing a slightly different game, and you have to have that mentality. Understand that if you care about online performance, it is a failure on YOUR part when a crossup hits you when it seems like you should have at least barely blocked it. Still, you can reflect on the match and pat yourself on the back for reacting in time had it been an offline game.
When it comes to “cheap” tactics such as fireball spamming and runaway tactics, there is no excuse for losing to them. You have to find counters and tactics to get around it. There are going to be easy and effective tactics in every game, and it is part of the depth of competitive play to find ways to shut down or out-perform such tactics.
Example: fireballs, repeated jumping crossups, turtling
From Sirlin’s “Playing to Win”:
Doing one move or sequence over and over and over is a tactic close to my heart that often elicits the call of the scrub. This goes right to the heart of the matter: why can the scrub not defeat something so obvious and telegraphed as a single move done over and over? Is he such a poor player that he can’t counter that move? And if the move is, for whatever reason, extremely difficult to counter, then wouldn’t I be a fool for not using that move? The first step in becoming a top player is the realization that playing to win means doing whatever most increases your chances of winning. That is true by *definition *of playing to win. The game knows no rules of “honor” or of “cheapness.” The game only knows winning and losing.
A common call of the scrub is to cry that the kind of play in which one tries to win at all costs is “boring” or “not fun.” Who knows what objective the scrub has, but we know his objective is not truly to win. Yours is. Your objective is good and right and true, and let no one tell you otherwise. You have the power to dispatch those who would tell you otherwise, anyway. Simply beat them.
Let’s consider two groups of players: a group of good players and a group of scrubs. The scrubs will play “for fun” and not explore the extremities of the game. They won’t find the most effective tactics and abuse them mercilessly. The good players will. The good players will find incredibly overpowering tactics and patterns. As they play the game more, they’ll be forced to find counters to those tactics. The vast majority of tactics that at first appear unbeatable end up having counters, though they are often quite subtle and difficult to discover. Knowing the counter tactic prevents the other player from using his tactic, but he can then use a counter to your counter. You are now afraid to use your counter and the opponent can go back to sneaking in the original overpowering tactic. This concept will be covered in much more detail later.
The good players are reaching higher and higher levels of play. They found the “cheap stuff” and abused it. They know how to stop the cheap stuff. They know how to stop the other guy from stopping it so they can keep doing it. And as is quite common in competitive games, many new tactics will later be discovered that make the original cheap tactic look wholesome and fair. Often in fighting games, one character will have something so good it’s unfair. Fine, let him have that. As time goes on, it will be discovered that other characters have even more powerful and unfair tactics. Each player will attempt to steer the game in the direction of his own advantages, much how grandmaster chess players attempt to steer opponents into situations in which their opponents are weak.
