Mr.Wizard, I suppose…
Lol, I love it.
How can people still be asserting that listening to buttons is cheap?
Let’s put it this way: listening to buttons and being able to react to them REQUIRES skill. I don’t think you would doubt that. Being able to respond to an audio cue requires just as much skill as responding to a visual cue. Outside the realm of Street Fighter, just in general, if a person can react to audio stimulus just as well as (or better than) visual stimulus, that’s pretty admirable.
What we’re saying, then, is that a player who utilizes audio cues and uses them to their advantage is applying a different part of their skills and abilities to the game where other players may lack, in order to try and get a win.
It’s equivalent to a prediction versus reaction argument. Some players have great reactions, whereas some players have great prediction. Most of the famous top players have both. But what you’re saying essentially is that if one person had better prediction or reaction than his opponent and used it to their advantage, that would be cheap, because he’s using a skill his opponent didn’t have, or didn’t have as much of.
To draw yet another analogy, let’s say you get into a fight. You are unarmed, save for your fists. If you HEAR the sound of a gun cocking, you are probably going to change your fight strategy if you want to win (or if you want to leave alive). Surely you wouldn’t argue that utilizing your sense of hearing in THIS scenario is cheap?
The end objective of the fight is to win (or to leave alive, at the very least).
The end objective of Street Fighter is to win.
People say its cheap because its something that occurs when you play side to side, but not when you play on traditional head to head cabinets. (even though I’ve heard or even felt) players mashing from the other side of the cabinet.
The funny part is, if it is so cheap how are you going to enforce it? 
It’s part of the game. People have been listening to inputs/reading body language since day one, and they’re still doing it. Anyone who’s ever played in an offline setting knows this. I played CE at an arcade recently and this little kid challenges me with Ken and starts faking fireballs with exaggerated arm and hand motions. He wasn’t even playing to win. He was just working on his fake fireball game 
wasn’t gamerbee a pad player
Listening to buttons/stick motions is nothing new.
Apparently there are only like 10 people who played on a cab here. Its a legit strat, and it is godlike to bait people with it. People who play grapplers should be able to bait jumps way too easily by just spinning the stick and than doing an antiair instead.
Nothing new here, it was a good match. bee is gdlk.
Ffs can’t we get past the tired repetitive posts of regurgitated ‘it’s legit and people did it on cabinets’.
How about the people who play on head to head?
How about the people that play online?
How about the people that play on pad?
Are they playing another game? Which is the ‘real’ ‘legit’ version of SF? Cos as far as I know, every tournament other than sbo and local ran bats is on console.
Maybe it’s time we all had the same rules- why does Justin get to sit with his ear next to someones stick but they can’t sit with their ear next to his stick? Is that ‘legit’?
I think this stuff is only fair when everyone has the same conditions- like on a side by side cabinet. It’s also a huge advantage for people that play in an arcade. How are players that don’t live near an arcade supposed to develop these l33t o.g skills? How about those of us that play at arcades with head to head cabs? Should we tell our arcade managers that we need old side to sides so we can level up our listening skills for evo?
SBO is head2head, and I think that tells you everything you need to know.
The best ST player in London is Japanese and he has said to mr when we’re playing that he prefers playing head to head because you’re playing the game in it’s purest form, rather than adding an uneccessary meta game by NEEDING to add an extra mini game of fake fireballs and watching your opponents hands etc. I agree with him. I want to play ST, not ST plus hand miming and eyeball multi tasking with the corner of my eye on his controls and fake reversal attempts.
They’re two seperate games, and I think Evo needs ruled to decide which one they’re playing. They should go head to head like sbo IMHO.
He’s holding an awfully large pad if he is.
And on another note, I have played on head-to-head cabs before in Taiwan and if you listen carefully enough, you can still hear button tapping.
Will the UK scrubs shut the fuck up now? Thanks.
In my experience that is rare. I’ve played on h2h cabs in a bunch of different arcades and could almost never hear inputs.
Not only is there nothing wrong with listening for the stick and buttons, its awesome. Fair play to the guy.
I’m pretty sure they can sit however they want.
So we should implement a rule that bans putting fake buttons into your stick, you could be baiting.
But you could be baiting with any button really, so we should implement a rule that bans having buttons.
All players should be required to wear earplugs so people cant cheat!
Players should be required to write down the moves they intend to use and hand them to the judges for inspection before match so they can detect fakers and button listeners.
Well no, as nobody has discussed what I’m saying. I’m not saying listening or baiting is cheating. I do it when I play on side by side. I’m not going to discuss whether I’m a scrub or not, as that’s just being baited, but what I am saying is the best Japanese player that I’ve ever seen on ST, who now lives in London, prefers playing head to head and even says himself that side by side is a different game.
If anything, the scrubby thing to say is that it doesn’t make a difference. You guys that are basically contradicting yourselves and using a straw man argument:
on the one hand you’re all saying it’s part of the game, it’s cool, get on with it, stfu. But by recognising it as part of the game you’re failing to acknowledge that for people that play head to head (like myself and everyone else who lives in Asia or plays 3S in London, Paris etc) play a different game. I play arcade on both side by side and on head to head, and I’m telling you, it’s a BIG difference.
You’re also failing to recognise that what Aion is saying and what I’m saying is different. He thinks all this listening business is wrong/scrubby/cheating whatever. I don’t. not at all. As with anything, if it’s there and within the rules, get on with it. What I was TRYING to debate was how this affects players like myself and players from places like Japan that play exclusively head to head, and whether tournaments like Evo can incorporate rules or options that cater for us.
Once you have established that side by side and head to head are very different (and they 100% are) then you logically have to address if people can or should have the option of one or the other. If a top player (and I’ve given examples of two, there are obviously plenty more) wants to play head to head, shouldn’t that be an option? SBO is head to head for example.
Our SFIV caninets and 3S cabinets are head to head or networked, so we don’t have to do this stuff. When we play ST at Casino, we do. When we play ST at Troc on head to head, we don’t.
Someone made the point that they can sit wherever they want. That’s not really true, as you can’t choose where your opponent sits. So Gamerbee can choose to sit on his chair, but he can’t choose for Wong not to be sat next to his stick listening to his button presses. My opponent couldnt stop me sittinig directly behind him watching his stick. Again, I’m not saying “oh no they are cheating this is cheap!” I’m just discussing how the rules affect the way the game is being played. In the same way that character select, character changing and other factors in a match have been adapted over the years to make the match as fair as possible, isn’t it also worth debating how set ups, be they side to side, head to head or whatever could also affect a match?
If you take what happened to Harmonaz, there’s an SBO player who’s qualified to be sent to Evo by winning a Euro tournament, and he’s saying he wants to play head to head. Why is that not an option? Why should, say, KO (the japanese 3s player that won evo 2004 iirc) have to adapt to what is undeniably a symptom of side-by-side arcade culture when he has only ever played head to head in Japan?
But I suppose they’re scrubs too. So address the actual points of my argument or shut up the fuck up, Thanks.
First off, best American players prefer playing side to side so anecdotal evidence should be tossed out the window. Just because one or two players prefer something doesn’t mean that’s how it should be.
Second, there are often cases of chair mind games (“chairsies”) or whatever they call it where one player wants to be behind another player while the other player doesn’t want to allow this. I think they have some sort of rule for this (some sort of chair blind select?).
Third, we’ve established that side by side and head to head are different. They’re both valid ways to play are they not? Here’s the thing: Evo allows and probably even encourages players to sit side by side. What you’re encouraging is changing the rules of Evo to fit the rules of other foreign tournaments. Evo never explicitly said it had the time nor the resources to set up head-to-head. Could it offer it fairly easily? Yeah if it knew beforehand to do it. However, that’s now how tournaments in America are ran and thus it’s unlikely to change in the future.
that’s not dirty.