Rhiya

Tsubaki has some of the least mashable strings in the game, lol The delay cancels make free frametraps

1. Playing online is no substitute for playing offline, but playing real people is infinitely better (and infinitely more enjoyable) than not doing so. Definitely play online some -- especially if there's not a strong scene near you -- but keep it to good connections, for the sake of your learning and your sanity, and know that even a good online connection just isn't the same as offline. 2. You'll want to stick to one game when you're starting out. Juggling different sets of mechanics is very daunting, to say the least, and doing that while learning to use those mechanics to their full potential is next to impossible. 3. It really depends on things like what character you play, or if you feel like you, personally, want to try using stick. Pad is fine in almost every case, though, and if you haven't felt like it's an issue, it probably won't be. There -are- top US players that play on pad. 4. Nope. If anything, it might've helped you a little.

Rachel is an exec-heavy character. Just gonna warn you, the awesome stuff you get isn't free at all. It's effort all across the board.

...Gods of anime over here

Since this is a clearly relevant time to dredge this up: http://pastebin.com/SMrq3Wzp EVO and anime don't mix.

I think it's an interesting way of getting funding. I'd personally consider buying in just for the novelty. However, using the playerbase for feedback (which you don't need to do, I feel) could be a double-edged sword. You'd definitely have players seeing things you wouldn't yourself, which is valuable. However, you need -good- players that also understand balance to get feedback from, or the feedback won't be worth anything; additionally, you need to be getting feedback on what's working and what's broken in a fleshed-out meta, which takes time, and is doubly hard to achieve with a small playerbase. Finally, the alpha would need to be relatively complete to get useful feedback that isn't an aesthetic judgment. On the other hand, I think if you use the playerbase as a way to let people test stuff, and then watch that yourself and decide what the game does and doesn't need based on a vision you already have of how the game is supposed to play and balance out, that's a little different. For example, if you had every replay from your matchmaking recorded onto a central server that you could access, plus access to match statistics from those matches, that'd be really amazing information for you as a dev. You could probably keep it in alpha, issuing constant patches to the people who bought in, and then release it in full when you feel like the product is where you want it. You'd have to play some politics to keep the alpha players happy (constant patching tends to breed constant complaints), and make them feel valuable, regardless of how often their voices get heard, but it could be both a unique system to get the game on its feet, and a good way to avoid releasing a product that isn't competitively interesting. There is one caveat unrelated to player feedback and its use, though. With such an open alpha, there'd be a temptation to -keep- the game in alpha or beta, where you can constantly make fixes and avoid releasing a "bad product." You'd need to balance the freedom you get against the need to create and have a final, but inevitably imperfect, product. Just my two cents on the whole deal. Like I said, though, I think it's pretty neat, and I'd consider buying into something like that just for the experience.

Command grabs work miracles for your pressure. A command grab that nets charge is the most beautiful godsend for that character, because it solves one of her biggest problems (being aggressive and charging are currently diametrically opposed, but you need charge to get damage to make pressuring worthwhile) while making her pressure scarier.

It's not really affirming the consequent; it's just using a definition you don't feel connects to the term well. You could call it "good mashing" and "bad mashing," if you prefer. "Intelligent mashing" is the more intuitive term, though, since its opposite is often referred to as "mindlessly hitting buttons." Alternatively, you could just assume success over time is correlated to "intelligently mashing" and failure over time is correlated to "mindlessly hitting buttons," and use induction. Nothing too weird going on there, unless you absolutely hate induction, or you hate that assumption. EDIT: Edits in bold.

Feel like this needs to get said. A lot of great blockstrings are completely free to being mashed, but that doesn't make them bad: it just means there's an answer to them. Nothing weak about that. It's not a shoddy blockstring or a bad blockstring if your opponent can beat it, because pretty much every blockstring has some answer or another.

Much like everything else, mashing is legit as fuck as long you don't get blown up for it. Mashing intelligently is an amazing way to get out of pressure in pretty much every game.

You need to delay the staff launch a little; you'll be holding D for a very tiny bit, and then releasing it just before (or while, if it works better for you) inputting Chun.

I honestly just see you doing whatever you want in neutral, and it doesn't make any sense. Someone blocks the staff, you run away; you 6B, but they're 2 inches from your face; you ditch the staff almost immediately in a matchup where it's useful. You don't look like you know what's going on in the match until you land a hit, and even then, the hit has to be in the corner or off something really braindead at absolute midscreen. My recommendation is to go practice everything that -isn't- combos. You can (and need to) practice everything in your play that isn't a realtime neutral game against a real opponent, and that includes blockstrings, varying blockstrings, hitconfirming, setplay, okizeme, choosing okizeme mixups, performing okizeme mixups, confirming okizeme mixups, choosing normal mixups, performing normal mixups, confirming normal mixups, spacing your normals, practicing various approaches, learning your position on screen relative to the rest of the stage, any generic system options that give you trouble (IAD gives me hell in some games, so I grind it), any character-specific options that have harder exec but are important (TK chun is a good example for EX Litchi), and a ton of other things. It's about making it so you're already familiar with -anything- you might want to do in a match. It makes your life a lot easier.

I think you have a point when it comes to getting people to play in the first place, but what ArcSys needs to do is get people on a machine and then keep them coming back. It not only has to do with the most initial of initial impressions, but also with how much a beginner feels like they need to learn. If something looks too hard, ArcSys is going to scare people off. I actually got scared off from learning Rachel in CT because I took one look at the combo thread and it felt like someone vomited a thousand-page list onto the forums with no explanation of what was most important, or even where to start. At least 20 combos there are labeled "BNB." At any rate, think of it like this: how many people want to keep dumping their yen coins into a machine if they don't feel like they can learn everything in front of them? More people will walk ten miles than a hundred; more still will walk five. If people feel learning to play Xrd is manageable, they're a lot more likely to do it.

FRCs aren't hard to fighting game players. Having played fighters for a couple of years, now, they aren't that terrible to me, either -- I mean, I could do a couple of FRCs pretty quickly. The thing is, ArcSys can't cater to the same playerbase for eternity. Players move on, and without new blood, scenes for games slowly stagnate and die. Xrd is ArcSys's best chance to bring in new blood to drop more yen coins into their machines and put more ArcSys-labeled discs in their PS4s. The 3D graphics alone make it clear that ArcSys is trying to bring in new players, and those kinds of control simplifications I mentioned go a long way to keeping players around to buy more revisions and play at their local arcade for years to come. When more people feel like they can get past the initial hump of difficulty, more people stick around. If it were just about the people already playing the game, it wouldn't matter at all -- but Xrd can't and won't just be about the people already playing the game. Just to further expand on the gap between beginner players and people who've been playing for a while, consider this. I'm teaching someone basic Melty right now. I'm playing characters I've never played before and doing bnbs without ever having touched those characters, because a lot of Melty bnbs are that easy. But the person I'm teaching is new to fighting games entirely. His character's combo is just buttons>3C>j.BC>j.BC>AT. I did that first try, no sweat, and get it every time -- but he's been practicing 10 or 15 minutes each day for the past week, and he's just starting to get it consistently in-match. The difference between a prior fighting game player and a brand new one is immense.

I think your point is valid, but you're also only seeing one part of the spectrum. Every game control scheme is made with intuitivity, practicality, and artistry in mind. Some control schemes lean more in certain directions: for examples outside of fighting games, Skyward Sword leans towards intuitive controls (at the expense of practicality for some things like falling), while a game like Shadow of the Colossus leans more to artistry (which has led people to complain, for years, that Wander is hard to control). The thing is, no game will be perfect in all three, and they're often at odds. Even the best games suffer a loss in some area or another: as an example of that, Okami's PS2 version sacrifices a certain amount of intuitivity by mapping drawing to a control stick. The PS2 controller simply doesn't have the resources to make it truly and flawlessly intuitive, like it would've been if the game was originally made for the DS -- drawing would've have been drawing, with zero disconnect between your actions and the in-game actions. To see how they're at odds, consider how SotC feels impractical to control for some people, but there's no question that it replicates Wander's struggle in your own experience; artistry is fighting practicality, and there wouldn't have been a way to get the same effect while making Wander easier to control. This applies to fighting games in a very similar way. Every bit of the control scheme in a fighting game is also attempting to cater to each of these three things, but it's impossible to cater to all of them at once; developers are forced to pick and choose. In your example, Sirlin catered to practicality at the expense of intuitivity and a bit of artistry. He made a good decision for the game, but one the community was likely uncomfortable with. Here, in our discussion, it's really the same thing. Hold-to-tech makes teching on the first frame and teching when you want to tech more practical, but takes away from the frantic mashing (and consequent feeling of involvement) that pressing a button to tech entails. Having an alternative input for FRC would take away from the feeling of cancelling a move on the -exact- frame you want to cancel it, but it would make FRCs much easier to perform. These are both examples of practicality fighting artistry and intuitivity, the exact conflict I discussed above. I hold the stance I do because I feel like the execution required to achieve that artistry is excessive in the above cases. If you compare to other video games, you can think of teching and FRC-ing like QTEs -- but the game doesn't signal you to do them, and you have about a sixteen millisecond window to get a first frame tech, or, say, a 32 millisecond window to FRC Millia's S disc. To give you some comparison of how quick that is, a normal blink is somewhere between 100 and 400 milliseconds. That's an insane execution request, and that's why I'm willing to exchange artistry for practicality here.

People act like charge times are long in P4A. Mitsuru isn't exactly Guile. You don't really have to wait a long time, especially not compared to SF.

In general, I like noncombo execution to be easy enough you can do it first try (though I do think fireball motions and DP motions are fine), and I like combo execution to have the meat of the difficulty. I feel this balances out playability and competitive feel, and lets people be rewarded for their efforts to learn the game while keeping the game accessible. As per combo exec, I like characters to have beginner, intermediate, advanced, and ridiculous combos, such that: -You could do a beginner BNB within no time after sitting down in training (or pick it up in-match if you're a good player) for gimped but solid damage. -You could do an intermediate BNB after some good, solid practice (think 30 minutes to an hour), and have it consistently not long after. -You would need serious time and practice to do advanced BNBs, but they'd be consistently doable after that. -Ridiculous combos would need serious practice, but might not even be consistent after that. They'd be the 1f link combos, the juggles that require strange spacing and only work on one character -- the combos that you use to style all over someone. Additionally, assuming a game with health like Melty, and a well-rounded character: -Beginner combos should do ~2k or 2.5k, 3k with meter. You should get good positioning off them. -Intermediate combos should do 4k-4.3k meterless, with equivalent positioning. -Advanced combos should net about 4.5k, with equivalent positioning. -Ridiculous combos should about 4.7k-5k with equivalent positioning, or 5.5k-5.7k if you sacrifice absolutely everything (you blow all your meter on rapids and supers, lose okizeme, and may even be left in a truly unfavorable position). The most important thing here is the diminishing returns. People capable of advanced bnbs should be rewarded for it, but the reward shouldn't shut out intermediate players. Beginners should get rewarded strongly for leveling up. Impractical combos should be just that -- impractical and jaw-dropping, and the signal that someone has gone in on the game hard. Also, to address this more clearly: I draw the line at what I feel is easy to learn. Making it so you can do everything your character has to offer (outside of combos) immediately really makes a difference to how people feel about a game -- think about how many people are willing to play Brawl, and how many people like how simply it controls. (I do think Brawl is unnecessarily simple (and I may well be wrong about that), but I don't think I've ever heard anyone complain about it.) Since a lot of how hard people feel a game is has to do with their initial impressions of how much they can do, making the controls simple and making all your basic system options and character-specific options easy to execute goes a long way to making something feel easy to learn. I also draw certain lines to keep things hard to master -- and also to keep the game worth playing to begin with. The reason I don't like 5PPP autoselecting an optimal combo goes beyond my spiel about combo execution above: it removes an important decision point from the game. The most important thing to complexity is decisions, and removing decisions removes excitement, enjoyment, and, most importantly, any semblance of skill from that part of the game. (Knowing what combo decision to make -is- a goddamn important skill.) It's the same reason you don't want to only move about and have the game select the best poke for you when you hit a button: there's nothing interesting going on when no one is making decisions. The difficulty in learning the right decisions for every situation and the fluidity of right decisions are what make fighting games hard to master, and also what make them interesting. I keep execution in the equation -somewhere- to make sure players that want to devote time to the game get rewarded, and also to make sure that there's enough "secret tech" to support a high level of play. (Supporting a high level of play also involves making sure there's arcane, useful knowledge, but that's a different bit altogether.) No one is going to keep playing your game if they can get beat by just any scrub who walks up to the machine, and no one wants to keep playing a game if there's nothing for them to learn or get better at. The reason I don't like things like "hold to FRC costs 35%, regular FRC costs 25%" and "hold-to-tech comes out late" is that they're just fake ways of making the game look easier. You're putting in something that's just going to be ignored by the top level of players, and the beginning players are just going to be annoyed they're being penalized. They're basic system mechanics, and they fall under the things people will want to feel like they can do immediately. Again, it's just like beginner mode in BB -- sure, you can hold a button to 720 as Tager, and sure, that's way easier than doing a real 720, but if you're playing beginner mode, you may as well not be playing the game at all.

Sneaking in here to say Tsubaki pressure was all about doing frametraps in basic strings and then sneaking in unsafe mixup with j.CC/6A/throw/etc. once you knew they were blocking. But yeah, 6C>6CC has been ass in pressure since it was introduced. Dunno why you thought it was anything other than pure shenanigans.

It's not a question of initial approachability; it's a question of how far you have to go to play ball at the top level. People like games that are easy to learn (i.e., you can do everything pros do and learn to do it quickly), and hard to master (i.e. the meat of the game is in making the right decisions at the right time, and the game has enough complexity to make that interesting). GG, at the top level, is hard to learn and hard to master. Pretty much all fighting games are like this, to be fair -- even Melee, which most people who don't know FGs think is a simple game, is hard to learn to play competitively -- but it's not something that needs to be this way. The meat of the game is in the decisions, not executing them, and emphasizing that through gameplay is something I wholeheartedly support, so long as the complexity doesn't suffer unacceptably in exchange. I do feel like competitive fighting games have become a bit of something different, though; they tend to cater to a crowd that wants constant displays of skill. If that's what people want to see, that's what should get made, but people should just be aware that it makes your community more resistant to growth -- and growth is something I'd rather have. It does me no good to play a game no one else is playing.

The thing is, you'd probably always get it in at least 3f by mashing. There's no point in adding an option that doesn't do anything, which is your suggestion. It's inelegant at best. I feel like you don't want to lower the execution for the game. That's fine, but you should know that it's only going to turn people away who might really enjoy playing your game otherwise. No one is saying to make 5PPP autocombo in GG and autoselect an optimal combo. I do think people would be in favor of an easier combo system in general, though. That sort of thing. Don't make everything braindead, but choose where you want the execution barriers to go, and put them in places that are intuitive and don't involve naturally simple actions. A successful tech only takes one button press, anyways -- what difference is it if you press it once and hold it?

The point of hold-to-tech is increasing accessibility. Something like that only increases accessibility at a nominal level -- think Beginner Mode in BB, which makes the game more "accessible" but does nothing for people who want to actually learn the game. It's also unintuitive. 1f window for a bnb sounds pretty impractical, honestly, unless you've done such a solid grind that it becomes pure muscle memory that doesn't fuck up 99% of the time -- and getting that kind of muscle memory just sounds rough as hell, since you have to learn to do it without the help of muscle memory first. If you're getting that shit consistently, you're a better man than I. Damn.

When I hear "fundamentals," I think of things like spacing, hitconfirming, and knowing how to vary pressure. It's the stuff that's common to every fighter that adheres to the conventional set of fighting game mechanics. Understanding neutral game is probably the biggest thing that comes to mind, though.

Good points, good post. It's one thing to think, "Alright, I'm probably going to drop here. I can tech chase." It's another to drop unexpectedly, in which case you probably don't have a chase planned. The second is the case I'm referring to. I slip up on really easy stuff sometimes when I play Melty, which is my main game -- and my character's exec, while not braindead, is far from hard. In a case where I'm not expecting a drop, teching is beneficial. I'm honestly unfamiliar with GG exec and combos, but I know in the games I play, finishing your combos is more beneficial than not finishing them 99% of the time. You get guaranteed positioning and damage over a gamble that could cause you to lose momentum, and momentum is god. (I play pixie charas, so momentum is doubly god for me.) If there's an easier alternative combo you're less likely to drop, the advice I always hear is that unless the difference is significant (corner carry vs. none, 2000 more damage, etc.), you should always go for what you feel comfortable doing at your current level of exec, because the rewards for a finished combo are guaranteed and pretty goddamn good. As a result, this whole tech chase deal feels a little weird to me. I think it's a really interesting mindgame, but it seems really ballsy and knee-deep in yomi. Maybe GG exec and combos are sufficiently different that this just isn't the case.

But then, it's also bad play when they should've teched and couldn't. Teching's main purpose isn't trapping players, anyways -- teching primarily punishes poor exec by letting an opponent get out of a dropped combo. The fact there are mindgames with teching is excellent, and I think it's great that teching has that kind of depth in GG. However, teching is primarily a way to deny damage and position. Even if teching is always a bad idea in "perfect play," "perfect play" doesn't exist. People accidentally fuck up their exec sometimes, and when they do, they won't be doing tech chases or punishes; they'll just lose advantage. One unintentionally dropped combo can be a dropped round in a momentum-heavy game like Guilty Gear. Hold-to-tech makes it easier to take advantage of those situations, and encourages good play in those situations. You're too caught up in the theoretical world where your opponent has perfect execution and master yomi.

And? Most new people mash buttons when they're being combo'd on their own, and try to tech as early as possible anyways. You're effectively saying that making it harder for someone to do what they want is better for them, since it's bad, when they would learn it on their own either way. In fact, they'd probably get the message sooner with hold to tech, since they'd know they were teching out on the first frame, whereas they might think they did it too early or too late if they were just mashing.