Essay

I've been trying more of the 2P tick throws you suggested, Bob, and I found it especially useful for timing tick throws after blocked notes. I'm a little more hesitant to use it after a wiffing j.H on people I've "scared them into blocking" because a common reaction around here to not being in blockstun as I'm hitting the ground seems to be "OMG mash throw". Redashing and counterhitting people's defensive throws can discourage them, if this is the case, as well as playing around with the rhythm and method of your approach. Otherwise, has anyone else thought at all about this: 41236H jc(9)... j.D~FD~j.S? That's j.D-FD-cancelling late out of your forward-jump-cancelled H.Stroke and immediately coming down with j.S. (There's a mouthful.) You can time it so that the j.S both juggles on the stroke hitting (follow up with 5P, maybe 5K) and would still put the opponent back in blockstun otherwise. It's probably quirky in how it reacts with people's air hurtboxes, but what isn't with this character?

Professional SFIV players can not hit true just-frame links with macro bug levels of consistency. In that game, plinking and blinking effectively reduce the majority of 1-frame links to 2-frame links (which are twice as likely to succeed. Two times.) If you watched Evo top 8 this year you saw Sako, who most regard as the poster boy "Execution God" of the scene drop more than 50% of the jab links he attempted, and he most certainly does not near 100% accuracy at his best, even in his old signature games like Vampire Savior.

Scarry realisation you just made me have: it's currently the other way around here. xD

Thank you for bringing up Baiken, I haven't understood how she has been sneaking under the radar of discussion here. Without the macro glitch, immediately just-frame countering a blocked move tends to require her to commit to a button with "parry timing" before she can react to a block, no? (This would result in a normal coming out if anything goes wrong.) With the macro glitch, the commitment to a button is taken away, and, like you said, she only ends up flashing FD a bunch. After being hard punished for letting her simply block a normal, how wouldn't this act of flashing FD at her opponent alone completely warp and alter the neutral game against her, discouraging pressure like never before? Wouldn't the only moves that could bait this be level 1 moves whose Active + Recovery frames add up to less than 11? That alone completely warps the majority of characters' effective footsie distance against Baiken. I also want to take issue with the idea of 30% of competitive Guilty Gear players playing on pad, if only because it differs drastically from what I have seen in my region. (I say "competitive" meaning players who might come out to tournaments and gatherings, for whom a competitive ban effects.) In the last year, I have split my time between two cities with healthy GG scenes, Ottawa and Montreal, and have been introduced to at least 60 who play GG enough that they get something out of gathers. Between these two cities, I have met 6, maybe 7, pad players (circa. 10% here). This is with community-pillar Rhannmah repping macro-free pad I-no with max-damage combos, and, not to flatter him, but clearly being looked up to and inspiring other pad players in Montreal. Still only about 10% pad players. I don't mean to nitpit your figures; just taking the opportunity to present data from the field.

You seem to have not noticed several good posts in the last day or two. :/ Yeah, a bit controversial. There's no reason to ignore the entire Japanese side of our community and the most ambitious of us who actually work their asses off to make it to Japan to play in arcades (see my post #145 for a current example, which you seem to have not noticed). There's also no reason to assume that it is in anyway difficult to explain this issue to the "new blood". I'm not sure how in touch you are with the aspirant GG players in your region, but the dozen or so of newer players I've dealt with lately tend to come in already accepting that this game is "legit" in the challenge it will provide, but also rewarding for the sense of accomplishment it can foster. You really should present this evidence, because it looks as if you have been misinformed, or misinterpreted something along the way. I've seen players hyped up as absolute execution gods, who can, yes, hit 1-frame links with higher accuracy than the norm. At no point, however, do they approach the levels of "high accuracy" that the macro glitch would allow for. It looked as if you were under the impression that you'd still have to time the directional input with just-frame timing, but this is not the case. The way Guilty Gear's input buffer system is weighted, directional inputs linger long enough that the macro glitch can save incredible amounts of timing, not to mention focus. (You know, focus: that limited commodity that has a habit of deciding tournaments.)

10/10 on the title. I had better not be the only one who can appreciate the K-1 GP and puroresu aesthetics this game is now up to its neck in.

Sick. Does this mean that there's an extra monitor kicking around there if I did bring a 3rd console? You know, if we ever wanted to reach untold new levels of excessiveness? Oh, was that your program? I had a friend in 3rd and 4th year who went through all that. Sounded exhausting, but I think it paid off. Good luck.

Well, if you hold turbo with Baiken and your guard counter fails to come out, you're risking getting counter-hit. Hold a macro and try it and at worst you do nothing! The turbo setting on most popular sticks doesn't repeat at 1/60 of a second either.... Clearly turbo is the lesser of two evils, and should be unbanned while we're at it! Seriously though, I agree completely. It's in line with using turbo. A turbo-allowed tournament would be just as disadvantageous to a PS3 pad-player, as a macro-bug-allowed tournament would be towards the GG fanatic who custom-built his stick to the 5-button configuration with the respect button off to the side.

Would that work well with DOT? If the macro is repeating the S-input, I think you're going to get S.Dandy Step before you complete the 632146 input. This glitch might not help every character equally due to the way some characters' inputs overlap.

I can't agree with this logic. This isn't some Platonic ideal we're talking about where the only thing that matters is the final abstraction. Everything that is conceivably possible in this game doesn't just weigh in equally on the meta. We're talking about a game where execution is part of how we calculate risk and reward. We're talking about a game as the community plays it, not as it imagines it could be played. I don't know about your local GG scene, but a player from mine is going as far as moving to Kyoto next week where he fully intends to try and compete at A-cho. He is interested in this because this is an international game, with an international standard and community. He shouldn't have to play one game when visiting Japan and a completely different one when in Canada. Anything but a full ban on this macro risks fragmenting the community and de-standardizing the experience.

Might be a no-go for me Friday. I'll have company from out of town. I should be good for Gonq tomorrow though. I was going to say that at least he timer-scammed-away some of Iori's recoverable health, but then I noticed that that was Ash on anchor.

Thought of the day: Macro Justice mirrors will kill all the hype this game built up for its viewerbase. So far here it's devolving into the first Justice who gets advantage locking the other down with alternating K and S missiles which are uninterruptable for an eternity until the defending Justice builds enough meter for the invulnerable super. Then players alternate back and forth "strategically" until supers are spent at which point the missiles start back up again and the match is feasibly decided if it doesn't manage to linger on to another set of supers. Do we really expect people to watch this paceless shit? Because these mirrors are going to become very common very fast....

Looks like the same deal for Algonquin as last week wrt Dev and I coming with set-ups. Circa 7PM is most likely. I'm definitely GG-starved at the moment, and looking forward to it.

If we're not banning the macro glitch, I'm playing Baiken or Justice. :3 That said, I'd test but I don't have a second PS3 controller. EDIT: Let me try sitting around vs. CPU and see if he'll do it. MOAR EDITS: First, I've come to the conclusion that for a punish that tight, the macro glitch isn't viable because once you're blocking, holding the macro (even without back) will make you FD and add frames on to your block. Second, now that you got me curious, I can confirm from training mode that Skullcrusher is not -12, and I'm skeptical that the TK'd version could ever be -7. At my best attempts at TK'ing the air version, it was always at least -8 (evidenced by being able to punish sometimes for the counter hit with A.B.A's normal 2S, but never her Moronha f./cl.S. As for the grounded version... also -8 on standing block, tested with the same punishes. (It'd be -7 from crouching block though. All of the frame advantage and static difference in the wiki better not have been calculated from crouching block....)

If you're looking for GG, just keep in mind we probably won't get there with our +R setups until circa 7PM. See you all there!

Back in the good old days (lol) it would be as early as 5, but Bruce had a bunch of Gaming Ottawa's setups stored right there on campus. I'm probably not coming that early though, so I don't know what the deal is yet. Details to follow.

I really really really want to make this happen.

I think they took a vote in the SRK thread, and Thursday won by popular demand. My understanding was that it starts this week. I'm probably down for bringing a console, or even more if I can pick up Rigel or someone from west of the college to help me carry stuff inside. Might have to contribute less if it's raining though.

Bliss.

Pardon the back-to-back posts, but there's one Zappa change that I've noticed that I don't really understand yet. Maybe someone else knows how this works: Sometimes, when I attempt the 236D Ghost Toss in neutral, only the forward and downward ghosts will launch, even though I have all three ghosts on me. I've tried a bunch of different inputs in training mode in order to replicate this, but haven't been successful. It only seems to happen to me in the middle of a match. FML xD Anyone know what is up with this? Usually when I input 236D, I'm banking on that upward Ghost coming out, and I've lost a few matches because of it now.

I'm not really sure what's optimal, but I just tested this and it works. Because the Dog has standardized pushback on 6D and 4DD, it's a little more rare for it to be in range of 8D when the opponent's cornered, but you can easily set it up. If the Dog is behind the opponent and you're a half-screen away, you can also 8D > 6D and easily catch the opponent coming at you through the air with 5P > c.S jc. etc... before they can tech.

Ah yes, this was annoying the hell out of me last time I played. :/

If I VCL high enough in the air that VCL recovers and then I hit the ground, I have absolutely no landing recovery, but if I do it at any of the heights where the recovery wears off, I feel like I have the same static recovery on landing that the ground version has. That's just going by feel, but my hunch is that it's still Landing+13 on recovery, but only if it doesn't first recover in the air. Maybe the recovery's something like: 11 frames OR Landing+13. Whatever the case, this will make it a little less risky to zone with VCL high in the air. From anything higher than peak normal jump you can double-jump or airdash after (depending what you used to get that high in the first place), pretty much any special will combo versus air hit, and Fortissimo will pick up from a grounded hit. New gimmick of the month: Wiff a high VCL on someone who thinks there'd be landing recovery and FB.Dive or Fortissimo through their approach.

Dev told me he was all for hosting Saturday. I'll try and show up in the early afternoon with the second setup, though I'll have to head out with it in the early evening.

Oh yeah, Rhannmah brought something to my attention that could use some fixing in the wiki and frame data. There is now clearly a difference in the recovery of air VCL between AC and +R that needs to be reflected. In +R, VCL can recover in the air, allowing us to do two VCL's from super-jump height, or even three from FB.Dive height, before hitting the ground. Compare this to AC, where you only get one, and then everything is locked out until after hitting the ground. As such, it's clearly lost its old "Landing+13" recovery in the transition to +R. I'm curious if the mook has the proper recovery data. You should check it out, mynus.