I’m glad I had the opportunity to have this explained to me, but what of the thousands of other players who don’t know about these things and are wondering why counter breakers are not working for them? Also I’m not sure why you chose to hone in on this one thing when the real BnB of my post was talking about breaking on frame 1. What are the solutions to feeling robbed in those situations I presented other than just saying “I was late”. What about the times when they break late but I input the breaker too early?
That’s kind of rude.
I really don’t like it when people compare KI to other fighting games especially SF. They are completely different games with different design philosophys, mechanics, characters, animations etc. Just because SF did something doesn’t mean every game going forward needs to follow suit or that any one thing is justified. KI was designed from the very get go to be simple in nature. If they wanted KI to have arbitrarily difficult execution they would of made it that way like SF4. Biggest thing I heard going into SFV was they missed the SF4 execution which is great…it meant there was a game out there for people who loved that stuff. For KI players though, especially casuals, just want to turn on the game and have fun…not get increasingly frustrated that their counter breakers “dont work” and then wonder why so come to the forums and have a guy named Infiliment explain it to them
I’m not arguing for myself here because as I stated earlier…I seldom if ever counter break and I’m really not actively playing the game at the moment so most of this doesn’t apply to me. I’m having conversation to figure out how we can improve the game for others if possible.
And for the record I do enjoy execution, took me months to learn how to do this and was satisfying as hell when I finally could do it. Others might not see it the same way, taking months to learn how to execute one thing could be boring or not worth it.
If I were to guess, the constant balance updates might possibly be the reason more players don’t get as technical. I mean I’m not exactly a technical player myself, but even to someone like me trying to nail any particular strategy down is kinda like trying to hit a moving target.
I see your point LCD, and I would share your sentiment if not for one thing:
The players already have the tools they need in game to figure out why their counter breaker didn’t work. It’s called frame stepping in Replays. The facts are right in front of them, yet they’d rather complain. I know, going to replays isn’t something people often do cause they just want to play matches, but it’s still absurd to me that people would call the system broken yet have no actual proof to back up their statement.
I think that’s all you can say, really. Sucks, but that’s how it is.
It would be interesting to know how common it is for KI players to actually practice counterbreaking (especially off of manuals and in juggles). Or is it one of those presumed “execution free” systems that players more or less overlook because it “should just work”?
Similarly, how common is it for a KI player to practice confirming lockouts (into damage loops, or whatever)?
I imagine if they’re to the point of nitty-gritty understanding that their counter breaker is 1 frame late, and that they need to counter break during startup of their move and not 1 frame after startup, then they should be pretty capable of problem solving a fairly basic concept of “what are techniques I can practice to input these buttons fast enough”. Otherwise, they will probably not be obsessing over a missed counter breaker in the same way. They will shrug their shoulders and move on to the next match like most players do.
Remember, think about past combo trial modes in games. Not counting the incredibly easy SFV trials, these modes very often contained super wacky and esoteric combos that needed specific corner positioning and character tricks to do basic things. “Oh, I had to super jump cancel that move 3 training mode squares from the corner, okay.” Unless you are a FG savant, you WILL have to look up how to do a non-trivial amount of combos on youtube just to understand the technique involved, let alone actually performing the inputs.
Learning random esoterica to get into the intermediate (and above) level of play in FGs is basically standard practice.
I honed in on this one thing because inputting throw (a 2-button input), then counter breaker (a different 2-button input) 5 frames later actually does seem like it’s decently difficult at first. Inputting something like Tremor and counter breaking before startup is much easier and I dunno why I would discuss it specifically, since there is no technical challenge there.
As I’ve told you in the past, counter breakers enforce a pretty hefty catch window now, a minimum of 24 frames and a maximum of 30 frames. I don’t believe this case (unless you have proof of a bug) actually exists anymore. If someone is trying to break 30 frames after you input counter breaker, then you had an incorrect read. That’s almost an entire medium auto-double’s worth of time.
I agree, actually. We can learn lessons from what is fun in SF games and what isn’t, but we don’t have to do everything like SF does. And KI is one of the games that breaks a ton of canonical FG rules and opens up a hugely interesting design space for players to explore.
But it’s crazy to think that even KI at a basic level will not have random rules and require execution practice. Those are tenets of every game in the genre without exception.
When I say “execution practice” in my post above, I’m being pretty generous. This is something you can learn in under 1 minute in training mode. If SF4’s execution is a 7/10, then KI, even with this counter breaker thing, is still like a 2/10. And to be honest, SF4’s execution is still actually pretty easy compared to most fighting games before and after it. (Combo videos for SF4 can be insanely hard, but basic match stuff is nowhere near the basic stuff you have to do in anime games, Marvel, or KOF)
I don’t get this part at all.
Casuals are not complaining about missing counter breakers by 1 frame, because they don’t know the details of the engine down to that amount of specificity. They are just playing and sometimes a weird interaction happens but they shrug it off and keep playing.
For people who are trying to learn the game and get beyond the casual level, I’ve been involved in communities for a dozen different FGs, and posts of “what actually happened here?” with a video link are pretty standard. You want to have the system explained to you by people who understand it, so you ask people and then they explain. Nobody who comes from casual SF4 is going to learn how to do complicated safe jump OS stuff without a forum post or a youtube video explaining it in detail to them. Many of them still don’t get it for months after.
Point being, if you are a casual, you don’t care about this type of stuff. If you are bothered by it, then I don’t think you are a casual, and I don’t think doing a bit of research on your own or asking people in the know is at all unreasonable.
The unfortunate part of all this is that I think there are surprisingly few people in the know. A few scattered people on the forums and elsewhere would be able to explain it, but if they go and ask certain tournament players, they will probably get back poor information (and a lot of vitriol directed at the game or its design team to boot). That is frustrating to me, because the top players should be the people who understand the game’s systems the best, not some random forum scrub like Infiliment.
… come on, man. Considering the stuff I have seen and read in various KI streams over the years, this is the least mean thing I could have possibly said. I’m speaking to a larger problem here, that many KI players (not even singling people out, because it applies to many) are just happy to complain about the engine, their opponent, or any number of things, rather than take responsibility for their loss. As a joke one or two times… alright, that’s fine. But 2 years and counting now, it’s less of a joke and more of a reflection on reality.
I will say I disagree with this simply because there are plenty of people content with not getting better and just enjoy playing their favorite game they way they want and won’t take advice or criticism. Also I think it’s a little bit absurd to expect players to know every minute detail of any game not just KI. People were still discovering and learning new things in Street Fighter 4 up until the day SFV came out; I don’t ever recall anyone lecturing Infiltration when he came into the scene in 2009 about not learning how to FADC fast enough
It’s fine if those people play that way, but they don’t get to complain when their lack of knowledge and/or poor decision-making is getting them blown up.
But I believe Infil was referring to top players and those who operate at a tournament level. I’m not exactly sure why bringing up the casual playerbase has anything to do with regards to top players’ understanding and execution of game mechanics. And I’m not meaning that derogatorily, just saying that people playing for fun who aren’t interested in advice or critique don’t sound like the people who browse forums, discuss mechanics and compete in tournaments.
And I’ll admit that I don’t know much about Infiltration’s rise to T1 line levels of high speed download, but bringing up his newbie period also doesn’t really make sense as a response. Everyone starts at the bottom. Some people never leave it. But “top players” seem to denote those who take on a strong understanding and performance within the game and go on to earn respect, either for their rankings, knowledge, consistency or some combination of all three.
There are plenty of top players in any fighting game that don’t know everything. I agree that everyone should strive to improve (if thats what they want) but by generalizing everyone into one tier isn’t correct. Just because Nicky, Sleep, bass, Thomopson are quote “top players” doesn’t mean they know everything about the game…and honestly how could they, I sure as hell don’t.
Even the great Einstein said on occasion, “I don’t know” and quite frankly I wouldn’t want to live in a world where everyone knows everything…it would make for a very boring and non-productive place to live. I mean how many times have we heard Keits answer a question by saying IDK…even he doesn’t have all the answers and he made the game lol.
So as a “top player” please forgive me for not knowing the tekk to input counter break on frame 1
Sure. Those players are probably not seriously and repeatedly asking the developer to switch a mechanic, though.
I never asked people to understand every minute detail about KI.
I asked people to research particular problems that seem to consistently come up in their matches and cost them wins. If you continually miss counter breakers match after match, then whether you’re an intermediate player or a top level tournament player, it makes sense for you to research this one specific issue and figure out its root cause, and what you can do about it.
It does not make sense to repeat your mistakes while continuing to insist that you are doing nothing wrong and the game is to blame for being poorly designed. And I mean this statement even if you have an objection to the design of the mechanic in question.
So, if you don’t need to know the precise rules for how scaling on linkers works to win tournaments, that’s fine. I’m not sure anybody even really knew how it worked until Climax started doing research on it recently. But if you are always upset that “counter breakers don’t work”, and then you refuse to investigate the issue so you can fix errors in your own play (all while continuing to say they don’t work), then THAT is what is frustrating to me.
You’re forgiven.
Now that you know, are you going to incorporate it into your play?
I’ve mad top 3/8 at every tournament I’ve been too, I think not counter breaking is a more viable strategy than people give it credit especially with this guess break everything meta. More chances than not people will just lock themselves out and even if they break me so what…If I’m comfortable enough to know that I can outplay them in the neutral then taking huge risks on counter breakers makes no sense.
Go back and Watch Nicky vs Thompson at SCR and count how many times his CB failed.
