@flstyle: thank you so much! I will watch tonight.

I wish it was in the GB chat though... ugh... twitch!

@siroptimusprime said:

Would have to agree.

One of my friends is a huge fan of his, and was like oh shit! its LI Joe! I thought he would get a pic with him and meet him and shit which was cool, but he came up to me and said lets go man, were going to draigs to party with LI Joe hahaha. Zeus was there too, then the following night we partied with Velociraptor John, Blockbuster John , Marcus Teddy and some others. They are all good friends with gabe (thrillhouse).

Such a fun weekend

I only got to see Joe once at EVO this year. :(

I missed hanging out with a lot of people since I was playing KOF, Tekken and KI and doing stuff behind the scenes stuff for Capcom Cup. Oh yeah also was having fun in the KOF Central/South America suite. I probably know a lot more Spanish after hanging there.

Next year could get wild... Street Fighter is guaranteed. New Smash coming out. New Guilty Gear. New Persona. New Mortal Kombat. KI will get updates. BlazBlue getting an update. The corpse of Marvel will probably manage another bounce. Potentially Tekken 7?

Under Night in Birth, Dengeki also coming out by then...

The Rose Brigade has finally reached full march. I've run into 10 tonight. Even though I hate the mirror match, I've gotten 3 double perfects in a row. No matter how many times I win the Rose Mirror, I'll be angry after the match. So annoying. My main is SO ANNOYING.

Please don't nerf Rose...

You win because you know the matchup more than others. You mained her, everyone else bandwagoned.

I could go into it, knowing the matchup is important, but the things you have to apply are DUMB. Since you have the same gameplan, you have to just let the other Rose think she is doing fine until she spends meter and then I win because of how unsafe her EX moves are. They keep doing the stuff they see other Rose's do. then they EX Soul Spiral, I get a hard knockdown, and throw vortex them.

But once it hits the wakeup game, it's rock, paper, scissors. If they backdash when I grab, it's back to square one, if they mash EX SS during a meaty, square one, if they tech, square one. It's so annoying. I hate being patient.

Has there been a mirror match in fighting game history that hasn't been moderately annoying?

@syz: Theoretically if you're more confident in your play with the character you should generally win mirror matches, same thing in an RTS. If there's any clear test of skill to fighting games its a mirror match.

Ain't no hype like James Chen hype

@syz: Ryu/Ryu is a good mirror match because he's so well rounded.

@fredchuckdave: I'd disagree. The skills you have to apply in a mirror match are completely different from the skills you have to apply with the rest of the cast. Normally you're jockeying to get into your ideal position while keeping your opponent out of their ideal position, but in a mirror you're both trying to get into the exact same position. It makes the entire neutral game feel dumb as fuck.

@starvinggamer: The whole point is if you're good enough at the game you won't play solely on matchups/doing identical things to each other; otherwise you're just following a spreadsheet and seeing how well you do, you'll do more creative things/adapt your timing etc. It's a fighting game so the number of things you can do are admittedly limited but the fundamentally more skilled (or "naturally talented" since I guess that's a thing?) player is likely to win most of the time.

Lots of Rose white knighting/hate going on in PR Rog's chat right now, fairly amusing stuff, also every other match is against Rose.

@fredchuckdave: My point is that being able to execute on matchup knowledge is the next step after fundamentals that separates good players and great players. Mirror matches throw out that stage of skill entirely.

@starvinggamer: Matchups can definitely win you a tournament/tons of tournaments but there's always a question of how you won if that's the case; which is why people (including Daigo) try to spite Infiltration/ChrisG etc. They might be wrong but there's some amount of thought behind it. Also I've seen a lot of KoF mirror matches (even exact team matches) that play out completely differently from player to player. I think it might just be a problem with Street Fighter/SF players, though I'm sure the thousands upon thousands of scorpion/scorpion mirrors in every MK game are less than exciting as well.

Also I don't think Snake Eyez really plays based off of matchup knowledge in general, just fundamental skill and awareness and he seems to be doing pretty well for himself. I guess it might be that Zangief plays against every character in roughly the same way which is why people don't like fighting Zangief/the matchup can be boring to watch.

You can tell just from the top 8 that Snake Eyez plays very differently depending on which character he is up against. Some matches he pushes a lot of buttons. Some matches he pushes very few buttons. Some matches he spends more time walking forward. Some matches he finds himself getting pushed into the corner. The ranges at which he pushes various buttons changes. The spacing that he looks for jump-ins changes. With the years of Gief experience under his belt, it would be impossible to play without matchup knowledge being a factor unless he got amnesia.

@starvinggamer: Over the course of a match he presses more or less buttons, Rufus is an exception given that there's a specific EG anti-Snake Eyez method that he has had to adapt to. In every single match from the top 8 he went from absolute turtle mode to "go nuts" mode depending on the situation and the pattern varied a bit (all of these things are strategies he's employing based on the opponent not based on the opponent's character, effectively he learns over the course of the match by dictating the pace). Spacing matters sure but it's more about Zangief's range than the opponents if you're not fighting Rufus/Hugo/Dhalsim. Obviously there are minor differences from match to match but the general pattern is much different/more to the rhythm of Snake Eyez himself than the character, which by and large is the difference between him and other Zangiefs (not matchup knowledge). The match where his matchup knowledge showed the most was vs Rose thanks to Filipinoman, but I believe if he hadn't had all that Filipinoman experience he might have had a better chance against Louffy given how different the two players are; he would have to "unlearn" his matchup knowledge as it were to get better at the fight. There's also players like Kazunoko who just go nuts all the time without much regard to the matchup, and while he's had middling success at EVO he is almost universally regarded as a top 10 player.

@fredchuckdave: I'm starting to think that we don't have the same definition of matchup knowledge.