New player having trouble dealing with combo assist

DISCLAIMER: THIS IS IN NO WAY AN ATTACK OR AN INSULT, BUT GENUINE ADVICE.

Rule number one of fighting games: you have to be willing to give your opponent credit. There is no way for you to tell whether or not they have CA on w/o asking them, so don’t assume they are. It’s pretty simple to just option-select an autodouble or linker, no CA necessary, no mashing.

Next, let go of rank and level. You don’t know who that person is (unless you recognize them), or what their story is, so don’t assume anything about their skill until you’ve witnessed it yourself. Tons of incredibly skilled players don’t even mess with ranked, and are thus qualifiers (as an example).

Instead watch your replays (or better, post them and ask for advice in the Replay Analysis thread), find your flaws, improve your defense. Hisako’s teleport is virtually NEVER safe, much less mash-friendly, so if you’re getting clowned on by Sako-ports, that tells me that you have barely begun your journey up the totem pole. Perhaps you are the very button masher that is giving you so much trouble.

It’s not your opponents, not these imagined CA-mashers, but your attitude that is toxic, and will keep you trapped in scrub hell. Based on what I can glean from your post and your specific complaints, you are likely giving yourself too much credit calling yourself “intermediate” - and that’s okay! FG’s are hands-down the most difficult and complex genre of competitive game, 100 hours is nothing, a drop in the bucket, but you must also realize that time will not magically correlate to improvement in this genre. There is A TON of information to take in and a lot of execution to work through just to break past that “beginner” threshold, especially if you don’t know where to start or how you are failing.

The only common denominator in all of your losses is you - you have to own that, or you’ll never improve.

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