they get the loss but their rank doesnt degrade…
QFT. Seriously, spot on.
Walk up block reaction is a HUGE part of my game.
Even more spot on:
“Online play is great for practice and for getting a pretty good idea of how the matchups go, and the US ST scene has really benefited from it, but it’s not good enough for serious top level tournament play”
This is horrible. They should get a drop in rank as well. I don’t care a lick if people with bad or unreliable connections are penalized. XBOX LIVE is broadband only for a reason. Without a drop in rank any unscrupulous player will always prefer dropping to taking the loss as it protects their rank. This also invaladates the ranking system. More than one drop a month should cause a sharper drop in rank than usual to discourage the practice.
IMO people bashing online play need to wake up. Essentially no one plays ST in arcades anymore. I would guess that 99%+ of games of ST played this past year were played online.
ST online on 2df or ggpo is clearly a highly competitive and deep game worthy of tournaments.
Is it exactly the same game as offline ST? No. There are some subtle differences on the extreme edge of what it’s possible to react to. But so what? That version of ST where its possible to walk that extra pixel forward before you block a fireball no longer exists in the United States.
Here are 3 separate questions:
-
Is arcade ST a deep and interesting competitive game worthy of tournaments?
-
Is 2df/ggpo ST a deep and interesting competitive game worthy of tournaments?
-
Are arcade ST and 2df/ggpo ST exactly the same game?
Answering No to question 3 implies nothing about the answer to question 2. And given that offline ST is barely even played anymore, I might question the relevance of the answer to question 1.
OK, so it’s not just me who has problems blocking fireballs online…it’s even WORSE in STHD, where if you’re any less than halfscreen away, you simply cannot block a fireball on reaction. Keep in mind i’m using Widescreen mode which is basically zoomed in. But it’s pretty much impossible, and I’m convinced it’s the only reason that Ryus are winning at all. I get SO FUCKING FRUSTRATED when I can blatantly see the fireball coming, pull back, and NOPE I eat it. What really sucks, is that you get the bad habit of trying to do things early - for example doing a jab DP early because if you do it in real-time as if you were offline, you get fireball to the face. So then you start doing things TOO early and it completely fucks up your game. ARGH!
Brian has a point. There’s nothing wrong with playing ST over the internet in any form. And if people want to hold tournaments in it, I don’t see a problem with that. However, as he suggests in #3, we should not under any circumstances say that online and offline ST are the same game. They aren’t. Lag basically forces you to change your gameplay and adapt to strategies that don’t work offline. There might be a godlike ST player online who can’t beat many of the good offline players, and vice versa. Remember at EVO 2k5 when that random Honda player made top 8 in ST? He wasn’t anything special at all, and got beat up pretty quick in finals. But I bet online he would be a much stronger force to be reckoned with.
Bottom line, if people want to play ST online, and play tournaments, let them. However, don’t make comparisons between online and offline ST, because they are not the same game. Many pro-ST players will basically refuse to play any form of ST online, because it really is different from offline play, and that’s fine. But the second that someone says that an online pro is better than an offline one, and vice versa, that’s when we need to take a step back and realize we’re comparing apples to oranges. They both taste good, but they’re not the same animal.
You’re being way too pessimistic about the state of the ST scene. The releases of AE and CCC2, the reevaluation of the Dreamcast version, and the announcement of SFHD have made the game more accessible offline and therefore more popular. Even before GGPO and 2df came out I noticed giant increases in the number of ST tournaments and tournament participants in my local areas and in the number of entrants at major ST tournaments. Remember, the number of people who are lucky enough to still be able to play arcade ST is only a fraction of the total offline player base, console players add a really big number to that. And once STHD and HDR come out, there won’t be any more non-geographic barriers to offline play like needing to find an ancient system, playing a slightly different version, or dealing with input lag, it’ll be easily available on the cheap for systems most people already have. In combination with the game’s online play getting new players involved, I think that’ll lead to a pretty a sizeable jump in the number of people interested in attending offline STHD and HDR tournaments.
Our focus, or my focus at least, is on playing fighting games competitively in tournaments, not on casual play; for me, casual play is only a way to better my performance in serious tournaments. So for me looking at the general amount of online ST vs the amount of offline ST misses the point, because the important thing for the health of a game isn’t how much a game is played, it’s how much it’s played competitively in tournaments. Virtually all ST tournaments in the past year have been offline, and in any case I don’t think that online ST play is even close to 99% of all current ST play.
And anyway, I think online ST can be interesting and competitive under the right circumstances, but I don’t think it’s worthy of tournaments because of the inherent problems with playing online. That doesn’t just include lag problems, which I guess we could weakly excuse as being a different game in CCC2’s laggy mold, but it also includes problems with fluctuating connections (which are not always related to something at the players’ ends), distance between players making some connections unplayable, the occasional inability to connect to certain other players, and computer hardware or software problems that prevent people from playing online in the first place (as was the case with me up until a couple months ago). All of those things make organizing and running serious tournaments effectively impossible.
That’s all well and good, but you have to understand that if STHD is held at EVO, it’s not the same game as the one you’ve been playing online all year with lag. Strategies will be different and some things that work online will become completely ineffective. With the way things are going, and if the trend keeps up and more people pick up online play and take it seriously, EVO may need to be re-named “The Offline Fighting Game Championships.”
I can’t think of anything in particular that works exclusively on GGPO that wouldn’t work in a normal match of ST. There’s no real input delay and the lag compensation works pretty much 99% of the time. I think it’d be safe to say that GGPO could probably prepare you for a real ST tournament given that you have a decent enough connection and play people with similar connections.
I can’t say anything about 2DF, though. Fuck 2DF.
That said, STHD is going to be released widely enough that people can play that to get ready for Evo and is going to be using a similar system to compensate lag and keep input delay nonexistent. It also isn’t like GGPO is going to magically get worse – we can only really move forward from where we are now. What’s with all the hate (besides being notorious for being SRK’s #1 hater)?
Yeah, that’s why I don’t want people to look at online tournaments as being serious (their seriousness being impossible nothwithstanding, some people might still decide to take them seriously). If people think of online play as serious instead of as practice for offline play, then yeah, they won’t be used to playing well offline, so they’ll do worse offline, and they’ll be less likely to play in offline tournaments, which are my main concern. Don’t think that this means I hate online play, I think it’s great, but mostly for what it does for offline play.
Edit: There are things you can’t do on GGPO or 2df that you can do offline. Anything that requires exact reactions becomes harder. This hurts Honda a lot because walking up and blocking fireballs etc on reaction and neutral jumping over fireballs on reaction are both harder.
Anyone who thinks that online play is even close to offline is crazy. Even talking about now is like beating a dead horse. Much of my game is based on reaction timing as I am mainly a RYU player. Its laughable how many times I have known exactly what my opponent is going to do and still eat attacks due too lag. But I will say this, Top tier players for the most part are still top tier players online so the playing field is level but still requires adjustments to strategy to compensate for the online horse-shit that happens.
Particularly in GGPO, I can see this being the case because the fireball will happen a frame or so “later” than it normally would, but you’d figure that managing to learn to do it online would mean that you’d definitely be able to do it offline. That being said, I can see the argument, but it doesn’t really change the fact that I pretty much am already a proponent for online used as practice for online.
I was playing waldo ex today online. first off i’m going to say ggs and waldo is pretty good. the gripe i had when i vs. him was that i noticed he kept on doing light shoryukens and alot of times i couldnt sweep him even if i swept early his srk would go through :(. also before he lands from a hp shoryuken i try to hp him out but somehow he gets to block it or gets to do something else it’s really annoying. i’m not sure if this is the lag kicking in or whatever but i felt that towards the later matches he had more priority over my stuff.
if waldo ex is here please post your thoughts.
Totally lag related problem, I feel your pain. Even better try ground countering kens super after he lands online. LOL
meh, people fuck that up offline as well.
HIT THAT NIG IN THA AIR!!! LOL
:mad:
Such a different game offline. I’m able to do so much more offline. The subtle differences are HUGE in ST since the game is so unforgiving and punishing.
-Emulated ST speed so much faster than offline ST
-Inconsistent connection/frame skipping
-lag
-lag
-lag
-Don’t know who’s using macros
-during online tourney if you’re forced to play someone far, far away, then you’re screwed in terms of connection
-etc
-etc
Online play is good for practicing matchups, nothing more, nothing less. Asterisk city.
I tried GGPO a couple of times last month, and although it was better than all the other online options I’ve tried, it wasn’t as good as offline. First, there is always a chance of lag, resulting in harder reversals and combos. Second, although people have disputed this fact, I did have dropped inputs and massive skipped frames. Pressing buttons and having nothing at all come out either means one of two things: my joystick is busted, or the program is dropping my inputs. And considering I was using a Hori Real Arcade Pro 3 that I bought a few months ago and have rarely used, I have to believe it was the program. And after only a few games, I got totally tired of my opponents seemingly just appearing in front of me and hitting me with no frames in between. Not saying it was fullscreen or anything, but when you’re used to offline ST, you get real tired of that shit quick. Third, apparently to avoid input lag you need to tweak your USB ports or something…which makes no sense to me, I guess Windows automatically delays inputs on USB? But that to me is a huge issue that somehow needs to be overcome…without having to download separate programs and fucking with windows registry settings.
Bottom line, it wasn’t a bad experience, but it would definitely take me time to adapt to some of the subtle changes. And if I did adapt, it would definitely fuck with my offline game. So in my best interest, I’ve stayed away. I’ve only played STHD online because it’s not “pure ST” and shouldn’t mess with that gameplay.
yea i played him a few more times and played someone with a better connection and now i can feel the difference. it seems whenever i play someone with lag their animation stutters from the get go. bah 
gotta work with what we’re given i guess.
Yes. There is a lag with the usb ports. I can’t find the post/program (Sabre pointed me to it). It’s simple to use and if the overclocking screws with your non-stick related USB devices, you can use it to turn the mhz back down to normal. It doesn’t do anything overly scary (I just wouldn’t run external storage devices while the port is turned up…just in case).
If you’re playing with the input lag I think you are, then yeah. I can see how you wouldn’t want to go back. I remember how horrible it was before learning how to tweak the usb ports. That input lag, however, isn’t GGPO’s fault.
I can understand the fear of altering your offline game with online ST…although I still think you’re missing out on some fun times…
DSP said it best. There are some strats that will work very well (somtimes be unbeatable) online that would never in a million years work offline (dekor much? LOL)
In HF you will see the greater majority of people pick honda and spam thousand hand, walk in throw, and repeat until you die and 99% of the time there is nothing you can do about it. You’ll also see a lot of people pick blanka and spam j roundhouse and then walk in bite again 99% of the time it is unbeatable. Even in a game like HF where sagat is a fraction of the beast he is in st he is at a huge disadvantage against chun online because she can run circles around him without fear of a reversal.
So obviously online play can’t be taken seriously, UNLESS the lag and input delay can be negated well enough to make an online match function 99% the same as an offline match would. I’ve only played on 2df a few times but every match I did play the lag didn’t hinder me or my opponent at all and if I were to replay those matches offline it would be the same.
I haven’t gotten GGPO yet does st on GGPO function well enough to be taken seriously? I heard ggpo and 2df are both very good and do a great job of negating/hiding the lag so for those who play on either regularly do you think your online matches would turn out differently at all if they were offline?
I wonder if the people here take online st seriously or not.