Siefer

? Yes, that is the very premise of the high-low mixup...if all he did was j.DD-j.B, then that wouldn't be a mixup, you just block high. The point of this is to create a true (well, as close as possible) 50-50 situation where you can't react to what is going on, but instead have to guess (yomi) which way to block. Since you can react to Relius' overhead, and there is enough of a timing difference between late AD j.B and empty jump, they are thus less effective. It looks silly, but when you do it right, the timing difference between the high and the empty jump low is fairly tight. Of course, this is all under the presumption the opponent respects you enough to allow you to do this. EDIT: Thanks for the vid Dusk. I guess I'm doing it right.

I'm not sure if I'm doing this correctly (Duskthanatos, can you post a vid showing exactly how it's supposed to look?) but I think I know where you're messing up. The trick is that you have to wait for the recovery on the 2nd j.D to finish before you press j.B. You are probably pressing j.B too early and thus nothing is coming out. It honestly looks absolutely ridiculous to me, but Dusk isn't wrong on the timing difference between empty jump 3C and just j.B off of this. You should also be careful of doing a blocked 3C too close to the opponent as you can jump over them with the j.B whiffing. You don't actually have to do it as fast as Dusk is implying, but you do want to get the first j.D low, and the next j.D as soon as you can.

Hm, I kind of figured that would be the case. That would explain why some of my combos blue beat on the CU 3C. The best I've been able to do in terms of narrowing down the right "timing" is to wait for the hit confirmation of the first hit, and then cleanly input 236C (my inputs usually aren't clean). Still, even with this, I don't hit my required 80% mark to use it in matches, I guess I'll just have to grind it out some more. Thanks for the clarification! EDIT: I take back what I said, I can actually do it fairly consistently if I do 12369C instead of 236C as soon as the hit registers. I guess doing the convoluted motion compensates for the actual timing necessary...well, hope that helps someone out.

Hi, I have a few questions on Ragna's 623D(1) used during combos: -What is the benefit of reducing his ID to just 1 hit? -Does anyone have any advice on how to consistently hit the 236C to make his ID just 1 hit? Visual/Audio cues? I can do it right now, but not consistently enough to use in an actual match. Thanks in advance for anyone who can answers these questions for me.

There is something I forgot to mention, it's entirely possible that a 3rd party "guided" Labrys into the tv world, a party that doesn't invoke a persona, but can still open the gate. This 3rd party doesn't have to be human, or at least, not a "normal" human. It was never mentioned what the exact rules were for opening the gate on your own, and if any exceptions to this exist. Maybe this is all just a dream in Vincent's head...

@Starlight777: If I remember correctly, you don't need to be able to invoke your persona to enter into the tv world. There are multiple instances in the game where characters were thrown into the tv without being able to invoke their persona. If you're asking how she got into the world on her own, as long as someone who can invoke a persona opens the "gate", she can enter...who that person was, dunno. I've been watching some match vids, this game looks quite fun, can't wait to see how it develops. If anything, it looks pretty.

lol, it's not that, it's just all of the people I trolled with Fiona in Arcana can now get their sweet revenge on me. As long as I have the financial flexibility, and the time, I'm always down for meet-ups, and I want to get better. But yea, I'm pretty bad right now, lol. I'm not being modest, I'm really just bad right now. I'm not used to the way and the speed the characters move and how much space they can cover atm, which kind of fucks up neutral. I'll get over it...maybe... I also miss my homing button.

Thanks for the info Katsu! Either way, I plan on getting the game and having fun with it, so now I have a little more to look forward to, but I guess we'll see how things develop.

So, have the concerns that Xie heard on his trip to Japan from players who played in the loketest been addressed? I don't mind if this ends up being a game just for fun, but it would be nice if it had enough depth that it could be played on a competitive level. If anyone answers with, "it's going to be at SBO" as your answer, that doesn't mean anything, Sengoku Basara, FUC, and Hokuto no Ken, all fun games mind you, were at SBO too, and they are all stupid broken.

East Brunswick is south of New Brunswick, which is where Rutgers is, it's pretty close to Rutgers. Ril, I may be interested in the march meet-up, I've been extremely busy lately, but I'd love to get some games in. I am pretty terrible in BlazBlue though.

Actually, I think that's partially the point, to showcase the hypocrisy in his actions compared to his moral "code". It highlights the dangers of pigeonholing yourself into a narrow and absolute state of mind. It wasn't just about Estelle, it was also about himself. I also want to note that it's dangerous to label characters in absolute terms ("bad" and "good") because it's really more about perspective and who is benefiting from the situation than the actual moral implications of it. A saint can be considered a sinner depending on what they've done and who you talk to, and vice-versa.

Thanks Toasty!

Hi, I have a question on these two combos. For the IAD j.(A)BD part, are you saying to unsummon Ignis after the j.B? Or are you saying to hit them with a j.8D or j.6D or something? Do you know of any videos off-hand that show this combo? I haven't seen it done in any of the match videos I've seen thus far and having a visual reference would be helpful if one exists. Thanks for the clarification.

Ugh, that's annoying. I don't recall ever getting the option to transfer files and I had to do it all over again. Well, it doesn't matter, I'm caught up now.

Hey Xie, I just wanted to let you know that I've found your beginner series to be...quite interesting, although a little rocky initially. I think it's a great resource for beginner players and I've recommended it to anyone who was interested in either BlazBlue or fighting games in general (although only the first few episodes for the latter). I agree that your latest character experiments wasn't as helpful to others as it may have been for you. If you would like to focus it on beginners, you could try the following which I think would be helpful: -Spend the first 30-45 min (or however long you feel it's necessary) in training mode offline to go over the character. Normals you feel are worth mentioning, when to use them, general combos you'll be (attempting) on doing, why you're doing said combo and what you're getting out of it, your general game plan with the character, etc. etc. I think this is a good idea for yourself and the viewer because you can lay down what you think you know of the character now, and you can review it later on after your matches to see if your preconceptions matched actual match play, and how you adjusted to it. -At this point you can go online and challenge various people. You can save matches that caught your eye (for whatever reason), and go over them too in real-time and explain why you thought they were interesting, how it may have changed the way you approached a match-up (or your usage of the character), etc. I wouldn't go crazy over this though, and only focus on one, or a few aspects that caught your eye for the sake of getting back to play more matches. -I admittingly haven't watched the end of your Bang episode, so I don't know if you've already done this, but you can set aside some time at the end to go over what you've learned through these matches and how it's changed or added to what you already knew about the character. There are a few problems with this approach however, the most notable is that you'll be sacrificing time to go over things you may have already known yourself, and thus limiting what you can get out of a particular session with a character. Also, doing things this way increases the amount of structure and time you have to put in to prepare for each episode, which depending on your work load at the moment, or personal life, may not be feasible. Regardless, I'll be watching them anyway, and look forward to future episodes. I appreciate this service you're doing for the community.

I have won.

This is a great idea, I would definitely watch this.

I think that's only one of the paths.

If you're having trouble with that combo, there are a couple of things you might be doing wrong: -You're jump-canceling the 6C too early. -You're messing up the input for 623B after the j.4C -You're not going back to neutral (after the dash) after the wall bounce for 5C. In the first case, you know this is the problem if the IAD is not coming out at all and all you're getting is a normal jump. Just go slower. In the second case, you have a little more time to do 623B after the j.4C then you probably think, again, just go slower and try to make your inputs cleaner. In the third case, you can try holding back when you do the 5C so you don't get 6C by accident, you also don't have to dash that far. The rest of the combo is pretty easy, hopefully this helps.

@Zeth: I did not base anything I said on numbers that (to my knowledge) were never officially released by...anyone for either sales or participants, however, according to a random post on SRK, MK9 actually had more than twice the number of entrants compared to BB. Mr. Wizard has also stated that if a game can't break 400 entrants at EVO, it probably doesn't deserve to be there (paraphrased), going by that and what actually happened with the 2012 line-up, you can reasonably conclude that at worst, MK9 had double the entries of BB. There are no official numbers released concerning total units sold either (the only ones who know the real numbers are the developers/publishers), but for the sake of argument, let's say that BlazBlue generated 350,000 sales in its lifetime. Rounding down the (supposed) number of entrants at Evo, you get roughly .05% participation rate compared to the total amount of players who purchased the game. Assuming that SF IV sold approximately 2.5 million copies in its lifetime, going by the (roughly) 1,700 entrants they peaked at in 2010, they had a participation rate of about .068%. I assume MvC 3 numbers would be similar to that, but to me, the fact that they were able to draw a larger participation rate despite a vastly larger player base is actually more impressive than BlazBlue's numbers. It's much easier to sell a lot of copies and then have an insignificant amount of people show up, but that wasn't the case here. That being said, going by these psuedo figures, I don't believe BlazBlue has peaked and could earn a participation rate of .06 or higher. As I've already mentioned however, that may no longer be possible due to the weakening of its brand name.

The primary problem here is the stagnation of BB's community and the lack of growth. If you go by the last couple of years, you can argue that SF IV has already plateaued and that it'll either sustain comparable numbers, or enter a period of steady decline, but the big difference between SF and BB is the sheer volume of players within that community, where even a period of steady decline may not have a material impact for some time. We can't compete with Capcom in terms of raw numbers, that's the wrong way of looking at things. Relative to its sales, I believe that BlazBlue has not reached a point where it has peaked in terms of tournament participation, however, due to the weakening power of its brand name, it's possible that it may never be able to reach that theoretical peak. There is very little you can do about this unfortunately. How to address this: The first thing that needs to be done is to identify what makes BlazBlue unique and different from its peers. Mortal Kombat did this back in the day with its different take on presentation and its (mostly superficial) emphasis on brutality and gore. This worked for Mortal Kombat and remains one of the defining factors that contributes to its continuing success from a financial perspective. Once you identify the elements that differentiate BlazBlue, you have to emphasize and run with it. Treating and applying the same tactics utilized by Capcom games to BlazBlue will not, and has not worked. Establishing our own major allows us more freedom in applying tactics to encourage player growth without the restrictions set in place by established standards. No longer do we have to compete for time, space, and prestige, and we can not employ strategies that only "anime" games can employ to help encourage player growth and participation. As an example of this, whether as a troll or not, I don't know, but some of you guys seem to like this Gundam game that came out recently for PS3. Having our own event allows us to either use that as a marquee title to focus on, or as a special exhibition. This is something that no other major is doing and we can utilize to market ourselves. This is just an example of what I mean. Another major advantage that we have over the larger communities is the general accessibility to "top" players. One of the things I dislike about where the Capcom community is going is this "idolization" process that is happening with top players, where the normal, standard player feels like they'll never be able to compete on the same stage as them, or that they have attained such a celebrity status that it's difficult to even meet and communicate with them at a major. Playing with a top player can completely change your perspective on the game, but more importantly, it indirectly implies that even a top player will take the time to get in a few games with you, and it's even better if they are willing to help you out if you so desire it. Time is a valuable commodity, and those that realize this appreciate and recognize this generous gesture. Some "top" players are already doing this, and that's a great thing, but perhaps we can expand this idea even further. That being said, the logistical (and financial) nightmare of building your own major when you know that you won't win out in the numbers game is daunting, and for a smaller player base like the anime community, it can only succeed with the combined efforts of other communities. This isn't something that is Dustloop and BlazBlue's problem alone, this is something that everyone in the anime community needs to get involved with. Although it remains as an ideal, perhaps the better idea for the time being is to piggyback onto a cooperative major and to implement experimental approaches there to see what works, and what doesn't. Regardless, we need new ideas and new approaches, because the old ones aren't working and just telling people to "show up" isn't going to do anything.

I posted about this on the SRK thread, and interestingly enough, no one replied or quoted it and instead went on pointless tangents that weren't really relevant. I obviously support your 2nd option, in fact, I advocated it in my reply on the SRK thread. I agree with most of what you're saying, but I also stated some of that myself in the SRK thread.

I'll hold it down in AH 3, Jersey isn't going to be free. Take care of yourself.

I wasn't aware that google maps could do that, thanks.

Yo, I'm thinking of coming to the Next Level tournament tomorrow from Jersey. How would I get there from Penn Station? Any help would be appreciated.