Trying to Get Competitive

Hi everybody, I am pretty new to the Street Fighter scene, or pretty much any fighter in general. I played them as a little kid, but not until recently did I see the depth that really came with them.

I have been playing STHD:R a ton lately, and I think I’ve gotten the basics down pretty well, I have about 170 wins on ranked and 170 losses though I have a feeling I am not playing very skilled people. I want to make some friends and learn from some veterans of the fighting game genre so I can try to improve more and more, I feel like teaching myself is only going so far. People I have played seem so antisocial and never respond to my messages. I’d really enjoy being coached and have someone point out some of the really deep parts of the game someone of my skill probably wouldn’t even notice.

I play Dictator, but I want to learn how to play Guile and Chun Li too, for now. Would anyone mind helping me out, or even just pointing me in the right direction for furthering my self studies? I’d really appreciate it, not making any friends is getting kind of boring as well~

On a side note, SRK seems like an amazing community and I will try my best to be an active member and contribute as much as I can to this great place! Thanks for having me~

hey dude you seem exactly like me, same background story and you mainly play dictator. i can’t help you because i only played street fighter 2 turbo, and i’m completely new to ST, but since i dig dictator i found this guy named YuuVega on youtube. you should check him out
YuuVega YT vids

I would say learn how to space, how to block, and watch plenty videos, stick to one character at first so you can become comfortable with the games engine once this is achieved then move on to different characters. but good luck to your career in the fighting scene dude.

I replied to your PM, but I will also say it in here: stop by one of our local tournaments in Seattle, we have a lot of really good players around here who are always willing to teach :slight_smile:

I also have the same desire to play well. I started out watching videos online and trying to mimic the play on my mac using MAME. But there was one problem, the game is unforgivingly hard. I screen capped my computer for some of my matches and when i would jump, the CPU would jump the exact frame. EXACT. lol It was good practice though. I mainly learned how to DP, thats it. (i still have trouble doing reversals)

But i would definitly like to make some friends on here. I got to the same school as str[e]ak and he’s a cool dude to be around, very friendly and likes to teach. (met him at school and he introduced me to SRK) But anywho, i feel as if i’m blabbing. My xbox gamertag is shinjo101788. Feel free to contact me any get some matches going. (I like to play cammy) :slight_smile:

Thanks a lot for the replies, I just decided to buy the Evo2k8 DVD, so hopefully that will give me some good matches to look up~ Do many good players in recent times play dictator?

Change your vocab. “Trying to Get Competitive.” Instead, say something like, ‘I am becoming competitive’ or ‘I will be competitive.’:woot: (And I’m only partially joking with that)

You have to be certain on everything you do when learning fighters or else it’s gona take you longer to truly be good and understand fighting games and your opponents. While acknowledging you’re new and have a -lot- to learn, have it in your mind that you will be a top player, and work as hard as you feel you need to in order to achieve that.

It’s that simple or complex, depending on how you look at it.

Every time you lose to something, ask yourself “how could I have beaten that?”.

If you can’t come up with an answer, copy whatever beat you and start doing that.

Once that is beaten, your first question is answered, so you can implement the answer in your gameplay.

This is a decent method for getting pretty good, but at some point you’ll hit a wall - you’re excersizing all the options you’ve made available to you and you still lose to certain things - you know how to beat them after it beats you, but that doesn’t help.

Now you want to start watching videos of someone who plays your char and seeing how the great players deal with these sort of things. Look at new chains, tricks, and moves you may have overlooked. Try to come up with a reason for every decision. Why did he do standing roundhouse there? Why did he back off and wait? What was he expecting? Why did/didn’t it work?

It sounds like you’re critisizing his gameplay, but this isn’t the goal - you’re looking for dynamics of the game that might not be immediately obvious. Once you realize what these dynamics are, you’ll be able to pay attention to them in your own play - and by this point, you already know how to deal with the everyday games by this point, so this is very valuable.

Hope this helped.

First I’m not a noob to fighting games by any means, but I kind of am to SF (even though it was probably the first fighter I ever played). At the time of playing SFII I didn’t really take it too seriously and just played vs the computer. Other fighters caught my eye over the years other than SF so I kind of strayed from it, but now I’m back!

I was going to start a new thread to ask my “newbie” question, but I thought I’d just ask it here instead. The thing that I find myself falling for a lot of the time is getting thrown. I’m not talking about the I’m turtling and they walk up to me and throw me kind of throws; more like the I’m the aggressor and I do a cross-up or jump in to combo and then I’m immediately thrown. Is it just I’m following up my jump in with the wrong move that doesn’t have priority against the throw or is it designed like that where a throw will always win if the initial jump in attack is blocked (and I’m too close on landing)?

The second thing that I find myself getting hit by is as I’m getting up I’ll be hit by an attack despite me doing a reversal on get up (ryu’s shoryuken). Is it that I’m doing the move to slow or are there certain moves that someone can do to you as you get up that the invincibility frame reversal move won’t hit first? It could entirely be that I’m doing the move to slow since I’m using a controller and I find it really hard to pull off moves with it. I’m getting a joystick in the next few days so I expect my reaction time to be a lot quicker then.

I could be wrong, but it sounds like you’re being thrown because you’re doing your jump attacks too early. To avoid being thrown after a jump attack, try doing it late (right before you touch the ground and not at the peak of your jump). Also, if your jump attack is deep enough, but you’re not following up with a ground attack, and you’re still close, you will get thrown by good players, especially chars with good throw ranges, like Chun Li or Dhalsim.

Same thing for a cross-up. To practice the timing for jump attacks and follow up attacks, I recommend doing a lot of combos in training mode or with a friend. eg. Ryu can do j.Roundhouse>cr.Fierce>Hadoken for a 3 hit combo. If you do the j.Roundhouse too early, the cr.Fierce will not combo and will only be a 2 hit. If the j.Roundhouse is fine, but the cr.Fierce is too late, it will also be only a 2 hit. There’s also a slight difference in combo timing from when your opponent is blocking to when he’s getting hit. Not much, but a little, so practice against blocking opponents and open opponents too. Once you have the rhythm of combos down, always do a jump attack and follow up attack with combo timing. Same for crossups. That way, you minimize the opportunity for an opponent to throw you during an attack.

If your Ryu’s reversal Shoryuken is being hit, it depends on when during the Shoryuken Ryu is being hit. Do you see the Shoryuken even come out? Does it come out, but gets hit when Ryu is airborne? If the Shoryuken never comes out, and you didn’t see “Reversal Attack” on the screen, means you never did it. If the Shoryuken doesn’t come out, but “Reversal Attack” is visible, means you did the Shoryuken, but it was stuffed by whatever attack your opponent did, which is impossible in Ryu’s case cuz his Shoryuken is invincible while it’s on the ground. It’s also possible you accidentally did Hadoken reversal and that’s the move that was stuffed, not Shoryuken. If the Shoryuken comes out, but is hit when it’s airborne, that’s normal, cuz Ryu’s invincibility ends once he leaves the ground.

Couldn’t have said it better. Best mindset to have in any competitive atmosphere.

OP - You should listen to the Gootecks podcast, its great for any aspiring player imo and one interview (JWong) in particular stands out that portrays the exact mindset you should have when encountering another player. Listen to the entire interview and I guarantee it will open your eyes on what it means to have a competitive attitude

http://gootecks.com/podcast/street-fighter-podcast-7-justin-wong/

Another thing to add on being effectively competitive is focusing on the bare basics rather than the flashy stuff you might see in some match vids. Don’t try and mimic setups, etc until you have a solid footsie game and awareness of what beats what. Most of the time the stuff you see in videos is only viable because the player has put their opponent into a mental corner through beating them with footsies and limiting their options.

The Gootecks podcast is great I HIGHLY recommend the combofiend one. Even though your playing HDR I recommend you get GGPO as well, the players there are typically of much higher quality so you will learn a lot.

KrsJin and SiYkO hit it on the head though. You gota be strong mentally and learn from your mistakes, since GGPO records your matches use that as your ?proof reading? tool. After a few days look back at matches you played and it should be easier to find your mistakes.