A bad mindset for fighting games

I am currently only really playing Guilty Gear Strive and sometimes Horizon Forbidden West, I still haven’t tried out SFV’s definitive update, nor have I checked out the two new characters in Melty Blood yet. Which means, as I don’t have any grand idea of a topic I want to cover right now, how about we look at another comment. Perfect timing too… I am only like over two weeks late on addressing this one.

he’s not wrong though. this is literally the exact same problem Dragon Ball FighterZ had, please don’t act like this isn’t true. if you have to rely on mashable characters/low effort characters to win, you should probably just play Divekick and save the FGC the headache.

At first I wanted to nitpick, but once I started writing I didn’t really like the direction I was heading towards. It’s easy to make fun of people and even easier to be all high and mighty, if not condescending, right? So I scrapped that. It is a bad mindset to have and the thought process within this comment still still irks me though. 

I don’t like the thought process

Ignoring the fact that this comment was left on a Scrubquotes YouTube Short that I uploaded, about a comment that complained about the first DNF Duel beta no less; mashable characters or low effort characters simply do not exist in today’s fighting games. Sure there are characters that are easier to play and there are characters that are a lot less execution heavy than others, but unless a character is absolutely broken, this simply doesn’t matter. Ed in Street Fighter V will not just carry us up to Grand Master just because he doesn’t require complex inputs and Axl in Strive is not an amazing character simply because he can zone us out, considering how helpless he is once his opponent gets in.

We are not really in a position of judging a player based on the character they are playing, nor is there any logical reason to scream for adjustments, before anything has even been figured out. An inherent unwillingness to learn on how to deal with a character matchup in fighting games is very much a you kind of problem. And that is what it’s really coming down to, isn’t it? People like this will just complain about surface level issues and claim that a character is busted, low effort, mashable, whatever the latter means, unless they can beat every character with an automated flowchart, one that will be taken apart and burned to the ground in about two matches anyway.

Why I disagree with this bad mindset

I’ve picked up Happy Chaos recently and I’ve been having a lot of fun in training mode with him, I get blown up left right and centre however. I have lost over 100 matches at this point I think far and won maybe 10 or so. 40 losses were straight up back to back against some Testament player as I mentioned in my last video. Does that mean that Testament is an easy mode character that doesn’t require any skill to play? No it doesn’t. It means that I didn’t know how to deal with it. Said Testament player turned out to be a Happy Chaos main on further inspection, so not only am I completely new to the character, fighting against a brand new character, they were also very much aware of what Happy Chaos can do and act accordingly. I actually got to play them again and I only lost 33 to 4 that time. Is that good? It depends on the perspective really. To me that’s a huge improvement, especially as I started applying new things that I had been practising.

Which brings us back to the same logic: If I want to get better, I’ll have to learn how to deal with characters and accept the fact that the person controlling the “problematic” character might understand the match up at a level that isn’t quite comfortable for me at this point in time.

The thought process is even worse when it’s applied it into other scenarios, an IRL working environment, like an office for instance. Granted IRL we would have to assume that the line manager is an equal opportunist, but… let’s not go overboard here.

Man, fucking Jasmine got a promotion, just because she’s using her easy mode pivot tables and calculated fields, with vlookups and nested if functions to automate her reportings. Meanwhile I am here doing this manually, the real way and still only get minimum wage.

It’s not exactly an apples to apples comparison, and it’s scenario specific, but still; their convictions on what is easy, low effort and how it should be done, still do not apply to anyone else but them, especially if there are no rules or guidelines in place to support this. In my simplified example Jasmine simply knew things, it doesn’t matter if she already knew, or if she learned how to do certain things on the job. The point is she’s using the tools available and applying her skills to get past something rather annoying, in this case reportings. Minimum wage person over here on the other hand will just keep complaining.

Circling back

To bring this back to fighting games, even though I am sure we are all very eager to see more of the exciting world of Spreadsheet formulas… it is vital to learn how to deal with the problem or in this case, the character we are facing. When they said “please don’t act like this isn’t true” they are trying to force their unsubstantiated beliefs onto someone else. Then there’s the “save the FGC the headache.” part, which gives off the impression that they’re trying to position themselves as an arbiter of a community that has never heard of them and probably doesn’t care about them either. I don’t really care about the FGC, so maybe I am wrong on that last part.

Let’s get real for a second. Games today get patched so frequently that it’s almost impossible for a character to be an actual problem and to continue to be a problem. I remember fighting Vega in Super Turbo, Chun-Li and Yun in 3rd Strike, Nina and Steve in Tekken 5, characters that were actually a nightmare to fight against when the person on the other end knew how to use them. None of these characters came “broken” out of the box though, there’s a rather hefty time investment to make them shine.

Again though, like it or not, patches are very frequent today, if something busted gets found, it will most likely be gone with the next patch. If after several patches, the thing we keep complaining about still hasn’t been fixed, don’t you think it’s about time we face the music and learn how to deal with it? They can keep whining and pretending or believing that they will get the majority on their side for stating how they and their community are sick of it, but in reality hardly anyone cares, because once again, low effort characters don’t really exist. Unless they have a button that wins the round and I mean that in the most literal sense, it is and always will be our job to learn how to play the match ups and deal with them.

I am not saying we are not allowed to complain, I bitch about the most illogical stuff while I am streaming all the time, but that’s just in the heat of the moment. Once that moment’s passed, we should always research how to beat whatever aggravated us, instead of leaving comments that barely have any ground to stand on.

Closing Words

What do you think, should the devs really neuter any fun out of fighting games, just because a very loud minority keeps complaining about issues that in reality don’t even exist, just so they can feel better about themselves? Which let’s be honest, also won’t happen, because they will then just whine about the next character they can’t beat.

Let me know about your thoughts in the comments. See you next time.