If you’ve come to this forum looking for cookie-cutter, or paper beats rock/scissors everytime answers, stop where you are.
Use this motto for this post: Practice doesn’t make you perfect, it just makes you better. There will never be a perfect answer for x vs. y vs. z
When you approach fighting games, why do you play? to win, or to lose fashionably(AHHHH YOU DIDN’T GET A PERFECT ON ME!). So when you lose, that’s why you’re here, what are you coming here for? to win right? But you’ve lost the battle right there. never come here asking how to win, because you will only keep coming here, over and over and over again. You will never be the person writing “how to win”. I did this too, back in the hay-day of tekkenzaibatsu.com for Tekken tag, I had an incredibly horrid time fighting against Changs, I had no idea what to do against elbow, 1,1,1 spam. So, i first went and looked for a thread, “how to beat changs” Didn’t find it, BUT! in my searching I found the how to play changs thread. In this, I learned what the bad matchups were, what frame DISADVANTAGES the characters had, and later was able to go to the arcade, learn how to play changs, then later figure out twin pistons punishes that tactic i was losing to. but, instead of asking how do i beat this one strat, i learned the entire character, so when the person changed strats, i was able to adapt to it as well, and continually beat the characters/players. So take the time to learn a bit more, instead of asking for instant gratification, you will develop better as a player, I promise.
There is nothing like answering the question, “How much should I play to get good?” answer zero seconds or never leave your chair. You play the amount you think you should. If someone plays alot less than you, and is able to beat you, re-evaluate what you do when you play. There are games where game hours will be precedent, not just on execution, but just on shear game-knowledge. I.E. MvC2. MvC2 is a bit of anomaly that you can play it for 10yrs(like most of us, since it came out) and still not see some shit that has happened in a match. So what do you do, plug that bit of info into your memory database, the more you see it, the more it becomes reactionary to deal with instead of thought process of how to deal with it. In sports, if you think on defense, it means you already got beat.
Failure to experiment. This goes in with the title of, this character beats this character for free, or this is all that character can do. Coming here, to the bountiful knowledge of srk.com, is poisonous to some players. People see character rankings, or matchup charts, and blame their losing on that. Bullshit. I.E. Chikyu Sodom, VDO, Zaza bros(rip dasrik), the guy from the one evo i can’t remember in 3s that brought twelve and everyone called him twelve-neto. they play weaker characters, but they win, maybe not all the time, but they win. Why? they go learn matchups, and experiment that shit down. Zaza’s double wolvies, chikyu’s ST t.hawk, vdo’s ken/rogue/col. they sat down, and instead of learning only what everyone else is learning, they took that, and then went outside the box. You will never play like someone else, no matter how much you try, you just won’t do it. Bowling is a great example, Pins are always setup the exact same way, and you can try your hardest to bowl the exact same way as someone else, and the result never be the same. The phrase that caught on, go into the Lab(go into practice mode), really does mean go experiment, don’t just repeatedly practice mimicking someone’s style of play, it won’t work, you will plateau as a player. reverting to a TTT reference again, when i first learned how to wave dash, i took that knowledge, that wavedashing was mostly mishmias, but then I tried other characters that could crouch dash and figured out they could to, but with slight differences in inputs(i.e. hwo’s/paul’s). Lastly on this, 0-10 doesn’t exist, regardless of what you may think or hear, it honestly doesn’t exist. So don’t go looking to find a character that automatically wins, or blame your character for why you lost, there is always something, regardless of how trivial or small a tactic or strat it may be, you can do to win vs. someone. Don’t give up, try/experiment again, again, and again.
I hope this rant isn’t offensive to anyone. I only hope you read this not in hopes of finding the key to the universe, but the path in which the key may lie.
OG