Yes and no. Unless you’re Daigo and you just DP anyway and everyone treats you like a god.
In KI, if you lock out against Glacius with meter he’s going to hit you for 50+%. Instead of people saying “see? The game is teaching you that you’d better not lockout,” people just say “nerf Glacius’s damage.” Most KI players guess break and all the pros complain about guess breaking ruining the game even though it is mathematically provable that guess breaking is bad and the game consistently punishes you for it. I think k the only difference is perspective.
Maybe people don’t like that there are a few more ways you can get lucky in KI.
People play the guessing game in Street Fighter when they:
tech throws
deal with wake ups (DP, block, throw, or jump)
In KI, you have all those things too. And the ability to combo break is another guessing mechanic that people aren’t used to. But you’re right, guess breaking is a mathmatically bad plan. But because it’s there, it add more uncertainty to the match.
Seems like we’re certainly on the same page there. I apologize if I sounded like I was trying to re-buttal I just wanted to add a point there that guess breaking (at least in my opinion) isn’t really a big deal.
Add holiday events. I like double XP but that seems like the default choice. It would be fun to add modifiers to the game, it would allow for Shadow Multiplayer to evolve also. A Christmas event could add a unique function like, Spend two bars of meter to freeze opponent for five seconds. Or during a St. Patricks event, something like hit your opponent as many times to get KI gold. Could even take some inspiration from MK on Halloween where raining hail occurs whenever a damage ender is used.
Essentially, just add depth to the game or something approachable and fun. It would also take an old formula and get creative.
With the examples I gave they’re very specific, they definitely don’t translate to other characters or games. But I’d be hard pressed to hear a KI player say, “I’m good at KI so therefore I’d also be good at SF”. No one should really expect to learn other FGs from this FG. Even though some of the fundamentals are ALL there and KI teaches you those fundamentals, KI has nuances that makes it very unique.
In the Tusk example, a new player who has no idea about fundamentals or neutral gets to play a character that can press a button and then another and punish someone for pressing a button. Deflect is a mechanic that works within a small window and yes at higher levels isn’t a big deal. But that isn’t what we’re talking about. At a low level a new player this is their first fighting game. They pick up a character that teaches them “hey if you press a button you’ll stop someone from doing their move and get big damage”. If they go somewhere else they lose that, but that is their first experience.
Breakers also make mistakes not as big a deal. BUT this is KI so that isn’t a fault necessarily but it’s something that makes the game unique in punishing mistakes. It’s okay to consistently make mistakes in KI because of breakers. But it’s a core mechanic of the game, so no need to change it. But I also think as a new player you’re taught that it’s okay to make several mistakes as the fight goes on. Other games don’t have that necessarily, but KI in particular doesn’t have a big GUARANTEED punish outside of lockouts and counter breakers. It’s not bad like I keep saying it’s just a thing that the new player has to worry about less.
I understand your point in that it makes new players ASSUME it’s ok to make mistakes but I feel like you need mention counter breakers because those are the tools that can stop players from combo-breaking or “guess breaking”
Players that don’t utilize this component of KI’s mechanics will get broken more often. So basically it’s up to the aggressor to curb their opponents habits, KI puts that responsibility and power in the attacking player’s hands. By utilizing it in their tool-set and also being more creative and unpredictable with their combos, players on offense can stop a player from combo-breaking which will make them think a bit before they even try it the next time.
Compare to MKX and SF, breakers are far and non-existent in some cases, the thing with this is; it can encourage players to use the same exact combos and as a result they don’t have to dig deeper into the games mechanics. In MKX you can only do one good combo if you want and still win. The only difference between KI which engages both players throughout the 90 percent of the match, you only get to do stuff after the player is done with an exceedlingly long (and probably damaging combo)
Basically Combo breakers means attacking players NEED to be more creative to stop combo breaking. A little more thought needs to be put into how players do combos that’s how you stop combo-breaking.
I can see where you’re coming from, however, but most games do alot worst on the other side ala-Marvel: You open up, you can lose the whole match by default thanks to infinities. When this happens all you can do is sit till your character dies and hopefully your opponent doesn’t get your other character when they jump in. this case it can discourage new players from wanting to get into the game at the same time.
Like I said, breakers are here for a reason, not saying they don’t need to be there. But from the perspective of other fighting game players that don’t want to play this game the idea that they can’t get a necessarily guaranteed punish off a bad move turns them off. Infinite combos, extended combos etc. are things of their own games. But with the breaker system its okay to make the mistakes because you can stop your opponent from punishing you. Yes you can counter break and make your opponent think twice about breaking. But if an opponent does something they shouldn’t have that is punishable there is always the thought of, “what if they decide to stop this from happening”. The game keeps both players active at all times an thats fine because that is how this game is built. But because both players are active the offending player regardless if they keep their combos fresh every time always must be wary of their punish because it may not be seen through to the end.
I know you aren’t saying this list is definitive, but this is a pretty big oversimplification of guessing in fighting games.
In reality, you guess every single time you press a button, every time you jump forward, heck, every time you try to walk into your opponent’s range.
Wakeups and close range pressure kind of distill guessing down to an easily digestible form (“ok, I have 2 options here and you have no defense that covers both options except guess which one I will do”), but guessing in FGs is incredibly deep, and only gets deeper as you add more options (as KI does). The pros just make all guesses look like guarantees because they understand opponent’s mindsets and maximize their guess chances better than other players.
Think about this: every time you see Punk press st.MK with Karin and it whiffs at a safe range, that was a guess.
People really should see guessing as a continuous function of risk over time. Every action taken at every frame is a small guess, because fighting games are not perfect information games, so you must constantly take actions not knowing their outcomes. In low-risk, low-reward situations (like walking back and forth without pressing anything for 10 seconds), both characters are trying to stabilize this function at some number close to (but not equal to) 1. Sometimes you press a button and that risk value drops down to 0.5 for a few frames, then back up to near 1. If you get knocked down or your opponent gets close for pressure, your function is going to start fluctuating wildly.
The end result, if you could find some way to mathematically graph this, would be a really cool-looking “noise” function where good players are stable and hovering over 0.8, and bad players are seeing tons of spikes.
The game is moving more towards guessing imo. The flip outs, the way air juggles and ground bounces work. It’s not what attracted me to KI. I liked it because I felt if I tried hard enough I could break by predicting. S3 sort of went the way of throwing that out of the window and making it harder to predict and at times mandatory to guess.
It’s at least partly true that flipouts create a mix up situation where you have to guess what your opponent is going to do next. But as per @Infilament’s post above yours it’s not really any different than any other situation where you and your opponent are standing next to each other in neutral.
I think people feel like it’s a guess more because it happens quickly, but it’s not fundamentally more “guessy” than other situations (like wake up) that people are perfectly happy with. And we’ve been having pretty much these same conversations since season 1, under the umbrella of “KI is too YOLO,” even though there were no flipouts in the game.
Is there something about flip-outs in KI that makes them such a big pain compared to air resets in other games? Is it that KI is too fast? I’ve asked this question several times and no one really gives an answer to it.
I actually think some juggles in the game can be reacted to with a certain level of prediction behind them. I play a lot of Sadira and some really good players have been able to break the most freestyle points of her juggles with a semblance of consistency. It’d be interesting if someone could make a sorta juggle flowchart for all the characters in the game, and see if that could help players.
By definition, predicting is an educated guess. Prediction if I were to use it in KI terms is when you can predict what your opponent is doing based off their previous habits in the match. Like guess breaking or able to identify/break only medium buttons. It’s only guessing after the first fw seconds or so.
You’re still guessing though. Predicting is just a guess that went right. In a lot of situations, there’s a 50/50 choice you have to make sometimes where your opponent can do one thing or the other, you thought based on previous behavior that he would go for Option A but he went for Option B. Is that a wrong prediction or a wrong guess?
I guess the simplest answer would be that a guess is a prediction that happens so quickly you can easily assume that no thought went into it. It is assumed you just pushed buttons and hoped for the best.
Even still, on a match to match basis it’s hard to tell if a reaction is a flat out thoughtless guess, or a thoughtful prediction based off of samples of many matches.
A good example is knowing that most low-level players tend to stick to medium ADs and linkers. Going into a match with a bronze its safe to predict that if they start a combo you can immediately swat it down with a medium breaker throughout the entire match. A little higher up, say silver, they start switching to lights simply because they’re faster to throw out…and so on.
Now obviously further up the ladder by the time you’ve reached the end of your second or 3rd match against a gold or killer you can tell if their movements are more thoughtless or not, but still, you can’t always tell that it was pure thoughtless guess just based off of reaction speed.
I guess when you predict you know there’s a chance you may be successful. When you toss a coin up you know there is a 50/50 chance you’ll get either tales or head. Guessing you don’t know your odds so you’ll never be able to know if you’re even throwing a coin up in air or a rock.
Prediction usually relies on previous information in order to understand future behavior. Guessing has none of that.
So heres a problem with guess breaking, as a lot of people try to respond with “you have counter breakers to punish people for guessing.” .
KI is always both players constantly interacting. With a guess break on defense you take a 33% chance of making the correct choice of stopping the offender from punishing you for whatever reason. The offender’s option is to counter it. BUT if the defender is guessing the offender must also guess when the defender is guessing. You have a paradoxical situation. The defender has a 33% chance of being right, and in that situation is it really reasonable to ask the offender to think about that chance of them being right? Not only that but also not knowing when the defender will take that 33% chance?
But this is the breaker system we have, it’s a weird thing and nothing to really do to it. But I bring this up alongside my argument of a lack of true punishing in the game, just smaller punishes. Its just a weird thing to think about is all. Not a game breaking flaw, but I feel like a small flaw. BUT this is KI this isn’t another fighter, this is how KI works, an that’s fine, you just have to accept what comes with the game as it was built.
Okay, you’re talking about the intent behind the action; prediction uses intelligence to increase your odds of success, while guessing doesn’t know or care about the odds.
But I don’t see what that has to do with S2 vs S3.