So I’ve been really trying to learn this game and it’s been tricky…really tricky.:bluu:
I’ve been learning to block more that when I started, but I still get caught by dumb stuff because I block the first few attacks (not expecting more) and when I try to counter I always get hit and then everything just falls apart. I can parry fireballs, but anything else is always by accident (any tips for practicing things other than fireball attacks if you don’t have a partner?)
Not to mention that since I’m late to the game (played it before about 7-8 years ago, but only super casually against the computer) everyone one online is just so much better than me (I’m 1-16 on ranked matches) and I end up tasting defeat often (I should go to the doctor and get tested for high cholesterol:sweat:).
Been playing against Arcade mode, but I can’t even beat that without using continues (Also can someone tell me why the last boss was easier than any of the matches leading up to him minus the first 3 or 4?) and the difficulty can’t be changed in OE as of writing this.
So my real reason (besides venting frustration) for writing this is to ask ways to build up fundamentals at this game and staying motivated to keep playing knowing I’m going to be losing a lot until I get the hang of things. I’ve done about 40% of the trails (Completed 46 or 47 in total including all of the basic parrying, trial 2 and 3 of Advanced, the first 3 handicap challenges and various characters). Thanks in advance for any helpful advice in practicing.
P.S. I have a lot of trouble comboing jumping attacks into crouching ones in this game. Any advice on that?
Just keep playing. Things will fall into place naturally.
Watching high level matches helps understand the game, go look up the latest stuff in the match vids thread or go to TheShend’s channel on YouTube.
Anything related to your character can be found in their character sub-forum, or you can probably google it or find it in the Shoryuken wiki.
As for jump ins, you need to hit them really, really deep. Otherwise you can’t combo them.
when you try to counter, you get hit… those are frame traps pretty much. they stop their attack in hopes you will press a button but they’ll also attack with a button with higher priority than yours.
tips on parrying other things that aren’t fireballs? thats when you have to read the opponent. if he jumps at you, is he gonna hit you or is he gonna press nothing and land and then throw you or attack then? think of it as chess. read your opponent ahead of time.
learn as much as you can from every source available. read frame data and old forum posts for your character, watch matches religiously (and question why everything happens the way it does), make training mode practice a ritual, and push through plateau’s. also if possible a mentor (preferably someone who plays your character but not necessary) will help tremendously.
The best way to practice basics is to find someone who will do matches with you without actually focusing on beating you up, just on practicing X or Y thing. I regularly do this with my buddies who are worse at the game. When I first got 3SOE I got really lucky and had DevilJin practice with me this way for a while. You essentially just go into a match and just isolate something and practice it.
I’ve been helping a buddy of mine learn Ibuki and literally all we do is “fight” each other on GGPO and I just walk him through all the normals and then have him practice their range and cancellability and stuff against me, while all I’m doing is walking forward/backward/jumping and not actually beating him up. Sometimes we practice footsies, etc. I’ll whiff moves on purpose in front of him and he has to try to punish them or stuff them.
It’d probably be even easier if I could voice chat him during the matches instead of typing, haha.
You don’t even need someone better than you for this, just someone who’s willing to practice with you. If you can find a practice partner you’d have a real shot at getting better quickly. After practice sessions you can do actual fights with each other to put your training to work, etc. That’ll help you incorporate whatever you learn into practical play.
Thanks for the advice everyone. I’m so terrible at the game it makes me depressed XD. I’ve never had this much trouble learning a fighting game let alone Street Fighter. I know the fundamentals are essentially the same in most 2-D fighters and I guess I gotta keep working until whatever it is I’m missing “clicks”. I don’t know how come I can play Jam in GG fairly well (at least enough to beat the comp on hard without IK), but another execution heavy character like Makoto gives me so much trouble. Maybe I should stick to Ken or Ryu until my footises and fundamentals are better and them try to learn Makoto.
I really wanna at least get to the point where I’m not losing 95% of my matches against people online and getting the floor mopped me by people who’ve been playing this for ages. All I can do is chuckle and sigh and grit my teeth.
Winning more than your losing online isn’t a very lofty goal so just keep playing and improving and that will come soon…
but those competent/experienced players will be mopping the floor with you for a long time.
It’s part of the fun and the learning of this game at this point in histroy
Find a video that lets you hear the buttons being pressed. Might be helpful. It’ll get you familiar with the sound of links, combos, and such. That way, while you still don’t know what it looks like when you have advantage, at least you can use the sound of your buttons as a way to let you know you are doing the right thing.
we all start bad. I started playing 3s a few months before OE came out. held about a 40% win percentage on XBL ranked for the first few months of this game. which confused the shit out of me because I thought I was awesome. uploaded this video of my first win on XBL back then, looks silly now but at the time I thought I was doing pretty rad stuff:
bad ibuki
Spoiler
[media=youtube]MlBU1oiTfo4[/media]
now one year and six months into my 3s journey, I’m less bad than I used to be. I still lose to good players and make mistakes but I’m a far better player now than I was then. I approached the game in four ways:
watch lots of footage. you’re already here at this board where they post a lot of high level stuff, so you’re in the right spot. watch everything that gets posted in the 3rd Strike Match Vids Thread. Investigate that old So Cal scene that people talk about, and the videos they’ve uploaded. Watch anything you can.
lots of playing offline. online might work too if you live close to people (I don’t), but this game was meant to be played offline and it is a smarter game there usually. it doesn’t even have to be a scene of guys you play with, I’ve played 3s with my best friend for this year and we’ve improved together. find one guy to play with and keep playing several times a week if you can. play both sides of a matchup and see what works and discuss why it works. exchange ideas and improve together. now if you can find more than one guy that’s even better, but you gotta find someone you can play with a lot at least. they don’t even have to have played the game before. yeah it’d be awesome if we could all have a mentor but that’s not always available. it’s just important to play.
training mode for execution. there are some hard things in this game for new players. hit confirms into super and combos and the execution itself that underlies those.
ask a lot of questions. this board is a great resource for that too. great players who’ve played a long while and know the ins and outs. read every thread, investigate the character specific forums and read everything for the characters you play, ask a question any time you need help figuring something out. sometimes people will be like “go figure that out yourself, that’s why we have frame data” or something like that so you gotta be able to research things too. often someone here answers a question and it gets you started, then you go practice it and play it and look at frame data to build from there.
I think it goes like: questions and match vids -> training mode -> playing real games. you learn something, you practice the execution to make sure you’ve got it down, then you put it into practice and see how it actually works. a lot of this game is game knowledge in general. if you’re playing someone better than you they can probably beat you with half the cast, not just their main. just keep playing and learning and you will improve.
EDIT: oops I think I just ended up taking what Pherai said and expanding it into a few more paragraphs. brevity is the soul of being helpful.
Train with variety. Pick one char to learn in depth but also experiment with the cast so you learn their general strats and motives. Play with people of all skill levels.
ey reptition is good bro! I’m glad you agree and the point is extra stressed. Lots of 3s players get lazy about supplemental study like videos, training mode and frame data
same way you motivate for anything. different for each person.
for me i imagine what i’d like to be achieving. then i make sure to set aside a little time for working towards that thing each day or every few days.
with 3s the furthest objective is to fight the guys i know on their level. the game is really fun already, but i want more. i get glimpses of that fluidity and synchronicity. that helps motivate. but you won’t get those glimpses unless you keep playing.
consistency is the most important part of improvement. the more often you do something the more times you have to adjust, recognize things and improve. think of it like iterations of yourself. the more iterations you’re making in the same span of time, the more things you can notice.
if you draw, paint, sculpt, write, play/write music, etc. it should be easy to understand what i mean. skills don’t develop on a linear path. they don’t develop spontaneously either. you need to keep in mind that no one sits down and becomes amazing instantly. that alone is usually enough motivation to keep going at it for me, whatever it may be.
I think the most important part of staying motivated for this game is simply not to take defeat negatively. This is a game where, at least in my opinion, experience is king, and with the age of the game, there’s going to be players that you can’t even scratch until you’ve gotten more experience under your belt (And even then, you’ll ONLY scratch them). A loss should be taken as a learning experience rather than something to feel bad about. (Unless it’s online, losing to online rather than your opponent is no fun)
Personally, my motivation in 3S has been to fight people like that. It’s an exhilarating feeling, to fight someone who can take everything you know about the game, your character, etc. and show you how little you really know, how predictable you are, and so forth. It forces you to think, pushes you to the limits of your knowledge and execution, and sometimes you even catch a glimpse of yourself playing on a level higher than you know yourself to be, though only a glimpse. Most times aren’t so fortunate I’m sure, but having those moments, it really makes you want to become stronger.
You can use training mode and use the dummy to attack you. Use auto parry to get an idea of the timing if you’re having trouble. After a while you’ll find a sort of… Rhythm that works on most things, though there are plenty of exceptions. Blocking is typically your better option though.
The only thing is practice. The timing can be relatively strict compared to other games.
Thank you everyone. I found someone I can play against offline, I just have to wait until they get at 360 or PS3 since they played 3S 90% in arcade and 10% on PS2. Yeah this game is really fun and the “meta game” of it seems all the more fun which is why I really want to get decent at the game:badboy: . There’s probably a thread on here about how to read frame data right? Because I have no idea how to read or use it.
If anyone wants to add me on PSN just let me know your from SRK I’m artboy_598 (I’m also artboy598 but that’s my Japanese account)
Diaper Bum, Mon Flare, and myself were throwing this around after the most recent Philly Bar battles and a few drinks. Name dropping.
*¡muévete! *means “move yourself” in Spanish. You are at a point, call it zero, you need to take actions, make choices to move yourself to a point, call it one, you want to be at. The first thing I would say is change your goal. Rather than focusing on the your 5% win rate, focus on the minutia of the game. Your goal as stated above is not only mountainous in your mind but also extremely vague. Make your goals more achievable, more specific, more attainable. Say to yourself “I want to improve my hit confirms % by x or I want to increase my throw tech % by y”. You are going to need to go into training mode and practice doing those things. So go into training mode and practice hit confirming into super off of cr.short x 2. Set up a dummy to put you into throw situations(you can find these in videos either your own or online) and learn to tech those throws. How can you expect to do them in a match when there is all this other stuff going on if you can’t do them when you have less to think about. If you can’t do it when you know it is going to happen you aren’t going to be able to do it when you don’t know what is going to happen. Also don’t chuckle and sigh and grit your teeth. Unless you lost because of something funny or cute, than you can chuckle while you are making a note, mental or otherwise, of the funny or cute thing your opponent did. Don’t grit your teeth you’ll ruin them. Really try to learn from the loss, think about the situations and decisions you made. More on that later.
The most common advice I get about improving my game relates to matters of execution. Many of the problems you mentioned are execution related. These problems can easily be fixed through practice, practice, and more PRACTICE. Want to learn how to parry something? Say Corkscrew Blow, you are going to need to go into training mode and practice it. I would suggest taking it slow and keeping things simple in the beginning. Something like maximizing your punishes against uppercuts or punishing sweeps on block(if your character can do this). With more practice your confidence in matches will increase, because you will be successful at the things you’ve practiced and you will start asking more questions-like what else can I do or what do I do next or what can I do before that happens? You go into practice mode and find out. Confidence will improve your game because you’ll be less afraid and Fear is the Mind Killer. Having patience in these matters is important because it won’t come over a week or month or even a year. It will take an amount of time based upon the amount of time you put into the game.
I think watching videos is a good idea and I see no one mentioned watching your own videos. After playing online, especially in ranked matches, I like to go back and watch videos of myself playing, especially losing, and break down my decision making or try to break down situations in those matches that confused me or gave me trouble. Later when I watch other players play those same matches I can compare the decisions against theirs. If a situation is giving me trouble I go into training mode and practice recreating that situation and try to figure out as many options as I can. That way the next time that situation or a similar situation comes up I’m more prepared to handle it and profit from it.
finally here is a link to another thread basically about the same shit that was buried a few pages down. My post is really good.
I added you on PSN. Hopefully our connection will be decent so we can both benefit from it.
