Well I took PL up on his offer, and here's my review of the ordeal:
His communication was great. He responded to my email inquiries quickly, and we scheduled a training time. They day of training, we both happened to be on about 3 hours before our scheduled time, so we went ahead and started our session.
We got about 30 minutes in before he realized he hadn't started recording. We went ahead and restarted the entire session, which I was ok with because it was basically 30 minutes of free training.
He definitely knew his shit. He sent me a list of the characters he knew the best, and I let him know the 3 I wanted MU experience against, and let him choose any other characters he knew to be good against Deathstroke. Our matches seemed to be free of lag, though I had spent the previous 4 hours in online KOTH so I might have just been used to it.
After our matches he sent the following email:
Alright man you play a very good deathstroke. Your use of interactables in combination with his zoning is good. However I would recommend not using sword flip as much on wake up. Sword spin is much safer. Of course sword flip is great to hit people who try to punish sword spin with jump attack so keep doing that.
Vs doomsday you have to start dashing forward when he does supernova. Gotta get used to that. In the corner doomsday is a monster so try to avoid the corner as much I know as deathstroke you are very used to moving back or staying at the edge of the screen but doomsday literally needs one read to push you into the corner where it becomes hell from there. Also jumping at doomsday is risky cause he can air grab you and get an unrollable knockdown that allows him to do a splash mixup.
Vs nightwing as you can he can counter zone well against deathstroke. I caught you a lot with Flying grayson out of staff stance but you probably don't know this you can crouch under flying grayson and punish it on whiff. My safest wake up attack out of staff is flying grayson but since its high its not much. Staff spin is very unsafe and you can get a full combo for blocking it.
Escrima air wing dings hit overhead that is probably why you were getting hit a lot by them. You have to block it standing. Also in escrima stance Nightwing doesn't really have any lows to hit you with other than ground spark, b13 and d3. In my honest opinion he doesn't have much to break your defense unless he is in staff stance. But in staff his movement becomes a bit slower.
vs Ares. Ares is a monster but as you see you don't have to worry about a full screen MB Godsmack cause your multi hitting projectiles will bypass the armor and hit him out of it. You want to avoid getting hasty with guns and makes it less of a pattern and more unpredictable when zoning cause one teleport can lead to death potential because of the MB Godsmack combo loop. When he teleports you can punish him if you aren't locked in animation already.
Not sure if you played MK but its easier to punish than raiden's teleport. Up close Deathstroke has further reaching normals than Ares does so it will be difficult for ares to win the footsie war up close. 32, swordspin and d2 should be enough to handle him. Also d2 is really good its safe you should use it more.
Right now im trying to compress the file all together so I can put it on youtube and list it as private or unlisted so only you can see it.
I was hoping to get my footage that same day, since this was around 4pm, but there were apparently some technical issues that prevented him from being able to post the video to youtube.
He managed to get the first video posted today. I was excited to see my footage was in 720p, but quickly disheartened to see the sound was so out of synch that I had to just mute the video. This was apparently unfixable.
The footage had to be split up into smaller chunks to be able to be posted to youtube. Because a match is only around a minute to a minute-and-a-half, I just assumed the video would be split between matches, with around 8 or 9 matches per video. I was disappointed to see my first video cut out mid-clash at 13:38, to be resumed on the next video. However, there are 10 seconds of ads at the beginning of the video, so it doesn't just go right back into the match footage.
Overall, I kind of wish I had just kept my $15. The technical headaches just weren't worth it, and I definitely expected better than out-of-synch interrupted match footage. Apparently PL did learn from this experience, and will be able to record better footage during "future sessions", but that doesn't really help me now. As a small business owner myself, if I had put out this quality of work for a client, I would have offered to redo the entire thing. As I told him via email, the entire purpose of me doing this was to have quality footage of my DS in action. It could have been against online randoms for all I cared. I can't record my own footage, so $15 seemed like a small price to pay. Unfortunately for me, PL is a much better fighting game payer than video editor.
[Edit] I re-read that last part, and it sounded a lot more harsh than I meant it to. It sounds like most of the issues with the video were software-related, and not necessarily PL's fault. However, as the customer that's not really my problem, and I really shouldn't have to settle for low-quality footage because he experienced software issues.
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