I know there are people who have been playing fighting games for a long time, but have simply not gotten any better. They’ve hit a ceiling or just don’t seem to be cut out for fighting games. I know this is a difficult genre, but how many of you genuinely think that not everyone can ‘get good’? Or do you think it’s down to application, effort and determination?
If BrolyLegs can pull it off virtually anyone else should be able to get good 
Not true some people just have to put more work in there others.
Everyone can become good, however, to become one of the ‘killers’ who are REALLY good, practice is not enough, you have to have the mentality and the brains for mind games which dominate high level play.
it matters ,alot just cant get passed the kinda moves thats needed on a dpad of any make, and then include all the subs sytems on top of subsystems and meters an ex moves,
a game like sf2 or a old fatal fury can break people in as its not littered with subsystems on subsystems, then there people who like me just dont have the time to practice, just learn as i play, my old sf2 days as a teen in the arcades got me fine for some games, long combo games like blaze blue,skullgirls,umc3 not so much
It would be easier for people to get better of there were more coaching involved. It’s kind of hard when people give vague answers such as practice or don’t suck. When I played Urban Terror competitively I had to coach all my friends through the system and they leveled up much faster than learning on your own. With this genre, games lacking an online training mode is terrible. This should be a staple in ALL fighting games. Also content producers can do a better job. RYU is such a heavy respected character for learning ssfiv yet there is not ONE tutorial, detailing how to get into the game with RYU from the bottom up most tutorials are just glorified definition guides. Also other posters get mad when begginer ls only practice combos, when literally every tutorialonly talks about combos only.
In my eyes there are only two viable tutorials to watch and it still isn’t enough to actually get better I you break them down.
Air’s Ryu guide(goes into a little more depth, but still not enough.)
Viscant’s MVC3 guide(outdated, but this is a prime example of how to do a tutorial)
If I ever get to a high level I’m damn sure going to make some tutorials and give out a bunch of tips that will help new players actually get to the intermediate level. How is it we have all these top players yet none I then are putting any serious effort onto raising thir skill level up, they obviously know somethings that majority of people don’t do not sharing that knowIedge feel is a slap in the face to the entire FGC.
Yeah some people will never be good and it is simply impossible for them, however most can reach the level of being decent if they put time and effort into it.
When I got into fighters I got into them not wanting to be the best. I never wanted and still have zero desire to make top 8 at every tournament. My one desire is to play a game that I genuinely love (3S and Kizuna Encounter respectively) and be good enough to give a tourney player a run for their money.
I feel like I see you making posts like this constantly. Why not take personal responsibility for your own results? How did the good players get good? There were no tutorials for them. FGs are littered with helpful content. If it’s a popular game that saw a lot of play in English speaking countries, there’s probably awesome help already out there. If you aren’t improving after watching it, you have to ask yourself why that is instead of blaming the community.
I’ve spent the last two years playing 3s since OE came out. Played some ST and CVS2 on the side. I didn’t really play any FGs before that. I used every resource available to me - asking questions here, watching high level matches as much as I could, sitting in training mode and getting my execution and counterpoke game more solid, playing a bunch offline and some online as well, and discussing and thinking through situations and how you might deal with them (theory figher-ing over dinner, basically). during that time I’ve consistently watched myself and the offline players I play with improve together. Are we as good as the Japanese or the old So Cal scene? Definitely not, but we’re a lot better than we started off as and we’re playing the game at a level where we appreciate it and enjoy what it offers.
In my experience the #1 thing that helped us get better was playing offline. There’s only 2-4 of us at any given time, but playing each other a few hours a day a few times a week has been enough. It’s very difficult to get good if you aren’t playing people offline, or if your offline competition isn’t interested in improving. If you don’t have those kind of people around you that should be the first thing you look for. I’m pretty sure you can find this anywhere though. I live in Alaska and we are sparsely populated. I’d imagine that if you can do it here (for an old game no less!) you can do it anywhere.
I know there are some average level players that never improves. It’s like they are stuck in a box , unable to get out and therefore unable to take their game to a higher lvl.
by good you mean high-level? then its only natural
I too started fighting games 2 years ago, but never focused on one game. reached a decent level for my standards. But going high level and theorize the game, is a completely different thing, requiring a lot of patience, time and resources. Not possible if you play once a weekend.
that was not always the case though. Online info started in early 2000. Prior to that a lot of players lived in the dark.
I was at a disadvantage too because I hadnt any console in the mid-90s and the only fighters in arcades at that time were mainly Tekken and Mortal Kombat. Which I didnt like that much. also played the games mostly alone, except MK for a while, where we shared a keyboard on PC! so without any community or online info, it was impossible to improve.
Online videos helped a lot too, because some terms were difficult to grasp by just watching pictures.
but really, it would be impossible for me to play on a gamepad. for fighters this limits your movements a lot. \I developed my playstyle thanks to keyboard and now to arcade stick.
Now I only play them on an arcade stick and once it stops working, its keyboard again and goodbye to grapplers and df, hcb combos.
I think it is - some people require less of those things, sure, but with enough effort anyone can get good.
Which is why I’m so bad! 
You are both right, in a sense. Let me explain my weekend to you.
My friend who is now in the military came home this weekend; he was may training partner in EVERY fighting game I played up to MVC1. We got better for years by mostly playing each other. Anyway he started playing again recently but he missed Guilty gear, and we have this constant discussion where he tries to explain to me that BB is a good game and I tell him that it is a horrible ripoff of Guilty gear. So on Saturday and Sunday while we were hanging I broke out a copy of Guilty gear and I actually started showing him how to play.
- How the game’s system is different from P4A and BB.
- I showed him the moves for each of the characters with strategic applications for them
- I told him what Roman cancel were, both types, and what the difference was between the two and which move you could use each on with the characters he was interested in.
- I explained the uses of meter in this game and when you might want to want to save meter to avoid damage instead of using it to extend combos or for supers.
- I showed him the basics of the combo system and how to figure out a basic combo, and I showed him combo videos.
- There was alot of execution practice, some training mode sparring and a coupleof runs through arcade mode.
He has fighting game experience and he could have figure those things out through practice, but within 4-6 hours over 2 days he has been permanently removed from that base level of people that are going into the new guilty gear with no knowledge of the system.
Coaching if you can get it works better than training yourself, because it keeps you from going down wrong paths and picking up bad habits, but the absence of coaching just means that you have to go that road and make those mistakes. Coaching is a gift that people can freely choose to give. I didn’t want my friend to have to wade through that swamp of learning guilty gear from the bottom up with just online competition and his limited local competition so I pulled him out of it, because I could.
Chukz
- Coaching is a better road than not having it
-Yes the community would grow faster if there were better teaching tools, but you can’t make people make videos if they don’t want to. Also the game keeps changing patches and new versions.
Igloobob
- if everyone is around the same level you are making mistakes, and thats just part of learning. Like I said my main source of competition for years was one other person with the same dedication to getting better as me, but when everyone is the same skill level and you make a mistake there is no one to correct it until you run into someone else who makes you pay for it.
-Its not whining to point out the fact that coaching leads to better faster results. - Top Player DO NOT start new games from scratch in any populated FGC area. If a top SF Player wants to start playing Tekken they don’t mill around in training mode trying to reinvent the wheel. They hit up the best Tekken player that they know and ask “How good is this character?”, “what are their weaknesses?”, “who are their bad matchups?”, “how do you beat that move?”
You deal with whatever you get, but if you get the opportunity to have someone point out those pitfalls for you then you take it.
I agree coaching is awesome if you can get it. and in my experience there’s a lot of people around who are willing to help. whether it’s the regulars on the 3s board, or one of the local strong SF4 players who spent a few hours teaching me SF4 Ryu, my journey of fighting game improvement has had a lot of people who have offered advice and it has helped a lot. where I disagree is when he talked about how the community is failing to help new players. this doesn’t match my experience at all. there’s a ton of content out there though of course you have to fill in the gaps and apply it yourself. maybe you watch a Ryu SF4 tutorial, then read the footsie handbook, then play a bunch offline with someone close to your skill level, then track down a local strong player and display genuine interest and see if he’s willing to take you under his wing. of course that isn’t always straightforward but I’d imagine if you’re showing up to local meatups and have a good attitude and ask for help people are going to be willing to supply it.
I’m sure that is probably written more simple than it actually plays out. but IMO there isn’t this deep failing of the community to help new players. you just need to be able to figure out where the gaps in the help are and work those parts out. watching a Ryu tutorial of course won’t make you a great player but it gives you material to work with and you figure out the rest by playing a bunch against anyone you can. if you can find a local community of solid players, then your life is that much easier.
I’m going to echo what pretty much everyone is saying here: I don’t believe there is a skill cap on any individual’s performance, I believe everyone just has a different skill curve (“talent”) which magnifies the teaching they receive to different degrees.
For you to get as good as Infiltration at SF4, well, it might take you 10 years of playing full-time. It might take more, it might take much less. I don’t know. But I believe it is possible.
I play poker for a living, and I’ve taught several of my friends to play professionally as well. One of them in particular knew nothing about games or math, so it took longer to teach her, but she got there. The combination of good training habits and willingness to learn are the most important things. Dive into whatever you choose to do with an open mind. Don’t worry about your limitations, you don’t have any.
If playing good in fighting games is like Calculus to someone then it’s safe to say that they might never become good. Some people may barely slip by and pass with a C and some might just get an F because they just don’t understand or the reason could be that they don’t have anyone to teach them. I don’t think fighting games are for everyone. Playing good would take good reflexes and some people don’t have good reflexes.
The problem with this viewpoint of ‘nobody has limits and everybody can become good’ is that you disregard the biggest part of being good in a fighting game - and thats getting into your opponents head and beating him ‘outside the game’. No amount of training, practicing links, or learning setups will help you in that aspect, thats just something which everyone either has a knack for, or they dont - of course its also an aspect of fighting games which you can and will get better at, but at a different rate for everyone, and its actually an aspect which DOES pose a limitation in a sense based on how clever you are with mind games, and again, this is not some uniform ‘everyone can become this good at mindgames’ thing, this is something unique to the person.
No amount of practicing 1 frame links and votex setups will make you good enough to compete with the likes of Infiltration, Sako, Xian, and Daigo, unless you had it in yourself to begin with - and lets face it, not many do.
If you play poker you should know that this is true, otherwise it wouldnt be the same 6 guys taking the money home all the time from big tournaments (Phil Hellmuth, Baranov, etc.) and everyone would be out there trying to get rich playing poker.
I think the personal limiting factors to getting better at anything are 1. motivation and 2. critical thinking skills that enable someone to investigate how to get better.
Without both of these, someone will forever stagnate at whatever skill they’re trying to build. There’s no way to get better at something without putting in serious time and effort, and there’s no all-encompassing guide to getting better being thrown on people’s doorsteps.
I really don’t think mind games are something you’re born with. It’s almost impossible for that to be the case. I got mine from years of playing games.
I’ve been playing fighting games for years but I am relatively new to playing online. I notice that when I play offline against the CPU or friends I usually do great. but when i play online I feel like a rush of nerves…whatever tactics i had aren’t fluid and my focus is shot.before the match even starts I’m unfocused and nervous.I guess I need more online rounds under my belt to get comfortable.