The value of teaching other Players

There is no, one final Street Fighter tournament. Teach other players to get better, you will see better play, you will make better players, you will have better games, It will be more exciting to watch, we will get to see comraderie between the players and… if somebody steals your tech, figures you out, takes home the victory? There’s always next year, man. And he’ll have given you the blue-print to master yourself, as you were not already mastered.

Far too often, I see guys get their backs up as soon as another player tries to offer them advice. Or, you’re watching a stream and you’ll see Strider101 giving advice to somebody and suddenly everybody is acting like this dude doesn’t know how to play Street Fighter, doesn’t know about any character’s weakness, just because there are two of them on the stage, and one he has not played with, against the other. This is a retards logic.

You’ve gotta set your pride to one side. It will make you better. I remember when this place was about teaching each other. Not just ripping the shit out of each other for man-up points. Those points are as worthless as your BP/PP. Teach each other, instead, right? That’s how we all get better. That’s how new players come back, because you give them a technique instead of leave them discouraged.

I wish I was better at teaching things, because I enjoy helping folks. But I suck at explaining stuff, especially orally.

eh, i try helping people, but most of the time its “character xxx is bad” so ill play that character and show most if not all their strengths and then they come back with “idk why you are showing/telling me this, i already know character xxx is good.” most people say they want to learn, but when you actually put in the effort to break down their character and the games mechanics for them and they just come back with snarky ignorant remarks, its obvious they arent serious about learning. i myself have tried teaching 11 different people in various games from 2010 until now, and i was able to bring 3 people up to my level and 1 is still struggling.

Hey, man. I totally get where you’re coming from. Sometimes you offer some advice to a dude and he spits it right back in your face. I always try and give props to people, even when I beat them, if they did something good in the match before that happened. You make a lot of friends, that way, and people are always happy to cut you a bit of slack and assume that you aren’t such a bad player yourself. You’ve gotta get through that pride that people have, right?

I met this Ken player, in Vanilla. He didn’t really know about FADC’ing his shoryukens, but I enjoyed playing him anyhow. He made it tough to beat him, despite that. And I told him, dude, wait until you have two meter to be throwing out unsafe shoryukens all the time, and he got way better after that. I really learnt a lot of stuff about the Ken match-up by teaching that guy.

I agree. Teaching others how to approach the game is extremely valuable not only for the involved players, but for the community as a whole. The problem, however, is two-fold:

  1. Teaching is a difficult skill to learn. It doesn’t come naturally to everyone, not even if you’re a top player, and it really is a case of people having an innate ability to convey information to people who learn in a variety of different ways and accommodating them. Just because you know what you’re doing in a fighting game and can play at a high level doesn’t mean you can impart that wisdom to someone else.

  2. People can be terrible students. This is especially true of the new age, where people in general feel much more entitled to something they don’t deserve. Egos often get in the way, combined with this strange importance placed on BP/PP, plus the high learning curve associated with fighting games, makes it difficult to teach. It really does take a unique person to learn how to play fighting games to even a competent level, and so not everyone is going to be so receptive to wanting to be taught.