Possible Dime level post incoming. You fuckers posted a ton overnight.
I get where Akhos is coming from. Maybe overly intense in execution but I get it. I sort of had the same thing going on where I was always either the best or near best player in my local group and you realize the pros are light years ahead of that, but you are still pretty good. Then you get ego checked - either online or by travelling - and the harsh reality comes to light. Shit burns.
I think from there it is a matter of degree. Akhos has the drive and desire to shoot really high, which is great, but the tradeoff is when you’re holding yourself to those standards you can beat yourself up a lot (which he does). And it is easy to keep measuring yourself that way because the internet gives you infinity opportunities to keep comparing yourself to players that are better or doing better than you.
We each self-motivate differently though. I’ve had a lot of troubles with this game over the past couple of years as I’ve tried to apply myself. Ups and downs and back arounds, same woe is me moments and “jesus fuck I’m trash I’ll never get out of bronze/silver/gold league” crisis. Individual games where I felt like the literal worst player in the world (despite Volt being right over there to give me reassurance) and days where it felt like I just booted the game up and mashed my face on the stick for all the good it did me.
What got/gets me through that is sort of what Highland talked about: remembering that it is all relative. General life reassurances aren’t super helpful right now due to marriage and work issues, but even reminding myself how far I’ve come in SF5 helps a lot.
Yeah I have shit days where I’m a noob idiot but I’m still playing way the fuck better than I was 12 months, 6 months, or even 1 month ago (that is mostly due to the turbo lounges, which I am a fan of). Maybe today isn’t the day the light finally hits my brain and I learn/remember that key thing but eventually it will happen. Just gotta keep a it and learn from the lumps along the way.
The other bit of HIghland’s advice is on point: stand by your wo/man. Most SF5 characters have to contend with at least one flaw in their kit (apparently not if you have a wicked neckbeard) so switching characters to address one set of issues usually just opens up another. Sometimes that is fine if one set of issues bugs you a lot less than the other, if the character “clicks” better, etc, but building that character skill back up is time intensive and can be a real bummer if at the end of that process you think “huh this character isn’t really what I want either”.
To borrow a phrase: the problem isn’t too few choices it is too many. If the game had 4 characters in it, it would be easy for any of us to settle on a main and boringly grind away at them until we were fucking wizards with them. But when the character select screen is now up to 35 characters it is really easy to have wandering eyes. Especially when you have so many variants on the archetypes now.
Anecdotally, and I don’t think this is Akhos’ problem but I’m on this track so here we go, I see a lot of this in the Gold ranks. It is a grind to get anywhere and what you see a lot of are players with thousands of matches logged but no progress. If you scroll through their match history you’ll see them bouncing between 3-5 different characters. It is a lot easier/more fun to play a different character than it is to focus in on why you are so inconsistent you can’t climb out of Gold and work on the very likely fundamental reasons. “Fuck introspection I’m playing Bison”.
Its why even though the character drives me slightly crazy sometimes I’m still iffy on trying to move off of Laura. Whatever meager skills I do have I’ve built up with her and switching to any other character is super painful because of how clumsy I feel (gets better over time but that is a time of beatings). And I know that even though I have issues with the character my actual problems are general and not something that is going to be fixed with a new character. It is actually going to be a way harder period because instead of working on those fundamental issues I’ll be training up a new character so I’ll be doubly worse.
That said though there is no harm in trying shit out to see what sticks - see: Frost leaving Cody for a couple of weeks on his sexy Kage fling - so I’m still gonna do that with the characters I think might be worth it. Hopefully in SRK lounges; if I’m going to take a beating, I’d prefer to have it be from the bastards I know and not the random bastards online.
Rambly shit. Props to anyone that read it.
Also X-Kira has been right in the same way a broken clock can tell you the correct time of day. Dude shotguns so many guesses out there that he is bound to hit on a few things.
Saying that a 4.5 patch is coming isn’t predicting shit. It is basic pattern recognition.
I predict this year we will get a costume bundle that is CPT related. It will have 3 costumes and a new stage. Also includes bonus FM challenges.
I can also say with confidence that this season we will get 8 characters. Kage was the first. The other 7 will be, in no particular order: Dan, Mummy Commando, Makoto, Rose, Dudley, Dudley’s Butler, and C. Viper.
Am I Swordfishing my way through Capcom’s servers? Or do I just really want EH articles written about me and realize that people aren’t too particular about their facts on the internet?
