Strategy vs Execution: Where do you stand?

Lol at people thinking that grinding training mode and grinding sports isn’t the same? Do you niggas actually believe that free throws and 3-pointers happen naturally? One of my cousins was a fantastic shooter; it also didn’t help that at a minimum, he would shoot at least 100 baskets a day. Athletes are at that level because of those PEDs and them training regiments.

On grinding other game, every time I sit down to study Go, my general gameplay gets better across a variety of games. Don’t let Xes nonsense full you though, keeping your mind active is a great way to keep away Alzheimers; so get down on that scrabble. On a different note, various stroke victims have used handheld consoles to regain their fine motor movements. Tetris will also get you back in shape to finger some women.

Vote Pertho for Front Page Writer!

It seems that people don’t like grinding those tennis skills either:

You can do the same thing this guy did and design an easier stick/pad. Good luck

Thanks! I actually did something like that. I noticed when teaching newbies that they have a little trouble with the standard sticks because they keep accidentally pressing the extra buttons off to the side. For most of them I offered to mod the sticks and plug the buttons, but some of them didn’t want to lose the button functionality or thought that button plugs looked lame. I came up with this strategy to solve the problem and keep all functionality:

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Got the plate from blklightning21. Works great.

http://oi42.tinypic.com/b7nvye.jpg

The design actually caught on a bit over at Tech Talk, which makes me happy. I initially planned to order a whole bunch of these plates for all my friends, but blklightning21 is really busy and having trouble keeping up with the demand. Nowadays I just help newbies get their hands on the excellent Exaprize stick:

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Bought it in Akihabara. Cheap stick, six-button layout, Sanwa parts. Great for newbies. Stick isn’t standard height but I guess you can’t have everything.

http://oi47.tinypic.com/fepd05.jpg

That’s a pretty cool stick. No homo. I wish I could customize my pad

And then everybody embraces the new technology and is at the same base level of execution requirements, and that discussion ends in a no-op. Not sure what the point there is/was.

Likewise with any discussion of the non-player aspects: a HitBox or turbo or macros might change some execution aspects, but when everybody has generally the same access (minus one player potentially being able to outspend the other) - where is that tangent going?

You made the point yourself, but it was incomplete. After embracing the technology everyone is at the same base level of execution requirements, but the base level is now lower. This allows pros to compete as equals while letting more people join in the fun. Like this (emphasis mine):

Goddamn, xes and ukyo are driving me crazy with rage. Both have retarded-ass logic.

On one hand, xes thinks that training mode is essential to play MvC2 at a basic level. On the other hand, xes has said in the past that the old or new Capcom games were/are accesible at a basic level:

But all of a sudden, he starts spewing garbage that is the complete opposite of what he has said in the past:

Great way to flip flop, xes.

Prove it. I call a big pile of horseshit on this because top players drop shit all the time. Execution would only cap out when a player’s execution is 100%, meaning that they never drop shit - ever. This will never be the case - ever.

Prove it. Which players, which characters and which games?

This leads me to ukyo and his own retarded-ass logic:

You’d have to be an idiot to believe this.

Top players drop combos and setups all the time. To say otherwise is just plain ignorant and it makes you look stupid. Why? Because there are tons of examples on Youtube that prove what you said to be a lie. I even gave you examples of top players who lost matches due to executional errors and/or dropped combos.

Sure it’s possible but has it ever happened? No. Will it ever happen? Not bloody likely.

Um… an executional advantage can be given to a player in the form of training mode, by “grinding” combos and setups.

RC’s are basic? You have no idea what the hell you are talking about.

Retarded-ass logic at its finest. Brought to you by xes and ukyo.

The funny thing about marlinpie is he knows how to block. It’s not like this is his first fighting game. He is actually very good at blocking stuff most people can’t block. The man is just always pressing buttons.

I guess we’re even, since you’re driving me to tears with laughter.

So you agree it’s possible? Great!

It’s almost like you’ve never played Guilty Gear. If you can’t FRC spike you shouldn’t be playing Dizzy. If you can’t FRC Tatami you shouldn’t be playing Baiken. So on and so forth.

Are you saying that having the ability to block is useless if you always decide to press buttons like a noob? That sounds like something I can agree with.

Man, people are literally getting angry at even the idea of a fighting game with less emphasis on execution.

I really don’t have a problem with the high damage combos being off limits to new players or players not willing/no desire to pay the training room tax, the problem is, the actual damn game is off limits to those without a large amount of time under their belts.

Fighting games progress like this. You start off mashing buttons which is fun for a short while. You then try to actually play the game properly which is problematic on two fronts. The ‘rules’ of the game aren’t obvious, why am I getting hit when I’m blocking this person jumping over me? The next problem, even if I can work out what I should be doing, I can’t make my damn character do what I need him to do. I should be able to hit this guy after he does that slow move but sometimes when I press a button he hits me, what?? This isn’t Street Fighter, it’s a frustrating, confusing mess. Fighting games at this level are quite frankly, shit. If you want to get to the good stuff and something that actually resembles an actual game with rules and meaningful decisions, you’re going to need to endure this crap for however long it takes your muscle memory to adapt. This isn’t any kinds of fun, is it any wonder most players don’t progress past the button mashing with friends phase? I can imagine most of the pro-execution people are thinking, “Who cares, go back to COD, scrub”.

According to the poll most people are saying that strategy is more important then execution. I agree.

What gets me is this: SFxT**

I liked the game, than bashed the game and sold it, and now have the game again (got a free copy, gamestop error in my favor). Coming back and playing this game after 2 months has opened my eyes in a way. I still don’t think the game is perfect/the best game ever/better than what’s out there but…

The game absolutely places more emphasis on strategy then on execution.

The execution barriers are far less then most other games out right now. Nearly everything that was in SF4 has been made easier. Most 1 frame links are 2 frames or more. Supers are a single quarter circle motion. pretzel motions like Guile and vega ultras are gone. Even the more damaging and “difficult” combos are ridiculously easy compared to Marvel and AE. And although magic series into launcher scales badly it still does decent damage and gets your character out and healing life back.

More people could theoretically pick up this game and play it than any other capcom fighting game out right now with the exception of maybe Super Turbo. The reason for this is that you can get to the meta game/yomi game much faster.
Because the requirements to play the basic game are so low players can start playing the actual game, i.e. the “meta game” much sooner. Some players will never reach the meta or yomi aspects of certain fighters, ever, because they will be forever caught up in the execution of the game. MvC2 and MvC3 both come to mind here. Unless you are doing rom infinities in MvC2, or TAC combos mid air into various loops in MvC3, there is no way you are actually playing the game in a certain sense. I mean, yes, you are technically playing the game, you have a controller or stick in your hands… but you aren’t really playing the game. Not the mental part of the game, you are stuck in the physical part only.

Most people, if what they say about why they like fighting games is true, like them because of the mental aspects and challenges that fighting games present. Out smarting another player, thinking 3 or 4 steps ahead, knowing that the opponent know what you are thinking and having to make that split second change. The list could go on and on but the thing that is important here is that all this takes place in the mind. I know some will respond saying that it will take execution to do the things that you are thinking about, and this is true. But, that’s missing the point. When the execution barrier is so high, very few players will ever get to the point where they can enjoy the game mentally.

Again, let’s look at MvC2 as an example of that last statement. The last couple years of it’s tournament life there were really only a handful of players that could play at that level. No one was going to beat these guys. The game was slowly turning into a spectator sport for all intents and purposes. People would watch and cheer and get hype but only a small group of people could actually play the game. The reaction time required, the execution, and various other barriers prevented large portions of the FGC from ever getting to the meat of the game… the mental aspect, not having to worry about execution and simply being able to think and plan an attack and then change plans if things didn’t work out. If you are worrying about execution during a high level MvC2 match you are going to lose.

SFxT and Super Turbo both allow players to get into the meta game much faster, though for different reasons. SFxT, as I mentioned, lowers the entry barrier by making the basic game easy to play and the moves/combos easy to do, letting new players focus on other things like zoning and footsies, since if all else fails they can rely on abc into launcher to at least make some progress. this combined with the aforementioned easy supers and the ability to cancel any hit into a super let’s them easily do combos they may not have been able to do other wise. A good player is going to hit combos like that in another game anyway, like SF4AE. Letting a player with poor execution have the ability to perform moves/combos like that makes it so the game relies more on the mental aspect, the meta, yomi, ect, instead of route memorization of combo strings and 1 frame link timing. No one I know liked memorizing stuff in school… why do people like memorizing stuff in games? It’s beyond me. Games should be fun pure experiences, not trials of patience and frustration.

Super Turbo does this in a different way. The game is very basic. No air blocking, no focus, no parry, no dashing, no rolling, none of that stuff. Each player gets a single super and that’s it, besides of course their special moves and normals. The game mitigates this with 2 things: very high damage and simplicity.
Getting hit in Super Turbo HURTS. The game also has a much lower “possibility space” due to it not having any of the things I just listed. This makes the game simpler. Note that this doesn’t make the game stupid, or easy, or anything negative at all, that’s not what I am trying to get at. Simplicity in this instance is a very, very good thing. Possibility space is all the things that can possibly happen in the game between two opponents at any given time during the match. Compared to a game like UMvC3 with it’s assist calling, air blocking, DHCs, tags, team composition, snapbacks, assist counters, super jumping, multiple hypers, TACs, ect… the possibility space of Super Turbo is lower. Much lower.

The reason this is good is because this allows players to get into the meta/yomi game of ST much sooner and thus arrive at a place where they can actually start playing the game. (remember for me, simply holding a controller is not enough to be considered “playing” the game, there must be a mental aspect to it.)
There isn’t as much of a need to spend hours upon hours, if not days worth of time, in training mode learning esoteric combos and perfecting 1 frame links. You can pick up the game and start playing, really playing using mental and physical aspects, much sooner.

This also ends up being better for the players who have better execution. Imagine 2 players of roughly equal skill mentally but one has better execution. Regardless of the game they are playing the player with the better execution will win. But, this will become more apparent in a game where strategy is more important than where it isn’t. This is because in a game where strategy is the focus there are less barriers to get in the way of the fight itself… Which allows players to actually fight each other in a literal sense, by doing battle mentally using the game as a medium. It is you vs him, and all, or most, of the artificial barriers are gone. Execution will always be present in the fighting games but the more a game is focused on it the less it becomes about the mental aspect and the less people that can truly play the game. Lowing the barrier allows more people in and thus you have more opponents. To me, that is what it’s all about anyway. The fight itself.

** I am not saying SFxT is omgbbqrofltheGreatestGameEvar! Just point out some things I have been noticing since I started playing the game again this last week. Coming from playing nothing but Marvel and AE for the last 2 months it has really been an eye opening experience.

Unless of course someone decides ‘Jin is cool, I want to use him first’.
And if we go by the 'I only play Guile, and If I cannot use Guile easily in this game, I drop it ’ logic that has been used, boom.

Again, disregarding all other things concerning SFxT, like most other fighters, it offers options concerning characters, execution level etc and there are things you need to grind out to graduate from ‘most basic shit’.

Totally agree with you from a combo perspective, SFxT has it bang on in that respect. Beginners have access to easy chain combos, intermediates can do good damage with 3f+ links and people looking for more have some place to expand on that. In terms of everything else, it still follows the usual frame perfect inputs when playing the ‘numbers game’.

I think that, even if MvC2 was really easy at a top level in terms of execution, or any other game that’s somewhat old and basically dead now, they’d still have died. Even if people could do the combos, to catch up on people playing a 10 year old game for its entire lifespan you’re going to have to put in some work playing the thing or just wait for them to die or something. So regardless of its difficulty on a technical level, you’re going to get less and less people willing to put time in (or even the time they think they’d have to put in, since its typical for people to exaggerate the requirements for a task one way or the other), and the game’s going to eventually die when those top players start quitting. But regardless of how old the game is, if you put the time in, there’s always the chance for you to compete.

Insert story about Damdai here.

EDIT: Also, ukyo_rules and everyone else here is clearly using different ideas of ‘basic’, I thought that was fairly obvious. Everyone knows FRCing isn’t actually a basic technique and there’s a ton of shit you should learn before it, since its fucking useless if you try and learn it in your first few training sessions even if you succeed because you can’t actually hit anyone. Same thing with the Mishimas’ EWGF (though its also fairly common knowledge the Mishimas are the ‘high execution’ characters of Tekken so if you don’t want to put time in with them just try someone else) and Viper, and of course roll-cancelling isn’t even an intentional part of the game, so there’s no way it could actually be basic. These are all things you’d need to win a major, and beat players better than you, but they’re definitely what you should be learning until you can call yourself intermediate.

In school, especially as a kid, you don’t see or want to see the point in memorizing stuff. With games memorizing and grinding stuff often leads to immediate tangible rewards. And look at some of the early platformers, they are much harder than games now but kids back in the day ate em up. Trials of patience and frustration have been a part of gaming since the beginning. It’s fine as long as the rewards are there.

Well yeah. Infinite > guardbreak > repeat. Except…

(skip to 2:54)
[media=youtube]1LTQgQuw_kg[/media]

Actually, I was referring to Roll Cancels. Not Roman Cancels or FRCs. Roll Cancel is definitely not basic.

Oh and you still never explained how higher execution games reduce strategy. Using online to back up your position is fucking terrible. Please explain to me how a high execution game like MvC2 reduces the strategy aspect - in an offline environment, where some uncontrollable element like lag is not a factor.

3s is cool because the strategy and mindgames present are there at all levels of execution. you don’t have to be able to hit confirm short short super or Ken’s cr mk or do like 50 Urien tackles to participate in the mindgames and player interaction that forms the core of the experience. execution is required at high levels of play but by no means prevents you from enjoying the game at a low level. you can easily figure that out by stepping into PS3 or 360 OE ranked, where most players clearly have never spent a second in training mode but are still having a good time.

that seems like a healthy way for games to exist. you necessarily have to get good at executing things to play really well but the game is fun at all levels of play. that’s also true for some other games in the series (ST strikes me as the same kind of game) but maybe not for some others. the combo-heavy games specifically, most players will never play the real game until they’ve spent a fair amount of time in training mode. that’s cool for some people but there’s a reason the “aw when is it my turn to push buttons” joke comes up so often in regards to Marvel etc.

what you don’t understand is that their is a fighting game for people like this, its called sf4. They make fighters for everyone those who have time and for those who don’t have the time.

What you guys want is that you prefer hard games to be so fucking easy, someone who didn’t have time could become a pro and that is preposterous.

if you don’t want to play hard games because they take too long to learn thats fine, you already have scrub games on the market that don’t take that much time. Not every game has to be so fucking easy it takes 2 days to learn all your combos echniques for the character. I literally learned every single practical ryu combo in sf4 in less than a week. I’ve been experimenting with morrigan and doom combos for 4 months in umvc3.

That extra time it learns to play a game makes the game better. More possibilities as long as they’re done right = better game. Its why the metal triangle compared to the piano is a POS. Metal triangle only plays 1 note, piano damn near has an infinite amount of possibilities when it comes to music. The more possibilities a game has, the less likely it will stagnate because lots of possibilities also means more creativity to the game\engine.

Hey look, 14 pages of Xes crapping out baseless theory, flip-flopping between stances and touting his opinion as the most valuable and well-informed while hiding it between a thin veneer of false mutual respect, all the while also ignoring or deflecting select arguments all for the sake of prolonging this sad internet circle-jerk.