Blanka is actually worse online in a lot of matchups because he plays a whiff punish game.
It’s hard to beat a character when you can’t reaction punish fireballs and they know to mash jab if they see a hop.
His matchups shift, they don’t really improve.
But wait… are you saying… stop… the meme is that Blanka = scrub. Don’t deny it, please! Don’t curse the legend, don’t dare inflict doubt upon the cherished common sense/general knowledge salty scrub excuses.
Man, I don’t see why people get so upset. I’ve had plenty of bloodied noses from online lag and just go with the flow.
And that’s what I’ve been saying this entire thread. That PPs are typically reliable measures of skill. That a shit player can not make it to 4000 PP because that would require defeating a lot of other highly ranked players, thanks to the point system equivalencies. That there is a massive circle jerk dismissing online play and those who excel in it.
Instead the thread goes on and on and on as each self-righteout nitwit feels the need to point out that one dude, or that other dude that one day, who did have high PPs but wasn’t that good, as if that somehow completely nullifies the GAUSSIAN DISTRIBUTION OF SKILL ON ANY SPECIFIC LEVEL
Exception by exception, anecdotal evidence by anecdotal evidence, the thread doesn’t go anywhere as each will grasp onto whatever they can and completely dodge logic and common sense.
And on and on it goes.
PP is inherently inaccurate because of the high k factor of each match, calling it typically reliable doesn’t say a lot when most good players still have a PP range of 800-1.5k if they play ranked a lot.
on PSN or PC it’s entirely possible to get to 4-5k without playing anyone especially good.
Points aren’t equalized between regions, platforms, or even the among the same player, how can they be accurate?
They are accurate because:
defeating those of lower PPs gives you very little. Losing to them, costs you a lot. By your rationale, that many players have low PPs, they should propose a higher challenge-to-reward ratio and bring the average DOWN.
Getting to 4000PP without beating anybody good means beating a TON of lower PP guys and losing less than 1 in 10 matches to them, over a LONG time.
This kind of consistency and ratio in itself is an indication of skill.
Points are equalized according win ratio. It is the only variable involved. If anything, that is the most legitimate variable involved.
Once again, it goes around in circles because you’re grasping at straws and not really understanding how the statistics work towards LOWERING PPs instead of increasing them, if anything, which makes higher PPs even more valuable.
A 4000PP player will be, at the** very worst **case scenario, a good player, with extensive experience and an unimaginable, and I do mean unimaginable, amount of luck and a skillset built entirely on exploiting the online system. This does not, by any stretch of the imagination, make him a bad player.
Does it correlate DIRECTLY into a real life ranking? No, because of several other factors. But it’s pretty god damn close.
I don’t know how else to drill this into you short of calling a statistics professor. It’s 3 pages of the same common sense arguments being fronted by anecdotal evidence of very rare situations. It’s just disagreeing for sport, maybe because the forum medium brings out the antagonistic nature of a few. Still this is no excuse for giving up on common sense and basic mathetmatics.
High k factor and the ability to cherry pick opponents makes rankings inherently unstable and inaccurate, this is why every other ranked game uses a much lower k factor for games. A lot of the times i’ll beat someone, and they instantly kick me when we get matched up again, but they continue to play ranked, undoubtedly looking for a good matchup.
Anecdotal evidence incoming. I played ranked the other day and I won 28 matches and lost 1, but the loss was -128 points. Everyone who I played over 3k would not rematch me, and would kick me instantly, so I was forced to grind people in the 2k range, which left me with a great win ratio on the day, but not very many net points because that loss was costly. On other days I’ve played at much wosre win ratios but been at positive points because I beat Wolfkrone a couple of times or w/e.
When I host games I get a disproportionate amount of bad matchups. Why aren’t Kurokiba or Willpower joining my ranked rooms when I see them online? Because Deejay loses to Blanka for free. Why are a bunch of mediocre Cammy’s repeatedly joining my room? Because if they can just leverage the matchup 25% of the time into a win they are netting points.
Now I’m a huge numbers guy but there are obvious problems with the current system. If this was chess I’d totally agree with you, low kfactors, inability to cherry pick opponents to such an extent, and there only being one matchup means that it’s fairly obvious who is good and who is bad. The rankings aren’t convinced a win is that legitimate and it takes a significant number of games for anyone’s rankings to move because the system itself demands a large sample size where as in sf4 your ranking can change several thousand places in the span of an hour.
Also our definition of good or bad might be different, which skews things. Whats good? I think most people are not good.
You’re a competitive gamer, I’m a 2300 PP Dan. There is a canyon between what we perceive as “good” or “bad”. But you have to agree that if you think most people are not good you are skewing things far beyond the mean skill level towards the median, which I feel is why this discussion is warped.
The mean skill level , or average, is NOT halfway between a first week player and Daigo Umehara. It is significantly below that. This means the top-bottom view on who is good or bad will be warped.
I am aware of how cherry picking opponents can be an issue, but is this significant enough to completely discredit PPs as a measure of skill? I don’t think so. Avoiding the occasional well-known bad matchup does happen, but this is a small percentage of their total fights. And that might be the case at the 4000PP plus range, but down here it’s “whoever’s green bar, I’ll take it”
Recently I was talking to Ixion and he said that getting to 5000PP is a pain in the ass and he has been in the 4s for a while. When one of the ( if not the) best Dans in the world says that and as far as I know does NOT cherry pick fights, I put that into perspective.
You are making the wrong argument. The argument should be ‘does online tell us anything about offline skill.’ Because offline skill is all that matters. The answer is no btw. It tells us nothing. A high points player might be great offline or he might be awful offline. I’ve met both.
You’ve made a competent argument that the points system might accurately tell us who is good at online sf4. But who cares. Online sf4 doesn’t matter a whole lot.
This is the problem. The absolute terms. Like it tells nothing. It tells plenty. It might not correlate directly, but there is a damn good correlation. To say otherwise is disingenious at best, ignorant at worst.
once you play a lot offline with a competitive group of people, you realize just how bad online is. it’s not close. it doesn’t mean anything to have a lot of points online. certain offline archetypes are even heavily penalized in an online environment, especially one with input lag based netcode like SF4. defensive players playing mostly on reaction for example. they are going to look a lot worse than they really are. and go crazy people are going to look better than they are.
you can see this in any game and pick out great examples from each of them. these are the go crazy style Blankas in SF4, or the mass roundhouse tatsu Akumas in 3s, or “just uppercut over and over” shotos in every SF game ever. we recognize these examples because they are so prevalent. no one who’s anywhere near solid would be dropping games to these clowns offline but you see them with killer win ratios and good amounts of points. but just because we pick out these examples doesn’t mean they’re the anecdotal evidence that strays from the norm. they’re just the most obvious examples that everyone can agree on. most other ways lag destroys the credibility of results are more subtle, and if you aren’t used to playing these matchups offline you might not even have an idea that anything is wrong.
I know I jump way too much and would get my shit pushed in playing seriously offline until I broke that habit. I’ve come very close to cracking 4k PP before. Online play lets me get away with this habit because 80 percent of the time people either aren’t good enough to spot it or online lag presents them from reacting properly.
Forget about the follies of the point system which have been widely debated. If that won’t convince you, here are a few reasons why trying to equate high PP to ‘good player’ is unwise.
Due to lag moves with a short window to punish on block, may become impossible to punish on block. This could allow certain moves to be abused in a way that would get you destroyed offline. This completely changes the game.
Lag and particularly spikes can mess up the timing on links, and since most people mash reversals and ultras, could cost you matches.
Turbo users and lag switchers
Offline is the game as it was intended to be, which is the point I believe Igloobob is making. If you are good offline, yes you are good. Online, since it changes the game so drastically in terms of what moves are safe, what aren’t, etc. is not an indication of how good you are at SFIV.
Where do y’all live that lag is even perceivable? Your innanetz must sucks.
I actually have good internet, it’s other people’s that is the problem.
I’m orange bar to Latif most of the time and he’s one state over =/
What we define as good is very relative. When I was a beginner I thought 2k pp was a sign of you being good. Then I got 2k pp and immediately thought people that had 3k pp were good. ATM I’m in the 3-4k pp range and I admit I’m not particularly good. I’m horrible offline and lack plenty of matchup experience. I don’t think a person that grasps OS, Bnbs, punishers and the range of normals etc necessarily is a good player. IMO said player just grasped the basics of the game and this still says nothing about his ability to adapt to various strategies and attack patterns.
Also as someone already mentioned you can manipulate your points by cherry picking. E.g, I never turn down a fight and often rematch people that beat me. I’ll rematch until I feel satisfied, often losing a ton of PP in the process. I could, on the other hand, “farm” points by going after people that I beat easily and just avoid bad matchups. I’ve noticed a lot of people cherry pick and in EU XBL a lot of people just kick you from their lobbies if they recognise you.
Yep cherry picking is going on alright, I always get Guile players rejoin my lobby after the first match, even if they lost, simply because they know Bison is probably their easiest matchup. I just vortex them to death with Akuma after to scare them off but it still happens way too often. I wonder why I never get Ibuki players rejoining my lobby huh…
As for how else online ruins the game, other than the obvious mashing and stuff going on, heres a few more examples:
Stuff like Deejays sobat kicks which are all negative on block (-5,7, and 9 respectively) yet are very hard to punish, especially if you try to do so with offline timing.
Stuff like Hondas headbutt and Blankas balls which are all reactable to offline but online most of the time if they start the move with you walking forward and not already blocking it means you will pretty much walk right into it due to the way input lag and reaction times are.
Both of these are highly abusable online and you can easily get away with them, and win matches by doing these, while offline you would get murdered for this bullshit. As for mashing, you have 3000-4000 pp ryu and ken players who can be beaten by nothing but baiting DPs and then punishing. They might stop after 2-3 full punish combos but the rule of thumb is ‘if youre getting combod theres a high chance the other person is mashing’ and thats the reason I never go for anything harder than 3 frame links or 2 frame plinkable links online, because I like getting hitconfirm combos to damage, but what I dont like is getting dpmashed if I drop a 1 or 2 frame link due to a hiccup in connectivity. And whenever I check my replays and I do my easy, pretty much undroppable hitconfirm combo with Bison (crlp crlp crlk scissors) I ALWAYS see their dpmash alright.
Oh yeah the full screen Blanka balls and headbutts are another good one. I’d add Dudley EX MGB in there too. Give me a dollar for every Dudley in sf4 and 3s who thinks full screen EX MGB is a counter to walking forward. No Mr, that does not work offline.
fucking online deejays…dj becomes so much better online especially the knee shot, which u have to pretty much predict
You people must be playing in 14400kbps because in Europe I get minimal lag and 70% + of my matches are spot on. I play offline quite often and in very good connections the difference is negligible.
Of course, I can see how if you’re playing using a 486 DX2 with 66mhz and calling from your land line you might be having problems punishing Blanka balls.
I, on the other hand, see mostly the same thing both ways. But of course, this thing will go on forever. The same argument from page 1 is still here, it goes in circles and as they say I can lead a horse to water but I can’t make him think.
The better you get the more you realize how different online is from offline.
And as I have stated, no matter how good your internet is you have a 2 frame delay minimum. That immediately makes a difference.