These random DPs come out and hit you mainly because for most intents and purposes, it snuffs out a good majority of moves. It’s easy to fall back on, especially with how easy it is to mash a DP in SF4. A missed link, a bad call or reaction on frame advantages/disadvantages and overall being too impatient will pretty much mean a fist to your chin. Just remember that you don’t ALWAYS have to react to every single thing the opponent throws at you. If he does a light DP and it’s a risk for you to react and counteract it, don’t. He’s obviously gonna be free to attack right after he lands on that DP, probably another DP. At the same time, watch out for what he’s throwing at you.
There’s a lot of opportune moments that you probably didn’t even know where he’s practically just bending over and saying “please kick me in the butt good sir.” Go through these special moves and sweeps that the characters do and find out where you have the advantage. You’ll be pleasantly surprised how many free combos, supers, and ultras you can do against blocked or whiffed normal and specials.
just pick a character that noobs don’t know how to deal with rufus sagat balrog r the best choice, i main chun but playin her against noobs is annoying, i use rufus to test the level of the player if they use random stuff i sit back and punish, if they r good i go with my main. just play defensive and you’ll wik 90 percent of the time, online scrubs r the worst b/c although they suck they have the worst egos
Scrubs will do something scrubby at some point in a match, usually horribly unsafe moves at predictable times. You know when they wanna DP so create situations where they will want to and punish accordingly, All you have to do is apply a little pressure and then back off.
Rule of thumb is that scrubs kill themselves. You don’t have to work for it, Let them give the game to you.
I had this happen to me so much, but when I switch over to Ryu every now and then it stopped. You can’t run away from Ryu, and you can’t jump on him either; and Ryu has some seriously damaging combos. But if you aren’t willing to try other characters;
For Sakura, do crouching fierce on all jump-ins.
You need to learn more combos for whatever character you use. Punish and go.
For people who do offensive chaos, turtle like a madman. Never stop. Eventually they have to cool down or make a big mistake, which is when you go to Bullet Point 2.
Yeah u are losing because u are trying to engage scrubs and not give them any respect. You can’t fight someone who picks attacks completely at random. They don’t care what u are trying to do so there is no way to bait them wiith higher level tactics. If ur a sakura player and ur trying to zone a scrub ryu with s.hk and c.mk u are just gonna die. They will just jump on ur face and sweep u till u stop. The only way to beat someone who does not give you any respect is to give them the utmost of respect. Let them do what they want.
The best way to fight a scrub as lame as it is is to never actually fight them. JUST BLOCK EVERYTHING!!!. Scrub players usually never use light or medium attacks. They are always using hard attack buttons which have terrible recovery on whiff or block like sweeps. If u just sit there and block they are going to do something desperate like a dragon punch or sweep. Block then win. Just block their jump ins starting out and if u get more comfortable later u can start anti airing their jump ins. Otherwise block then punish laggy shit.
honestly, if you know they’re “scrubs”, or crap players, you need to realize you can’t play them the same way you do against people who know what the hell they’re doing. That’s where most of it starts. Especially in something like SF4 where they can mash out DPs if you slip up on a link or of the sort. But this could be said for any game.
as much as it can throw you off because you’re playing down to a opponent not as good as you think, it helps honestly. Let him make the moves and counter it. It’s simple and effective if they don’t learn.
Part of the problem is due to input delay. If you wait until the last moment to punish a DP, due to input delay, if the other player has been mashing out another DP, your attack will likely just be stuffed since the mashed DP will come out before your delayed punish. This is extremely noticeable with Ken’s EX SRK.
Most low level players aren’t random at all. The OP’s problem is that he likely doesn’t think it is worth trying to read the player in the first round, eats low.roundhouse for the first half then enjoys a second course of “random” dp’s the final half then explodes, “OMG! Random! Scrub! POPYCOCK!”.
Some say there is no mind game to bottom rung players. I call bullshit.
You know what a “random” “scrub” will do? Hit you with something, then do that something again and again and again and again and again. You know what you’re doing? You’re eating it. Don’t feel bad, I eat it to. The thing is, I don’t throw the stick on the ground and quit because “shit is random”. I pull my hair out because I practiced everything else except the most important tool: read the god damn opponent in the first round.
You likely got hit by “random sweeps” because he hit you with low roundhouse, you ate it. He tried it again, you ate it. He backed up, tossed some shit out, saw you get in range and you ate low roundhouse again. Random DP…ALL of the lower tier players DP wildly, especially when they are about to lose (hint hint hint!). You need to look out for DP regardless of it being Valle/Choi’s/Daigo’s Ryu or JoeFuckBallz1982. You likely also went in for an attack string and got reverseled…or tried to do something on their wake up…or jumped when you weren’t supposed to jump. After you got hit by the first two in the same way, you need to make a mental note of that and avoid or bait.
What I find hilarious are the randoms online that can’t control space worth a damn and are complete pattern making machines…yet they can dp>FADC>Ultra as naturally as scratching their ass. They have their hail mary play down, but be damned if you ask them to actually run the ball after kickoff. Don’t be that guy. Dear lord I don’t wanna be that guy either.
SFIV breaks the natural corellation between skill and winning that most players are accustomed to.
Let’s say your level of skill starts at stage A, then B, C … right through to S rank or whatever. In other games, someone in B should consistently beat someone at stage A, and someone at stage C should consistently beat people in both B and A etc. However, in SFIV it seems that there is a much smaller correlation between skill and winning during the initial stages. That’s why so many people don’t like SFIV - you don’t really get rewarded for skill as much as you seem to do in other games until much later than usual. One of the reasons this is so is because of the higher risk associated advanced techniques. You miss your 1f link? Congrats, you’ve just eaten a DP. Most players will stay at that level for a long time until they get the execution down or add new strats to their toolset (which means they’ve progressed to the next skill level).
So as far as losing to scrubs go, don’t worry too much about it. It’s only natural in a game that has a low entry level. Keep honing your skills against and use the advice in this thread.
It’s like poker… when you’re going against someone that doesn’t know any better, you have to play down to their level. Stick to the very basics and you’ll take their money without much risk.
I don’t agree with this at all, primarily because I think you’re mistaking good technical execution for good over all player. This goes for every competitive game ever: What good is landing any advanced technique if you can’t bother to set the opponent up to eat it? With your philosophy we’re trading one major deficiency for another. I.E. It’s okay that you got out played, because unlike your opponent you know how to hit 1 frame links.
Other examples:
Fuck ST. I was out footsied in Super Turbo. If only the opponent sat in the corner for me so I could perform chickenwing loop.
Fuck basketball. We got beat by a team using nothing but fundamentals. Don’t they know we can dunk better than them?
Fuck Modern Warfare 2. We got beat in domination by a team that would only capture two points and bottleneck us into the third. Don’t they know we can beat them in team DM? Didn’t they see the few minutes where we captured all three points but lost track of where they were spawning?
Fuck boxing. I keep getting jabbed in the face, then he comes in and punches my ribs and slowly wearing me down. Doesn’t he know I have this sweet left hook, right uppercut to the chin knockout combination I could land if he’d just stay still? Fuck! My ribs hurt!
Fuck Chess. I was checkmated by a rook and bishop even though I totally stomped all over this guy’s queen. RANDOM SCRUB!
Real life IV example: John Choi. I was there when he first started playing IV and he mopped EVERYONE without learning how to do anything advanced execution wise…even dp FADC ultra. Why? He knows how to read his opponent and in doing so, set them up to do stupid shit with fundamentals.
I WILL agree that it is a huge culture shock to go from trying to play with high level players to randoms, but it is a shock because you need to adjust your parameters and how you read the opponent. I always read opponents wrong though and come in last at KS scambats…so maybe people shouldn’t listen to me!
Honestly, a lot of this “random scrub online BS” like DSP like to say is because they, DSP and others like him, are unable to judge the opponent. I watch the 1st round and see what this guy is up and I predict that, say the guy is Cammy, I see this Cammy has an EX bar and will most likely do her special air throw EX style, so I sit back and wait for it and about 75% of the time, the guy does it.
Do I ever predict wrong? Hell yes I do. Do I get pissed and quit like DSP? Hell no I do not.
May I suggest to the OP trying overhead attacks on wakeups? I love doing them, and I have only started doing them since I was inspired by everyone’s favorite announcer Chris Hu who shows no respects crouching wake up. Just the other day I did 3 tiger elbow overheards in a row on a crouching Vega player.
But in all honesty, Idk what to tell you that will work 100%. I used to be pretty poor at SFIV when it first came out, I just never surrended and trusted my insticts and learned how to read stuff.
No, I don’t think think execution is what makes a good player, and that’s not my point. I should have emphasized the word risk. If you missed a 1f link in previous games, chances are you wouldn’t get punished because mashing didn’t work, so there’s more incentive to keep trying it. In SFIV, you regularly get punished hard for a mistake like that. So you either keep risking losing matches while you learn to lose it effectively, or you stop using it.
Now many people might argue that 1f links aren’t essential to gameplay, but you can expand it to things like oki, blockstrings, hit-confirmation etc, even stuff like learning how to make an unsafe jump safe. It’s all the same. In previous games, these things were dead simple and very effective, so it left you to focus on the mindgames. In SFIV, it takes much longer to use these things effectively (no meaties on wakeup, low blockstun etc etc etc), but you can’t really avoid using them if you want to get better. So now you get the guy who wants to learn how to up his Oki game, and he ends up eating a dozen auto-corrected DPs. Or the dude wants to learn blockstring mixup pressure and the same shit happens. That’s just how SFIV goes. It’s not like in ST (for example) where these things were relatively safe.
It took me a LONG time to understand the upclose game in sfiv and add new strats to my toolset.
Now my upclose game is so neutured and contains many reversal baiting gaps that wren?t necessary to such a degree in previous games. My mid range footsies are all focus proof because i look to fadcbackwards if they FA or i use long range jab x back hop. My crossup game is almost completely gone vs srk characters and i’ve evolved into a very minimal style player from a rushdown machine 6 months after release.
Back then I was far enough ahead of the curve to not really ever lose to scrubs but against decent players I would often scrape wins I should have hammered home with 60% life leads, the reason was because of the higher risk associated aggressive techniques (which would have worked in previous games vs scrubs). Which is perhaps what ilitirit is saying. Passive aggressive play is the way forward in sfiv.
A good overall player understands that that passive aggressive play in sfiv means not playing aggressively when the damage potential of your opponents defensive options (read: reversal tiger uppercut) outweighs the damage potential of your aggressive technique. (a good fail example: [media=youtube]Gu3dYQxcQxw[/media]) so perhaps you two aren?t really disagreeing with each other at all.
To the OP, you need to not pick a character that works well with your natural abilities. Maybe sakura isn?t for you.
Okay, that’s way more help than I need guys Thanks for your time, I really appreciate it.
To the people saying “just go Balrog Ryu Sagat”; okay fair enough. I usually destroy scrubs as Balrog. What I think I really need to do is to learn to AA properly as Sakura, and to punish like a mother.
If you are losing to scrubs then you are not playing with patience. A good players will adjust to the opponents patterns. The worse a player the more predictable they are. Scrubs are predictable and if you can’t discern their pattern then you might not want to refer to them as scrubs.
The best way to beat them is to relax and wait. I like to use bait tactics since everyone plays the same 5 characters just find what works. For instance, shoto’s love to lp. dp there way out of rushdowns and block strings. Bait the light dp and hit em with an ultra. I use Blanka and I even see good players fall for the bait. They think it’s a get out of jail card but it ends up leading to capital punishment.
Thanks for your time, I really appreciate it.