I don’t see how that disproves my point. They don’t do one chances because they think they have chances to succeed in neutral. They do them because they don’t want to get guess broken. The thing is, if someone guess breaks and gets it wrong (and there’s a 66% chance of that) then if they go for longer combos they get much more damage. Or if they’re opponent is thoughtful about their breaks, they can possibly get a little more damage because their opponent is scared of a counter breaker. Combos are always in the favor of the offender, and most of the time, strecthing your combo a bit makes a big difference. So I feel like they’re playing suboptimally in that regard.
There isn’t a 66% chance of guessing wrong. That’s left over from the way the combo system worked in S1. Once you had to earn your manuals, the percentages changed. After a light linker you have 4 options, and two of them are light, so guessing light is 50/50 at that point. After a medium linker, 5 options, and it continues from there. 66% in the attacker’s favor for a guess break only comes after a heavy linker. And that’s just based on the options, that’s not taking into account the difficulty of the options and your opponent’s tendencies.
Short combos are completely about neutral. All one has to do is watch S1 footage of Justin Wong, where he would do nothing but short combos. While everyone else was trying to go the way of Grimmz, Justin was betting that his neutral was better than yours, and he would open you up more often for less risky damage vs you opening him up for long combos.
As for slightly longer combos, there comes a point where the damage scaling makes little difference and your potential damage has already reached a point where it’s not increasing substantially. The question at that point is how much is that potential damage worth to you for the risk of going longer. My number was 3 attacks, as extra damage after that wasn’t worth the risk of losing half the damage I’d caused.
As for disproving your point, I never wrote one chance were a S3 specific problem, I just stated they were more prevalent in the current season. Disproving you was never a goal, I was just stating an observation.
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And your observation is correct.
All I’m saying is that there’s really no reason why S3 has more of it than S1 and especially S2, and that I don’t think short combos are the optimal way to play the game unless your enders are poorly designed (looks at Arbiter and Gargos).
That’s where we’ll have to agree to disagree. I think the manual change in S2 is one of the reasons for more guess breaking. In S1, I really learned my manuals to counter that–and it worked. I could hit every manual Sadira had, and it slowed the combo game down to the point I could react to the lock out and take advantage. But once that was gone, it didn’t matter because whether my opponent knew my options or not, light and medium guesses were now more powerful.
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thank you sire
thank thank thank you[quote=“MoBVertigo, post:56, topic:13811”]
The damage issue really hurts Sadira b/c all your attacks and approaches come with serious risk. Being able to hit hard was a serious advantage in S2, and I think this system wide nerf hurts some characters more than others, but it is a problem within the whole game.
[/quote]
i just hope they fix that problem in the next patch.
The second part of that sentence contradicts the first part!
And what you’re saying isn’t even true, there was no system-wide damage nerf. Some characters do more damage now, and S3 introduces the game’s heaviest hitters. Sure, quite a few characters do less, but “system-wide” has a very specific implication.
Sorry, but most of your posts here just make me think you misunderstand the game. Stuff like, “short combos are all about neutral.” They definitely are not. A player that’s actually confident in their neutral won’t be afraid to extend their combos and use reactable stuff, because if they get broken but they’re better in neutral, they didn’t really lose much. Short combos into setups are banking on set play and few chances to make up for a lack of confidence in your neutral game–though, even that is pretty iffy since they still get the chance to guess right on wakeup and end your momentum.
There was a system wide damage nerf, it’s just that the amount of damage being decreased wasn’t standardized, but the nerf was across the entire cast, except for Fulgore, who had his damage cut in S2 continuously.
Here’s the proof:
A strategy designed around short combos IS about neutral. I can’t win with short combos if I can’t open you up continuously, and in order to do that, my neutral has to be better than yours. If you open me up once for 50%, but I open you up 4 times for 25% a pop–I win.
I don’t need to defend this point again, YouTube Justin Wong KI and watch superior neutral and short combos win him tournaments and make consistent top 8. Watch the footage of Sajam and James Chen talking about Justin’s strategy in the game (you’ll have to find it, b/c I’m not searching for it for you).
Lastly, there’s no contradiction in my sentence. Especially when it’s read in context with the rest of the paragraph I wrote.
All those damage nerfs, for the most part, were just ender balancing for the sake of standardizing their rewards. Damage > HKD > Exchange > Launcher > Wall Splat > Battery > Advantage (I believe that’s how it goes, correct me if I’m wrong).
And some characters benefitted from the systemwide change, since they didn’t have a damage ender to begin with.
@MoBVertigo that isn’t what neutral means. Neutral is where you’re at after getting broken. It’s where you’re at when nobody’s knocked down and nobody’s at advantage. If you are doing short, repeated combos into a setup, you are trying to avoid playing neutral.
Short combo into ender was Justin’s ■■■■ because shadow damage enders were jacked and he didn’t HAVE to do anything else.
The contradiction is there, you can find it if you think!
The only thing really nerfed damage wise in S3 was enders that gave utility (like wall splat), and some shadow enders that lead to other stuff after, like juggles or flipouts. By and large, in-combo damage and neutral game damage is the same.
I’m with you that they went too overboard on the shadow ender damage, though. I would like to see Wulf and Sadira’s shadow enders hurt a bit more. But I can’t say it’s been a trend since S1 to reduce damage. S1 damage was actually extremely weak, outside one chance to shadow. Jago’s DP did like 5% or something (damage in neutral was much weaker than either S2 or S3, since there was no first hit bonus), and extending your combo to level 4 often wasn’t worth it because there was no level 5 shadow ender. Essentially, the only way to do good damage in S1 was one-chance into shadow.
Justin did 0-chance or 1-chance to break combos because he preferred being in neutral to getting combo broken, because S1 combo breakers gave a hard knockdown and then Justin had to guess. If Justin played S3, I think the best way for him to play (like the best way for everyone to play, I think) is a mix of short combos and long combos. I imagine Justin would rarely counter break, because combo breakers now put him in neutral and, like you say, he’s confident in his neutral. Justin very clearly feared being combo broken in S1, and that was the reason he did so many short combos. With a virtual slap on the wrist for being broken in S3 (some matchups notwithstanding), he’s free to go for longer combos on occasion knowing that it’s all free damage to him. He’s gonna do a short combo and then just stand in your face and outplay you anyway… might as well take a freeroll on bigger damage before he does that!
I still don’t understand why people say guessing wasn’t common in S1. Because of the manual rules and the focus on one chance, guessing was the only way to play. Guesses were less successful on average, sure, but if we played S1 for 2 years, the only thing you would ever see is guess breaking, full stop. S2 and S3 give slightly better odds to break successfully, mixing in a combination of guessing + reaction breaking, but also reward the breaker less (no HKD) and also punishes the breaker more for lockouts (level 5 shadows). I think it’s a change towards a more dynamic, less constricted game that isn’t 100% solved or cut and dry.
Vertigo says that FG players are smart and know that long combos aren’t worth it, but then why are so many of them disliking guess breaking? Long combos are the way to punish guess breaking, so they have to play a role in your game, and they are definitely worth it. You do short combos until you force the opponent to break early on a guess, and then the idea is supposed to be that you mix it up with longer combos so lockouts hurt. But for some reason, lots of players are missing that second part of the equation.
HonzoGonzo (who has only been playing KI since S3 launch) in that Sajam video made a comment like “I’m just gonna always go for the big damage, because if I’m broken then I’ll just go outplay you in neutral”, which I think is the right approach in S3. If you are confident in your neutral, why would you constantly take the least possible damage from all your openings, when being broken doesn’t put you in a mixup? Just go for the freeroll on all the damage, and make people who lock out pay the price.
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Yup.
Just a personal quip, I have no idea why they nerfed Glacius’ damage ender. At first it made sense, they nerfed the damage of the shadows that led to juggles. But juggles were never practical for Glacius anyway, so what’s the point?
And yeah, Shadow Recluse and Eclipse could use some readjusting…maybe even Shadow Buster since the air throw is breakable now.
THANK YOU FOR POINTING THIS OUT
Exactly.
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To answer your question directly, players don’t like guess breaking has to do with the mentality of a fighting game player and the culture that exists within the FGC. To a fighting game player, opening you up takes skill, the hours in the lab of practice to create setups leads to being able to open people up. Guess breaking is hated, not because it breaks combos, but b/c it is a no skill way to counteract a skill. Basically, it’s a scrub way of getting out of a situation. You may not agree with it, but that’s at the heart of the hatred for it. No one hates combo breaks, it’s the guess, the part that nullifies hours in the training room people hate. Speaking for myself, if someone broke my combo on reaction, I was never salty about it, and you can tell when a break is on reaction.
Guessing is part of every fighting game that I can think of, but it’s also something that is generally hated as well. One can look at the change from USFIV to SFV where the main thing Capcom did was get rid of vortex, which is essentially a guessing game. Fighting game players want to beat their opponent on skill, partly due to the hours it takes to get good at one of these games. One has only to watch a stream to see constant examples, across all games to see this. How many times have you seen a high ranked player complain about how they got beat by a scrub, and if they played right they would’ve won. Happens all the time. So whether there is a “right” way to play a fighting game, there is definitely an implied right way, and deviations from that, even if successful will cause complaints.
I do agree with you @Infilament, about the optimal way to play KI, but that’s not what we see in the game, at least not at the highest level. Short combos reign supreme (lets define short as any combo with 3 or less breaking points). And HonzoGonzo’s point is mute to me, because he doesn’t play. So his theory is just that, a theory, the practice is significantly different. If he played at the level where he was making top 8 consistently with that strategy, then we can discuss, but he doesn’t, and no player that plays in that manner does either.
I’m really gonna dig into that post later because there’s just SO MUCH I disagree with, but for now I’ve got a plane to board.
I’m afraid your definition of neutral is incomplete.
“The neutral game is when both opponents are on their feet. It is about the knowledge of your own and your opponent’s ranges, about movement and spacing, all in order to gain an advantage or set up a mixup situation that starts up a combo.”
I can’t do better than this definition. Short combos don’t avoid neutral, as many KI characters, Sadira included, get better advantage from higher level enders. You can’t avoid neutral with short combos.
Lastly, thank you acknowledging I was right about that “system wide change” that benefitted some characters…which was exactly what I wrote in my original post.
IIRC, they said the reason Glacius’s damage was nerfed was to better differentiate him from Gargos whom they wanted to be better in order to make him more boss-like. At least that’s what I remember. It may be something else of Glacius’s that I’m thinking of.
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You’re thinking of his ranged auto doubles. They made it do 10% less damage than his close ones because Gargos’ does that.
While I don’t have a problem with it, I didn’t understand that change much either. I get that it’s consistent with Gargos, but Glacius is supposed to be a zoner, so… shrug
That’s right, it was ranged ADs…sorry.
This is so silly to me. Maybe these pro FGC players should pay more attention to math instead of practicing footsies.
You know what else is theoretically a no skill way to counter a skill? Mash jab or DP on wakeup. Of course, it’s only a no skill counter if it works. The times when it gets you crush countered into death, people are like “yeah, stop waking up it’s a terrible idea.” If people baited lockouts with the same skill they use to bait wakeup mashing in SF games, KI would be a lot different.
I may not agree with what, that guess breaking requires no skill?
I think the act of pressing two random buttons at a random point in time and breaking a combo requires no skill. I could teach my mother to do this in 30 seconds. That’s why we need to look at the bigger picture of risk/reward. We need to crunch the numbers and not just go based on random “feelings”, feelings that are very often proven wrong long term in numerous fighting games. We need to understand that guess breaking, when properly handled by the offense, is a bad idea (especially at the beginning of combos, where the punishment is the highest).
What I think is that players need to get over their hatred for something that makes no provable sense. They may be frustrated in the short term, but then they are quick to forget this frustration when the short term variance goes away and they win a match on 4 openings because their opponent guesses wrong. They just shrug it off and go back to their complaining, and this is extremely frustrating to me.
I’m reminded again of poker players. The old guard (ie, right around the start of internet poker’s dominance in around 2003 or 2004) often played limit poker as their game of choice, a game that rewarded “poker fundamentals” (ie, rarely raising pots without premium holdings, folding strong hands to raises even though the pot odds suggested calls were in order, making sure they could never lose more than 5 or 6 blinds per hand). They did play no-limit and other higher variance versions of poker (like PLO), but there was a “particular way” to play poker and if you deviated from it, you were a scrub.
When internet poker blew up and players could play 50x the hands per hour that they could in a casino, players actually discovered the real math and strategy behind no-limit was to be an aggressor. They played a wide range of hands from crazy positions, they made 3-street bluffs with no hand, and they made hero calls with A high on textured boards against tight players. And these players got huge amounts of money so quickly that the game was forever changed. Now, 10 years later, the only players who have any success at high stakes are players who have fully adopted aggression and varied play in their game. Many of the old pros hated them for “scrubbing out” wins against them in live games by playing like a nutcase, but the math proved they were right and they made all the money. Now, those pros either play the same way, or they’re broke. It’s that simple.
I think KI is in a similar boat. It’s run by players who are scared of losing, quick to say guess breaking is fully random (rather than people weighing the risk/reward and choosing the correct counter-strategy to your refusal to deviate from one chance combos), and quick to assume the worst case will always happen while forgetting about the best case. Now, I don’t think KI should be played super nutty (in fact, I think it’s provably optimal to play a “safe, but risky” style of game, kind of right in the middle)… just like how even the most extremely aggressive poker players will fold flushes against other nutty players because they know they’re beat by a rivered boat.
But I am absolutely positive that some players are playing the game with a provably suboptimal strategy. And that is not the game’s fault, and I’m irritated if people say that “it’s the status quo so it won’t change”. If KI is played long enough, or Japan’s best players/Infiltration play this game, they’ll get dunked by better strategies and they’ll either adapt, or move on to another game. They’ll probably blame the game for being stupid on the way out, too.
I don’t understand this point. I thought you were talking sarcastically about “top” players who complain when they get beaten by scrubs, but now I’m not so sure you’re being sarcastic at all.
The only result that matters is the win or the loss in the game. There are some notable examples of good players being salty (Chris T talking about SFV Chun on twitter recently, for example), but they have to hold that L and I think pretty much everyone agrees that Chris put his foot in his mouth big time here. Actual top players don’t complain about scrubs beating them, they just get better at the game until they never lose.
Sometimes these players also lose to a strategy that defeats short combos.
Maybe they should do things that aren’t always short combos. It’s, like, the most basic thing ever, and even though people that would dunk me in a set 10-0 are doing it, it’s still a bad idea. A good idea is a good idea, whether new-to-KI HonzoGonzo says it (someone whose opinion on FGs is trustworthy enough to listen to, even though he got into KI late) or the Evo champion says it. Just like how a good character is a good character, even though they might not be winning tournaments right now.
Sorry if this post was abrasive, I am just so irritated by players (not even necessarily you, just in general) that refuse to do the proper thing because it exposes them to a bit more variance and they are short-sighted about long-term benefits. They refuse to shrug off short-term bad luck (ie, a match they lose because the opponent guessed right 7 out of 8 times, something that is very clearly not indicative of long term play), saying “oh well, my strategy is still sound”. I mean, sometimes your opponent techs all 10 of your throw attempts too, and then doesn’t press a button the 5 times you try to shimmy them. Tough bananas, it happens. And then, when they start losing to guess breaking, rather than adapt their strategy accordingly, they just blame the game or their opponent on something that is truly in their own control.
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If you do a combo with one chance into a knockdown/launcher/whatever ender followed by a setup, then repeat that sequence, you will not engage in the neutral game until you are broken or the opponent blocks your setup. Neutral very specifically implies two things:
One, that both characters are on their feet and able to fight.
Two, that neither character has frame advantage–ie, they are neutral.
It’s also implied that there’s some space between the two players but that part is a bit murkier since the exact range isn’t as easily defined as “standing up and at even frames.”
Waking up from a knockdown directly into a mixup is not neutral. That’s not what the word means. Landing from a flipout directly into a mixup is not neutral. You’re only actually going back to neutral after enders on certain damage/resource/special enders.
Pretty much everything else infil has covered.
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I’m not sure why you posted this, especially with a preview post. You obviously agree with my definition of neutral, which means the point of contention is purely an opinion. I don’t believe short combos are trying to avoid neutral, and you do. Case closed. I simply don’t agree with you.