Sometimes I wonder why I even attempt to play this game or fighting games in general.
I don't feel like I ever improve so I lose my patience which makes me frustrated so I miss inputs or start doing random stuff out of desperation.
I don't even care if I win or lose it's the fact that I feel like I'm in a slump that I can't get out of.
Oh and GGs to
@ShotgunInsanity
Do you want your own replays ever?
Dont get me wrong, Im shitty, but when i was playing SFIV (the only fighting game Ive ever taken to the point I would consider myself decent at) I hit a couple slumps and just didnt understand why I couldnt get better. Like I was just treading water but didnt entirely understand why. Both times I sat down and started watching some of my own replays and analyzing my matches, vs the matches of much better players and tried to break down how I thought about my approach vs how I guessed they thought about their approach. It really helped me see patterns in what i was doing that I didnt even realize were there - but players were reacting too and it helped me not only level up my mindset, but find additional tech and tighten up my gme in general. Id see a better player in a similar situation do one thing I wouldnt have thought to do, then Id research it and try to figure out WHY he did it. Sometimes I found out there as an OS there I didnt know about, or he was doing what he was doing because it covered such and such options from the other player, or spaced him out in such a way, and so on and so on. It really ended up helping me a LOT. While I did this, I didnt play. I just set the game aside and researched and watched my replays for a few days.
Its interesting, but its been proven that we learn while sleeping.. That leaving a task and coming back to it will help us improve at that task. There was a study done with a skiing arcade game, the Alpine Racer maybe? Its one of those where you stand on these skis build into the machine and you use them to control your character in the game. The study had people playing the game for X amount of time and then resting, then sleeping, then just doing other things, and coming back and playing again and there was an immediate and undeniable correlation with sleep and improvement. If someone played the game for say, two hours, then went to sleep and played the game the next day for 2 more hours, he showed more improvement than the players who just played for four hours straight. I have seent he effect in myself (and you all probably have too) when grinding combos in training mode. You're learning something new or struggling with something difficult and you practice a while and then eventually quit. When you come back to it the next day the combo is immediately easier and you dont struggle as much.
The replay watching and taking a few days off kinda revolves around the sleep/learning idea. Another thing that hampers progress is when you start making a lot of mistakes and you're just playing badly, but you keep playing, just trying to grind through it, that in itself actively makes you worse, because the repeated mistakes, be they mental, decision making mistakes, or physical execution mistakes, are starting competing to over-ride your ingrained mental processes. We spend hundreds of hours grinding combos and teaching ourselves to react to situations in specific ways and when you start over-writing those 'correct' reactions with incorrect ones, you just hurt yourself in the long run.. So when I tilt, I stop. I play another game or stop playing for the day, or whatever.
I know thats all a little 'heavy' when all we're talking about is fighting games, but Ive used those ideas successfully myself and they really helped me in SFIV. I hit a huge slump and was about to just quit the game, because it felt like I hit a wall and after over a month of playing at that wall I wasn't even the tiniest bit better, I was worse if anything, and I thought, well maybe this is it for me, Ive reached my own personal limit and if this is as good as Ill get, then I see no reason to keep playing, permanent mediocrity isnt very exciting or interesting to me. But the shit listed above really helped me finally break through that wall and carried me quite a ways past it.
