Lag Sucks

Yea, I know, that goes without saying right? Well, let me explain where I'm going with this. I have recently come to the conclusion that lag simply makes me garbage at VF. I have been playing some matches on VF5 online again lately, after a several month long hiatus. Over the past couple of days I have had the opportunity to play some people I haven't played in quite a while. Some have gotten better (HappyFriend), while other are about the same (Konjou), and others still refuse to play me at all (Kaminari Oyaji).

So when I was playing HappyFriend's Jeffry earlier today, something magical happened. Through some mystical cosmic alignment, our connection and skill level was actually such that moral play trumped random abare tactics. This is something that I cannot ever recall happening to me before. Now I know I have been accused quite a bit of being an abare using player, who wouldn't know moral play if it smacked him across the head. But this isn't really true. I know how to play moral, but under most circumstances, either the other player isn't good enough to justify doing so, or the lag does not allow me to execute good moral play.

That's not an excuse you say? Well, maybe not, but there's not a whole lot I can do about it. If my options are, hold block even though I know I won't be able to react and defend properly, or mash punch and hope for the best, I'm going to mash punch. There is basically a cutoff point, where I can no longer break throws or block low in time. Once I reach that point, mashing punch actually tends to be the better option, unless the other player is somehow coping with the lag better than I am. Which does happen incidentally.

Just earlier, I was fighting Konjou, and he was doing his usual gimmick of turtling and poking, which he feels is the right way to handle my style. And he's more or less right, but not for the reasons he thinks. For instance, he was doing this thing where he poked me in the head with a punch, canceled, and poked again, over and over. Under normal circumstances, there would be a lot of ways you could deal with this. You could block and elbow, you could evade, you could go for the low punch, you could block and crouching back-dash, etc.. In my case I was having a hard enough time just blocking. I was trying my best, but nothing I tried was working. If I held block long enough for it to work, he could throw me, and I wouldn't be able to react. If I tried to input evade, his punch would still hit me. If I tried to low punch, it would sometimes work, but then he would low punch me before my block frames activated. I don't think I tried to crouching back-dash, but I doubt the lag would have let me get out of range in time. No, I was fucked. So what do I do? I abare punch and hope to nail him trying to throw me. And now, OMG I am teh scrub.

But okay, I know what you're thinking. If the lag was really that bad, why couldn't I turn around and do the same thing to him? Well, I really don't know to be honest. There is some evidence to suggest that lag can be asymmetrical, and affect one person more than the other. Even if that weren't the case though, I still play VF very reactively, and usually do my inputs at the last possible moment. It really throws me off when the lag won't allow me to do that. Not badly enough lose against someone much worse than me, but badly enough that against someone who is actually good, I will screw up the timing of my inputs again and again. This more or less makes it look like I have no fucking clue what I'm doing, when the reality of the situation is I simply can't execute what it is I mean to do.

And once again, I know what you are thinking. This is just what someone would tell themselves to justify how badly they suck. Well, the reality of the situation is, when I fought Konjou, I won almost as many matches as he did. That is, until a combination of the lag and his turtling started to demotivate me enough that I went on autopilot. But I still feel really bad about the way the matches went, because even though I was trying hard at first, I still couldn't play a good moral game with him the way I know he wants me to. I guess my point is, we all have our shortcomings at playing with VF, and dealing with lag gracefully seems to be one of mine. (Wow, you know come to think of it, Konjou has probably never seen me play anyone else, other than those WCG matches years ago. Given how our matches usually go, I can see why he doesn't think very highly of me as a player.)

So, if you were in my position, what would you do? Try to play as moral as possible all the time, even knowing it makes you lose more often online? Or keep scrubbing it up with abare, even though it pisses a lot of good players off?

 

Hey man I can comment more on what you wrote here but as for Konjou high punching you over and over....you have to learn to fuzzy guard. Once again, a high punch that is blocked still leaves the blocker at -2 (yes the attacker, whose high punch was blocked, actually gets a +2 advantage), so he can basically do as many of those high punches as he wants to. You have to fuzzy guard, which will 1. duck the throw after the punch, 2. duck the punch after the punch, and 3. also block the mid (yes fuzzy is that fast). Once you block his mid, you have the advantage. Once you duck his throw, you have a free P+K or throw of ur own.

And it aint wrong to throw a high punch out sometimes there like you were doing....you were only at -2 and your punch is 10 frames...so you had a good shot at beating him if he tried something else.

 

Crouching is the best option to the jabs, so they completely whiff. you can punish, or 2P if you want. Crouching is REALLY good in VF!

As Eileen, you can use 3p+k and look for a CH and follow-up with 6k for a combo. you could also do 4pkg, which guarantees 46p > p3pk. The 46p is dependent on foot position after 4p+k+g though.

Oh and to answer the question you actually asked, you gotta do what you think will work at that specific moment. So there's no direct answer, especially when it comes to playing someone that knows stuff.

 

Ok, in theory yes. But like I said, lag. In practice what would happen is I would get hit twice before the block frames activated, and then get nailed with the throw anyway because the lag made it come out late.

 

You can't do elbow after his punch blocked cuz you are at -2 and your elbow is still 14f. I strongly believe these constantly punches were due to Konjou realized he had suffered in lag issue plus you have 10f punch. And yes, lag sucks.

 

Oh really? I though elbow did beat that after blocking. Thanks to the lag, half of the time it did, so you can see where I got confused...

 

Haha, I think I know what's going on here. Konjou couldn't use his elbow at +2 due to lag and got your elbow hit instead, so he realized he had to use faster moves which are either P or 2P. So the match probably was like he constantly used regular punches in order to narrow down your attacks, and make you block. Try next time by doing ETEG, and it should buy you some chances.

 

Actually, he was using Sarah at the time... Also, I would have loved to use ETEG had the lag actually allowed me to. Believe me, I tried. I got hung up on the part where I hit the evade button and the punch hit me anyway.

 

If I was in your position, and I was going to make a moral choice, I'd make the moral choice regardless of it makes me lose online more often or not. If you do otherwise, you just forming bad habits for yourself. If I was going to make the abare choice, I'd make the abare choice regardless of if it makes me lose more often or not.

It's a choice, and I'm making it whether I'm playing online matches or offline matches. I don't scrub it up, however strong or weak I'm playing on any given day I'm not trying to scrub it up.

We've played online plenty of times, and I have the same exact issue with you, where I get my moves stuffed constantly, usually when I'm under the assumption that I executed them air tight(and I know my frames, on the common universal strikes, believe me). Playing online can often times cause a draft. And even moreso with rust combined with that. I try to keep it movin', as I'm sure others would to, as I'm sure Konjou would try to do too, but I can tell you're going to make it hard for him calling what he was doing gimmicks and made it a point to say you were winning just as much as he was(when it doesn't matter) and posting it on the forums.

I played some matches online with Dennis the other day, and near the end of our sessions some silly stuff happened cause the connection got bad. We just ended the session and laughed about what happened, that's what graceful looks like to me. Even though we've all been anything but graceful at times with playing online, cause you can easily just be in a bad mood.

 

Sara has a 14f elbow too, so it didn't matter whom Konjou used. I was just assuming, and to be honest I can't guarantee what's Konjou's exact thought during your matches. Also Sara has 10f punch as yours.

2P might be the best solution for me to stop my opponents keep using punch I think.

 

I wasn't trying to be insulting. I was just saying, he was using mainly a few specific things to beat me, that lag made it difficult for me to deal with them the right way™. And the only reason I said I won a fair amount of the matches we had is so people didn't get the idea that I lost and decided to go on a rant because I'm a sore loser or something. That seems to be the default assumption when you blame anything on lag... But the matches I had with him were just an example anyway. I was also having similar thoughts when I was fighting kingofvf4 earlier, and him being from France and all, we lagged horribly, and I barely won any matches against him at all.

 

In practice that's what I did more than anything else. But then he would just 2p me back, and I would be forced to block as I couldn't get the evade timing to work very well. And really, mashing 2p all day long because lag won't let you do anything else with any degree of consistency does not make for good matches.

 

What did you do after you 2P him?

 

I know you wasn't trying to be insulting, but it sure looked like it was coming off that you were. But you clarified, you weren't, so it's whatever.

btw, you sent me a message on live earlier and I responded, and then a few min later I tried to get some games in with you and sent invite twice but you never accepted(while still "Viewing Menu"). I guess that was when you were mad frustrated.

 

Does it really matter? Given the amount of lag, what I actually ended up doing and what I meant to do were frequently not the same. Anyway, I didn't make this thread to pour over the specific details of the one situation in the match (out of many) I used as an example. Moreover, to ask the question, should you always try play moral, or should you always try to win?

 

That's not mutually exclusive.

 

Huh? I wasn't really frustrated. More than anything else, I was bored. Konjou always said he had boring matches when I played him, and you know what, he was right. When you have to limit yourself to the extent I did to ensure the things you actually do use in a match have a fair chance of working, that's usually how things end up. But I also thought that realistically, if I had tried to fight the match the way I would have liked to, I would have lost every round. And that got me thinking, so I wrote my first post.

Also, the only message I got from you was "i was playing already". If you sent any others, I never got them.

 

Konjou can say the exact same thing, about you, just remember that. Try to look at it from his perspective too, when you do that.

Nah I sent one message, but then I sent two invites so they'd disappear after I stopped hosting.

 

Hmm... but you know, the unfortunate thing is, had I been able to react and defend well in the first place, there would have been no issue to begin with. It's just that when there is that much lag I have to make a conscious effort to play moral even when I know it leads to situations where I will not be able to defend, and that puts us in a sort of prisoner's dilemma. If I play 100% moral, and he plays 100% moral, theres no problem. But if something he does beats me when I know it shouldn't have, then I throw something out that shouldn't work but does, and before you know it, the match has degraded into a 2p battle.

 

It does matter, cuz there were a lot of things you could do after 2P hit +7. But you said Konjou could 2P you back so I'm wondering what you did? A regular punch right after?

To answer your question, if you can't react properly at +7, you can just leave the match, cuz it's not VF anymore.