Graque

I agree with everything you said. I think I've read somewhere that the time it takes a human to react to a single is roughly proportional to the log of the number of states which require different processing. To put it differently, the bigger the surprisal of what your opponent does, the longer it'll take you to react. So knowing your opponent's tendencies will make your reflexes much quicker. However, surely it's still useful to know what you can respond to "on reaction" and what absolutely requires you to make a read. For instance, I learned that it's pointless for me to try to block Leo's stance overhead on reaction. If a Leo is mixing up lows and overheads, I shouldn't beat myself up over not blocking well---instead I should think about how to avoid that situation to begin with, or use other tools (backdash, option selects, dead angle as you mention, whatever). On the other hand, blocking a dust doesn't require a hard read. If I'm continually getting blown up by Ky's dust, maybe then I do need to just keep a better eye out for dusts, and just practice blocking them.

I'm new to the game so sorry if this is obvious. But I was practicing blocking mixups in training mode and I realized that the random playback feature could be used to quantify my reflexes. For instance, against Ky I set two of the three slots to A below, and one to B: A: low, (small pause), low B: low -> greed sever Then I set it to random playback. I was surprised, but I couldn't block greed sever. I'm a bad player, but I thought I had blocked greed sever before on reaction. I guess I had just gotten lucky or used option-select timing. So apparently I can't block Ky's greed sever (19-22F), but I on the other hand I can block his dust (28F). I can also block Leo's dust (25F), but not his stance overhead (18F). So apparently my reflexes are between 20 and 25F. I was going to try other moves to try to narrow down the range, but then I realized that I could just change the input lag setting and see how much I could increase it before I couldn't block any more. It seems for non-dust overheads I need about 23-25F, but for dusts I can react a bit quicker, perhaps closer to 20F, presumably because of the big red marker. Anyway, does this methodology make sense? Has anyone else tried this? I think I'm slow, but I'm curious what other people find. Has anyone spent a lot of time training and improved their reflexes? (I just tried for about 20 minutes with Greed Sever.)

After seeing FR18 Xrd, I have a question about the finals where Kazunoko beat Marlinpie. First though, congrats to all the competitors! I had never watched a Guilty Gear tournament before, and don't really know the game, but it was obvious that past a certain point, all the players were amazingly skilled. So about Kazunoko, he lost his first set as Sol to Marlinpie (Zato). But after that he switched to Ky and beat Marlinpie 6-0. That series was really the most interesting point of FR18 to me (even though I watched more USF4), because I couldn't really figure out how Kazunoko won. To me, Zato looks like he has a ton of mixups, tricks, pressure, and zoning. (And he's top tier apparently.) By comparison, Ky seems to be a plain character that could easily be in a street fighter game. I noticed Kazunoko killing eddie occasionally with stun edges, but other than that I didn't really see anything that Ky was doing other than fundamentals. Anyway, I guess my question is: why did Kazunoko switch to Ky, a character he presumably was less comfortable with than Sol, and how did that switch help him beat Marlinpie? Thanks!

Sorry, I kinda meant the opposite but didn't phrase it very well. I thought people were saying that everyone starts on a "level playing field" and the only thing that matters is your training/dedication. (It turns out people weren't really saying that though.) Anyway, since someone brought up Brolylegs, I was just mentioning that you could see him as a counterexample to that---he definitely started with a huge execution disadvantage compared to the average player. (I assumed his condition, arthrogryposis, was a genetic disease, but after reading wikipedia it seems it may or may not be, but either way he was born with it, and it's not something that he can fix by hard work.) So for him the playing field couldn't have looked very fair. How was he able to overcome it? Was it genetics or hard work? Who can say, I have no idea about his particular case. I know I've kinda been posting on the genetics side, since I do think it's significant, but here's a great summary article written by the psychologist who right now is leading the other side of the debate: Anders Ericsson. http://drjj5hc4fteph.cloudfront.net/Articles/2007%20IJSP%20-%20Ericsson%20-%20Deliberate%20Practice%20target%20art.pdf He basically argues that it's all about practice, not genetics, and he identifies the kind of practice that is most efficient for mastering skills. He also talks about the development of reaction speed. It's a dense read because it's written for other psychologists or sports trainers, not gamers, but it's totally applicable to fighting games. IMHO could be very helpful whether or not you believe genetics matters at all.

You're probably talking about Brolylegs, who was born with arthrogryposis. He's an awesome player who literally has to play with his face because he can't use his hands. To me that's just proof that genetics can matter. Because of his condition, he had to overcome challenges that no one else had. For instance, he plays Chun Li, because she was the character he could control best with his handicap (I think he couldn't do the shoryuken motion well). Brolylegs deserves more credit for being a great player despite all that. I don't see how anyone could deny that not having working hands is a huge disadvantage. I wonder if Luffy is an example of this. He started playing fighting games with SF4, and he won his first tournament after only playing a few months. And of course he won the last Evo. Maybe you think Rose is overpowered (I don't), but still he's one of the world's best SF4 players. So to me he's obviously someone with tons of natural ability, who was able to catch up with extremely dedicated world-class players who have been playing fighting games for twice as long or more. But recently he said he only plays SF4 a few hours a week now, and he mentioned his job, family life, etc. He may be talented, but it doesn't surprise me that recently he's been losing more to top players. Momochi and Daigo practice like 8+ hours a day---no one who plays 3 hours a week can compete with that.

Awesome quote. That's the real challenge here, to acknowledge that life isn't fair---that people do come with different natural abilities and weaknesses. Yet on the other hand you can't let that stop you, or use that as an excuse. I think that's why people here are looking at things so black-and-white. Some of the people here are thinking of the science, which tells you that genetics has a crucial role in everything you are, the way your nerves are wired, your brain, etc. Others (like Hollysmoke) are thinking of the mindset required, that when it comes to getting good you can't start thinking about genetics, which is also true. It's not all-or-none, I think you need both some genetic ability and lots of practice/dedication. And it's mostly practice. But someone else mentioned it before, not everyone will improve at the same rate. I think a talented person could get to a skill level in 1500 hours, while the average person might take 1800 hours to reach the same level (assuming both are practicing similarly). Unless you take extreme cases (e.g. someone with Down's syndrome) the influence will be subtle. Other than through twin studies, I thought this would be intuitive from being in school. Anyone could do well by studying hard, but some people pick stuff up quicker than others. For instance, I was always good at math and bad at languages. Now I'm trying to learn Chinese, and it's really painful lol. But I'm not going to give up---eventually I will get it to a workable level.

I didn't, but I took a look now. The only one that worried me was that the article did not exist, but it seems it does and the abstract was correctly conveyed by the Economist (and other publications that reported the study). See for instance http://pss.sagepub.com/content/25/9/1795 and http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/07/30/0956797614541990.abstract. Most of the other posts seem to be trashing the study based on ignorance (e.g. the first post claims that the first years of music are based on motor skills, not aural ability, when the first paragraph of the article mentions that the study covered participants who had up to 20,000 hours of music practice, which is well more than a few years). Anyway, it would be equally ignorant of me to support the study as being great, because I also have not read the study. And at any rate I'm not a cognitive psychologist. But what I do know is psychologists have been examining nature vs nurture debate for quite a while (using e.g. identical twin studies) and there is body of literature that suggests that, in many areas, achievement partially depends on talent, not just practice. Something like this has to be true... It's obvious that not every human has what it takes to be an NFL lineman. So why think that every human has what it takes to be, say, a world-class singer? Singing ability is less obvious than body size, but both are determined partially by genetics. A chimpanzee, even if well motivated and raised by loving human parents, obviously just doesn't have the genetics to be a good singer. True, if you want to succeed at something you need to try hard---thinking about talent won't help you at all. And also I agree that practice is more important than talent. So for fighting games, it may not matter other than theoretically. But, for instance, it matters to me as a parent. It's a tricky balance, but I'd like to encourage my kids to do things that they are both "talented" at and have a passion for. (Of course, I would never tell them that they're good at something because they're talented, I would just say they worked really hard lol.)

I think this is true, or at least close. Talent can matter though---it's not just for NFL players. Here's a report about a recent study that I found very interesting: http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21606259-musical-ability-dna-practice-may-not-make-perfect TLDR version: based on twin studies, it appears that certain musical skills (including recognizing rhythm) are genetic and not teachable, even after years of practice. If that's true of music, it's probably true of fighting games, because it's so important to notice other players' rhythm. True, effort is still more important. But if you want to be top 8 at Evo or whatever, you probably need a decent talent level, plus, of course, thousands of hours of dedication.

There have been some great responses here. How much of the difference is due to netcode though? I don't know if this corresponds to rollback netcode, but some games (Skullgirls I think) allow you to play with fixed delay, so the delay should be something you could get used to. Ping times (round-trip) on a good connection can be 10ms or less, so it seems a fixed two frame delay (two frames = 33ms) should be possible. Reaction times can be 300ms or more, so online delay seems like it could just be similar to monitor and speaker delay, which I think can also add around 10ms I think. So anyway I'm wondering if offline and online would be almost identical on a good connection if the netcode were good.

Thanks for distinguishing between late gattles and links, the distiction is pretty clear once you actually start doing the combos so I would have been confused otherwise. I just did the missions as Slayer (except the Venom one) and had a few noob questions: Mission 1 - Block Sol's uppercut and punish. Is (c.S > f.S)*2 > 5K > Mappa the BnB combo for these basic situations? Mission 45 - get through Venom's balls. I'm hilariously bad at this trial. I've lucked out a few times with a combination of forward dash and Mappa, but I feel like a real Venom would find it trivial to zone me out. Any hints? Mission 49 - You need to interrupt I-No's Stroke the Big Tree and do a combo for more than 100 damage. 5K CH > c.S f.S 5K > Mappa works, but just barely (like 102 damage). I feel like I'm missing something. Does Slayer have a stronger combo that starts with a low? Some of Slayer's moves like 5H and his command throw stagger on hit. Is there some way for me to look up what my frame advantage? I noticed in the practice room I can control how fast the dummy mashes out of these, which is a great feature, but it would be nice to be able to look them up too. I find reversals and air combos much much harder than they were in Street Fighter (I basically can't do them at all) but hopefully that's just practice. Thanks for any info. 4

Cool thanks guys, I will practice some combos and then give him a shot online. Hope it's not like SSF4 (my first fighting game) where I lost basically 100% of my first 70 matches online lol.

Not sure if this is the right place, but I'm just starting on the GG series now and am thinking of learning Slayer (next two choices would be Sin or Ky). I've read that overall he's not super-demanding technically, but does he play ok online? I'll be playing online mostly, and I read he's a "links" character, which makes him different from most of the other characters. I've played some Street Fighter, so I'm ok with links but I've also heard that GG has laggy netcode. Does the lag affect Slayer more than other characters? I play Rose in SF4 so I figured Slayer would be kind of similar (mappa=soul spiral, lots of dashing, no invincible reversal, no divekick, lol). But Rose's 1f link in her BnB combos is a pain online, another char might be better to start. Any opinions (beginner or advanced) welcome. Thanks,