Damn, seriously some good shit in this thread. Thread of the year? It’s too bad I haven’t had the Internet for so long-- I certainly missed out. Would you guys mind if I post some of your tips in another forum I frequent? Of course I’ll credit each and every post I take!
I’ll try to add something to this thread in the future. I haven’t had the time to read every post in this thread, so I’m afraid I might say something that has already been mentioned.
James! By all means, please spread the word, I’m pretty sure that most people are all about the progression and improvement of the SF world, so please, spread the word!
And be sure to read APOC’S post…that post is easily the best one in this thread.
If you want to use any of my stuff, that’s fine by me… just give me due credit, please. …And… if possible… lemme know where it’s posted up so I can see any feedback others may have.
bump because page 2 is not crackin
i guess the only thing constructive i have to contribute is to not do scrubby things when you start losing the pace.
example: mackinzie and i had some casuals a couple of nights ago and i started ex.dping when i was getting caught in the corner.
I’ll be back after 500 posts…good, insightful posts be found here
Page two again? Not cool. A little bump love.
If only I had something to contribute at the moment. 
bump for kendrik
Thanks, man. I have no idea how I missed the thread. I looked for it… and I even used Firefox’s search page button. Alas.
So.
I am my own worst enemy. It really is true. I made it out to Versis last night (the closest thing to Preppy’s we here in Portland have), and this fact punched me in the face, then took stike after strike before I could even hit the ground.
How was I my own worst enemy last night?
I thought I was playing a game.
I’m sure we’ve talked about this at length in this thread, but the reality of the matter hit me again last night after getting my ass handed to me repeatedly.
I mean, sure, fighting games are still games in many senses of the word, but I was just there chilling, having a good time, hanging out with people, playing games.
Everyone else was there to win.
Street Fighter and its ilk may be games, but to compete takes another mindset entirely. It takes the drive to win, but even more so… it takes the drive to become a top player.
There’s plenty of talk of the need to practice combos, links, etc… I know I’ve even talked about building body memories in order to execute effective strings perfectly every time, and that really is important.
But more important is consistency in practice. In the last couple months, I haven’t played fighting games very seriously. Sure, I’d have a couple days here and there where I’d play tons, but weeks with only minimal practice? Yeah. Pretty near impossible to be a strong player if I’m not putting in the effort to get better.
Pro sports guys train day in and day out non-stop. Fighting games aren’t a pro sport in the sense that success isn’t dependent on being in peak physical condition, but the same kind of committed training seems to be just as important for anyone wanting to dominate.
I haven’t been putting that effort in. Getting my ass handed to me made that incredibly clear. I am my own worst enemy.
Bumping this back to first page
EDIT: Apoc’s post on page 2…simply amazing
I need to vent.
At first I planned on making a new thread, but as the night went on I figured this was the best place to put this:
There’s nothing worse than realizing flaws about yourself. This all goes back to eighth grade for me when I was told by what I thought was a good friend of mine that I complained way too much. I had to step back and look at myself and reassess my current place in life. At the time it made me angry what she said. We fell out of touch and I haven’t talked to her since then though I wish I could talk to her and thank her for what she did for me. After that I took the chance to change who I was and she’s the sole reason I am the person I am today.
This has been dwelling within me for some time now and I think it has had enough time to gestate and formulate itself into something worth posting.
I’ve always been a good writer. I got it from my father. He is an amazingly accomplished writer considering he only does it as a hobby. He has no dreams of having a best-selling book, he just likes to write. He writes for fun and has won several short story contests with his work. He is part of a critique group online where he critiques other people’s writing and in return has his writing critiqued by those people. He takes their criticisms and uses it as a springboard for improving his own writing. I’ve always looked up to him as a writer. Every time I read one of his stories I am blown away by the style and form he uses and never feel like my own writing is anywhere near as good as his.
Last week I had a long discussion with an acquaintance of mine at school who plays music and writes poetry. His brother is a freshman at the Berkley college of music in Boston and is the most accomplished bass player at the school despite only picking up the bass one year ago. The guy I was talking to feels the same way about his brother’s music that I do about my father’s writing. He knows he’s a talented musician but he doesn’t feel like he lives up to his little brother’s level of play.
Because of this neither of us like to submit our work to the person we look up to in fear of the criticism it will bring on. He doesn’t like showing his brother his music because he knows his brother will tear it apart and I don’t like showing my father my writing because I know he will tear it down.
But they do this because they know it will make us better at what we love to do. By tearing us down we can be built up again better than before. By tearing apart every last piece of my writing my father is just helping me improve the little things that could make a good piece great. I want to be a better writer but I’m not willing to submit to the things that will make that happen in fear that the things that I’ve worked so hard on will be shut down and shut out.
This mentality has carried over to my Street Fighter play.
I’m not a bad player. My execution in the training room is spot on and the fundamentals are there. I’m past the point that the average player is at. I’m in the community and I’m part of the scene. I’m around some of the best players in the world on a regular basis and I’m willing to put in the work to get better, but I need to defeat the demons inside me before I can take the next step.
I want to get better at Street Fighter. It kills me to not be respected as a player in this community when I’ve put in so much time and effort to get to where I am now. Street Fighter IV is the first fighting game I’ve ever cared about truly getting better at and Street Fighter II was my first fighting game ever as a child. My fighting game roots are in this series and because of that I have a special connection with it.
I’ve only played one other game on a competitive level and that is Warcraft 3. I would say I’m at about the same level of play as I am in Street Fighter. I’m not skilled enough to roll with the best, but I’m above and beyond the average player.
But my fear of criticism is holding me back. It isn’t a conscious thing. I don’t deliberately ignore critiques on my gameplay, but it’s something that just happens. Tonight it hit me as I was driving back down to Olympia from Seattle: I take criticism very poorly considering I want to improve.
Dugg has been one of my chief coaches in Street Fighter IV. He watches me play and while I’m playing or after I finish he goes over what I did wrong and what I need to do.
“You need to be more patient” he says. “I know, I know” I respond.
“Block more, block low” he says. “I know, I know” I respond.
“More flamekick mixups, less jumping, wait after your feints” he says. “I know, I know” I respond.
Again, it’s not a conscious thing. I really do appreciate his coaching and I’m really glad he’s there to keep me in check and keep me focused on what I need to be doing, but by saying “I know, I know” I am just deflecting the criticism. I find myself making the same mistakes game after game. I’m not getting any more patient and I’m not blocking enough and I’m not taking his advice to heart. I do know that I need to be more patient and I do know I need to block more and I do know I need to jump less. I’ve watched enough videos and done enough research on these forums to know exactly what I need to do, I just don’t do it. Why not?
It all goes back to my fear of criticisms in my writing. I don’t like to think I’m doing something wrong. It’s just part of my personality. I unconsciously put the advice to the back of my mind and continue doing what I’m doing whether it be the right thing or the wrong thing. I don’t read my teacher’s notes on my papers because I don’t like being told I’m doing something wrong and I don’t practice the advice in game because I don’t like to think I’m a poor player.
I know I’m not the best player and I know I’m not the best writer, but if I want to improve myself from here on out I need to take a step back and take a good look at myself. I need to take people’s advice and put it into practice. When someone says I need to be more patient I need to take my next match, win or lose, and play patiently. If I’m jumping too much, I need to consciously jump less in my next match and realize when I make mistakes and improve myself by not making the same mistake twice. I’ve asked Jeff to critique my Viper next time I see him at a session and I’m afraid that I won’t take his advice seriously even though I know it will be better for me if I do.
Until I break this subconscious mindset I won’t be able to improve myself any further than where I am now and that scares me more than any critique.
Good place to post this…this is something that I’m working on as well, and it’s hard to get used to. The hardest part about everything you’re talking about, however, is being able to recognize it and start workingtowards improvement. So you got the hard part out of the way 
Excited to see where your game goes from here, I’ve always been telling people you’re Viper is going to click soon…only a matter of time. :lovin:
(and my coaching is actually just my RC cola to Mickey’s Coke.) 
Looking forward to your new developments SirMike. :wgrin:
Totally agree. Like, I used to even be able to recognize my problems as a player in each match and fail to fix them. I don’t know whether to coach people while they’re playing because for some people it breaks their concentration, others it helps.
Something I’ve found that worked for me when I was teetering on the brink of playing solid, was to go into a match with a goal. Say I have a bad habit, like randomly jumping forward and hitting hk. Because it’s WUFUS and I get a free ultra or op snake strikes!! Then I’d play some matches where I never even use j.hk, not even for a punish, not for anything.
Another habit I did this with is focus attack. Fuerte has a bomb focus attack. Rufus has a shit one. So coming from Fuerte I was considering focus attack a good move in my arsenal… and getting fucked up because of it. So I played a handful of matches where I didn’t use focus once. Which was hard! But I eventually did it. Fireballs being thrown? Find a new way around them. They throwing out singular pokes? Find a poke that beats it. Once I learned to play in a more handicapped style like that, I find that I only bust out j.hk or focus attack when it’s actually useful.
Just one of many ways to try to improve. You don’t tell your opponent you’re doing this, obviously, it’s just a personal challenge.
Reserved for Edit later
When the game first came out, I didn’t have a stick, so I wasn’t playing very seriously and was just messing around with the characters to have some fun. I would play Balrog, and hold down TAP till 45 seconds just for the chance to make someone go WTF.
I found though, that when I handicapped myself that way, I would actually play a bit better then when I had all the buttons, because I forced myself to play smarter.
That specific instance is a terrible example of how to improve (since it was just a gimmick for fun), but I wanted to point out a way in which I experienced what Elias was talking about. Taking away some of your options forces you to play the game in a new style, and you can get past some of the mental barriers you’ve set up about how to deal with certain situations. You give yourself more options by forcing yourself to find new answers to problems.
I know exactly where you are coming from man. I’m now an artist in my senior year of college, and as someone looking to make money as a commercial artist, I can tell you critique is an absolute MUST to getting better. Nobody works in a closet and jumps ahead in their game. Some try, but usually fail, and when they do succeed, they are usually difficult, pretentious assholes to deal with, and will have great difficulty finding employment . Yet even though I understand all this, it is something I’ve SEVERELY struggled with for a long time.
It took me quite a while, but I finally realized how stubborn of a person I was. From what I can tell, it’s something I inherited from my family. I don’t know if you feel that it’s necessarily stubbornness that’s attributing to your fear of criticism, but as Duggish said:
To get past this I really had to understand that the critique wasn’t an opinion about me as a person, but a comment on the work itself. And that might sound obvious, but in the moment of criticism, especially harsh criticism, it’s easy to become defensive because we like to look at the things we do as extensions of ourselves, and really, they are. But to look at it deeper, you have to understand that the criticism is almost always a positive thing, and it’s going to help strengthen what you had intended (key word there) to accomplish.
So about all you can do man, is realize your obstacle (in your case, your fear) and work, work, work at getting better. Only through hard work do we really achieve anything in life. It may be painful, but if you can keep it in perspective, and assure yourself that the pain is worth your goal, then it all comes together, and you become stronger because of it in the end.
Best of luck dude.
After most of the matches I lose, I really just see the mistakes that I made and caused me to lose. So far in tournament wars for instance, my biggest issue has been patience. I need to learn to calm down and just stop doing things and I think it will imrpove my game quite a bit.
I should probably just take a few shots an hour or so before my matches.
I know how you guys feel about improving. It’s something I need to work on as well, that’s why I really enjoy playing with you guys. It’s rare to find a great group of individuals that you can compete and hang out with!
We all know people who are “good” among their friends, try to step up to our level, get demolished and give up on getting better or really get on the grind. From sf2 -> all kinds of fighting games -> sf4, i’ve been working on my game. It’s only fairly recently (starting with cvs2 and 3s) that I’ve been determined to get to the next level.
I look forward to the commentary and tips after my matches to hear what everyone else would have done in my shoes. It makes me rethink my strategy for the next match and apply what I’ve learned. It’s difficult to make sure you remember them during gameplay, but thats what being on the grind is all about. Keep on making your mistakes (within reason) but always try to do something different. I know I use Blanka’s slide entirely too much, but i’ve been working on not relying on it by using the fierce button a lot less. It’s helping me get better, or maybe just playing different, either way i’ll find out the results during my next match!
We all just need to remember to stay positive when we are defeated and look at what you learned and hopefully will apply as the next step in becoming an overall better player.
Bump
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