Digital Watches

IIRC there's one other person who posts here in Eugene (Chrome Homura) and also a few folks in Salem who play. If I can get a ride from someone, I'm definitely down to play in Salem if more people are congregating there.

I love how most of these theory-fighter solutions rely both on people being extremely inexperienced and them assuming you're extremely inexperienced. I have never seen a good player who will reliably "lose concentration" just because they're in a combo, especially a Guilty Gear player. If all that you're saying is that you should be thinking about mixing up your opponent during a combo, I agree and we can leave it at that. However, it sounds like you honestly think that getting combo'd puts anyone worth their salt in some kind of micro-coma that makes them incapable of concentrating for the full continuous 2 minutes or so required to play any match in a fighting game. In case you're unfamiliar with the metagame most people are playing in almost every fighting game ever, Oki is a real thing, and knocking the opponent down has certain advantages. Most of the time, you have a limited set of options from grounded, these being pretty much "invincible or instant things you can do in one move with no control over the positioning". Sure, you can guess right and win against something risky they tried, but they have a good 40 or so frames to set up something that's safe, ambiguous, or just straight up goes through any options you might be trying. By doing anything but blocking it, you are betting that, despite having pretty much every possible option their character can use versus your five or so reversal options (That's about right for most characters that have more viable reversals than average. Backdash, throw, DP, Burst, super.), and absolute control over the spacing and timing of their setup, compared to your zero control whatsoever (If you DP late, you got meatied and your DP didn't come out, try again next time), they didn't account for whatever option you chose, that they know you have beforehand. Now, of course this does happen plenty, and there are characters that just can't cover all those options in a given matchup at once, yada yada. I'm not saying getting knocked down should lose you the game or that you should never try to reversal out or anything like that. I'll also say that tech traps are great, resets are useful, everyone should learn them, I use them all the time, etc., but the fact that you have a dragon punch doesn't put you at an advantage when you've just been put in guaranteed knockdown, and it certainly doesn't mean that you should make a blanket statement like "they are much more vulnerable while in pressure/combo than they are in knockdown." That's complete bullshit and you know it. Guilty Gear in particular has a ton of reasons that make that untrue, one of which you mention yourself: Damage Scaling. If you're trying to set up a tech trap, or a burst bait, or something like that, the worst they will ever have to do is take your original combo, which you won't even get if you're dropping it to try a reset. I can't tell you how many clever plans just flat out don't work if I sit there and don't tech out. By pressing zero buttons, I force you to finish the low-damage combo you were originally doing, and you don't get your reset. Plus, I still have the option to tech at any time I'm not in stun, and burst at literally any time, meaning that your reset attempt has to not only come from the limited option pool of stuff that works from the combo you were doing, but has to account for a pretty wide variance in possible timings, unless you're assuming you're playing against someone who's just going to mash it out regardless. So worst case for me, I eat your combo that I was assuming was guaranteed in the first place, by doing nothing. But let's talk about a situation where I actually have to think to get out of your reset. If you're comboing someone on the ground, and you create a false gap, then yeah, you can get a reset if they're not looking for mixup (Hint: Good players are, period). If they do nothing, you get your free impossible dust combo reset, and they take a bajillion more damage than they would have off your 2P setup. But when you make that gap, assuming you're playing against a person who has an attention span at all, they have all of the options they would have in a reversal window (that's if your gap is only a single frame), and you have fewer options than you'd have on okizeme, because they're stunned for much shorter than they'd be knocked down, they can move as soon as they're out of stun, and you're limited to the timing, spacing, and cancel options you had from the combo or blockstring you were already doing. So here you are with your cool mid-combo mixup, and they have to deal with maybe 3 or 4 possible options from this string, and they have more options than they'd normally have in a reversal situation. But yeah, much more vulnerable position than hard knockdown. We'll go with that.

TIL mash DP is a mixup.

God this O2 guy is a pro. Is there any reason I'd never heard of him before +R? Perhaps along the lines of living under a rock or something?

I figure it's about time we had an ACR video thread. Post match videos from ACR here. This will become the new video sticky, but the old one will stay up until ACR hits the states

It has come to my attention that Rensengeki may now once again add guardbar on block. Can anyone confirm this?

I mean, I guess you can use it for frame advantage from an air approach, but that's iffy.

There are two main things you're probably going to have to get used to in the switch from 3D to 2D fighters: First: Technical/input/timing differences. No matter what you've gotten used to in 3D fighters, the technical tricks are almost certainly going to be different. Setting aside the obvious things like "Block is no longer a button," you're also going to have to get used to the primary mechanism for accomplishing things in fighting games: Buffering inputs. You've almost certainly noticed that, as compared to most 3D fighters, directional inputs do a lot more actions that aren't directly moving your character around. Because of this, most 2D fighters have a concept of buffered inputs, and most experienced players, whether they know it or not, have mastered a number of tricks involving the input buffer that give them an edge on people who haven't played 2D fighters as much. Additionally, timing will be a difficult transition, especially when dealing with mixups. Not only will you have to deal with a considerably different set of options to look out for, but also oftentimes they will be coming at you much more quickly than in a 3D fighter. The same applies to things like confirming hits. Especially coming from something like SC, you should find someone who's willing to practice with you and just have them run their pressure game while you try to block it. It's really the kind of thing that you'll only get better at with practice. Approach/Defense As I mentioned before, 2D fighters have a considerably different set of options than 3D fighters. Learning to deal with approaches from the air, faster high-low and frametrap mixup, crossups in general, projectiles in general, and the generally more intense offensive options afforded to players in an "airdashing" style 2D fighter can be intimidating even for people coming from something like Street Fighter. This is a two-fold problem, as not only is this something you'll have to learn to deal with, but something you'll have to learn to use yourself. A couple of rules of thumb: -Air approaches are risky because there are many moves that are unblockable from the air, and because anti-air hits often more easily lead to a damaging combo from most hits. -Block low by default UNLESS the opponent is in the air. In almost every game of this genre, overheads from the ground are pretty slow, and a throw is easier to see coming than a fast low. Mixup is hard to read, but it's much harder if you're not defaulting to blocking low. -It's better to block than to swing. If you see something coming at you, don't try to beat it unless you're 100% sure you can, or it's your only option. Frametraps are arguably the strongest type of mixup, and getting baited out is actually usually worse than just blocking wrong, because counterhits are often punished more severely. Learning to defend will often be a matter of going up against good players, and learning to go on the offensive effectively is even harder: You'll have to experiment a lot, but it helps to watch matches of good players (Japanese players) of whatever character you intend to play. Getting a handle on character-specific options for a wide variety of characters will help your defense, and getting a handle on yours will help your offense. Unfortunately, a lot of it is just going to come down to experience. So get out there and play a lot!

Man, it's times like this I wish I were way better at Japanese.

The reasons I consider it a degenerate term are as follows: -Due to a number of properties like the disparate hitboxes that sometimes exist between active frames of the same move, things to do with spacing, etc., saying that one move will "reliably" beat another move is ill-expressed by the concept of "priority." It's more often the case that a move can be used to beat another move, and when it is a reliable fact, it's usually due to something like "The move is fully invulnerable, it will win every time, obviously" or something like that. Priority is not just inaccurate, it's actually a bad analogy for the behavior. -The term is inherently confusing to new fighting game players. Especially due to mechanics that are more heavy-handed, such as Blazblue's "Invulnerability to X type of hit", players who aren't familiar with fighting games at a technical level may be led to believe that priority is actually A Thing™. Any misinformation we can avoid spreading is a plus. -If we use the term priority to (very inaccurately) describe hitbox interaction, we can't use it to describe the cases where a priority system is actually at play, such as in option selects. This ship may already have sailed, but it's roughly annoying as all fucking get-out to try to circumlocute that particular term out of an explanation of option-selects or an option-select-adjacent situation. tl;dr: Stop saying priority to mean "Good hitbox." It's a stupid term and you should feel bad for using it.

Yeah, priority is an annoying term that people need to stop using.

Yup. Slayer also gets away with some crazy shit just by virtue of his ungodly fuck-you abare, since that one hit from some weird disjointed invisible hitbox you didn't know about will net him a combo for like, a good 2/3 of your life and a solid knockdown. Scary

That last thing Reaver said: If you want to be good, play the game. And more importantly: Play against a wide variety of people at a wide variety of skill levels. Guilty Gear is what most people would describe as a pretty hard game. You're going to lose a few matches for dropping your combos or not knowing about some obscure thing some character can do or whatever, but way more often, you're going to lose because you were outplayed. There are enough tactics to keep in mind and enough of them can be happening at the same time or in rapid succession that if you're not playing people who are at least roughly as good at the game as you are (I'd argue that it's even better to play against a lot of people who are just strictly better than you), you'll stop improving and become a big fish in a small pond. I'm sure you've heard this advice in some form or another. What you may not have heard is that it's also important to play people who are worse than you. First of all, it helps them improve. You want new blood in your local scene, because paying for gas is a bitch and it's great to have competition. If they stick with it and care at all, they'll probably be decent competition eventually, or at least be someone who knows your game and will punish you for bullshit you'd get away with against people you don't play as often. It may seem like it gets old playing people you're going to beat every time, but don't be a douche, you were in that boat once too. And it helps your play, too, believe it or not. It gives you a match situation in which to practice some stuff in "easy mode." Still a real match, but with less pressure not to make mistakes. I've certainly pulled out some new thing I'm working on, like a better combo or a crazy headgame against the guy in the semis or finals of some tournament, but 99% of the time, that's not going to work out well. Trying crazy new shit against people you know you'll probably beat is a great way to step up your game for the harder matches in which you'll need all the tricks you can get.

Ugh. Dustloop is literally *the worst* right now. Why won't it see newlines when I edit?

Priority Is Not A Thing™. It's upper-body invuln around (Like, pretty severely so, basically all but the feet) when the active frames happen as of AC

The main thing I could see as a nerf is that it's not unblockable anymore. I'm also curious as to the properties of the guard points (What frames guard, is it both high and low, etc.) 5H floorbouncing and bomber FRC are fucking bananas, by the way. Does 5H still have invuln?

3P has two hits? Which way does the second hit pull? Also, can't tell if 623P is buff or nerf.

Is there any hint as to a release date, ("Sometime before X month" or somesuch)?

Yeah, stuff that's hard isn't match-practical, especially stuff that's hard on a pad.

That's actually exactly what I think it'll be good for (5P->46D), which basically means you can get a good damage combo from pretty much the whole screen away if they jump. Like I said, don't drop the soap.

TL;DR Sarcasm on the internet.

Fuckin' legit.

Will you guys still be going in uh... late august?

Finally: A real zoning-centric character in GG.

So here we discuss changes in ACR, like nerds, because we can't play the game yet. Changes so far: Watches' armchair theoryfighter first impression: Looks like whoever's balancing R really likes Axl and really hates gimmicks. Optional 2-hit chains and the new gatlings (Seriously that shit is gonna be overpowered) basically stack up to mean that Axl has even more ground-to-air control (especially if doing one-hit chains means less recovery, but even being able to counterhit more readily on AA will be a big win) and even more disgusting abare for hitting someone who jumped. I'm guessing that if you're jumping against Axl in ACR, you pretty much done dropped the soap, good luck next round. It also looks like they're trying to get rid of some of the more gimmicky Axl mixup, like JI H Raei and TK bomber, which makes me sad, but isn't really a serious nerf, since Axl's high-low mixup was always shit on offense anyway. Gimmicky players will learn to tickthrow and frametrap and probably do better in matches overall. Meh. I personally am going to abuse the shit out of ambiguous 2-hit 2H and j.S if I can find any way to do so. Probably get used to using your 6H, a jump-in, your dust, or maybe raei if you really need an overhead. To be honest, you're not losing much utility, just a little variety. And the BOMBER FRC of course. As for the new FB: I can see this going a few ways.Best case: Remember those combos you couldn't get because you hit a f.S or 2P, or just straight up hit from too far away to get a rensen FRC to hit? Wellp. Almost full-screen ground abare buff to complement the almost full-screen air abare Axl already had and got even more of from the new gatling.Worst case: Basically does the same thing as rensen FRC in a combo and is a very situational anti-air that's probably outdone by Axl's already extensive air control from the ground in most cases. Boring but not bad. Either way this is probably going to be more of a combo extender/launch than a zoning tool, just because it barely fills a role Axl doesn't have something better in his kit for. I'm sure a lot of people who aren't very confident with their pokes will use it as a more "general-purpose" anti-air at that range, but I doubt it'll be what you see people use in high-level play to anti-air most of the time, unless it does something crazy like prorates > 100%. What it WILL probably be good for is beating invincible stuff that twitchy people throw out (Like kokuugeki and to an extent rensen already do, but slightly better due to being probably faster and having more space coverage.)