You’re restricting your view of the game to Top 8s at premiere tournaments. The game’s design decisions have much farther reaching implications.
I already know how this thread’s gonna die.
My bet’s on 3 days.
No no no, I’m saying that if Jago blocks PP, between his advantage (6f or 11f depending on which PP) and the startup of the following PP (17f if memory serves) he will ALWAYS have enough time to put down a fireball. Now Gargos has no choice but to deal with that fireball. If you’ve thrown your fastest fireball, it’s likely that even a “short combo” worth of animation will take up too much time for Gargos to evade, and now are you free of the combo, with hitstun (and thus time) to follow in and establish your turn. I’m not speaking in hypotheticals, I’m speaking of tried and true strategy. Once we factor all that stuff, having a PP blocked is still NEVER in Gargos’ favor, unless the opponent is playing poorly. Weak opposition is the ONLY factor that makes this scenario favorable to Gargos.
This is kind of indicative of your whole argument.
EDIT: 30mins of PT and when I return you’ve RQ’d the conversation. Honestly, I’m not surprised, but I guess it was a cool discussion or something.
Ok then…we were talking tournaments in this thread, so that’s what I was directing my comments towards.
But yeah, please do elaborate on what you really mean then when you have the time. Once you get away from a discussion of high level play, I think the actual aim of a FG can be quite varied. It has to be fun at the casual level (nutty characters/mechanics and intuitive controls [think CAM] help with this), not overly frustrating, interesting to watch and engage with, and with a sense of balance in the “average” MU (where players feel like “I could have won that”). Once you step away from high/high intermediate levels of play, I think the whole conversation about “randomness vs fundamentals” becomes pretty meaningless actually. Your average FG player doesn’t know even the (incredibly vague) definition of fundamentals, and largely isn’t interested in the conversation beyond “did you see that sweet move/combo I just pulled!”
I think a legitimate beef with late S2 and S3 could be that there are some seriously annoying “scrub killer” characters out there (Shago) who can potentially make the game less fun for some people. Characters like that (and Gargos with minions) can be barriers of entry for people, and they can turn off those who perhaps are a bit more knowledgeable about FG’s and have an expectation of “honest” play. But I’ve also got friends who picked up S3 because they saw Sleep doing ridiculousness with Gargos at EVO, and so that sword cuts both ways.
Mechanics wise, I guess I just don’t see the difference in flipouts murdering people and the old launcher->sweep HKD. The players who get dunked by the former pretty generally got dunked by the latter as well, and they didn’t defend themselves any better against S1 Wulf or Sadira than they do against S3 Sako or Arbiter. Bad defense gets murdered in KI and always has, and the breaker game is considerably less punishing than it ever has been, meaning that strength in neutral is even more highly prized now than it used to be.
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That’s a when, not a how. 
I know what I said.
I hope so, 'cause I sure don’t get it. 
From what I read he made 2 separate statements in the post.
- He knows how the thread is going to die.
- He believes the thread will die in 3 days (at time of posting)
The second statement is not an elaboration on the first. It is completely independent of it.
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Ah, okay. Two separate paragraphs - got it! 
I’m not used to paragraphs being single sentences (I’m not even sure if the 2nd was a complete sentence), and when I usually seperate something in a similar way, it’s usually to indicate a dramatic pause, which is what I thought he was doing. My bad. 
On a deeper level discussing how things are “too random” in a fighting game is puzzling as is. As the fighting games in general are in gernal elaborate games of rock, paper, scissors.
Which is to say until you know themind of your opponent everything is a guess.
However unlike rock paper scissors you have a lot more tools at your disposal, knowledge of match ups before hand, and a number of other factors that let you “know” what an opponent can do.
So no, even against total strangers if you don’t do your homework about the character the fault of not knowing what they can do is on you. Once you know what they can do then you determine what they’re most likely to do. There is no such thing, in this game, in this era of locals, ranked, replays, youtube, twitch and psychic mindpowers as having no choice but to go into a match completely ignorant.
Ima get more into this as games where the mitigation of randomness is a big part of its strategy is my thing.
I think you may have responded to the wrong post?
[X People] will RQ the thread when they have no more nonsense to back up their nonsense with, leaving those with decisive and factually correct input left in the room to stare at each other, and since they are all in agreement w one another, they’ve nothing left to say, and the thread dies of natural causes w/o pomp?
Cuz I think we’re almost there now.
Haha, I wish.
^^^^^
People are mistaking “sometimes I feel robbed” for “that was luck.” Keits had a funny tweet about this earlier today or yesterday. KI does not have a higher percentage of guesses or luck than other fighters, but one thing it does have is a LOT more decision making coming at you very very fast. In that sense, it has a pace more like Marvel than Street Fighter. (EDIT: This is probably not accurate. It’s got a neutral pace more like Marvel, but not Marvel’s forty second vacations while your opponent strings supers together to kill you.)
I think the idea that the game is dominated by randomness or luck is statistically and easily verifiably false. The same people don’t win over and over again at random. It just doesn’t happen.
If you go watch the Capcom Cup (which I keep bringing up only because it’s the latest SF V tournament and I actually watched the final four), you will see TONS of just guesses. Any individual moment (i.e. what you do on any frame in neutral) is ALWAYS a guess. The skill involved is understanding the game and your opponent enough to make consistently high percentage guesses, in real time and then follow through to take advantage of your success with damaging confirms or combos. In KI there is an added element of playing the combo game well enough to maintain your damage (or alternately escape high damage if you are the defender).
@ZDhome, I think you are doing a fine job of trying to say exactly this - you want to make bets that are at least 51% in your favor. Educated guesses, not just random. A series of good choices. I think it’s a frustrating discussion to have because people are arguing over individual percentages and decisions as sort of a proxy for the entire game.
I think where people disagree with you is where you jump from that to suggesting KI is somehow more random than other games. It’s certainly got more going on than SFV, and the day it came out everyone recognized that it was a really intense, high stress game because of the two way combo interactions. You can’t just make a mistake, eat your punishment and then prepare for the return to neutral. You are immediately on the hook for another decision to try to minimize your damage. And that makes the next neutral decision more challenging for some people. Maybe challenging isn’t the right word, but things come at you quickly and it may make things feel more uncertain than a slower paced game like SF. But that isn’t the same as random, or mashy, or luck based. It just isn’t.
I am a Glacius player. ALL of the things people say about Gargos now they said about Glacius in S1. It’s the frustration of a zoner, and people are less familiar with the matchup and they end up getting wrecked and saying “how is this fair.” Gargos, like all good zoners, requires patience and high execution to beat (if he’s being played well). That’s what zoners do.
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I lol’d pretty hard on this xD
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It’s because everyone has a different definition for the term and if there is one labeled, not everyone follows it.
The same follows for the whole “scrub,” term. Again, said person is following their own definition of what that means. Without context as to their definition of the term, we cannot understand what they mean.
I don’t get where these things come from the fray. Winter time is usually a slow time for fighting games, especially with the holidays around with the additional one or two majors during this time period.
People still playing the game != KI is dead.
Could be the newer blood getting into it aren’t aware of the bigger picture of things in terms of optimization, while you have your way of doing things, they have theirs; the luxury of being your own person in playing fighting games.
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Mostly just keeping the string of conversation going. Also on my phone so hard to do this proper.
But to continue.
Point im making is that every button press is a conscious decision, trained reflex, bad habit, or just random mashing.
Part of some peoples issues stem from a refusal to calculate reward along with risk. Where others are frustrated by such a massive set of answers they feel that most opponents ( and in a larger sense this is true) simply throw random antics out there.
It doesnt help that the dev team preaches that no one, not bass, not yhompson, not itamaster, or even sleep have shown true mastery of their characters toolsets. Either that is a fair criticism from a group whose job it is to give you interesting things to do or just as likely a challenge from a game designer to gind more shenanigans and break their ■■■■ so they can tweak as necessary. Either way it certainly doesn’t help high level players to want to take risks with money on the line knowing a rico suave, daytonj, or some random japanese GGxrd player pulls out some ridiculous tech on you when they can totally destroy you without it.
To me this complaint about stagnant tourney play stems from two things at its root. First, the tourney community is very small. Bass doesnt have to train to deal with hundreds of potential competitors when he shows up in top 8 all the time against the same twenty odd people depending on when and where. If the devs are pushing more casual play modes right now thats because that is where both money and growth come from. I only wish them success in this.
The second reason is that the tourney group is also very young. The game is technically three years old. However with a constantly growing cast of characters and constant shift of mechanics we’re getting hit with and losing things all the time it’s basically getting a new version of the game every year that is never “complete” until roughly December.
The result is that new shenanigans get introduced, more work has to be put in. Between all that fundamentals don’t really get developed because people are messing about with gimmicks that, well, work because no one finds out good counters to them. Simply put, the game hasn’t had time to settle and mature to allow the players to work out all the gimmicks and appropriate responses to all of them.
However there is a glimmer of hope in that people with fair to strong fundamentals are stilll going strong, and taking wins. That to me is promising in this supposed yolo, shenanigan random fest that some like to claim that S3 has become.
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I very much like this statement, because it’s simply true.
Just watch Kombo Klash San Antonio 2016. That’s a tournament worth watching
OP has been edited to explain why.
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I want to do a larger write-up on the subject of where all the skill in fighting games is at some point, but I’ll leave these points here now:
- If you want to come out and say that you’re most interested in seeing which pro can get the sickest blend of tight links and complex motions in against a training dummy, then by all means, go ahead. Otherwise, I think it’s safe to say that we’re all here because we’re interested in the quality of players’ decision-making at these “random” stages, where each player makes their move in secret and reveals more-or-less simultaneously. Rather than antagonizing about “luck” and randomness pushing out skill, you could find out what a mixed strategy is, and respect the intellectual content of good players’ random tendencies.
- With that in mind, “more randomness stacked on top of all of that” gives KI players more decision points, thus more opportunities to demonstrate that the quality of their decision-making, i.e. their “random” tendencies, is stronger than that of their opponent. It should be a boon for advanced players – a chance to demonstrate their more comprehensive knowledge of the breadth of scenarios in the match, to participate more fully in more decisions due to their superior mental stamina, and to smooth out variance with the greater volume of decision points and the higher frequency with which they get to show off their sheer superior decision-making skill – rather than being seen as this oblivion where good reads in the parts of a match you deem “skillful” go to die.
- The greater the density of decision-points in a match (such as in KI’s combo system), the more the game starts to resemble something like chess with its staggering possibility space. Decision points which are closer to one another to the point where the outcome of one is within the unreactable window of the next end up entangling. The space of situations you can be in within a fighting game is tiny by comparison to something like chess, so if you can separate decision points cleanly then you can just back-solve a scenario graph and figure out the best (mixed) strategy for each situation. However, when an entire string, or graph, of these decisions entangles and can’t be separated, then full strategies for entire sections of the game (“the combo game” rather than “the followup to a medium linker”) must be considered in concert, and we’re left exploring the shores of an exponential sea of possible options, much like we are with chess.
A few quick points:
- Every strategy used in a fighting game, outside of optimal punishes, is “random”. Choosing not to overhead is as random a strategy as choosing to overhead, choosing to block at midscreen is as random as choosing to wind kick.
- For as long as players want to do one-chance combos under the assumption that the chances of a successful guess break landing are 100% and the punish for a whiffed counter-break are a guaranteed half a lifebar, such players won’t be worth listening to on matters of how big the reward is for coming out on top.
Take it from someone with a math degree: you do not understand odds.
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