thatdemoguy

STEP 1: PLAY AND WATCH

There's something absolutely magical about being able to sit down with an opponent and test each other's knowledge. Learning new matchups as you play them, getting all the new "tech" to use next time you play. Figuring out the little nuances and foibles of not only yourself, but of your opponent. The tells. The ticks. The reads. Its simply amazing. And that's what you get from playing! Let's not get on watching because that's a whole other level of joy. The high that's achieved from witnessing the mental exchange between two equally matched players is a beautiful thing. At its most simple level, or to the untrained eye, it appears to just be two (or more) characters on screen that are just throwing out attacks until one of them is the winner. But once you take the time to learn the levels of a game's meta, you start to understand basic conventions like how attacks work, spacing, and footsies. Then when you learn a little more, you begin to know the importance of normals, anti-airs, execution, movement and you start to understand decision making in high pressure situations. Then when you start to get advanced, you learn that while you are playing another person, they are still bound by the limitations of their character, so you start to play against THAT character as much as the person controlling them. If you know more about what they can do than them, the match may be over before it begins.

The reason I brought up both PLAYING the game and WATCHING the game is because I feel both are extremely important to player growth.

Let’s start with PLAYING.  Anybody can pop the game into their console, grab a controller, and press some buttons. Even people with some level of knowledge of the game, predicated solely upon how they played previous games in the series, can pick it up, go to character select to find their chosen avatar and get a couple of wins. Throw some fireballs or some wake up uppercuts all the way to the arcade mode boss, and maybe even beat them on the hardest level. But what EXACTLY does that accomplish? Honestly nothing. Yes, you will know your character's moves and maybe how a few of them work, but the CPU will never ever, and I repeat NEVER EVER replace a competent human opponent. Note the key word there being COMPETENT. What this means is that it does no good to play another person if they aren't making you work for the win. Pushing your limits and forcing you to adapt. Putting you in tense spots where you have to make split second decisions that are the difference between winning and losing. This is the beauty of competitive fighting games. Two total strangers can sit down against each other, and within the span of one fight, they can know more about the other's thought processes than some of their own friends. But on the opposite end, constantly beating on someone who knows less than you or falls for the same gimmicks does nothing for either of you. But the problem is that far too many people do exactly this. They spend too much time playing people far beneath their skill or at a stagnant level and develop a "best on my block" mentality, which creates a misguided sense of comfort and a false feeling of complacency with the game. This is because if someone isn't feeling they are being challenged by the people they play with, then they quickly lose interest in not only playing them, but playing the game in general. I have experienced this personally. Over a period of two years I grew bored of playing a game with my circle of friends because I was no longer being challenged. I reached a plateau that none of them were able to. I didn't practice or even touch the game unless we were all playing together. But it didn't matter because I was able to play a very low level intermediate game and still win. I was gaining nothing from these wins but quickly losing my drive to play the game at all. It got to the point where I even sold the game because I saw no need to even have it anymore. To prevent this from happening to you, I say its immensely important to seek out competition that is going to push you as a player. This doesn't mean that you have to take time off work, forget all your priorities and drop big money to travel all around the country to every tournament in the circuit, but I am saying that it wouldn't hurt to reach out and find players in your local community. Say within 50 or so miles. Find out what they play, how often they play, and if they are looking to improve at an equal rate as yourself. Then from there, you can look into travel. Going from local, to regional, to national (majors). Now as far as going to tournaments, I implore you to not be afraid to eat a goose egg your first attempt, or maybe even your first couple of attempts. There is no shame in going 0-2, it can and will happen. And once that happens you're free to go play all the matches you want with the rest of the community. People from different areas from you, breaking that 50 mile barrier. So get out there and play. Get to know people there. See someone from another area playing a character that gives you trouble? Play some money matches. Take some losses. The lesson in this is that if you're losing, then there's still something for you to learn.

Now say you can't travel. Say you have family or career or other responsibilities that have to take precedence. Then I say play online. If that's what's available to you, take advantage of it most definitely. But don't just jump into random matches. If you have friends that also play online, set up lobbies with one another. Use the party chat function. Talk to each other while you play. Brainstorm and share information. If your friends aren't online then use all of the search criteria available to you via the in-game options. Search for opponents of a higher skill level than yourself. Slowly work your way up the ranked ladder. If you play a particularly good opponent, then send them a 1v1 fight request, play a long set with them to work out your problems with that matchup. While I know this can be hit or miss due to the rise of boosting and other forms of online rank manipulation, this naturally goes right into what I want to say about WATCHING. Im fairly sure that the Street Fighter V retail copy will have an option in its online suite that lets you search and watch the top rated replays by character. USE THIS!!!! Look up the best replays for your character, watch them, save them, replay them in your own time. The wins and the losses. Try to understand why each scenario played out on screen in the way that it did. See what they do that you could emulate or implement into your own play. See the mistakes they made, and against what character they made it against. Then file this in your memory for later so when you are presented with this very same scenario, that you react accordingly. Also if you're not able to travel to tournaments, at least take the opportunity to watch them. The multiple streamers across the huge community, be it bifuteki, nycfurby, pandaxgaming, leveluplive right on up to sp00ky himself, they all archive their broadcasts. Meaning if you aren't able to sit there for hours on end to watch pool play all the way to finals, then you can easily find the matches that are essential to watch. They all even do a fantastic job of separating most matches by what characters are being played, so its extremely intuitive to find exactly what you're looking for if you're willing to put in just a little effort. Then while doing that, learn the names of the top players, and then go watch their personal streams or visit their YouTube channels. These guys all drop valuable gems of knowledge constantly while they are also in the process of learning the game just like you. In fact AS I AM TYPING THIS VERY POST AT 4AM EST, I am diligently putting my thoughts here but I also have Alex Valle's personal stream going on another screen, and I can hear him as he is breaking down Ryu and Rashid in the Street Fighter V beta. Without a shadow of a doubt I can say that the things I am picking up just from listening to him break these characters down will no doubt reap rewards when I get the chance to play personally.

STEP 2: TRAIN SMARTER NOT LONGER

We have all heard the adage that practice makes perfect. This does indeed hold true, the more you practice something the better you will get at it. But what if I were to tell you that it's not really how much you practice, but what you practice? What if I were to tell you that you could actually spend less time in training mode, yet still produce results? Don't believe me? Well it’s totally true. A far too common occurrence or rather error in the mentality of a number of players is that they feel they have to train for hours on end to close the skill gap between themselves and the supposed top players. But what they don't realize is that even those supposed top players, may not spend as much time in training mode as they assume. MIND YOU I AM NOT SAYING THAT TOP PLAYERS AUTOMATICALLY TRAIN LESS....but what I am saying is that I guarantee that they train smarter.

When I say they train smarter I mean they don't waste any motion or use up any time doing things that aren't helping to improve their game or building on top of their foundation of fundamentals. Am I still not making much sense to you? Well I will ask a question, when you personally go into training mode, what do you do? Do you just pick your character, then choose any random opponent/stage, and go to town doing stuff? Do you check the command list, then simply go down it just to see what every move looks like? Or here's the best, do you turn on replenishing or infinite super meter? Do you have a crazy combo that you have no idea how resource dependent it is? If you do, guess what? YOU'RE NOT TRAINING SMART. You don't have to agree with me, but you are doing it all wrong. Outside of seeing and possibly memorizing the various special moves/super attacks, you aren't doing anything that makes you truly better at the game. What do I mean you ask? Well I am glad you did, because now I am going to ask you a few questions I bet you can't answer based upon that training scenario. And they are as follows....

What are your anti-air(s)? What's your furthest reaching normal/poke? Is that normal special/super cancellable? What's your best ground to air? Or air to air? How much stun do your attacks give? How much damage does each of your attacks do? What do you punish with?

That seems like a whole lot of info to try and process, but it's really not. In fact I can tell you that the game itself actually provides you every single bit of that information. Those extra tabs in training aren't just there for show, so use them. Turn on attack data to learn exactly how much damage/stun you are dealing. Set the CPU to do things like jump in, empty and with different attacks from different ranges to see what you can do to anti-air. Make them crouch to learn what normals hit crouching opponents. Set up 1-hit guard to see what your block strings are, as in strings of attacks that once they block the initial one, there are no gaps thus forcing them to block the entire string. Set up the various tech roll scenarios. Find out which of your attacks cause a hard knockdown.  Make them tech in different directions or at different speeds to see how you can apply further offensive pressure. Flip the script and have yourself in the disadvantageous situation, which teaches you how to play from a defensive position.

Having problems against a particular character? Set that character as your training dummy and run through their attacks to see how you can properly punish them. Identify their weaknesses. Find every opportunity for you to deal damage. And as far as dealing damage, learn what your optimal combos are. I don't just mean your "super crazy saved up all my meter to blow it all flashy impractical never land it in a real match" combo. I mean know how to deal damage when you have zero resources, all the way up to when you are fully stocked. Don't be that player that's given the perfect opportunity to put the hurt on an opponent for making a crucial mistake, but doesn't know how to hurt them properly. Don't be that player that punishes....with a throw HAHA

Also as far as stage choice, you know that training stage? Yes the one that has all the blocks and it’s sectioned off like a grid with the red center line? That stage is an invaluable resource for learning your ranges. You can easily learn your character's and opponent's jump height, jump arc, and EXACTLY how far each character's attacks hit from. So there won't be any questions as to why this or that either did or did not hit. You will KNOW why.