Just to be clear, Geek was talking primarily about psychic breakers and uncanny avoidance of counter breaks. There isn’t much option selecting available within combo - about the best you can do is to try and break and simultaneously hold up to avoid throw resets. There is not a way (to my knowledge) to OS the breaker game any more than that. The instant you hit one valid break attempt, you are committed to it, and pretty sure the game reads multiple simultaneous breaks (aka pressing 3P+3K macros) as “lock this fool out for mashing”. That or light break maybe. :-p
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No I was referring to on hard knockdown.
Just on those two counters - totally not even work scrubbing the replays for (as you’ve stated), just a lil’ Tech/Counter OS (which is STUPID risky, BTW; god forbid you throw that thing out at the wrong moment). It’s pretty rare that I get into a situation where I’m actually wondering if an attack or a throw is about to come my way… and that’s definitely a situation specific to point-blank range.
Ah - you must be talking about the meaty>rekka/counter OS. You’re right - didn’t try that one even once!
We’re only ever as good as our last game - so from where I’m standing, that’s a solid Cinder! 
I’m almost positive the game reads this as light break - so yeah, that “OS” will net you a 33% success rate at best 
Ah. The comment you replied to was a different one than that, so thought that was what you were addressing. Apologies. 
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Let me make something clear: characters aren’t equal. There will always be characters that are better than other characters, and this goes for every character in the game. The part that is ambiguous is figuring out whom these characters are and where they sit amongst each other.
The match-up probability that you’re referring to is more of this ambiguity in that it is an estimate on which character is favored to win a given match, again measured in a vacuum (hence the ‘out of 10’ aspect).
For instance, Tusk vs Aganos is heavily in Aganos’ favor, but as you were just mentioning it’s certainly possible for Tusk to come out on top in this match-up.
The numbers themselves are also an estimate, but are representing more general concepts. 5-5 simply means it’s an even match up, 7-3 is a largely uneven match up, but that’s not to say the 3 is guaranteed to lose. If competition was simply an ordeal of painting by numbers nobody would bother playing the games in the first place.
Generally it doesn’t go higher than a 7-3 match up if the game is well balanced, but they are definitely real. There’s no mistaking that Tusk vs Glacius, or Omen, or anyone else with a large array of projectiles involved are a bad match up for him. Just knowing that by looking at the match with your own eyes is pretty much you already figuring out “Oh, that’s a 7-3 match-up” but with intuition instead of numbers. You yourself, Geek, know what a 7-3 match-up looks like without needing to know any exact numbers behind it, the numbers are simply a way of quantifying it on paper and nothing more, no reason to get bent out of shape over it.
It’s also possible for these values to change over time as we learn more about the characters in play. We simply label them now with what we do know in order to give it some kind of value in the meantime. Nobody is pretending this stuff is set in stone, and I wouldn’t recommend letting the numbers themselves haunt you as some kind of authority on the matter; these things are malleable.
I hope that paints a clearer picture on the whole issue. Only fools take tier lists as law unless the game is poorly balanced, and even then there is no rule stating you must pick the best characters or die. In competition there are many players who want every edge they can get, which is understandable, but if everyone is using the same top tier fighters that advantage starts to diminish, and that character’s tools becomes more and more exposed.
I mained Thunder in S1 and 2, but having horrible match-ups never stopped me from getting my yum yum ketchup.
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Season 2 Thunder vs Fulgore. The epitome of bad matchups.
why you say that?
I would say watch last year’s EVO Grand Finals matches between Rico Suave and Guttermagic and you’ll begin to understand.
Basically, while Thunder struggles against zoning in general, Fulgore is an especially bad customer for him. Fulgore can play this guerilla style, hit and run kind of gameplan to such an effective degree against Thunder. His backdash was SUPER fast, covering a hasty retreat really quickly, and the teleport can put him at distances Thunder can struggle to get to as well. Any work Thunder put in to get the opponent into the corner could too easily be negated by a quick teleport and basically playing a lame game zoning plan constantly. Also given that Fulgore had two anti-airs to cover different ranges of aerial moves, and a projectile game that could push Thunder out farther than he could gain ground, and some long distance punishes to most of Thunder’s gameplan, it was a VERY lopsided matchup. I at least hold the opinion it was lopsided, to a larger than usual degree. There were even ways Fulgore could shut down all the advantages Thunder’s instinct mode afforded him, making even that comeback mechanic less than helpful.
I am a little more confident though in Thunder’s season 3 form. He has a lot of effective tools to now deal with certain pressure situations and get in more effectively, his Call of Sky is much more worthwhile to use and the Murder of Crows dash on hit or block of skyfall is a really nice added pressure tool. Also now that the upward laser is gone and he now only has one anti air special he has to correctly space, Fulgore doesn’t have an absurd amount of control for air space.
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Tell me about it. Now Thunder is actually allowed to jump at full screen…
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Ivan Ooze VS everyone
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Boy it’s been a while since I’ve seen that, good times.
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Okay, I stand corrected, but if we’re going down that road, Magaki from King of Fighters was also a real pile of doggy poo as well.
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Hehe, sorry for the off-topic excursion…
I’m really glad that this discussion evolved the way it did - lots of good info in here for people looking to learn more about OS in general.
Thanks for your insight man.
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Let me make something absolutely clear: I never said they were…
…but they might as well be without a player to actually use them.
This hypothetical vacuum is exactly that - hypothetical. It doesn’t exist. The players will always be a factor - I just want people to stop ignoring that very important fact, and start taking them into account, because in this vacuum of yours it always assumes the players are of equal skill; I’ll be the 1st to tell you that in the reality that I live in, there’s no such thing - there’s always going to be somebody better and somebody worse. There is nothing in between that.
You just reiterated what I wrote.
I’m explaining the deets behind why OS and Tiers are both intrinsic to fighting games and will always exist, and what the matchup numbers are actually about. Nobody is arguing that the players are what win games.
That’s all.
This is very incorrect.
Players earn wins, yes, but the characters can be assessed by their actual tools without assigning a person to play them (you can assume “reasonably perfect play” here). You can say “Fulgore wins against Thunder because their tools interact in this way, and a smart Fulgore player will come out on top more often because of it.” If you assign a bad player to Fulgore and a smart player to Thunder, then this statement doesn’t apply in that small instance, but it is no less true on the whole.
The goal of a player, then, is to try and emulate “reasonably perfect play” as much as they can. They’ll probably never fully get there, but the truthfulness of the original statement is not affected by it.
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Just as a note, we’ve had this very same tiers argument before with the very same players - it was pretty much a wash then, and I think it unlikely that delving into the topic too much further here will change that outcome. It is probably better to allow this thread to remain focused on the subject of option selects.
My $.02.
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$.98 more, and you got yourself a dollar. 
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