Where is the help for new players?

Is it too much to ask? I posted looking for help and got one reply. No one else can help new players?

Honestly? These forums are fairly dead.

i thought this was one of the top forums for talking about this game?

What do you need help with?

Ever since they switched the forum software around, things are a little bit goofy. @AutomatedHero

Winning, essentially.
I find myself not really knowing why I’m losing. I understand frame data. But I don’t understand many siutations where stuff hits me even though it’s heave slower moves and I’m blocking. I can throw out a jab, it gets blocked, I then block but get hit by a cr.HK
Things like that.

And Ken.

I hate Ken

Alright, let me copy/paste some stuff I wrote in a different place which would be up your alley. It’ll be a general guide for how to get started. More specific things, we’d have to play to sort out what things you are doing wrong.

Now this stuff is a general idea you can use to get started. There are lots of ways to go about learning to play SF games. It used to be different enough that NY/east coast players were known for their defense and Cali/west coast for their rush down. here is more or less a way to go about learnign your character:

  1. Pokes, anti air, tick throws.

  2. BnBs (these should be like 2 to 3 go to combos), meaties from common knockdowns, Frame traps.

  3. Basic Gameplan (how does your character want to win the game), mix ups etc.

  4. Match up specific things.

All that should be like 2 months’ worth of stuff. the explanation for that is:

  1. First tier gives you a goal to your games. Don’t worry about winning or losing. Worry about making sure you are hitting your anti airs and poking from the right distances, you want to focus on winning exchanges on the ground and pushing people into corners with your character. This is basic SF stuff. Almost every character can do this gameplan. Learning to do it with your character gives you a foundation to start off the rest of the strategies. Between doing this and tick throws, you essentially can play entire games. I’ve done this to PlusFrames with Yun because a good ground game opens up his divekicks way more.

  2. You know how to control the midscreen with your character, now you can start adding how to get more damage out of them. So you want one meterless combo and one metered combo. In SF5, you want one combo that’s meterless, one combo that uses one EX bar and one super cancel combo. You get one of each on those and you basically have 90% of your combo needs. In 3S you basically need your one meterless combo and then how you use super most commonly. Yun is a bit involved but Ken is baby cakes easy. Ken only needs to learn 3 combos: short short super, cr.mk super, and lp DP kara DP link (you can skip the last one and just practice canceling into DP from cr.mk or doing mp/hp target combo into lp dp). One you have one meaty and one frame trap, you pair that with the tick throw you learned and you also have 90% of all the offense you’ll use for a long time. One you establish one meaty, you can add a lot of variations to make your offense harder to deal with. You put this with the stuff above and you have a ground game and then ways to punish people and more opportunities to deal bigger damage.

  3. You already have a ground game, you know a few BnBs and a couple of meaties. now you can start investigating what the overall gameplan is. The basic idea is that you’re going to use the info in part one and part two to execute step 3. It may weird to say you want to wait so long for the gameplan, but once you get there, a lot of characters are going to need the stuff from part 1 and 2. Guile requires you learn pokes and anti airs, Gief wants you winning the ground, Makoto wants to scare you into not pushing buttons with frame traps so I can Karakusa you.

This is also where you’re going to spend time learning the specialized tool that makes your character tick. If its Guile, you’re learning how to boom. If its Ryu, throwing hadouken, if its Gief, learning how to piledrive etc.

Some characters also have specialized mix ups that they get to play on people. This is where the tomfoolery is going. Aegis reflector, Vega walldives, old zeku flips, Fuerte stuff etc. Here you start incorporating all that nonsense. Basically you’re adding all the juice to your gameplan.

  1. And here you start the long stretch to learning match ups. This step is basically means getting acquainted with the 1-3 of the rest of the cast. What’s their ground game like, how do they pressure, what are they trying to accomplish for the most part etc.

So there you go. If I wanted to take a leisurely stroll through a game, I’d take this approach to it. Its a bit different in anime games but meh, it should get you started on stuff.

Do you have any replays in particular that we could check out? In general it sounds like you aren’t taking proper advantage of situations where you have plus frames. What’s your CFN?

Thanks or the reply

I cannot fight Ken or Ryu at all. I can’t deal with the way they are played or fireballs or the insane specials that seem to catch me regardless. It feels as if everything I try is way slower than their slowest moves. I can’t get my head around it all. Those two are the worst characters for me, and of course they are the most popular which is all the more frustrating.

You can try this replay:
4d192b9f2
or search for my CFN, same username as here

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I’ll take a look later and hit you back up with a post.

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Alright, so you play exactly whom I was hoping you wouldn’t be. Zeku is kind of a rough beginner character. His projectile functions more like a slow normal than a regular fireball.

On the plus side I play Zeku so I can help you a lot with this. Is this your first SF game?

Edit: Alright, and you play Rashid too. Alright, which of these do you like best?

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Thanks for taking a look.

So this isn’t my first SFV. I’m familiar with the franchise, I just never learned it to any great degree. I even bought this on release but gave up, partly because the original version was broken and wouldn’t even play online, but also because I found using the DS4 pad really difficult. I played SF4 for a while on the 360 bt that was years ago. Even then the complexity of the game was beyond me. So esentialy, yes I’m a beginner. That’s probably the easiest answer. But I understand basic concepts. I just can’t do them very well.

I played Rashid but wanted to try some of the other characters to see if there was a better fit. Zeku is a lot harder, which is unfortunate, though I suspect that’s not going to make too much of a difference. Rashid is perhaps a little more rushdown than I’m comfortable with. I struggle to anti air with him even though he has the tools. He’s a bit quicker than I think I can deal with.

So yes that replay is me playing badly. I find that fighting players like that determines how I play because I don’t know how to get in and pressure them and take control. I know what he’s doing but I just struggle to deal with it. I really don’t enjoy fighting Ken.

I think I prefer Zeku. I can’t really do the charge characters effectively so I don’t use them at all either.

Thanks again

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Okie dokes.

Haven’t forgotten, day has been super busy. I’ll look over a few of your matches and give you some basic pointers.

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sure, no problem. Thanks

Before I talk about kokus and some of the stuff going on with fireballs, I’m gonna give you a basic framework for how FGs work that doesn’t get discussed much: everything you do on screen is going to elicit a reaction. If you throw a lot of fireballs, your opponent is gonna want to jump, if you throw a lot, eventually they’ll want to tech, etc. You may not be good at spotting these now (and I’m not great but it is something you can actively work on), but a good frame of mind when playing FGs is to view them as “I did this and my opponent did this…what does it say about my opponent”.

When you’re playing Old Zeku, you have to keep in mind that doing koku zoning is going to force people to get around it in a few ways: they’re either going to try and jump over it or use some type of move to get through them. In the case of the Ken match, he kept doing HK tatsu to go over your koku and you never addressed it. You can beat HK tatsu with DP fairly easy. Just go to training mode, have ken do a few normals then HK tatsu. Practice reacting to tatsu coming at you with DP.

Another big problem you’re having is a weird new player mistake: hardest means best. You keep doing HK kokus and only HK kokus. All three of them have their places; but HK koku is easily the worst. Basically here’s the short version of it:

LK koku when you’re dealing with characters who outside of st.hk range.

MK Koku when they are farther away from that.

HK koku when you are super far away to force people to move.

right now I’m watching you play an Alex player and you didn’t really do a lot of kokus in it. You could’ve been eating him alive with them but tried to play footsies instead. You did better the second game

When throwing kokus, remember that you’re sort of waiting for them to jump so you can get a DP. you want to frustrate on the ground while keeping an eye on when they might jump.

Watching a few more clips, think i’m gonna have to give you a few more posts later on a few things.

Are you hitting up training mode for anything yet? Do you know what your bread and butter combos and your meaties are afterwards?

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Thanks for responding.

The Alex match was difficult because i know he can charge in and throw me so I was expecting that and didn’t want to get caught.

You may like to watch some of th emore recent matches as I think I have done better. At least yesterday :smiley:
In training mode I’ve been practicing his bassic combo with mk mp and teki/koku as well as lp lp into koku. I’m not sure what else he has, i’ve been mainly working on old zeku. I’ve also been practicing pokes, but that’s a little difficult as the AI can only do what you program it to do, it doesn’t react like a person would. Other than that I’m not sure what else. Matchup specfic stuff is difficult without knowing the combos that other characters use against me. That’s a ltitle difficult to work out, even with replay.
Meaties are generally fierce or roundhouse. Fierce is obviusly better since it can combo into m teki/zoku.

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Trust me, it will become much easier the more you play. I remember playing SFIV and going 1-20 when I started. It may be a steep mountain to climb, but there’s nowhere to go but up.

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Yeh people mainly just seem to use discord now. Go join the SF discord. Forums are dying out these days to discord, which are basically forums in and of themselves. But yeah I;m old school and prefer forums myself lol

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