Current Events > It's weird to me that a brand new player often will challenge a pro more than

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an amateur competitive player in a lot of video/card games. Anything from poker to counterstrike to your fighting game of choice, the randomness of facing a new player is often harder to predict and react to than the amateur who follows patterns you might understand more. Pro will still win in most cases, but still weird.

There's always that off chance "wtf is he doing?" becomes the newest metagame tech.
Then the noob goes back to being curbstomped, for not understanding why that happened.

Questionmarktarius posted...

There's always that off chance "wtf is he doing?" becomes the newest metagame tech.
Then the noob goes back to being curbstomped, for not understanding why that happened.

Yup. Hearthstone is probably the worst example of this, as the meta is so badly locked in place that going to play unranked casual matches is almost a completely different game.

This isn't true for fighting games. Not knowing what to do is going to get you murderstomped in 3 seconds, unless it's mahvel or somesuch, where you get stuck in a 100+ hit combo for a minute.

I've seen matches where people are playing an expected meta and -only- an expected meta, but that's an amateur thing to do.

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Guide posted...

This isn't true for fighting games. Not knowing what to do is going to get you murderstomped in 3 seconds, unless it's mahvel or somesuch, where you get stuck in a 100+ hit combo for a minute.

I've seen matches where people are playing an expected meta and -only- an expected meta, but that's an amateur thing to do.

It's absolutely true for fighting games, though the degree of how true varies from game to game. Unfamiliar matchups and off meta champs are one thing, but the big issue is fighting games are very heavily about mind games, and those only work when the opponent knows what they're doing to some degree. A random attack at the wrong time can connect and be a big threat, though you're very unlikely to kill because, as you said, combos are huge.

OctilIery posted...

It's absolutely true for fighting games, though the degree of how true varies from game to game. Unfamiliar matchups and off meta champs are one thing, but the big issue is fighting games are very heavily about mind games, and those only work when the opponent knows what they're doing to some degree. A random attack at the wrong time can connect and be a big threat, though you're very unlikely to kill because, as you said, combos are huge.

The noob may get brutally pummeled, but an unknown cancel or priority quirk may be revealed in the process.

An experienced player would use x move (poke, usually) if I try and close in with most of my combo openers, and I know that because they'd know which of my combos are relatively safe for me to initiate with, and they'd want to use a safe poke to prevent that.

New players on the other hand would use a flip or whatever that doesn't combo or counter my stuff at all, and so I don't know how to close in because they could pull out a lot of different moves rather than the formulaic ones that make sense.

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The mind game only matters if you know what you're doing in the first place. Like, to get to the point where you can unbuffered command grab someone on wake up, several times in a row, is only going to happen if you're good enough to get to that point.

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gunplagirl posted...

An experienced player would use x move (poke, usually) if I try and close in with most of my combo openers, and I know that because they'd know which of my combos are relatively safe for me to initiate with, and they'd want to use a safe poke to prevent that.

New players on the other hand would use a flip or whatever that doesn't combo or counter my stuff at all, and so I don't know how to close in because they could pull out a lot of different moves rather than the formulaic ones that make sense.

I don't know about closing in, but if they're using something low priority and unsafe, that's generally easy to stuff on reaction. You don't have to go in if they're just going to jump into your DP/lariat/loljab

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gunplagirl posted...

New players on the other hand would use a flip or whatever that doesn't combo or counter my stuff at all, and so I don't know how to close in because they could pull out a lot of different moves rather than the formulaic ones that make sense.

In the end, "pros" get set in convention and matchups to the point that they're essentially scrubs who win a lot. The only difference here is that they learn something from the inexperienced or insane, rather than cry foul at something unorthodox or nigh-random.

Guide posted...

I don't know about closing in, but if they're using something low priority and unsafe, that's generally easy to stuff on reaction. You don't have to go in if they're just going to jump into your DP/lariat/loljab

As long as they don't play a projectile spammer character, that's generally the easiest way to do it.

Questionmarktarius posted...

In the end, "pros" get set in convention and matchups to the point that they're essentially scrubs who win a lot. The only difference here is that they learn something from the inexperienced or insane, rather than cry foul at something unorthodox or nigh-random.

I wouldn't go that far but you'll definitely notice the difference between chip and combo damage with those matchups.

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