monkfishesq

Yeah I know. I knew from the start that I was never going to be able to consistently win straight away. People wrongly think that I want to be able to beat people without any practice but that's just not it at all. My biggest concern is never being matched up with people at my skill level. I found out yesterday that the 360 version uses MS Trueskill for its online matchmaking (I wrongly thought it used the PS3 tier system)

The point where beating your head against people who you never have a chance of beating and never have a chance to learn from has been extremely early for me. I've never fought anyone that didn't use Peacock/Double or Peacock/Valentine. One of the matches where I felt like I could learn something and maybe actually have a chance was a German guy who used solo Cerebella. It started off pretty well but once he hit me he turned that into a 30 hit combo every single time and just annihilated me.

@PerfidiousSinn I've added you and just holla if you ever want to fight!

e: Another night of being beaten so badly that it's physically affecting my mood. One player in particular was using Parasol/Cerebella. He was using a throw assist with Cerebella I think. While I was in the air he'd throw out some of the napalm balls and then from there kill both my characters in one gigantic chain where I couldn't even block a single move.

That's one of the biggest problems I've encountered so far. Blocking low using the d-pad on my controller just never works. I tried to defend against their mix ups by blocking high then low but during their low attacks it would just flat out stop blocking no matter how much I was pressing down and back. My one saving grace is that I managed to beat a solo parasol player as Fila/Ms. Fortune. I had about one health left at the end when I got a lucky high kick in while she was doing one of her supers. My heart was beating so hard that it was actually causing my back to hurt due to the stress/adrenaline.

This can't be the only way to learn fighting games, can it? By beating your face against a brick wall made up of players who are immeasurably better than you are over and over again until you can't feel anything. I don't see how I can ever improve myself by being consistently matched up with people hundreds of times better than I am.

My birthday is coming up next month and I was seriously considering getting the sf4 arcade stick. I can already mentally picture that it is 500 times better than using a pad just because of the placement of your fingers and how you're not having to just use your thumb to hit the face buttons one at a time and then your index finger for the trigger. I know it's not going to make me instantly better and I still need to practice but will it at least make it easier to learn all this shit? The pad is just a total handicap and being completely brand new to 6 button fighters on top of that is just a whole other mountain to climb while learning fighting games.

What kind of 'practice' though. You're saying that like a catch all term of 'oh just play and you'll automatically get better.' How exactly am I supposed to practice when the trueskill system Microsoft uses matches me up with people with whom its impossible to practice with on account of them being leagues ahead of me in terms of skill.

Or should I just be practicing against the motionless AI dummy in the training room? I don't have £100 to spend on an arcade stick so I'm automatically at a disadvantage using the pad.

So I finally decided to put some more time into Skullgirls. I knew that I didn't have a single hope in hell of ever beating someone so but I wanted to take my knocks so at least the game would put me in the right tier and hopefully match me up with people around my skill level.

Boy was I wrong. For around 3 hours I was mercilessly beaten into a bloody pulp by nothing but peacock/double, peacock/valentine and solo valentine players. It was honestly physically depressing in real life to be beaten that badly and not have a chance to learn what I was doing wrong or learn how to at least block half of the shit that was coming at me. I didn't get an accurate count but I can estimate that I lost around 30 games in a row. That doesn't seem fair at all and especially for me having never played a 6 button fighting game before.

I looked around every single menu in the game, the versus menus and even the leaderboard, which by the way didn't even have my W/L ratio. The only option was to see my gamertag. Is it even actually possible to know what tier of players you're in? Because from where I'm sitting all I could do was guess. I couldn't even tell if the people beating me were in the top class players or someone who's only practiced in training for a couple of hours. If I was moved into the lowest tier then there really is no hope for me.

The average skill level of people I was matched up against today was about 5 times in order of magnitude better than I was. Not in like a 'It would just take a little more practice' kind of better. It was more like a 'They managed to get one hit on me and then chain that into a 50 hit combo' kind of better. Every single action I tried to take ingame would just be instantly countered and punished. When I actually managed to block one of their disgusting combos I couldn't even capitalise on it at all. Not even with a piddly little 2-3 hit combo.

I want to like you, Skullgirls. Why won't you let me play with people who *don't* have combined achievement points of a minimum of 1000 with every single fighting game release over the last 5 years. Why can't I fight people as bad as I am, so I at least have somewhere to start? Looking around the rest of the internet it seems nobody gives a shit about this kind of thing. I'm just met with instantly FGT community hostility. "Oh, you're trying to learn how to play? heh you fucking scrub stop complaining" I can physically feel the smug gitiness through my monitor and across the internet from these people. Sorry I haven't been playing fighting games for over 10 years :( My one saving grace is that I managed to beat one guy at the very end of my play session. It felt like he was around my level because we were kind of flailing around each other trying to get in. So that brings my W/L to around 2/40+

I'm really not feeling this 'new player friendly' vibe anymore :(

I did. The point is I shouldn't have to have done.

Let's forget about pre-orders for a second and look at this from someone who hasn't gotten it yet. You could get it on gog for $10 with only a demo soundtrack or you could get it in the HiB for whatever you want (but for the sake of argument let's say a minimum of $5)

Why would anyone buy it from gog after seeing how cheap and how many extras you get in the bundle? I know the bundle is only up for 2 weeks and that's a long time of losing out hand over fist.

So you don't think that letting gog/gamersgate promote their game as the 'only' place to get it and also giving gog a demo soundtrack of only 3 songs (Which gog couldn't do anything about)

Then at the moment of release they go and make a humble indie bundle with: Botanicula, Machinarium and Samorost 2 all with their FULL soundtracks for what basically amounts to FREE. You're seriously trying to tell me that there's nothing wrong with that? That people who in good faith (including myself) bought it on gog thinking that it was the only place to get it and then finding out that I could have bought it for 1 cent in a humble indie bundle on the day of release with the full soundtrack.

GoG by the way had no idea they were doing this. They found out about this when we did.

It's a fucking scumbag thing to do whoever you are. Indie or not.

gog isn't to blame here either. They had no idea this was happening until it was already done. There isn't even an easy way to contact Amanita to tell them what fucking scumbags they are either.

Yeah. The humble bundle contains the FULL soundtrack for Botanicula, Machinarium *and* Samorost 2. It's a fucking joke. I paid $8.99 on gog because I thought it was the only place to get it and then they turn around and spit in everyones faces.

If it ever comes out. It's already out on gamersgate and gamesrocket. Plus the cracked version. Still not out on gog.

Curse you! I still need to work my way down into Tier 1 but it's hard. The crushing disappointment of being beaten that badly over and over again to get into the right Tier is hard work. (please tell me you are on a 360 oh god I need to fight people on my own level)

It was brute forced:

"Using the clues treyher threw out and others had pieced together (first two are the same, 3rd isn't A, multiple sets of 2, and net 90 degree rotation), I wrote a program to generate the possible combinations. It came up with 3760 combos. Incredibly, one of them worked!"

The best thing is that getting all 3 parts of the heart cube doesn't even do anything..