**Copied over from the SF4 Forum, credit going towards eoneo, thank you for writing this up!
Original thread is right here.If you want to read what other members wrote, please go there.
**
This is just my attempt to explain why people seem to be acting like assholes. I started writing this in response to a post in another thread:
You know, I’ll agree that there’s a lot of sore egos on this site. Some people just love to bitch, troll, and swing their E-dicks around (myself included). And the same is probably true for any online forum.
But one should also try to understand that this whole community has been completely flipped on its head in the past few months.
Now, I don’t mean to be, but this is also going to sound very elitist. Just try to bear with me here on this analogy:
Imagine a yearly physics symposium where people come together to discuss the very latest developments in the field. They’re talking theories that can’t be proven for another decade, or might not be proven ever, or why a past theory has become irrelevant, etc. etc. and other such topics that people who haven’t studied physics for a decade won’t be able to understand.
Then one year, a large group of high school physics students comes to the symposium for a field trip and starts asking a lot of basic physics questions. Questions like, “How do you calculate acceleration?” Or adding their two cents about theories when they don’t know where the theories came from.
Now, the regular symposium dudes are glad that the students are excited about learning physics, but a symposium isn’t the place to be teaching basic physics formulas, let alone argue about theory without knowing the basic formulas.
Complaining about the difficulty of canceling moves or how throwing is cheap is just that. It’s not relevant to the topics at hand, and wastes time and energy.
Or for a closer analogy, it’s a bit like going on a chess forum and complaining that the knight’s movements are too confusing. Can you imagine how much shit you’d get?
Now, stepping away from the analogy, I of course don’t think Street Fighter is as difficult or important as physics (well… maybe for me personally it is actually more important than physics :wgrin:), but I think the point is clear. A community that comes together to discuss somewhat advanced game tactics can’t function well when it’s being cluttered with questions and complaints about basic game operation. Or complaints about a character being “cheap.” (I’ll get to that later…)
We’re getting “server is too busy” every 5 minutes these days. And when I can finally get to reading some threads, they are constantly being derailed by beginner questions and the resultant shitstorms that follow afterward.
Don’t get me wrong. I am personally all for helping beginners. The more people that are exposed to my hobby, the more:
a) the more players, and therefore more competition,
b) the more $$$ for Capcom, which hopefully means more (hopefully good) games from them.
c) the more exposure, and therefore higher chances of it becoming less of a shitty niche hobby (aka more prize money at tourneys, and maybe more tourneys in general).
And call me what you will, but I admit that I kinda like being the veteran that posesses a pool of wisdom that scrubs want to access.
But SRK functions first and foremost a forum for high level discussion about fighting games, and therefore it never had a chance to build up the knowledge base necessary to assist people approaching Street Fighter for the very first time. Are there really any Street Fighter FAQs out there that explain that a cross-up must be blocked high? Or that trying to block a move from across the screen will only make you walk backwards? Or even how to properly execute a charge move? Of course not! These things are so beyond basic for the users on this forum, the topic never comes up.
So with release of SF4 and the recent the flood of first-timers on SRK, I think this is the perfect time for just such a basic database to be properly built. Then we hopefully won’t have this problem again in the future.
The people that are willing to help can work with the beginners to build a super basic guide for people who have never heard of Street Fighter in their lives. The unique viewpoint of the beginner is just as integral as the knowledge of the veteran, because only a beginner can see things that a veteran would take for granted (e.g. “How do I shot flamy air punch?”). I think the “THE SF4 BEGINNERS Thread! NEW? POST HERE FIRST!” thread is a perfect start.
If we can ride out the growing pains for a bit longer, I think we can build a guide that will in the future prevent the annoying repetition of silly questions, and at the same time, be a great help to people looking to learn the game for the first time. Let’s just hope that it isn’t wishful thinking.
Now, I think there are some problems that can’t be resolved by a good guide, and these problems are are laziness and kids. I admit I’m lazy, and there have probably been more than a few times when I went on some forum and asked questions without first searching for the answer myself. But a good beginner’s guide will hopefully cut a lot of that down. Kids on the other hand… well what can you do?
As for whining about something being ‘cheap,’ I hope that’s banworthy. When coming to a forum like this, a person should spend some time learning about the community and the common interest that brings them together (in this case, Street Fighter) before posting. Do you go on a chess forum and complain about Queens being able to move in any direction they want? Reading just a few posts about specific character match ups will quickly tell you that there are always ways to beat another character’s moves. In fact, that’s exactly what this community is for! To build up that knowledge base. And even before the community comes into the picture, the game PROGRAMMERS designed the game so that there is always a way to beat a move. NOTHING is unbeatable. Look at how blanka is designed specifically to get around fireballs!
Learning this complex game of paper/rock/scissors is half the fun of Street Fighter. There is absolutely no excuse for cluttering up space and tieing up servers with INANE complaints about shoto “fireball spamming” or Ken’s “flaming uppercut.” If you took 30 seconds to look through the official Ken thread, you’d find that his “flaming uppercut” is actually a terrible anti-air. A Ken player should instead be using MP shoryuken to anti-air – his HP version often gets beat by early jump-in attacks.
So in short, spend some time here reading and learning, less time bitching, and in a month’s time, you’ll feel awful silly about some of the things the new people have started posting here lately. I promise.
In the mean time, we’ll hopefully make some guides that will eventually answer all your questions, yeah?
edit: Glad that this made sense. And for those who hate reading:
TL;DR version:
**1) Clutter hurts the forums.
2) New posts are *generally *(I know, not always…) for talking about novel ideas or latest news (i.e. things that haven’t already addressed in guides/FAQs/threads).
3) Posts asking repeatedly about basic operation wastes everyone’s time, and fucks up the server.
In other words, read the text book instead of asking questions in the middle of class.**
Unfortunately, it’s going to be just a little bit hard with the search function down, but we have a beginner’s questions thread to compensate in the mean time (and even then, you should try to find an answer yourself BEFORE running to that thread). And don’t forget to check out all the other helpful threads (thanks, Dentron):
though it may be way different from other forums i’ve been to.