Flawless Victory: Why Fighting Games Take The Most Skill

fireball

its hadouken

 

I had to dumb it down a bit for the WoW players so they know what the glowy things are.

 

bah they dont even know who fatal1ty is

 

anyone who's watched mtv knows who fatal1ty is. Might want to name someone less known.

 

fireball has one less syllable.  easier to use as a term, instead of each character's specific "fireball" move.

 

Whenever I say hadouken I always feel forced to put the same energy into it as the characters do. HA-DOUUUUUUU-KEN.

 

I was playing SF2 on the machine in my local Circle K a long long time ago.

Fatality is overrated as ****.

bad troll is bad.

 

Could be a Yoga Fire...so the term fireball is ok.

 

button mashing isn't going to get you anywhere vs. anything but complete scrubs in SF.  Some fighters are a bit more forgiving, Soul Calibur and MK for instance imho.  While I generally like Projects stuff I kind of chuckled a bit at that part.

 

Eddie Gordo in the old tekken games used to be scrub friendly, but really only to beat other scrubs. lol.

 

I don't consider myself an expert of fighting games, as I never played many outisde of soul-caliber, but I can definitely say button mashing really just tests how conscious-minded your opponent is.

I like to equate it to real fighting (as loosely as it may be related). You have some people that think martial arts (or fighting games) are nothing but learning techniques and executing them, but it is more a matter of knowing *when* to use the techniques you have. To counter any button masher in any fighting game all you pretty much have to do is use your fastest/most direct moves, and watch as they fail miserably because they aren't giving any thought into their movement, angles of attack, or positioning.

The same can be said for real fighting (or sparring I suppose). If you have a really aggressive opponent who likes to just barrel in and attack, he is best countered by straight direct punches or kicks. Some people may think winning a fight is nothing but being mad and charging at the other guy, but if that other guy is worth anything, he'll know how to retaliate.

 

That all being said, if your opponent is a moron or not aware of how important timing/positioning is, you can probably just go berserk if you're inexperienced to increase your chances of winning.

 

nm

 

Lol, yes I think some people read "Rule" as in "Win Everything at a Competitive Level".
In seriousness, I put "rule" because "5 Genres that Anyone Can Win Occasionally" didn't seem to fit right.

Fighting games are in there because they're the easiest games to pick up and play. Is that not a good way for a non-gamer person to start?
Obviously if they're playing against someone very skilled, they have little to no chance, but newbie against newbie going beserk has a pretty equal chance to win, and it's loads of fun in the process.

Glad I could stimulate discussion. If Vir wasn't the seasoned Gameriot angy man I might take offense XD As it is, it's a pretty hilarious article. The Shind pic is classic!

 

djwheat and slasher made the same point last week,  It is a very accessible game, that even inexperienced fighter fans will enjoy and play with their friends.  They may not get online and be dominated by the cream of the crop but they will have fun.  It is also very deep however if you want to play at high levels, arguably more so than SSF2 even.

Rule was probably the wrong word but your reasoning makes sense.  Heck I would argue something like Madden is harder to "jump right in and play" than most fighting games.

My friends are more than welcome to button mash and try to beat me, just not on my madcatz stick. 

 

Vir, was your opponent retarded. Shoto jumpin stuffs standing roundhouse, what the hell! Plus the better option is TU->F+RH->Ultra.

Sagat players are gay, but I still +1'd you.

 

I totally standing RH shoto jump ins with standing RH.  Maybe it's because players usually go for deep RH's?  I don't think I've gotten a trade with S RH vs a shoto jumpin.

I do trade with F+Roundhouse sometimes, and that is just ******* retarded, because I can trade and land an ultra before the other guy hits the ground. lololol sagat.

You can TU -> F + RH without a FADC thrown in there?

 

If you trade a fierce TU, his backflip will cause the f+RH to hit and you can follow it with an ultra, no FADC needed. This 70%+ Combo is usually followed by:

Connection to Other Player(s) Lost!

And yeah, if they don't stick anything out S.RH will rape them every time. I usually manage to pop 1-2 of them off before they get wise and start throwing it out earlier, but dropping the TU trade is fine with me, since if you can't ultra you can always have them land on a fat EX LTS.

 

I disagree because of the sheer volume of information needed to play Warcraft at a competitive level.  The decision-making process is enormous, just pressing the correct key every 1.0 seconds (rogue GCD) or more often if the ability is off the GCD like shadowstep along with maintaining awareness of a 3D area, gauging distances, etc takes as much concentration and thought as the ins and outs of fighting games.  My game was Guilty Gear for PS2 and I got pretty solid with Faust - just as a reference for where I'm coming from.     HAVING SAID ALL THAT, both are very complex and I wouldn't really say either has a huge advantage over the other in a "skill" war.  Twitch skill?  Fighter takes it hands-down.  Two different games, like comparing Chess to Soccer.                QUESTION:  Do you notice the shift in popularity Obama is taking?  When USA Today puts out an article today  saying "Obama more popular than ever" and then refers to their poll on whether or not people "are hopeful for Obama" still as their source, you know the Democrats are revving the publicity machines to make people think everything is OK.  Thoughts?

 

I agree with this. For as much as everyone bashes WoW as a noob friendly game, it's by far the most complicated game I've ever played. In an FPS game all I have to do is aim, shoot, throw grenades and change weapons. WoW has a lot more variables. I can pick up an FPS game pretty fast and get close to pro-level. I blowed balls at WoW for like 2 years before I finally got good. And I still can't break 2300.

 

I Guilty Gear but I suck at fighting games with the exception of Mortal Kombat. Plus, playing fighting games with current generation D-Pads is like trying to finger your girlfriend with your elbow.

Obama has simply made more promises than he could ever fulfill.

 

At a time when less government and less taxation would turn the ignition on an enormous potential national economy, he talks in ways that break confidence on Wall Street and tries to push an enormous government spending spree that will leave the nation dependent like a heroin addict when the funds run out in 2-3 years.  The right knows this and libtard democratic congressmen vote blindly.  This will push us into true socialism (if we weren't riding the razor's edge already).  AUGH WHY DO I KEEP THINKING ABOUT THIS!?!?  I'M IN WIND ENERGY, I SHOULD LIKE HIS SPENDING ON ENERGY AND TRANSMISSION LINES!  IT BENEFITS MY SUCCESS DIRECTLY AND I STILL HATE THE SMARMY, LYING ****.

 

+1 for you, because Guilty Gear is still on of my favorite fighters of all time.

 

The makers of the game try to take that from you every new patch, though. In its inception, the GCD is a skill-limiter. When it first reared its ugly head umpteen years ago I pointed the same thing out, although back then I had no idea that they would throttle player skill on a continual basis. You're so used to it now that most people can't even think of how the game would operate without it, not having played MMO's without it. If I can press my buttons faster and more accurately than you, why shouldn't I?

RNG, class comps, horrid class balance, and bad arena design don't plague non-rpg variants. Take the tier chart in SF for example. Based on pro-player evaluation, they give a matchup rating out of 10 for the matrix of all characters versus all characters. No character "loses by default", like you see in games where classes are designed around rock-paper-scissors. Especially given that certain comps, even played horribly, against bad comps with good players have heavy advantages.

I suppose the main aspect of RPG combat versus Fighter combat is the factor of RNG in and of itself.

What you need to look at, though, is that the article Vir talks about in his blog is referencing poorly designed Fighters that reward button mashing or create 80 hit combos out of 5 button sequences (Killer Instinct anyone?).

 

Sintor:  I won't quote your whole post, but while it CAN be true for some things, WOW's GCD is a great way to lay out a framework to design DPS and HPS goals around.  They know you can only do something once every x seconds so they can minimize broken burst (lol dmg is borken rite now dood) and tune the game.  I don't think it affects the other portion of the game which is decision making relative to an enormous amount of information coming in at all times.  Relative positions, distances, cooldowns left, time left on used cooldowns, etc.

 

Remember this, the only thing it does is provide a stop-gap for their own balancing acts. Like I said previously, you probably haven't sat down and imagined what life without GCD is like. It requires rebalancing across the board as it is a core-design philosophy that a game with many years of development has been built on. I remember when it went in and it was a total cop-out on limiting apm instead of balancing individual skills against their usage.

While abilities are NOW built around GCD, they didn't have to be. Looking at certain classes now with "GCD forgiveness" being coded into them, you can start to see that they have to lift up the band-aid a little bit because the class needs to perform actions at a rate that goes beyond this limiter they placed ages ago.

Look at RTS gameplay. Lets say you put a limiter in on APM like the GCD. Suddenly, your players that were in the upper 20% but not in the upper 5% have evened out. It's hard to quantify RPG PvP mechanics like TTL (time to live) versus certain RTS aspects, but you can see how a game like that could have been built and balanced on the assumption that only X actions can occur every X seconds. It starts to water down the elite playing field, but it doesn't mean that suddenly all aspects of game balance are disregarded. Base distance, movement speed, etc all still apply, just that you've limited a certain aspect of the game via input restriction.

 

rofl you are ******* stupid, first of all you are a terrible wow player who never attained any decent rating so you should just shut the **** up.

wow will never compare to a decent fighter or rts

 

Troll police.  I'm afraid I'm going to have to take you into custody, kid.

 

shut the **** up you disgusting ******

 

 

+1 for truth.  The people who were swept away in the Obamania during his campaign are now wondering who they voted for and why this black man with the huge grin in office is pushing marxist moves through Congress.  Well put.

 

The people in the middle who were so eager to punish the Republicans thought they were getting a moderate, not a marxist. 

They weren't paying very much attention, then. Obama was clearly a very liberal guy by US standards.

 

Yeah but he campaigned in the general election as a moderate (which most politicians do).  My impression was that Americans believe him when he said things like "I'm going to cut government programs!" and when he scolded the Bush administration on spending.

Now he's going to spend more between his bailout and his first budget than Bush did in his entire administration.

 

Hmm, probably not, if you count the "real" cost of the Iraq war. But discounting that...

Of course, it might be that the Afghanistan conflict isn't ended quickly by additional troops and ends up costing more under Obams than Bush, which'll help balance out Iraq a little bit.

 

Even with a real cost of 1-2 trillion over how many ever years, Iraq will cost nothing compared to what Obama has done so far, and what he will do in the future.  It's a ******* sad joke to even compare the two.

Something like the Iraq war is a fixed cost.  Eventually it will cost nothing.

Entitlements like SCHIP which gives health insurance to 'kids' who are up to 30 years old are programs that will never go away, and will cost more and more as medicine becomes more advanced and expensive.

The worst thing Bush did for spending was not Iraq or Afganistan.  It was the medicare entitlement.

 

Hey, three conservatives voted for that bill. It's bi-partisan!

Besides, Obama's spending will have at least some positive impacts, even if it proves ultimately to be a big mistake. I'm not sure I can say the same for the Iraq war (for America, discounting tactical gains). Have any highly beneficial trade deals come out of it? Genuine question, I don't know.

Out of interest, what would you do? Ride out the recession? Tax cuts to the rich? From what I gather, the latter is a pretty bad idea (unless you reduce the budget to compensate, which no one ever does).

 

P.S. I'm not entirely sure if it's possible to make the current US system worse. Either fully socialising it NHS style or making it genuinely private would be cheaper.

 

How does it feel to be on top of snail now?

Seriously, Syp is gonna win anyways - that guy is posting like eight articles per day. But I will kindly +1 each of your articles, Lord Vir.

 

How does it feel to be on top of snail now?

Pretty good!  But I'm sure she'll pull some skillful literary switch to get back on top.

 

Just when I was having fun you go and be a good sport Let's both do our best!

 

Quake,Q2,Q3, CS and SF2,MK2,Tekken3, Soul Caliber > WoW and most other MMOrpgs.

Reason being is they are much faster games that require more individual skill than anything. The FPS games however are the ones that can incorporate individual + group at the highest level of gaming. And then there are Starcraft, Warcraft and Red Alert players which have some amazing micro.

The only MMORPG game that took some skill (group only) was Shadowbane. Strategy in controlling your guild and allies on where to hit, even attacking multiple banes (city capture/destruction events) at the same time took a lot of skill and depth that WoW will never touch. The best was a group of 10 picking off zergs of 30-60+. Never had so much fun.

 

FPS's take the most skill in disabling your reflex to blink. You blink, you die.
RTS & MMOs need you to remember 158 hotkeys to be successful. You press the wrong button, you die.
Fighting games require milisecond timing. You hit down right left down X a bit too late, you die.

And all of them want to know what your opponent is thinking at any time.

 

I could agree with you on a very basic level. On a more advanced level; controlling spawns, items, memory of hot spots (peak spots), knowledge of each character, hit boxes... blah blah blah.

 

+1, verrry well put.

 

I think DAOC took more group coordination and was more rewarding than Shadowbane, and I played both, just imo of course

 

Yeah I have heard similar experiences with DAOC. I never played DAOC, but how can anything be more rewarding than destroying and taking over a guild of 200+ active people then rubbing it in from their former city via **** talk?? hehe

 

Yeah it was fun and I guess I never did anything of that scope, that sounds badass!

 

SF takes a lot more skill than WoW but certainly less than starcraft or wc3 and much less than something like CPMA quake3. Console games are inherently skillcapped.

 

CPMA was so fast... aghhh I miss it.

 

I can't really comment on RTS games, as I've barely played them online, never mind in any kind of competitive environment.    They do seem to take quite a bit of micromanagement, knowledge, and some kind of predictability about what kind of units your opponent builds so you can counter with units to take them out.   RTS always seemed like more of a race to me though, who could build and produce units the fastest, control resources, and knew when to attack vs when to defend.