Parting Thoughts

[TheRealDMac]

DISCLAIMER: This is meant to spark discussion. It is not an attack on anyone and I'm not here to argue. Our community is actually pretty great by competitive gaming standards, but it has some issues it needs to address if it wants to survive.

 

I’ve been meaning to type this up pretty much since I lost in quarterfinals, but a combination of “I regret being so weak”-induced-trauma and work deciding to trample me has been keeping me busy. There are a couple points I’ve been wanting to make for a while, based on the things I noticed while I was trying to prepare for EVO. This is a text wall and in some ways just my EVO journal, but there IS a TL;DR summary at the end. It may be just inflammatory enough to be read by people though. (Well, it’s meant as more of a fire alarm than a Molotov cocktail.)

 

First off, I’ve seen a lot of people who genuinely came into the game wanting to improve, myself included, transition from loving the game, to viewing the game as a chore, to falling into some sort of despair. This ranges from hating the game, to hating the players, to just not wanting to take games seriously anymore, but still grinding away. This is typically accompanied by a lot of lashing out and generally salty behavior, and it typically spikes around major tournaments. I’ve started to think this comes from the sad nature of anime fighters in general. The day Persona 4 Arena: Ultimax was released, a series of clocks started ticking. It was only a matter of time until ranked died. We only had so long to prepare for our respective first tournaments. We only had so long until Xrd, which was probably going to steal a lot of the stronger players, came out. We only had so long until the EVO announcement, which may have killed the game if UNIEL had been chosen instead. We only had so long until BlazBlue’s next Extend version stole back the casuals we’d stolen from Chronophantasma. And then we only had so long until EVO. When the game first came out, I got mad when I lost a ranked match, because I knew ranked would be empty in a few weeks and I wanted to get to S-rank as a test of whether I’d improved at all since vanilla. Then ranked died as predicted and I went about happily playing the game again. Around late December – early January, I started to get really upset when I lost again, and when somebody asked why, I pointed out that I probably wouldn’t have any time to play after Kumite in Tennessee in January, so my hard work would feel wasted if I wasn’t ready and performed poorly. Thanks to terrible real-life luck, I had plenty of time to keep playing again shortly after that. But the more work I put in, the more stressed about the game I became, the more every loss that came from my mistake and not the opponent’s read started to sting, the more I wanted to put my stick through my monitor when I got hit by raw teleport or Raging Lion. I’ve taken hundreds of losses across plenty of games, and aside from the occasional lag-spike-every-time-I-land-a-starter phenomenon, or the classic so-much-delay-that-AoA-vs-Sweep-is-a-50/50 scenario, I’ve never really gotten too upset about it.

 

I reflected on this a bit after noticing that my Xbox stick was damaged solely from wear and tear but my PS3 stick had a dent in it, and I concluded that it’s because for Persona players this summer, there was no “next time.” For the casuals, that doesn’t mean much. And some of the netplay monsters will always be netplay monsters, with or without a reason to be monstrous. For those of us who were trying to reach a goal in the game though, the weight of that realization became heavier and heavier as EVO approached. This was it. We had one shot. One tournament season. One EVO. (Maybe a last gasp at CEOtaku, but without some top players or any Japanese competition.) I think on some level everyone who was preparing for EVO this year knew that. If a Street Fighter player gets sloppy and makes a fatal error, it’s “oh well, I’ll go back home, practice better, play cleaner, and there’s always next year.” (And the year after that, and the year after that…) When I got hit by a teleport of all things and lost in the 3rd round of my 3rd match immediately after making it out of pools, it was “…and so ends my Persona career.” That’s a struggle not felt by many communities (Soul Calibur is right there with us) – having to bear the weight of the knowledge that your game is going to need life support the moment another game in the same category of fighters is released. For those of us that don’t particularly care for BlazBlue or Guilty Gear, that goes double. The solution to this, obviously, would be for Persona’s community to rally behind their game and ensure that it always has a presence of some sort at major tournaments, but that’s a discussion for another time, not to mention we may never get 2.0 in the States and there may not be enough of a community for such an idea to be viable, which I’ll get to. At the very least I hope that the BlazBlue and Guilty Gear communities learn from our death and have measures in place to keep their games alive when the ArcSys (and/or tournament organizer) support stops flowing someday.

 

               The other thing I wanted to talk about is how it bothers me when people talk about the “Persona community” and how it’s weak or it’s toxic or it’s a bunch of people who couldn’t cut it in Guilty Gear and BlazBlue. The “Persona community,” in the sense that so many people like to toss those insults at it, doesn’t actually exist. I get where those statements are coming from. A huge number of people who play Persona are toxic. A huge number of people who play Persona are terrible at the game. A huge number of people who run around terribly playing Persona also at some point ran around terribly playing other fighting games. But those people aren’t “Persona players.” They are people who know how to play the game, or people who have currently picked it as their troll-cave.

 

               This begs the question: who am I to talk? I’m pretty free myself. I still made it out of pools at EVO. In fact, as soon as I saw my bracket and the only name I recognized was Tahichi, I knew I was going to make it out of that pool on the loser’s side. And that’s a huge problem. Sure, I put in a ton of work. More than I think the many people who are happy to brush me aside will ever give me credit for.  But I still have a few deadly flaws in my gameplay, my reflexes and execution aren’t that great, and I suffer from a dangerous lack of matchup knowledge, even against the characters I’ve fought the most, because I was born in netplay. (I’ve probably seen 200 separate Narukami players online and maybe 5 of them knew the game well enough to  take my actions into account and respond properly rather than just blocking until my string ended and pressing A raging lion > SB raging lion > B raging lion > AoA.) Surely someone worked harder, worked smarter, had a strong local scene to teach them, right? Surely there was SOMEONE in my pool besides the #1 seeded player at the tournament who was strong enough to gatekeep a mediocre Mitsuru who’s barely even good enough to be considered a relevant source of information about the character? Nope. Kaigu got a lucky break when I called out his Minazuki command grab but my DP went right through it, and I made a few errors that probably should have cost me a lot more than they did against Ledgehopper, but other than that I’d go so far as to say I got through pools easily. In fact, take a look at my bracket: (http://evo2015.s3.amazonaws.com/brackets/p4_a125.html). (If any of my opponents are here, you all seemed pretty cool and you can hit me up for casual netplay whenever, no offense is intended :P.) I beat Masterscrub without losing a round. I remember that he SHOULD have taken a round off me but didn’t convert off a fatal or take advantage of a dropped combo properly, and he threw out a desperate dance super in the 4th round, but not even as a reversal. “Poor guy,” I thought, “I probably just condemned him to 0-2 after he suffered through the 8 am pool wakeup and endless line.” I was wrong. He got 3 wins in loser’s bracket. That’s a winning record at P4U1.1’s biggest tournament. So that must mean the “Persona community” is made up of people who are free to Mitsuru 5A and Rise runup dance super, right? WRONG. Let’s take a closer look at the composition of the bracket. Masterscrub got a few wins in Smash 4. Prince 2k3 wasn’t exactly feeling himself before our match if I remember correctly. He may have said something about mainly being there to spectate. Carl Heiser was so super-serious that he didn’t even use a tag. Rocket was playing like 6 games. And Ledgehopper nearly made it out of pools himself, so he wasn’t quite free. We’ll blame Yukiko. The point I’m making is that for the most part these weren’t people that came to EVO to play Persona, they were people that signed up for Persona to add to their EVO experience. It probably wouldn’t have looked much different in an alternate reality where EVO 2015 had hosted UNIEL and this was that game’s bracket.

 

               So where is the Persona community then? When Lord Knight said he couldn’t think of a single person who started with Persona and went on to be strong in another game, where was that mythical person who should have been insulted? How many players are there who started with Persona and went on to be strong in Persona? A lot of people whose first fighting game was Persona either played it for the story and fell off or never had even the slightest interest in trying to reach high-level play in it. A lot of people who the snarky remarks about our community are directed at floated in from another game and are presently floating away to Guilty Gear or BlazBlue.

 

There’s a very small group of people who are “strong” in Persona in the States. You can probably count the “top players” on your fingers. And that small group is worn out, from what I’ve seen. They’re weighed down by the responsibility of carrying the US in what will probably be its only real showdown with Japan in Ultimax. They’re hurt by the fact that all the toxic stream monsters and SRK trolls and Capcom fanboys saying Japan was going to sweep us at EVO were proven right, and frustrated by the fact that there probably won’t be a “next time” for them to get revenge. They’re exhausted from having to discover all the tech that we read on Dustloop by themselves, rather than simply reading it and applying it. What’s more, I’ll go out on a limb and say that some of them are probably disappointed by and/or mad at the rest of us. In the end, the top player group at EVO was nearly the same if not exactly the same as the group of top players at NEC. Nobody took the info they put out and used it to join them at the top. Some of us tried. We got gatekept by the adult responsibility/no locals vortex, the school/poverty vortex, a lack of time to practice, or a lack of natural talent, but credit where credit is due – we had people who genuinely tried to reach their potential. Together with the top players, those people form what semblance of a “competitive community” this game has. There were also people who were at most hoping for a 3-2 record; who never really aimed for the top or hoped to be the best, but who came out to support the game and who came a truly impressive distance in the 10 months or so they had to learn the game. They weren’t shooting for the top, but they genuinely wanted to improve and they had their own goals they were fighting for. (If Ultimax was actually your first competitive fighter, and you had less than a year to learn everything to compete with people coming off vanilla experience and general 2D fundamentals, what hope did you ever have?) They, together with the competitive community, make up the “Persona community” insofar as it exists. The problem is that this group of people is still barely a group. Some of the top players fight amongst themselves over petty things, some of them are dismissive of potentially valid suggestions made by the lower-ranking competitive players. Some of those lower-ranking competitive players act the same way, drawing battle lines and dividing into cliques, treating the here-for-fun-but-looking-to-improve players as irrelevant, and worst of all being more interested in pointing out who they’re superior to than improving themselves past a certain point. The end result is that this tiny group of people that was ever actually vying for the top ends up being multiple even smaller groups that hate each other, when they should be happy there are even worthy opponents to fight. Is it because we all knew there was no next time after EVO? Were we all just playing some twisted survival game to see who could last the longest before Japan knocked us out? If so, couldn’t the problem have been addressed by keeping the game alive? But who’s going to save the game when the people that stand to gain from tournaments either hate each other or don’t think it’s worth saving? It’s probably too late for Persona. From a tournament organizer perspective, we’re not going to draw enough numbers to be profitable. If we could revitalize the community, we could change that, but we can’t get new people to learn the game because we can’t get more tournaments and it’s going to be a vicious cycle. The just-for-fun players that supported our tournament community don’t have enough invested to change that, and many (not all, of course) of the competitive players don’t want to. The lack of 2.0 is just the last nail in the coffin.

 

These are just the personal observations of one of the least-recognized EVO quarterfinalists, of course. (I was even “Omar” for a little bit.) I may be completely wrong. This post may be the second coming of “Relius is decent at best.” My hope, however, is that future anime FGC groups and what’s left of us when Persona 5 Arena: We’re Still Not Resolving Liz’s Subplot releases will learn… something from all of this. We had plenty of advance warning that our game was in trouble. We were an anime fighter, for one, and on top of that SKD was winning all his locals and making top 8 at tournaments without owning the game. I know there were people that recognized this and tried to reach out to the community. I know that locals are still incredibly fragmented due to the hugeness of the US and the lack of social acceptance of competitive gaming, and most of the places that reliably had them did produce competitive players. I know that a lot of the netplay outreach attempts were poisoned by toxic individuals who just like watching us suffer. I know some netplayers who could have been great would rather Raging Lion xN than pay to fly to a tournament. I know that the anime community is made up largely of highschoolers and college kids who don’t have jobs or still live with their parents and can’t travel even if they wanted to. I don’t know what to do about all this. But I do know that if Persona had a “next year” they could have saved up for it or gotten their parents on board, and that the reason I couldn’t get any new players out of the Capcom/Guilty Gear/3D crews at my locals was because they all assumed the game had less than a year to live and therefore wasn’t worth learning, and that there has to be a way to break that vicious cycle.

 

TL;DR:

1) Anime players are salty because their games are always on a death clock, so they can’t redeem themselves/get revenge if they underperform. We can’t get new Persona players because people see the death clock. Persona is on a death clock because we can’t get new Persona players.

2) Just because toxic people play Persona doesn’t mean the Persona community is toxic. The problem is that the Persona community barely exists, not enough people want to get better so it’s lonely at the top, and some of the top players don’t always get along, so the community is fragmented and unable to save itself. There are people who play for fun and support us, but they have no reason to revive a dead game.

3) Almost everyone is free at Persona. Almost nobody seems to care. This makes the top players sad and prevents the players trying to reach the top from getting valuable matchup experience. If you want to get to where the top players are and you don’t have said players at your locals, you basically have to go through the same brutal lab grind they did.

 

Sincerely wishing he was able to articulate this better,

The gamer formerly known as Omar.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWbLjFT0sWQ

 

Edited August 5, 2015 by TheRealDMac

[Poultrygeist]

I want to read and respond, but you REALLY owe it to the reader to format and space out your post better.  That's one giant paragraph and that's not pleasant to read at all.

[TheRealDMac]

Line breaks inserted between indents. Sorry, it's been through a few copy-pastes.

[Poultrygeist]

Thank you.  I'll edit with my response.

[pokemonblaze234]

I only read the TL;DR

And tbh, the stuff that you said in the TL;DR is true....... >_> And obvious

I'm not an american anyways

[Orrax]

Persona will have another chance next year, but as a side tournament. And Japanese players will enter. It just won't be on Evo's main stage, that's all.

And we will get 2.0. The question is when. I am worried it could be quite a while yet.

The "toxic player" stigma is a problem -- partly because there really are some difficult players, and also partly because there are some people who seem to assume their opponent is intentionally being an ass for any minor grievance.

Also, there is definitely a problem in the air dasher community with supporting games. It seems like a combination of a lot of people who refuse to play more than one game at once, to a lot of people who only want to play the current game that's only out in Japan, to a lot of people who just like to complain about other people's games. In the end, I wish more people were willing to support other people's games.

Edited August 5, 2015 by Orrax

[indie_animator]

That was an interesting read.  Hadn't read anything so in-depth on fighting games in a while.  Good points on the "Persona community" & how it is perceived.

I watched some of your gameplay on YT at Evo, and reading this, it's great that you've got serious focus at both the game & expressing your thoughts.  Yeah, there are negative things about all this, but on the bright side, you got to attend one of the most amazing fighting game tournaments around, and advanced a bit by winning. 

I hear what you're saying about how hard it is to get new players due to the "death clock", but I'm happy to have helped bring in a new player due to recommending the game.  Every little bit helps.   And good point on the local scene & tournaments.  I really want to get into them, but location & cost can be quite tough (and I'm long past college 0.0). 

Anyway, thanks for the post.  Let's all hang in there.

 

[FeedtheHead]

Why don't we make a persona google docs thing like blazblue and guilty gear? Sure it wouldn't have as many people on it but it would be a start. Maybe people would be more inclined to play if they could visibly see that there are people to play with online.

[Fortune]

We did. http://www.dustloop.com/forums/index.php?/forums/topic/11101-p4u2-player-database/

[FeedtheHead]

oh my bad

[heavymetalmixer]

I, as a player that comes from a third world country, swimming in poverty, without any sign of offline community and given that my best skill level is on the only dead game of the four I play, that death clock you say is something I know really well. No tournaments, almost no community, hate inside the groups and despair because of the classical "no body gives a fuck about it, is dead". The only thing we can do is keep playing and try the best we can to not be toxic and teach others so they're not toxic and get interested in becoming better.

 

That's it, as a Melty Blood player I really want P4U2 and other anime games and air dashers to be played for a long time, and I guess everyone here wishes the same.

 

[Solid Faphands]

I'm glad i'm not the only one whose put too many hours to count on the lab, only to get bopped by not knowing the match-up for certain characters, because the local community died in like a month. Shit happens, but then you get back home and start playing again, and realize that the same game that stressed you out is really something worth playing every second of.

 

    I know i'm new to the scene, but i think this game and this community is great and i hope i can continue playing this game online for whatever time it still has with my shitty connection.

Edited August 6, 2015 by Solid Faphands

[Poultrygeist]

The death clock as you guys put it is nowhere near as much of a problem as it used to be.  I don't know anyone that doesn't run all three major Arcsys games, including Persona.  Not being on the Evo mainstage means nothing, you'll still find it as a side tournament and you'll still find it at other majors and events.  I think your attitude is too defeatist.

[RurouniLoneWolf]

Reading this opening post, I kind of feel like a lot of this is really just you projecting your personal feelings on to the community, a lot of which may have been tainted by the stress and burdens you put on yourself by putting too much stock into what your performance at Evo means for you as a player. I also feel like that the reality of your situation is that you might in reality not spend much time interacting with the rest of the community. There were a number of things about you said about the community that were off.

I'm not going to go over them all but here's a few things that really caught my eye. Putting it all in a collapseable because wall of text.

"Anime players are salty about underperforming..."
This was the biggest tip off that you don't spend much time observing, talking or interacting with the anime community. For each game, I can only think of a handful of people who would get unhappy about their tournament performance. A lot of the anime community, including a lot of top players really aren't that competitive that they're worrying too much about their tournament performance. Some think this trait our community has is bad, others say its good. There is no right answer. Everyone has their own methods for continually improving that suits them best. It's up to each person to figure out what those methods are for themselves.

 

"Top players fight over pretty things"
"Top players are lonely at the top"
I'm not a top player so honestly, I can't say for certain what I'm about to say is the truth of the matter but my feelings on what you said are as follows. They definitely don't seem lonely to me, at least Persona players. Top Persona players interact and talk to each other and get along well with each others. Reading their exchanges on twitter is probably one of the only reasons I even bother reading my twitter feed these days to be honest.

On top of that, this comment really makes it sound like being a top player automatically shuts you off from the rest of the community but it all really comes down to the community itself really. In Persona's community, I don't really think it's much of an issue. The only real issue here is just that a lot of players just aren't making enough of an effort to socialize within the community in general more than anything else. In GG and BB's community though, there really is an imaginary line drawn in the sand between top players and everyone else. But that's kind of unavoidable. Unforutnately, a number of good players have made one of their favorite past times to laugh at all the things weaker players do and say that they think are dumb. Can't really expect a lot of them to want to voluntarily interact with top players in general, even if they aren't all like that. But that's the GG and BB's communities problem a.k.a not my problem.

 

"Almost everyone in the Persona community is free"
A lot of your analysis on this was pretty flawed. You used your experiences fighting randoms on Netplay and your pool at Evo to try and prove your point but these all have glaring flaws. Playing randoms on netplay can only give you an accurate read on the community if everyone also mostly just plays randoms but for getting prepared for Evo, I'd imagine a lot of players focused on specifically playing strong players and people putting in effort to improve instead. You also used your own experiences in your pool to try and generalize the overall pool experience but every pool was different. Some pools were very free for good players to get out of. Other pools had good players probably even better than you not make it out of their pool just because there were multiple strong players in their pool. That's just how pools are, especially at a tournament as large as Evo where they can only really seed people who've made a top 8 at a big major before.

 

"If you don't have a local scene, you got to grind that lab"
You need to grind the lab even if you have a local scene. There is no replacement for lab work. I kind of feel like you only said this because you believe there's no value in fighting people on netplay from the experiences you had. But if you go out of your way to fight people with a good connection and good players, netplay can be very helpful for your development as a player

 

"New players don't want to pick up Persona because of DeathClock"
A lot of this point really just came from your own personal experiences of trying to get people from other games to play your game. The issue here is that you took the excuse they gave at face value instead of properly analyzing the situation to find what the real problem is. You never really considered the idea that trying to get people who don't have much interest in your game from the start to play your game is already a lost cause in the long run. It really just comes down to that they already have games they're very interested in and will ultimately want to play over something they don't have much interest in. So long as this is the case, there will always be an excuse why they don't want to play the game or why they don't take the game seriously at all.

As far as new players go, if people are interested in picking up the game, they'll pick up the game. The only thing that's going to stop them from picking up the game is if they go hop online to try and fight people...and find next to no one playing the game.

[TheRealDMac]

@RurouniLoneWolf: The only thing I'll directly dispute is the claim that I didn't spend time interacting with the community. Sure, I almost never see anybody face-to-face, but I chatted with other players on an almost daily basis for months while preparing for KiT/CEO/EVO. Even if we were chronically distracted from actual tech discussion :P.

As I said I'm not here to argue, but just to prevent your summary from leading people down a separate road (I messed up hiding it the first time so sorry for all the text): 

-I meant the reputation of being salty in general, i.e. hatemail, ****posting, etc. Although I definitely saw a lot of people who seemed a lot more upset about EVO performances than I was, especially the ones who had a real chance of surviving to top 8, our group actually is pretty good at accepting tourney results and moving on, aside from the occasional post-finals depression.

-I didn't mean literally lonely, I meant there are probably less than 10 of them and they each therefore have a very small pool of people to truly test their skills against.

-Almost everyone who "plays Persona" is free at it. That is a very different statement than "the community is free." One of my main points was that the competitive community is a much smaller subset of the group of people who plays the game; I was being especially careful not to be the typical Capcom fanboy or weaboo and declare that the U.S. was free as a whole at fighting games. I also allowed for people who want to get better but don't care about reaching the top. And I also made a point of acknowledging that some people just don't care about getting better and that as frustrating as it can be, we can't shame them for not wanting to be great at a game.

-Of course everyone has to grind in the lab. I never meant to imply that you magically didn't have to go to training mode if you lived in New York. All I meant is that having somebody show you their character's most dangerous setups and answers in person and being able to take the time to experiment with ways around those options is extremely valuable compared to opening up each character's gatling table in the wiki and setting up a series of recorded training dummies, just to figure out where your character is able to push a button on defense.

-I analyzed the situation and concluded that when the anime player who was between games and the guy in my scene who seems to drop what he's playing and try to learn something new (that he thinks he'll be good at quick) every few months told me they didn't want to play the game because it would be dead soon, and they told me this like 2 weeks after the game was announced for the EVO lineup, they actually meant what they said. And I factored in stories from other scenes. But of course I could be completely wrong and I even acknowledged from the beginning that this was all based on personal observation.

[Poultrygeist]

In GG and BB's community though, there really is an imaginary line drawn in the sand between top players and everyone else. But that's kind of unavoidable. Unforutnately, a number of good players have made one of their favorite past times to laugh at all the things weaker players do and say that they think are dumb. Can't really expect a lot of them to want to voluntarily interact with top players in general, even if they aren't all like that. But that's the GG and BB's communities problem a.k.a not my problem.

 Would you mind telling me how this is not an issue shared by Persona?

[TheRealDMac]

 Would you mind telling me how this is not an issue shared by Persona?

The rift certainly exists, but I haven't encountered much elitism compared to other communities. There's no singling out of and laughing at people for being bad, unless they invited it with a terrible attitude. There's very little dismissing of requests for gameplay discussion. The only times I've seen top players respond harshly have been when they're dealing with someone stubbornly refusing to believe facts on grounds that they refuse to believe them, or when they've just finished dealing with somebody like that and a second person comes along who looks like they may be moving in the same direction. I've gotten the swift hammer of justice before when I miscommunicated something and there was fear somebody else would pick my mistake up and run with it as fact lol. Name recognition leads to flooded ask.fm accounts, endless twitter feeds, requests for matches, harassment from jerks, etc, so it's understandable if the more widely known players try to filter their attention a bit. (Not to mention I can only imagine how infuriating it is to explain in detail to Newbie A why Strategy X is a terrible idea, complete with explanations of why it doesn't work and better alternatives, and then go online and fight Player B, Player C, and Player D, all of whom seemed convinced that Strategy X is the one truth, one of whom sends you hatemail, and one of whom asks for the exact same advice you just gave Newbie A.)

I've seen almost none of the typical "git gud scrub" type stuff outside of netplay monsters, and I've seen very little of the hostility toward non-traveling players in Persona that I've seen in other communities.

[RurouniLoneWolf]

As I said I'm not here to argue

Then I guess this is where this conversation ends. No point wasting my time writing a long post if the claims of your post aren't up for debate.

 Would you mind telling me how this is not an issue shared by Persona?

This is an odd question to ask. Partly because I feel the question should be "Would you mind telling me how this is not an issue shared by most other fighting game communities?". Partly because usually, when there's a problem, the two questions you have to ask yourself are "How can I fix it?" and "What caused the problem?" since it usually gives important clues on how to solve a problem. There isn't much reason to ask why this isn't a problem in other cases because the answer to the question could be multiple things that would probably vary whether I was discussing Persona, UNIEL, DFC, AH3, SG, Injustice, MK, etc. and the answers aren't necessarily applicable to the current problem at all. The real question here should be "Why is this a problem in GG and BB's communities to begin with?". That's a question you're going to have to answer on your own though because to be honest, I go out of my way to keep my distance from these 2 communities these days and I'm not up to date. Got fed up with all the same issues and drama just happening repeatedly. Ugh, it really was like being back in High School.

Also, to be clear, this isn't an issue of elitism. It's really more people having personality defects than anything else. The key thing about the sentence I just wrote is that when I say people, I mean different groups of individuals. It's been a long time since I've actively observed the BB community but lets use my out of date observations as an example anyway to highlight what I'm trying to say. If there weren't people who feel the need to say things in such a definitive and authoritative way, good players probably wouldn't make fun of them to begin with when they say very wrong things. They'd just correct them or ignore them. If there weren't vocal and closely followed good players who were the kind of people to make fun of people for saying very wrong things, then people wouldn't make a big deal out of it. If the community wasn't such a "go with the flow" type of community and proceed to blow up the joke to the point that people are still making fun of it months later, there wouldn't be a problem.

Individually, these personality defects don't really cause too much of a problem but together, they form a problem that would be very hard to fix because unfortunately, a lot of this just boils down to how people are. People saying things in a definitive, authoritative way is usually a habit of speech picked up from interacting in particular social groups. People usually don't do it intentionally for the negative effect that actually happens, they just grew up thinking that's how people should talk. It's more or less the same deal with good players making fun of them as well. They openly make fun of them because in the social groups they usually interact in, it's a typical thing to do and much more importantly, it's not a big deal where they're from. The people who are the target of the joke won't take it as seriously because they're already used to this type of thing happening. On top of that, a lot of the good players making fun of things happens outside of DL where they can't really be regulated and can say pretty much whatever they want. Best you could do is politely ask them to tone it down. As for the part of the community that blows up the joke, way too many people to change. You can't really expect much here.

Like I said, in my initial post, a lot of this comes down to the community that just happens to form around the game. Sometimes you get lucky and you get an amazing community Sometimes you draw the "Go Directly To Jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200" card and get a not so good community.

 

[Anne]

For the sake of community, having been friends and part of the better, "top player" Persona circles, it kind of goes both ways. A lot of us have our own quirks and problems, and I will say most of us are pretty bad at trying to talk to other players. I'm not a god player by any means, but I've spent enough time with a lot of them and play with them and perform well and understand a lot of the game. A lot of us actually understand and spend hundreds of hours combing through multiple games. There's a lot of investment, and between each other there are generally agreed upon truths of game theory and optimal play within a specific game. So when somebody comes along and, well, tries to invalidate that based off their own view we get kind of annoyed. It's really hard to try and raise the level of the scene and help out when somebody refutes your claims based on inadequate experience.

And like, how do you deal with that? You don't. Persona manages a bit better because our top players tend to be more lowkey and the clique that surrounds them is pretty easy to penetrate. It still sucks though. I operated under the impression of "I need to end misinformation", and the people coming to us were okay with that. The problem was for the people who refuted me I was really harsh on, mostly out of frustration. Like, understand my position, I was really awful. I was really fortunate to become friends with Bace and some people though, my second major offline event was NEC 2013. 5 out of top 8 finishers were in my hotel room, I spent that weekend playing with all these people and taking in all of their knowledge. I learned a lot of my problems, gained a huge understanding and so on, just by appreciating and playing and listening. Did I think this made me better? No. I thought I was ass actually, I came home and watched hundreds of hours of videos, listened to everything I could, questioned other things with an open mind, etc. Nobody was saying "we're just better cause we win", a lot of people were saying "We wish others could have the same understanding."

And there was actually a pretty sizable amount of players willing to listen. People said wrong things all the time, constantly. We weren't mad at them, we'd correct them and try to help them. A lot of us became Dustloop mods, we tried to make things, we did a lot. Then people would really question and push, and a lot of resentment built up over anything we had to offer being disregarded. Like think about it, you go through all that and see the game go further, and people will say heavily contradicting statements and then back up those statements with very minor things. When it's corrected, I think people got the idea of "we're better because we play offline, cause we win, we put up numbers." That's not really the case, a lot of it is "we play the game in a more optimal environment, we've had the chance to experience high level play, we've shown some understanding of it, and our statements line up with the logic."

That's when mistakes were really made, because some people started drawing lines of "netplay vs offline" and so on. And what's worse is we didn't discourage that. What's really bad is that I became incredibly frustrated with the misinformation and attitudes being flung around I just put my foot down. I felt I was in the position to do so, and I was really mean about it. "No more misinformation, fuck your feelings, I care more about people reading correct info." It's real easy to get fed up. It didn't help that I started getting death threats and people would harass me over PSN, threaten to hurt me at tournaments, etc. I didn't want to shut people but I did. Remember when Barzorx was Aki mod? A lot of people had problems with his attitude and what he said. When his name got brought up I said I wasn't too keen on him, but others said give him a chance. I said he can maybe learn something and straighten out whatever issues he had and he can get a chance. Whenever he had his whole meltdown all my info got thrown up on 4Chan and I got brigaded in his name, even though I hadn't messed with it in months. A decision I made to try to help out the situation drove me to quit Dustloop and messing with it.

So like, there was no winning no matter how you cut it from my perspective. I couldn't catch a break, in a community defined by misconceptions and freedom of opinion, I shouldn't have tried to change that. It was really abrasive, I was rude, I was fed up as shit. I was also diagnosed with PTSD(I was misdiagnosed with mental disorders before hand) and it turns out a lot of the attitudes thrown at me were pretty personally harmful. You try being in that position, where any hard work or serious study was thrown out the window to the idea that people can say what they want and it be fine. That's not fine, the big egos and grudges and the need to control spaces, that's not fine and a lot of people were guilty of that. It was only less so by the fact the Persona space was smaller and younger, and there was less personal history involved in it.

Now I come back to the forum, and it looks like things have gotten better in Persona since personal problems seemed to be buried. Elsewhere though, Idk. I don't want to post here anymore to get dragged into an argument that detracts from the game and is aimed more at personally discrediting me. I've mostly dropped the habits of arguing and being down on others, but I come right back and it's fiercer than ever and I have trouble avoiding it. I don't like to say things on twitter because "call out culture" is at its highest and things are really personal. You don't get credit in this community for being right, you get credit for proving somebody is wrong. Your spectacle vs somebody who wasn't liked got you big points, and almost everybody played into that. People at the top see this, people below them resent it, clashes happen, etc.

Anyways, I'm tired of a lot of the fighting. I've mostly made peace with my mistakes, there are a lot of people I'd like to apologize to for various reasons or another, but not much I can do about it. Just moving forward, I'd like to try and not play that game with people but it's really difficult. We've all been kinda shitty to each other and feelings won't go away overnight, some probably shouldn't. Not much of a way to live though, it sucks trying to talk about fighting games and not knowing who's going to call you out next. It's not a way to live when I have to avoid twitter or events because Idk how I'll be treated over a video game. But I helped create the mess, all I can do now is deal with it best I can. I helped give the mess to quite a different people too, but oh well. The only thing I can say is, it's totally fixable but I lot of people have to actually want to fix it outside of their own interests.

Just like, listen to who think is right. If somebody says something, take the time to read it and see if it makes sense. If somebody is being a problem, you don't have to go at them. You can just keep doing what you're doing and hope it does enough to make things better. Support those who are doing well and helping positively so they can shine and that can be the message. I can't stress that enough. When somebody is being a problem, you can just let them go and focus on doing something better instead.

Edit: Slight clarification. I didn't think I was better for showing up to an event and hanging out with top players. I do want to say though that experience and experiences like that lead to me pursuing getting better and gave me a good base to learn from. Just because you do well at an event, go to events, hang with top players, etc. doesn't make you better or worse, but it does give you opportunity to learn and assess the game and yourself. If you do well or understand more or play better, you need to know WHY that's case within context of the game. It's not enough to say "I got a trophy and talk to major winners therefore I'm right", which it might come off as. I'm just showing where the pursuit came from and how eye opening it can be to have your perceptions changed like that.

Edited August 12, 2015 by Anne

[Poultrygeist]

This is an odd question to ask. Partly because I feel the question should be "Would you mind telling me how this is not an issue shared by most other fighting game communities?". Partly because usually, when there's a problem, the two questions you have to ask yourself are "How can I fix it?" and "What caused the problem?" since it usually gives important clues on how to solve a problem. There isn't much reason to ask why this isn't a problem in other cases because the answer to the question could be multiple things that would probably vary whether I was discussing Persona, UNIEL, DFC, AH3, SG, Injustice, MK, etc. and the answers aren't necessarily applicable to the current problem at all. The real question here should be "Why is this a problem in GG and BB's communities to begin with?". That's a question you're going to have to answer on your own though because to be honest, I go out of my way to keep my distance from these 2 communities these days and I'm not up to date. Got fed up with all the same issues and drama just happening repeatedly. Ugh, it really was like being back in High School.

 

 

Because you made the distinction between the Persona community and the other two, that's all.  I didn't mean to imply that it wasn't a universal issue because it absolutely is, and anyone who doesn't believe me is free to check out EventHubs comments sections lol.

Also, to be clear, this isn't an issue of elitism. It's really more people having personality defects than anything else. The key thing about the sentence I just wrote is that when I say people, I mean different groups of individuals. It's been a long time since I've actively observed the BB community but lets use my out of date observations as an example anyway to highlight what I'm trying to say. If there weren't people who feel the need to say things in such a definitive and authoritative way, good players probably wouldn't make fun of them to begin with when they say very wrong things. They'd just correct them or ignore them. If there weren't vocal and closely followed good players who were the kind of people to make fun of people for saying very wrong things, then people wouldn't make a big deal out of it. If the community wasn't such a "go with the flow" type of community and proceed to blow up the joke to the point that people are still making fun of it months later, there wouldn't be a problem.

Individually, these personality defects don't really cause too much of a problem but together, they form a problem that would be very hard to fix because unfortunately, a lot of this just boils down to how people are. People saying things in a definitive, authoritative way is usually a habit of speech picked up from interacting in particular social groups. People usually don't do it intentionally for the negative effect that actually happens, they just grew up thinking that's how people should talk. It's more or less the same deal with good players making fun of them as well. They openly make fun of them because in the social groups they usually interact in, it's a typical thing to do and much more importantly, it's not a big deal where they're from. The people who are the target of the joke won't take it as seriously because they're already used to this type of thing happening. On top of that, a lot of the good players making fun of things happens outside of DL where they can't really be regulated and can say pretty much whatever they want. Best you could do is politely ask them to tone it down. As for the part of the community that blows up the joke, way too many people to change. You can't really expect much here.

Like I said, in my initial post, a lot of this comes down to the community that just happens to form around the game. Sometimes you get lucky and you get an amazing community Sometimes you draw the "Go Directly To Jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200" card and get a not so good community.

The desire to stamp out misinformation is noble, but to actually execute it is not so black and white.  It seems like some of you think there's some boogeyman that intentionally wants to mislead people with faulty info, this is not usually the case.  Most misinformation either comes from one of two fronts.

1.New/inexperienced players being salty (I hate this character, he shuts down all of my options, etc.)  This can be easily proven wrong with objectively truthful information, these people are not trying to sabotage anything and furthermore there's no reason to mistreat them when you can be patient and prove them wrong.  If they continue to be pigheaded then oh well, let them be a lost cause who won't ever improve.

2.People who were misinformed themselves or genuinely don't know any better.  Let me give you an example.  I was watching an Adachi "tutorial" on Youtube to try and get some more info on him, and this vid encourages the viewer to use his DP often, which is "amazing because it hits both overhead and low."  Now I'm not really a Persona player, and in fact if this statement is true and I'm wrong, then it only proves me right because I don't know any better myself.   Point is, I highly doubt the creator of that video was trying to mislead budding Adachi players to start mashing out his DP all day long and get themselves blown up with counterhit combos.  

I have to also say that you specifically using the phrase "to make fun of" is very concerning.  I'm all for laughing at some arrogant shitposter who thinks he knows the game based off minimal experience (shoutouts to Scrubquotes), but a lot of times that's not what happens.  By going this route you discourage discourse to new/inexperienced players, because they will dread opening their mouths lest they get made fun of by the same players they look up to.  This creates a high school clique image, is this what you want?  I don't think it is, but that's how it looks to the little guys.

I'm not sure I"m even qualified to make this post because I don't play Persona, but some of what I'm reading is genuinely worrying to me.  I know, the very desire to cut misinformation off at the roots is, in and of itself, part of desire to make things better for new/inexperienced players, but some of the measures I've seen taken are very counterproductive.  In fact I would dare say that you should be especially mindful of how you treat less experienced players in Persona because you're going to see a lot more of them due to crossover JRPG fanbase.  It's your call though.

I have a feeling this post was better suited for the DL community thread...maybe I should bring it there?

[RurouniLoneWolf]

 - Snip -

You've certainly had it rough, Anne. It's very unfortunate. I hope you can eventually get back to a place where you can talk freely. You're always welcome here on the Persona forums ^,^

 

- Second part of post -

uh, are you talking to me? I feel like you meant to quote someone else because I don't really see how this conversation of stamping out misinformation applies to me.

[Anne]

On the subject of making fun of people, I mean, I can't control twitter. People are assholes. There are a lot of new players that say absurd things. I'm not going to lie, I laugh at the idea of Adachi's DP being amazing for those reasons, it's a pretty comical new player mistake. At the same time, a lot of people would either ignore that, or just say "hey, that's not how this works." Then people go off the rails and that's how it happens. The twitter part of the community is weird monster mash of people, and lots of nasty shit happens there going a lot of ways. Been there, done that. I dunno what to tell you, but making fun of inexperienced players is pretty rare outside of "wow that sounds ridiculous" type stuff. People should probably take more time to educate somebody rather than laughing, but laughing happens. Sometimes it's just the absurdity too.

Like, people don't know when they're making fun of a situation or another player. This happens to me all the time, I'll be playing online and something absurd happens. I make a tweet about how funny it is, and that player sees the tweet and thinks I'm making fun of them. This happened recently, a Margaret made a bad DP and I got a FC into a mortar loop. It was really funny how it happened and somebody took it as me gloating over them that I did that to them. That could've happened to anybody and I would just be really excited and laughing that it happened.

This happened when I was streaming too. I was fighting a Chie player who was doing really escapable set ups for oki instead of safejumps. I was saying things like "This is person is pretty good, I don't know why they are using these set ups" and I would groan when they kept happening. I would deal with them and keep winning, but I was genuinely confused why they'd be doing that and was pretty disappointed cause they were playing fine otherwise. I got a message saying "why is my name in your mouth" and I was like, uh, I'm not trying to be rude but that's how I felt. I didn't just say they were shit and laugh at them, I was just like "Why are they doing these set ups I'm DPing and escaping over and over again?"

Idk what it is, but people take their wins and losses online or in casuals super seriously, and any criticism at them or Ls they take seem to hit hard. Then the defensive-ness and lashing happens. Like I wouldn't intentionally try to put people down, but I can't comment about what I think of play or moments that happen? I don't get it. I lose online a lot, I've taken some hard Ls here and there but I still believe in myself and kind of know where I'm at. I also have people say things about my play I know is true, I die because I'm sloppy and when I get nervous I mash a lot. I accept that. Sometimes I have people who say I'm wrong. People made fun of me for blowing up fuzzy jump, and I could've got defensive but I let it rock some. Turns out I was mostly right about that at the end of the day and I can be okay with that. I was annoyed yeah, but the way things are with the internet and all what are you gonna do?

The real problem is when malice pops up. There are people who really just don't like others for reasons or another, or really get off on putting others down. That latter group actually doesn't happen in the better players very much, but my god the former. We're a really small group, personal problems run deep and leave these big lasting impressions. You would be really surprised to understand that a lot of these problems happen not over information, it's over people not liking others. People start fights with me here because they didn't like me as a mod, I know that. There are people I don't acknowledge because they've gone out of their way to hurt me or I don't approve of them. It happens. BUT, when somebody is right about a game they're right. I'm not gonna dispute that. The undertones get really, really rough though and people not "in the know" with the twitter stuff get a lot of wrong impressions.

Edit: I'm not saying I'm not part of the problem, that would be dumb. These are just my experiences in this mess.

Edited August 12, 2015 by Anne

[TheRealDMac]

Then I guess this is where this conversation ends. No point wasting my time writing a long post if the claims of your post aren't up for debate.

 

They're certainly up for debate, but they were meant to encourage discussion among other people, not to give me a chance to debate all of dustloop. I gave my opinion, and you basically said my opinion was wrong. I don't want to get into the "who's right and who's wrong" thing, that doesn't feel productive and I'm already fatigued.

Edited August 13, 2015 by TheRealDMac

[Shadowfury333]

 

Idk what it is, but people take their wins and losses online or in casuals super seriously, and any criticism at them or Ls they take seem to hit hard.

While I'm not a P4A player (except in tournament casuals, no Playstation consoles), when I get like this (moreso in Skullgirls), it's because I assume that people are going to be that stereotypically malicious player. Basically, it's not the losing that's so hard; it's the general assumption, built by those who do engage others in a toxic way, that the loss and criticism is basically the end of your social standing. So why not lash out? By that point, it is assumed that there's nothing else that could destroy one's standing in the group, so controlling emotions feels like a waste of time.

Of course, it's also quite embarrassing (at least with Skullgirls) when it turns out that no-one is like that, and you've just gotten angry over nothing. It would be like if you hallucinated that everyone around you was a hungry wolf ready to tear out your throat at the first visible sign of weakness, rather than a rational human being who really has better things to worry about than your results in a video game.

Edited August 13, 2015 by Shadowfury333

[Anne]

 

Of course, it's also quite embarrassing (at least with Skullgirls) when it turns out that no-one is like that, and you've just gotten angry over nothing. It would be like if you hallucinated that everyone around you was a hungry wolf ready to tear out your throat at the first visible sign of weakness, rather than a rational human being who really has better things to worry about than your results in a video game.

I will say that is not an unreasonable thing. I have a condition where sometimes my view of events is a bit warped if certain parts of my anxiety are peaking. A lot of people in gaming might have stuff going on, and it's inconsiderate of me to not think of it. It's hard to empathize with sheer anger and nasty feelings flying out though, we should probably communicate better and take less offense to things unless we know the whole story. People are weird, I've been on both ends of this.