A Measured Response Against Fighting Game Difficulty Misconceptions
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- Опубліковано 27 вер 2019
- streamed Sep. 26-27, 2019
A lot of y'all really don't seem to understand what 'perception' is.
This is a follow-up to a previous video: • Fighting Games Are Not...
So you may find some of the points repeated.
Timestamps:
0:30 - "There's more pressure in a 1v1 environment"
0:48 - "Skills don't transfer 1 to 1 between all fighting games"
1:48 - "But when you're new to the game you don't get to 'play the game'"
3:26 - "But beginners don't FEEL like they're playing when they're losing"
6:40 - "But you have to LIVE in training mode if you want to learn"
13:56 - "But in fighting games you're not going to win until you've put in work"
14:29 - "But it's easier to jump around between different MOBAs"
15:50 - "But anybody can just click a mouse in an FPS/MOBA"
16:14 - "But even if you arent playing well, in other games you FEEL like you're playing"
17:23 - "But in fighting games you have to practice execution to do basic things"
20:57 - "But I can blame my teammates in other games"
21:57 - "Okay, so what are the ACTUAL reasons learning a fighting game might be harder?"
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Editing/Thumbnail by Magic Moste:
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#FGC - Ігри
Y'all do realize when you say stuff like: "It's NOT perception it's just that new players FEEL like [X]", that the players PERCEPTION about the game and what is going on is the basis for them to form their FEELINGS on it; right?
If you'd like to see what Sajam had to say about your argument peep these timestamps:
0:30 - "There's more pressure in a 1v1 environment"
0:48 - "Skills don't transfer 1 to 1 between all fighting games"
1:48 - "But when you're new to the game you don't get to 'play the game'"
3:26 - "But beginners don't FEEL like they're playing when they're losing"
6:40 - "But you have to LIVE in training mode if you want to learn"
13:56 - "But in fighting games you're not going to win until you've put in work"
14:29 - "But it's easier to jump around between different MOBAs"
15:50 - "But anybody can just click a mouse in an FPS/MOBA"
16:14 - "But even if you aren't playing well, in other games you FEEL like you're playing"
17:23 - "But in fighting games you have to practice execution to do basic things"
20:57 - "But I can blame my teammates in other games"
21:57 - "Okay, so what are the ACTUAL reasons learning a fighting game might be harder?"
Because fighting games feel more personal even in online voiceless interaction, it feels better to believe that what you’re doing is significantly harder and more intensive than what those other people are doing on their teams and with guns etc.
So what's the takeaway? Fighting games aren't hard, players are just stupid? I've gotten a bunch of people into FGs, and they all had fun playing locally against other people who were ass, but as soon as they went online they stopped playing, because everyone was bodying them. Especially in anime games, where the only people playing them a few months after release are vastly better than anyone starting out.
As someone who played LoL from season 1-5ish, the ability to play with friends made even the 40 minutes of getting your ass beat fun, which doesn't happen in most FG environments. I even feel bad winning sometimes, because instead of a crazy match with footsies and whatever else, I have to just wait until the guy inevitably throws out a launch-punishable move, then do a combo, then hold back until he does it again. "Perception" is vastly more important than "Truth" when it comes to keeping peoples' attention, and thus maintaining a good population, tourney scene, etc. Ignoring that and just telling people, no, what you are experiencing is not what is actually happening, look, you made a decision not to throw a sweep, and now instead of 10 seconds the round lasted 15, is just dooming the genre to failure. For an extreme example in the other direction, look at casinos/lottery: the perception is that you have a chance at winning, and you'll win eventually. In reality, you're an idiot and the house always wins.
We’re talking about the experience of playing something. Feelings are the entirety of the experience! We’re not talking about mathematics. Saying that’s just how you feel” makes no sense at all in this context.
@@happychocobos The takeaway is that Fighting games are not inherently harder than any other competitive game to get into and all of the excuses we examined can be applied to learning any other competitive game. The goal is to get people to re-evaluate how they think about the difficulty in fighting games particularly in brand new players and those who attempt to teach fighting games. That's it. It's not that complicated.
One's perception can be changed and should be examined when new information, ideas, or counter-perspectives are offered. That doesn't mean they WILL change but we as a community can cut through some of the bullshit that we peddle about fighting games being so hard, and in doing so we can narrow down and recognize more of the other fixable issues that keep people from getting into fighting games. This is another link in the chain of topics we've been talking about like netcode and tutorial content.
@@MagicMoste yeah, and just because it's not inherently harder than other games doesn't mean it's hard. Fighting games are still hard, it's just that other games, like mobas and fps are about just as hard
I think the biggest thing is game literacy. The reason why there's such a big idea that fighting games are so hard to learn is IMO due to how relatively different the controls are to some other games.
These people are saying "anyone can learn to aim a crosshair" but grab someone who has never played a videogame and put them on DOOM and they will be utterly lost.
Me. I've played videogames for years and I've never been into shooters. I tried playing Apex with my friend and I was struggling to even see other people in the screen in the distace, let alone aim shoot at them
Csgo might be a better example
I was finding doom eternal easy on the hardest difficulty, as soon as I move to fighting games, while I still had fun, I was mashing at the start, even after that where I had the basics down I was super tense and struggled with inputs (without even using special moves yet) and just chose buttons based on what felt good. I didn't even know you could mash out of block. Having seen people who have never played games before and remembering when I was 11 and played my first (easy) fps it was clear that I had just never played these types of games before. Still fun the whole time though.
I wish people understood that blocking and defense are moves in fighting games. Like successfully consistently blocking an opponent is huge.
one of the biggest things to learn in any sort of fighting game that i think is so important is to crouch block/block
Underrated comment. Successful defense is not only playing the fighting game, it's like half of the battle, if not more.
Yeah and can be really hype. One of the hypest clips of all time is Daigo parrying. Why don't they understand defense is a major part of the game?
That's real cute, but what comments like these miss completely is that blocking isn't fun.
@@SkyTowerKurogane That’s your mind-set. Someone else can find learning defense incredibly enjoyable. After all, if you improve your defense, you’ll get combo’d less often. You are reducing potential frustration. That, and getting combo’d doesn’t have to feel frustrating. It gives you a breather to think about what you can do next. It’s all about mindset. That’s not to say that there aren’t genuine things to be frustrated about, but it’s like what Sajam said in a recent video: Eventually you have to play the game AS IT IS, not as you WISH it would be (this is the video, in case anyone is wondering: ua-cam.com/video/NgqKjvgcTV4/v-deo.html ). It’s like if I complained that hiding behind cover in a shooter isn’t fun, I just want to get some kills. Blocking IS that “cover” in a fighter. It’s a part of the game.
I feel like everyone's just obsessed with going straight to mid to high-level in fighting games asap because they consider that "really playing", without remembering what they did when they were learning as if they were just regular old video games. Find something you like (since 50% of learning is motivation anyway) and just play a lot of it .
This
Lower level play probably is a bit more entertaining for casual players in other games though, I *feel.*
@@SoysauceML theres also the skill gap. I think many people want to play their friends, and if their more experienced they body u, u lose motivation because u cant be on their level yet, and its not a fair fight. Most team games ur friends come with u on the same team to carry u, not fight u and show u that u suck compared to them and it wont be an exciting match for them unless they like teaching u.
@@ALPHAHXCORE Finding opponent is definitely a thing, but I think that many casual players won't find lower level gameplay fun, and just feel like their character having a spasm. I think there needs to be more newbie friendly mechanics (that you can outgrow later) and good tutorials so they find a direction towards proper play instead of just hammering buttons while lost.
Yeah, people take it too seriously, gate keep, and let their egos get in the way.
The one thing you NEED in fighting games is to plug in a GODDAMN ETHERNET CABLE save everybody some trouble.
McDonalds wifi warriors
i hAvE gOoD WiFi ThOuGh
WaT iS a EtHeRnEt cAbLe
Blank Spotato I tHiNk ItS a TyPe oF aNiMaL
Kilik Rung I tHoUgHt It WaS a KiNd Of BoRgAr
As someone who learned sfv the "proper" way grinding in training mode, and is currently learning ggxrd the "wrong" way, I can say throwing yourself into the fire and learning as you get your shit pushed in is a much quicker way to learn. At least for me
That's how latinos learned games and that's why we have some completely fucking monstrous scenes in mexico or brazil.
Turns out you learn a lot if you pay attention when the best players are sodomizing your characters.
Urgency can do a lot for motivation.
It's like when a parent throws their kid into a deep pool to teach them how to swim.
@@Wesmoen Bad example, that shit traumatized me when my parents did it
@@RFLCPTR never said it was a good way to teach things. But it could be a motivator to avoid dying! :')
@@RFLCPTR my parents did this to me and I almost drowned and had to be taken out of the water after I passed out and stopped breathing, I learned how to swim eventually but I'm never going near a pool again
Bro a lot of these arguments almost made me quit fighting games lol. I remember wanting to learn Tekken so I jumped into the discord to get some advice. "How do I learn the game?" They sent me this 40 video playlist which for someone who's new was incomprehensible! I spent the first weeks in the game not playing a single human. I learned how to Korean backdash and learned a combo flawlessly while watching the playlist because that's what I believed I had to do. It was boring. On top of that when i finally felt like I was ready to play I had noooooo idea how to apply the skills I learned. Couldn't land my combo didnt understand when to backdash it was a terrible time. Now I pick up games and learn the easiest bnb pick a character by how cool they look and mash until I need to learn more it's way more fun.
Fighting games are easy to learn if you don't care about winning
At a low level, sure, but odds are you won’t put that extra couple of hours in trying to master one-frame links, nine-step combos, and matchup idiosyncrasies if you don’t care about winning.
But people don't really go in like it's a college curriculum. You play until you see a problem then you lab it. People learn combos because they're losing the damage game. People learn one frame links when they have the simpler combo route down pat. The soultions come naturally. All you have to do is be less salty.
@@Sakaki98 ''not caring about winning'' doesn't mean ''don't care at all'', just take one loss at a time and don't put too much weight on it, focus on improving because the winning will come as you get better.
Skell
You just made the same point I did. “Focus on improving because the winning will come as you get better” is a line of reasoning that only stands if the “winning” part of the experience holds some value to you.
If improving at the game will net you more wins, then it follows that your motivation to improve is generally stronger the more you care about getting said wins, that’s all I’m saying.
EagleOneGS
Hard agree. I remember going 0-10+ against most people on fightcade when I was just starting to learn Third Strike. Getting your shit kicked in is part of the experience, might as well prepare yourself to gain as much as possible from it.
Losing in MOBAs is actually worse than getting bodied in FGs. If I lose lane, I'll constantly keep losing any trade after. It's a slippery slope. In a FG, you start every round on equal terms. Okay, meter might be saved but I believe that's minor, at lower levels, anyway.
I play league. Sometimes o just get a 1 hit kill. Is something you can't react. You just accept your fate after you fed 10 kills. That was actually why I stopped playing right after my first match and came back 1 year later. MOBAs have the pressure of 4 teamates arguing about who fed who too.
He's talking about perpetually losing because your new and your opponent is better than you. You will lose again when the round starts. A better comparison would be losing one 40 min moba game vs 40 min worth of rounds straight in a fighting game
@@mcstreamer9 but the situation in fighting games doesn't get worse. If you're vastly inferior in skill, that gap usually stays the same from round to round and you start each round the same. In a MOBA, every time you get killed in lane and return your opponent is actually stronger than before and is going to body you harder and harder. Like, in League you might lose a 1vs1 in lane because you don't know how to trade and you give up a kill. When you return to lane the opponent has an item advantage and is going to kill you even easier. Then he kills your tower and you can't even farm, then he has enough gold to actually just dive you under your second tower after he killed the rest of your team etc...
The closest thing i can see in fighting games that is reminiscent of this is basically you losing the first round to just better execution by your opponent and then get bodied even faster the second round by the opponent using a bunch of EX special moves in addition to the better execution thanks to the meter he gained in the first round.
@@mcstreamer9 But you'll lose every interaction with an opponent in that 40 minute eventual loss in a MOBA, and each interaction makes the next one even worse as your in-match progression falls farther and farther behind. Not only are you behind on the skill gap, but the other team's characters literally get stronger and stronger as the match goes on. A head to head confrontation that might have been even at the start of the game becomes more and more impossible the more you get killed. Imagine if every time you got knocked down in a fighting game your opponent's character dealt more and took less damage.
In a fighting game, if you play against the same opponent for 40 minutes straight you'll actually have more of a chance to do well against them as the rounds go on. Your opponent will most likely be doing the same things against you that worked early on so you can try doing something different. In a MOBA, if you try doing something that would have worked in your first interaction but you're in the late game, it's probably not going to work because your opponent is so much more powerful now so now you don't know if that would've worked at the start. You have to play a ton of games to know how to play the early game right so that you can then be strong enough to even participate in the mid to late game.
I disagree, losing your laning phase does not spell an ultimate loss for your team and gives you ample time to rethink and restrategize what to do in the seconds of your respawn.
Disengages can happen in teamfights and you can always ask for help.
Your teammate can help you get your farm up for the item you need by pulling creeps or babysitting you.
Your teammates will warn you to about the other team trying to get an easy kill on you, or perhaps your team can use you as bait.
If you play MOBAs I'm sure you're also familiar with someone "carrying" a team, even by heroes that aren't carries themselves.
In fighting games, nobody is there to help you when you are being bodied, that is why the perception that "you are not playing" is there.
Losing in FGs in a beginners mindset gets you thinking "Ahh, what the fuck do I do?" rather than, "Shit, I need help."
"Imagine if before trying to play a MOBA you're told..."
DOTA community is _notorious_ for this. "Don't queue up as a new player until you've played hundreds of hours vs bots".
Yeah, I got to that point in the video, and the credibility for the video honestly went into the negatives for me...like dog....thats EXACTLY WHAT MOBA PLAYERS SAY.
"some assholes are assholes, therefore sajams 20 minute video of good points is wrong".
as someone whos been playin mobas for nearly a decade now, you gotta realize that anyone who tells you to go back to bots is an asshole to be ignored and muted, DOTA players that do this especially, since the entire past few seasons of DOTA have literally been entirely about re-writing the meta so everyone has to learn together.
@@ajallen212 no its not, at least in lol no one expects you to do that
It's weird bc I could learn league extremely easily after playing tons of Dota but my league friends had the opposite problem
@@Treem0re It's because DotA has more information and it's depth of execution tends to reach higher than in LoL.
You only last hit in LoL. That and, the general way creep dmg works, how last hit animations are, and how available mana is for spamming abilities onto the wave, are all generally easier in LoL. I haven't played DotA in some years now, but when I left, most heroes could not freely throw their abilities onto the wave without thinking for CS.
In DotA you last hit and deny. The creeps put more dmg into the waves faster, some heroes have harder last hitting animations, and spamming abilities for CS will have you running out of mana very quickly. The game is putting more demands on your mechanical abilities than LoL, so a DotA player adjusting to LoL will be easier than the vice versa in just this one aspect.
Then you could compare intermediate level concepts like managing the courier, or understanding combat ranges. The most intense micro in LoL is managing who your pet is attacking which is very specific to certain characters only. In DotA everyone has to learn how to manage the courier eventually, and it's even a fun motivation to because getting your items without going back to base feels good! It's one of the things my LoL friends liked about the game even if they struggled to use it because even they could understand it's benefit.
And then there's combat ranges, you might have to watch for a Blitzcrank Flash hook from a full screen, but in DotA Sniper can literally auto attack you from outside of a full screen at certain points in the game. There will be a knowledge gap when going from one game to the other because different characters and items do different things, but the information you deal with in LoL can be more familiar from DotA and less dense, while a LoL player has to learn unfamiliar information and has to interact with more things instead of less. These factors allow a seasoned DotA player to apply the transferable skills to LoL more easily while a LoL player will struggle to remember how to look at the mini map because they have to focus on getting their CSing down pat again.
The only thing lacking is a bass line and the intro "Best Hair in the game" and this could be a Sajam's version of Fantano's Let's Argue.
Tfw exactly no one understands the definition of perception
Those are big words
Mimi Peahes why does perception not matter when talking about how fun playing something is?
@@Theyungcity23 I don't know what made you think I think perception doesn't matter. The problem is people keep perpetuating the meme that fighting games are uniquely difficult somehow and just generally don't how to introduce new players to fighting games. New players would be having more fun if they stopped listening to the types of people who say fighting games are too difficult.
@@mimipeahes5848 outside of this debate, I've generally heard the idea of fighting games being too hard from scared new comers, not from fighting game enthusiasts. People are put off by their experience with the genre, not by remarks they've heard online.
Lucas Williams Aris has a whole rant video on here about how fighting games are insanely difficult. He’s saying that you can spend all day practicing one thing in a fighting game and you still suck. It takes years of that process to become competent. He even says that you have to be a bit of a genius or a weirdo to be really good at them.
The anxiety thing is super relateable. I remember in Overwatch, it took me a very long time till I could summon the courage to play Ranked because I was nervous about things like letting my team down, everyone being way better, the fact that my best character was low-tier, etc. I kept putting off Ranked while telling myself, "let me get a little more better at the game first," and was just playing casual Quick Play matches (which some players argue only improves mechanical skill). When I finally worked up the nerve to play Ranked, I found that people were sometimes better than me, sometimes at my level, and sometimes way worse. The matchmaking seemed to have done it's job. I got over my anxiety after 1-2 matches. Maybe I'm just projecting, but sometimes it sounds like some people want to be "perfect" or a similar notion before ever playing against someone, and for me it was because of performance anxiety and some perfectionism. My mindset was "I have to do well RIGHT AWAY," as opposed to, "let's just see what this is like, fool around, experiment and have a good time."
Oh hell yea. I remember when UMvC3 came out I refused to even touch the online mode because I was nervous I wouldn't perform well. I never did and altho I liked the game I only ever played it vs CPUs and never got to fully enjoy it.
Time passed and I got into Blazblue and I decided to bite the bullet and try ranked. I found that although I certainly wasn't the best right away there were a lot more people at my level than I thought there'd be.
I was level like,, 130 something before I touched ranked and that was only cause the group I was playing with wanted to queue and I completely agree with you about the ranked anxiety, and I also agree that you get over it quick when you realize that you’re going against actual people who can mess up just as bad as you can. Same thing happened when I started Strive. I would do cpu matches and arcade, occasionally do player lobbies with my friends but never do online games. One day no one was on and the bots weren’t doing anything so I was like screw it and hopped online. First game I went against a Leo and (at the time I thought) I absolutely shit on him. After that I swapped characters and am now perpetually floor 4-6 and it’s just always a fluctuation game. Am I floor 8/9 like my friends, a few bordering on Celestial? No, I am not. But when we do play I don’t always get fucked to the point on non recovery
I feel this too except in Fighting games I feel it for casual play as well sort of. It's not anxiety per say I just have a strong mental block on doing it and I think it just stems from my severe avoidance of competition my whole life when it's just me alone.
“Learning how to play something like Rocket League on the other hand is really fun.” Eh, there’s not much difference. in rocket league if your opponent is vastly better than you, you don’t touch the ball. that could be seen as not playing or you could look at it as being able to work on defensive mechanics. same as in a fighting game
Rocket League basically is a fighting game. You have two sides in direct competition. The game consists mostly of moving around and finding out when to attack or defend. You can play with simple ground and jump moves, or practice to learn big, meter-burning aerial maneuvers.
@@reptylus3129 rocket league = anime fighter confirmed.
I had pretty much the same experience playing RL as I did playing MK online the first time (i.e. got dumpstered and had no idea what was going on)
I have never thrown a controller in my life. Not when losing money matches and getting shat on at locals, not when my controller died midway through bed of chaos. No sir. Rocket League on the other hand was the closet I have ever come to a C.spike, IDFK why. It was the most frustrating experience ever LMAO good on anyone who can play that game with a big smile and zero salt, I legit respect y'all.
Matter is at least defense is way easier to learn in rocket league and you need to know wayy less to execute at an okay level
You an even go far without proper air control
For me fighting games are difficult to learn because there is no one to play with. It takes sooo much effort in games I enjoy, abd communities in europe for those games are near non existant.
When I queue in rainbow six, i got a game in 1 minute. Same with League.
If fighting games had good netcode and not these awful lobbies, and smooth matchmaking, I wouldnt struggle.
check Sajam's recent video on How to find the FGC on your area. I always thought I'd never get games and now I am in like 7 different discords making lobbies left and right
@@youngcrespo Therein lies the problem. No one should have to be a part of "7 different discords," let alone one to find people. First of all, Sajam's solution only works if people actually see his video, which most of the playerbase won't; they especially won't at the time of the game's release, where it matters most, since that is when the numbers start dying down. Any time a 3rd-party solution is needed, the developers have failed. .
@@noboty4168 7 different discords one for each game. also building community outside of just meeting people randomly in ranked once isn't bad in the slightest.
@@youngcrespo Good thing I didn't say that, then. I did say that needing to use the likes of discord to even find people to play with was. If you want matches with specialized rulesets that you cannot get in the game, by all means go to discord and find like-minded souls. However, there is a problem with that specialized ruleset is "a game, period." I was quite clear on this.
Probably mk11 or KI or even skullgirls have the best netcode. For the "no one to play with" part, you can always play with a friend or ask someone you find online to practice with you (there are a lot of games that have a online practice mode, and its perfect for learning matchups and strategies)
Wait... did these people already forget core A gaming's "why button mashing doesnt work" video? The part where he says that one dude who understands the basics still won a match even though all he knew was fireball, jab, and shenlong!!! Beat that roofus?! (It auto corrected to doofus 7 times before letting say roofus)
You speak of the legendary Gandhi?
Fighting Game Bouncer should become a FGC Meme
Yes we need this! Good idea
I started playing Tekken this year, the first fighting game I really took an interest in. To be honest I would really just appreciate a tutorial of some kind. Stuff like tech rolls and get up attacks I had no idea even existed until I saw them in the load screen banner
Same I've been scouring the internet for tutorials but often they come with terminology I don't understand yet and I just end up having to search for more tutorial videos just to understand the last one.
There's no way around this. Tekken is like the hardest game ever, there's shit people who've played for 7 years don't even know that you might have stumbled upon. You're in the same boat just don't give up and you'll be good in like 5 years lol
Sam Edwards Thankfully that seems to be the only fighting game that has a lack of a tutorial.
Everyone talks about having tutorials for Tekken but I'd be hard pressed to believe that a tutorial would help much at all, (unless if you're talking about for complete beginners).
No amount of tutorial would ever prepare you for green rank Tekken.
@@baki9191 lmfao ahhhhhh yes green rank tekken good times good times......
I have never seen anything close to how he slides into thanking sub mid explanation. It is inspiring.
So I think the key difference is reaching "intentionality" .. the point where you feel you are in control of your play. In a first person shooter that happens quite quickly: first person shooters are not hard to control, you can quite quickly get your character to do what you want. It takes a lot longer to work out what you *should* be doing at any point in time, but there is essentially zero execution barrier. By contrast fighting games generally have a really long learning curve to reach intentionality: it takes an awfully long time to reach the point where your character consistently does what you intended them to do. In some fighting games this can take months of play, and in my opinion it is this very high barrier to entry that makes fighting games seem especially hard.
I come from CS (1.6 and Source) and it is very hard to control things there. When I was a kid and I was learning how to play it I was playing small-map deathwatch and just sitting trying to feel the aiming and firing mechanics.
To be intentional you need to differentiate and to do that you need to isolate first. As Sajam said in the video, you can isolate and use three moves at the beginning of playing fighting games. That would not be hard to do intentionally.
I'm no fighting games veteran but I'm learning very quickly exactly because of right attitude. Intentionality is not really a problem of game.
You can still see people play unintentionally in different genres even on average level of play just relying on repeating same stuff. They don't have full control on what they're doing because they don't play consciously and don't really choose what they're doing. And that is not even the problem with the speed of the game. You can still plan consciously for high speed fightings.
Late reply but the topic is interesting so bear with me.
That one at 7:17 using DMCV bloody palace as something easy to get into without practice is totally wrong
"What's stopping a player from just jumping online and learning?"
Bad netplay ayyy lmao.
Damn, and here my novice ass is just living in the BBTag tutorial.
Learning combos and figuring out who I even like.
Thanks for telling me I should just complain that the game is too hard.
Brilliant video. So many people are getting into fighting games more than ever now, especially tekken. I definitely need to show this to my friends getting into fighting games.
I still think there's a little more to it. Yes, with a person that's completely new to video games, jumping immediately into competitive fps or moba will be just as hard as jumping into competitive fighting games. I fully agree there. However, where fighting games differ is that they have barriers to entry that can't be overcome in other non-competitive games.
For example, anyone that's played a substantial amount of Minecraft, Portal, or Skyrim has a pretty good grasp on the fundamentals that are necessary to begin enjoying a competitive fps. Even though they won't be great, they'll know how to move and how to aim, and those will both improve naturally as they play either more Minecraft/Portal/Skyrim or more competitive fps.
On the other hand, fighting games have barriers to entry that can't be overcome just by playing non-competitive games.
The biggest one, imo, is the command system. No amount of 2d mario or Golden Axe is going to get a new player familiar with how to input a shoryuken. These commands will be clunky and unintuitive until the player slogs through the learning phase where they are struggling with one of the following: getting beat up by online opponents, performing dull drills in training mode, or fighting AI over and over. None of these are as painless or as inherently motivating as, say, playing Portal.
I think Nintendo recognized this issue with existing fighting games when they were conceptualizing smash bros. Smash ditches the command system entirely, and re-tuned movement to play a lot more like a platformer. Suddenly, anyone that can play 2d mario will now have much easier time transitioning into their fighting game. Imo, this is a large part of what has made smash so successful.
with what you said about smash: 100% yes
I would call it 'non-fighting-game legacy skill'. If someone were to create a fighting game where you move around with WASD, look around with your mouse and do stuff by hitting a single key like left click, right click, Q, E, R etc. then new players would automatically have an easier time picking this game up because they bring in the legacy skill of doing all that from other games.
Traditional fighting games on the other hand are so unique in the way they control that players from any other game genre can't transfer their existing skills to it.
I agree with pretty much everything you said, except for "see that's just a perception." Of course it is. We're talking about people's experiences and how the feel playing different games. What would we discuss other than perceptions?
If you look at human beings and their finger pointing, blaming, flaming and toxicity... it comes as no surprise that 1v1 games such as fighting games, real time strategy, etc might be a bit too confronting. Reflecting on yourself (and why you lost) is a skill that needs to be learned.
This series of videos will never get old to me. Legendary commentary on player perception.
Hold on a sec Sajam: Let me get my popcorn out before reading the comment section to this video.
Sajam's takes so fresh he changes his shirt for each one.
Calling the experience of new players just perception as a way to brush aside the negative emotions that can come with learning a fighting game for the first time is silly imo. Of course its perception, everything is perception. The issue is the fact that the fgc fails to retain new players and grow the scene compared to other esports, and if the perception is that the early stages of learning aren't fun, then those things need to be addressed in a productive way, or at least acknowledged.
Beyond that, realistically fighting games have a relatively steep learning curve. Even the use of basic abilities often lie behind execution barriers, and wakeup options often require pretty specialized knowledge of the controls, as in mk11 or tekken. The built in mechanics of the game pose a significant challenge to operate. This can be tough for new players to get the hang of, and thats ok, but waiving it aside as perceived rather than real difficulty is ridiculous.
Fred Elick Preach!!!
well said
I remember quitting SF4 very early in it's life because of how execution heavy it was. Later on, I watched Ultra Excellent Adventures and got interested in playing SF4 again. This time, I came with a different mentality. I deliberately picked a character who I wasn't even familiar with their command list. All I had to rely on were buttons and good neutral game. No combos or anything fancy. And then I won a bunch of matches... And I had fun.
I used to spend around 4 hours a day playing training mode in Guilty Gear X2, mastering a bunch of combos. Recently, I jumped into Xrd and realized that you can get a lot of damage in just by hitting HS a few times when your opponent is being reckless.
What I'm saying here, is that this perception of having to spend lots of hours in training mode is so wrong - it may be a better idea to know as little as possible about execution and instead focus harder on learning how to actually win fights.
i mean id say that having some form of combos in anime fighters is a must, because otherwise the enemy will be much more brave to use sloppy offence, as they are not scared of the consequences, meanwhile u will get combod if the enemy chose to put in that time. I picked linne in unist, and I jumped head first into games, but also did combo reps after every session, I can actually do a bnb now and it matters a lot because ur a lot less stressed about making consistently better calls than the other guy, or otherwise u die to their much better damage.
Ofc thres guys who auto pilot, have full dmg combos but u still beat them with single normals, but most have a gameplan AND know a few combos, its not THAT hard to learn em, but u gotta commit.
Shahar Korren when I first got into GG and learned Johnny I lagged him 5 hours everyday for a month then hopped in online for the first time and got smoked. Took me a week to even get used to the game.
Coming from a Tekken perspective, good fucking luck.
You can go in knowing your normals, maybe one launcher and maybe one basic ass 45dmg combo and you really will not win that way. Not when you get over half your life wiped out by one punish, and you're offering up 20 punish openings to your opponent per round because you don't even understand the framedata and keep tossing out launch punishable moves.
@@phant0mdummy This is exactly what this and previous Sajam video addressed. You *can* win with very few moves and a simple gameplan at lower levels.
It doesn't even matter if you throw out 20 launch punishable moves a round, nobody punishes properly till Emp+. Nobody is going to launch your -20 move or sweeps in green ranks. You're assuming that one beginner doesn't know frame-data even for their character, while the other one knows the data for every character in the game which is absurd.
Look at people like Forsen as an example who was using "bad" moves, whiffing all the time, using bad combos, didn't know much about the game and was still winning (Sajam also mentioned his name).
"when you're getting combo'd you still have decisions to make"
[wobbling intensifies]
"where am i going for lunch"
“Can I still return this game?”
@@Kibblenator lmfao
For me, the barrier into fighting games was the anxiety and disappointment in losing for hours on end, and there were many times in which it felt much harder than any other game that I had ever played. That feeling stemmed from the fact that I don't get to 'cool down' mid-match if I am getting to angry or upset at the game due to feeling like a failure or missing an input to shaking hands. In LoL, which I played for almost 8 years, after dying, I had at least 60 seconds before I died again, sometimes more! That was a great cool down period to deal with the fact that I am still trash after 2k hours. In fighting games, I get seconds after losing a stock before I get my next stock taken away from me, and it just makes my emotions much more dramatic than in other competitive games. I think that a lot of other people may feel this same way but don't quite understand how to express it properly or how to approach the problem, and instead of doing so, they resort to blaming other things because its easier or making excuses like the ones in this video.
But at the end of the day, for most of us, these are games, not jobs. It is up to us to be stubborn and keep playing and dealing with the fact that the game is no less fair than applying for a job that you are totally qualified for and will never get because you wore the wrong color tie to the interview.
Thanks for making this man. We need better ways to communicate to improve the genre and you are constantly giving them to us. Thank you so much you are a doing a big service to the genre we all owe you a lot.
The point you made about it being natural to lose while trying to improve was hella good and something i needed for my mindset rn. always appreciate the persoective you give my guy
While I think this is a really awesome couple of videos and that you articulate your point extremely well, I also feel a bit torn on if I agree or not. I think the main hang-up I have is my own experience with trying to teach my friends how to play fighting games and how it always ends in frustration for them. It usually goes like this:
I bring one of my favorite fighters, or a new fighter with Street Fighter-like mechanics, over and they see me doing all of these cool moves and combos and they want to do it too. However, unless I basically walk into their random flailing punches, I destroy them. If I do that, they realize that I'm holding back and get mad but, if I don't, they complain that all they get to do is lay in a corner and get hit. Eventually I reach a middle ground of letting them hit me and still showing off neat stuff, but then they inevitably ask "How do I do X move like that?" then we pull up the move list and I try to teach them to how to do stuff like quarter circles in the most basic of terms, but they just can't get it down and always end up jumping or just not having the move come out more often than not. If we get any more complicated than a fireball motion? Forget about it.
Then, after the twentieth time of them screwing up the move and not being able to do the other 'cool looking moves', they always end up saying how stupid it is that the moves don't work and that fighting games are too hard and then I can't get them to play another fighting game for about a year or until Smash comes out. It's a consistent and annoying pattern and I've never had it happen between most friends for any other genre of game. It's probably just tunnel vision on my part, but it's happened so much. I suspect I'm probably not the best at teaching the genre to absolute newbies either, but none of my local buddies ever play fighting games unless I bring them up :/ Meanwhile, these same friends run circles around me in League and any game involving a mouse and keyboard. I can't properly articulate it, but there's just some barrier I can't get them past in most games of this genre.
When I first tried learning Guilty Gear I just went online and started playing matches. I got blown up a lot, then I went into training mode to try and get my IAD execution down. Then, once I could IAD at people, I played more matches. I think that a lot of people try to "learn" Guilty Gear by going into training mode then they go online and they think the game is hard because they never practiced neutral and all their hours of practicing dust loop meant nothing because they can't land a hit. If you just start by actually playing matches and not caring about combos and just doing gatlings and dusts then the game is a lot easier to learn and wrap your head around. People spend so much time trying to learn combos and not learning how to block bandit revolver and end up having to start from scratch anyway once they go online.
A lack of Skinner box mechanics heavily affects the perception and mentality that fighting games are hard
It's a refreshing "downside" of them to me.
Next MK game features Move unlocks. You only start each character with 2 normals, then have to unlock normals, specials, and fatalities with leveling up your character.
That's why MvC2 is the best. Play the game, earn coins, go use the gachapon machine and hope you get cool new characters like Omega Red.
Isolex that’s like Absolver
@@isolex_ Might literally accidentally end up being the perfect fighting game tutorial mode, lol
A lot of people don't seem to realize that at the end of a day, a fighting game is a video game.
You get better naturally at them because you enjoy them, whether you get attached to them for the character designs, or how fun it plays organically. Even just a baseline amount of enjoyment of a game will let you pick up concepts or ideas across games (neutral play, whiff punishment, anti-airs, combos, footsies, punishment, execution, etc.).
It's very easy to dial in these concepts across each and every single fighting game. I picked up FighterZ after spending years in Tekken (3D to 2D) and I was off the ground in no time.
This genre is far more all-encompassing than people think. You play because it's fun. You get better because you enjoy playing. You win because you got better.
Exactly, I think FG fans sometimes overcomplicate the genre it and that creates the perception of it being super hard, when all you need to get going is learning the controls, yet like Sajam says people are like "you need to be able to do 1-frame links, FADC into ultra and plink" before you play, when the learning comes from identyfying a problem (Getting hit by a Shoryuken when the opponent wakes up), solving it (Just block), and improve on it (Bait the Wake up Shoryuken and combo the opponent)
Im late to this but this comment is a hidden gem. Im noticing alot of peeps here are kind of over complicating it like, Ew said above me. Thats really what it comes down to like you said, if its fun to you then the learning process will be smoother bc you just love the game
Fighting games aren't necessarily the hardest genre to learn. They're just the worst designed for teaching. A platformer can teach you it's first few first principles just by where it's placed you on the screen when you start the game (Mario starts you on the left; levels are going to be mostly linear from left to right. Metroid starts you in the middle of the screen; you're going to need to navigate both left and right) and the first level will be an introduction to gravity with very low stakes. A fighting game doesn't do that, most tutorials are going to be about systems and basic control mastery, and not the actually important stuff like neutral, or zoning, or spacing, the stuff someone like me needs to be able to understand basic cause and effect in a match (or maybe I'm wrong, but after seeing various well regarded tutorials be useless shit like systems and basic control mastery, I'm not inclined to throw away a couple hundred dollars grabbing a bunch of games to exhaustively go through their tutorials in the off chance one of them might not be complete trash for people like me who don't know anything about how the games operate).
And understanding cause and effect is the most important lesson a game needs to teach, since that's the thing that will make decisions useful rather than just random inputs.
I would say your point about fighting games having difficult tutorials compared to platformers could apply to basically any multiplayer game. A large part of every multiplayer game cannot possibly be in a tutorial because it requires you to learn how to beat humans and not robots. That's why part of the learning process for any multiplayer game is playing against other humans. If you take any person who has played like 100 hours of a singleplayer mode of a multiplayer game, and you put them up against someone who played the tutorial and then played against other humans for 10 hours, pretty sure the player with 10 hours will win. Fighting games aren't that different from other multiplayer games, but multiplayer games are a lot different than singleplayer games.
I know this video is like, hella old. But as someone who tried to learn her first fighting game by labbing in training mode/arcade before going onto fighting other players, it was pretty detrimental to my enjoyment starting out. It pretty much resulted in me feeling GREAT whenever I got to apply what I'd practiced, which is to say, when I hit the other player and managed to combo them. In every other situation, I got frustrated because I didn't have any actual answers to what other players do. I only started having fun again after A. taking a break and B. just. playing online for a while? Idk I'm with you papa Jam, once you've fought all of a game's characters enough times, you start to see the things they can do, and then you can start to try to beat those things, and *that* is where the joy is for me now. Getting to work things out, and really beat the character by my own merit, because I figured out what I could do.
Do I still get salty sometimes? Oh absolutely, all the time. But even so, I have way more fun now that I'm *playing* the game and not "training" to play the game.
These couple videos really opened my eyes as to what I have been doing wrong. I spent so much time focusing on being good because of how the pros play that I neglected trying to build the base to grow.
This is a great video, damn! Very necessary to help heal these terrible misconceptions still ingrained in this culture
I think this "perception issues" are much more important than you think Sajam.
No one cares that its 25 deggrees if it feels like 15.
Feeling is what is important for the most people and most people can't look past that feeling in order to see the truth.
My 2 cents. When i played COD, even tho i was a beginner, i had fun because i was in a group with friends, same as rocket league. On fighting games im not chatting with friends. If we r playing together its against each other or training because one is better than the other, not cooperative, so its much easier to get salty or frustrated. I like fgs, but sometimes i don't play because i feel anxiety just thinking about connecting online and playing faceless randos.
Very true, I think. I don't think the games themselves are necessarily more difficult to learn, but playing a team game with your friends is a different experience than playing any solo game. It's not as much about having other people to blame than it is about having other people to share the experience with.
Fighting games solved that with lobbies. Get together and play some sets.there is also communities that would love to play with you. If your friends dont play just get them on discord and talk while you solo play.
You need to meet people like myself then. The type of person that plays to learn but doesn’t take anything seriously so I never get salty, and just chat with you the whole time unless you *really* want a serious match. FG’s are amazing that way imo
Cant you play fighting games with friends also tho?
IMO, compared to other genres, fighting games have a larger barrier to overcome, and do less to help players break through. It's not simply that fighting games are harder than other genres (and I would argue that they generally are), it's that developers and publishers don't do enough to make the new player experience and learning process fun and rewarding. Often they don't even _have_ a new player experience, or any way to learn about the game.
As such, fighting games require a community to make up that difference. That's why the FGC is so tightly knit, for lack of a better term. Without that community, you have players spending years, decades even, playing the games in isolation or with a small group of friends and family, without even scratching the surface and discovering the "real game," so to speak.
Other genres can get away with doing less for new players, either because they're less complex or because they force community interaction via teamplay -- which leads to toxicity, yes, but also education. Even playing fighting games online, the player-to-player interaction is typically minimal, because the onus is on the player to reach out.
I wouldn't even necessarily say that fighting games are harder to learn. but they're hard to _get into._ In other words, they aren't _inviting._ Modern MOBAs and FPSes do a lot to entice players and keep them around, and fighting games aren't doing enough of that, if they're doing it at all. And they don't do enough to introduce players to the actual meat of the game, whereas for most other genres that meat is pretty surface level.
Well said my friend
That is just not true that other genres do more to help you learn. Legitimately almost all competitive games with a ranked mode that people take serious are awful for brand new players..........CS GO, VALORENT , OVERWATCH, DOTA 2, SMITE, LOL, HON, APEX LEGENDS, FORTNITE, ROCKET LEAGUE, HEARTHSTONE, RAINBOW SIX SEIGE, FIFA, LEGENDS OF RUNETERRA, DOTA AUTOCHESS, LEAGUES TEAMFIGHT TACTICS, ARENA PVP IN WORLD OF WARCRAFT, Starcraft 2,Warcraft 3. All of these games I listed are either single player or team based competitive games that all have ranking systems and they have people that get sponsored to play and compete and make a living in those games. And not in a SINGLE ONE OF THOSE GAMES do they have a good fun new player experience when it comes to playing people who already know how to play even just a little bit more then you. And not in a single on of those games do they teach you enough in game to realistically let you beat people who look up information on how to play better for there respective game outside of the game itself.
In all honesty to say you feel mobas are easier to learn on a competitive level compared to a fighting game is so insane and backwards. You need a decent understanding of EVERY ability EVERY champ,hero, or god does and you need to know a decent understanding of all the items in the game and how they interact with the scaling of each ability. Thats legit like over 600+ abilities you need to know off top of your head to be able to lane ok against someone on average. Compared to the handful of moves you look at for your own character in a fighting game?
@@anthonynicholeonyxgomez7809 You entirely missed what OP was trying to say.
First and foremost, games like CS:GO, Valorant, and Overwatch have such simple mechanics that damn near anyone with even a passing familiarity with video games could understand by playing their fairly well-made tutorials. They certainly aren't "awful for brand new players", hence why you pretty much never see anyone complaining that a game like CS:GO takes hours of practice in training mode to grasp. All of the games you listed can be played at a beginner level with little to no barriers to entry, although some definitely do more for the new player experience than others. Secondly, the notion that these games need to prepare you for players that are better than you or that have done more research on how to play the game is asinine. Pretty much every major competitive online game has rock-solid matchmaking, especially at lower ranks. As a new player in Dota, you will rarely be playing people that are considerably better than you. For the most part, the game pits you against players just as inexperienced as you. Naturally, players that have done more research or have spent more time playing the game will do better against players who have not. This is just how games work, and it has absolutely no bearing on whether these games are easy or hard to learn/get into. Unlike many fighting games, many competitive online games like CS:GO and LOL do a pretty good job of ensuring that players are evenly matched so that it's unlikely that one team will stomp another.
Finally, OP never said anything about learning games at a competitive level. No one is denying that a game like DOTA is just as hard to play at the top level as competitive Street Fighter. High level DOTA is an entirely different game. However, DOTA does a much better job of getting newer players into its online experience and puts a lot more work into ensuring that the game stays rewarding and not too overwhelming during the early stages of a player's development.
@@AriyanK0091 cept literally none of the games you said have in game tutorials that actually teach you to play at a decent base level so no. If you dont go out of your way to learn using 3rd party guides in literally every game you mentioned your ganna be trash. Period. So no the new player experience for any competitive solo or team based game with a high skill ceiling does nothing to teach you to play against real people. I mean CS go and valorant both have shooting mechanic where if you move your bullets don't actually go where your crosshairs are. Meaning unless someone told you to not move when your shooting you would miss every shot and not know why cus its never told to you in game. Just dead ass wrong bruh.
@@anthonynicholeonyxgomez7809 You haven't defined what you mean by a "decent base level". I'm assuming you mean intentionality, where players feel like they have a solid understanding of all the game's mechanics and are playing with some level of strategy without constantly having to look up the controls. If you're going by this definition, pretty much all of those games help you reach intentionality in the early stages. Even if you're a little slow on the uptake, games like DOTA and League make all the pertinent information readily available to you; if you forget one of your abilities in a MOBA, all you have to do is look down for a second. It lists your hotkeys, mana cost, cooldown, everything. The same applies for items. Hell, DOTA literally has a guide system that tells you what to build for your character in the middle of a game. You absolutely don't need a "third party guide" in order to understand how most competitive games work at a fundamental level, since the controls and mechanics are almost always clearly explained to you. Also, CSGO and Valorant clearly show you that your bullet spread is affected by movement in the tutorials. Most players might not be good at aiming early on, but it certainly doesn't take much brainpower to realize how that works. The simple fact of the matter is that most competitive games have figured out what they do and don't need to teach new players in order for them to understand the game. Unfortunately, this isn't something most fighting games have figured out.
Well, I do agree with Sajam's overall argument, I think another interesting thing to consider is something along the lines of the dopamine arguement someone made in the comments of the first video, and that's that losing in fighting games and losing in other games can be presented in different ways to the player. For example in a shooter you can lose and be at the bottom of your team, or you can still lose and be the third best player on your team score wise at the end. Similarly, in a racer, you can come in 8th and lose, or you can come in 4th and still technically lose, although coming in 4th feels a hell of a lot better than 8th, and can give you some sense of a victory. In fighting games, every match, you're either coming in first or dead last, there's no qualifiers
Fighting games are not harder to learn than other games. You're 100% right that it's a perception issue. But that's exactly it. Perception matters a lot when it comes to people willingness to continue onward with learning something.
Been randomly browsing content cause it's interesting, but IIRC uh... there's a semi-famous anecdote about Tekken that I *hope* I'm going to get right. I *think* it was Justin Wong joined a Tekken 6 tournament basically to make up the numbers, and ended up going to like. T8? Because his fighting game *fundamentals* were just so good that it didn't matter that he barely played Tekken.
Completely unrelated but I love the way Sajam thanks the subs on the fly connecting it to what he's talking about
Sajam, you're fighting the good fight. Sent this video and many of your other ones on similar topics to my friends. Hopefully this will help recruit to the FGC
But Sajam my perceptions are fact while it's everyone else's perceptions that are just feelings.
I'm a simple man, I play, I win, I keep playing, I lose, I stop playing, try to remember what my opponent did that I didn't, head to practice, training it, and go play again, repeat.
What you need is Curiosity, Perseverance and Small-Goals.
Then you hit the actual wall. You know, the one where there's like 50 fucking characters with at least 80-120 moves each... some having near 200 moves each... and you gotta start trying to keep all that data in your head... and then you reach that matchup one day and can't remember if it was Josie's string that went high, high, mid or was it ... yoshi's that was the high, high, mid... shit, too late, it was low. Got counterhit. Combo carried to the wall, 98dmg and I forget if it was 3 or 4 that got me off the ground with a low kick... fuck, punished again.
Learning Tekken is just a pain in the ass. Yes I'm exaggerating... but honestly, by how much? It's a substantial effort to learn your main and retain their moves, timings, punishes, etc but once you start taking on learning enemy strings, frames, etc... good luck keeping it all in unless you're paying the bills doing it or you just stopped playing other games entirely.
@@phant0mdummy I feel'ya. The best part of any fighting game is playing it on the realease date for the 1st month(s), after that its up to personal decision to keep it up or drop it. Usually I satisfy myselft by getting to the middle ranks and see how far I can reach, that itself is my usual goal. After that, what determines if I stick with it or not is Friends who still play it, honestly I kinda "dropped" Tekken after a while for two reasons netplay(that was actually "my problem" with Port-forwarding) and some friends who no longer played the game for fun, and where way in to it to the point I start seeing the exact same 2nd paragraph of yours. And feeling bad for not being up to their level to give them some enjoyment as well. I try going for a different game (like SSBU) to see the other side of the coin "easy to learn, hard to master" I quite had a lot of enjoyment out of it and even start attending tournaments eventually(not that I got anything to "show" I barely would win the 1st few matches, hehe).
But I finally found a Game i was enjoy a bunch, GrandBlue/GBVS, but then "lack of time" and "friends dropping the game with other online players" made me unable to continue further Past S rank.
But I don't hate the time I spent learning those games, it was a h3ll loooot of fun to do it. I think I even became a better person as a whole and got more confident in my self to take other IRL challenges. There is nothing wrong to try hard to learn a game, we might never be a PRO Top8 best player learn all the FRAME DATA, but we can always learn on the go as we need and thats something we all should be acquainted with.
Thinking about it, I do really agree with this video. It is all about perception, and based on my really casual "Perception" a lot of people really emphasize "having to learn" advanced techniques, the "meta", frame data, matchups and I don't see this perpetuated by players in other genres. I played Rising thunder somewhat and I would say I was OK, but my learning mostly came from learning some B&B combos, reading up on the mechanics to know what sometimes happened that confused me, playing against others, and finding where I struggled and learning to solve the problems I had, so for example with Dauntless I learned to bait Talos's grabs since I was being too predictable and getting grabbed and losing, and the solution just came from playing the game, finding a problem, and working on a solution for it.
I was just in Giby's stream the other day and he was talking about how people make the same mistakes learning Garou 8:00.
This is very helpful, because I'm having a really hard time with Tekken. It's not like I'm not getting better (every time I change something) it's just that I still get steamrolled and sometimes I do feel like "what's the point."
I think, the attractive thing about training mode is that it's a safe space. If you're not at a local, or your friend is not next to you, it's hard to learn against a specific idea.
EDIT: all these training mode haters need to play SamSho.
I kind of feel like this is an elitism issue, and playerbase already invested in the genre boasting themselves up with how hardcore their genre is.
In MOBA's most people are still just mashing buttons 4000 hours in.
Yup
I feel like there's a couple of things I need to discuss. Thank you to Magic Moste for the time stamps.
tl;dr: Sajam, your point about bronze rank is so apt about the discussion. You said you Throw > sweep your way to victory through bronze. That's because you're abusing the opponent's ignorance. In a low difficulty curve, this trick shouldn't work at all, since not being able to find the answer to this trick is a symptom of a high difficulty curve. Most of your points is how "this is easy, because you don't need this or that," when really, the reason you don't need this or that is because you're abusing the difficulty curve. You're flexing on people who is struggling to learn in the first place. The whole point of the discussion of a difficulty curve is to make these people who you're flexing on with sweeps, to stop getting flexed on, so that they can enjoy it like we do.
First off: Perception is super important. We talk about UX all the time right? About menus and stuff? Game designers still learn from the first Mario game about how to make intuitive designs. Being able to give and let the player digest information at the shortest amount of time is an art by itself, and basically have academic courses revolving around it. BUT, let's assume that for some reason, this doesn't matter, and let's talk about just the disagreements I have with your dismissal of certain points as just "feelings."
1:48: This point, and a few future points, are flawed by using Moba as a comparison, since both suffer the same difficulty issues as a genre. Add RTS to the mix too. You play a different game in all 3 genres when you're behind, thanks to the snowball heavy attribute. In a moba or a fighting game, when you're behind, while you do still get to make choices, you make more choices leaned towards certain situation. In Moba's case, you're playing safe. In FG's case, you're playing in constant disadvantage, probably in a corner. Compared to FPS, like CS, when you're getting beaten, your executive gameplans are mostly the same, just changing when you're gonna eco. While I think that this is actually a good thing, it doesn't change that it will have a physical impact in your learning progression, since these two scenarios deviates from "normal" play (play where you'll be most of the time after beginner level).
6:50: You're right, you do learn most from humans, and spending 100 hours in training is useless. However, a new player must spend first few (sometimes, dozens, depending on their learning source) in an offline mode, just to get the feel of the control or understand basic mechanics. I mean, seriously, Sajam, tell a new player to do a double QCF D and see how much trouble an average player need to do that. As a Smash player, I can tell you that we're much more controller savvy than the average gamer. Even to some dark soul players, UP-B can prove to be difficult. RTS had the same problem, but they circumvented this by having a campaign that marks as the tutorial for mechanics, a basic intro to microing, and an apm benchmark to make sure the players are using hotkeys instead of left clicking everything. These are deliberate design choices to ease the player into learning the rest of the game, to get past beginner level, and send them to the right learning path.
The previous points also ignores information overloading. A new player doesn't know what they need to be learning. It's very easy for us to say "yo, after this string, my turn. Gonna try this combo" To them, it's "holy crap, I'm getting beaten, uhhh, what button do I press to get out of this? Is it ok for me to do a tatsu here? Oh, it doesn't work? Why? but hey! Dragon Punch works! I should spam that! I won!" learning a bad habit or "oh no, DP doesn't work, what do I do now?" and proceed to never do that again. To correct these stuff, you need ALOT of time as a new player.
8:30: there's no right or wrong way to learn, but there's right or wrong way to play at low-mid level. In Smash, it's open knowledge that those with better technology wins automatically. No matter how impressive Gorp is, this is mostly true. After all, knowing that your DP have invincibility changes completely how you see neutral and disadvantage, or knowing a combo that does 30% decreases your neutral interaction to only 4 times. Despite never touching Mk series for years, I can beat my casual friend who owned most MK to date, despite only touching MK11 for 10 minutes. Infact, I was dominating him, just by spamming sweep > throw. He doesn't understand what to do, because he never understood using down 3 in his entire life, because no one ever taught him to. This is a result of the high difficulty curve compounded by other things. Even with good tutorials, like Rocket League, it doesn't change that this curve will cause "right way to play based on level" to exist, and that is a fundamental problem, that's following flowchart instead of enjoying the actual game.
11:13: fantastic point, and that is the issue! They don't even know if they'll enjoy the game, hence, they don't learn it to the point they'll enjoy it. Rocket league lost alot of players because the game proved to be much more deeper most of the playerbase thought. When aerial became common, the player base were polarised, and people left because they were intimidated with how the game was changing. Suddenly, there's this whole formation we need to adhere to just to play online, and getting their asses kicked by people who were able to get the ball when they can't. Most people who try these games don't get to enjoy it to the level that we do. Heck, forget fighting games, even casual genres like tactic games have this issue. Fire emblem 6 is a game known for being pretty deep, but it turns off many new fans of the series because you must play the game a few times, AND have a pretty precise game plan, to enjoy it. Otherwise, it's just large maps with loads of unfair bullshit.
15:50: While the original poster said it poorly, he has a point about intuitive learning. Yes, 2 hours in fighting game gets you to move left and right, do a 112 and sweep in tekken. Cool. Let's assume that that's your progression for the rest of your 100 hours into this. You'll get really good at 112 and sweep, but that's it. Maybe you'll learn to pick up how to attack advantage state because you got so good at 112-ing. But yeah, that's the extent of what you'll learn, because the rest of the game is unintuitive. They are things that you must have tutorials for. Compare that to COD, the game we used to call the rep of "bro gaming." In 2 hours, without even lessons, you learn what every button do, and that's all you ever need to learn. You just need to get good at those things. That's because COD is designed to be as intuitive and as shallow as possible. Sure, in the mental side, there's map layout, trigger discipline, and all that stuff, but compare those few points to the GIANT BUTTLOADS of match up knowledge you need to learn in FG. Not even CS can compare. Again, MOBA is a poor comparison.
17:23: addressed previously, don't have to learn techs, but it'll dramatically increase your ability to win. It's funny that you go ahead and talk about the right way to win this bracket too lol. Hey, we're experienced, we're fighting against non-experienced, of course it works. The goal here, in this difficulty curve talk, is to eliminate the possibility of being able to sweep > throw your way to victory. That's a symptom of the difficulty curve, not a solution. If I could do that, it meant that I'm abusing the difficulty curve.
21:57: yeah, true, they're all problem, and I agreed with you in previous vids lol. Every other genres paces their tutorials better. For example, even in moba, the other absolutely convuluted mess of a genre, have a very distinct learning progression: you learn to lane > you learn to team fight > You learn to take objectives > You learn to win games. Thanks to that, learning fundamental moba is organised in-game, hence, prevented from having information overload. But yes, even that genre sucks for new players because of item progression and position transition.
Nonetheless, your original point that FG is not harder than some genres out there can be right. Maybe the skill gap isn't even that big compared to the more casual games, that may also be right. I dunno, I'm someone who played every genre to a certain level, so I'm completely out of touch of how casual players feel about difficulty. But there's no need to ignore the real problems of the genre.
Another point is that maybe you're also thinking about difficulty in terms of time spent to learn something? Because that's not the right way to go about this discussion. I find mental based stuff super easy to learn, Japanese to read light novel in half a year baby. But my muscle memory is dumb AF.
So the entire point of the shit Sajam said about just using Sweep and Punch in Bronze, is that you can literally do that at any starting skill level and do okay enough. You don't need to know insanely sick combos and tech just to play a game while starting out, thats Sajam's point.
Saying that "being able to just sweep and anti air your way to bronze is abusing the difficulty curve", is like saying "Going for 2 pointers instead of trying to go for 3 pointers is cheating". Sajam gives an example of something simple to do to to learn to start and to climb because you don't *need* to know something at the skill level you're starting at.
Doing simple shit properly gets more results than doing hard shit incorrectly. Going for a simple 2 pointer (fundamental buttons in a FG) you know you can land is infinitely better than trying to do a half court shot (a complicated combo/punish/setup) and missing the rim (whiffing the combo/setup).
It took me months to start getting wins in a fighting game, and like 2 weeks to learn dota
First I just want to note that I appreciate the formatting for the points in the description.
Your image of people picking up mobas/fps's is completely disingenuous. You are not just mashing buttons in a moba from the first second you play, you get in a game as lux, maybe you have friends to spoonfeed your runes and builds or maybe you don't, but either way you can read that your Q roots, so you can mouse over someone and press q and know it will shoot a projectile that roots, maybe you're a bit slow and it takes you one full game to understand but that's really it. This is an intentionality that's inherent to simpler games. This isn't something you have to learn and this isn't something you have to master to implement in a game, it's something you read, you throw it out, you see it and you understand. This, plus merely 5 other buttons including summoner skills(which aren't frequently used and can be put aside for extreme low level play all together) are ALL you have to worry about when you start out in a moba, it's a simple jumping off point and from here you can start to look at what pros build for your character and so forth, it's a clear path. When you start out in sfv for example, you have six neutral buttons, six lows at least, X amount of directional commands and X amount of specials to learn, it's a complete informational overload for people who sincerely care about understanding how to win.
The fact is when most people pick up league, they don't go 0/10, they go 3/5 because they're playing a game with a generally more intuitive control scheme and they're facing people with a lesser skill gap(due to the larger player base). This rewards them with positive feedback that they wouldn't see in a fighting game for a very long time. This goes double for someone who's experienced in competitive games and can realize the damage they get from fullscreen ken H.tatsu's isn't legitimate, they'll have to dive even deeper before they get meaningful positive feedback and that can be a really long time.
I would argue that's a problem with the fighting game's matchmaking, rather than an inherent problem with fighting games. If fighting games consistently and accurately matched players of similar skill level, then new players after some placement matches should definitely have a close to even win/loss ratio. It wouldn't matter how much information the player has committed to memory, because the close to even skilled opponent would have a similar deficit in knowledge, and thus it would come down to which player plays better in that game. You think Rocket League, or even League, would have as many players as they do if the matchmaking was terrible and new players were constantly up against mid to high tier players? It would kill morale. Proper matchmaking is important for new players to stick around, because they'll leave if most of their opponents are too far above their skill level.
All moba noobs will go oom in 30 to 60 secs and attempt to stay in lane oom until they die. It is essentially the same as not playing the game. On top of that, most noobs will have no clue where to stand in order to be considered safe. This leads to a lot of vision related deaths and once the guy absuing vision adv gets 2 early kills, he'll kill 2 more people and then start killing the whole team and nobody will be playing the game, on your team, for at least 20 minutes.
Just because you know what things do, doesn't mean you understand the intricacies of how to use them effectively. Example: using lux q to hit minions for last hit is extremely inefficient, but noobs do it all the time. Hitting enemies with spells while they're under their tower and then going oom, then when you have 80% ho, they have 40% hp, you fight them on their side and lee sin aproaches from fog to kill you... these things happen all the time and soon enough, you stop being allowed to play in the first 5 minutes because tou died 3 times. And then everybody stops being able to play because they all died 7 times each and lee sin is on a 25 kill 10 assist streak with a full build by 12 minutes and all first towers are down.
A team going 5-40 while you are particularly just 1-5 won't be very indicative because you were the one that started all the deaths.
@@Darkscoper if u dont have a playerbase u cant do this.
@@Th3Sh1n1gam1 You seem to be missing his point. The fact that a new player can actually use Lux's Q at all means they've already overcome the first barrier to entry for a game; learning how to activate the tools at your disposal. In a MoBA, this is a relatively easy task because your abilities are all just one button-press away. In a fighting game, this can be quite a difficult task, because so many of your moves require an arcane series of inputs, not just one button-press.
While the Lux player is learning not to waste their mana, learning to recall, and learning to position themselves correctly, the fighting game player is still stuck just learning how to use all of their abilities consistently, never mind learning when or how they should use those abilities.
I think the major disconnect here is that Sajam is talking about somebody who's actually interested in learning the game, not necessarily to a pro level but still willing to figure out what works and who has the basic pattern recognition skills to do so, while the commenters are talking about their friends that got the game on sale, mashed buttons against each other, get bodied by people with even a bronze level understanding of the game, and decide it's too hard. Obviously the second person isn't going to do well at the game and just complain, caring about what that person thinks about fighting games is stupid
Why would someone who isnt interested in learning the game be good at the game? Of course they would be shit. The same goes for any game
@@Kerplunk990 As someone who doesn't play fps's to get gud, I can confirm after many hours I still suck ass at them.
@@Kerplunk990 If a game has more "loitering" activities, as in a moment where u dont really have to play the game, or get free kills etc. people are more inclined to p;ay them in a stagnant manner without trying to improve. MOBAs are decent examples, so is battlegrounds in MMOs.
I am happy you have stated the obvious I tried to explain this to friends so many times who get upset to losing some push on and get good normally without practice mode
I applaud your analysis of the arguments. Very solid response. Feelings aren't arguements.
Shinobi Theninja but in this case the argument is entirely about feelings.
"In the next game, if you don't sweep, ypu block, and you've learned"
And then get bodied anyway because they know what to do, you don't, and feel even worse because it seems like you will lose regardless of what you do.
Fighting game players have no fucking clue what goes through the mind of someone who is not as into the genre as they are.
Salty Shunk You have to stop getting ad at yourself for not understanding something fully yet.
I know that’s easier to type than to actually accomplish, but it would be like getting mad at a Professor for correcting you on something you were wrong about.
Are you really mad at the teacher? or are you mad at yourself for not being the smartest person in the room?
@@jwm1444 and you still don't get it. It is very difficult to learn anything when you have no idea what you are supposed to learn to begin with. This is why there is such a high barrier to entry for any fighting game. You have to know so much so that you can see where your mistakes are before even trying to play. If you are starting off with nothing, progressing beyond that is almost impossible.
Salty Shunk that is simply not true. i promise you, i was TTTTTTRREEEEEEAAAAAAASSSSSH in FG’s for many many years, the only people i could beat were my cousins and my friends and that was if i was lucky enough to own an FG that they didn’t.
I got better and it was because i tried (it’s frankly something i still work on) to not get angry at myself for losing. Because who cares? Why am i putting all this pride and ego on the line? What’s the point? It makes the game not fun.
I’m never winning EVO, i’m not making any Top 8 anywhere lol. 98.99% of the people who play FG’s will never be that good either.
@@jwm1444 good for you? As an unrelated statement, nobody in the world exists that are missing limbs because I have all of mine.
I don't care much either but I get frustrated when I can't learn something I should be. It seems like you didn't read a damn thing I said. When you know nothing, you don't know what you don't know, and thus it is a lot harder to improve. Try telling someone who is illiterate to read A Brief History of Time and see how well it goes for them.
Salty Shunk
“I don’t care much either, but i get frustrated when i can’t learn something i should be.”
As one of my friends once said, Should is a Guilt word. You can’t expect yourself to be good at something you have no basis in, that much you are right about. that’s just setting yourself up for misery and failure.
However, it’s not “impossible” or even any more difficult to learn FG’s, it just takes time and learning to to get mad at yourself for not being immediately good at something. Like literally anything else in the world.
Also it’s not “iMpOsSiBlE” for an illiterate person to learn how to read. Yeah, it’ll take time, but after teaching someone who WANTS to learn, they will get it eventually.
You, and most people who try fighting games are not illiterate, dumb, stupid or whatever negative adjective you want to throw on it. You’re just being stubborn.
Sajam, I think there is a big confounding factor that isn't discussed (and I agree with nearly everything you said) and that is the empowerment factor of games against the mental model of challenges. For example, in single-player games, with rare exception, the game gives you an extreme sense of empowerment at all levels of play. Usually, as you get better, you're tackling ascetically more serious challenges (for example, boss characters getting more and more powerful) so you constantly feel like you're getting better and better. I think this is "very ingrained" into video games culture. Where the rub lies, is in how competitive games are different.
Competitive games of anytime (FG, MOBA, etc.) are less about your absolute empowerment and more about giving you a tool set to overcome someone else's use of their tool set. I find that one of the most important things that happens when I coach newer players is that they need to understand that competitive games are about testing yourself and your mental model against the challenges that someone else presents. This usually highlights something really important for newer players, in that the "salt" they feel is usually the end result of their mental model "not working" against the challenges another player presents and an inherit biased that they feel regarding either "why" their model should work or why someone else is breaking their own self-imposed rules. I usually draw this connection with when someone feels "pissed" in a single-player game, and it's usually when you feel like the game is breaking either the explicit or implicit rules it's been establishing over time. I think what makes any competitive game "tough" is that the game is constantly about building, breaking, and improving your mental model, where as most other games are about reinforcing your empowerment.
When it comes to other competitive games versus FGs, I think it's probably that the feedback you get for "getting better" is actually quite bifurcated in FGs. When you improve little things (AA more consistently for example), it doesn't lead to more wins at first, just maybe losing but instead of your opponent having 90% health, they have 65% health. In a single player game when you fight a boss, if you are consistently getting closer to beating them, you feel improvement because you know you only need to win "once". You can kind of see it in your River City Girls play through against Abobo for example. It's usually only when you start accumulating enough "improvements" that you can see clear dominance over opponents (for example, your speed run of people in KI during The Recipe) that people feel like they are accomplishing something akin to stomping a big tough boss. In a FG, once you get over losing less, now you're moving to maybe winning X% to X+5% Hence, it takes a metric ton of real improvement to sometimes feel your accomplishing anything (and this is not even accounting for the fact that as other people around you improve, it diminishes the impact of your own improvements)
Other games "tend" to give more visceral feedback when you improve in whatever form (gain a new level, etc.) whereas FGs, the feedback is more minimal. It's partially why doing things like congratulating yourself for more consistently AA'ing someone is a big deal to say motivated as you used in some of your videos. I think one of the more interesting ways you could make FG "easier" to learn is to potentially just give better indications of improvement at all stages. For example, let's say over the course of 10 games, you have a very high AA rate, maybe unlock a title and a customization piece for your character to highlight that improvement. Love your stuff! Cheers!
This video is so useful. I play Skullgirls, and as someone who is teaching one person how to play "normally" I always stress the importance of learning how to play against other people. Beginners especially, as the unpredictability of "noobs" are very useful tools to learn how to play.
I gotta say, this video helped me immediately. I'm trying to learn KI and I was trying not to fall into the practice mode trap so I was mixing up practicing combos and setups in training mode and going online, but I was too focused on the large scale stuff like dealing with combo breakers and counter breaker timing, not dropping combos, what mixups to do and how to set them up. The problem was when I went online I'd just have someone jump in on me, hit me and one missed combo breaker made me take 50%, make that mistake 4 times and I lose. After watching this I started thinking more about the basics, I keep getting jumped in on so I'm just gonna focus on getting good at anti airing, I lost a few games but hit my anti airs, then I came up against a rash who would jump in to start every single combo, my first lifebar went super quick with me taking less than 50% from him, so I chilled out, just started backing up and doing 5h with arbiter. I learned that it's really good at catching jump ins because it reaches so high and is so disjointed. He on the other hand didn't learn that I was just going to keep doing that, so for the rest of the game and the second game we played I basically just did 5H into mercy's demise until he died. I messed up a few times and got caught but it gave me a lot of practice on anti airing in just one game.
Lol dawg you know I still go for those swag ass moves the most important thing to learn is how to style for the ladies.
I’d kept up with SFV competitive for a while so when I got the game I jumped right in and tried to do crazy things right away. I had fun but I didn’t love it and I lost interest quick. I bought tekken a few months ago, spent 20 minutes in training finding a cool character and learning a couple moves, went straight to ranked, and fell in love. I think in large part it was because I just let myself be a newbie. Don’t be afraid to lose matches and mess around.
facts
Man, Sajam, I absolutely love the stuff you have been talking about lately. You are sparking REALLY great conversations. Netcode, lack of content, difficulty...
When it comes to this (and I don't think you'll find anyone that agrees more with you on this topic), I just don't understand where the perception that being in training mode is not playing the game.
I knew about fighting games well before, but I got super into them with DBFZ, I still love the game, but I haven't played a match since EVO, yet I still go into training mode regularly and have fun doing cool combos and stuff. Now, I understand that may not be for everybody, but I personally don't like going into a League game against a Diamond player who is going to shitstomp me because I haven't played the game in 2 years.
Oh, and the Rocket League comment. Fuck that! If you want to do any of the aerial tricks you see Masters or Grand Masters do, you have to spen HOURS in the game's equivalent to training mode. I am diamond in RL and man... the parallels with FGs are insane.
Anyway, the content you guys have been putting out is fucking fantastic. Keep it up!
When I first got into fighting games I played against my friend and lost 50 games in a row and it was probably my best learning experience in any game
I think different game styles just appeal to different players. Perception is subjective, but it's still a thing. It still matters. Some players are okay with losing a whole lot just because they love games and they love the journey. Other players don't necessarily mind losing but need to actually feel like they are improving along the way. Some players want this validated with wins. Anything beyond that are people who probably just don't have the competitive gene. I remember when I first picked up League of Legends, I had zero idea of what I was doing, but I feel like I still won 40-50% of my games, either because I was carried by my team, or I just happened to right click enough against players just as terrible as me and get a bunch of kills. Which, even if you aren't actually improving, is a good feeling and encourages you to continue playing. In modern fighting games, you will absolutely lose 80%-90% of your matches online when you first start. For some people, that's just discouraging. Which is understandable. Before the advent of online, everybody loved fighting games because you didn't have to play against tryhards across the country, you just played with your friends most of whom were no better or worse than you and who played 'honorably' because they didn't want to piss off their buddies. Now fighting games are pretty much solely relegated to people who have a competitive itch and who dont mind getting rocked over and over as they improve. It doesn't really happen in MOBAs. MOBAs and pretty much any team-based game virtually guarantees that you will win a large percentage of your games simply by pure chance, because there are factors in those games outside of your control. But on the flipside, this is why I love fighting games because your destiny is in your own hands. Improvement is generally fast and noticeable. Once you learn how to beat something, you never lose to that thing again. Improvement in MOBAs is hard to notice because it's so gradual and has hard-to-notice results.
I will never stop seeing you in my videos LOL. 8 years later.
Every time I see a video line this it's a top 1% player blabbing about other top 1% players. This doesn't remotely reflect the actual difficulty of the genre. 99% of gamers can pick up and be successful in any other genre except fighting games.
Of the people who buy a fighting game, literally
You have to define successful. If we want to talk proficiency think about MOBAs, how many people actually make it to high ranks in MOBAs? How many people build a diverse champion pool and know how most of the champions work? The stats say not very many. In League of Legends it's generally accepted that any average player can make it into Iron ~ Gold with moderate skill. They can one trick a champion well, they can play a few champions proficiently, maybe they're just really good at macro play. But "high ELO" (what most would consider actual proficiency at the game) sees only like ~20% of players (who play ranked).
In shooters it's not that different. In a game like Overwatch (which honestly doesn't demand as much as other shooters in terms of raw skill at shooting) you still only see about 30% of the playerbase (who plays Ranked) attaining a high rank. If you expand either of these examples to the entire player base, the majority of which don't play ranked, you see probably only about ~10% (if that) of players actually becoming proficient at the game. And that's not professional level, that's just "better than the average player".
I highly doubt the numbers are that different for fighting games. I have 20 odd cousins who have played fighting games since we were kids and none of us are that good at them, a few are above average but most of us are just whatever. And we still play! And that's how a lot of people play fighters so long as they have others around their skill level. The only difference is that in MOBAs and shooters it's generally easier to find people in your skill level to practice with because the online is good and the communities are large enough to consistently match you with other new or similarly skilled players.
If you're a new fighting game player and the only people you have to practice with are veterans who know how to TOD you, yeah, you're going to quit and the game is going to feel impossible. The same way if you dropped a lv1 League player in with a Plat Player (hell even a Bronze Player) they'd probably be rolled over and think the game sucks. The same way if you dropped a day one shooter fan into a lobby with experienced players they'd feel the game was impossible after being headshot 20 times in a row. You admit it yourself in this comment that so long as your friends had other new players to play against they enjoyed playing the game! If they used those games with others at their skill level to intentionally grow and learn (like Sajam states is important to building proficiency in any game), they'd probably become skilled at the game at a similar rate to someone intentionally trying to learn a MOBA or Shooter for the first time.
EDIT: TL;DR - Players in MOBAs and Shooters generally do not reach high levels of proficiency in their games, that's what the raw statistics tell us. This is similar to how a majority of fighting games players don't become "good" or "successful" players. The only difference is that in a MOBA or Shooter the online environment allows for inexperienced or unskilled players to easily and consistently match with players of their approximate skill which allows them to keep playing without being discouraged. In Fighting Games the communities are smaller and the access to other unskilled players (especially online) is limited. This gives the PERCEPTION that Fighting Games are harder and leads a lot of players to quit because they're sick of getting stomped by long time players. If this kind of situation was placed on a MOBA or Shooter you'd see the same situation -- unskilled players being beat on mercilessly by skilled ones and quitting the game as a result. This tendency of new players to quit because of getting stomped online by more experienced players is not evidence for or proof of Fighting Games being inherently harder.
EDIT #2: I state that my cousins and I have played fighting games for a long time at a casual level and that none of us are very good, and this may come across as supporting the idea that fighting games are harder to learn (after all, we're still bad after years of practice). I'd like to also state that myself and at least 15 other friends have been playing League of Legends since Season 2 and none of us have ever gotten above Gold V in ranked, and the majority of us have never broken out of Silver. So the situation is pretty similar. It's only anecdote, but whatever.
Your thanks were on point in this vid. You've been practicing!
I think its quite funny, when I started playing FG's I told a friend "its much easier to see your results, cause the game can be broken down quite easily. It just feels good hitting the Anti Air or finally converting a certain button." He told me that he doesnt think that way and that to learn fighting games one had to lab all day.
When I started learning BBTAG (my first fighting game), I just sat in training mode but getting my ass handed to me online and learning from those mistakes and learning what moves typically land a hit is so much more fun tbh. And that way you get plenty of matchup experience too which is super valuable for characters with big rosters!
I legit just learn most plus and minus moves for my characters by playing online because even with crappy netcode, it's SO MUCH more fun to play and improve neutral/footsies/general patience than just sitting on a wiki page looking at frame data or sitting in training practicing combos that get scaled down anyway.
Also the argument that the skills from fighters aren't as transferable is absolutely not true!
I tried UNIST before BBTAG but gave up for the time being due to the high execution for some combos, I came back to try UNIST again after learning basics in BBTAG for a few months and the same combos are no problem now.
I think the most important part people don't seem to realize: I don't think fighting games are any easier to learn than most genres. I think it's about the same, that's all.
I think the notion that combos arent interactive is incorrect.
You may not be able to burst after a combo, but you are there. If you think the combo is going to kill, you are assessing your plan for next round, if that combo isnt you are thinking about your next move. Even if you arent combo breaking you are still playing the game and thinking about it. When I am getting combod, by someone, I am thinking of the situation that will come after and how I can survive in that situation and reset to neutral. Combo breakers and stuff along these lines just add a whole new layer of RPS, strategy and tactics to combos for both players, so I find this to be extremely engaging and definitely underrated.
Also, I feel like combos are one of the few times in games where you can take a breath and think, which is really hard to do in the heat of battle. When the opponent is using up their mental resources to do a combo, you are free to think and react to stuff your opponent isnt able to. But that may very well be just me.
I agree that multiplayer games have similar learning curves and the main difference between them is that, in a team based game, you can win without learning anything about the game, as in a 1v1, it's on you.
The thing that made me realize it is when i started playing battle royale shooter solo. I sucked Hard and had to start learning basic stuff so i could hold my own.
On another note, that's why fighting games NEED a good lobby and netcode. If you're a beginner and you want to learn, but it takes 10 minutes to find another player and it's laggy as hell, it only adds to the frustration of not knowing how to play the game.
I honestly think difficulty itself has a subjective element to it, and this subjective element is why people often state Fighting Games are harder than others. If you boil down learning a game to just knowledge, then you will actually find that the amount of things a beginning player must learn is about equal across many genres. But I feel an issue with the level of knowledge is that what is considered "passable/acceptable" by a player is perhaps larger in a fighting game than a MOBA, since, in a 1v1 scenario where you can blame no one but yourself for a loss, your ass will get beat without knowing what seems like so much information in a fighting game whereas you can get wins in a MOBA by virtue of its team structure.
The pressure of exactly what must be done to win, whether than be during a match or learning, varies wildly between individuals. Some people can pick up a game, understand complicated mechanics, and commit important information to memory almost instantaneously. And the perception of the player, I feel, is inherently a part of the difficulty discussion because it reflects the mindset and abilities of the new individual; namely, it reflects what exactly they find difficulty in grasping or what pressures them.
yes
ok my first introduction to fighting games was from my cousin. We played sf4ae and he would destroy me i didnt really know how to play but just by him coming over and playing a bunch i started just jumping over his hadoken and started blocking his sweeps. And when i started liking the game more and more, THATS when i started actually training moding and doing combos.
If you wanna get into a fighting game just PLAY. If you dont like it, u dont like it. And thats not the games fault
From what I’ve learned so far playing fighting games, which isn’t much mind you, fighting games are only harder to “learn” than other genres if you want to win immediately. If I want to win immediately in a MOBA my friend could come carry me. But I wouldn’t be learning or getting better, I’d just have an extra win in my win column.
Since dropping my care for winning, UNIST has become way more enjoyable. And I try to look at the positives. If someone combos me to hell and back, I can learn from it, and I also get to see a cool combo because I sure as hell can’t pull off what they’re doing yet. Anyway, thanks for this video. The FGC has been quite encouraging to me so far, whether they know it or not, through videos, forum posts (some from over a decade ago even), UA-cam comments, etc
I consider there's 3 main issues in regards to learning fighting games, all of which are indeed related to perception:
- People seem to think that if you are not winning you are not learning. This is something I've observed when teaching a friend how to play. She would start blocking some things better or doing some things more consistently (albeit small things), but because I kept winning she didn't think she was learning anything.
- Unlike more mainstream genres like shooters, people rarely have played fighting games in an incidental fashion, as opposed to playing them trying to improve. Many people have played shooters just to play them, and they are not aware of how much they have learned about shooters by doing so that they didn't learn about fighting games.
- The "hours on training mode" myth. I don't even know who came up with this and it could not be further from the truth. My best guess is because of the "not winning means not learning" thing people tend to think that you have to be in training mode for hours so you can win out of the gate.
For me, the key is that people should learn to appreciate the learning they do even though they still lose and that they stop listening to the silly people trying to convince them that it is oh so hard.
I'm not especially interested in winning out of the gate but there's also this assumption that losing a game always teaches you something. Sometimes there's not great lesson to learn from a loss, especially when you don't get a chance to properly make any inputs, and it's very hard to sit there and get rolled with no chance to actually press any buttons and go, "Hm okay I should have done [some input or move]" when a lot of times just starting out you don't even know HOW to do those things. If you get hit into a combo that takes 70% of your health and press forward at the end of it and don't even get to move before you're caught in a new one, and then you try pressing backwards to create distance and don't even get to move before you're caught in a new one, and there's no way to break the combo in the middle, or with any input you've tried, of COURSE you're not going learn anything, except that "Trying to escape this isn't going to work."
If you haven't got knowledge of how to stop them from doing it in the first place, and you're in the same boat I was in starting out, where every player you encounter is just silently demolishing you or actively telling you that you're bad at the game without any actual advice, then sitting in the lab or against the AI opponent is really all you CAN do until you've figured out how to play. Coupled with less-than-helpful tutorials and a lack of a community to interact with until you're already good, you're just kind of stuck.
"Appreciating the learning you do" only works if there's any learning TO do, people telling you it's hard aren't "Silly." Fighting games ARE hard. There's no way around that. They require specific knowledge of how to interact with the opponent, practice and execution of precise inputs that you have to be able to perform under pressure, and an understanding of what, EXACTLY, you can do to escape a given situation when placed in it, and until you get to a baseline that you aren't just instantly losing with no chance of playing with intentionality, you can't really learn a whole lot about it. Do I think that other games at top-level competitive play are inherently easier? No. They aren't. But bottom-level, just starting out, beginner play absolutely _is._ Fighting games are often inaccessible unless you've already gotten good at it. You can't reasonably expect someone to be able to identify and work on problem areas in their gameplay if their gameplay consists of "Press one button, fail, you aren't allowed to press another button." There's no information gained there. The only new knowledge gained is "pressing that button didn't do anything. Let's try a different one-- that didn't do anything either." Without someone to teach you what your options in a given context are the only option is to trial and error your way through dozens or hundreds of games where you press one button and then die, or press two buttons at once and die, or walk a different direction and die, until you chance on one of the possible combinations that don't lead to your immediate demise.
Further, the only way to really play a fighting game incidentally is if a friend invites you to play and neither of you have ever touched the game before.
Don't really understand what you're after. I've played games of almost all genres and by far Street Fighter is the only one that simply feels impossible to get into. I've been playing Street Fighter for 4 years now and I can't do combos for shit. I still keep forgetting button inputs even for characters I've played in training mode for hundreds of hours. I've had over 50 match losing streaks online, only winning a couple matches just because of flukes or when the enemy realizes I'm so bad they'll literally just taunt me the entire match and switch to the same character I'm using just to kick my ass and humiliate me. While every other game I've picked up very easily just after a couple hours of playing the game and doing some research about them online. Street Fighter? I've spent countless hours watching pro players, watching guides, analysing shit, but no. I can't play the game for shit. But in FPS games I'm a semi-professional and I'm able to beat people in strategy games online on my first try. I'm just unable to ever get good at Street Fighter no matter how much effort I put into it, I'm unable to learn unless I have a coach holding my hand all the way through. Racing games, I really suck at them but I'm able to still beat veterans on my first try hardly even knowing the controls, using way worse vehicles. Sports games, I easily grasp whatever if it's a football game or a hockey game, I'm good at it. Even some other fighting games I'm instantly good at. But not Street Fighter. I even lose to my little brother who is way worse at every single other game we play. I've given up on it, no reason to suffer with SF if I can get good at any other game I want.
If you've played SF for 4 years and cant do a combo, thats simply on you. I introduced my buddy to Tekken and within a week or 2 he could do a combo that takes half your health away
@@Kerplunk990 I'm just unable to learn the game. I can't do it. It's the only game I have trouble with.
@Allu Maybe Street Fighter is indeed not the game for you. What other fighting games are you good at? Maybe we can find a commonality among those other games that Street Fighter has (or doesn't have) that can help identify what the "problem" with SF is and why you can't get into it.
And then either SF will click, or we give up SF forever because it sounds like it only causes you grief...
@@malcovich_games I'm bad at almost all fighting games. Only fighting game I was good at was WWE 2011 but that's not even a "real" fighting game.
@@dazeen9591 Well uh, not sure what we can do then, maybe fighting is not the genre for you.
But before you go:
1. Can you win if you focused on just a poke, a throw and a simple anti-air?
2. Were you able to try different types of fighting games? Smash/Brawlhalla or Soul Calibur or Naruto Ultimate Storm are different kinds of fighting games you can try. Maybe even Nidhogg, Divekick or Fantasy Strike. Or Gundam Versus, which is kiiiiind of a fighting game?
If fighting games were easy to learn, you would start playing with only the 3 basic moves you are talking about.
Thats not the case, someone will hop on, see 30 moves and weird inputs, so pick some at random and not know why theyre losing
Theres no feedback loop to help them learn.
Youcant just say "its simple, just already have the knowledge of what moves operate over the main concepts and what the main concepts are"
Shooters theres one thing you obviously need to learn, which is point in the right direction.
Thats why they are easy to learn, there is an obvious thing to first learn
This is so true.
In fact you mentioned the bronze level KI being able to win with just sweep, anti air and throw.
This even works at low levels of tournament play.
In our regional multi-game events, I'd often enter games I liked but didn't play, such as SFIV and IJ2. I won multiple sets and even made upper half of the bracket once in IJ2 with just sweep/uppercut/throw/trait on Atom.
Fundamentals carry, regardless of the genre. After that gotta learn the game no matter the genre.
Losing in fighting games feel way more crushing than any other game other than 2019 overwatch
21:20 i find this idea of transfering the guilt of losing to the team 'cause one of the things that got me into fgc and tcg was the fact that being it an individual game, I'd have to deal with the whole responsibility of the loss by myself. One of the things that i like the most in olaying individual games competitively is that it forces me to deal with my mistakes and face my own shortcomings with no justifications
mrpinguimninja i think that’s the biggest problem for most people.
People treat losing in a FG as if they lost a fight IRL.
So I commented on the other video about my experience with Smite vs Fighting games. I wanted to mention this time about training mode. I suck at Tekken, but I've been playing it a lot recently cause I want to get better. I usually spend enough time in training mode per character to learn like, 1 or 2 combos that work along with the basic ground game and pokes. That's like, half an hour in training mode per character max to get to what I consider usable. I can win a good amount of matches with 1 combo and some pokes. And that's any fighting game.
With Smite I probably lost so much more starting out because I didn't understand the items or how to play certain characters. I'd play bot games to try to figure some of it out, but mostly I learned from getting blown up or stuck in 40 minute games where I'd die a minute after respawning. And my friends never wanted to surrender so we'd just be there. You don't have to spend a significant amount of time in a training room on a moba, but I think part of that comes from just being able to review items outside a training room or the game. Your only real option is to play until you get good, which usually takes a few dozen games until you get good.
Same for me with League, got completely destroyed when I started. Back then there was barely a tutorial. With Tekken I got to the point were I was having fun way faster.
I think you've done a good job isolating and dismantling misconceptions about fighting game difficulty. As someone who works in the game design space, I would be curious about your ideas on how fighting games can better convey their mechanics to players. For example, what would an idea tutorial look like? Would it be a separate mode or would it be integrated into the single player experience? Or maybe even in the multiplayer? Maybe it's an issue of visual feedback? Do you think there is a way to design around these issues?
Just an idea. I'm sure you have a lot of ideas. And if this was already addressed and I just missed it, a link would suffice.
Great content, keep up the good work.
It seems like Sajam's argument is predicated on the idea that perception and reality are different when it comes to learning fighting games, and that players' perceptions that a fighting game is hard doesn't necessarily make it hard. I mostly agree with that. However, I think there's some key things that get overlooked in this argument.
The first is that fighting games are and always will be far more mechanically challenging than any MOBA. It just does not get easier than pressing one key on your keyboard, then clicking a target. And even if that is complicated to a new player, every single possible detail you could wish to know about an ability is available at all times at the bottom of the screen. That includes the hotkey, mana cost, cooldown, damage scaling, everything. In fighting games, you have to memorize which moves you can use. If you don't know the input for a move, it's not like you can just look up your command list during an online game. I think this is one of the reasons why newcomers think that you have to spend hours in training mode to get good at fighting games. In order to play with any kind of intentionality, you have to know your damn options. If you can't remember them, you need to spend time practicing them so that you can commit them to memory. The alternative to that is losing over and over because you didn't know any of your moves.
Another reason I think fighting games seem so hard for new players is because the mental strain of a fighting game is very different from that of a MOBA. In a MOBA, most of your actions take a lot of time. Walking all the way to your lane can feel like a chore at times, and getting from one end of the map to the other without a tp scroll is super slow. MOBAs have a lot of down time. You don't need to be thinking about everything at once. If you're in jungle farming some creeps, you can leave your character to auto-attack until the camp is dead while you check your minimap to look for someone to gank. Same thing if you're pushing a lane. Hell, Dota gives you a full minute to buy starting items and allocate your first skill point before the first creep waves spawn. Rarely do you have to watch your positioning, item build, skill build, ability cooldowns, enemy locations, ward spots, jungle camp spawns, Roshan timer, death timers, and rune spawns all at the same time. You have a lot more time to individually process most of those. In a fighting game, you have to make decisions quickly and constantly for the duration of a match. You don't have nearly as much time to decide on your next move, and most new players end up mashing as a result. The only time MOBAs really reach that intensity of quick decision-making is during team fights, where you do have to consider a lot of variables at once.
This is why one of my favorite features of Dota is its guide system. You can click a small book icon at the top left and it'll show you a bunch of popular builds for the character you're playing, usually from really good players. The guide usually includes a short summary of how you should play the character, which items you should build, and which abilities you should level up. They even include explanations for why you build specific items and some situational alternatives. These guides are great because they effectively take off a lot of the pressure of deciding your character's build while you focus on more fundamental stuff, like last hitting or learning how to lane and gank. In fighting games, you're responsible for every single part of your character's kit, as well as how to use it. That's daunting to most new players, and it usually causes them to either lose, or spam a couple moves over and over (which is not a sustainable strategy).
If anyone had the patience to read this, you have my respect. I've played a lot of Dota and for some reason I found it way easier to learn than any fighting game, so I thought I'd try to explain why I think that was the case for me.
What do you mean by mechanical??? I don t think BROLYLEGS can play any moba or fps at a level were he can enjoy it. There is too much button. Plus MOBA is in fact a sub genre of RTS/Tower defense and those two genres are not slow by definition developper decide to slowdown it. I remenber years ago when playing to CC3 most matches end up with more than 150APM bro. Note that 1APM can combine two button like crtl+click. Same think with FPS there are fast and slow peaced FPS. So here is the dev choice to do it fast not the core nature of a game or The same thinks happen to FG. SAMSHO is fucking slow. You press one button evrey 5s.
For the intensity your analysis is weak or incomplete because even if the game is fast peaced. if you want to play a match during 10 min you can. I have 2 of my friends that play SF4. When they play together they allways agree to put time infinite. They can play 30 match in 4 - 5 hours at least. One round can go to 10 min and I'm not lying. It's a torture for me but they enjoy like that. nThey don t give a shit to react to what ever plenty option you are talking about. They lose and then what? another long match. They don t need this kind of intensity and yet the game doesn't oblige then to react. But if they want to play in a tournament or with others players like any high level player this not going to append. Exactly the same think you described with MOBA. Playing alone doing your causual you can play as you want. So it depends of you and other players in both case not of the game.
For variable, I don t know but it seems like there is actually a fucking lot of variable in MOBA but in fact you just don t care when you play to MOBA. You can do the same think with FG. You don t need to care about all those variables and the situations are simple: block low/high chop reverse ;ove if defending, watching to punish if neutral or doing your save string if offensing, in any other situation you just have 2 or three options and giving you 10 minute more are not going to help you (you are going to do some stat before choosing wich action? no kidding).
In both case if you do that at your home with buddies no problem no need of all this variables. Else where in a team for ex in MOBA or with people other than your buddies who sure come to fu*k you well. You will lose like hell. IN BOTH CASE.
The problem here seems to be perception. It seems like ther is more causual player in MOBA tham in FG. People come to FG thinking that their are going to train and be good without being causual first. But in MOBA or others people accept that. In fact I even think that FG is easy to learn because of that people who started think that their are going to go against Daigo or I don t know they get bodied like hell. They cry.
To go further you cannot see a match were a low tier team face a top tier team in MOBA or FPS.... But in FGC this recurrent. And the low tier even do well. This give the perception that as just a causual I should do it. So people set up high goals and fail. So they blame difficulty. In other genre no one even think to play again top tier when he begin. NO WAY.
The thinks that we tell to people, the way we present thinks, the dream that we sell to people change their perception of think. This is the main factor in the problem we are talking about.
"getting combo'd isn't playing the game because you can't do anything"
Lategame League: literally a minute of waiting time for respawn where you can't do anything but buy items
You can still talk to your team.
Death in csgo is basically that except you cant even buy anything
I haven't watched the whole video, but so far these misconceptions have been completely enforced by the FGC as if it's something to be proud of
Losing sucks but it's definitely part of learning to play a fighting game. One of the homework assignments in David Sirlin's playing to win is to play online until you lose 10 times. You have to lose and condition yourself to work adapt and improve, and when you do improve sometimes it's difficult to see, but that's like just about any skill in life you want to learn.
Sitting in training mode is the worst way to learn a fighting game, you need to know how to play the game to make use of training mode, it's a tool to answer questions that come up while playing
"The mechanics of mobas are easily transferrable"
Has this person seen SMITE?
This makes a ton of sense; I am a relatively new fighting game player that recently moved into a living situation with one of the best Guilty Gear players in the world and right now learning has never been easier despite being spanked harder on a regular basis now than i ever have in the past. But I am getting much stronger as a player simply because he helps me focus my attention on the right areas, he doesn't dumb down his play too much, he doesn't go easy on me, and he doesn't hand hold when we play, he just asks questions about why I do what I do and then offers game information to help solidify the reasoning behind why my idea does or does not work in most situations.
I am not a sore loser, but I am mostly pretty averse to getting stomped on eternally and remorselessly in a game, but despite that my passion and skill have grown because he has helped me see the bigger picture about whats meaningful in getting better, which is exactly what you have mentioned in the last video:
If anyone here disagrees strongly with Sajam here, I would advise trying to work on simple challenges like "hit my anti-airs, hit my target combo, force them into the corner, dont get cornered" and be PROUD when you succeed! Mastering skills will boost your desire to learn more and streamline the learning process each time! Its about learning how to learn!
UI is very much an understated aspect of fighting games being harder to learn. Some people might not even realize what a counter hit is because instead of making it super apparent on what a counterhit is, you just see a little popup on the side of the screen where you wont even be looking. Then you have the issue of the UI just not being good at all and being confusing or weird to look at in the case of something like BBTag.