I think I’m going to start posting this video in every topic where KI players start saying misleading or ignorant things about risk vs reward in this game.
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As long as we’re tossing out anecdote, a lot of my friends, and myself actually, don’t watch individual KI streams because they don’t want to hear people ■■■■■ about the game they play for an hour and a half. I’d suggest that all the hate-streaming and Twitch moaning probably has had a much greater negative impact on viewership and interest than real or perceived sub-optimal play.
If a new player is interested in a game and all he can find is our semi-regularly toxic FB page and some streamer who spends 43% of his time calling the game brainless and yolo (and again, let’s please really understand just how much of those “yolo” and “braindead” options figure into supposedly honest FG’s), then just how likely is he to stick around? Our community’s hate of its own game is, in my circles, far more of a turn off to watching or playing the game than “man no one anti-airs or labs enough.”
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I actually agree with a lot of the points you make, and if you don’t remember Cinder is one of my top 3 characters so I know how you feel in these matchups.
Didn’t appreciate the sass, though. Not sure what I did to offend you, but that was completely uncalled for 
I think the player base is just different in s3, not worse or better. Theres more casuals and people with anime backgrounds now, whereas in s1-2 the KI scene was dominated by sf4 players with sf4 fundamentals, so naturally the game was more footsie neutral based. Also, there were way fewer archetypes and characters when that.
Another thing I have noticed is the quality of the netcode degrade a bit, more laggy rollbacky than ever. people get away with murder online. There needs to be something added to online to help determine lag. Some people start to pick up bad habits because of this. And certain characters are hard to block with lag.
The reason i mention online is because its the primary way ki players train.
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And for myself (though this is not a “you’re wrong” post), I guess I just don’t see this big devolution in the importance of fundamentals and solid play you and others often speak of between seasons 2 and 3. I think a lot of the complaints I hear about how “people” play in season 3 are the exact same things I saw in season 2.
Pink Diamond is no more patient in S3 than she was in S2. Sleep’s neutral and pressure with arbiter is no more a bastardization of “real” neutral than the way he played Kan and Aria. Jagoblake was often impatient and DP’d in ill-advised spots, and the brothers Shin still DP’d their way across the screen like Thunder had forgotten to walk. Zerg knew how to Aganos, but not how to block on wakeup or to stop just “doing things”, and most Wulf and Sadira players ignored their characters’ (really good and pretty good respectively) grounded footsies and relied on utterly insane instinct shenanigans (often popped out of instinct) to make up for any deficiencies in the neutral. KI S2 was as dirty as S3, though perhaps a bit less crazy at the extremes (Gargos w/ 2 minions) and a little bit slower (no flipout), and our players largely played it suboptimally as well. I feel like a lot this falls on KI’s small and relatively young community, whether in S1, 2, or 3.
I think Hank Hill’s powerline whiff punishes and corner resets are an excellent example of understanding a character’s toolset and using it to augment strong “traditional” play. I think watching DaytonJ is poetry in terms of how he rolls through a wheel of defensive options to throw off baits and unreactable pressure strings. Perhaps vainly (hey, I might be one of those players you mention who isn’t as fundamentally sound as he thinks he is), I think my anti-airs are solid and that I have pretty good defense with Hisako.
I dunno, I actually enjoy watching KI S3 a lot more than I did seasons 1 and 2 (and I loved watching both). I think the game rewards strong MU knowledge and fundamentals, even if some of our top 8 players don’t always showcase this. To be clear though, the players who most consistently do well in tournament are the ones who are very sound in the neutral, and who do actually have an understanding of patience and risk and reward. A lot of what is actually really smart varieties of play gets blasted in silly ways (“Nicky only does well because Fulgore’s OP! He DP’s too much because he doesn’t have good fundamentals!”), because as you say, a lot of the community only thinks they know FG’s. DP’s are a signaling tool, and liberal application of that signal (see @DEClimax video above) is not automatically “yolo” or bad. Nor is smart application of counter breaking, even if it doesn’t actually work. As Infil points out, even at high level the punishes often aren’t really there, and that whiffed counter has larger implications in the combo game throughout the set.
But hey, we all like different things, so no one here has to agree with me on those things. I just really don’t see this supposedly elevated level of play that S2 had. People didn’t lab then either, some top 8 players didn’t understand their MU’s or know how to just block, and dirty instinct shenanigans to save the day were as standard (and in some ways even more potent) as they are now. Bass was still solid as hell, Liger was a patient footsies Riptor (come back man! 
), and Sleep made a mockery of “fair” neutral. A lot of this ish really was the same.
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This is a large part of why I quit watching individual streamers. I tend to miss tourney streams because I’m often doing something else and sort of forget, but I catch up on archives. Unnamed individuals, however, completely turned me off of their streams with the incessant crying and (more importantly) the blatant ignorance or misunderstanding of the game. Nothing is more “cringe-worthy” than watching a really good player spew fallacies about game mechanics and interaction. It boggles the mind that people can be good at a game wherein they have no idea how stuff works.
As far as sub-optimal play being a deterrent goes, we have a LOT of new blood trickling into the mix. They are showing up to stuff, and learning, and performing. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY plays this game optimally, not even close, but that doesn’t detract from the amount of high-speed decision making going on that makes the game interesting. Hell, Bass’ Mira is pretty darned sub-optimal, but every time I watch him play his decision making and blood management has gotten a little better, and I think that’s interesting enough to warrant a view.
Insofar as other games go (I’ll use SFV as the example), optimal play is a little more obvious to discern and execute, meanwhile they also require far less active decision making, and the “braindead” “yolo” tactics are FAR more rampant - remember when SFV launched with it’s extra artificial input lag that made run-of-the-mill 20f overheads physically unreactable? That whole game is filth, and people eat it up and hold it in esteem, meanwhile we’re playing the ONLY FG developed with human reactabililty in mind, and our best players are so slope-browed they can’t fathom it.
/rant
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Im interested in reading this whole thread soon, but i dont have time right now. I will still add something to the conversation that i dont believe has been addressed yet.
-Any “Shenanigans” in this game can be defeated with 1 correct change in playstyle.
That alone means there is no such thing as “un avoidable bull sh**”
HOWEVER.
Every time this game gets an update, the “shenanigans” tends to shift to different characters every time. Every character has gotten shenanigans at some point in time that has made them a stronger character, and because the shenanigans were so NEW to the game, people didnt have enough time to learn about how to avoid them before the next tournament.
Every update, the playing field radically shifts, and new characters are revealed to be OP. After a few weeks, people figure out how to beat them, and it’s not too bad any more, but for a significant amount of time, the “new shenanigans” drastically affects the game.
NOW
Any PRO player can obviously fix the whole issue by saying to themselves: “Its my JOB to play KI, so i need to STAY ON TOP of all the new shenanigans. EVERY update that comes out i will study the new changes, and find counter-strategies for them”.
I imagine a lot of the pros DO that constantly. But the next problem comes from the viewing experience. WATCHING KI is no longer an enjoyable experience because most of the matches can be summed up in one sentence:
“Player ‘A’ Is attempting to use this new shenanigans from the last update… Has Player ‘B’ figured out how to deal with it yet?”
And in most cases, the answer is no. (probably because in this game, 1 mistake can shift momentum 100%)
I believe the above statements are the “link” between the games design and the watching experience. No matter how good of a player you are, it DOES NOT have a correlation to the happiness of the viewer if you are using, or going against, shenanigans.
Yo I'm gold in KI. Got bodied by 2 arbiters because he grabbed me mid screen. 😂😂😂😂😂😂
— Eduardo Perez (@PR_Balrog) 8 December 2016
Forgot how good the netcode of this game is. pic.twitter.com/b6d6hkXeIs
I hear this so much. People that come from SFV to play KI are blown away by the reactions required, and netcode.
Then they go back to SFV, and they are like:
“Man, this game is ■■■!” 
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I see where you are coming from, but at the same time that feeling goes away very quick (for me anyway) if the opponent DOES adapt to the new changes and continues to force solid play.
Plus, this doesn’t really have an effect on new players coming in who haven’t been watching KI evolve.
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_What is exactly you miss watching in top 8? Less gressbreaking on manuals? less risky-gambling (hard reads yolo style I get broken and I will wake up with shadow so I can catch you mashing?) style. More neutral game, use of normals to hit confirm? Reactions (reads) to patterns and attacks?
Holy… I didn’t know this was a scrubquotes thread.
Otherwise I just want to do two things. First, echo what @STORM179 said. If someone does a wake up DP at KI it’s like ■■■■■ look at that YOLO garbage. This game has no fundamentals.” In SF it’s like “wow, such incredible yomi!!” People just get it stuck in their heads that the game is broken and needs fixing. We have thread with a dozen people agreeing that tournaments are not what they should be, but everybody has a different idea about why. Jago and Fulgore are so OP that they win, but also when Sleep plays different characters and wins that’s all “shenanigans.” I don’t really understand what people want.
Second, and this is not sarcasm or mean spirited. If you don’t like watching tournaments then just don’t. It doesn’t mean that the game is fundamentally flawed and the community is second rate because you don’t enjoy watching tournaments.
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There is alot of unreactables in this game with no risk, that lead to big damage. If the devs could really make stuffs more reaction based than guess or yolo based, it will be nice. Many people will be exposed too.
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You’ve got to be kidding. All of what you just said is demonstrably false. Unreactability in this game always bears scaling risk, from negative-frames to flat out punishability. And this game is the only one that allows you to get out of jail by reaction or read after getting hit by the unsafe unreactable stuff. Other games, like SFV, provide characters plus-frames for unreactability.
This is what I’m talking about when I say the KI community doesn’t know what the ■■■■ it’s talking about, but talks like they do anyway. It’s not just ignorant, these folks flat out lie about their game. That’s so ■■■■■■ up. No wonder we’re smalltime.
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I don’t want to really get into it, but there’s big damage unreactables in EVERY fighting game. Watch Capcom Cup and see Knuckledu working people over with Mika in the corner and tell me SFV is all about footsies. Hell even the footsie game involves basically using your knowledge about range and attack options to throw out things that you think might work and are unlikely to be punished. Watching the Capcom Cup I saw lots of random normals at range just being thrown out in case they other guy came in. That’s all guessing. Educated, high percentage guessing but guessing nonetheless.
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Jago goes into plus 2 or 3 frames advantage, that puts u in almost infinite blockstring in addition to his plus frames normals and specials… You Must Get Hit, if a Jago pops instinct on offense. So technically, the health is free.
I forgot the meter gain on steroids
Being a spectator in most KI Streams, it’s ok. But the things that make me hype:
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Epic Footsie Battles
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Hit confirms from amazing distances and or juggles that would have dropped if not practiced
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Optimization of combos for max damage
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Counter Breakers
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Good Awareness of the match ( Like Blocking a Sadira Air Assault in Instinct)
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Adaptation
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Clutch Combo Breakers
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Comebacks from Danger
May be slightly off topic but idk…
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I just want to throw this out there… during Season 1, didn’t Justin Wong get Top 8 without having any knowledge of breakers? Didn’t CDjr often use one chance breaks with Sadira?
In Season 2 didn’t we see the same people like Gutter, Rico, and Paulo using Thunder or even just Fulgore?
Season 3 has been the most diverse in contenders and characters.
Sometimes I don’t get where these complaints come from…
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It doesn’t work like that. I don’t see where getting some extra frames of advantage equals infinite blockstring. Even if that was the case, I don’t see how an infinite blockstring for a DURATION of instinct means that you must get hit.
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The thing is, these are all things that you can pretty much ONLY get from KI nowadays. People talk like SF is some grail of honest footsies, but it’s nigh-impossible to whiff punish on reaction in that game. That entire ■■■■■■■ game is “yolo” and people refuse to acknowledge it. SF4 was a different story, and the cool thing is that now that SF4 is competitively dead, we’re literally the next closest thing.
But no, let’s go ahead and pretend our game is purely “yolo” and “guesswork” despite reaction-based play being not just possible but more rewarding than the inverse, and more prevalent in KI than pretty much all of it’s competition.
We are Scrubquotes, and that’s what’s gonna kill us.
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