Yep, I admit it, I suck shit at this game
But I don’t want to quit
I mean I can at least hold own against some of my friends and I spend tons of time in training trying to learn BnB’s, combos, what is really meant by linking and all tons of shit
but when I hop online to play none of this works, none of what I sit in training mode trying to learn gets applied to the “real world” situation of fighting other players
heck I’m even ashamed to admit that I’ve lost to people who just come in and do nothing but SRK and Flash Kick, they’ve cornered me, I down back and I still lose because I just don’t know wtf to do between attacks!
So yea, I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with me, why I suck so bad even though I truly would like to get better at this game.
I don’t want to insult or scare you, but I’m going to be honest.
I seriously think Street Fighter (like any other activity in life) is not only a matter of practice. Of course practice will make you much better, but not perfect unless you’ve got some innate skills for it. A friend of mine’s been playing fighting games for his whole life, and I have seen him having his ass handed by other friend in two days. Just because he lacks some abilities that are either impossible or just too hard to practice.
SF involves a lot of reflexes, dexterity, patience and being able to read your opponents. I see videos of top players and I am absolutely sure I would not reach that level even if I played for my whole life.
I don’t want to sound like you can’t get better - it’s just not true. I feel like I am leaps and bounds better than when vanilla SF4 came out and it all amounts to hours and hours of practice on and offline.
My most sincere advise is this: Play for pure fun. I love playing this game, and I swear I have much more fun losing to good players than winning. Don’t expect to win, expect to get better. But keep in mind that you will eventually reach your limit, and it may be soon.
Abuse tick throws. Abuse cross-up tick throws. Once they have you figured out and start teching you, start getting in and SRK.
This will improve any starter’s game greatly.
If you notice that Ultras are getting you punished most of the time, then just stop using them.
If someone spams SRKs too much, walk up to them to bait the SRK and block it. If you sweep or knock them down, get close to them and block to bait out the SRK.
If a predictable strategy is beating you, put it in training mode and figure it out. For example, I used to hate it when Adon’s would get in on me for free with Jaguar tooth, so I worked out the right counters to the move when I saw it coming. The same should work for you. If you can’t figure out how to punish srk’s, you gotta learn the timing in training mode. No need to get overly frustrated, it’s just important that you learn how to correct your mistakes next time the situation comes up. Take each step one at a time. GLHF
I’ll add you online, we’ll play a few matches… I’m no where near a good player lol… Starting using the stick in march this year… so you know I’m a n00b
It’s okay - I’m terrible too! Try to have patience and start at the bottom. One thing I found very useful when trying to get better at Virtua Fighter was applying layers of strategy. At the bottom layer, you have the people you’re describing - these are the people that spam a single move that works for them now and then. These people, you don’t want to go much beyond beating them with footsies, and throwing them (or better yet hitting a combo) every time they whiff their DP attack. At this lowest level, trying to apply advanced strategy will just get you killed. The scrub that you’re playing against isn’t applying strategy at the same level and is just mashing. Trying to do advanced things like baiting or delaying your attack strings to try and pick up counter-hits and start off on combos won’t have an effect on the opponent, because they’re not really watching what you do - they’re just mashing that DP they love so much.
As you get higher up in skill, you start needing to apply more and more layers of strategy. At a very high level, it’s no longer enough to simply win through tick-throws - your opponent is thinking about that too, so now you have to add even more delay to throw their timing off, or mix up your combos.
One really good thing to keep in mind is that you should always play one layer better than your opponent, and no better. I don’t mean to say that you should dumb your game down, but rather, that you should give your opponent no more credit than they deserve. If they continually fail to successfully deal with your cross-up into a combo, then keep applying that. Don’t change what’s working until it stops working.
Most of all - don’t get discouraged. This last piece of advice is more for me than you, because if I don’t write it out, I’ll forget it and hurl my controller through my TV screen.
This. Know how to beat moves that you can’t deal with. Like punishing. Use the training room to set up these kind of situations. You’ll react instinctively next time someone does it to you on a match.
Also, you can practice some techniques one at a time on matches. Choose one, for example crossups. “On this match I’ll try to cross up my opponent”. Even if you lose to other stuff you’re not really paying attention to, you’ll become more familiar to when and how to apply cross ups on your matches. This goes to whatever you want to.
Of course, later it’s not so much about execution and technique but more about abstract stuff like match-ups, strategy, mind games, spacing, etc.
I also suck at this game btw, so I’m right there with ya. Guess it takes times, patience, and lots of practice
You can build up all of those skills you mentioned if you put in the proper time, dedication and focus into the game. Of course different people have certain natural born gifts inherited from their family tree, but where did those skills originate from? They weren’t just blessed upon them randomly, they had to practice and built those skills up from experience.
Your friend that has been playing fighters forever that got his asskicked, simply got bodied because he himself doesn’t fully understand how to properly play them and is probably not serious enough (or never was) to devote time to fully study how fighting games work especially when you are playing against a human.
Those top players you see in videos have thousands and thousands of hours of hardcore experience and practice in the game, they weren’t simply good overnight. You have have to work to reach to that kind of level, if you are fully interested and committed to it.
Even if you have spends loads of hours on a game, do you think you spent that time wisely by upping your game by fixing your bad mistakes and erasing/eliminating your bad habits?
Lot of good strategic tips so far. Really good actually.
I do have to agree with an earlier statement tho that basically everyone does have a ceiling and practice can make you better but at a totally different rates between people. 10 hours in training mode to get a Balrog link for example for one person was 200!!! hours for me.
So at some point you have to ask is all this time worth it? Not being pessimistic, but fact is not everyone can practice and be Daigo. Everyone can practice and get better, but just like lifting weights or writing literature, it wont yield the same results for everybody. You have to be realistic.
The goal here is really to “hold you own”. Make good players “play” you rather than “troll” you and use you as a combo dummy. I suck big time too BUT, i can hold my own against 3000-3500PP players online. I worked up to this. I was able to do this by limiting the characters I play, and learning the FUCK out of my matchups.
At this point your best bet like someone else said is MAKE THIS GAME FUN. I’ve kinda lost that trying to get better at this game in the last year. There are times I wonder why i even waste so much time playing this stupid GAME. We have to circle back to FUN FACTOR. Are you have fun???
sounds like you suffer from the exact same problem most new people suffer from. you go into a fight and you’re thinking “Raaaawrr, I’m gonna defeat you, prepare yourself” and you jump at them or walk towards them and try some shit. vs your friends you beat the living hell out of them and all is well. but vs better players, they either the ones who’re beating YOU that way or they just block your shit and tag you in the nuts and now you’re like “oh shit” and they just proceed to pick you apart at every step of the way. that sound familiar?
what you need to do is find out your abilities in relation to your opponent’s and act on that. in short, you need to learn how to USE the combos, attack setups, etc. that you’ve learned and apply them to a real fight, not just how to do them.
generally, it goes like this: (before i start, you’ll know if your offense or defense is superior when you have all the confidence in the world that it will succeed vs that particular opponent) if your offense is superior to their defense, attack them non-stop. if it’s inferior, then either cease ANY attacking PERIOD (tourney desperation method) or learn exactly what it is he does when he defends himself and ingrain that into your head so that you know that will be his response the next time… then try a different way to attack them (offensive adaptation). if your defense is superior to their offense, defend the entire match (or at least as long as you have a life lead). if it’s inferior, either stop defending even if you’re being attacked or create a new defense by watching what he does to break your old one (defensive adaptation). by the way, if you still can’t understand who is superior or inferior, just take a good look at your emotions. chances are if they’re doing something that annoys the hell out of you, whatever they’re doing is superior to what you’re doing.
now to mix them. because, of course, when you’re fighting someone you’re not dealing just with offense OR defense, you’re dealing with both. so…
if your OD > his OD, play any way you want. you’ll win.
Your O>D but D<O, don’t block. instead, counter his attacks; he’ll most likely throw them out foolishly. if he doesn’t throw them out foolishly, that means you can force him to defend whenever you want. your O>D, so you know where this shit is going already
Your O<D but D>O, defend; if it’s not a situation where you really have to scramble to get a win, try using safe offense so you can learn what his defenses are and how to attack him. ex. jab him one time then just block for an eternity then see what he does. in situations where you MUST get a win, get one hit and then defend the rest of the match. your D>O so he’ll have hell attacking you. unless he has a safe way to hurt you… which will then become a OD < OD case.
Your OD < his OD, use your absolute best character and do your damndest to learn his moves. Don’t even try to beat him, just watch what exactly he does. play like a fucking training dummy; have a set way to attack him and look at what he does to stop it. you’ll develop your own ways to fight once you know his responses. you MUST test his abilities and learn his responses or you will be beaten effortlessly, repeatedly. and if you’re in a tournament, you might lose one too many matches to make up for it.
be very aware that superiorities may change in a match due to adaptation. but very rarely will you go from OD < OD to OD > OD. very possible to go from O>D D<O to OD > OD though.
Just wanted to mirror some of the sentiments of the thread. A lot of new players have come into the fighter fold in the last few years and it can be frustrating. Honestly a lot of the players who have loved the fighting genre have been playing it for years and years so it’s not even solely a matter of pure talent–these players have years of experience that they can transfer. I know if I started a new fighter and a friend who was getting into it started I would learn more day one then he would, but that’s mostly because of the experience gap.
Some people learn quicker than others but we all face it. I got into RTS games with Starcraft 2 and while my brother is a godly player I can barely hold my ranking. I played way more than him in the beginning but it didn’t really matter. He had enough experience that it has and will take time for me to “catch up” so to speak.
So I would say stop worrying about catching up. You will improve as long as you want to and put forth the effort. Perhaps not as meteoric as some (and the pro-players of the day are making the self comparison even harsher) but it will come.
The nuts and bolts advise I’ll leave to players better than I, but there is one thing I’ve learned about translating practice to real matches. PLAY MORE REAL MATCHES! I think when you are new it is really easy to spend so much time in training practicing setups, combos, etc on a dummy. It helps your execution and you should always practice your execution but you have to practice playing actual opponents too. You may drop a combo, miss an ultra, etc, but you are learning how people actually play during a match. Execution allows you to make sure when you find your opportunities you maximize your advantage (do the best damage, stun, gain mental/positional advantage, etc) but it’s the experience of playing against real opponents that helps you learn how to find any of these openings in the first place. Anyone can tell you how to punish a whiffed shoyruken, but it’s much harder to tell you how to get a good player to commit to one in a bad spot–or even better how to make a good player wary of using it!
One thing that you’ll see common with a lot of the best players if they have a lot of experience under their belt. Not everyone starts out winning tournaments but many with continued effort become players that can make a bracket difficult.
I hope you stick with it and if ever want to get in some casuals (and you’re on xbox) feel free to send me a friend invite.
