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[Bal]

RE: Fighting game tiers. It's also a dangerous trap to get caught up in tier lists to begin with. Yes, eventually they will be valid, but they're usually regional (Balrog is rated much higher in S/SF4 the states than in Japan where he is played almost not at all), and sometimes a player will come out of nowhere and totally change how people look at a certain character.

For instance, I think we'll be seeing a lot more Adon play in future SSF4 tournaments thanks to Gamerbee at Evo this year. For those who didn't see, he eliminated Justin Wong from the tournament and made the top eight with what is considered to be a completely shit tier character. Wong himself is quoted as calling him the worst in the game.

[Rico]

OHKOs were banned not because they were uncounterable, but because so few Pokemon have Sturdy (and they aren't very good) they either completely stagnated and minimized viable team comps or just sucked the fun out of the game.  Evasion was banned mostly because most of the ways that theoretically should counter it if Nintendo cared at all are also affected by Evasion chance, so you could slap PHazing on every 'mon and it wouldn't do a thing.  Both of them get retested a couple times every generation to see if they're workable, and they're really not.

As far as fighting games are concerned, sure there's the rare occurrence of a guy's preferred style perfectly lining up with a terrible character, but unless there's some legitimately new brilliant strategy that no one else has thought of (there isn't), it's a matter of Daigo/Gamerbee just being that much better that it doesn't matter that he's playing a trash character.  I don't see how it changes up tier lists at all.

[Kazz]

i play terran

in SC1 i could play protoss but i have never, in either game, gotten the hang of zerg.

i just always seem to have too many of the wrong unit and generally the inability to fight whatever the enemy made.  which shouldn't happen, as terran i have more access to information about him than he generally does about me.

i'm thinking i should change my strategy to just turtle like a motherfucker and be unattackable and make heavily defended expansions until the enemy is tempted into blowing his wad on me, then cleaning him up with air or somethin

i find that having a medivac full of marines blow up is just about the worst thing that can happen to you so i don't put them in those

[Frocto]

I'm not "up" on competitive Starcraft, but any strategy that depends on your opponent making the first move seems like a bad one. They are always going to do the thing that gives them the most advantage and you the least.

Also, Envy should delete his terrible post.

[Bal]

Well, in the case of SSF4 the tier lists are pretty subjective because it's so new, so someone like Gamerbee coming out of nowhere and showing potential in a previously dismissed character will probably encourage people to explore that character. Older games, like Third Strike, have pretty solid tier lists with no real room for surprises.

[R^2]

I trained damn near every Pokemon available in D/P. The complaints ITT are largely why I got burnt out on it. I really want some of my builds to be useful, but they never ever will be.

[Detonator]

If I want to get back into Starcraft 2, I'm seriously considering putting up a "cheat sheet" that tells me what things I'm supposed to be paying attention to, because I'll always forget something.

[Bal]

The boxed copy comes with a notebook. I shed a single nostalgia tear.

[Doom]

i play terran

in SC1 i could play protoss but i have never, in either game, gotten the hang of zerg.

i just always seem to have too many of the wrong unit and generally the inability to fight whatever the enemy made.  which shouldn't happen, as terran i have more access to information about him than he generally does about me.

i'm thinking i should change my strategy to just turtle like a motherfucker and be unattackable and make heavily defended expansions until the enemy is tempted into blowing his wad on me, then cleaning him up with air or somethin

i find that having a medivac full of marines blow up is just about the worst thing that can happen to you so i don't put them in those

Don't do this.

The best tip you can ever hear about being good at RTS in your entire life is this:

Rushing wins. Hesitation dies.

I used to be garbage at skillful video games in general. As a teen, I eventually had my "Play to Win" revelation(i.e. how to do so, not an all-consuming desire and compulsion to do so, insert TF2/LoL joke here) and that was part of it: I'd have to stop comfortably turtling(but it's so much fun to make the perfect base and research every tech and hit the unit cap!) and start doing scary, risky shit like taking an expansion within the first 4 minutes of the match, or sending my ENTIRE shitty eight Marine military force out on a search and destroy.

I remember awhile ago we had some SC1 matchs for a Pyolympics and I saved recordings. They all show the same thing: me meticulously seizing control of the map via information while my opponents try to get a really cool tech upgrade on me. I'd have a zergling under every expansion. I'd poke and prod them the entire round. Maybe they'd finish their rushed tech hop. Except within parasitic moments, I know and just use a flat counter to it. Or drop Lurkers on their base because they didn't make anti-stealth. Or etc. And I'll have 1-2 expansions before they feel they have the balls to get go for one, with, OF ALL THINGS, AN ARMED ESCORT LARGE ENOUGH TO SUPPORT THE BASE ENTIRELY! laughingmutalisks.png!

I'd just send the drone alone. If I'm observant, I cancel the hatchery if he's discovered and burrow. If I'm unobservant, I could lose full Hatchery funds, but so what? I'm not going to win making Hydralisks 1-3 at a time as money trickles in. This isn't the only way to play but you get the idea: if I think I'm getting comfortable or too cautious, I go conquer part of the map or look for a fight. The opponent sure as fuck isn't gonna sit there and let me build up to 200/200 with Tier 3 Upgrades.

But yeah, if there is a way to win in ANY RTS via turtling, I'd love to read about it. It'd be fascinating. Because it'd be the 1% difference. And not Civ4, where obviously it is childishly easy to slam dunk a cultural victory. Decisive, early action is the heart of it.

[Bal]

It isn't so much rush don't hesitate as it is simply don't hesitate. The key to RTS, and to StarCraft in particular is to always be trying to gain the advantage over your opponent, no matter how trivial. Harass, if you can't harass contain, if you can't contain out macro, etc, etc, and always keep in mind that the direct path is the shortest path to defeat as often as it is to victory. All-in rushes aren't called cheese just because they end matches so fast, but because they're so binary that they're not even fun to watch. Either the rush succeeds, and the player is victorious, or it fails and they lose because of the tech and resource gap they've given in favor of the rush.

Really though, StarCraft and StarCraft 2 are just fucking hard. There are so many options open to every race in almost every situation that you pretty much have to be ready for anything.

Oh, and scout, scout, and more scout. It's all well and good to be ready for anything, but knowing is better than guessing.

[jsnlxndrlv]

Pretty sure we could accomplish this same discussion by linking to the Art of War and leaving the exercise of applying its principles to competitive StarCraft as an exercise for the reader.

[Rico]

Another way to say it is to never be passive.  If you're going to stall/turtle/draw out the game what have you, be sure you're not just waiting around doing it.

[Saturn]

RE: Fighting game tiers. It's also a dangerous trap to get caught up in tier lists to begin with. Yes, eventually they will be valid, but they're usually regional (Balrog is rated much higher in S/SF4 the states than in Japan where he is played almost not at all), and sometimes a player will come out of nowhere and totally change how people look at a certain character.

People also tend to forget that the tiers are based on HIGH LEVEL PLAY.

if you are Scrubby Mcbuttonmash picking a top tier character isn't going to help you much

[Kayin]

Well it all depends on what you mean by turtling. You can effectively turtle in Starcraft, but that doesn't mean "hide in base and tech to battlecruisers" or the plethora of bad ideas I had when playing Doom (when my friends and I would accuse of Ultralisk Rushing. ........... wtf were you smoking, younger me?). Doing a walloff as terran and powering your econ is pretty good, but you have to have a definitely plan of when to attack. Literal rushing (4pool keke) isn't all that hot, but effective harassment can be very important. If you don't harass you at least need a definitive point for when to attack. "Hey, when thermal lance finishes or when I research stim" or some key moment like that (the cool kids call this a 'timing attack'). You need a gameplan you can stick to.

If you're making Marine/Marauders though, you wanna be moving around the map. You got a very mobile army as opposed to if you go mech. With Mech it's okay to play relatively passively and just grind down the map over time. Terran walloffs are generally pretty great either way because they don't really cost you anything thanks to how depots work. Anyways while I take issue with some of the finer details, Doom does have the right mentality. You want to be doing things. Oh also Kazz, try the 111 build.

As for fighting game tier lists, my experience is "American players cannot make Tier Lists". As for the new characters being on the lower half of the list, I think it's half and half lack of experience and capcom being too conservative. I think we'll see some fluctuation up for some of them as they get their games developed. As for gamerbee's success, I do think a lot of it was actually related to a combination of his skill and Adon's surprise factor, though he's definitely better than the US players gave him credit for.

Also what Saturn said. It's kinda funny that a lot of the time low tier characters seem the most broken at low level play.

[Bal]

Which makes the tier list whinging of Smash Brothers players all the more hilarious. I mean, in melee there were basically two tiers "can wave dash" and "never used". I have no idea what the community is like now that wave dashing is gone from Brawl but I imagine they bitch about it and play melee instead.

[Kayin]

But everyone could wavedash.

Melee had a lot of characters used competitively despite the face that the game has awful balance. Delightfully stubborn people I guess. Anyways the wave dashing thing was always overstated. It's not even that omfgpowerful of a technique, it's just what everyone noticed. Smash's problem was more that the top 5 characters are all just obscenely good compared to everyone else. The game was balanced to about the same degree as Street Fighter 3: 3rd Strike. Which is to say 'awfully'. Well, I guess it's worse in Capcom's case because they were actually trying, but whatever. Wave dashing not being in brawl seemed to piss people off more from a "BUT I LIKE WAVE DASHING" angle.

Of course they're all 14 so they made a big fucking deal out of it but whatever >:( Also Better Brawl seems like the most mature attempt to rebalance Brawl while keeping it like Brawl I've ever seen. I was shocked the community  was mature enough to produce soemthing like it. Then I found out they wanted it to be more like melee still. SIGH.

[Doom]

I'm pretty sure the most heinous Melee balance issue was that Fox could shine you infinitely in 1/2 the stages. There only had to be a wall. You'd think a set of meaningful criteria could be established and agreed upon and a referee could call out and punish abusers, but that'd be something almost sensible. What did the Smash community do?

They banned half the stages. Then they banned another 1/4 of them for having "random" things, because being skilled at a game means never adapting to changing circumstances on the fly.

Super Smash Brothers Melee - Fox Tricks

Here we go. Smash became a game of like, Sheik Marth Fox and Falco doing the same super-precise glitchy shit to each other on Final Destination.

I think Brawl fares slightly better but I heard they banned Meta-Knight or something. Maybe the future could've changed if they had just banned Fox back in Melee days...

[patito]

You can't really establish a referee to rule out "abuse" of a move, If Fox can do something outright broken and all that is required is that there be a wall, then you have to ban either fox or stages with walls. Since other characters also have glitchy things they can do with stage layouts you can't really start banning characters. So banning stages and playing only on the most basic of stages is the most sensible solution.

Getting a referee to rule out on "abuse" is quite possibly the worst idea I've ever heard.

[Frocto]

It is impossible to ban people for abusing techniques like that, since there is no way of saying when they are using the move, but using it fairly and reasonably without abusing it, and when they are abusing. It is way too subjective. How many times would you allow Metaknight's dimensional cape glitch in a single match? Once? Twice? Would it vary from player to player? What if they claim they pressed the button accidentally, or did it without thinking of the glitch?

Edit: Yeah, basically what Patito said.

[Doom]

Oh well! At least I am not a competitive melee player.

Haha wow. It always felt like Mario was super garbage and his timing/priorities were way off when Brawl was released, but to see him in garbage tier...