Protip: don’t be a fool, OF COURSE, we can guess. Heck, the stream commentators do it all the time: “Hey [Bodied player] you’re going to add [opposing character] to your team next week right?” “Hell yeah!”
If you don’t think high profile stream play affects the public’s team selection and tech, you’re living in a dream world. Dnyce and others use of Phoenix during East Coast matches earlier in the month lead to more Jeans in that 3rd spot in this tourney. Anyone who wants to take Justin’s crown is going to have to get around Tron, even if that means “If you can’t beat’em, join’em.” His Wolvie team’s Akuma weakness was exposed and his She-Hulk team won in part because RyRy didn’t know the matchup and couldn’t punish a lot of Justin’s unsafe She-Hulk shenanigans.
As for Chun, there’s theory and there’s play. In the clutch position, she’s routinely airdashing into the opponent’s attacks and missing the level 3 HCs. Most times she can’t random HC and be safe afterwards and if you need her to get in all alone without an assist against someone with one that’s uphill. Chun as your third is hardly a sigh of relief, it’s suddenly 2x the work which is not where you want to be after you’ve dropped your two point characters.
He’s not entirely wrong about Doom. Doom doesn’t have much in the way of “I can hit you whenever from wherever” types of hypers (don’t even bring up Photon Array…) and relies on a lvl 3 (which again, is up close) to do the really great damage. Most of his loops can end in a Sphere Flame too, but that’s still…up close. Chun Li is the somewhat the same in that respect, although her Kikosho super may be better than any of the options Doom has at midrange or greater and her lightning leg hyper might move fast enough to catch assists from midscreen.
Hell, I’m not a bandwagon jumper, and I’ve been working on Amaterasu lately anyway, but not once did I really consider how much she utterly dominates Sentinel, and could easily fit into any decent team that wants a Sentinel counter (because they don’t want Sentinel on their own team either).
I really hope this is shades of things to come. Props to sp00ky and the organizers.
IMO one thing that was really obvious in the Winter Brawl GF was the lack of matchup knowledge. RyRy definitely had a good grasp on Justin’s Wolv/Storm/Kuma team after his win in Winners Finals, but it looked like he had no idea how to deal with She-hulk and the Tron assist. It was pretty impressive though to see him try to adapt on the fly in the second set of the GF with Haggs but Justin just had too much knowledge and too many tricks.
But yeah, great display by both players. Can’t wait for Final Round. Streeeeeem monsta
If people are really making harsh assumptions based only on a single tournament (ignoring the fact that the game isn’t even one-month old and that there’ll be a lot more tourneys and stuff on the span of the year), they’re being a bit naive. ie, we just saw Joe gettin’ bodied pretty heavily - assuming he’s trash right of the bat is a bit too much right now, since there is close to no one of Joe’s high level play around to base up any claims whatsoever.
Sure, we’ll always get some nice info from any stream or tournament. But let’s give the game more time to settle some stuff. That’s what I’m saying.
Actually, there have been a few tourneys up to now (you can find the archived footage on the mainpage of SRK’s newsfeed), two WNFs and an east coast tourney. The point is that all that info is up there and the top players do their homework. They watch those streams to figure out ways around each other. That’s how RyRy beat Justin’s Wolvie team, much in part to WNF scouting and having a mental gameplan for it… and it’s how Justin and RyRy beat Phoenix based teams.
Time doesn’t do anything on its own. If we all shut up, didn’t post, and didn’t try anything until the next tourney, tech wouldn’t advance. My point is that Tron is a good 3rd character and what- if anything- is the weakness to exploit there? I listed the weakness of the other popular 3rd characters and am asking for the issue to be engaged, not simply sit… because time doesn’t beat Tron, homework does.
IDK, alot of the Dante showings haven’t been that great. Most have been them keeping to the basic combo’s(which aren’t even his more damaging combo’s), but getting blown-up because they don’t know how to do anything else besides simple combo’s, and teleporting. He actually has more tools to stay in, and prevent himself from being knocked from the air so easily, etc. He’s a really good character, and definitely up their with the top characters, but requires a bit more dedication to use(since you can’t really just toss him on a team, and expect to be god-like with him). There’s alot more to him that actually hasn’t been explored yet.
Also the variety is great for the game. Most characters are playable.
I know - there were a quite nice tourneys around since launch. The top players were amazing as usual.
There is still a lot of stuff to be discovered and we lack a good base on most of the subjects to make a definite claim for now.
We all know that Sent is pretty solid, for example. But for other characters and situations, we’ll need time and more solid information to build any base to any claim.
Saying that Chun is worthless as a last character is a bit too much; since having XF on her can change her gameplan, as well depending of her opponent(s). Sure, she’ll have to work a bit to do her things in that scenario, but she’s not so useless being the last one standing.
I’m not saying that we have to stfu and keep stuff to ourselves. It is preferable to back up any point with solid arguments - arguments which by themselves are built by more than one tournament/experience. Of course, in my opinion. :3
Phoenix is some serious bullshit though. It’s seriously like fighting a boss character, only with diarrhea health. I fucking hate her with a passion, serious milestone with sent.
I actually don’t think thats a very good team build. Think about it, your point character is playing with no assist that actually affects your opponent, plus if there is one thing I learnt from that match, its that dark phoenix without lvl 3 x-factor is just not as terrifying. Yipes actually had that match, he just made tons of mistakes, probably due to a lack of experience or something.
And oh boy is the phoenix hate gonna hit a new level after this tourney. I still don’t think she is that bad, kiets mentioned some stuff I never thought about, you can punish a lot of phoenix’s/DP’s fireballs really easily. I guess people just need something to hate on, first it was sent, now its phoenix, I wonder who it will be after the next major, probably wesker or something.
Needs more Deadpool and Viper. Severe lack of X-COPYability for these characters at the moment!
I am impressed at the variety in character choice at FRIV compared to WB5 though…
Sentinel teams getting blown up and not having 95% of teams including the robot is great.
Going to copy/paste my Final Round experience here:
We couldn’t leave until Friday afternoon 'cause one of my friends couldn’t get off of work early. Didn’t get to Atl until really late Friday night, so we didn’t have time to stop by the tournament until yesterday morning.
All of our pools were supposed to start at 10 AM but my first match didn’t happen until 3:15 PM. >> Pools were understaffed and it was hard to get information out of anybody, so I couldn’t leave to get something to eat or anything out of fear that I’d be DQ’d. >__> This did give me time to get plenty of casuals in and get some jitters out of my system, though. At one point I had an 11-game streak and a 10-set streak going. I was in pool 4 and ran Taskmaster/Felicia/Morrigan the entire time. Summary of my tournament matches:
vs Kazujiro - Wore an SRK Tech Talk shirt. Nice guy, but he didn’t offer much more than target practice. Two easy Taskmaster OCVs.
Got a bye because my opponent didn’t show.
vs Too Much Damage - I took it to the last game but then I had a brain freeze. I wouldn’t stop doing the same things even though it was apparent that he wasn’t having a problem dealing with them. Really good player though; pretty sure he made it through our pool without a loss.
4, 5) vs Krono, DBX - The next three matches happened immediately one after another 'cause people were finally showing up at pools and staying there. These two matches blend together in my head. Pretty sure I won 2-0 both times but the games were close. DBX seemed mad salty about it 'cause I barely lamed him out via time over twice, lol.
vs fubarduck - Probably the best-constructed team I faced all day, in either tournament or casuals. It was built around the DHC damage scaling reset glitch: combo into Storm’s wind hyper, DHC to Wesker’s counter (whiff), shoot 'em off the ground and then keep the combo going. I knew I was in trouble when he 100%ed one of my characters rather easily. He took it 2-1 and knocked me out of the tournament. My highlight in this match was taking his Sentinel from 100 to 0 upon entry with XF3 Felicia in like 10 seconds tops, though. lol.
Filipino Champ was in my pool and I chatted with him a bit. Nice guy when he’s not building up his heel persona. The last match of our pool was FChamp vs Tokido to see who would make it out of losers; I didn’t even know Tokido was in my pool until then because he had registered under the name “Happy Set” instead. They played 3 out of 5 instead of 2 out of 3 for some reason. Champ took the first 2 games rather convincingly and was on track to win the 3rd, but Tokido threw out a beam to KO Phoenix during the one moment Champ decided not to block or something, and then Tokido went on to win the set. He kept performing consistently better as the set went on, too. Complete reversal of momentum. Tokido played Wolverine/Akuma/Sent and FChamp played something/Sent/Phoenix. I really would have liked to play either of them to see how I could have done. Champ plays Phoenix in the exact same manner one of my friends does.
That friend of mine also tore up his pool pretty hard with Wesker/Tron(or Haggar)/Phoenix until Marn knocked him into losers. I think he was only 2 games away from making it to top 16. I think I would have had to have won either 3 or 4 more. Not a bad showing, I think. Would have liked to have done better or to at least get the chance to play against some big names but at least I mostly kept myself together and didn’t get randomed out. I learned that I have no idea how to safely punish or approach Wesker; both players I lost to used him. I also learned that my chance of winning basically hinges on whether I can land more throws than my opponent; in every match where I could throw with impunity, it was an easy win, whereas I was out-thrown in both games that I lost.
Other thoughts and notes:
There were a lot of pad warriors out and several of them were doing well. I rocked a Saturn USB myself.
A lot of people still don’t demonstrate proper assist usage. I would basically spend the first 10 seconds of each match getting a feel for whether my opponent (a) knew how to use assists to cover his point character and (b) knew how to protect his assist from punishment. If he was bad at either of those I could basically relax, turn on auto-pilot, and just shoot arrows and call meter assist from full-screen all day.
I saw every character used in tournament play at least once. A good Thor took a round off of me in casuals. One player actually knew how to play Hsien-Ko on point and get mileage out of it.
I only saw Sentinel in about two-thirds of the matches I witnessed instead of the ~95% I see on streams. I also no longer find Sentinel to be threatening personally, at all. Too many people use him as a crutch and are thus predictable and easy to adapt to.
I only ran into one Hidden Missile assist user, which I was eternally grateful for because our monitors had no sound and the place was too loud to hear anything clearly anyway. When you’ve trained yourself to punish that assist on reaction to audio cues, that’s a huge issue. Fortunately the guy I was playing was still predictable about using it.
I asked Mike Ross for a game in casuals but he had to leave before I got the opportunity. At one point JWong, apparently disgusted with Mike’s play, booted him off the station they were at and picked Mike’s team to show him how he’s supposed to play the game. Wong thus demoed some Sent combos that I had actually never seen before, and out of all the players I watched he still looks the most solid overall. I didn’t do much spectating though.
Said hi to MarkMan.
I was happy to have a crowd in casuals and my later tournament matches who were impressed with my team and performance. Taskmaster makes a great early-game bruiser and Felicia & Morrigan both make great XF anchors. I managed to 100% somebody with nothing but Felicia throw resets once. Some people had no way to get around Taskmaster’s zoning and I could thus fire off arrow hypers and rebuild meter via assist with impunity. I combo’d 13 Morrigan fireballs in a row via Astral Vision once. Landed a lot of XF Guard Cancel hypers (which very few people are using as often as they should, btw). Probably my best moment in casuals was when I had one guy down to just Sent, used Kitty Helper, and then just stayed on the opposite side of the screen using Felicia’s meter charge for the rest of the match while the other cat just kept jumping on Sent, preventing him from knocking me out of the meter charge with a beam and eventually netting the KO. That got a laugh.
Pretty much everyone I met and talked to was having a great time with both the tournament and the game, which makes all the bickering about what needs to be “fixed” in MvC3 that you see on the Internet all the more funny.
Ran into some of the TvC players I met in Columbus last year. Most of them seem to be doing well in MvC3, though I think only RyRy made it out of pools.
Running SF4 and MvC3 pools simultaneously is the stupidest thing ever. At least half the delays in all of the pools were due to people registered in both games and having to bounce back and forth between them.
Judging from comments in the NeoGAF FR thread, Marn was wasted all day. I only caught a couple of glimpses of him from a distance so I wasn’t quite sure if he was out of it or if he was just being Marn.
Yipes absolutely loves seeing Sentinel lay on the hurt. Like, I saw him glance at a TV as he was walking by, and the moment a Sent on the screen pops XF3 and connects a launcher Yipes just stops in his tracks and starts dancing, lol.
We left a little after midnight last night. Didn’t seem worth it to spend another night on a hotel when we’d have to leave before much of the finals action on Sunday anyway. I’ll be spending today streaming with the rest of you.
Those of you guys who haven’t yet made it out to tournaments should do so; they’re pretty rad. :3