I get you. Procrastination is a thing, and and habit that’s worth minimizing.
You have to find the balance.
I can’t give advice myself because I’m also struggling with this, but budgeting the time consciously is probably the way to go.
Just had a party recently where Smash 4 got put up for playing and after a few hours of games actually had a friend tell me he hates how I play and just took all his energy away from him. He basically said he hates how I zone and pester while I look for an opening. I’m not the most articulate person but tried to tell him that he needed to play the game how it is not how he wants. He liked doing Yoshi’s forward air which has a sizeable amount of landing recovery so it was easy to shield those and retaliate.
I hate how I ‘ruined’ the game for him but I don’t know the right way to tell him that if he wants the ‘W’ you gotta learn what a games does and doesn’t allow in its rules and learn how to read another player.
i was ziggurat world champion
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tbh i think a lot of people getting mad at competitive games is getting overwhelmed and focusing on something that they don’t really want to deal with right now
they’re getting grips on how to deal with X and Y but not the slightest clue about Z, so when it comes as a combination occurs people can only focus on what’s making their blood pressure rise the most at that time
i used to get really mad too, i’ve chilled out over the years, maybe a little too much because i have no energy for it anymore
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I’ve found one of the best ways to keep people interested in whatever competitive game we’re playing is to teach them how to deal with the style of play that you’re using to beat them
this doesn’t really help when things get really heated, but when you’re playing casually and just messing around maybe you can try to outline why yoshi’s f-air is bad as he’s using it and getting punished
one of the issues I don’t really see talked about a lot in competitive scenes is how to cultivate an atmosphere of improvement, and one of the most important things to do when cultivating this is keeping whoever you’re playing with interested in the game! I’m not sure how you do this, as the people I played smash melee with were already predisposed to understanding high skill systems – they’d watch videos of professional play and stuff like that, and it might be harder to get people who aren’t super interested in the game to do things like that
patrick miller also talks a lot about fighting games and teaching them, which might help! he has a really good point about fighting games in that it’s kind of a weird edge case as far as high skill games go, as “learning” a fighting game means getting your ass beat over and over again. I’ve found that my growth in fighting games (whatever little growth that is) has happened in bursts and spurts as opposed to a gradual increase in skill; I learned how to wavedash but I didn’t feel comfortable using it in actual play until randomly I “got” it and it was fine
It also doesn’t help that at the best of times the guy I was playing with is aggressively anti competitive. Despite being from an engineering background he rarely has the drive to improve or try different approaches. Also doesn’t help I tend to play Megaman who, when played on point, is a wall that requires a solid approach game to get through and I don’t know the best way to explain his options to break through other than just having a feel for pellet patterns and walking while trying to nail perfect shields etc.
There was a really good twitter post about ‘characteristics of someone who can get good at games’ by a Japanese fighting game player. I forget where to find it.
yea!!
oh the translator of that used to be an iamper
he got way into guilty and i didn’t
Maybe this is specific to street fighter but I’ve found that my fundamentals have improved as a result of indulging people who complain that I can do all the moves and they can’t. Playing in a way that prevents me from Pressing Buttons as per usual has made me a much more thoughtful player and has improved my odds against my sparring partners, one of which is a national tournament level 3rd strike player. I even beat him one time!! Pass the Ativan!
Turns out street fighter is about not pressing buttons!
Yeah, one of the scariest but most important skills to learn in any fighting game is how to control the situation just by watching, waiting, and not pressing anything. I struggled with this for the better part of a decade before I finally understood how important that skill was to winning any fighting game.
And it is a very intimidating skill to learn because when you first start doing it, it means surrendering control of the match. You commit to some degree of inaction in order to observe, and that makes you vulnerable to people who might think less but act quicker. But you have to accept this risk if you really want to improve, because if you just act out of fear of the unknown, without information, just to try and break the suspense, then you won’t really be able to tell what’s going on in the match or your opponent’s head.
A good way to practice this skill in 2D fighters is to devote some matches to doing almost nothing on the ground and focusing almost entirely on anti-air. Doesn’t even have to be DPs or optimal punishes. Just focus your energy on making the opponent take some damage, any damage, every time they jump or otherwise take to the air.
When they land, focus only on not getting hit. Keep whatever range you need to make your anti-air work, and feel free to do big punishes on serious mistakes like blocked random DPs or supers. But don’t try to press the opponent to make something happen. Just watch what they do and react. Let them kill themselves by attacking you.
And after they get hit by your reaction anti-air, try and remember whether or not they change their behavior. (I know this is hard to do in the heat of the match. I still struggle with it myself.) Do they clam up and try to play defensively themselves? Do they stay overly aggressive but switch to a ground attack? Or do they just get tunnel vision and keep doing the same thing over and over until they die?
I would honestly say controlling space without hitting buttons – with the mere threat of your attack – is the most important concrete fighting game skill to develop by far. (The only ones more important are intangibles like attitude and critical thinking, which are important for life far beyond playing games.)
If you make this skill the foundation of your playstyle, whether you favor offense or defense, you can build a style that can beat any kind or level of player with enough practice and experience.
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smash’s neutral is almost the opposite of street fighter I think! if you look at any high-ish-level smash match, you’ll see that a lot of the spacing revolves around short-hopped aerials because those are the moves that allow a character to move and possess a hitbox at the same time – it’s almost like every character is their own projectile move that causes them to get hurt if the opponent can hit the projectile with their own in the ideal case. the only defensive button that players can really use to prevent a move from touching them is the shield, which leaves the player completely stationary and allows the attacker to put on more and more pressure
so what this means in terms of “getting good” at smash is that you really need to learn how to press buttons in neutral almost ALL THE TIME. it’s probably because attacking has just as much to do with movement/positioning/spacing as it does with actually pressing a button, but it leaves us with: the player who presses more buttons seems to win more in smash because there’s way more space to control in neutral and the only way you can do it without a good projectile is to literally put your body there
I bring this up because in @ArOne’s case, it seems like ArOne was playing in a style that “works” for smash, setting up a bunch of hitboxes that the opponent has to get through in order to get close whereas his opponent who got frustrated seemed to want to play in more of a traditional street fighter style where performing a move is a huge commitment should result in a big payoff. and I think it’s important to note that just because ArOne was playing a projectile-heavy character doesn’t mean that he couldn’t be playing a similar style with a character that has good aerials; in melee, jigglypuff works in a very similar manner
but the frustration that this causes in the other player is really palpable because it’s the same kind of frustration that manifests in games like starcraft or league of legends – the player needs to possess a base level physical dexterity that’s much “busier” than street fighter’s execution, which complicates things even more. and the fact that this dexterity is visible in a way that it isn’t in street fighter can be really intimidating
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One thousand blood potions.