Social's VF5FS Blog

Fail, they did not line up perfectly!!!

 

Much Respect Social.. Im a Lei Fei hater lol!!! I hate that bastard.. He's just to tough. I hope you get your groove back quick.. we need to catch up on sparring...

 

@Chibiaya - I should have said 0 people are doing 100% max damage with Jacky. I'm not even doing max damage with Jean, I find something new everyday.

@Social - I know nothing about FS Goh.

 

I know im not.. I take my damage anyway I can get it... 83 -95 is the range im staying for my non launcher combos. Against upper tier players such as yourself... Im not chasiing high risk.. Fuck reaching for big damage.. I just wanna kept hitting you from every angle... Eventually it will open up.

 

Hi all,
I've had a trying couple days here on my work trip to Juneau. I left for the airport yesterday and my arduous journey began. I started my day with a long pissy voicemail on my phone with my boss asking why i wasn't at work, and what the hell was i even doing. This was probably the highlight of my last 2 days. He felt like a 1st rate douche when i called him back asked him what he was talking about. He actually scheduled the flight that took me to juneau but didn't put it on his calendar.

My flight actually left 1.5 hours earlier than my itinerary that was emailed to me. Thus i had the luxury of waiting 3 hours for the next flight.

Then i got to everything started going wrong. I forgot my xbox for that out of town hotel room training-not the end of the world. Then my credit card was declined at the car rental. I my bank seemed to go to every length to not care. In fairness it was my fault, i was near my limit and need to do my expense reports to pay it. Eventually i just had to break down and call my brother wasted wish to go to my bank and make a credit card payment on my credit card. For whatever reason only credit card payments post instantly to my credit card. This particularly sucked since wasted was under the weather/3.2 flu. I felt awful about it.

Well after that i went to home depot in juneau (i'm a vendor rep for power tools) and made my rounds and worked a little bit. Afterwards i went to the hotel to book my room for the night. I stopped at the local fred meyers and bought some fried chicken. I got it back to my room and ate about 2 bites and thought this isn't very good. 2 more bites and i thought, wow this chicken is actually right. Fast forward to 30 minutes later and i'm getting very very sick. I don't know if it was food poisoning or not, but it was near enough to make no difference. And this is how i spent the whole night throwing up instead of sleeping. By about 8 AM i started to recover to the point of being post sick rather than actual sick. Between being sick, and throwing up, and not sleeping i felt like i was operating at about 40% of my mental capacity. My head was dizzy and felt swimmy. My voice sounded weird in my ears, which is great since my job involves tool demos and customers. Honestly, i would have been useful showing up drunk.

I legged out that miserable day and my boss was kind enough to get me a 7:50 return flight. Which is kinda asinine since i don't particularly care to work 10 hours of free overtime. I did my 8 hours, and headed to the airport to just chill for 3 1/2 hours.

Man i was stressed the whole time too. Driving around in the rental car after being sick all night i was simply not OK to drive. I was having trouble staying in my lane because i was so dizzy. Well, i shouldn't say having trouble, but it was a real effort and took all of my attention. Thank heavens they don't have ice there yet. I would have given up and just called a taxi instead lol. Hell, even now the second i stand up i get dizzy til i walk it off.

The good news is i'm mostly out of the woods now. I've decided i'm not dying, and i'm glad that i didn't go drop $1000's on a trip to the hospital. I'm happy to be going home until monday, and plan to practice some throw escapes. Need to keep reinforcing that. NIce thing is i can do it on lvl 5 dojo training and get to learn some moves. I'm thinking today i'll be practicing lau and jean. It's a really great way for me to learn my frames. Also it's fun to practice my wall combos there. I found a 170 damage wall combo. Although, it involves 2 stagger recovers to land. On the other hand the stagger recover actually works sorta nicely and even though it won't be guaranteed of the opponent ducks on recover you still get the full damage.

P.S. thanks for the effort you guys put into that tier thread. Lot's of good reading to help me pass the time.

~social ruin

 

Man what a great night of vf5.
I got my ass handed to me by like 8-9 different people. Going through some growing pains as low attacks have erroneously fallen out of favor with me. I need to remedy that and did some research tonight that i think will help.

Love the dojo. It actually is fun to practice now. Tomorrow might be a few rounds of stagger recovery (still not fun to practice). It would be nice to eliminate some of that damage.

Also i'm hoping to practice vs lvl 5 or special sparring and focus only on whiff punishes. There are too many close matches where i watch that low k whiff and don't react. Giving away free damage won't get me anywhere.

Next order of business will be to practice some better combos vs lightweights. I realized i'm giving away around 20-30 dmg a clip on some of the combo starters that i regularly hit. Another reason this is appealing is they look sweet.

My oki game is severely lacking. I have to admit, i find oki harder to implement in fs. It's like everyone just rolls backwards and plays everything safe. I have a few ideas how to chase these miscreants down and force the issue at advantage. Having limited oki is really hampering my game. Anytime you can attack with strong initiative or advantage you have to force that issue. Not sure i will get around to this tomorrow, but it is definitely on my to-do list. I need to enlist the help of some strong friends for a bit of oki theory to base my game on. I don't really know what is strong oki material on FS. On vanilla it was easier to force out those guesses for me.

I like to play a pretty game of vf and right now that isn't happening too often. By locking down more dmg and putting myself at advantage more, i should be able to allow myself to play a beautiful game. I look forward to improving my fundamentals to shut down abare players quicker. Even though it was a tough night of near losses (and some wth was i doing) games, it was really heartening. I see no reason why i couldn't be doing 40% more damage while taking 20% less in short order.

Evading is still an issue here in Alaska. You have to buffer the hell out of an evade (especially at round start, i have to press that crap at like .5 seconds before the round). Still, i'm gonna cross my fingers and hope that muscle memory will adjust and make it natural someday.

Great room tonight. Room matches are so sweet. I look forward to being able to split my matches in them someday soon, and then taking on ranked. Sorta been putting off ranked matches until i feel up to par.

Was proud of wasted_wish's playing recently. He's taken his pai up a bit of a lvl. 2 1/2 weeks ago i was better than him, but not anymore. I look forward to seeing the stuff he's working on used in games in the future.

Thanks for all the games tonight guys, it was awesome getting to see such a play style variety.

~social ruin

 

More Social blogs coming at you vfdc.
Last night i finally had a decent night of vf5fs. I had been going through some struggles as mentioned above. It was becoming frustrating as i spent a lot of time in lvl5 training-hammering-hammering-hammering throw escapes and wall combos. I mean i was doing WORK to try and get better. I was all HYPE to go out and bust out these new-damage-avoiding/dealing skills on my fellow loyalists.

Well the following day (3 days ago i believe it was) i took my game to a massive room of well-knowns. I didn't realize quite how much i had stagnated in the time i solely focused on TE/wall combos. One problem was, i didn't play vs level 5, i blocked vs level 5 holding TE all the while. I mean, yeah i threw out some big launchers to cause him to throw too. But i was laying on that guard trying to bait out -12+ moves to land the ez pz free damage. I want to improve that too. Back on point, i got in the room match and started out ok i suppose. Almost one a few, and then lost one i should have won. Then had some lag-in-my-head-or-was-that-me-or-was-it-my-controller-????-spells. In the end, i'm not sure i won a single game. To make matters worse (sorta, but sorta better) wasted wish was playing some of his best vf yet.

I got myself trapped. I was losing so i wanted to play a solid 6p based game. I was scared to go slow-low because i was already getting punished too easy. Left me one dimensional. It was a mess.

Anywho, last night i rededicated myself to some low game, it opened up my mid game, opened up my throw game...finally i had an offense going with goh that could space me a little breathing room and cause my opponents to hesitate. It came together and had a shadow of the strength that i was thinking/hoping i could get. (oh yeah, spent an hour throughout the day working on stagger recover and it paid huge dividends).

The highlight of the night for me was learning you can start gohs wall combo with 3k+g (compliments of shinybrentford). This is fantastic news. In the immortal words of Andre the Giant "That's woooondeerrrful". I also saw how i was misusing my p sabaki. Which is stupid, because i used to use it correctly.

I'm out of town again today but already excited to go home tomorrow and start adding another layer.

Lowlight of the night was making wasted wish play when he didnt want to. He was a but under the weather and sleep deprived. I guilted him into it by telling him, "if u aren't playing u aren't getting better"...he promptly proved me wrong, hahhaha.

~social ruin

 

Social Ruin's blog for the win.

More players should start a blog. Be it newer players chronicling their adventures, or misadventures as it may be, towards becoming respectable, veteran players regaining form, or well-formed players trying to clear that last hurdle towards being beastly.

"But wasted, isn't this more than a little self-serving?" One could view it as such. But this "One" does not. In my opinion, VFDC is too quiet. I remember back in the "glory days" of VF5 Vanilla you could log on and find 5 new posts every 30 minutes. Blogs are just another layer of interesting to add to the site.

If feck, marly, G1 Tin Tin, Airigens, SDS......any of you, if you had a blog i'd drop by, drop a line, or just lurk and read it.

I'd gladly read and see what new bad-A airigens is doing to better his game. He has made such amazing progress in a short term. What is he practicing, how much "studying" is he doing? or is he just running through the obvious set ups/strats anyone can glean from watching chief flash games? (i see most all the same set-ups between the two).

Likewise, say newbie XYZ is listing what he is training, and says "lots of practice vs sarah in dojo, i hate her. I spent 2 hours using her just to get it!" Then a more veteran player could step in and say:

WHOA NEWBIE XYZ, THATS TERRIBLE!! You don't do max damage combos, you don't fuzzy, you don't throw escape, you never evade, and i have played you 100 times and you never use any of your throws. Why spend 3 hours to get better vs one character, when you could have spent that 3 hours working ON YOURSELF and be better than every character?!?!!?! Here, try these drills instead.

So you guys see where i'm going with this. Blogs can be a source of entertainment, inspiration, humor, improvement, etc... Really, just a way to add more interesting content to the site.

/blog (on social_ruins blog, lol)

 

A personal blog post.
I'm trying something a little different here. I know a lot of you could care less about my day to day goings-on. Especially since my blog format is intentionally wall of text. I try and give the vfdc'er something to read if they want some vf related talk (since the sight has so little action). Anyhow, i decided when i post non-vfdc related posts they will be in purple, so you can skip them if you aren't interested.

I'm the great city of Kenai today for work. Another overnighter with no VF /cry. I really want to bring an xbox and do stuff, but to my dismay i found out the 2nd xbox doesn't seem to work. Thanks RedRingSoft. Honestly tho, i waited too late at night to download that crap anyway, but not the point.

Fortunately, kenai is a 20 min flight and has no security passpoint. Still i almost missed my flight. Free stress, gotta love it. First night of snow (1-1.5 inches) in anchorage last night and every year at the first flake drivers (women?) lose their minds and wreck their cars in droves. Don't ask me, i don't know why. And there were 2 wrecks on my way to the airport. I left my house 2 hours early, even though it's a 30 minute drive, and takes all of 15 minutes to park, check bags, get pass, and to the gate. I thought i'd get their early and do GG's or the above blog. It takes 1 hour 40 minutes to get to the airport. By the time i'm checking my bags and getting my pass it is 8:14 AM, and the plane boards at 8:20 AM. Stressful start to the morning lol. And to think, when leaving for the airport i turned around a block from my house to go back and grab my coffee. The whole drive i was thinking, is my spending 5 minutes getting my coffee really gonna sabotage my flight!!!!

I get to Kenai, and go to the local Alpine Suites (not suites really but i find hotel rooms are actually nicer than i had expected across the board for all hotels). A new girl is training at the counter and she's actually really really cute. She is goin out of here way to chat me up and giving me some serious googoo eyes--or so it seems. At this point i feel like i'm being uninteresting and not making a good show of my half the conversation--considering tfam and i stayed up til 2 am play vf, and then wasted wish and i wanted to hang out before the night was over. For those of you living under a rock, wasted wish is my 'in real life' identical twin brother and we live together. Long story short a notched about 2 1/2 hours sleep.

Had to back edit here for a minute. When i say she is training i mean a 55 yr old experienced desk lady is basically attached to her at the hip.

As an aside i will say that i can function on 2-3 hours sleep a night rather well--even for 4-5-6 nights in a row. I'm a bit of an insomniac by nature, and have never been the type to just accidentally fall asleep. I don't mean this as some sort of badge of honor. I don't consider it some great boon. It is a consequence of my inability at times to sleep. It is more like how a man with a limp goes on walking. Ok, so can function on little sleep, blah blah blah...I do however, lose some desire to be witty, clever, charming, talkative, and the like.

Well, i'm thinking damn this girl is really giving me the eye. And she is passing the counter test with flying colors. The counter test is, "she looks good behind a waist high counter, hope she's not a mess when she steps out from behind it".

At this point i conspire to maybe see one another a few more times, and see what's up. Meaning, instead of getting the free coffee at Home Depot today, i'll go back to the hotel (literally across the street) for my coffee. Again, she is giving me the eye when i come back and is doing the smile thing where it's more like they can't stop smiling when we make eye contact.

I go back to work for a few hours and then come back to the hotel. I write her a nice little note on a small work sticky tab paper thing and fold it in half and head back downstairs to hit the desk again to ask if they have a fitness room (which i already know they do). The older lady tells me the directions while the cute one tries to hide looking at me out of the corner of her eye and smiling away. Don't get me wrong, i'm not exactly giving her the cold shoulder

I'll pause here to say i know a note is lame, but if there is a subtle way to try and get something going with a girl that has her manager next to her at all times i don't know it. Plus, i'm pretty much positive their has to be some don't fraternize with the guests rule...just has to be.

Finally i just say screw it, and get to an angle where only blondie can see me and wave her over to me. (she is pretty happy about this). She makes no bones about it and just walks away and out the door to where i am. I hand her the note feeling a bit awkward, saying 'yeah didn't want to do this in front of your manager'.

The damn thing is folded in half with the mssg (my digits, and what not) on the inside. It's sticky notepad paper so it's stuck shut. She looks at it like it's a rubix-cube. And she is reading it (it's an advertisement for powertools, that's the line of work i'm in) and completely baffled she's like, "um..thanks. I ummm..ok, you wanted me to give this to my boss i will".
YEAH THAT'S IT!!!! you figured me out. We've been digging each other all day and i waved you out here to have you give your boss a flyer for a rotary tool.

So i said, 'no, i think you are supposed to open it'. She's opens it and still staring blankly at only the add on the front and says, "err thank you, i'll give it to her". My YOMI was pretty weak on this one guys. I thought the situation was self explanatory, but damn me. So i kinda give her the turn it over hand sign because at this point she is still gonna give my info to a 55 yr old lady. Now she turns it over and reads it with me standing right fucking next to her. This is not going well at all. If this was gonna be the case i would have just said it to her myself, but my head is like wtf is so confusing about this. So now i'm standing there a--32 year old man--with a pretty lady reading a note i just handed to her.

Fuck me. I might as well have just walked up, puked on her, and said, "Hi, I'm SOCIAL RUIN and i stayed up waaaay too late last night watching videos of Shangster and flash in their RAPE ROOM"

Back to reality. She says sincerely, "well aren't you smooth". I'm thinking fuck no. It took me 10 minutes to convince you not to give my info to your boss telling her how great it was to talk to her.

At this point i don't know if this disaster blew it for me or not. But if it did, i'll reserve the right to take the high road and tell myself, 'if she couldn't figure that one out on her own, i'm probably not missing much'.

Thanks for reading,

~social ruin

 

Ahhhhh what a great day.
I have a semi-rare and unexpected 2 days during the work week in a row where i get to work on my VF game. Today was a total surprise. It was scheduled as a hellish day in Juneau which involved me leaving my house at 5:45AM and arriving back at my front door at 10:30 PM. It really was a truly ridiculous notion giving the logical alternatives to scheduling that could have been pursued. Well, Karma bit my boss in the ass and my flight was pushed back 1 hour, then 2 hours, then 2.5 hours, then 2 hours 45 mins, the 3 hours, then 3.5 hours. At this point it no longer made economic sense the company to fly me up there. I feigned being angry about the injustice of the airlines poor service (on the phone with my boss) and then gleefully drove home and played VF haha. And tomorrow i plan to put in a short day as well. Start taking back some of the massive OT my work has been wringing from me and not paying me for. Then the weekend. I hope to level up in these 4-5 days.

At a great boon to my game my brother saw in the shoutbox where tricky said that stagger recovery only can be done during the red joystick--just like on vanilla. This was a shocker to me. I am absolutely positive that i read one of the changes to this game was the red stick only showed when recovery phase was almost over and that you should try and recover the whole time (i actually thought this was in the in-game tutorial *shrug*). This is fantastic news to me. It also explains why i could recover quicker in games than in practice--i.e. slower reaction time when it happens organically than when i'm recording cpu action then recovering meant i would stay more in the red. Now i'm practicing stagger recover the correct way and look forward to whipping out some lighting quick stagger recovers. All part of my never ending quest to avoid a sliver of damage here and a sliver of damage there.

Just that one little bit of damage avoided will win you maybe 1-2% more rounds. Sounds small but given how many games a person can play in a relatively short period of time, and games going 5 rounds...2% could be a round every 10 games or so. Well, that is not that significant, but when you start compounding this effect, next you know you are simply tougher to beat. And of course any tech that leads to you maybe dealing 1-2% more damage in the process and you got a 2-4% swing.

Stagger recovery is absolutely one of these such swings. With quicker stagger recovery i have already seen a large swing in dmg taken:damage dealt. Every time i stagger quicker than my opponent expects i'm getting to block an attack they thought they'd land and grab some advantage. I love it. And i'm still not recovering as nearly as quick as i know i can.

The opposite side of this coin as i've been trying to work on some circumstantial tech that has not led to anything but negative results so far. Trying to get a handle on that Goh triple-option select from a -10 disadv. Starting to get the hang of the throw reversal, and the p sabaki/TE is easy enough, well perfectly easy. However when i put the computer on mid/throw then suddenly the throw reversal is a beast for me to get in lol. I always press it too soon. And it certainly doesn't help that the computer does the mid about 80% of the time and throws 20% of the time. And forget it in an actual game. Yet, i remain undiscouraged because i remember feeling the same way about regular combos once upon a time, and then wall combos, and then fuzzy, and then throw escapes. Before you lock in that muscle memory it is just a lesson in frustration. Wait no!!! i was gonna...ugh.

Now if you could just react to low attacks a bit quicker. I honestly don't know whether it is me or online. Surely a bit of both.

I'm pretty sure that's my plan of attack for the next couple days. Isolated stagger recover practice (i get overheated practicing them in about 5 minutes lol). Wasting time on that triple option select that i won't be using for sometime now. Maybe fuzzy-attack option select if i get any responses to the thread i made there. Then some lvl 5 training and working on low attack reaction time. Oh yeah, and working evading strings of moves/combos rather than one evade and forcing them to track my undisciplined attacks.

~social ruin

 

Good morning VFDC'ers,
Well at least morning for me here in the wonderful city of Fairbanks, AK. On the road again for work. The endless grind. It is currently -24 farenheit (-31C) outside and i can here the wind whipping by my 3rd floor hotel room window. And this is just the tip of the iceberg for Fairbanks. In deepest winter i can look forward to some -40's on my trips here. Granted, there is a road sign right past the home depot that says "North Pole" next exit. <--this is not a joke, i am within spitting distance of the North Pole.

I got off work last night and came to the hotel and just geeked out to some serious VF watching. First i saw myself playing chief flash real time, that was somehow surreal. well of course it was actually my brother SMB on my account, but still a strange thing to stumble upon.

Then was Exzet (kage) vs Truewiseman FT10. 10-9 for Truewiseman. Too many disconnects but otherwise a very good set. VFDC elitism reared it's obtuse head as many VFDC vets agreed that it would not have been nearly as close offline and that wiseman would have killed him. This is just stupid. No one can say such a thing with any actual certainty. The only thing we know for certain is that Exzety (spelling) adjusted to the online environment roughly as well as Truewiseman did, and thus it would make more sense to assume he would adjust to an offline environment roughly as well as Truewiseman will. I hate this offline based denial so many people actively engage in. Note: really enjoyed Blackstars commentating. I am a somewhat low key person by nature, so i enjoyed his style and that he didn't make endless references to himself, how good he was, his own accomplishments, and the like.

Then was KO vs Denkai. Another good set. KO acquitted himself nicely. Although somewhere near the midpoint it turned into a standard KO FT10 (ya know, where both players start just being trollish and not really playing their best).

I fell asleep 1/2 way through the GT vs Denkai set. Thief was up 5-4, but Denkai was outplaying him IMO.

Oh it kinda sucked. When watching my brother play flash i got to watch on stream as my beloved joystick died. Sometime during the last 2 matches the up direction quit entirely. 7,8,9 directions became a deadzone. Very sad. Hopefully SMB will unscrew the bottom of the stick and it will be an ez fix, like something just came loose. We have a backup stick and a SFIV tournament edition. But the D-pad area of the bottom of the joystick is smaller (if that makes sense). Less joystick travel distance which might be good, but also might be less articulate for clean inputs. Don't really care to have to adjust to a new stick. I really loved my stick.

On the other hand, i actually ordered a hitbox the night before!!! That's right, i may be making the switch to the hitbox. Actually i just had to try it out. It looks like it could be the future of joysticks. It was scheduled to be shipped yesterday, so we'll see. I'm pretty excited to get my hands on it and take those damn steps backwards in the name of getting better lol. I wonder if my joystick dying the next day was a sign it was a good choice.

I've still been working hard on my game. I actually got the fuzzy-attack-option-select working pretty well. Generally i just come out of the fuzzy with goh's 46p into combo. My ability to do so on 1p side outpaces 2p side. Still not 100% but definitely getting better. It feels pretty beastly...ya know in dojo. Practicing this ill say it makes you realize just how rarely people try and throw you after they block your '-5 moves haha. I really need to improve my fuzzing after being hit/blocking jab. If i could rock this option-select vs 2p/p->throwers, now that would be sick. Really i need to start fuzzying after i get hit/block adv moves. Not quite sure how to go about practicing this, but i'll figure something out.

My stagger recovery practice has paid huge dividends already. Also my triple option select tech is getting strong for dojo. Not quite game ready yet, but it's on the horizon.

I still need to invest in my Oki, but a developed a new tech for myself (new to me, i hadn't seen it anywhere else). After seeing the grapage available on cheif flash's catch grab game i decided that i am going to abuse the ridiculous grab range of goh's 4pkg-p+g and use it as purely a catch throw in some situations...it works. Most surprisingly it makes a strong oki move. You can outrange a rising attack with it and use it after causing whiff. Also this will set up other mixups. And yes you can punch theory holes in this strat. But it flat out works. Just like you could say everyone should dodge wolfs huge stagger chop on oki, yet even the best players stand there and eat it--often times passing on free side crumple (i.e. if u have a move that doesn't need CH to side crumple that chop gives it away for free).

I need to go back and work on movement again (never enough time to practice everything). Of course, if i get my hitbox and convert to it, i get movement fo-free, lol. Really hyped about that damn hitbox. I hope it gets here soon, i've heard some real horror stories on the time it takes to get these. If i like it enough, i'll research modding sticks and maybe turn my old stick into a hitbox (assuming it is good and truly broken).

Seems like i am forgetting something i intended to discuss here, but thus is life. Time for one last cup of coffee then i'm going to brave this insane weather and go get some work done.

~social ruin

 

Of Salvage and Sabotage:

It was a brutally gloriously brutal day today.

The Brutal:
I woke up on little sleep to the buzzing of my alarm clock. I was dead asleep, and it was one of those mornings where it feels like the alarm clock has wronged you some great in justice until you realize, 'oh fuck, i set that and i have to get up and go to work'. I toyed with the idea of grabbing an extra 30 mins of sleep (a luxury i have with my job) before deciding it would be an empty space of trying to sleep but thinking about work. Had some morning coffee and got to it.

Man did work suck today. I'm having to build a display for 12 volt power tools at all 7 of the stores i service (vendor rep for Home improvement chain...u could probably guess, but given all my bitching i'll be ambiguous and not say). I basically go to one store per day, and do a list of chores i don't fee like doing, mixed in with selling to customers walking the aisle. Well this display takes forever to build (i got 5 more to go...tomorrows gonna suck too). Long story short, it was a 10 1/2 hour day of grinding and slogging away.

At this point there is the added stress that i like to lift weights almost every day (preferably at least 3 out of 4 days), and when you leave for work @ 6:45 am and get home @ 5:25 pm, it starts wearing away that resolve of 'when am i gonna lift weights...crap, if i go know i'll have like 4 hours before i have to go to sleep and then do this again.' I did however make it in for a quick superset burnout, so i kinda worked out, just not so much as i wanted.

The Glorious:
When i got home from work there was this suspicious package sitting amongst the clutter of packages on my stoop. In my job, they send me an insane amount of packages with literature, displays, sales initiatives, more displays, more advertising... I kid you not, i have a company provided storage unit FULL of boxes, about 9 large boxes outside my front door, and about 5 large boxes in my house. Half of this stuff i have no earthly idea what they want me to do with. A 4th of it is for stuff that needs to be done in like february...it's a disaster.

So i'm looking at this box and hoping against hope that it is the new stick i ordered for VF. I don't think it is, i presume it's more F my life mail from work. I ordered the stick on 11/5, my credit card was charged on 11/7, and i've never received any tracking info for it. Yet..yet..yet...it does looking promising. I tear it open and to my delight .............YAYAYAYYAYAYAAY!!!!!!!! My hitbox arrived today only 4 days after ordering it. Hell yeah.

Some of you might know that my stick actually died on flash's stream the day after i ordered my hitbox. My brother smb/wasted wish was playing on stream while i was out of town, and i was watching as he announced the death of my stick. So sad. Luckily we have his Street Fighter arcade stick...but we were using mine because we liked it better.

Well, we get to some hitbox training, and let me tell you, it's no walk in the park. It is both at once-as bizarre as you might think it would be, and surprisingly easy to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I dork around with it just long enough to land a few of my full combos about 3 times each, and familiarize myself with pressing 2 buttons for a crouch dash. Did a little fuzzy guard, escaped a few throws. Can't really option select attack fuzzy with it, but shouldn't take much more than 20 mins to learn, and then repetition after that.

The 2nd round of Brutal:
Then we took it for a test spin in some player matches. ouch. It's really tough not to freeze, and with goh i couldn't hit my 6k followup to save my life. 43p is an adventure in anything but muscle memory. The most unintuitive part of the whole thing is definitely jumping to the left. Using ring-index-first-thumb to stroke the buttons, the left jump is an unholy combination of ring finger+thumb and guard on ur right hand. Whipping this out on a moments notice would be like deciding that you are gonna start stagger recovering with your nose and foot. Also, strange to say, i was a sitting duck. For all that the hitbox is going to make movement an efficient drill in dancing right where i want to go, my fingers would like to never find the evade in actual play. Again, that thumb as up...unintuitive to me.

Final Verdict:
I love it. Goh's headbut guard break is a thing of beauty on the hitbox. For the time being the controller adds about 3 frames to any inputs i'm going for, but that is all me. I can easily see it shaving 1-2 frames from everything i do when wanted. I honestly believe it is just going to be simply more efficient than a joystick. BTW the transition is not nearly as dramatic as pad to joystick is. Suddenly blocking lows is much easier as well, and this is something i generally struggle with. I'm pretty excited about evade buttons as--living in alaska my evades tend to have some disappointing latency that causes great frustration to me. The evade button will put me closer to on par with my opponents on the east coast. This should do wonders for my ability to defend myself.

I will say though, that it is a bit disheartening to realize i now need to practice movement, TE, ETEG, ECD, stagger recovery...and everything else i have already practiced all over again. Basically, i'm gonna have to reboot my practice regimen, and grind back to where i currently am on the joystick before i can improve. I'm hoping this happens sooner than later. I was really looking forward to playing some serious VF this weekend, now it looks like i'll be a dojo gym rat instead. Arrrghhh. But it's worth it.
I have to say, the hitbox both salvaged my night, and sabotaged my weekend

~social ruin

 

Hello vfde'ers.
Man tonight was a rough night in the social ruin lexicon of player matches. As many of you know i recently bought a hitbox and now me and smb/wasted/aka are trying to transition to it. Well tonight was my first nigh playing with the HB drunk. 3rd night total. I got my ass handed to me by so many people. SMB's pai was holding her own. errr his own. i should say. Since he's my brother lol.

So the night started with LuckyGT and congratulations man. GT is officially the strongest U.S. player. I won't believe denkai or yuki is better than him until i see it. He is the best right now. Asshole knows ever damn characters low into wall. If you are confused...play the jerk.

I will say his play is so sublime, my follow up is a coin toss. I either play well or get destroyed Again, if u haven't played him u don't know. Tonight, the almagam of GT, Hitbox, And Drunk destroyed me.

I got destroyed by all comers. I was hammered. It was still a dissapointment. But on blast: meslted, i destroy u soon, G1tintin:destroy u agaain, allsatar brad: destroy u soon. I got it in me

I sorta want to play an FT10, even tho i don't have my legs yet. But not vs east coast..ya guys know why.

F Lucky GT best american player. Congratz.

~social ruin

 

Lol. It is your second night with the hit box, social, not your 3rd

And yes, GT is amazing. His character knowledge is truly impressive.

 

There is no best american player.. Kill it. GT is official though bottom line.... He can get caught slipping just like the rest of us....

 

lol i was smashed. 2nd night ur right smb.
@SDS, get off my blog post color, haha.

 

It did that for no reason....... I swear man lol

 

Shut up social.

SDS will take your rank, and he'll take your blog too.

 

Who cares about GT being the best in the US when I CLEARLY am the best taka player in the world!?!?! Get with it!

 

Had a boring time in a class at a school, so i was surfing VFDC and found this thread. I check only XBOX Live forum and pretty much never checked the other forums, so this is first time i read this thread.

I like what you are doing social. I noticed you mentioned my name in the first page. hahaha
Well I don't wanna bring this back to this thread, but I do think Jacky is strong too. As I'm using Jacky, I feel much comfortable playing him than playing my old man. Shun is still my main, but I mess around with Jacky most of the time in ranked. People who have played me in Vanilla should know that Jacky has been my 2nd character in the game ever since I started to play this game. That's the only reason why I'm using him, but I got too many messages from VF-players that why I'm using Jacky and not Shun.

Simply, I got very very bored with playing Shun, so I picked Taka, then I got bored again, then I picked Jacky once again. Making combos with Jacky is very fun for me, but the damage of combos are ......lol

So I understand why people complain about him. I'm just saying though. Other people may have the other opinions about what I just said, but yeah I agree with you social.