I’m sure you’d agree with me that that’s not real RPS.
That’s not the one I’m talking about. I wrote what you linked after I moved back to the US. What I’m talking about I wrote while I was still in Japan. There was something wierd about that post since on the post, while the author was “Zass” it didn’t link to my profile. I think that post got eaten when the forums were upgraded (from forums.shoryuken.com to shoryuken.com/f222).
No, I would not say that those characters are soft banned in the US at all.
As an example, the last ST tournament I played was Ghaleon’s side tourney at Evo where you and I took 2nd and 3rd respectively. You played claw the whole time and I played boxer/claw. That’s a great example of Claw being a tournament staple. (And PS: Where are the vids from that tournament? There were some great matches and we need more US ST footage in general. Anyone?)
It’s not about whether one or two players make a face, it’s whether or not in general the community has a tacit agreement to not play those characters.
That’s a good question, and I don’t know the answer. When I lived in Japan, it was before youtube and the explosion of japanese videos. And again, I did pick Claw in a tournment, won it, and nobody made a face. Then again as a hairy barbarian I could have probably gotten away with picking shin-akuma too.
And I did see other claws at tournaments. I saw MORE Vega at an SBO qual, he did quite well (although there was almost no applause when he won). And as I mentioned in my other post, there was an O Sagat as Daigo’s partner. But those characters were rare compared to other tournament staples such as Ryu, Boxer, Guile, Chun, Dhalsim… etc.
So the answer is I don’t know. Maybe attitudes have changed, or maybe it’s still there We have american players living in Japan now, maybe a player living there now could ask and give us an answer?
I will say this. I found Japanese ST to be a much more pleasurable environment because of the lack of Claw/O Sagat. I agree with Yoshimi that the game is more interesting and fun without those characters.
Don’t get me wrong. Claw is my oldest main. I’ll play him in US ST to win anytime. But the environment is just much more fun without them imho.
Yeah, that topic must have got sucked out in one of the migrations. You had a topic on agsf2 that covered early experiences in Japan years back: Tokyo A3 exhibition and ST [Report] - alt.games.sf2 | Google Groups
It’s not the one you’re referring to here but someone here might find it an interesting read. A pity it’s not one of the topics XSPR commented on.
Yeah Zass definitely has great stories- I’d have commented more about A3 but thought it a more dead game and ppl’d be more interested in ST. That game was so complex.
Anniversary Edition/Hyper came out just after Kuroppi was here, and that game can be found probably more often in arcades now than ST (operators dropped a lot more money to get that game than the price of an old ST board). People pick CE characters pretty soon in that game at one point or another (at least in Tokyo, but everywhere else I imagine too). Not just CE dictator, but others too like Ryu, Guile and other CE chars. Daigo didn’t chose o.Sagat but he DID choose CE Sagat at his last entry, mostly to counter CE Guiles, which were getting really really popular at the time. It may be similar now where, you have this situation that claw might not be as bad as CE this or CE that, but it’s like, I think I know enough about AE now that CE chars are better than ST, so I don’t need to PAY money at the arcade just to be challenged and lose to them, and the only reason I would would be to play CE again but I prefer ST. Last time I played that in an arcade, this guy was playing CE Dictator and I was like fuck it, I’ll play Akuma. I played that guy like 10 or 15 games and I didn’t win one.
With o.Sagat, I hardly see him but do sometimes every now and then, basically like Zass and Kuroppi described. You can pick him or claw but it’s like, are you trying to impress people with 10 wall dives in a row, sorry, not impressed. Muneo wasn’t losing to Zangief, he was losing to Nogyo, and won just about as much in that link, and of the rounds Muneo lost as o.Sagat, those were CLOSE rounds- even when backed into a corner he had counters, it was more of a mind game at that point, and gief had to work to get in that close. Nogyo doing a lariat for each of those low tigers, now how many Zangief players are THAT consistent in the US?
The reason I put o.Sagat and Claw into the ugly category of “possibly banned, not gonna lose any sleep over it” is because I see their tactics as not only easy to do but you can even see it coming and the block (let alone the counter) is difficult. With a fireball trap, you have to set up the spacing distance JUST right, time your fb’s JUST at the moment you are able to, AND outguess the trapped opponent to do a FAST one when he expects another SLOW one, ALL of those things. And when you’re fb trapped, you can block it, that’s the thing, just hold the stick back, and you still get to play the mind game of, “when is the fast one coming?”. But a wall dive can be done on an opponent anywhere, not just the corner, in fact as DGV said the corner is the one place you’re relatively safe because you cut down the ambiguity aspect, so at least you can then block it (and only have to deal with other corner traps of claw, you’re out of the fire, into the frying pan). Dhalsim doesn’t have his speed, only his reach (a bit better) but not his strength. Dhalsim has to get his reads right a LOT more than any other character.
“Soft ban” term: For what it’s worth, Sirlin said something effectively similar about A2 Chun Li during the A2 days, that of the top California players, everybody (or almost everybody) hated Chun Li, so in big tournaments you didn’t find too many Chun Li’s in the top 8 but I think quite a few at the start/mid sets of brackets. Zass was the best if not one of the best Chun Li’s in that game in the US I think but few others at his level and above chose Chun Li so I think that’s kind of like a “soft ban” in the US, would you agree Zass? What about SF3:3S and Chun Li, similar?
I don’t ever recall selecting my the game speed or someone setting a speed in a tournament here so definitely not the norm (if I did have the option, I’d set it to standard speed, whatever most ppl’d agree on as standard speed).
btw as a reward to all the people that check this thread, the one all about me, XSPR, I think I’ll be the first one on srk to post this for you guys:
Sega Installs ?Toylet? Games in Japan?s Urinals | GameLife | Wired.com
I gotta try that out next time I’m there. I’ll have to be sure and prepare by drinking a lot of caffeinated beverages so I can piss like a race horse right before I start.
LOL! That’s awesome.
I didn’t see anything like that in A2 in the US.
If we take the two biggest A2 US tournaments, looking at chun li usage we have:
B3 Report (Part II) - alt.games.sf2 | Google Groups
Chun li in 5th place (Rich Koven)
Chun li in 9th place (Graham Wolfe)
*Note that I played Sodom at B3… so I didn’t play chun in that tournament.
I don’t recall the others (Did Thao who tied for 7th play Chun Li?), but that’s at least two if not three in the top 12.
Then at B2
Official B2 report - alt.games.sf2 | Google Groups
We have
Chun Li in 3rd place (Zass)
Chun Li in 4th place (Eddie Chung)
Chun Li in 5th place (Peter Ree)
There’s other names in the top 12 I don’t remember the others but there may have been chuns.
That’s the big tournaments. I also went to smaller tournaments where I saw Chun Lis.
I saw lots of Chun Lis all the time in A2 in the USA. So I wouldn’t say it was like a soft ban at all.
How about 1/2 a Sagat for Evo2k10 SSF4 semi-finals (http://www.eventhubs.com/news/2010/jul/09/evo-2010-live-stream/) at the largest SSF4 tourney ever? Isn’t that a non-existent soft-ban of sorts that just so happens to involve the same character at the same top tier level?
Someone in Japan may see the comments some US folks say about Sagat being good in an easy way, look at our results, and accidentally add 2 and 2 whereas in actuality, most players here don’t like playing as Sagat and/or don’t think it’s as competitively advantageous to do so.
God bless you. Here’s an idea, how about ST tournaments with a ban on Claw and O.Sagat? But of course it could never happen. How sad.
or you can have all o sagats and claws in the same pool and put them in their own corner.
But Dhalsim and rog are totally OK? Who’s gonna counter sim?
lol @ superiority complexes and discrimination from other people who use top tiers
You guys are worse than the Smash scene.
you laugh here and then call me a dick…
Me. I’ll pick Ryu and beat other people that play Dhalsim. Because Dhalsim is slow and has to hit people about two to three times as much as other characters do, and he has no wake-up attack.
… Or a mashed out super + upkicks
guilty as charged. =)
Did he say that…? Even jokingly…? I didn’t catch it.
For the record I have a lot of respect for Ganelon’s claw. When I watch him play, it feels like his victories are clean and fair. I can’t say that for certain players of lower tier characters…
That was a good read. Good looking out papasi.
I have invented a time machine. (Sorry to upstage all the Higgs boson physicists!) I don’t want to make a new thread for this, but since it’s one of my noted accomplishments, I’ll just write it up here.
I thought about going back in time and preventing the financial crisis, but figured I should do something really important instead; I will go back in time to write the Controlling Space paper before Seth Killian, so that the FGC will have this valued resource all the sooner.
I think it’s great to have someone like Seth, an FGC insider, work in the industry for companies like Capcom because he understands the customer and has been able to represent our interests well. Inkblot wrote up a nice summary of Seth’s service to the FGC recently (http://shoryuken.com/2012/06/30/thanks-seth-more-than-a-community-manager/). I’m very happy to make myself a small part of all those valued achievements.
To show my gratitude, I will be sure to make my own version of the Controlling Space paper, and be overly verbose instead of just copying and pasting Seth’s version. Seth’s version reads well, and as anyone that knows my writing online knows, I can certainly be verbose! As Seth said at the top of (what will soon be) my paper, “innovating is best”. ““Stealing”” is not quite the same, but I really doubt Seth or Inkblot will have a problem with any of this.
XSPR
Ok now that EVO 2012 is done, I’ll go into a little more of my time travels. I am back from the past and have set history straight, however I’m going to need YOU to help, ah, what’s that phrase? “Keep it real”. When you see the proof that my time machine works, please go to the Controlling Space thread and click “Like” on my post there at the bottom (mrdhalsim).
Here is the proof- it’s a bunch of reading, with other unrelated stuff included to make it mesh well with the universe and avoid potential calamities, however, buried somewhere in my verbose writing is nested the essence of controlling space and where Seth clearly got his inspiration. Apparently, in some timewarp factor incident during my travel, Seth and Ponder (Inkblot’s twin brother) commented on it themselves in some rare spin of cosmic justice or something- still workin out the calculations for all that, not sure how it happened exactly yet, but in any case you can see what they say. Or, should I say, have already said. btw Ponder kinda counts as Inkblot himself, because you know they probably have some genius twin power activation where Ponder wrote it on his computer and like, in some other location, Inkblot gets the spider sense and looks up like “huh? I just got this strange feeling like someone just wrote the basis for a thesis on the fundamental fighting game strategy that people will refer to again and again.” Here it is: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/alt.games.sf2/N5JPN7DF0hU
Ok so read all that, or just the parts about controlling space, and Seth’s comments. THEN go to the modern day Controlling Space thread, and see MY comment (mrdhalsim, which should be all the way at the bottom) and click LIKE on it: Controlling Space
This will demonstrate to the world that the real is something that, above all, must be KEPT.
XSPR
Well, I can barely understand his examples since I do not play Marvel. He did not mention DPing limbs, I think. Anyway, not a very good article, IMO.
I don’t remember which thread my original discussion with XSPR over the relative strength of competitive scenes took place in but I just wanted to note here that based on Evo 2012 results where MAO and Kusumondo dominated, I have to agree that the top active JP players are currently noticeably stronger than the top active US players.
That’s not to say I was wrong about the one-on-one win record being fairly close before—after all, Kusumondo had come here before and gotten taken out by Alex Valle and John Choi on the DC version of ST with 0-1 frame input lag—but the US-JP tourney win record slanted substantially towards the JP side after this last tourney. Yes, we can win sometimes against rusty players and/or in favorable matchups, but we can’t currently match the highest level active Japanese players on a consistent level equivalent to their best players using the same characters.
It’s going to be tough to remedy this situation in the US with players so spread out, few specialists to really unlock a character’s potential, and reliance on online play (which has different timing) compared to Japan, but I hope folks here are motivated to do their best. After all, there’s always another year to shift the tide. As of now though, I’m with XSPR that we have some catching up to do.