I dunno, I think it’s fair to say that if you’re playing 3rd Strike and someone makes a super predictable attack at you, you could call that a “mistake”. If you parry 1 frame late, and you get hit, that is also a “mistake”, and then you lose the round because you get hit by Chun low forward into super. The two mistakes happen in very short succession, but the guy who made the original mistake wins, because your mistake came second.
The “tough” thing for me is the fact that there are times during the game where your opponent has a chance to input breaker, but you don’t have the opportunity to counter break. Your opponent will get locked out if he tries here, but your trump card is guaranteed to fail no matter what you do. I think the answer to dealing with 1st frame mash guess breakers is not to counter break, though… it’s simply to do opener into linker every time so they lock out. So while it’s pretty annoying, it’s probably not going to kill the game for me.
@cRCupcake 's findings are basically that the opponent is unable to input any breaker during the startup of a manual’D special move, even if they are in hit stun, which is… pretty interesting. It’s kind of both a blessing and a curse, because if he’s mashing lights and you do light wind kick after landing a jump in, he WILL break you, even if he inputs it way early. If you were to do a light manual, though, he locks out and you win. But it means you can first frame counter break these special moves if you want to take the risk, and you’re guaranteed to catch any and all break attempts. If you were to try the manual, you have no way to prevent him from locking out by mashing early.
I dunno, does this favor the defender or the attacker? As a defender, I don’t like having to guess strength AND timing, because that means I lock out more and the opponent doesn’t have to counter break as often.
Also @cRCupcake, you might want to take a look at some other counter breaker findings I had that don’t cover cases like this, in this thread: Exploring inconsistent counter breakers
Basically, ever since S1, doubles, linkers, and shadow linkers will do weird things to your hit stun on a move-by-move and hit-by-hit basis, making counter breaks difficult somewhat “randomly”. For example, maybe the 2nd hit of heavy wind kick linker cancels your hit stun, but the 3rd hit doesn’t, so it’s harder to counter break the 2nd hit (to give a random example I haven’t tested). The devs said they will take a look at adding some sort of prevention against this if they have time. I’m really curious if they’ll get around to it, it seems very important to me to improve the feel of the game.