Pretty much this is the mentality you need to have. It helps if you play with friends too as pretty much everyone feels this way at some point and it’s nice to know you aren’t alone. I was feeling this again about a week ago then started learning frame data and getting answers to the questions people I play with couldn’t answer.
I just went on a 37 loss streak learning a new character, yeah its demoralizing but you shouldn’t give up. Get salty and get motivated, is what I say. Of course, stop for breaks. Sometimes if you play too much you lose focus and you hit autopilot.
i would say just keep playing, thats what i do, my first SF game was vanilla sf4 and i picked viper to learn, so if anyone knows about taking tons of losses and just keep grinding its me, but the games not all fun all the time, sometimes u just gotta put in the extra “Work” to get to the next level so it starts being enjoyable again.
I went into SSF4 knowing full well I was going to get raped. I originally play Tekken, but moved into SSF4. I read up on fundamentals and just kept playing. I even recorded matches to study what I was doing wrong. Eventually I got decent enough to hold my own in online matches and now I’m doing pretty well for myself.
It’s all about knowing how bad you want to be good at this game.
I don’t do this, but try imagining yourself in a situation where someone has a gun to your head, and they say they’ll pull the trigger if you lose…nah, nevermind…I’ll never make it as a high school counselor. Just keep practicing, I’m sucking right now as well playing with Guy, but I’m determined to keep going. I won a lot when i first got Super, but i guess i was playing little kindergardeners and thought I was the shit. Now I’m losing to every character online, but when i do, I go into training against that character and see how i can get around to winning the next time i encounter that match up again(even started writing notes on different match-ups). When i get cocky again, I go back and encounter another match up i wasn’t expecting, and have to repeat the process, but i’m digging the progress. Soon(hopefully!) i’ll know all the match-ups and move onto learning another character all the way through. Cheers to temporarily sucking!
This is a long post!
I totally know what you’re going through, MrLonely. When I first got Tekken 6, I also got the LE stick with it and it was the first time I had ever played a fighting game on a stick, outside of playing them every now and then at an arcade. Fortunately, a lot of it came natural to me and didn’t really take long at all to learn, just had to practice my executions.
Anyway! So, I hopped online thinking, “Alright. Let’s see what the competition is like” and by the end of my session (a short lived one at that, lol), my record was already at 2-32 or something like that. I got rocked hard!
I was so frustrated by the time I was finished, I thought, “Man…maybe this game isn’t for me after all”. I took a break, came back the next day and was motivated to get better, so I headed over to TekkenZaibatsu to look up some really basic combos and stuff for me to practice. I trained for a few days, then decided I was ready to hop online again, so I did, and I actually started winning some.
It just goes to show that if you train enough, you can prepare yourself for the situations you couldn’t handle before. You can also capitalize on whiffs properly and punish them well enough to actually do some reasonable damage instead of like before…when you just threw out your weak little 1-2 hit after your opponent whiffed, heh. Sure, you won’t be GDLK just from training a couple of hours, but you’ll certainly be better and you’ll improve, little by little.
As you progress, you’ll find more and more challenging opponents. Some of which use new tactics and some of which who are aware of your tactic, so you’ll have to devise new strategies in order to set up your opponent for your old combos. That’s usually when you start looking through videos on Youtube and more guides on sites such as SRK, TZ, 8WR, DL, etc. to see how you can mix up your game and such.
Now, once again, this stuff will help you for a little while, but you have to remember something. You’re not the only one improving out there. When you try to come up with a way to beat someone’s tactic, there’s always someone else out there looking for a way to beat yours.
As you go further up that ladder, you will notice the time and dedication put toward improving yourself will increase because you’ve crossed the line of, “casual player” and are now, “competitive player”. You’re playing with the big boys now, so you can’t afford to whiff and do stupid shit anymore like a scrub. This is also the time you break out of that scrub mentality of calling better players than you, “cheap” and accusing people of, “spamming” when really, they were just zoning.
Don’t think that all of the problems you are having with your game has to do with the game itself. It could very well be the mentality you have when going into the fight. You could know your main like the back of your hand, but if your opponent psyches you out and messes with your head, all that knowledge about combos, setups, etc. isn’t going to mean shit. So, even after knowing how the game itself works, you have to know how your opponent’s mind works as well as your own if you want to succeed and step up your game.
There used to be a time where I would get so frustrated at myself for losing to guys that I felt I shouldn’t have lost to that I would just call them a, “scrub” or “spammer”, but the truth of the matter was…I just didn’t want to admit that I was stupid enough to fall for something so predictable because that meant that all my training so far had been for nothing since I was falling for stupid crap. Personally, I feel that one of the hardest things to come to accept as a new player, as simple as it may be, is the fact that there are better players out there. A lot of new players who feel as if they have a lot of knowledge just claim other players are, “scrubs” or “noobs” if they use a simple tactic (i.e. hadouken for zoning and shoryuken on jump-in) instead of just accepting the fact that the player was better than them.
It took me a while to realize that these players that were beating me with such tactics deserved to win. I also ditched the whole, “I shouldn’t have lost” attitude because that was rather arrogant of me to think I just shouldn’t lose. There was a particular match in T6 which made me realize why my thinking was wrong. I was fighting someone online and they kept running into one of my attacks, so I used it over and over.
Well, towards the end of the round, I swept him four times in a row and he fell for it EVERY single time when he got up. I ended up winning and got hatemail from him, claiming I was a scrub because that’s all I knew how to do. It was like I was looking at myself in a mirror for a moment because I remember sending someone something like that before out of frustration. See, I was an idiot because I related the number of different moves/combos/etc. to skill.
So if I saw them doing the same crap over and over, I thought they were just really stupid and not worth my time…which made me really mad when I would lose to them, lol. As sad as it sounds, it took quite a while for me to realize a win is a win. It doesn’t matter if it’s by a jab, fireball, or Ultra. The win is awarded one way or another, all the same.
Once I opened my mind a little, I could admit I was even having fun in some fights, despite losing and had no problem sending a, “Good game” message to someone, and accepting them as a better player. Anyway, it’s going to take a lot of dedication and you’ll have to invest a lot of time into this if you want to be good. It’s certainly not going to happen overnight, so you have to be willing to accept there will be bumps in the road every now and then, plus your occasional roadblock.
If you’ve got the determination to press on though, you can break through that wall. You’re just going to have to take some losses before doing so. Also, when you do encounter a wall, be sure to analyze your game and see if there is absolutely anything at all you could work on and do better, then check around a site like this for tips from other players who use your main, then once you train and do as much as you can within the game, try thinking outside of the box. It could very well be a psychological issue and I’ve known some people to get stress from playing for long periods of time, so sometimes a break is just what you need in order to clear your mind and come back fresh.
Basically, everyone has a different way of getting around that wall. Some smash right through it, some scale it. There are different answers for everyone, so there’s no real absolute answer we can give you to help solve the problem you are going through. You’ll have to find the answer yourself.
We may all be trying to get to the same place, but we’re all taking different roads in order to get there. Just trust your instincts and you’ll be fine. Regardless, good luck with your endeavors and remember to have fun!
If you’ve been stuck while using your main then try a different character. I used to play strictly as Blanka, but i’d be getting punished ridiculously every time I messed up a roll. Eventually I switched to E. Honda, who has some similarities to Blanka, and was able to understand Blanka even better while learning how to play another character. I’ve found that switching it up can lead to a better understanding to the strategy of Street Fighter.
Now I use E. Honda as an alt to my Cammy main