We often forget that new players need to learn to “walk” and that training mode is often not very useful to them. Like, strive was my first FG ever and I started out by playing my friend and going 0-25. The thing was that i just couldnt hold back to block consistently. Training mode is just not going to help when you cant even control your character. We need to push narratives that new players shouldnt stress the high level details and just play the game to gain basic muscle memory.
This is a really good point and one of the reasons why FGs tend to feel so much harder to learn than other games. There are so many mechanics being shown immediately to the new player that the newbie will try to take it all in at once, fail at each of them and get discouraged. It came to me recently when I was playing Apex, how I only just now started slightly learning the more advanced ways of movement and optimizing my games after 300+ hours. I didn't care about it before because it wasn't really shown to me, but I still had fun in those 300 hours, learning the more surface-level things, like every character's abilities, weapons, maps, etc. I understand that FGs want to even the playing field with showing everyone all the mechanics they need to play the game, but I feel like players will eventually learn the deep stuff themselves by getting involved more with the game and the community. Of course, there are a lot more things that are different between FGs and other competitive games, but I do think one of the reasons why it's so hard to learn FGs is because they make you think more about learning the game rather than enjoying the game at first.
This. I came from Smash, and the reason why Smash players stick to Smash so vehemently is because the gap between picking up and playing and "gitting gud" is far more narrow than traditional fighters. Leveling up and learning is far more fun and happens far sooner in that game. Traditional fighters and its players and streamers don't really show the early stages of that journey into improving, so for most new players, they only have preconceived notions to go off of. Training mode is only as useful as your knowledge of the game, and so people just need to play each other and take L's and W's and see if the game is even a good fit for them before worrying about improving.
On the part of pushing the narrative of not worrying about the difficult stuff and just play the game....people like myself have BEEN doing that. Mfs aren't trying to hear it though. On the part of content creators showing the early stages. There are plenty of content creators I'm sure that do that. Yall are just looking for it in all the wrong places. Hell I did it with Injustice 2 and Tekken and I would dare say KOF and DOA 6
One of the most important things I drive into new players isn't any tech or footsie or whatever. The first lesson is always to block, please for the love of God just learn to hold back and you'll win so much more at a begging level just being able to hold back the ape brain and block.
One of the newest fighting game excuses that's pretty strong is when the rollback first displays a block and then a hit, the person this happens to will insist that they did indeed block and the game was wrong to "change it" to a hit. Strong one for a new age of fighting games. Anyway yeah great video lol
Its the opposite for me which is one reason why I dislike it. I KNOW I hit them because I saw their health go down combined with them making either a counter scream or KO scream and yet still moving like nothing just happened.
Something I think of a ton is when I was learning Terumi in CP and CF there's a route where you do like microdash 2C into sweep 22CCCCC but I physically can't do those kinds of inputs but 5C moves you forward so you get like 2C 5C sweep 22CCCCC into whatever for like a couple hundred less damage overall but basically no execution. Plus even just learning DP motions can be 6523 has made me incredibly consistent on my execution even if it's technically slower by a handful of frames. This is partly why I prefer playing with friends since no one cares since we just want to do cool shit
Yeah playing with friends is a good way to get an understanding of your characters since as you said you guys want to do cool shit. Terumi bnbs always change in every version, when I was learning him in CPEX. He had this weird route where you can extend his combo off of messenga but the timing was so strict I never learned it and just went for the more easier route since it was more consistent. The stomp combos always change in every version too lol, funny you brought up CP because I heard back then you wouldn't mash terumi 22CCCCC, you would have to just pound the button because even mashing it, the full stomp won't come out.
I like it when there's easy combos for slightly less damage. And people sometimes just hung up complaining about "one frame links" and "hard combos" when they don't even need to do them at the level they're playing at.
I do agree with the points but as a relatively new player still dealing with cases of ranked anxiety or just anxiety playing against other people the "80 hours in training mode" for me roughly translates to "I want something simple that I can consistently do in training mode and then jump online and practice that in matches", and sometimes it gets a while to get that proper consistency in the lab for me before I feel it makes sense to play against another human. When I discover something it's not just 2 minutes either. I need to get the muscle memory down to at least some extent, understand the spacing, and again try to get consistent. This gets easier the more I play 1 character and when I switched to Bridget I got that "square one" feeling again, and discovering something and realizing this would take 30 minutes can start to hurt your momentum. I do think this is a case of where just being a fighting game vet in general really helps with not losing that momentum in learning because you're not fighting your hands and learning a new controller at the same time, not to mention processing all the other more novel concepts to fighting games in general.
I have dealt with the same thing a lot. I lose steam once I start thinking about switching characters or upping my technical game. It gets to the point that I just don't play because I don't want to spend an hour or two in training mode before playing with a friend or in tower. I realized something while reading your comment though: spending upwards of an hour to get one thing down consistently in training is entirely on me. Sajam has said before not to be a training mode warrior because once you get into a real match all that consistency goes out the window anyway. I could absolutely make myself spend just 5 or 10 minutes on something, enough to just see, "okay this is how much of a window I have and what I'm supposed to do" and then do ALL the practice in real matches, where it should be. The only reason I spend longer than that is because I want the satisfaction of doing the thing in the dojo. However, it's getting in the way of the most fun part of the game, which is playing other people, so what's the point?
as much as we whine about perceived barrier of entry and whatever in fighting games, at the same time i feel like you're just listing things that you can't succeed at immediately. if picking up a new character or playing on a new controller didn't feel fresh and different, if there wasn't room to grow, then it'd be bland. It's the most fun you're gonna have with the game when you don't know jack shit and you discover on your own strategies that work. you don't have to spend any time in training mode or have any consistency to play online. you just have to stop bitching out of accepting the fact that you'll lose matches. the results screen doesn't determine your enjoyment out of the game and in a match that is lost, there are always small wins throughout, just not ones large enough for you to score the win and you have to be happy with that. in battle royales only one person out of 100 win the match but that doesn't make it so the 2 guys that you knocked down before getting eliminated wasn't an accomplishment. in the case of strive, 6P the jump ins, do some shimmies on oki and try to learn your opponent and do some sickkunt reads, even if you lose, you'll still feel rewarded for what you do right, even if it isn't flashy. if you think the game's not fun once you take your first few steps, then you won't find it fun 200 hours in having learned the combos, so don't sweat it.
the problem with people who have misconceptions like these is they see all this high level play and tech and think this is how everyone plays the game. when in reality it isn't and you can find people in all different skill ranges to learn and have fun.
As I learn a new game, I leave certain parts out. This helps by lightening the burden of new information. This also creates a path of things to learn when I feel I've peaked. For instance, my low parry combo game is wack asf, but I'm not at the stage to low parry regularly so no reason to study that yet.
My friends played csgo for 10 years and are around platinum+ in valorant. Ive only played valorant on and off for 2 years, hit gold 2 this season. Played street fighter my entire life and just hit gold a month ago. My friends refuse to play any fighting game whatsoever because they dont have the "years of experience necessary to be good." However recently I got them to play multiversus because it was free and we could play teams so I could help them out. Now theyre hooked and Im hoping when project L drops they have fun with it and I can get them to play a couple of other games too. Im hoping that project L comes out and everyone has a good time.
honestly same. I love fighting games but like no one in my friend groups are willing to give them a chance. Lot of my friends come from playing league so I'm hoping when Project L comes out I can get them to at least try a fighting game and see why I enjoy the genre.
Lol, unless you're playing KoF or Tekken, those years of playing aren't going to help you outside of fundamentals. Very few series do the whole legacy skill thing nowadays.
having played a lot of competitive games over the years the one thing that sticks out to me about fighting games is just that you have to be more mature about how you handle losses than so many other games. a Dota loss can be a grueling 45 minute slog of misery but at the end of the day the ego bruising can be shifted over to teammates. you can acknowledge your mistakes and learn but also tell yourself "its not all my fault". with fighting games it is your fault. people get nervous and toss them aside before getting to the point where their wins, whether thats taking a match, round, or just keeping the opponent from perfecting you, are also entirely on them and how good it can feel to finally have it click.
tbh, I find the personal accountability that you're forced to deal with in fighting games to be a lot less frustrating than losing in a team game like League. It sucks really hard to feel like you lost because your teammates let you down, and it sucks equally hard to know you're the one who let your teammates down even if you don't want to believe it. Losing a match or two in League can really just ruin my mood for the rest of the day, I can lose 20 rounds straight in a fighting game and be like "alright run it back" and feel totally fine. It feels so nice after playing team games for so long to know that the ability to win is entirely in my hands.
@@backstabuuu i think he was saying that ppl can always blame their loss on something else in a team game due to there being so many factors that go into a win/loss. i have a friend who plays valorant who would rather die than take any accountability for losing/dying. it's actually an art form the way he comes up with excuses of why he loses. When he plays smash he gets extremely frustrated when he loses because he can't blame it on anyone but himself
@@evriXO On the flipside, there will be players who understand their culpability in their losses and take their losses way too hard on themselves (not a criticism, I do this super-often). But even then, that's also something that Sajam has covered more than once in his tutorial/teaching videos. To be honest I don't think there's anything missing from what Sajam's already covered that is super-critical to understanding or teaching people how to 'get over themselves' when it comes to fighting games. At some point, people just need to teach themselves.
I used to think this too, but people absolutely blame shit other than themselves in FGs, it's just shifted from teammates to 'broken character', 'my input didn't go out', 'spammer', etc. If someone doesn't want to blame themselves, they won't, tbh it's that simple imo.
As someone who has played a ton of MOBAs and FPS before getting into fighting games, I don't really understand the whole "fighting games are harder because you can't blame your teammates" sentiment. If anything it's a good thing. Having no teams is like one of the biggest reasons why I like fighting games. It's not really like "oh no I don't have teammates to blame" it's more like "thank god finally I don't have teammates to blame." You're telling me I have to earn my wins and I deserve my losses and the same thing also applies to my opponent? GOOD. That's what I want. Plus the FGC likes to act all high and mighty about the whole "no teammates to blame" but they just blame the game or the character anyway.
I remember the first time I picked up my favorite LoL Champ of all time, Rammus. It was a pure Sajam moment for me right there. The character looked cool to me, I loved the fact that he was tanky and his powerball ability just screamed "I'm going to troll everyone with this". The one thing that was stopping me from picking him up was that he's a jungler and I had never played that position before (mostly clocked in time as support). One day I teamed up with two friends and we started shooting the breeze when I mentioned that I wanted to play Rammus but didn't have the stomach to try jungle. One of my friends said "just pick him, man, it'll be fine. just clear in XYZ order and see if you can gank at around level 4-5". I told him about my concern and he told me to just mute chat and do my thing. 5 games later, we came out with 4 wins and a close defeat. More importantly, I had a ton of fun and even played Rammus on my own for several days as well. Even scored a triple kill at some point when I barely had any experience even doing damage.
I mostly played rammus in the Beta of LoL, but during that time he was def my main and loved that little rolling ball. Think I didn't even jungle with him because nobody knew anything at casual level 😂
i have had a variation of this experience a couple of times now: - i tried my hand at competitive (Smogon) Pokémon for a hot second with a Gen 8 sun team and actually didn't do half bad, but it came with a LOT of trial and error games and tests to see where my movesets were bad or where my teams felt gimmicky. i did generally have fun tho, and i wanna give both that and VGC another go one of these days. even in single player games, i played through all of Kirby and the Forgotten Land and only realized after completing most of the main story that there was a "dodge" ability that is incredibly useful.
as an ex-SMITE player, hearing Sajam talk about his MOBA experiences is giving me PTSD Flashbacks It's all accurate, anyone saying he's lying is coping
As a new convert from league to mainly playing SF6 / Tekken and GGST , Learning fighting games has been 100x more fun than learning league MOBA's are a hellscape for learning, league specifically, the community is not gonna help you, the best you'll get is ' just last hit lol' and the toxicity about any rank below master is just god awful, 'you're bronze? Have you tried turning your monitor on' even if you've just started playing the game My time in the FGC has been positive interaction wise and great mentally, yes I lose, sometimes I get frustrated, but nothing is worse than having to play an hour long slogfest where you've lost lane, you're useless and your team won't surrender, even if all 3 lanes have lost
The thornmail on Ashe joke got me cuz my first bots game ever I bought six warmogs and was confused on how I was losing fights even though I had triple peoples health
I've been learning Bridget recently after being an exclusive Ky player since way back when I started playing Xrd. And let me tell you I genuinely felt kinda nervous going online with her. I had no idea what my gameplan was with the character, had no combos except for gatlings, didn't have a clue what I was doing. ...and that's exactly how I learnt the character. I noticed I was hitting a lot of CH 2Hs but didn't know how to follow up, so I went on dustloop, found some CH 2H combos and practiced them until I felt fairly confident with them. Also, for a character like Bridget with all the yoyo setups, there was just no way I was going to be able to go into training mode and lab all of those out and understand where and when I was supposed to use them, so I didn't bother. I just played matches and experimented with the yoyo and started to get a feel for how it covers space and the shmixes I can get off of it. My small Ky brain hasn't gotten around to learning more optimal yoyo setups yet, but I feel a lot more comfortable easing into that after just playing the character a bunch.
I feel the majority of people that say things like "I have to spend X hours in Training mode before I can go online" aren't describing what they actually want to accomplish. Sure you can say "nah just play online and press buttons", and that works for some, but when it comes to thinking you *need* to be in training mode, it's so you can win matches. Fighting games are 1v1, it's a clear winner and loser every single match. People just want a quick W, or something they can focus on if they lost. In team games there's more people can look at to see what they did well (or what they can blame), and fighting games don't have that aspect in them. If I lose in League I can see if my CS was good, or if I warded well, in FPS there's K/D/A.
I'd give them a move (or 2, or 3, or top 10) they can mash to beat arcade mode/low rank opponents. One may think that's not learning, but having muscle memory for a move/string is great, so they don't have to think about it anymore. Then if they want to learn more, tell them that they can block something and punish it with the move they just mastered. As for in-game feedback, it's really tough to have stats at the end of the game and have it mean something to people. Without actually having a better player view a player's replays, I hope the SF6 in-game commentator feature would work well for that, people will just hear things like "No anti-air!?" and "No punish" and "He's now getting comboed for a questionable decision, that move was very unsafe on block" and stuff.
I've been playing a lot of Legends of Runeterra lately, and was enjoying myself, so I thought I'd check out the reddit and some content creators for the game, and it was just endless complaining about everything all the time. The weird thing was that reading and watching people be so negative made me less motivated to play, even though I was having fun before.
Yeah sometimes it can be annoying if the dominant noise about a game is negative while you are just trying to have the most fun. I do get it if people are sometimes upset about something ect but it can def make a game less fun
I played League back in the day and was building Lich Bane on jungle fiddlesticks. Realistically, I had no idea what I was doing but still crow-twerked on people. Have fun. Learning over time is okay, being optimal is not an entry requirement.
Main barrier to fg is price Buying the full game The dlc character Some fighting games are starting to experment with free to play or buy the game dlc is free which is less money to spent to play, most popular games can be play by boke pockets
could just wait for a sale. i just got tekken 7 original edition for $13 (normally its 90), comes with all the dlc characters besides like 3. but waiting for a sale can take a while
I am consistently baffled at the misunderstanding regarding having to spend time in training mode before you go online. I've heard this talking point countless times now, as we all have, and as someone who's kinda new to fighting games (1 to 2 years depending on what you count, so definitely new but not super day 1 new), I just think it's bullshit. And sure, watching your videos before getting into them helped, but if I'm honest I was as overwhelmed as everyone else when starting in my first fighting game, so I istinctively went to training mode. After litteral seconds there, I realised that I had no idea what to practice, what to look for, what to do, beyond the motion inputs I had heard about. After the first few matches, I could clearly see what my problems where, and I realised what my improvement path was. How can people who play other games be so convinced that spending hours upon hours in training mode is helpful, letalone mandatory, for playing the games. Kinda shows to me how something that you can literally disprove in seconds can be believed by everyone just because of which shape common discourse surrounding a topic can take.
The short answer is, people want to win. They want the rewards of being good without needing to be good, and when they realize they need to be good they complain about needing to go through the process of being good (or what they think that process is). When they say "you need to be in training mode for 10000 hours and understand everything fundamentally about your character before going online", they're really talking about not just going online, but going online *and getting an 80%+ winrate*. They also tend to unironically think that that's what their opponents do. There's also the angle where people want to go online to play against other players, and so want to interact with aspects of fighting that SPECIFICALLY require online play - playing vs. a player, not a character. For these people, if you're at a level where those aspects AREN'T all that's left for you, that you should just stick to playing CPUs instead, since there's no extra benefit or enjoyment in online play.
Here's what you tell people about training mode when they're first starting out. Go in there with the purpose of getting more familiar with what buttons do what. That should take 30 to 45 minutes at most.
Then you've got people who believe the training mode is the thing that ruins the genre in general. "No one should bother with training mode, how can you find that fun? Just play the video game and figure things out that way you nerd" and of course it's coming from a non FG player, but I still find it hilarious people can actually think that way, and never take in the opinions of the people that actually play the fucking games
@@kickasscowell5654 yeah, that too... for fighting games, and for all genres really, it's people just feel allowed to express strong opinions while knowing they have no clue what they are talking about. Training mode specifically is a tragically misunderstood tool unfortunately.
@@kickasscowell5654 It's funny, really. People often forget that there is aim training tool for FPS players, and it's hours long of boring progress just shooting moving dot on the screen, which a lot of video on "how to improve your aiming" specifically told you to download that tool and practice. That's even worse than combo practicing in fighting game. I also saw my friends spent hour practicing last hit and deny in DotA and I can't tell you how boring it looks, but they said it's necessary to get good at the game. I wonder if those people complaining about training mode have ever seen people train in other genre.
@@ike804 "Idom is an anomaly of a player. We cannot treat him as if what he does is possible for others in other situations." You can apply that statement with any great player that doesn't have a legal disability too. Let's face it, it's not possible for most basketball players to land the NCAA or NBA. It's not possible for most fighting game players to even finish top 4 at a local, let alone top 16 at a regional. So many things get in the way. However, a person can always be the best they can be.
@@malcovich_games Yeah and I never said you couldnt. 95% of top players are anomalies. However, its still MASSIVELY disingenuous to my statement to compare a player like Brolylegs to a player like IDOM when one has an entirely different reason to be an anomaly
@@ike804 I concede that you have a point, and I think we are approaching the statement from different points of view. You are saying "not all differently abled people can play fighting games the way Brolylegs does" while I'm just mirroring what (I think) the OP is saying, "making the most out of one's situation in life".
I've been telling a lot of people recently that the idea of "I need to hit the training mode right out the gate" is a trap for new people. The way I explain it is how are you suppose to know what to lab if you don't even know what your character does or what situations you might be put into?
Sajam I literally told Justin on his stream the week after he won UMvC3 Evo that you can just tatsu cancel into super with Akuma after demon to making that kinda difficult link (which he himself would drop quite often) to none difficult, and he did not know until I told him. In fact the whole stream thought I was BS'ing lol and I didn't even play Akuma. Just was someone who dabbled around.
it all comes down to how invested one can get in learning the game. the one thing i think fps and moba's have over fg's in terms of investing in learning it is the social aspect. fg's are mostly 1 person vs another person whereas most fps and moba's you're teamed up with other people and more than likely with a friend. it's easier to enjoy a game when you're winning together. and we might not like to admit it but it's hard to learn a game when you're friend is trying to teach you how to play the FG while kicking your ass in it. some might feel more motivated to learn the game so they can eventually return the favor OR just go ask the friend if they want to try winning together in a team based game.
The thing is the more we go along in gaming I feel like the next generation is all about perfection. Sajam made a joke about optimal jungle pathing but honestly there are a lot of players that actually think they need perfect pathing before even trying a lot of new games have their own version of lab/training mode now.
I wish more people spent their time watching Sajam video instead of going to training mode or reddit/twitter. The former would help their grow much better.
The League and Runeterra remarks are too true lol. I know this is primarily a fighting game channel, but I'd love to see vids of you playing either if you record or stream those.
As someone learning Bloody Roar Extreme I will say: it doesn't matter how simple inputs or mechanics are, executing at a high level is hard, my main has effectively kara SPD as her bnb conversion and man are the cancel windows killing me in matches
Good Stuff Sajam! I appreciate your dedication to identifying real problems in a positive way and your skill at explaining why many other perceived problems are just structural parts of playing video games. Keep rockin
A lot of Fighting Game veterans, and even just casual tournament spectators, seriously underestimate how *_bizarre_* certain concepts that we take for granted are compared to every other genre. The three things that I see beginners struggle the most with are: 1) Holding back to block. 2) Low, high and mid attacks. 3) Motion inputs. Unless the game designers deliberately decide to add these features (usually as a homage to Fighting Games), no other genre possesses them. It is something that requires a complete mental shift, which will naturally require a period of slow adaptation.
It's quite interesting seeing fighting game players try to fight these misconceptions (which is fair, but) without analyzing how intuitive these systems are to the "average gamer". Like I might not have played any fps in my life, but a sniper rifle will (most of the time) behave at least similarly to how I expect it to, even if I can't physically aim well with it. I have expectations of how grenades, armor, or jetpacks work and most of the fps adhere to these expectations. And while fighting games do have some parallels to real life combat, (as you pointed out) there are just a ton of stuff that don't intuitively make sense relative to irl fighting. I personally think that while high, low, mids only exist in fighting games, they are intuitive with at most very brief explanations. But concepts like hold back to block, air combos, and attacks building meter makes 0 sense relative to irl fighting and thus what people expect.
WASD to move, mouse to aim was really bizarre to me when I started shooting games. I was more used to games where you don't control the camera. So I don't see having bizarre basics as a unique problem for fighting game.
NO genre of game is intuitive. NONE. Whoever said there is, they're lying. Each person's genre or game of choice...I guarantee you they struggled at learning it.
I mean there are concepts just as bizzare/unintuitive in mobas, RTS games, and hero/competative shooters as well and people don't act like they are some impenetrable genre like they do with fighting games, that's like literally the whole point of this video
Regardless of the skill ceiling, these are still fighting GAMES at the end of the day. Play them like what they are. It's still fun to pull them out with friends and just mash stuff without knowing very much. These games are practically DESIGNED to make almost every single hit feel as enjoyable as possible, even if it isn't the hardest stuff to do, because of their arcade roots. You just have to adjust your expectations of yourself. You're new.
I have a question - what do inexperienced people expect when playing fighting games? Do they expect to control everything perfectly, press any button they want without consequence, and win with little to no challenge? I'm asking because I'm wondering how the expectations form the misconceptions - i.e. if you expect your character to be Kratos or Arkham Asylum Batman then no matter how small the startup and cancel windows, or easy motions are, you'll call a game clunky, or if you expect wins early and often then a growth mindset won't develop.
They expect the onboarding to be as smooth as an FPS or a MOBA, where you read 2-4 abilities and starting shooting/moving around cause its so intuitive. But they've forgotten when they first played FPSs/MOBAs, they had to struggle with the muscle memory of aiming, strafing, or using right-click to shoot AND move at the same time, controlling the camera and etc. This problem is compounded by fighting games shortcomings but they forget that they're learning a new control scheme in a new genre. They treat it as if its another MP game in a genre they have 1000 hours in and they should be competent with the entire control scheme instantly.
As someone who was an absolute newbie less than a year ago, I can tell you that unrealistic expectations are definitely a factor to consider. It's not even a matter of thinking "I will win 90% of the matches I play." Most beginners have some awareness and instead think "As long as I win 50% of my matches, I will be happy." The problem is that, when you are a beginner to fighting games, you are likely to win only 10% of your matches _and that's if you're lucky._ A lot of people don't win a single match until a week or two after starting. That is a MASSIVE punch to the face for a newcomer, and presents a seemingly unsurmountable wall to climb, which is why most people give up and settle for watching matches online instead of playing.
I think they expect to be as good as they are at the games they are already good at relatively quickly. Someone with years of experience playing other games goes into a genre with pretty unique controls and finds that their existing gaming experience doesn't mean much at all, so they get frustrated when they're essentially starting as an eight year old picking up a controller for the first time again
I think the biggest problem is matchmaking, fgs have less people playing, in mobas and shooters you can fight people with similar level, even if you're still losing more than winning Ofc smurfing is a thing but fgs leave that bad impression on a player, imagine starting in strive and needing to fight in floors 8-10 to find players even though your skill level is floor 3, and the only way this is solved is if fgs had more players, so its more or less an egg and chicken problem
I think the major issue that makes people bounce off fighting games is the lack of engaging tutorial and you essentially having to make your own progression goals. A fighting game with a well made single player mode focused on teaching you basic strategies one at a time, like if you started out with only normals, and had to work your way in on a sagat that just mashed fireball, then you unlock fireball and fight a zangief who has an invincible grab and you have to play keepaway w him, then you play a cami who just spams divekick and you need to DP her, then you fight zangief again but now he jumps based on your fire ball rhythm and you need to learn to mix up your fireball timings and react to jump ins, so on and so forth.
Virtua Fighter has all of those features! It's just not flashy enough though. Here's some of the other features I want to see to motivate certain kinds of players... * Multiversus has battle pass and daily missions. * KOF XV has "first loss of the day protection" for low ranks. Not all people are intrinsically motivated to get better, and some people just can't treat losses as a learning experience, and would rather protect their in-game rank score or earn some in-game currency instead. For traditional fighting games, daily quests can be tied to learning mechanics rather than wins. e.g. perform 3 anti-airs, perform a crossup, do 2 whiff punishes, block 20 attacks, block 1 overhead (except jump attacks), escape 1 throw The player can over above the terms to get an explanation on what the terms are, click to receive a video demo.
@@malcovich_games that's what irks me a bit though. If it's what they're looking for in a fighting game, tf is they're worry about it not being flashy enough for. That's like a woman meeting a dude that has everything she looks for in a man but won't give him the time of day because he's corny or some shit like that.
@@Drebin1989 tl;dr: A wall of text about VF4 not selling despite singleplayer mode and flashiness in fighting games that casuals are attracted to. VF 4 Evolution had an awesome singleplayer campaign. Think SF Alpha 3's World Tour except you rose through the ranks in Japanese arcades and eventually fought the ghosts of the best of VF players. Its missions mode was very in-depth and also has specific matchup-specific missions like OP has said. Yet its sales were trash even in Japan. I think VF in general really failed to innovate in presentation. VF1-3 may have still had the "WOW 3D" effect, but it could no longer compete in graphics vs average video games, and competitors like DOA and Tekken appeared. Long-time fighting game players look at a game and only really care that the UI is readable at a glance, and the animations are fluid and consistent. Casuals want to mash and look cool while doing it. As simple as some fighting games get, presentation goes so far in selling them in addition to single player. Rage Arts and KO slowdowns have sold Tekken 7 to the casual audience well. Guilty Gear (in general) has so much extra "animu" that you stop noticing when you play the game a lot, like excessive dust/smoke sprites behind a character that runs or jumps. Strive has the large annoying COUNTER and hit counts, that again, we get used to.
@@malcovich_games and yet some of those same casuals complain about those Rage Arts. Whether its "they're too long" or "they do too much damage" or scrub carrier and any other thing they can think of. Its like they never think about what happens if they're on the receiving end. Be careful what you ask for. As far as looking cool while doing whatever...when are people ever going to learn doing that does nothing but get you in trouble most of the time? You see it all the time in basketball and in other genres of games. Fighting games are no different in that aspect.
As someone who is bad at video games: When I tried out the Blizzard moba (i forgot the name) I went into it to get a taste of what it's like. The fact that success is not all on my shoulders did two things: psychologically it lessened the frustration because of the knowledge that not everything that goes wrong is necessarily my fault, and gameplay-wise the better players around me allowed me to get a bit of the flavour what it's like to play it. When I tried out SF5 and Smash Ulitmate I also went in to get a taste (at least partially because I heard they were beginner friendly). All I got from that was that I got clobbered around for 30 seconds and then the match was over; rinse repeat. That came 100% from me not being any good at it, and didn't allow me to get any flavour of it. If you're someone like me back then who just wants to see what it's like and don't have any specific goals, that's just an express road to frustration. I startet playing Guilty Gear Strive a few days ago, and I have a specific goal now, so hopefully I will last for a bit longer than previously. (It also helps that there's Dojo Missions that explain what game mechanics are there & how they can be used, but that's another topic.)
I was convinced to play LoL one day and my friend was showing me the basics of basics and gave me a play by play everytime we would go down a lane. Then kid you lot 2 of my teammates are yelling at me cause i wasn't playing my champ correctly then i said it's my first MOBA cut me some slack. Next thing you know I'm being told to uninstall the game and that I'm hotdog water and you best believe that was my only game after that lol. It pretty much discouraged me to play
I've said it before and I'll say it again, the hardest part of learning FGs is that your first step is unlearning what other games teach you. Anything other than turn based games place such an importance on reaction speed and accuracy, so many of your deaths could be avoided, or at least partially avoided, by improving either/both of those things. So you come to SF with that mindset and get wrecked because you think you just need to react faster to block jabs, without realizing a large part of a character's moveset isn't reactable, so it just feels like you cannot function. Which is true{ish}, but you've identified an incorrect solution.
As someone who played league in 2010, stopped for 12 years, and made a new account to play with some friends again this year, the league part is so accurate. I'm over here getting flamed on a new account at level like 8 for not jungling the right way. Obviously. I've never jungled in my life. Back in 2010 we weren't playing the "right" way, we were having fun. You're on your 8th smurf account trying to hit 30 to play ranked and plateau at gold again, and you've forgotten that new players actually exist. At least in a fighting game I don't have to deal with that
This is because new player queue is currently flooded by smurfs or people who got banned and made a new account. It got so bad that there's this general understanding among the people there that "if you are here, then you already know how to play the game".
In a game I said: maybe you should go help somebody else, I'll sit under a turret, you'd probably be more useful helping somebody else. Then was called names by that cat on a book, because of course. It was my first match - vs bots. And she never left my lane that match. I never criticize somebody else's game in chat. It may be their first match.
As much as I like fighting games, I've come to realize I'm just not cut out for them. Really, I suppose I should say I'm not cut out for competitive games cause, yeah, I don't really play much of any of them. More the single player gamer here. So I just haven't developed the proper mindset for it all. And getting over that hurdle is proving far more difficult than anticipated. I guess it also doesn't help that I have this perception that I'm choosing all the wrong fighters to play either. Like damn it. "GG Strive"? "DBFZ"? "Street Fighter"? Nah, see me in freaking "Chaos Code", "Spectral Vs Generation", or god damn "Arcana Heart". Fighters that are not exactly thriving or even regarded well. So yeah, excuses, excuses, bad mentality, excuses. It's a dumb personal struggle I gotta get over. For now, I'm just content playing them in very small bursts and just watching whatever video footage of matches I can come across. If nothing else, I've been doing quite well with getting clips of the quirky fighters I like featured in Sajam's WIK so that's always a fun time. Though it seems like I've been seeing some of the opposite reactions than I hoped, less garnering interest and more dismissal as kusoge trash, but still, I'm taking what I can get as a passive fg participant.
MOBAs are toxic as hell lol. When I played Smite, getting a last-second resurrection on a teammate as Khepri was amazing, until the teammate dove tower again immediately after rezzing, dying immediately, and then pinging "ultimate is ready!" on you like it didn't JUST go on cooldown
im liking the talk about how fighting games price and package themselves this might be the biggest barrier for people wanting to try the genre because why would you pay 60$+ for a hop in and beat up people online game when theres so many other games you can do that in that are free. i hope there’s more experimenting with it like melty having free dlc instead of buying characters/season passes, if it’s feasible for any other companies to do this i hope it becomes a norm.
this is 100% true and imo THE biggest problem with fighting games. They are a highly competitive genre that gets priced with a 60 dollar tag and shitty online modes, no wonder they all have such a small playerbase compared to mobas
People who say friends make learning easier are like, 10% right and 90% wrong. It still isn't very fun playing dota and getting turbo fisted for 50 minutes by someone either smurfing or like just better enough that they stomp your team. It isn't fun playing valorant and being bottom frag every match not knowing what to do even if I'm with my homies.
You could ask your friends how you could improve though? And also hopefully one is an IRL buddy who can watch a game of you playing it (and maybe have a few laughs about how you play suboptimally in the process)... worst case you'll have to beg them to watch a demo/replay..
I think part of it is moment to moment enjoyment or the little interactions that make people happy. What I mean by this is even if youve never played an FPS before if you boot up CoD odds are you can get some stupid kills you toss grenades or hide behind a door with a shotgun and you can get some "cheap" kills. These can be very fun for completly fresh players. I recall way back when I played bad company 2 my dad whos gaming experiance ended with tetris on the OG gameboy asked to play. He played for about 30 mins and despite never even using a playstation controller before was able to get a few kills. He even got a triple kill when I told him to throw a c4 into a house. He found it greatly amusing. He was terrible at the game and by my standards lost because his kdr was terrible but he got some fun moments. I dont think you can reasonably achieve something like that in a fighting game. The closest I can think of is hitting your friend with a hadoken in street fighter. But what can happen is you go online instantly get put in the blender and your gameplay highlight of the match was landing a knockdown once. Of course stuff like that is part of the learning proccess but that simply doesnt click with most people. Now something you may be thinking is comparing a game like guilty gear to CoD isnt really fair but if you look at it from the perspective of a very large part of the gaming audiance it makes sense. They just wanna boot up the game throw some fireballs or do something dumb and have some fun. But what alot of them get is put in a blender and realize they are gonna lose 100 matches in a row where they do very little to earn the right to "play the game". For some people thats ok for some it isnt. As a final thought I think the problem is for most genres if a game isnt for you go play another one in the genre. CSGO to competitive and difficult for you? Grab the noob tube and go play some COD for that cheap dopemine. But for fighting games there really isnt an alternative. Strive to difficult for you cause your being put in a blender? Well maybe fighting games arent for you cause its gonna be similar in bassicly all other fighting games. Is there a solution? I dunno probbably not I actually reccomend most people I know IRL to not play fighting games because I know 95% of them are gonna be put in the blender and ask me the next day why I made them waste 60 bucks lol.
1:30 Funny this is that I'm pretty sure that you could find quite a lot of people in game who would be very eager to inform you, that you in fact cannot play online unless you do master the optimal jungling route.
if you're in any MOBA master rank and don't know how to play your position then yes, don't play online or don't solo que or derank to a rank thats suited for your skill level, because unlike fighting games where you're wasting your own time by playing badly and losing you're literally wasting your other teammates time if they want to climb rank or don't play rank
@@GarethXL That's really what fucking sucks about MOBA's and part of why I can't get into them. The idea of my playing poorly or not picking the best load outs or whatever leading to other people on my team not having fun is the most stressful feeling in video games ever, at least for me. In a fighting game, I can play whoever I want and if I get smoked, whatever. It's just me. I don't gotta worry about anyone else.
@@GarethXL You'd be surprised. I got yelled at for playing sub optimal heroes in overwatch in casual too, as well as stealing gold from other players by helping them kill in my first ever LoL beginner casual game when I started I didn't realize that teaming up on enemies was a bad thing. I unno how ya'll stand it.
About that training mode comment. I think the difference is you can easily spend 80 hours in training mode before playing online but you shouldn't. It's just that training mode trying to optimize and do the best combos and get them fall asleep you can spend a lot of time doing that it's a Time sync and it's honestly kind of fun for some people but it can just make the hours fly by but like you really shouldn't spend that much time before going online so I think it kind of just gets mixed signals as to what people think they should do when other people do it because it's easy to fall into that trap.
Paladins, a hero shooter with many MOBA elements, is similar to this. There's an item shop, decks to build to augment the characters to your preferred play style, then each character has 3 talents that can drastically change how their kit works, there's 4 different classes of character. And if you start feeding the enemy team you're gonna get that asshole that sits in spawn and throws the match. But I still recommend the game!
people need to just have fun playing games and stop thinking so critically about the most optimal way to get good and be the best, cus 99% of people arent ever going to get that far. Play the game man, you have fun you keep playing, you dont then stop playing. theres an infinite number of games to enjoy out there, this shit isnt as complicated as some people make it
the whole "80 hours in training mode" thing is so funny to me, as someone who used to kinda hold that belief. ive been playing league with friends a lot the past few weeks and literally only in my past 10 or so games have i felt like i had any idea/control over what i was doing (aka "playing the game"). it literally took upwards of 30 games just to reach that point, and i still suck ass. this is just what its like when you try a competitive genre with no prior experience. this is also the main reason why im a huge advocate for singleplayer content in fgs. no one got good at warcraft 3 by jumping into online immediately: they played the long and super fun campaigns first.
the problem being usually fighting game single player usually sucks at teaching you how to play properly cause the ai is bad but thats something that can be improved at least
@@Ixs4i yep its still super primitive, but honestly i think content is a bigger issue than the ai/tutorials. if ppl just had something fun to play for 10-20 hours theyd at least get used to their character and the basic mechanics. thats why im hyped about sf6's open world thing, could be a gamechanger
That's the thing though. Back when all these fighting games had single player content, people weren't fucking with them like that. That includes games like Street Fighter Alpha 3 or KOF Maximum Impact 2 or Virtua Fighter
I am completely confused on how new players dont immediately bounce off of League. Not getting to have fun because of things you couldnt possibly know about is just insane
You're only responsible for 20% of your team's success in LoL. For a lot of people, that makes it a lower pressure situation. You hit a couple of abilities while your team does all the actual heavy lifting to win a team fight and you go "hey, that felt pretty good!" Meanwhile if you're new to fighting games, depending on your chosen game, it's very possible that over 50% of your time in matches will be spent passively watching your character get smacked around while you go "you know, I *might* be able to make it to the bathroom and back before their combo ends."
@@beybladetunada5697 I guess for me it's the amount of downtime you get if you get skill issued and how clear your mistake is? Like if you get skill issued in an FG your consequences are immediate and noticeable because you're dead and the round is over, and then you can go into another round right after to apply the lesson you learned. In a MOBA you either FF or play out a lost game for half an hour because you made a mistake in your build, and at the lose screen an inexperienced player won't be able to understand why it happened
Don't you have a video series where you play Killer Instinct ranked, and "get out of bronze" without using combos or anything complex? That feels like it should be as well known as any of the really popular fighting game video essays.
Boy I beat people who knew how to play street fighter when I was hella new to SF and fighting games with just some well placed normals, I didn't know how to do special moves at all. You can for sure play some games, not just fighting games, as simple as possible if you figure out where best to put those buttons.
It's pretty sad how undervalued the experience of just playing a game with your baby giraffe legs is nowadays lol. I love the blissful ignorant moments of just pressing buttons and figuring out wtf to do organically through trial and error. It's such a fun part of the everlong cycle.
the league of legends thing is funny cause it's so true. My sister told me she played the tutorial in secret so she could surprise me and we could play together. She said after she played the tutorial and went into an actual match she got flamed so hard that she just refused to touch it again.
people just doesn't want to improve, they want to keep doing the same thing every time and somehow at some point win just because they got better at repeating the same
I get your point on Legends of Runeterra, but Kai'Sa WAS too good. She wasn't god tier broken (leave that to old Azirelia), but she was ending games on turn 5-6 with her basic combo, which is way too fast. She ended up pushing a lot of decks off the meta, but now that most people stopped playing her, her WR is still pretty high with Akshan
I wanted to get into fighting games, and I played some practice mode to find a character I liked. Then I found my first match online and had a bunch of fun, but immediately after the game my opponent told me to go back to practice tool and don’t bother with online until I mastered the combos. That ended up totally killing my interest in playing fighting games online. I know it’s shallow and thin skinned of me, but I just didn’t want to play with those kinds of players in my limited free time.
I highly encourage you to join a smaller, more friendly community, either through Discord or Reddit. Playing random people online is a bad, BAAAAAAAD idea. Not just for fighting games, but for multiplayer gaming in general. Making friends who share your passions is essential to sustaining those passions.
umm..... yeah unless you're playing something like MK or orther normie populated games like platform fighters i highly doubt it unless you beat him up badly because most players don't mind newbies and infact welcome them more because it's a good chance to test out combos and confirms rather then on a dummy, in fact if it was in a lobby majority of people would tell that person off and if 1 asshole talking shit is all it takes to make you feel bad, sorry to say this but you might want to steer away from anytype of competitive games especially ones with a chat/communication function
i'm sorry you had to go through that as your first. online can be kind of a gamble with which kind of opponent personality you're going to get, especially if they try to give extra comments after :(
you're justified in feeling that way. Fighting game players have the mentality that everyone plays fighting games for the sole purpose of improvement as oppose to acutally having fun. Getting your ass whooped for hours on end isnt fun but its the best way to improve but is not fun in the slightest. Constant stopping the game to get coached on small improvements and situational knowledge will help you improve but again not fun. Anyone who tries taking the fun out of a fighting game for you, take them out of ur brain and life immidiatly. Give fg's another shot tbh, youll always find these wannabe proffessors who turn the whole game into a lecture once in a while but more times than not youll find chill people who just wanna play the game and have fun with it
having played a lot of different competitive games the thing that is the worst about the FGC is how mean everyone is to someone who is just getting started playing their game. the second worst thing about the FGC is how if you say you don't like a mechanic or say that you think this aspect of fighting games is poorly designed everyone jumps on you and calls you a scrub who doesn't understand fighting games
So it's been over two weeks. Doesn't look like the LoR competitive scene is saying "the game is terrible and the balance is bad and this is the worst the meta has ever been." Maybe Kai'sa was actually just unbalanced. Hmm.
0:23 it does not help that I have legit seen people tell new players stuff like that as 'helpful' advice. That and saying that the new player should or must player character X for Y long before being able to play character Z, which is who the new player actually wants to play.
IMO if you're new the most worrying about combos you should do is just the simplest thing you can find that leads to a knockdown. Like if "any button->sweep" works in the game you play just do that while you're figuring out what your character does
@@arachnofiend2859 Oh no, I agree. It's just that I find it bizarre that people would tell new players they need to do all that before playing in the first place.
Based video. These kids&casuals really need to stop gatekeeping themselves by just throwing their controller down in salty frustration saying "iT'STo0HaRdDddd". No. It isn't. An entire generation mashed on fighting games as kids at pizza shops, arcades, their snes and ps1 with far less information readily available. Didn't stop them from loving the genre for years.
FInally someone says it, the fucking the tutorial had you buying not 1 BUT 2 THORNMAILS VS TRUNDLE WITH ASHE, ARE YOU FR???? my first matches I got flamed hard because I built 2 warmogs with all the characters
Sajam I’m with you; but fr fr you didn’t optimize your jungle clear before you hit the rift? That’s like 10 minutes in practice tool. Despicable man smh.
Sajam be like "y'all say you need to practice combos in fighting games but what about when you first go into a shooter and like you don't know how to press W to move around it's exactly the same thing y'all" Biggest problem with fighting games is their low player numbers really. When I first started DNF Duel I could find people who genuinely didn't know how to play and I could beat them because I was the one who learned the starter combo. That was fun, and it kept me playing and improving. But if you went into DNF Duel nowadays there's barely any new players to be had and people are gonna hand you your ass on a platter, and despite everyone pretending like oh it's no big deal losing is doing absolutely nothing to my emotional state, losing over and over can be pretty demoralizing. That's where the "I need to learn too many intricate complexities to be good at fighting games" mentality comes from. If there was a Popular Fighting Game with as many players as League of Legends nobody would ever say this because you'd always have new players to pit yourself against and you'd actually feel like you stood a chance. You can replicate this by looking for new fighting game releases and playing on day 1 but it sucks that you have to do that.
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"My dog ate my inputs" XD im crying
I was crying🤣
“I had a blindfold on, and my dog pooped on the screen, and I was only using one finger, and it was my little brother playing.”
"This game is dead, look at this graph."
LMAO they don't miss.
We often forget that new players need to learn to “walk” and that training mode is often not very useful to them. Like, strive was my first FG ever and I started out by playing my friend and going 0-25. The thing was that i just couldnt hold back to block consistently. Training mode is just not going to help when you cant even control your character. We need to push narratives that new players shouldnt stress the high level details and just play the game to gain basic muscle memory.
This is a really good point and one of the reasons why FGs tend to feel so much harder to learn than other games. There are so many mechanics being shown immediately to the new player that the newbie will try to take it all in at once, fail at each of them and get discouraged. It came to me recently when I was playing Apex, how I only just now started slightly learning the more advanced ways of movement and optimizing my games after 300+ hours. I didn't care about it before because it wasn't really shown to me, but I still had fun in those 300 hours, learning the more surface-level things, like every character's abilities, weapons, maps, etc. I understand that FGs want to even the playing field with showing everyone all the mechanics they need to play the game, but I feel like players will eventually learn the deep stuff themselves by getting involved more with the game and the community. Of course, there are a lot more things that are different between FGs and other competitive games, but I do think one of the reasons why it's so hard to learn FGs is because they make you think more about learning the game rather than enjoying the game at first.
This. I came from Smash, and the reason why Smash players stick to Smash so vehemently is because the gap between picking up and playing and "gitting gud" is far more narrow than traditional fighters. Leveling up and learning is far more fun and happens far sooner in that game. Traditional fighters and its players and streamers don't really show the early stages of that journey into improving, so for most new players, they only have preconceived notions to go off of. Training mode is only as useful as your knowledge of the game, and so people just need to play each other and take L's and W's and see if the game is even a good fit for them before worrying about improving.
On the part of pushing the narrative of not worrying about the difficult stuff and just play the game....people like myself have BEEN doing that. Mfs aren't trying to hear it though.
On the part of content creators showing the early stages. There are plenty of content creators I'm sure that do that. Yall are just looking for it in all the wrong places. Hell I did it with Injustice 2 and Tekken and I would dare say KOF and DOA 6
One of the most important things I drive into new players isn't any tech or footsie or whatever. The first lesson is always to block, please for the love of God just learn to hold back and you'll win so much more at a begging level just being able to hold back the ape brain and block.
@@loopygordo BINGO!!!! That's exactly why most of them struggle. They're allergic to blocking
People have been playing video games for so long that they've forgotten what its like to be completely new to a game
Listen Sajam, you got me into fighting games but I am not letting you talk me into MOBA's as well
Sajam, I'm having deja vu here... I feel like we've discussed this before...
There’s not a month that goes by where Sajam does not try to remind the FGC about this point.
@@suspecthalo As he should
One of the newest fighting game excuses that's pretty strong is when the rollback first displays a block and then a hit, the person this happens to will insist that they did indeed block and the game was wrong to "change it" to a hit. Strong one for a new age of fighting games.
Anyway yeah great video lol
Its the opposite for me which is one reason why I dislike it. I KNOW I hit them because I saw their health go down combined with them making either a counter scream or KO scream and yet still moving like nothing just happened.
Something I think of a ton is when I was learning Terumi in CP and CF there's a route where you do like microdash 2C into sweep 22CCCCC but I physically can't do those kinds of inputs but 5C moves you forward so you get like 2C 5C sweep 22CCCCC into whatever for like a couple hundred less damage overall but basically no execution. Plus even just learning DP motions can be 6523 has made me incredibly consistent on my execution even if it's technically slower by a handful of frames. This is partly why I prefer playing with friends since no one cares since we just want to do cool shit
Yeah playing with friends is a good way to get an understanding of your characters since as you said you guys want to do cool shit. Terumi bnbs always change in every version, when I was learning him in CPEX. He had this weird route where you can extend his combo off of messenga but the timing was so strict I never learned it and just went for the more easier route since it was more consistent. The stomp combos always change in every version too lol, funny you brought up CP because I heard back then you wouldn't mash terumi 22CCCCC, you would have to just pound the button because even mashing it, the full stomp won't come out.
I like it when there's easy combos for slightly less damage.
And people sometimes just hung up complaining about "one frame links" and "hard combos" when they don't even need to do them at the level they're playing at.
I do agree with the points but as a relatively new player still dealing with cases of ranked anxiety or just anxiety playing against other people the "80 hours in training mode" for me roughly translates to "I want something simple that I can consistently do in training mode and then jump online and practice that in matches", and sometimes it gets a while to get that proper consistency in the lab for me before I feel it makes sense to play against another human. When I discover something it's not just 2 minutes either. I need to get the muscle memory down to at least some extent, understand the spacing, and again try to get consistent. This gets easier the more I play 1 character and when I switched to Bridget I got that "square one" feeling again, and discovering something and realizing this would take 30 minutes can start to hurt your momentum. I do think this is a case of where just being a fighting game vet in general really helps with not losing that momentum in learning because you're not fighting your hands and learning a new controller at the same time, not to mention processing all the other more novel concepts to fighting games in general.
I have dealt with the same thing a lot. I lose steam once I start thinking about switching characters or upping my technical game. It gets to the point that I just don't play because I don't want to spend an hour or two in training mode before playing with a friend or in tower.
I realized something while reading your comment though: spending upwards of an hour to get one thing down consistently in training is entirely on me. Sajam has said before not to be a training mode warrior because once you get into a real match all that consistency goes out the window anyway. I could absolutely make myself spend just 5 or 10 minutes on something, enough to just see, "okay this is how much of a window I have and what I'm supposed to do" and then do ALL the practice in real matches, where it should be. The only reason I spend longer than that is because I want the satisfaction of doing the thing in the dojo. However, it's getting in the way of the most fun part of the game, which is playing other people, so what's the point?
as much as we whine about perceived barrier of entry and whatever in fighting games, at the same time i feel like you're just listing things that you can't succeed at immediately. if picking up a new character or playing on a new controller didn't feel fresh and different, if there wasn't room to grow, then it'd be bland. It's the most fun you're gonna have with the game when you don't know jack shit and you discover on your own strategies that work. you don't have to spend any time in training mode or have any consistency to play online. you just have to stop bitching out of accepting the fact that you'll lose matches. the results screen doesn't determine your enjoyment out of the game and in a match that is lost, there are always small wins throughout, just not ones large enough for you to score the win and you have to be happy with that. in battle royales only one person out of 100 win the match but that doesn't make it so the 2 guys that you knocked down before getting eliminated wasn't an accomplishment. in the case of strive, 6P the jump ins, do some shimmies on oki and try to learn your opponent and do some sickkunt reads, even if you lose, you'll still feel rewarded for what you do right, even if it isn't flashy. if you think the game's not fun once you take your first few steps, then you won't find it fun 200 hours in having learned the combos, so don't sweat it.
I appreciate your content! Smart analysis and a wholesome lack of toxicity. Thanks Sajam.
the problem with people who have misconceptions like these is they see all this high level play and tech and think this is how everyone plays the game. when in reality it isn't and you can find people in all different skill ranges to learn and have fun.
Exactly. You know the phrase looking for love in all the wrong places? That's exactly what people be doing.
@@Drebin1989 thats so funny how similar those two things are 😭
As I learn a new game, I leave certain parts out. This helps by lightening the burden of new information. This also creates a path of things to learn when I feel I've peaked. For instance, my low parry combo game is wack asf, but I'm not at the stage to low parry regularly so no reason to study that yet.
Thats the best approach to take. Why most people don't ever think to take that approach...I truly have no clue
My friends played csgo for 10 years and are around platinum+ in valorant. Ive only played valorant on and off for 2 years, hit gold 2 this season. Played street fighter my entire life and just hit gold a month ago. My friends refuse to play any fighting game whatsoever because they dont have the "years of experience necessary to be good." However recently I got them to play multiversus because it was free and we could play teams so I could help them out. Now theyre hooked and Im hoping when project L drops they have fun with it and I can get them to play a couple of other games too.
Im hoping that project L comes out and everyone has a good time.
honestly same. I love fighting games but like no one in my friend groups are willing to give them a chance. Lot of my friends come from playing league so I'm hoping when Project L comes out I can get them to at least try a fighting game and see why I enjoy the genre.
Lol, unless you're playing KoF or Tekken, those years of playing aren't going to help you outside of fundamentals. Very few series do the whole legacy skill thing nowadays.
having played a lot of competitive games over the years the one thing that sticks out to me about fighting games is just that you have to be more mature about how you handle losses than so many other games. a Dota loss can be a grueling 45 minute slog of misery but at the end of the day the ego bruising can be shifted over to teammates. you can acknowledge your mistakes and learn but also tell yourself "its not all my fault". with fighting games it is your fault. people get nervous and toss them aside before getting to the point where their wins, whether thats taking a match, round, or just keeping the opponent from perfecting you, are also entirely on them and how good it can feel to finally have it click.
tbh, I find the personal accountability that you're forced to deal with in fighting games to be a lot less frustrating than losing in a team game like League. It sucks really hard to feel like you lost because your teammates let you down, and it sucks equally hard to know you're the one who let your teammates down even if you don't want to believe it. Losing a match or two in League can really just ruin my mood for the rest of the day, I can lose 20 rounds straight in a fighting game and be like "alright run it back" and feel totally fine. It feels so nice after playing team games for so long to know that the ability to win is entirely in my hands.
@@backstabuuu i think he was saying that ppl can always blame their loss on something else in a team game due to there being so many factors that go into a win/loss. i have a friend who plays valorant who would rather die than take any accountability for losing/dying. it's actually an art form the way he comes up with excuses of why he loses. When he plays smash he gets extremely frustrated when he loses because he can't blame it on anyone but himself
@@evriXO On the flipside, there will be players who understand their culpability in their losses and take their losses way too hard on themselves (not a criticism, I do this super-often).
But even then, that's also something that Sajam has covered more than once in his tutorial/teaching videos. To be honest I don't think there's anything missing from what Sajam's already covered that is super-critical to understanding or teaching people how to 'get over themselves' when it comes to fighting games. At some point, people just need to teach themselves.
I used to think this too, but people absolutely blame shit other than themselves in FGs, it's just shifted from teammates to 'broken character', 'my input didn't go out', 'spammer', etc. If someone doesn't want to blame themselves, they won't, tbh it's that simple imo.
As someone who has played a ton of MOBAs and FPS before getting into fighting games, I don't really understand the whole "fighting games are harder because you can't blame your teammates" sentiment. If anything it's a good thing. Having no teams is like one of the biggest reasons why I like fighting games. It's not really like "oh no I don't have teammates to blame" it's more like "thank god finally I don't have teammates to blame." You're telling me I have to earn my wins and I deserve my losses and the same thing also applies to my opponent? GOOD. That's what I want.
Plus the FGC likes to act all high and mighty about the whole "no teammates to blame" but they just blame the game or the character anyway.
I remember the first time I picked up my favorite LoL Champ of all time, Rammus. It was a pure Sajam moment for me right there. The character looked cool to me, I loved the fact that he was tanky and his powerball ability just screamed "I'm going to troll everyone with this". The one thing that was stopping me from picking him up was that he's a jungler and I had never played that position before (mostly clocked in time as support).
One day I teamed up with two friends and we started shooting the breeze when I mentioned that I wanted to play Rammus but didn't have the stomach to try jungle. One of my friends said "just pick him, man, it'll be fine. just clear in XYZ order and see if you can gank at around level 4-5". I told him about my concern and he told me to just mute chat and do my thing.
5 games later, we came out with 4 wins and a close defeat. More importantly, I had a ton of fun and even played Rammus on my own for several days as well. Even scored a triple kill at some point when I barely had any experience even doing damage.
I mostly played rammus in the Beta of LoL, but during that time he was def my main and loved that little rolling ball. Think I didn't even jungle with him because nobody knew anything at casual level 😂
i have had a variation of this experience a couple of times now:
- i tried my hand at competitive (Smogon) Pokémon for a hot second with a Gen 8 sun team and actually didn't do half bad, but it came with a LOT of trial and error games and tests to see where my movesets were bad or where my teams felt gimmicky. i did generally have fun tho, and i wanna give both that and VGC another go one of these days.
even in single player games, i played through all of Kirby and the Forgotten Land and only realized after completing most of the main story that there was a "dodge" ability that is incredibly useful.
as an ex-SMITE player, hearing Sajam talk about his MOBA experiences is giving me PTSD Flashbacks
It's all accurate, anyone saying he's lying is coping
As a new convert from league to mainly playing SF6 / Tekken and GGST , Learning fighting games has been 100x more fun than learning league
MOBA's are a hellscape for learning, league specifically, the community is not gonna help you, the best you'll get is ' just last hit lol' and the toxicity about any rank below master is just god awful, 'you're bronze? Have you tried turning your monitor on' even if you've just started playing the game
My time in the FGC has been positive interaction wise and great mentally, yes I lose, sometimes I get frustrated, but nothing is worse than having to play an hour long slogfest where you've lost lane, you're useless and your team won't surrender, even if all 3 lanes have lost
The thornmail on Ashe joke got me cuz my first bots game ever I bought six warmogs and was confused on how I was losing fights even though I had triple peoples health
I've been learning Bridget recently after being an exclusive Ky player since way back when I started playing Xrd. And let me tell you I genuinely felt kinda nervous going online with her. I had no idea what my gameplan was with the character, had no combos except for gatlings, didn't have a clue what I was doing.
...and that's exactly how I learnt the character. I noticed I was hitting a lot of CH 2Hs but didn't know how to follow up, so I went on dustloop, found some CH 2H combos and practiced them until I felt fairly confident with them.
Also, for a character like Bridget with all the yoyo setups, there was just no way I was going to be able to go into training mode and lab all of those out and understand where and when I was supposed to use them, so I didn't bother. I just played matches and experimented with the yoyo and started to get a feel for how it covers space and the shmixes I can get off of it. My small Ky brain hasn't gotten around to learning more optimal yoyo setups yet, but I feel a lot more comfortable easing into that after just playing the character a bunch.
I feel the majority of people that say things like "I have to spend X hours in Training mode before I can go online" aren't describing what they actually want to accomplish. Sure you can say "nah just play online and press buttons", and that works for some, but when it comes to thinking you *need* to be in training mode, it's so you can win matches. Fighting games are 1v1, it's a clear winner and loser every single match. People just want a quick W, or something they can focus on if they lost. In team games there's more people can look at to see what they did well (or what they can blame), and fighting games don't have that aspect in them. If I lose in League I can see if my CS was good, or if I warded well, in FPS there's K/D/A.
And its cause people to play like a dumbass in those team games
I'd give them a move (or 2, or 3, or top 10) they can mash to beat arcade mode/low rank opponents.
One may think that's not learning, but having muscle memory for a move/string is great, so they don't have to think about it anymore. Then if they want to learn more, tell them that they can block something and punish it with the move they just mastered.
As for in-game feedback, it's really tough to have stats at the end of the game and have it mean something to people. Without actually having a better player view a player's replays, I hope the SF6 in-game commentator feature would work well for that, people will just hear things like "No anti-air!?" and "No punish" and "He's now getting comboed for a questionable decision, that move was very unsafe on block" and stuff.
I've been playing a lot of Legends of Runeterra lately, and was enjoying myself, so I thought I'd check out the reddit and some content creators for the game, and it was just endless complaining about everything all the time. The weird thing was that reading and watching people be so negative made me less motivated to play, even though I was having fun before.
Yeah sometimes it can be annoying if the dominant noise about a game is negative while you are just trying to have the most fun. I do get it if people are sometimes upset about something ect but it can def make a game less fun
I played League back in the day and was building Lich Bane on jungle fiddlesticks. Realistically, I had no idea what I was doing but still crow-twerked on people.
Have fun. Learning over time is okay, being optimal is not an entry requirement.
Main barrier to fg is price
Buying the full game
The dlc character
Some fighting games are starting to experment with free to play or buy the game dlc is free which is less money to spent to play, most popular games can be play by boke pockets
could just wait for a sale. i just got tekken 7 original edition for $13 (normally its 90), comes with all the dlc characters besides like 3. but waiting for a sale can take a while
I am consistently baffled at the misunderstanding regarding having to spend time in training mode before you go online. I've heard this talking point countless times now, as we all have, and as someone who's kinda new to fighting games (1 to 2 years depending on what you count, so definitely new but not super day 1 new), I just think it's bullshit.
And sure, watching your videos before getting into them helped, but if I'm honest I was as overwhelmed as everyone else when starting in my first fighting game, so I istinctively went to training mode. After litteral seconds there, I realised that I had no idea what to practice, what to look for, what to do, beyond the motion inputs I had heard about.
After the first few matches, I could clearly see what my problems where, and I realised what my improvement path was.
How can people who play other games be so convinced that spending hours upon hours in training mode is helpful, letalone mandatory, for playing the games. Kinda shows to me how something that you can literally disprove in seconds can be believed by everyone just because of which shape common discourse surrounding a topic can take.
The short answer is, people want to win. They want the rewards of being good without needing to be good, and when they realize they need to be good they complain about needing to go through the process of being good (or what they think that process is). When they say "you need to be in training mode for 10000 hours and understand everything fundamentally about your character before going online", they're really talking about not just going online, but going online *and getting an 80%+ winrate*. They also tend to unironically think that that's what their opponents do.
There's also the angle where people want to go online to play against other players, and so want to interact with aspects of fighting that SPECIFICALLY require online play - playing vs. a player, not a character. For these people, if you're at a level where those aspects AREN'T all that's left for you, that you should just stick to playing CPUs instead, since there's no extra benefit or enjoyment in online play.
Here's what you tell people about training mode when they're first starting out. Go in there with the purpose of getting more familiar with what buttons do what. That should take 30 to 45 minutes at most.
Then you've got people who believe the training mode is the thing that ruins the genre in general. "No one should bother with training mode, how can you find that fun? Just play the video game and figure things out that way you nerd" and of course it's coming from a non FG player, but I still find it hilarious people can actually think that way, and never take in the opinions of the people that actually play the fucking games
@@kickasscowell5654 yeah, that too... for fighting games, and for all genres really, it's people just feel allowed to express strong opinions while knowing they have no clue what they are talking about.
Training mode specifically is a tragically misunderstood tool unfortunately.
@@kickasscowell5654 It's funny, really. People often forget that there is aim training tool for FPS players, and it's hours long of boring progress just shooting moving dot on the screen, which a lot of video on "how to improve your aiming" specifically told you to download that tool and practice. That's even worse than combo practicing in fighting game.
I also saw my friends spent hour practicing last hit and deny in DotA and I can't tell you how boring it looks, but they said it's necessary to get good at the game. I wonder if those people complaining about training mode have ever seen people train in other genre.
Got into fighting games with your videos being a large part if it. Keep up the good work
i think brolylegs is a good example of what is possible if you shut others out and become the best you are able.
Brolylegs is an anomaly of a player. We cannot treat him as if what he does is possible for others in other situations
@@ike804 "Idom is an anomaly of a player. We cannot treat him as if what he does is possible for others in other situations."
You can apply that statement with any great player that doesn't have a legal disability too.
Let's face it, it's not possible for most basketball players to land the NCAA or NBA. It's not possible for most fighting game players to even finish top 4 at a local, let alone top 16 at a regional. So many things get in the way.
However, a person can always be the best they can be.
@@malcovich_games Yeah and I never said you couldnt. 95% of top players are anomalies. However, its still MASSIVELY disingenuous to my statement to compare a player like Brolylegs to a player like IDOM when one has an entirely different reason to be an anomaly
@@ike804 I concede that you have a point, and I think we are approaching the statement from different points of view.
You are saying "not all differently abled people can play fighting games the way Brolylegs does" while I'm just mirroring what (I think) the OP is saying, "making the most out of one's situation in life".
I've been telling a lot of people recently that the idea of "I need to hit the training mode right out the gate" is a trap for new people. The way I explain it is how are you suppose to know what to lab if you don't even know what your character does or what situations you might be put into?
Sajam I literally told Justin on his stream the week after he won UMvC3 Evo that you can just tatsu cancel into super with Akuma after demon to making that kinda difficult link (which he himself would drop quite often) to none difficult, and he did not know until I told him. In fact the whole stream thought I was BS'ing lol and I didn't even play Akuma. Just was someone who dabbled around.
it all comes down to how invested one can get in learning the game. the one thing i think fps and moba's have over fg's in terms of investing in learning it is the social aspect. fg's are mostly 1 person vs another person whereas most fps and moba's you're teamed up with other people and more than likely with a friend. it's easier to enjoy a game when you're winning together. and we might not like to admit it but it's hard to learn a game when you're friend is trying to teach you how to play the FG while kicking your ass in it. some might feel more motivated to learn the game so they can eventually return the favor OR just go ask the friend if they want to try winning together in a team based game.
The learning process is where the fun is. I got 2 friends addicted to dota and the randoms online were very understanding funnily enough.
“They’re gonna blame you no matter what you do,” got a big ass sigh out of me.
What Sajam is a very definite top player in: dropping truth bombs.
The thing is the more we go along in gaming I feel like the next generation is all about perfection. Sajam made a joke about optimal jungle pathing but honestly there are a lot of players that actually think they need perfect pathing before even trying a lot of new games have their own version of lab/training mode now.
I wish more people spent their time watching Sajam video instead of going to training mode or reddit/twitter. The former would help their grow much better.
The League and Runeterra remarks are too true lol. I know this is primarily a fighting game channel, but I'd love to see vids of you playing either if you record or stream those.
As someone learning Bloody Roar Extreme I will say: it doesn't matter how simple inputs or mechanics are, executing at a high level is hard, my main has effectively kara SPD as her bnb conversion and man are the cancel windows killing me in matches
Well yeah, kara SPD is probably a pretty difficult input lol
Good Stuff Sajam! I appreciate your dedication to identifying real problems in a positive way and your skill at explaining why many other perceived problems are just structural parts of playing video games. Keep rockin
A lot of Fighting Game veterans, and even just casual tournament spectators, seriously underestimate how *_bizarre_* certain concepts that we take for granted are compared to every other genre.
The three things that I see beginners struggle the most with are:
1) Holding back to block.
2) Low, high and mid attacks.
3) Motion inputs.
Unless the game designers deliberately decide to add these features (usually as a homage to Fighting Games), no other genre possesses them. It is something that requires a complete mental shift, which will naturally require a period of slow adaptation.
It's quite interesting seeing fighting game players try to fight these misconceptions (which is fair, but) without analyzing how intuitive these systems are to the "average gamer".
Like I might not have played any fps in my life, but a sniper rifle will (most of the time) behave at least similarly to how I expect it to, even if I can't physically aim well with it. I have expectations of how grenades, armor, or jetpacks work and most of the fps adhere to these expectations.
And while fighting games do have some parallels to real life combat, (as you pointed out) there are just a ton of stuff that don't intuitively make sense relative to irl fighting. I personally think that while high, low, mids only exist in fighting games, they are intuitive with at most very brief explanations. But concepts like hold back to block, air combos, and attacks building meter makes 0 sense relative to irl fighting and thus what people expect.
WASD to move, mouse to aim was really bizarre to me when I started shooting games. I was more used to games where you don't control the camera. So I don't see having bizarre basics as a unique problem for fighting game.
It's called the Curse of Knowledge, and it's a really big hurdle to overcome for someone trying to teach others fighting games.
NO genre of game is intuitive. NONE. Whoever said there is, they're lying. Each person's genre or game of choice...I guarantee you they struggled at learning it.
I mean there are concepts just as bizzare/unintuitive in mobas, RTS games, and hero/competative shooters as well and people don't act like they are some impenetrable genre like they do with fighting games, that's like literally the whole point of this video
Regardless of the skill ceiling, these are still fighting GAMES at the end of the day. Play them like what they are. It's still fun to pull them out with friends and just mash stuff without knowing very much. These games are practically DESIGNED to make almost every single hit feel as enjoyable as possible, even if it isn't the hardest stuff to do, because of their arcade roots. You just have to adjust your expectations of yourself. You're new.
I have a question - what do inexperienced people expect when playing fighting games? Do they expect to control everything perfectly, press any button they want without consequence, and win with little to no challenge? I'm asking because I'm wondering how the expectations form the misconceptions - i.e. if you expect your character to be Kratos or Arkham Asylum Batman then no matter how small the startup and cancel windows, or easy motions are, you'll call a game clunky, or if you expect wins early and often then a growth mindset won't develop.
They expect the onboarding to be as smooth as an FPS or a MOBA, where you read 2-4 abilities and starting shooting/moving around cause its so intuitive. But they've forgotten when they first played FPSs/MOBAs, they had to struggle with the muscle memory of aiming, strafing, or using right-click to shoot AND move at the same time, controlling the camera and etc.
This problem is compounded by fighting games shortcomings but they forget that they're learning a new control scheme in a new genre. They treat it as if its another MP game in a genre they have 1000 hours in and they should be competent with the entire control scheme instantly.
As someone who was an absolute newbie less than a year ago, I can tell you that unrealistic expectations are definitely a factor to consider.
It's not even a matter of thinking "I will win 90% of the matches I play."
Most beginners have some awareness and instead think "As long as I win 50% of my matches, I will be happy."
The problem is that, when you are a beginner to fighting games, you are likely to win only 10% of your matches _and that's if you're lucky._ A lot of people don't win a single match until a week or two after starting.
That is a MASSIVE punch to the face for a newcomer, and presents a seemingly unsurmountable wall to climb, which is why most people give up and settle for watching matches online instead of playing.
I think they expect to be as good as they are at the games they are already good at relatively quickly. Someone with years of experience playing other games goes into a genre with pretty unique controls and finds that their existing gaming experience doesn't mean much at all, so they get frustrated when they're essentially starting as an eight year old picking up a controller for the first time again
I think the biggest problem is matchmaking, fgs have less people playing, in mobas and shooters you can fight people with similar level, even if you're still losing more than winning
Ofc smurfing is a thing but fgs leave that bad impression on a player, imagine starting in strive and needing to fight in floors 8-10 to find players even though your skill level is floor 3, and the only way this is solved is if fgs had more players, so its more or less an egg and chicken problem
I appreciate y’alls input - very clarifying answers
I think the major issue that makes people bounce off fighting games is the lack of engaging tutorial and you essentially having to make your own progression goals. A fighting game with a well made single player mode focused on teaching you basic strategies one at a time, like if you started out with only normals, and had to work your way in on a sagat that just mashed fireball, then you unlock fireball and fight a zangief who has an invincible grab and you have to play keepaway w him, then you play a cami who just spams divekick and you need to DP her, then you fight zangief again but now he jumps based on your fire ball rhythm and you need to learn to mix up your fireball timings and react to jump ins, so on and so forth.
You got fighting games that do those things and yet people don't fuck with them
Virtua Fighter has all of those features! It's just not flashy enough though.
Here's some of the other features I want to see to motivate certain kinds of players...
* Multiversus has battle pass and daily missions.
* KOF XV has "first loss of the day protection" for low ranks.
Not all people are intrinsically motivated to get better, and some people just can't treat losses as a learning experience, and would rather protect their in-game rank score or earn some in-game currency instead.
For traditional fighting games, daily quests can be tied to learning mechanics rather than wins.
e.g. perform 3 anti-airs, perform a crossup, do 2 whiff punishes, block 20 attacks, block 1 overhead (except jump attacks), escape 1 throw
The player can over above the terms to get an explanation on what the terms are, click to receive a video demo.
@@malcovich_games that's what irks me a bit though. If it's what they're looking for in a fighting game, tf is they're worry about it not being flashy enough for. That's like a woman meeting a dude that has everything she looks for in a man but won't give him the time of day because he's corny or some shit like that.
@@Drebin1989
tl;dr: A wall of text about VF4 not selling despite singleplayer mode and flashiness in fighting games that casuals are attracted to.
VF 4 Evolution had an awesome singleplayer campaign. Think SF Alpha 3's World Tour except you rose through the ranks in Japanese arcades and eventually fought the ghosts of the best of VF players.
Its missions mode was very in-depth and also has specific matchup-specific missions like OP has said.
Yet its sales were trash even in Japan.
I think VF in general really failed to innovate in presentation. VF1-3 may have still had the "WOW 3D" effect, but it could no longer compete in graphics vs average video games, and competitors like DOA and Tekken appeared.
Long-time fighting game players look at a game and only really care that the UI is readable at a glance, and the animations are fluid and consistent. Casuals want to mash and look cool while doing it.
As simple as some fighting games get, presentation goes so far in selling them in addition to single player.
Rage Arts and KO slowdowns have sold Tekken 7 to the casual audience well.
Guilty Gear (in general) has so much extra "animu" that you stop noticing when you play the game a lot, like excessive dust/smoke sprites behind a character that runs or jumps. Strive has the large annoying COUNTER and hit counts, that again, we get used to.
@@malcovich_games and yet some of those same casuals complain about those Rage Arts. Whether its "they're too long" or "they do too much damage" or scrub carrier and any other thing they can think of. Its like they never think about what happens if they're on the receiving end. Be careful what you ask for.
As far as looking cool while doing whatever...when are people ever going to learn doing that does nothing but get you in trouble most of the time? You see it all the time in basketball and in other genres of games. Fighting games are no different in that aspect.
People complain about fighting games being hard to learn but the one time I tried League it felt like going to war on the first day at boot camp
That Metaverse avatar you got in the thumbnail looking mighty clean Sajam.
man, i remember how huge shurelia's league tutorial videos were for teaching what nowadays would seem like the most obvious things
Ironically the same can be applied to all of Sajam’s videos repeating the same boring tropes and minutia.
As someone who is bad at video games:
When I tried out the Blizzard moba (i forgot the name) I went into it to get a taste of what it's like. The fact that success is not all on my shoulders did two things: psychologically it lessened the frustration because of the knowledge that not everything that goes wrong is necessarily my fault, and gameplay-wise the better players around me allowed me to get a bit of the flavour what it's like to play it.
When I tried out SF5 and Smash Ulitmate I also went in to get a taste (at least partially because I heard they were beginner friendly). All I got from that was that I got clobbered around for 30 seconds and then the match was over; rinse repeat. That came 100% from me not being any good at it, and didn't allow me to get any flavour of it. If you're someone like me back then who just wants to see what it's like and don't have any specific goals, that's just an express road to frustration.
I startet playing Guilty Gear Strive a few days ago, and I have a specific goal now, so hopefully I will last for a bit longer than previously.
(It also helps that there's Dojo Missions that explain what game mechanics are there & how they can be used, but that's another topic.)
I was convinced to play LoL one day and my friend was showing me the basics of basics and gave me a play by play everytime we would go down a lane. Then kid you lot 2 of my teammates are yelling at me cause i wasn't playing my champ correctly then i said it's my first MOBA cut me some slack. Next thing you know I'm being told to uninstall the game and that I'm hotdog water and you best believe that was my only game after that lol. It pretty much discouraged me to play
I've said it before and I'll say it again, the hardest part of learning FGs is that your first step is unlearning what other games teach you. Anything other than turn based games place such an importance on reaction speed and accuracy, so many of your deaths could be avoided, or at least partially avoided, by improving either/both of those things. So you come to SF with that mindset and get wrecked because you think you just need to react faster to block jabs, without realizing a large part of a character's moveset isn't reactable, so it just feels like you cannot function. Which is true{ish}, but you've identified an incorrect solution.
Buying thornmail on Ashe? At least you weren't me who thought buying amplifying tome on Garen would've done something when I was first starting out.
As someone who played league in 2010, stopped for 12 years, and made a new account to play with some friends again this year, the league part is so accurate. I'm over here getting flamed on a new account at level like 8 for not jungling the right way. Obviously. I've never jungled in my life. Back in 2010 we weren't playing the "right" way, we were having fun. You're on your 8th smurf account trying to hit 30 to play ranked and plateau at gold again, and you've forgotten that new players actually exist. At least in a fighting game I don't have to deal with that
This is because new player queue is currently flooded by smurfs or people who got banned and made a new account. It got so bad that there's this general understanding among the people there that "if you are here, then you already know how to play the game".
In a game I said: maybe you should go help somebody else, I'll sit under a turret, you'd probably be more useful helping somebody else. Then was called names by that cat on a book, because of course.
It was my first match - vs bots. And she never left my lane that match.
I never criticize somebody else's game in chat. It may be their first match.
As much as I like fighting games, I've come to realize I'm just not cut out for them. Really, I suppose I should say I'm not cut out for competitive games cause, yeah, I don't really play much of any of them. More the single player gamer here. So I just haven't developed the proper mindset for it all. And getting over that hurdle is proving far more difficult than anticipated.
I guess it also doesn't help that I have this perception that I'm choosing all the wrong fighters to play either. Like damn it. "GG Strive"? "DBFZ"? "Street Fighter"? Nah, see me in freaking "Chaos Code", "Spectral Vs Generation", or god damn "Arcana Heart". Fighters that are not exactly thriving or even regarded well.
So yeah, excuses, excuses, bad mentality, excuses. It's a dumb personal struggle I gotta get over.
For now, I'm just content playing them in very small bursts and just watching whatever video footage of matches I can come across. If nothing else, I've been doing quite well with getting clips of the quirky fighters I like featured in Sajam's WIK so that's always a fun time. Though it seems like I've been seeing some of the opposite reactions than I hoped, less garnering interest and more dismissal as kusoge trash, but still, I'm taking what I can get as a passive fg participant.
MOBAs are toxic as hell lol. When I played Smite, getting a last-second resurrection on a teammate as Khepri was amazing, until the teammate dove tower again immediately after rezzing, dying immediately, and then pinging "ultimate is ready!" on you like it didn't JUST go on cooldown
"My dog ate my inputs" kek.
im liking the talk about how fighting games price and package themselves this might be the biggest barrier for people wanting to try the genre because why would you pay 60$+ for a hop in and beat up people online game when theres so many other games you can do that in that are free.
i hope there’s more experimenting with it like melty having free dlc instead of buying characters/season passes, if it’s feasible for any other companies to do this i hope it becomes a norm.
Could you imagine how much harder DNF could've popped if it was F2P?
this is 100% true and imo THE biggest problem with fighting games. They are a highly competitive genre that gets priced with a 60 dollar tag and shitty online modes, no wonder they all have such a small playerbase compared to mobas
"My dog ate my inputs"
Gonna use that one next time I need to blame something, that's mad funny.
People who say friends make learning easier are like, 10% right and 90% wrong. It still isn't very fun playing dota and getting turbo fisted for 50 minutes by someone either smurfing or like just better enough that they stomp your team. It isn't fun playing valorant and being bottom frag every match not knowing what to do even if I'm with my homies.
Get better friends
You could ask your friends how you could improve though? And also hopefully one is an IRL buddy who can watch a game of you playing it (and maybe have a few laughs about how you play suboptimally in the process)... worst case you'll have to beg them to watch a demo/replay..
@@ArkadijsZaptesburka Sounds like the exact reason why nobody has friends
I think part of it is moment to moment enjoyment or the little interactions that make people happy. What I mean by this is even if youve never played an FPS before if you boot up CoD odds are you can get some stupid kills you toss grenades or hide behind a door with a shotgun and you can get some "cheap" kills. These can be very fun for completly fresh players. I recall way back when I played bad company 2 my dad whos gaming experiance ended with tetris on the OG gameboy asked to play. He played for about 30 mins and despite never even using a playstation controller before was able to get a few kills. He even got a triple kill when I told him to throw a c4 into a house. He found it greatly amusing. He was terrible at the game and by my standards lost because his kdr was terrible but he got some fun moments. I dont think you can reasonably achieve something like that in a fighting game. The closest I can think of is hitting your friend with a hadoken in street fighter. But what can happen is you go online instantly get put in the blender and your gameplay highlight of the match was landing a knockdown once. Of course stuff like that is part of the learning proccess but that simply doesnt click with most people.
Now something you may be thinking is comparing a game like guilty gear to CoD isnt really fair but if you look at it from the perspective of a very large part of the gaming audiance it makes sense. They just wanna boot up the game throw some fireballs or do something dumb and have some fun. But what alot of them get is put in a blender and realize they are gonna lose 100 matches in a row where they do very little to earn the right to "play the game". For some people thats ok for some it isnt.
As a final thought I think the problem is for most genres if a game isnt for you go play another one in the genre. CSGO to competitive and difficult for you? Grab the noob tube and go play some COD for that cheap dopemine. But for fighting games there really isnt an alternative. Strive to difficult for you cause your being put in a blender? Well maybe fighting games arent for you cause its gonna be similar in bassicly all other fighting games. Is there a solution? I dunno probbably not I actually reccomend most people I know IRL to not play fighting games because I know 95% of them are gonna be put in the blender and ask me the next day why I made them waste 60 bucks lol.
the answer is rumbleverse or for honor I guess 😂
Sajam talking about those Season 1 before there were roles days lol
Shoutouts to all Johnny players
(I’m a Johnny player)
1:30 Funny this is that I'm pretty sure that you could find quite a lot of people in game who would be very eager to inform you, that you in fact cannot play online unless you do master the optimal jungling route.
if you're in any MOBA master rank and don't know how to play your position then yes, don't play online or don't solo que or derank to a rank thats suited for your skill level, because unlike fighting games where you're wasting your own time by playing badly and losing you're literally wasting your other teammates time if they want to climb rank
or don't play rank
@@GarethXL That's really what fucking sucks about MOBA's and part of why I can't get into them. The idea of my playing poorly or not picking the best load outs or whatever leading to other people on my team not having fun is the most stressful feeling in video games ever, at least for me. In a fighting game, I can play whoever I want and if I get smoked, whatever. It's just me. I don't gotta worry about anyone else.
@@starmantheta2028 it's very simple really, just don't play rank
@@GarethXL You'd be surprised. I got yelled at for playing sub optimal heroes in overwatch in casual too, as well as stealing gold from other players by helping them kill in my first ever LoL beginner casual game when I started I didn't realize that teaming up on enemies was a bad thing. I unno how ya'll stand it.
6:03 Ah, the Master Duel Duellist Cup Experience
About that training mode comment. I think the difference is you can easily spend 80 hours in training mode before playing online but you shouldn't. It's just that training mode trying to optimize and do the best combos and get them fall asleep you can spend a lot of time doing that it's a Time sync and it's honestly kind of fun for some people but it can just make the hours fly by but like you really shouldn't spend that much time before going online so I think it kind of just gets mixed signals as to what people think they should do when other people do it because it's easy to fall into that trap.
Paladins, a hero shooter with many MOBA elements, is similar to this. There's an item shop, decks to build to augment the characters to your preferred play style, then each character has 3 talents that can drastically change how their kit works, there's 4 different classes of character. And if you start feeding the enemy team you're gonna get that asshole that sits in spawn and throws the match.
But I still recommend the game!
people need to just have fun playing games and stop thinking so critically about the most optimal way to get good and be the best, cus 99% of people arent ever going to get that far. Play the game man, you have fun you keep playing, you dont then stop playing. theres an infinite number of games to enjoy out there, this shit isnt as complicated as some people make it
Bro, the Orange Box was $20! Like what a DEAL!
perfect thumbnail ngl
the whole "80 hours in training mode" thing is so funny to me, as someone who used to kinda hold that belief. ive been playing league with friends a lot the past few weeks and literally only in my past 10 or so games have i felt like i had any idea/control over what i was doing (aka "playing the game"). it literally took upwards of 30 games just to reach that point, and i still suck ass. this is just what its like when you try a competitive genre with no prior experience. this is also the main reason why im a huge advocate for singleplayer content in fgs. no one got good at warcraft 3 by jumping into online immediately: they played the long and super fun campaigns first.
the problem being usually fighting game single player usually sucks at teaching you how to play properly cause the ai is bad but thats something that can be improved at least
@@Ixs4i yep its still super primitive, but honestly i think content is a bigger issue than the ai/tutorials. if ppl just had something fun to play for 10-20 hours theyd at least get used to their character and the basic mechanics. thats why im hyped about sf6's open world thing, could be a gamechanger
That's the thing though. Back when all these fighting games had single player content, people weren't fucking with them like that. That includes games like Street Fighter Alpha 3 or KOF Maximum Impact 2 or Virtua Fighter
I am completely confused on how new players dont immediately bounce off of League. Not getting to have fun because of things you couldnt possibly know about is just insane
You're only responsible for 20% of your team's success in LoL. For a lot of people, that makes it a lower pressure situation. You hit a couple of abilities while your team does all the actual heavy lifting to win a team fight and you go "hey, that felt pretty good!"
Meanwhile if you're new to fighting games, depending on your chosen game, it's very possible that over 50% of your time in matches will be spent passively watching your character get smacked around while you go "you know, I *might* be able to make it to the bathroom and back before their combo ends."
It's just like dying to random overhead in an fg tbh, it's literally the same thing, knowledge checks, all competitive games have knowledge checks
People continue playing for many reasons, maybe they play with friends, maybe they want to get good, and so on
@@beybladetunada5697 I guess for me it's the amount of downtime you get if you get skill issued and how clear your mistake is? Like if you get skill issued in an FG your consequences are immediate and noticeable because you're dead and the round is over, and then you can go into another round right after to apply the lesson you learned. In a MOBA you either FF or play out a lost game for half an hour because you made a mistake in your build, and at the lose screen an inexperienced player won't be able to understand why it happened
Totally understand playing with friends tho. Shit is funny
6:10 A tale of two patches
Dog ate my inputs? Nah fam the game ate my inputs, every time
Don't you have a video series where you play Killer Instinct ranked, and "get out of bronze" without using combos or anything complex? That feels like it should be as well known as any of the really popular fighting game video essays.
Sajam mentioning TF2? "Now I've seen everything!"
Boy I beat people who knew how to play street fighter when I was hella new to SF and fighting games with just some well placed normals, I didn't know how to do special moves at all. You can for sure play some games, not just fighting games, as simple as possible if you figure out where best to put those buttons.
my dog does eat my inputs though. he's getting so hungry he eats abstract concepts and i worry for my future
I mean jungle isn’t the best example because you can also die to jungle mobs, maybe don’t involve other humans until you at least don’t do that
If Sajam made LoR content it'd be so good that all the other LoR streamers would go out of business, so he doesn't to protect them
It's pretty sad how undervalued the experience of just playing a game with your baby giraffe legs is nowadays lol. I love the blissful ignorant moments of just pressing buttons and figuring out wtf to do organically through trial and error. It's such a fun part of the everlong cycle.
Thornmail Ashe......I feel so old.
Good Answer Good answer!
the league of legends thing is funny cause it's so true. My sister told me she played the tutorial in secret so she could surprise me and we could play together. She said after she played the tutorial and went into an actual match she got flamed so hard that she just refused to touch it again.
people just doesn't want to improve, they want to keep doing the same thing every time and somehow at some point win just because they got better at repeating the same
The only reason I spend 80 hours in training mode is because those 80 hours are often times more fun than any amount of time I spend online.
Anyway yes so excited for the new patch of Runeterra>.>
The Orange Box was a $40 game! :D
I get your point on Legends of Runeterra, but Kai'Sa WAS too good. She wasn't god tier broken (leave that to old Azirelia), but she was ending games on turn 5-6 with her basic combo, which is way too fast.
She ended up pushing a lot of decks off the meta, but now that most people stopped playing her, her WR is still pretty high with Akshan
If that last line ain't it, I don't know what is
I wanted to get into fighting games, and I played some practice mode to find a character I liked. Then I found my first match online and had a bunch of fun, but immediately after the game my opponent told me to go back to practice tool and don’t bother with online until I mastered the combos. That ended up totally killing my interest in playing fighting games online. I know it’s shallow and thin skinned of me, but I just didn’t want to play with those kinds of players in my limited free time.
I highly encourage you to join a smaller, more friendly community, either through Discord or Reddit.
Playing random people online is a bad, BAAAAAAAD idea. Not just for fighting games, but for multiplayer gaming in general.
Making friends who share your passions is essential to sustaining those passions.
umm..... yeah unless you're playing something like MK or orther normie populated games like platform fighters i highly doubt it unless you beat him up badly
because most players don't mind newbies and infact welcome them more because it's a good chance to test out combos and confirms rather then on a dummy, in fact if it was in a lobby majority of people would tell that person off
and if 1 asshole talking shit is all it takes to make you feel bad, sorry to say this but you might want to steer away from anytype of competitive games especially ones with a chat/communication function
i'm sorry you had to go through that as your first. online can be kind of a gamble with which kind of opponent personality you're going to get, especially if they try to give extra comments after :(
you're justified in feeling that way. Fighting game players have the mentality that everyone plays fighting games for the sole purpose of improvement as oppose to acutally having fun. Getting your ass whooped for hours on end isnt fun but its the best way to improve but is not fun in the slightest. Constant stopping the game to get coached on small improvements and situational knowledge will help you improve but again not fun. Anyone who tries taking the fun out of a fighting game for you, take them out of ur brain and life immidiatly. Give fg's another shot tbh, youll always find these wannabe proffessors who turn the whole game into a lecture once in a while but more times than not youll find chill people who just wanna play the game and have fun with it
I mean, you're going to find those people everywhere. Even when playing chess people talk shit.
having played a lot of different competitive games the thing that is the worst about the FGC is how mean everyone is to someone who is just getting started playing their game. the second worst thing about the FGC is how if you say you don't like a mechanic or say that you think this aspect of fighting games is poorly designed everyone jumps on you and calls you a scrub who doesn't understand fighting games
tf game were you trying to pick up lmao
@@hefdef9961 meltyblood AACC
So it's been over two weeks. Doesn't look like the LoR competitive scene is saying "the game is terrible and the balance is bad and this is the worst the meta has ever been." Maybe Kai'sa was actually just unbalanced. Hmm.
Thumbnail game is strong
0:23 it does not help that I have legit seen people tell new players stuff like that as 'helpful' advice. That and saying that the new player should or must player character X for Y long before being able to play character Z, which is who the new player actually wants to play.
IMO if you're new the most worrying about combos you should do is just the simplest thing you can find that leads to a knockdown. Like if "any button->sweep" works in the game you play just do that while you're figuring out what your character does
@@arachnofiend2859 Oh no, I agree. It's just that I find it bizarre that people would tell new players they need to do all that before playing in the first place.
Based video. These kids&casuals really need to stop gatekeeping themselves by just throwing their controller down in salty frustration saying "iT'STo0HaRdDddd". No. It isn't. An entire generation mashed on fighting games as kids at pizza shops, arcades, their snes and ps1 with far less information readily available. Didn't stop them from loving the genre for years.
FInally someone says it, the fucking the tutorial had you buying not 1 BUT 2 THORNMAILS VS TRUNDLE WITH ASHE, ARE YOU FR???? my first matches I got flamed hard because I built 2 warmogs with all the characters
Word of advice: this doesn't just apply to fighting games lol
Sajam I’m with you; but fr fr you didn’t optimize your jungle clear before you hit the rift? That’s like 10 minutes in practice tool. Despicable man smh.
Sajam be like "y'all say you need to practice combos in fighting games but what about when you first go into a shooter and like you don't know how to press W to move around it's exactly the same thing y'all"
Biggest problem with fighting games is their low player numbers really. When I first started DNF Duel I could find people who genuinely didn't know how to play and I could beat them because I was the one who learned the starter combo. That was fun, and it kept me playing and improving. But if you went into DNF Duel nowadays there's barely any new players to be had and people are gonna hand you your ass on a platter, and despite everyone pretending like oh it's no big deal losing is doing absolutely nothing to my emotional state, losing over and over can be pretty demoralizing. That's where the "I need to learn too many intricate complexities to be good at fighting games" mentality comes from. If there was a Popular Fighting Game with as many players as League of Legends nobody would ever say this because you'd always have new players to pit yourself against and you'd actually feel like you stood a chance. You can replicate this by looking for new fighting game releases and playing on day 1 but it sucks that you have to do that.
i feel you. best way to learn a fighting game is to have a friend who's about as good as you who you can play with regularly.
In general I definitely agree with you, but the last LOR patch actually was the worst meta in the last two years :p
I invite everyone to watch Artosis rage clips so you understand how similar game genres are.
Is it reupload?
no