Moral vs Abare Play

And that folks sums it up perfectly.

 

I think when I used to play, I would over criticize myself, and worry about things that weren't happening on the screen. A lot of characters have amazing options in good/bad situations. If your opponent isn't using those options, I think a good player isn't gonna bother worrying about them. Like, if a guy isn't using sarahs 1 throw, what's the point of trying to escape it? If my opponent isn't throwing me at all, I'm just gonna block everything. You might eat even more damage than you would have from the throw by trying to escape 100 throws 24/7 lol. Its up to your opponent to put that fear in you. Otherwise, abuse em for being one dimensional

 

I'm personally much more successful as a player, when I keep my playing moral.

 

I think players with better reaction time favor moral play. People like me who can't see +4 as quickly or recognize flashes of color tend to abare more often.

 

You probably right about that.

One thing's for sure, if I start attacking out of disadvantage a lot, I'm losing matches constantly. Sometimes I'll play matches deliberately trying to devise some ways of attacking out of a bad situation all day, and I just lose even to players that I feel I shouldn't. I don't know how some players even do it. I'm at my best when I play a wild moralist style.

 

Thanks Tony, you're a real bonus to VFDC for keeping people interested in VF.

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Here's an interesting video that you see some moral and abare play mixed in together. I think the match is a great example for this thread.

One example of abare is when you see the Lau player use heelkick abare after his low rising attack is guarded. The Lau player also often uses 2p abare in slight disadvantages, especially after heelkick is guarded. Watch at 2:53 when Lau's low rising attack is guarded, Goh does nothing as he probably expected to see a heelkick. The frequent abare heelkick tactic after low rising attack probably threw Goh off a bit. This looked like a balanced match to me with lots of back and forth action from both players.

For me, I will discuss the most common abare tactic I've seen in VF which is to use 2P in slight disadvantage. The moral, defensive minded player can acquire the knowledge below by doing nothing or using fuzzy guard. Defensive players who have a while to play the same person, wont mind losing the first few matches to gain this knowledge and ultimately score more wins. Offensive players who want to rack up the wins as fast as possible and who might not play the same person many times in a row may often resort to abare 2p and find it very effective. The tactic is annoying and before your opponent can pick up on your habits and start throwing out big moves to nerf your abare 2p habits, you may have won a half dozen matches and moved right along. The problem here is that longer-term, most people using abare 2p have no idea what they just beat and how that knowledge can benefit them. These players will often lose more matches in a long session of VF vs moral defensive style players.

Personally, I'm an offensive minded player and I use 2P abare at slight disadvantage to test my opponents knowledge of frames and also to see how they react at being in slight advantage. For some, it may take many years of experience to turn 2P abare into a tool to understand your opponents reaction. It's super hard, at least for me, to watch carefully what my opponent was trying to do. Remember that 2P doesn't clash in VF5 Vanilla, so it's possible to watch if your opponent just tried to throw, attack, dodge or just guard.

Most people just 2p abare in an effort to make advantage for themselves out of being in slight disadvantage and it stops there. This is a hurdle all offensive 2p abare VF'ers must go through in reaching the next stage of strength. By reaching this level of watching ability, you may suddenly go from thinking you're seeing mindless 2P or auto-pilot abare to understanding that your opponent is using abare 2p as a fast move available to gain advantage on hit and to memorize your reactions. This leads me to another point that while abare 2p is a useful technique against people you've never played before, if you continue to use 2p abare over a long session against the same person, you're probably throwing it out there because it works and not because you really understood what your opponent was trying.

For the person using abare 2p, once you understand the reaction, you'll stop using abare 2p and switch up. For example if I watch that my opponent likes to attack while at slight advantage, I'll dodge or guard. If I see that they like to throw, I'll use a jumping attack to land bigger damage than 2p. If I see they like to dodge, I'll do a slow floating move to catch the dodge for big damage. That's the key to using abare 2p intelligently. If we play theory fighter, we understand this is what we are supposed to do after being in slight disadvantage, but in real play using 2P to gather this knowledge is hard. 2p is probably the most often used move in slight disadvantage and it's also such a fast move that you really have to pay quick and close attention to yourself and your opponent. Again, this is very hard and something that might take a while for you to develop a talent in seeing.

 

True I must say I played Kruza the other day and while it was a strange sight to see because both of us lack much stepping; I killed my antics to deal with his Aoi abare. The result was a very simple looking 5 win streak while previously he started beating me with mad counter hits into aoi shennanigans I didn't really know how to deal with.

Goes to show that even a scrub like me can benefit from moral play. Putting the time in to GET the reaction time for moral play may be more my fault than anything. (and lack of an attention span) While playing Kurza I just noticed that while he didn't do anything fancy defensively, he caught most of my mistakes, and delays. If he had a step game my simple stupid would have just lost with no answer at all.

Crazy stepping + moral play to quote SRK memes is Gdlk

 

On some wakeup kicks it's difficult to discern whether the opponent gains the advantage or not on normal hit, so the usage of that heelkick is a good choice sometimes. In addition to that, I think the rising kick situation at 2:53 where it was blocked, is some matchup knowledge too coming into play. Goh has the ability to sabaki the heelkick but then he's open to all those great punches Lau has, or Lau just baiting Goh into using the advantage. I think it's generally a decent idea in the matchup vs Goh to attack out of disadvantage to throw the Goh play off, in combination with ETEG to strip Goh's rewards.

Also I think some moves that leave an opponent at disadvantage isn't really a disadvantage either in the usual sense... if moves have respectable followups and where in specific matchups a character's movelist defensively can strip a characters options on advantage. Even distance and all that can play a huge significant part in it, if the fastest thing can't reach and stimy the opponents list of moves, and the other stuff can get reversed otherwise, then the advantage needs to be used in different ways that can probably get beat out by abare. Which really doesn't seem like an advantage anymore. Aoi for example creates situations like that, where her disadvantage is almost as if being an advantage instead. At certain ranges doing a sweep into tenchi stance for example.

A lot of stuff I'm finally learning after all this time. The more stuff I know, the better my moral play gets. Cause then I know in a specific matchup what moves make a best fit, on my advantage, and a lot of times it's not just a 6P. And my character of choice has benefits playing this way too.

I was playing with Denkai the other day, Jacky vs Jacky, and sometimes when he'd do 6P and I guard it, in an attempt to beat his fuzzy guard, instead of going for delayed throw, I went for 1P to get some damage to discourage fuzzy, and he went for P+K upon having his 6P guarded and it beat my 1P cause beat knuckle does more damage, and I slightly hesitated due to 6P having a followup and looking for possible backdash cause we were in open stance. 2P would've been a possible better response, but in the matchup 2P is going to miss against backdashing in open stance which is what the situation was, and P and 6P responses can be pak sao'd. And also to add to that, there's a bunch of other moves I could have used in the situation that could've gotten evaded and left me open, jabbed out of, or guarded for guarantee punish stuff.

So that story is kind of showing why sometimes not filling the void up with a move is a good use of advantage too. And matchup knowledge might have made the Goh do the same vs Lau. Goh has the ability to just stand there sometimes, because the character has options to shut down moves that come his way, but using that obvious ability, is obvious and can doom the player, so the threat of it can be good enough to make opponents dig their own grave.

Sometimes it's not even a real disadvantage if your opponent still has just as many options, even worse when you give them that many options. With Lau he keeps having the options, and they all reward so much, that's why he's so good all the time.

After all this time, even though I understand the dynamic of situations in VF, and can speak a little bit of knowledge about how the game works, I'm really low when it comes to specific matchups knowledge, and the more I learn that stuff the better I get now, because I have the tools already. I can seriously be taken advantage of even with my own characters at times. But now it's a bit different, instead of me just being correct in my guesses, I understand in specific matchups there's just great puzzle pieces you can put somewhere, that end up making advantage/disadvantage atleast in the small sense, just about who has initiative on a jab.

 

@Tonyfamillia: Good job on this thread. It has been a long while since I was interested enough in a theory question here that I partook in the discussion. I can also see this applies to more than just me. Your well deserved props

This paragraph you wrote is exactly why I enjoyed playing you on the regular back in my heavy training days. You and I both strive to play the game on a mind level like this. This is what I call "getting into someone's head", when someone can make all these calls right in the moment, or after a set of matches. This adds layers and layers of depth on the game that you can't get from just looking at the frames, you have to actually play the game and see the distance your moves cover, where the active frames actually are, what evasive properties your move has, and all this while taking into account what your opponents' options are too.

That my friends is what being in the zone feels like. All that just comes together into a good old butt whipping that's unparalleled. Things like this are why what looks like a risky option on paper is in reality a much more safe option when taking into consideration range, execution, damage and active frames of moves given your matchup

 

Thinking this way has it's downfalls when the matches don't go into that kind of depth though. Of that I've played, the few players in the states that I'd consider clearly stronger than me, have the ability to adjust for layers of depth, or lack there of, with consistency. Which I don't do, and it usually surprises them all the time, when I tell them of some players I lose matches to. I over analyze a situation, because that's just how I am as a person, and I don't think that's really a bad thing either because I don't judge, just perceive.

When you go too deep on players that aren't playing at that level of depth, you end up getting beat and frustrated and wondering why. For example, what's the point of doing a delayed 33K after a CH 6P, if your opponent was going to always hit P/2P or immediately hit some fast buttons, in response back to you anyway.

Matches don't lie when both you and your opponent feel the depth of choices made, regardless of who wins or loses. That's how you can tell when your opponent is strong at the game too, it's easy to spot it.

You know how in DBZ the stronger they got, the faster they got, and the fighters that weren't on the same power level could only see blurs and streaks, or as if the guys were just standing there because it was moving too fast? I guess it's like that?

Sometimes the most elementary day 1 tactics beat some pretty high level stuff. I guess that's some of the metagame. I remember Denkai told me awhile back, that in VF, a veteran can sometimes have difficulties vs a novice, where an intermediate would smash the novice, and the veteran would smash the intermediate, or something like that. Haha I messed it up. Energy drains quickly in VF, so I guess that's how it can happen, but you got to be able to adjust skill level accordingly to keep winning.

Have you seen that video where Kyaso(Kage Tetsujin, I think it was his name) played VF3 against 100 opponents? And he said that it was really difficult because he was trying to do certain things that just didn't phase the players. It's on youtube somehwere.

Either way, I think the variety of skill levels in this game is great, but there are some large gaps. A big downside to the game too sometimes. And the best part about when this game first came out though on 360 was that there was more players like ourselves, just starting out, which is great for VF because the game is at it's best when players of the same level of player play it against each other. When the gap is wide it's not all that fun from both sides.

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I hate to mention something Sirlin said, cause I don't really care much about his philosophy, but he was right about something he said once. It was about fighting or avoiding the fight or whatever. He mentioned his a2 rose low strong, against some dude he said was clearly better than him, but he degenerated the match and avoided "fighting" using the low strong. If he played regular, he would've gotten beat.

I don't know where this goes in my point, but I'm just putting it out there.

 

I have that same problem. I remember telling you and other guys players I would lose to and you'd be shocked. I have a real hard time adjusting to players that aren't thinking in layers like I do. I actually noticed I had this problem, and it was hella frustrating to lose because I didn't adjust to an opponent that just wasn't going to let me put another layer of complexity to the match. I found it boring to play matches like that. I actually moved over to SSFIV to specifically work on this failing of mine since I could run into more players there that weren't going to think in layered play-style. I've gotten a lot better at dealing with varied player skills through online ssfiv, I look forward to brining it over to VF one day.

I hope by the time VF:FS comes out I'll have enough free time to play seriously again since I'm pretty confidence I can learn to beat non-layered play now, even in VF.

 

I think you'll be fine. It's something we both could try accomplishing.

I hope FS comes out, that's pretty much it.

 

Nice Convo Slide and Tricky. Sometimes its a mind up thing when you listen to people who know thier shit lol!! But seriously sometimes you can only get into a zone when you playing with someone who regularly punishes your mistakes accordingly.

Lately i've been playing GT a lot and trying to crack his defense is mind numbing. He knows Jacky strings and he just straight up disrespect your shit mid string because he knows that character very well. He forces me to adapt to things on the fly and it makes VF so much fun knowing that my memory is being put to the test. after about 4 matches i get into this zone where i feel i can get a hit whenever i feel like it but its doesnt mean im winning the matches lol!! You can be in the zone and one good mistake can get you a quick loss. What im trying to say is with great opponents you can find your zone a bit easier when you know your mistakes will be punished.

 

I find that the better I get, the more easily I find myself doing things that, at a previous skill level, I'd call the zone. What my zone play looks like changes as I as an overall player level up.

Leveling up to me is brining my zone level play into my everyday normal play. After that happens my new zone starts to look different. That's when I sometimes need to search for new sparring partners, unless they level with me.

 

I think the mix of both is what creates top players, it throws out the element of suprise. I unfortunately play very abare style and have been called out for it. I also know the combos but have problems with full execution of said combos.

 

Just want to reply on the annoying PPP part: Unlike other characters, lion's PPP is only -3 on hit and Brad is one of the characters lion can do d/f+p+k+g or u/f+p+k+g (depending on stance) to evade standing p, elbow & low-p together.

 

Is there a list of what moves lion can evade with that maneuver? If not, I'm sure the lion community would be happy to see it.

 

Heh, that was a good set of games we played, TWP. You made the right adjustments while I did not and had a bad stretch as a result. Plus I have to learn to defend low with more consistency.

Anyway, I like to play at a faster pace -- be aggressive and initiate the action whenever possible. I didn't know there was a controversial play style term like "abare" to somewhat describe what that is. And by definition it seems that "moral" style aims to take a more passive approach as an attempt to establish a slower, more deliberate pace... and, to my chagrin, also requires more thinking to employ.

This may seem like a weird thing for people to understand, but I absolutely hate to think while playing VF. I play mostly by instinct, anticipation and feel. I find that when I think too much I hesitate, and when I hesitate I become indecisive. And I honestly believe the worst thing to be playing VF game is indecisive. A seasoned player will look to immediately go for blood against an indecisive opponent and not let up.

With that said, I agree with everyone stating that the best players can can pay both styles well and switch up on a whim. Unfortunately, forcing me to play "moral" style is like suddenly taking a fish out of water, lol.

And lastly, the truth is I'm not much of a stepper to begin with. But when you showed Shun's DM P+K move it completely discouraged that tactic. Stepping would've put me at a bad situation more often that I had already put myself in with my lousy job of defending against certain things you were doing.

Kruza

 

True enough Kruza would you believe that a few of hose DMP+K's were actually me trying to offensive move but my guard button is intermittent? Not to take anything away from you but sometimes it just didn't work. One thing that I have noticed while playing however is that DMP+K changes the complete psychology of an knowledgeable opponent faster than anything else. Not that I think it's a great feature or anything but I've seen matches swing completely in someone elses favor just because they've seen their opponent do it once.

Case in point I was getting the better of Jhwo the other day when he decided to focus on DMPK for difficult situations and setups for excessive mule kicks at small disadvantage. It threw me completely off for 2 games straight before I decided to stop playing him. It was the combination of the DMPK that did it mainly however.

What people generally call "not thinking" on here isn't really abare. It's called autopilot. They can be used in cohesion however a lot of people with auto pilot with an abare-ish pattern that for instance will include a move with special high properties, evasive properties, tech crouch, reversal or Sabaki properties (heck even DMPK). That way they use those properties to cover up their mistakes for example with Aoi you LOVED to reverse, until I started throwing instead.

One thing I noticed however is you generally didn't attack after being hit, or put at disadvantage. You constantly attacked from small disadvantage when blocked however; if I had an elbow class move with Shun I probably would have made you pay for it more often than I did. I'm sure he has answers of his own but I'm pretty poor at small advantage critical thinking with him so far.