Digital Watches

So what's to stop the makoto from buffering the input during the hitfreeze, and getting it consistently? Does the ability to do that make the game worse? If so, the game is already worse. Situations you're describing are not a serious part of high-level play because it's the exact kind of thing that people who have practiced enough don't have to deal with. But it's also a completely non-interactive element because of that. If I sat home and practiced doing the input fast enough to finish it before the buffer window was over, I could easily choose to block or DP as the situation demanded, and this is not actually a skill level it's particularly hard to attain. Does getting good at the game make the game less interesting? Your argument would say that it does. I don't particularly object to DPs having the motion that they do, because it's kind of a trivial barrier and we'd run out of inputs or do things more accidentally if they were much simpler than that (Though quarter circles aren't bad as DP inputs either), but it's silly to say that the execution barrier is adding something to the game when anyone can just practice enough to not deal with it. There are some choices that make sense, or are reasonable compromises on this issue, and I don't think we should rigorously go through and try to eliminate everything some people have a hard time doing. But if we can for sure say that there's no compromise being made, easier is better.

Sym: I've yet to hear your reasoning for why something that isn't an interaction between the two players should be a gameplay focus. You've re-stated your perspective several times, but you've never explained your reasoning. You say something being strong should make it hard to execute. Why is that worthwhile? What does it add to the game? Should blocking be made harder, since it's the strongest gameplay mechanic in fighters? Mac: I would agree, except that there are people who can and do do that under pressure. Consistently. It's really straight up just a matter of practice. Like I said, I'm glad to practice whatever thing I need to in order to be able to play a given game, but that doesn't mean it's inherently a good thing that it exists. It just means that the people who can actually make their character do the things they want them to do will have a smaller pool of people who can also do that to play against. It means that there will be less people who can play the game at a higher level, and therefore that there will be competition-plateaus at which good players stop improving because the people they're playing haven't even gotten past the minimum entry barrier to play at that level. I'm not saying we should strive to get rid of all execution barriers, because that's impossible and some execution barriers are worthwhile (Like blocking and parrying quickly), but certainly we can agree that there's no particular interesting thing happening because of like, KoF-style 8246828282828A+B+C commands existing or whatever.

Similarly, being caustic to people who are acting poorly and being loudly dismissive for the purpose of making fun of them may make you feel smart (for some values of "smart") and gain you some twitter followers or whatever (people love drama), but it's a poor way to try to change their behavior, and really only manages to make those people resent you.

Okay well, I wasn't going to chime in on this "are execution barriers inherently good" debate heavily because it's kind of a tangent, but since people seem to want to talk about it, and I have a pretty strong opinion on the subject... While it may be that some people like things to be challenging for being challenging's sake, I disagree heavily that unnecessary execution difficulty adds anything of value to fighting games. This is not to say that I think we should get rid of things that are hard, or resent games for having hard things you can do in them. After all, a lot of things are hard because their usage is an edge-case that the developers didn't intentionally build into the controls of the game. Some things are also hard because they involve predicting or reacting to the opponent quickly, which is interesting from a gameplay perspective. However, when there's a situation where some control-scheme thing can be made easier to do without changing any interactions between players, it should always be done. Every damn time. I'd argue that this does not diminish the challenge of playing a fighting game in any way. In many cases, it makes the game harder. It merely eliminates the friction involved in learning how to play the game. Imagine a fighting game where everyone was frame-perfect in their traps and combos. This would in fact, from the perspective of a player, be a harder game, because you would not be getting away with shit because of your opponents' poor execution. When you make it so that the players don't have to spend any attention to make sure they do what they meant to do, they can spend all that attention, focus all their dexterity and reflexes, on making things harder for their opponent. Being able to do a frame-perfect link consistently doesn't mean you can't still delay your attack to mess up your opponent, it just means you always mean to when you do. Whether or not you believe fighting games should be a purely mental game, I should hope you believe that fighting games, and competitive games in general should, fundamentally, be about interplay between two opponents. Along these lines, I would argue that any difficulty you take away from merely being able to do stuff in the game frees up brainpower, attention, and muscle memory to be used against the opponent in interesting ways. I defy you to come up with a counterexample. Obviously there are definitely going to be things you can't make easier and still do what they do, and I'm not advocating changing those things. Microing a ton of units in starcraft in precise ways to spread out the damage among your own forces and concentrate your fire on the opponent is going to always be hard, because any amount of skill you can devote toward that task is directly in competition with your opponent. Blocking an ambiguous mixup is always going to be hard, and should be, even though block is a one-direction command and takes 0 frames to come out. It's difficult because your opponent is deliberately trying to trip you up. I'd even say slashback and other parry mechanics are a grey area, because a lot of the difficulty in doing them is knowing what attack your opponent will be doing and when it will hit you. But executing a combo? Cancelling an attack? Yeah, I'll learn how to do that shit no matter how hard it is, because there's no good reason not to if you want to compete, but I'm not going to complain about it suddenly becoming easier. All I gain from it being harder is bragging rights about a purely manual dexterity task, and less competent people to play against (Which I hope you agree is a bad thing). It's not an interesting component of why I'm able to beat someone at the game. It's just required minutia to get to the point of being able to do the thing I want to do at a given time.

Actually, a lot of people buffer the dash after the input of the special move. It works for the same reason you can TK a move: The input buffer allows special moves to happen a little bit after the directional input has been recognized. To get properties like downward-gekirin or downward-tatami from an airdash, the move needs to happen during the airdash. What that actually means is that the game needs to recognize the button press then, not the directional input. How you input within the window the buffer allows is a matter of preference. For example, for backward IAD gekirin, I use 214754K, but for forwards IAD gekirin, I use 9563214K. It doesn't actually matter how you input it as long as the button is pressed (or released) during the actual airdash animation. For airdash > special specifically, I find that as a general rule of thumb, it's easier for me to airdash first when the move's directional input ends with the opposite direction of the airdash, and buffer the special move's input first when the move's directional input ends with the same direction​ as the airdash.

At Klaige's request, I've moved Klaige's posts on this to a top-level thread so we can have a more focused discussion on this important topic​. We have a new game announced, and when it hits, I hope that everyone here would want a thriving scene of players. That doesn't happen automagically, and we need to talk about what we, as a community, need to do to make that happen.

Hey, people I might be staying with: We should talk over gchat or AIM or something to hammer out details since this is getting to be pretty soon. My email is eshink at gmail dot com and my AIM is available below my avatar.

Honestly I'm of the opinion that any change that can make the game easier without changing the choices players can make in the game is a good thing. Think about it honestly: What strategic choice is being made to play out differently by ramping up or down the execution requirements where it's possible to do so? Do you find it inherently interesting for a player to mess up at a critical moment and lose because of it? But the point is that that's not the issue at hand when it comes to community growth. To everyone ever: Read Klaige's post, and then read it again, and then actually self-assess and think about times you've been a dick to new blood and ways you can improve. People want to do things more when they have positive experiences doing them. It doesn't matter how hard or easy a game it is, more people will play it if there's a positive, inviting community that people like being around. Be encouraging, be friendly, be likable, have fun, and let other people have fun. If you want real competition, you need a thriving scene, and if you want a thriving scene, you need an attitude that makes people want to play games with you. The reputation of a sketchy or insular community is much harder to get past than the difficulty of any game.

It's possible to be competitive without being a dick. Plenty of scenes have strong players and weak players who play each other and enjoy themselves. It's a matter of having some damn social skills and making the social environment inviting even for the people who aren't going to win a lot. There are a lot of game mechanics in GG and other games that are needlessly difficult, sure, but people still play and enjoy games they're not immediately good at. Trying to shift the blame for people becoming disinterested to the game mechanics makes both worse scenes and worse games.

Honestly all you need to appeal to casual players is shiny graphics and anime characters, which we've got, and are in no way themselves a bad thing. I'm not worried that they'll dumb down gameplay until I see evidence they're actually doing that.

Honestly I don't know why people dislike toon-shaded modeled stuff. Generally looks pretty good, and there's no reason it would effect serious changes on the way gameplay is by itself. Plus looking more modern will make more people want to play it. This looks cool.

In addition to a lot of other stuff people have said (Made friends, rekindled interest in fighting games in general), I've also probably gotten better at thinking because of GG and fighting games in general. I'd argue GG has taught me both to think before I act more often, and also has made me better at understanding what other people might be thinking, or at least trying to think about it, at a given time.

Updated first post with some of this.

So I've been busy for a bit but coming back to this thread, I notice a few things we're converging on and would like to update the first post soon so we have something to work with. Basically: I think people generally already agree with what I've defined as advantage and disadvantage, both in the strict sense of actual static difference E.G. on block, and in terms of the harder-to-measure situational difference that can be used to mean having more options in a given frame than the opponent, or, if we want to inject some math into it (which we should whenever possible): having a higher statistical likelihood of winning the exchange (defined as either hitting the opponent or forcing them to block) assuming both players chose randomly out of their possible actions. I realize that no one is literally choosing randomly, but it's a more powerful definition that way, because it means we can quantify it in terms of all possible actions from a given point of the match rather than just the ones we think the players are likely to want to do. This means that our model of play is not confounded by players acting unpredictably, and can still definitively say whether they played an exchange from advantage, neutral, or disadvantage in all cases, at least in theory. It also means we could sit down and look at cancel states, ranges, etc. of a character and make a complete list of all of their options at a given point, and then draw some conclusions based on knowing all possible options (including "waiting and doing nothing this frame"). Might be silly to do so, but it's possible. As for pressure (Which people seem to agree on more than what rushdown is), I'd argue that we do need to narrow the definition people use when talking about pressure for it to be useful to our purposes here. I think the idea of psychological pressure is a good theory as to why the term is used (or in other words the term's etymology), but doesn't constitute a strong operational definition. I do like blockstun as an operational criterion for pressure, but we don't necessarily need to use it if people are iffy on that aspect. What I do think is that we can talk about situations like Nu pressuring someone from long-range, or things like that. That's actually a great strength of an operational definition: Because the term is defined by what can be measured about it, it allows us to talk definitively about uses of the term that might be counter-intuitive to people using the term more loosely. So what I'd say we agree on is that pressure consists of a player who has situational advantage acting in order to maintain situational advantage, limiting the opponent's options and keeping your own options open. If we use the statistical likelihood given random actions criteria, we can even stop there and call it good. What this gives us is the first of a set of terms involving game state transitions. This is an idea I have to give blitz some credit for, because he PMed me with a very good post about it (Not sure why it's not here, but I'll respect his wishes on that). Pressure is then the general name for the "transition" from advantage to advantage, and we can talk about more specific cases of pressure, like okizeme or block strings or offensive footsies, with pressure operationally defined as the general case. Is it cool with everyone if I put these definitions in the first post? Then we can get back to trying to nail down rushdown and stuff.

Aren't like, most if not all japanese tournaments of everything single-elim? It's not really a controversial thing.

@circ: Definining "rushdown" by closing distance is not a bad idea. I also like that the implication of this model is that it's a property of an attack rather than a character or a player (And that the property is inherited by having that kind of attack.) That facilitates a tool-based model of characters, which I like a lot, because it allows us to be more granular in our assessments but also gives us a way to qualify assessments of characters, which can really be seen as kits, or sets of moves. So as an operational definition, could we say rushdown is the use of any attack or sequence of attacks (such as IAD->j.H, or rekkas, or whatever) that also moves the character closer to their opponent? @dime_x: I don't really find drawing a distinction between EG high-low, crossup-based, and throw mixup all that strategically meaningful, because when it comes right down to it, it's basically an implementation detail. Having access to more than one of these games means your opponent has to keep more things in mind, but if I'm sitting there blocking and suddenly get hit by a mixup, what kind of mixup it is is kind of irrelevant to what the state of the game now is. It's information, but it's a methodology, not a concept in and of itself. It's like combos. There are combos with cool properties, and obviously if you play a certain character, it matters what buttons you have to press to do the most damage, or get knockdown, or be burst-safe, or set up a tech trap, but often there isn't really an actual difference in the situation implied by the structure of the combo. When talking about broader concepts, it's what the mixup or the combo accomplishes that matters. However, I do like that you're trying to do what's called duck typing, or defining things by what they do. That's a great way to produce operational definitions.

Man, I'm torn because on the one hand, I really need sleep, but this has generated a lot of discussion, which is good. I'll compromise and try to address what I see as a concern about the premise of this effort. @tataki and a few others: The point is to have terms that are useful. We're not trying to do linguistics or anthropology here. I'm not trying to write the Oxford Fighting Game Dictionary. There are probably plenty of resources that already do that. I know the whole "linguistics are descriptive, not prescriptive" thing. The fighting game community has no shortage of people who want to talk about it, in terms of its culture. I'm proposing a way to talk about fighting games, the games themselves, in a useful, clear, and informative manner that can hopefully bring about actual new information from analysis and discussion. Hella theory fighter goes around with lots of smart people saying very contradictory things and there is no resolution or gold standard because there's no real way to tell precisely what anyone means. You say "just use terms how people use them", but people mean different things in ways that are ill-defined. There comes a point where mere emergent language fails to resolve disputes or produce solid information. That's why there's specialized language used in contexts where the meanings of words have to be well-defined because what they mean actually matters. Legal texts define words in specific ways. These words are usually words people actually use, but they try to use narrow definitions to ensure that precedent can be applied consistently. Scientific fields use terms in specific, operationally defined ways so that if you read a peer-reviewed paper, they can discuss the actual facts of their experiments in terms that always mean the same thing, and can be measured, tested, and falsified. Again, scientific terms often overlap with real words people use, but you can't go backwards and say that means that other usages from normal speech are valid in the scientific context. To use an example people will be familiar with: People go around saying they're "OCD" because they like their bookshelves straight and their houses clean, or because they're grammar nazis, or because they're pedantic about some other minor thing in some other stupid way, or even a lot of things. Generally, almost none of these people would get diagnosed with the serious, crippling, actual psychological disorder that is called OCD (Which actually has way more to do with a concept called "thought-action fusion," intrusive thoughts that cause severe distress, and an irrational belief in ritual alleviation of said thoughts). The DSM, which is basically just a book of operational definitions of disorders for psychiatrists, defines OCD in much narrower ways so that actual trained doctors can make an actual diagnosis. If you look it up in the DSM, you'll notice that their terms are pretty narrow. You'll also notice that even though the DSM is a serious project undertaken by a lot of smart, well-educated experts, there are still disagreements because the human brain is pretty damn complicated and it's a genuinely hard problem to recognize meaningful patterns of behavior or mental function that are problematic and unhealthy, let alone fix them. And compared to some fields, clinical psychology can actually be said to have a pretty loose standard for some of its terminology. Once you want to convey actual meaningful information about complex topics, it becomes necessary to agree on narrow, measurable definitions of words. They may not end up being completely clean like mathematical concepts, because interesting, complicated problems can't always be broken into easy math. But distilling terms into small concepts that are defined by at least somewhat measurable criteria means we can at least get past the phase where all arguments have to end with people agreeing to disagree, because there's no mechanism to even reconcile whether their terms mean the same thing every time, let alone an actual disagreement between people. In other words, using terms people already use is fine, but using them how they use them (IE nebulously and with no way to fact-check them) doesn't suit our purposes here. For the purposes of being tied to measurable criteria, just saying "rushdown" is equivalently useless to saying "close range offense". Neither of those terms have litmus test in and of themselves. And besides, what if we end up defining some equations? Do you really want to write out an equation every time you talk about, for example, centripetal force? We could just as easily agree on a definition that's exact, and then know by consensus that that's what that means in contexts where we have a need for well-defined language.

@Iora: Yeah, "frame traps" I think are an important thing to nail down. Usually when I hear people talk about frame traps, it refers to situations where one player has frame advantage but allows a gap where the opponent can act in some way. The most common one is allowing them to throw out an attack (or "swing") from frame disadvantage, thus effectively dropping the soap. I think that specific situation is best known as a false gap as well. It's a frame trap because it's not really at neutral, and the player doing the trapping is still at actual frame advantage, or at least situational advantage (Maybe that should just be called a trap) So what's a good operational definition for a trap? A binary condition where we can definitively say "That was a trap" or "That was not a trap?" Maybe... a trap is a specific kind of pressure game where one player tricks the other player into attacking from disadvantage. Furthermore, A frame trap is a trap performed from frame advantage (As opposed to a more ambiguous advantage state) How does that sound?

@Celerity: I like the general idea of how you're defining a "rushdown character" because if we're going by a strict definition, we can do stuff like argue from high-level matches whether this is the way a character is being played. Especially because we can (in theory) make arguments like "In (insert recent tournament, E.G. A-Cho or Final Round) we can identify that in matches where (x character) won, we can identify them successfully converting a rushdown attempt into pressure/damage, whereas in matches where they lost, we see them still trying to transition but failing (IE being hit out of their attempt, or succeeding the rushdown but losing their pressure and not getting anything out of it, etc). We can conclude that this character was being played as a rushdown character." If we can then also point out situations where this occurs, do silly stuff like literally count them and compare them to similar statistics about other characters/players, etc, we can at least shift our disagreement to some facts about real games rather than some fuzzy ideas about "offense-y-ness". I think this is a good definition, although we should write it out concisely with a way to measure it. @Reaver: I don't think offense and defense as you're describing them there are very useful. A definition that is too inclusive tells you as much information as a definition that includes nothing. In the case of trying to determine whether someone is "Forced to guess", I'd argue that depending on what you mean by that, you're either describing too many or too few situations, depending on how you define "forced", "guess", etc. Is someone forced to guess if they're attacking someone with a DP? After all, the person with the DP can DP or block. I'd argue that both players are sort of "guessing" (in that they don't have perfect information on what the opponent will do) at all times, and since this information they don't have is important, we could argue that they are almost always "forced" to do so (Again, by some definition of "forced" that I'm just assuming you're using. This ambiguity itself is telling). On the other hand, you could also say that a player is only "guessing" when there's explicitly an ambiguous situation, where the character they're fighting has two or more equivalently available and unreactable options that have to be defended against differently (What many people describe as "mixup"). Which is it? Can we really describe matches clearly in these terms? Where does the distinction lie, and how can we measure it reliably, or at least settle arguments about it based on facts we can extract from just watching the match (as opposed to reading the players' minds)? Also: Are you proposing that we use "rushdown" as an explicitly derogatory term? By the definitions you've mentioned, a player that always assumes that they are on offense is pretty much a bad player. Such a person is by definition poor at situational awareness, and if they are assuming that they are always "forcing the opponent to guess" as opposed to ever having to "guess and defend accordingly," they are (setting aside that I still don't necessarily know what's going on in the match by talking about it in these terms) probably just playing poorly and losing if they're against someone who does not have this problem. Do we have a use for operationally-derogatory terms? Possibly. I don't think that's what people want to mean when they say "rushdown" though. As an aside, while our discussions might get detailed, our definitions should actually be simple. It's easy to string lots of smaller concepts together to talk about complex concepts, but defining words in complex terms is just a headache, and doesn't tend to produce useful definitions. Try something simple, measurable, and that excludes more than it includes within the domain of discourse.

The problem I have with definitions like that (and you should too) isn't anything on the order of them being inaccurate terms. No, I'm saying that even when they are considered accurate, their accuracy is unimportant, because they are not usefully descriptive terms. The only discussion they'll produce when there's a conflict is a lot of florid prose where a bunch of them get strung together and no information is exchanged. That's why I like the idea of having operational definitions for these terms. I don't want to "just suddenly change years of fighting game terms," and in fact I am specifically trying to avoid changing terms for things as much as possible, and trying to find operational definitions that fit some interpretations of terms that may already exist. I'm trying to encourage us to form more of a solidified consensus on measurable things that these terms mean so that we can speak clearly to each other, and if we need to, creating new terms to describe situations or concepts that do not have an established term but exist within whatever conceptual framework we map this terminology to. Operational definitions in science are often uses of a word used by the lay population in much broader ways, co-opted to serve as useful definitions for people actually doing research in the field or who actually need to exchange meaningful information about it. I'm not proposing we go proselytize on SRK and be pedantic in every region thread here about using terms loosely, just that we should define a higher standard for serious attempts to exchange and discuss information about gameplay so we can actually use all these concepts to do so in a way that gets anything done. So hopefully that's clear. That said, rushdown is a pretty problematic term because it's used very interchangeably with "pressure" and sometimes even "mixup" by a lot of people, as well as the simple act of using forward dashes, as well as to refer to characters that do big combos, as well as to justify an artificial class of characters that can include almost any character depending on who you ask in at least Guilty Gear... You see my point. I could go on about how this term is ambiguous, doesn't convey much information (besides the term itself and some vague ideas about being "offense-y" in general) to new players, doesn't allow much useful exchange of information between knowledgeable players, especially ones who disagree about something concerning "rushdown." So it's probably useful to design our terminology around this a little bit, so that instead of a clusterfuck of at-best-overlapping at-worst-equivalent terms about offense, we have useful words that mean things that we can reason about and that we all understand and agree that they mean. Proposal: Pressure refers to the acts done to try to maintain situational advantage from the position of situational advantage. (In other words, I'm now using the term more broadly than I previously proposed, but no less operationally.) This means that games like okizeme, blockstrings, and true frame traps are pressure games, as are the specific situation of burst baits, for example. (Well, actually it would mean that if I could operationally define those, which I plan to, but I'm just giving you examples of how this classification better fits what people currently use than my previous proposed usage). It means that footsies and pressure aren't mutually exclusive, and can be talked about in the same context, but with it clear which one is which (Note: The two coming up at once is a common situation in Guilty Gear). It also means that we can safely say that someone who is blocking isn't playing a pressure game on the opponent (okay, maybe sometimes we can say Baiken is, but like I've said a zillion times, she's really weird​) Rushdown refers to any attempt to move the game state (Or "match flow" from my examples before, but I like poon's term for this) from neutral to a pressure game (for you). Again we have some useful properties with this term. We can now talk about specific points in a game that are strictly "rushdown". We can talk about "successful" or "unsuccessful" rushdowns. It's also useful for excluding some situations. With this narrow criterion for the term, suddenly not all offense is rushdown. We can exclude reversalsfrom rushdown (Which most players would anyway) even though reversals are an offensive play. Pressure also isn't rushdown now. In fact, by the definitions I've just proposed, pressure is never rushdown and vice versa. But we can talk about situations where a player mistook pressure for rushdown, meaning they did not know they were already at disadvantage (I use this example because it happens a lot in real matches). Now we know when a dash is rushdown and when it's not in some very definite terms. So I think operationally defining things is useful and completely necessary for meaningful discourse. Hopefully I can at least convince you of that, if not even any of the actual specific definitions I'm proposing just yet.

@Star: Operational definition is a specific term that means a specific thing, and I'm advocating the use of actual operational definitions, not just mere terms. Fortunately, it's a well-defined term that has its own Wikipedia article and everything, so if it confuses you, you can read up on what it means. That kind of clarity and usefulness is what we're striving for. Also: I don't know where you get the idea that I'm going to hand out infractions for disagreeing with me, but I'm not, and that would be stupid. It'd be good if you'd keep your disagreement constructive, but infractions are for actual bad behavior defined in rules of the forums. Anyway, here are some proposed attempts to operationally define some of the specific gameplay terms I used in that article, to start us off: Frame advantage is any positive static difference. The notation used to describe this state is +(number). Again, in any situation where this doesn't refer to a single attack being blocked by a normal guard, that should be specified. Relatedly, frame disadvantage is the same thing with any negative number, and frame neutral should refer to a static difference of zero. These terms are extremely narrow, use them accordingly. Situational advantage is the broader concept of having more or more powerful options than the other character given all of the factors at play in a given span of time, including but not limited to range, actual frame advantage, and of course, what moves both characters have access to. When referring to a character being at advantage, at disadvantage, or at neutral, this is the term being invoked. Use the +/- notation to specifically refer to actual static difference. This is hard to measure, but it's theoretically possible with a lot of detailed information on hitboxes and frame data. Pressure is any situation in a fighting game in which one character is specifically in blockstun and the other is at situational advantage. Note that because of the way chains and other cancel properties work, this often does not mean that the opponent is strictly at frame advantage in an airdashing fighter.

Mynus brought up a good point about that article I just put up, which is that we should have an actual thread to foster some actual debate about what operational definitions we should use to talk about Guilty Gear, airdash fighters, and fighting games in general. I think Dustloop is as good a place as any to curate a glossary of terms that are well-defined, consistent, and useful. This will help us to communicate clearly about gameplay concepts, allowing the forum to be an even better source of information and discussion on the games we discuss here than it already is. Operational definitions are a matter of community consensus. We can eventually use the wiki to keep a record of terms we can agree on. But for now, let's have a thread about it. I'm going to post some terms I think are useful in a separate post, since what I'm not trying to do here is try to force people to use terms I personally like. But I am going to outline some guidelines for what to consider when agreeing on the definition of a term. An operational definition needs to be at least somewhat measurable. The very best kind uses math, but where that's not possible, it should at least have a built-in metric of some kind so that if people disagree, they can argue with facts and data, and we can reasonably expect there to be a correct answer in theory, even if in practice an agreement isn't ever reached. You should define terms with a test that defines how they can be measured. An operational definition needs to be consistent. Terms that we have operationally defined need to mean the same thing every time. Obviously what the overall implication of something is can be context-sensitive, but the terms themselves need a 1-to-1 correspondence to other uses of the term. An operational definition ought to be useful. The existence of the term should make discussion clearer and should refer to something that comes up enough that we actually need a definite word for it. Operational definitions of more complex concepts can and should be built, where possible, from other terms we've operationally defined. This allows us to have usefulness, consistency, and measurability all the way down. As such, I'm going to start our Glossary of Terms with an operational definition that we all already (hopefully) use consistently: Static Difference: The number of frames of stun an attack causes, minus the number of frames the move takes to recover. In its normal use, static difference refers to this statistic in the specific situation of the attack connecting on its first active frame and being blocked by a normal standing guard. (Other cases of static difference, such as after the attack is instant blocked, should be specifically stated.) Frame Advantage/Disadvantage/Neutral: The three possible states a player can be in in terms of strict static difference. The accepted notation is to say that someone is "+/- x" and sometimes E.G. "on block", or "on hit" etc., where x is the difference in number of frames before each player can act. Thus, a player at +2 can act 2 frames before her opponent can. Situational Advantage/Disadvantage/Neutral: The statistical likelihood at a given frame that, given a random choice of the available actions, one player will win an exchange (defined as connecting with an attack). Analogous to static difference but more complicated, as it includes ranges, invulnerability, etc. A player can be at situational advantage and frame disadvantage, but it is less likely. Transition Model of Fighting Games: A model of fighting games that talks about gameplay in terms of transitions between situational game states, of the form "S1 -> S2" E.G. "SA -> SN" a move from situational advantage to situational neutral. (Props to blitz on this one) Pressure: Actions taken by a player at situational advantage in order to remain at situational advantage. Or, in transition model notation (SA -> SA). I'll keep stuff we seem to have reached a consensus on in this top post. As previously stated, any terms I'm personally coining, or offering a more (in my opinion) narrow or operational definition of than is currently typically used, will be posted as suggestions for community comment. I encourage anyone who wants to to contribute terms to be discussed here, and to criticize or voice support for any definitions that have been proposed.

As requested: Real Advice™on understanding characters, playstyles, and the lingo used to describe them: Based on the number of threads about this topic, the character select screen seems to represent the bulk of the challenge and angst people face when playing Guilty Gear, and given the amount of variation and different suggestions the exact same description can cause people to give in such threads, I think it's worthwhile to talk about what the fuck anyone means when they talk about character playstyles. I'm aware everyone seems to have a vague sense of what a "rushdown" character is, but it's really clear that some of these terms are kind of fuzzy, and even the ones that we have kind of a consensus for are themselves defined in pretty loose, non-operational ways. So I'm going to make an effort right now to nail down some actual metrics we can use to talk about this because it's more productive than finding these threads vaguely annoying every time they pop up. So here goes. Advantage and Disadvantage: You occasionally hear fighting games discussed in terms like "frame advantage" or "+/- x on block". There's a section in the frame data that's called static difference (or SD). This concept is more obvious in 3D fighters and old-school-style 2D fighters (IE not airdashers) than it is in Guilty Gear and the like, and so you hear intermediate players talking about it there, even though I'd argue it's no less important. But this is the most quantifiable and arguably the most important part of what makes a character's playstyle in Guilty Gear, and I think all our playstyle terms can be defined from aspects of this metric. Being "at frame advantage" means, at its simplest, being able to act in fewer frames than the opponent. In frame data this is applied to how much stun a move puts the other player in. Everyone knows this. But the broader concept of being "at advantage" has a few more variables. In Guilty Gear, you have 0-frame throws. If you're in throw range, the opponent being at even -1 after you block a move means you get to punish them. Having a faster attack than the opponent has puts you at advantage, all else being equal. Having a faster attack at the range at which you're currently fighting puts you at advantage, all else being equal. It's hard to quantify everything, but with frame advantage, we can actually do math and figure out who is at an advantage at any given point in a match, if we wanted to. If we paused the match and looked at all the frame data and checked some hitboxes and did some calculations, we could figure out that point who is at advantage at any given time. After a hit. At neutral. At any range. Obviously you're not going to do this for every match, but it's an interesting way to watch one if you have some time on your hands. But advantage isn't static, nor is it monotonically deterministic. Games between good players don't always end with one player getting advantage and then keeping it and winning. A lot of the interplay of fighting games comes from people playing from disadvantage. Or moving around each other trying to gain advantage. If you're playing fighting games and don't know this concept, you're doing it wrong. If you do know it, you probably don't think about it enough when you're playing. I know I probably don't. It's very important. Static Difference as Situations: Once you've got a solid idea of what advantage and disadvantage are, then we can talk about situations that arise in fighting games. I'd argue there are only two kinds of situations, and the rest are just subsets of them. There are neutral situations, and there are non-neutral situations. This sounds like an oversimplification but it's a very useful simplification. There's a lot of variety in how these situations work and how they can play out. I'll rattle off some examples so you believe me, and to establish context for some other terms people use. A pressure game is a non-neutral situation where one character is at advantage and the other character is in blockstun. For the player at advantage, pressure games consist of keeping that advantage, using ambiguity to keep the opponent from recognizing or at least capitalizing on the situation when the player loses advantage ("a pressure reset"), and trying to break the opponent's defense and get their damage ("mixup"). In addition to mixups like highs versus lows, throws, crossups, and the like, people talk about false gap mixups refer to situations where the player at advantage uses a moment that looks like a pressure reset to bait the opponent into acting predictably, or even bait them into fighting from disadvantage. People who don't think about the game in terms of static difference eat false gap mixups all day, often without knowing why they're losing. A zoning game is a neutral game where players use the threat of the attacks they can do at a given range to keep the opponent from attacking. Within zoning games, there are a lot of what people call footsies, which are games in which one player attempts to attack the other, and the other attempts to beat the swing. The players, if they're thinking about it, are betting that acting where and when they did puts them at advantage, or are trying to predict the other player and fight them from disadvantage, usually things like invulnerability or guard points help with this. Zoning can also involve characters moving around trying to get into a position where they're at advantage, or trying to bait the opponent into attacking at a bad time or predictably. In a game with chains and good movement options, zoning games are fast and dynamic, and the winner tends to get to move into pressure, a combo, or okizeme quickly. This does not mean they aren't an important part of how those game work. People often say there aren't footsies in Guilty Gear. Those people are often bad. Being safe is a neutral game where one player has done something to be at frame neutral or frame disadvantage, but out of range or not at enough disadvantage that the opponent can really capitalize on it. This can happen during a pressure reset, or from another neutral game, or from a semi-unsuccessful reversal (Not unsuccessful enough that they get punished or thrown in pressure, obviously). Okizeme is a non-neutral game where one player is at disadvantage because they're knocked down, giving the other player somewhere around 30-40 frames to set up an attack. Clashes are a neutral game where both players have equal opportunity to act from the clash. Combos are a non-neutral game where one player has landed a hit and is doing "guaranteed" damage to an opponent (You know, unless they have a burst). Getting around or baiting bursts, baiting out techs, attempting resets, and choosing between knockdown, pressure, and damage are important considerations in combos, and involve interplay between opponents. You get the idea. I think this is a useful way to think about fighting games. It's especially useful for defining play styles in ways that are meaningful instead of stupid. Character Playstyles are About Situations: "God Watches, all this shit is obvious. What does this have to do with whether I should pick up Venom or ABA?" Okay imaginary voice of OP, I'm getting to it, calm your tits. There are a ton of terms people use to describe characters, like "rushdown" or "zoning" or whatever, but these are usually kind of poor, reductive descriptions of how a character plays. A lot of them are either stupid terms or used stupidly a lot. I'm not sure which. Basically, I'm proposing a way to talk about this that's clear and has an operational definition that everyone can agree on and, if there are disagreements, can be used to argue with math or at least some kind of pseudo-objective measure, rather than just saying vague terms that mean other vague terms at each other. There are only two fundamental kinds of situation in fighting games, but there are three kinds of situations a character can be in. At advantage, at disadvantage, and at neutral.Almost any fighting game that's any good has characters dealing with these situations all the time. Guilty Gear in particular has a lot of situational fluidity, with tools like the different blocks, bursts, fast throws, and DAAs to change up the situation at unexpected times. So in reality everyone rushes down, everyone blocks, everyone plays okizeme, everyone plays wakeup, everyone zones. Being bad at any of these things will hurt you no matter what character you're playing. To get an idea of how a character plays, the main thing to talk about is when they are in these situations, which they are good at being in, and which they are in most of the time. A character with a good reversal is better at fighting from disadvantage than a character without one. They have a tool that can more easily be used to exploit a small gap at an unpredictable time. It doesn't mean they should always try to reversal, but it does mean that they have that option, and it can be used unpredictably. A character with fast, chainable, jump-cancellable normals and gap closers tends to be good at keeping an advantage. They can keep an advantage for a long time, and if the player is good at pressure game, they will probably land some damage. Guilty Gear specifically rewards keeping up a long pressure game into a good hit confirm with extra damage, because of the guard bar. If you don't pay attention to the guard bar, you're doing it wrong. A character with fast, visually-ambiguous mixup tends to be good at fighting from an advantage. Millia isn't great at keeping up pressure for a long time compared to a lot of characters, but when she has advantage, she is very hard to read. A character with good hitboxes from different ranges, or with fast moves, or with pseudo-invulnerable moves like a good 6P are good at winning neutral games. Faust has a lot of big, disjoint hitboxes, weird invulnerability, and basically ways to beat things he's predicted or has time to react to. But Guilty Gear is a complex game with a lot of weird characters. What a given character does is hard to put in one category. For example: Jam is considered by many to be a "rushdown" character. While her mixup isn't super-ambiguous compared to E.G. Millia, she has a lot of ways to keep her pressure up and false gap people to death, and high-damage doesn't hurt either. She's also a zoning character. Her neutral game is very advantageous compared to similarly low-range characters, and you can keep people scared of her ranges on their approach with tools like 2S, FB puffball, and her 6P. Jam can fight pretty effectively from neutral and advantage. She's not terrible at fighting from disadvantage either, with tools like a parry, a decent (not great) DP, and sometimes FB puffball again. She's not as dangerous in any of these situations as some characters, but she has ways to do each of them more effectively than a lot of characters. Venom is what Melty Blood players call a "morphing" character. Good Venoms will often play defensively and fish for neutral hits until they can get set up or land something, and then they stick to the opponent and keep up pressure. Venom needs some set up to get to the point where he's good at fighting from advantage, but once he gets going it's really hard to stop him. Baiken doesn't so much fight from disadvantage as change what it means for her to be at disadvantage. Many of her moves are available instantly from blockstun, and their startup happens in hitpause, meaning she is actually fighting at advantage on block a lot of the time. Her zoning game is above-average too, because she has tools with large, disjointed hitboxes, to make it scary to approach her, but not as scary as for example Ky or Faust. When it comes right down to it, if I had to say it in one word, the majority of Guilty Gear characters fall in the aforementioned "Morphing" character bucket, with a few "pressure-specialized" characters and like one or two "zoning-specialized" or "reversal-specialized" characters mixed in. My point is that these terms are not very useful descriptions of what a character actually does. Most characters don't neatly fit into these buckets. Understanding advantage, reading frame data, watching matches, and best of all, actually trying a few characters out against good players, will tell you actual information. Fuzzy words like "rushdown character" will not. TL;DR Our terminology for playstyles sucks, we should use something more definable. I've attempted to lay out a way to do so. If you're having trouble at the character select screen, you can go think really hard about it and watch matches, or you can hit random and learn a character by playing them. You should actually do both. If anyone disagrees with something I'm saying or would like to weigh in for some other reason, please do.

I've gotta apologize here, because I forgot for a second that this was a "help me pick a character" thread. As such I retract my previous comment, and replace it with the following advice: Pick any character and play them. There might be a character that's better for you, but you're going to suck at every character at first, and it might be frustrating, and you might switch at some point, but the only way to really get to know how a character plays is to play them, and play against them, and get experienced at the game. Even the really knowledgeable people aren't going to really be able to accurately predict what you'll be good at and have fun with.

The character that best fits what you're talking about is definitely ABA. However, ABA has a few quirks that make her a bit steep to learn, so if you want an easier time, pick up Jam. She's not exactly the kind of rushdown character you're talking about, but she can switch up her game a lot more easily than most characters, and you get access to good damage and good options with her earlier in the learning curve than a lot of characters (I don't like calling characters easy, but Jam gets to intermediate level fast. Of course, if your execution isn't tight, you'll have a tough time with her high level stuff)Edit: Er said that wrong.