TheRealDMac

Do you enjoy BB more than Persona? I personally don't like BB much, to the point where I'm dangerously close to playing CF "for the story." If you're of the same mindset, then why not keep at it until the game dies? There are a couple Skype groups that would probably be happy to help you as long as you kept a positive attitude, and I know you're in the GFaqs sidegame chat. I'm pretty sure some of the people that could add you are in there if you ask. (I'm not in the Persona chat anymore so I can't help directly.) The game may be on its deathbed for tournament play, but there are stubborn netplayers who will stick it out. You can at least get to the point where you can consistently outplay them, and then you can blame lag in good faith instead of out of rage. (Shoutouts to Narukamis with 150 awakened meter and their incoming SB Swift Strike > C Cross Slash > OMC > SB Raging Lion.) You've certainly improved since the first time we played, by the way, even if you pressed DP literally every time I landed a non-counterhit-Coup :P. Also, extend your pressure with gunshot more against Mitsuru; if you vary the placement in your strings and I don't IB it you can keep me trapped for a really long time unless I risk a DP or spend 25 meter for SB Coup, both of which you can bait since the Coup probably won't be + on block at typical Adachi corner pressure range. (PM/Skype me to continue matchup discussion so we don't go off topic in here.)

You see? This is why we can't have nice things. I'm over here studying and learning and trying to better myself as a person and then people come from everywhere just to laugh at 'Murica and call us ignorant orz. (Kidding, kidding.) On topic though, ONE FINAL ITEM OF NOTE: Anime fighters have always been the redheaded stepchild of the FGC. There are a wide variety of reasons for this, and some of them, like Japan having a larger, more accessible scene and earlier access to everything, we can't fix. Some of them, however, are completely under our control. People who don't like us are just WAITING for an anime player to do something stupid and embarassing so they can hold them up as an example of the scene being a joke. (Of course, there are less and less jerks like this after every positive tournament showing, and we might all know that one person doing something stupid isn't representative of the scene at large, but think about how many people are afraid to get on an airplane when statistically it's the safest way to travel.) Don't be an idiot when all eyes are on you, so that we can continue to gain legitimacy and keep getting godsends like CEOtaku to generate hype. To be clear, I'm certainly not saying that people can't have fun and be stupid. I'm just saying that there's having fun and being stupid in your hotel room or with your friends, and there's making a fool of yourself on stream or on twitter or in front of a camera or whatever. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFwUcEwD4l4 (Sorry, too much military doctrine influencing my thinking. We're foreigners in the rugged, well established nation of Capcom, and everything bad we do will be blown out of proportion, but if we build rapport with the guys in charge we'll eventually be welcomed instead of being tolerated. HEARTS AND MINDS, GUYS, HEARTS AND MINDS.)

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

The rift certainly exists, but I haven't encountered much elitism compared to other communities. There's no singling out of and laughing at people for being bad, unless they invited it with a terrible attitude. There's very little dismissing of requests for gameplay discussion. The only times I've seen top players respond harshly have been when they're dealing with someone stubbornly refusing to believe facts on grounds that they refuse to believe them, or when they've just finished dealing with somebody like that and a second person comes along who looks like they may be moving in the same direction. I've gotten the swift hammer of justice before when I miscommunicated something and there was fear somebody else would pick my mistake up and run with it as fact lol. Name recognition leads to flooded ask.fm accounts, endless twitter feeds, requests for matches, harassment from jerks, etc, so it's understandable if the more widely known players try to filter their attention a bit. (Not to mention I can only imagine how infuriating it is to explain in detail to Newbie A why Strategy X is a terrible idea, complete with explanations of why it doesn't work and better alternatives, and then go online and fight Player B, Player C, and Player D, all of whom seemed convinced that Strategy X is the one truth, one of whom sends you hatemail, and one of whom asks for the exact same advice you just gave Newbie A.) I've seen almost none of the typical "git gud scrub" type stuff outside of netplay monsters, and I've seen very little of the hostility toward non-traveling players in Persona that I've seen in other communities.

@RurouniLoneWolf: The only thing I'll directly dispute is the claim that I didn't spend time interacting with the community. Sure, I almost never see anybody face-to-face, but I chatted with other players on an almost daily basis for months while preparing for KiT/CEO/EVO. Even if we were chronically distracted from actual tech discussion :P. As I said I'm not here to argue, but just to prevent your summary from leading people down a separate road (I messed up hiding it the first time so sorry for all the text): -I meant the reputation of being salty in general, i.e. hatemail, ****posting, etc. Although I definitely saw a lot of people who seemed a lot more upset about EVO performances than I was, especially the ones who had a real chance of surviving to top 8, our group actually is pretty good at accepting tourney results and moving on, aside from the occasional post-finals depression. -I didn't mean literally lonely, I meant there are probably less than 10 of them and they each therefore have a very small pool of people to truly test their skills against. -Almost everyone who "plays Persona" is free at it. That is a very different statement than "the community is free." One of my main points was that the competitive community is a much smaller subset of the group of people who plays the game; I was being especially careful not to be the typical Capcom fanboy or weaboo and declare that the U.S. was free as a whole at fighting games. I also allowed for people who want to get better but don't care about reaching the top. And I also made a point of acknowledging that some people just don't care about getting better and that as frustrating as it can be, we can't shame them for not wanting to be great at a game. -Of course everyone has to grind in the lab. I never meant to imply that you magically didn't have to go to training mode if you lived in New York. All I meant is that having somebody show you their character's most dangerous setups and answers in person and being able to take the time to experiment with ways around those options is extremely valuable compared to opening up each character's gatling table in the wiki and setting up a series of recorded training dummies, just to figure out where your character is able to push a button on defense. -I analyzed the situation and concluded that when the anime player who was between games and the guy in my scene who seems to drop what he's playing and try to learn something new (that he thinks he'll be good at quick) every few months told me they didn't want to play the game because it would be dead soon, and they told me this like 2 weeks after the game was announced for the EVO lineup, they actually meant what they said. And I factored in stories from other scenes. But of course I could be completely wrong and I even acknowledged from the beginning that this was all based on personal observation.

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

DISCLAIMER: This is meant to spark discussion. It is not an attack on anyone and I'm not here to argue. Our community is actually pretty great by competitive gaming standards, but it has some issues it needs to address if it wants to survive. I’ve been meaning to type this up pretty much since I lost in quarterfinals, but a combination of “I regret being so weak”-induced-trauma and work deciding to trample me has been keeping me busy. There are a couple points I’ve been wanting to make for a while, based on the things I noticed while I was trying to prepare for EVO. This is a text wall and in some ways just my EVO journal, but there IS a TL;DR summary at the end. It may be just inflammatory enough to be read by people though. (Well, it’s meant as more of a fire alarm than a Molotov cocktail.) First off, I’ve seen a lot of people who genuinely came into the game wanting to improve, myself included, transition from loving the game, to viewing the game as a chore, to falling into some sort of despair. This ranges from hating the game, to hating the players, to just not wanting to take games seriously anymore, but still grinding away. This is typically accompanied by a lot of lashing out and generally salty behavior, and it typically spikes around major tournaments. I’ve started to think this comes from the sad nature of anime fighters in general. The day Persona 4 Arena: Ultimax was released, a series of clocks started ticking. It was only a matter of time until ranked died. We only had so long to prepare for our respective first tournaments. We only had so long until Xrd, which was probably going to steal a lot of the stronger players, came out. We only had so long until the EVO announcement, which may have killed the game if UNIEL had been chosen instead. We only had so long until BlazBlue’s next Extend version stole back the casuals we’d stolen from Chronophantasma. And then we only had so long until EVO. When the game first came out, I got mad when I lost a ranked match, because I knew ranked would be empty in a few weeks and I wanted to get to S-rank as a test of whether I’d improved at all since vanilla. Then ranked died as predicted and I went about happily playing the game again. Around late December – early January, I started to get really upset when I lost again, and when somebody asked why, I pointed out that I probably wouldn’t have any time to play after Kumite in Tennessee in January, so my hard work would feel wasted if I wasn’t ready and performed poorly. Thanks to terrible real-life luck, I had plenty of time to keep playing again shortly after that. But the more work I put in, the more stressed about the game I became, the more every loss that came from my mistake and not the opponent’s read started to sting, the more I wanted to put my stick through my monitor when I got hit by raw teleport or Raging Lion. I’ve taken hundreds of losses across plenty of games, and aside from the occasional lag-spike-every-time-I-land-a-starter phenomenon, or the classic so-much-delay-that-AoA-vs-Sweep-is-a-50/50 scenario, I’ve never really gotten too upset about it. I reflected on this a bit after noticing that my Xbox stick was damaged solely from wear and tear but my PS3 stick had a dent in it, and I concluded that it’s because for Persona players this summer, there was no “next time.” For the casuals, that doesn’t mean much. And some of the netplay monsters will always be netplay monsters, with or without a reason to be monstrous. For those of us who were trying to reach a goal in the game though, the weight of that realization became heavier and heavier as EVO approached. This was it. We had one shot. One tournament season. One EVO. (Maybe a last gasp at CEOtaku, but without some top players or any Japanese competition.) I think on some level everyone who was preparing for EVO this year knew that. If a Street Fighter player gets sloppy and makes a fatal error, it’s “oh well, I’ll go back home, practice better, play cleaner, and there’s always next year.” (And the year after that, and the year after that…) When I got hit by a teleport of all things and lost in the 3rd round of my 3rd match immediately after making it out of pools, it was “…and so ends my Persona career.” That’s a struggle not felt by many communities (Soul Calibur is right there with us) – having to bear the weight of the knowledge that your game is going to need life support the moment another game in the same category of fighters is released. For those of us that don’t particularly care for BlazBlue or Guilty Gear, that goes double. The solution to this, obviously, would be for Persona’s community to rally behind their game and ensure that it always has a presence of some sort at major tournaments, but that’s a discussion for another time, not to mention we may never get 2.0 in the States and there may not be enough of a community for such an idea to be viable, which I’ll get to. At the very least I hope that the BlazBlue and Guilty Gear communities learn from our death and have measures in place to keep their games alive when the ArcSys (and/or tournament organizer) support stops flowing someday. The other thing I wanted to talk about is how it bothers me when people talk about the “Persona community” and how it’s weak or it’s toxic or it’s a bunch of people who couldn’t cut it in Guilty Gear and BlazBlue. The “Persona community,” in the sense that so many people like to toss those insults at it, doesn’t actually exist. I get where those statements are coming from. A huge number of people who play Persona are toxic. A huge number of people who play Persona are terrible at the game. A huge number of people who run around terribly playing Persona also at some point ran around terribly playing other fighting games. But those people aren’t “Persona players.” They are people who know how to play the game, or people who have currently picked it as their troll-cave. This begs the question: who am I to talk? I’m pretty free myself. I still made it out of pools at EVO. In fact, as soon as I saw my bracket and the only name I recognized was Tahichi, I knew I was going to make it out of that pool on the loser’s side. And that’s a huge problem. Sure, I put in a ton of work. More than I think the many people who are happy to brush me aside will ever give me credit for. But I still have a few deadly flaws in my gameplay, my reflexes and execution aren’t that great, and I suffer from a dangerous lack of matchup knowledge, even against the characters I’ve fought the most, because I was born in netplay. (I’ve probably seen 200 separate Narukami players online and maybe 5 of them knew the game well enough to take my actions into account and respond properly rather than just blocking until my string ended and pressing A raging lion > SB raging lion > B raging lion > AoA.) Surely someone worked harder, worked smarter, had a strong local scene to teach them, right? Surely there was SOMEONE in my pool besides the #1 seeded player at the tournament who was strong enough to gatekeep a mediocre Mitsuru who’s barely even good enough to be considered a relevant source of information about the character? Nope. Kaigu got a lucky break when I called out his Minazuki command grab but my DP went right through it, and I made a few errors that probably should have cost me a lot more than they did against Ledgehopper, but other than that I’d go so far as to say I got through pools easily. In fact, take a look at my bracket: (http://evo2015.s3.amazonaws.com/brackets/p4_a125.html). (If any of my opponents are here, you all seemed pretty cool and you can hit me up for casual netplay whenever, no offense is intended :P.) I beat Masterscrub without losing a round. I remember that he SHOULD have taken a round off me but didn’t convert off a fatal or take advantage of a dropped combo properly, and he threw out a desperate dance super in the 4th round, but not even as a reversal. “Poor guy,” I thought, “I probably just condemned him to 0-2 after he suffered through the 8 am pool wakeup and endless line.” I was wrong. He got 3 wins in loser’s bracket. That’s a winning record at P4U1.1’s biggest tournament. So that must mean the “Persona community” is made up of people who are free to Mitsuru 5A and Rise runup dance super, right? WRONG. Let’s take a closer look at the composition of the bracket. Masterscrub got a few wins in Smash 4. Prince 2k3 wasn’t exactly feeling himself before our match if I remember correctly. He may have said something about mainly being there to spectate. Carl Heiser was so super-serious that he didn’t even use a tag. Rocket was playing like 6 games. And Ledgehopper nearly made it out of pools himself, so he wasn’t quite free. We’ll blame Yukiko. The point I’m making is that for the most part these weren’t people that came to EVO to play Persona, they were people that signed up for Persona to add to their EVO experience. It probably wouldn’t have looked much different in an alternate reality where EVO 2015 had hosted UNIEL and this was that game’s bracket. So where is the Persona community then? When Lord Knight said he couldn’t think of a single person who started with Persona and went on to be strong in another game, where was that mythical person who should have been insulted? How many players are there who started with Persona and went on to be strong in Persona? A lot of people whose first fighting game was Persona either played it for the story and fell off or never had even the slightest interest in trying to reach high-level play in it. A lot of people who the snarky remarks about our community are directed at floated in from another game and are presently floating away to Guilty Gear or BlazBlue. There’s a very small group of people who are “strong” in Persona in the States. You can probably count the “top players” on your fingers. And that small group is worn out, from what I’ve seen. They’re weighed down by the responsibility of carrying the US in what will probably be its only real showdown with Japan in Ultimax. They’re hurt by the fact that all the toxic stream monsters and SRK trolls and Capcom fanboys saying Japan was going to sweep us at EVO were proven right, and frustrated by the fact that there probably won’t be a “next time” for them to get revenge. They’re exhausted from having to discover all the tech that we read on Dustloop by themselves, rather than simply reading it and applying it. What’s more, I’ll go out on a limb and say that some of them are probably disappointed by and/or mad at the rest of us. In the end, the top player group at EVO was nearly the same if not exactly the same as the group of top players at NEC. Nobody took the info they put out and used it to join them at the top. Some of us tried. We got gatekept by the adult responsibility/no locals vortex, the school/poverty vortex, a lack of time to practice, or a lack of natural talent, but credit where credit is due – we had people who genuinely tried to reach their potential. Together with the top players, those people form what semblance of a “competitive community” this game has. There were also people who were at most hoping for a 3-2 record; who never really aimed for the top or hoped to be the best, but who came out to support the game and who came a truly impressive distance in the 10 months or so they had to learn the game. They weren’t shooting for the top, but they genuinely wanted to improve and they had their own goals they were fighting for. (If Ultimax was actually your first competitive fighter, and you had less than a year to learn everything to compete with people coming off vanilla experience and general 2D fundamentals, what hope did you ever have?) They, together with the competitive community, make up the “Persona community” insofar as it exists. The problem is that this group of people is still barely a group. Some of the top players fight amongst themselves over petty things, some of them are dismissive of potentially valid suggestions made by the lower-ranking competitive players. Some of those lower-ranking competitive players act the same way, drawing battle lines and dividing into cliques, treating the here-for-fun-but-looking-to-improve players as irrelevant, and worst of all being more interested in pointing out who they’re superior to than improving themselves past a certain point. The end result is that this tiny group of people that was ever actually vying for the top ends up being multiple even smaller groups that hate each other, when they should be happy there are even worthy opponents to fight. Is it because we all knew there was no next time after EVO? Were we all just playing some twisted survival game to see who could last the longest before Japan knocked us out? If so, couldn’t the problem have been addressed by keeping the game alive? But who’s going to save the game when the people that stand to gain from tournaments either hate each other or don’t think it’s worth saving? It’s probably too late for Persona. From a tournament organizer perspective, we’re not going to draw enough numbers to be profitable. If we could revitalize the community, we could change that, but we can’t get new people to learn the game because we can’t get more tournaments and it’s going to be a vicious cycle. The just-for-fun players that supported our tournament community don’t have enough invested to change that, and many (not all, of course) of the competitive players don’t want to. The lack of 2.0 is just the last nail in the coffin. These are just the personal observations of one of the least-recognized EVO quarterfinalists, of course. (I was even “Omar” for a little bit.) I may be completely wrong. This post may be the second coming of “Relius is decent at best.” My hope, however, is that future anime FGC groups and what’s left of us when Persona 5 Arena: We’re Still Not Resolving Liz’s Subplot releases will learn… something from all of this. We had plenty of advance warning that our game was in trouble. We were an anime fighter, for one, and on top of that SKD was winning all his locals and making top 8 at tournaments without owning the game. I know there were people that recognized this and tried to reach out to the community. I know that locals are still incredibly fragmented due to the hugeness of the US and the lack of social acceptance of competitive gaming, and most of the places that reliably had them did produce competitive players. I know that a lot of the netplay outreach attempts were poisoned by toxic individuals who just like watching us suffer. I know some netplayers who could have been great would rather Raging Lion xN than pay to fly to a tournament. I know that the anime community is made up largely of highschoolers and college kids who don’t have jobs or still live with their parents and can’t travel even if they wanted to. I don’t know what to do about all this. But I do know that if Persona had a “next year” they could have saved up for it or gotten their parents on board, and that the reason I couldn’t get any new players out of the Capcom/Guilty Gear/3D crews at my locals was because they all assumed the game had less than a year to live and therefore wasn’t worth learning, and that there has to be a way to break that vicious cycle. TL;DR: 1) Anime players are salty because their games are always on a death clock, so they can’t redeem themselves/get revenge if they underperform. We can’t get new Persona players because people see the death clock. Persona is on a death clock because we can’t get new Persona players. 2) Just because toxic people play Persona doesn’t mean the Persona community is toxic. The problem is that the Persona community barely exists, not enough people want to get better so it’s lonely at the top, and some of the top players don’t always get along, so the community is fragmented and unable to save itself. There are people who play for fun and support us, but they have no reason to revive a dead game. 3) Almost everyone is free at Persona. Almost nobody seems to care. This makes the top players sad and prevents the players trying to reach the top from getting valuable matchup experience. If you want to get to where the top players are and you don’t have said players at your locals, you basically have to go through the same brutal lab grind they did. Sincerely wishing he was able to articulate this better, The gamer formerly known as Omar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWbLjFT0sWQ

These types of things make me happy :D

I'm basically done for now, but I may come back eventually when I have time. Whether I keep playing at that point depends what I find - will it be great players clinging to what's left of the game they mastered, or will it be 0-bar Narukami players who skip the intro so they can do Raging Lion/Swift Strike 50/50s, and reliably DP > Super on wakeup every time they have 50 meter?

Shut up Kirito your alt is annoying and I knew it was you XD

Just give me a 500 cost Leo and I will be so happy for the game's whole life.

A bit of a random question - do we know whether EVO setups will use EN or JP voices? It's a minor thing, but I'd like to get used to the sound cues that I can expect to be dealing with.

So.... has anybody been using the Tartarus 10 lobby? I never see anyone in there. I have to drive 90 minutes to play one of the two players within practical distance that can consistently beat me (out of about 5 players total who still play the game in practical driving distance), so I'm always desperate for practice lol. Also I'm pretty sure Reako's Mitsuru obsession has us covered, but I'll check and see if anything's missing from her info. (...lol at implying anybody who's going to EVO needs my help with Mitsuru.)

Nameless_Pawn is my JP account. Everyone boots me for connection because I live in the middle of nowhere, Mississippi, but I still try to sneak in a match here and there lol.

The entire section is inactive :P. But uh, I updated the Zaku III section. Yay me.

Another recent reply!

I am sad that this has no more replies or discussion... I used to know a fancy combo or two and may have to start playing again just to give Mashymre some respect. Well, now that I've messed around for a while, it seems like anything remotely fancy wastes damage :/, unlike the Kshatriya (the suit I mainly played) or the Gouf (the other grunt suit I used) which actually had a creative combo route or two. The poor Zaku is also hurt by strange damage numbers, so you occasionally leave people alive with health in the single digits. Compensate for your lack of extra arms or fancy electric whip combos by using the ridiculous mobility and respectable damage of your newtype mode. BASIC COMBO ROUTES: 5BB>5BB does 200 flat and is the best you can get off of 5B without wasting a self destruct or super 8B>5BB>5B (only works against the wall) = 181, you can also go 8B>Grab for 175 because the 3rd B is hard to hit. 8B>5B = 93 8B>fully charged A = 146 4/6B>2B>Grab = 188 2B>5BB>boost dash (the one that uses the X button, not the double tap on the pad)>5B = ~200. ^If you can't get this one just do 2B>5B>Grab for 196 Dash B>2B>Grab = 183, that's the most I can manage off the Dash B stun. A>boost A> boost A = 137 (individual non-consecutive shots do 65) Fully Charged A = 90 ReGelg Assist = 40 per volley Regular Grab = 124, Grab>A = 126, Grab>2B = self destruct for 280. POWER OF A CYBER NEWTYPE COMBOS: Awakened 5BB>5BBB = ~256 damage Awakened 4/6BB>5BBB = ~257 damage Awakened 2B>5BB>Grab= 260 damage Awakened 8B>5BBB = ~261 damage (only works against the wall) Awakened Grab = 160 damage Awakened Grab>2B = self destruct for 348 damage (!!!) Awakened Super = 288 Damage NOTES: -Comboing into the super or the self destruct is pretty much worthless because of the damage reduction -The gun won't combo off itself unless you boost in between shots -The gun's damage decreases off consecutive hits -The fully charged gun does not consume ammo -The gun will usually whiff if you combo into the grab. Use the regular version if you're using it as a combo ender. -Your self destruct explosion can catch your target's teammate. -You can cancel out of the self destruct and just hit them with your sword instead until the moment you die. It does hardly any damage, but may be useful if you realize you're about to cost yourself the match. You can also just dash away. -Fun fact: if you win with the self-destruct, Mashymre will have a different win quote and be holding up the ReGelg's head.

I was the not-as-good Mitsuru who played sloppy and got 7th lol, I was just curious where everybody ended up. Persona players are practically an endangered species these days. Also I was gonna try and run a side event for P4U at our Mississippi tournament if there was enough interest, but it looks like that idea's gonna be too dead to ask people to come down from Tennessee. Also Annel Frank were you the one I played a few SCV casuals with? And ran into getting food later?

Any of the Persona players from KiT back in January in here?