Overcoming Plateaus in Fighting Games 

My plateu is having fun matches.

trying new games and characters helps so much more than you'd realize at first. When i first tried to get good at SFV, I played super defensive, respecting the frame data and only blocking and punishing. This gets you out of silver. Then I tried Strive where you naturally learn to go aggressive. When I came back to SF I winstreaked to plat just because I found a better balance between playing respectful and aggro organically. It's like you learn without learning

The power of just "sleeping on it" I believe is severely underrated. I tell all my newbie friends just to absorb information as it comes to them, and after a good rest, they come back with superpowers.

This is great advice! Another way of putting it I think, is that when people over-emphasize their ELO or numerical score, they lose track of a felt sense of accomplishment that comes from learning. The “plateau” people feel is reinforced by the external measure of wins/losses. But if you create your own metrics for evaluation - how often you anti-air, delay tech, etc - you can essentially be climbing a new graph of your own design, while improving on an overall level at the same time.

The area right around 6:30 is where I've been lately, where you just want to play because the things you know how to do are fun to do in matches, but you need to spend time learning the things you don't know. When you're salty because of a loss and thinking you couldn't have done anything better, I like to take a walk through somewhere familiar. Long enough of a walk where you can zone out. Then you can get over your salt and realize there was something that other player is doing that you're not, and you can start to figure out what those things are; then take them into the lab next time you boot the game up.

great advice, i just passed a plataeu in sfv, and i think what happened was sfv was my first fighting game and i grinded it so hard that i burnout, so i stop playing it for a couple years, and played dbzf, mk11, ggst and kofxv which helped to see different forms the same concept is applied from game to game and i start using this more efficiently, now i feel like i was stupid to do not see that before and i end up enjoying my return to the game a lot!

I’m still new in fighting games and I’ve been trying to learn ggst but the thing that is helping me improve is trying different fighting games whenever I feel stuck in a game, this helps me see what’s wrong and learn a lot more when I get back to GGST

This sounds like a weird request but can you talk about balancing health(eating well), time(maybe you have a full time job as well as streaming) and being a competitor? I feel so overwhelmed trying to balance taking care of my responsibility and improving as a player. In any case, this is a great video and I love the content

This has been a really insightful video. I have been plateaued in gg strive for a while now. I’ve been stuck in floor 9 for quite a number of months. When I do rank up to floor 10 I always get bodied and go back down immediately. I’ve definitely spent too much time blaming my character(Ky) on what he isn’t great at instead of going to the lab and learning match ups better. I also have a really bad habit of spamming dp because haha funny move go brrrrrrrr. Realizing that I’m playing without purpose is a big help. So I’m gonna give your suggestion of smaller purposeful sessions a go and try to just improve my fundamentals. Thanks for the great video!

Love the personal yet educational approach you often take in making content. Keep up the good work!

Great video like usual diaphone! I"ve been stuck around 2000 elo in strive and it can be a challenge knowing what you need to improve on in your own bubble. Thanks for the video!

Thank you, Diaphone! Excellent content. Great insights, really inspiring. Keep it up, bro.

Love the honesty, thank you! Encouraging video

The thing with adjusting your mentality and gameplan to your opponent hits really close to me. I've been all in on Strive and I'm a Potemkin breaking from Floor 8 into 9 (got promoted last night even, let's see if it lasts, lmao). Now a thing that happens with advancing as Potemkin is that Mega Fist is completely busted. People have no idea how to deal with it, you spam with abandon, it's fantastic, you will win MANY matches on the back of brute-forcing people with Mega Fist. And then you start facing people who know that they can just block Mega Fist and you're immediately in trouble. So a lot of what I've been going through now is weaning off Mega Fist (and also just bluffing with Hammerfall) and getting some more controlled aggression where I'm taking better risks. However, every once in a while I still meet someone that doesn't respect Mega Fist and in those cases, yeah, it's a great tool. Making that adjustment on the fly without completely falling back into the old habits and muscle memory is a bit of challenge (on top of having to adjust the new mindset to apply new and different options as deftly, which is quite hard at first. You're immediately working at like 60% reaction speed) but I DO feel like it IS making me a way more consistent and threatening player, partly because it's making me think more about how my opponent is playing.

"you just need to guess better" this has been my pain playing sol in strive for months now and only recently in the last week have i started feeling like i've made a breakthrough. im not actually guessing better. but after losing so much so consistently to basically everyone i could lose to, i've had time to actually temper and control my mental. and this has made me way more level headed when im rotating my options which has helped me come out of situations at advantage when before i probably would have just spiraled into death. it's not that im guessing better, its that i feel like i need to guess less often now since im spending more time reading the flow of a match instead of trying to brute force my way through something to establish my rhythm i had previously been struggling a lot with getting the motivation to play and learn strive both because i could tell i wasn't meaningfully improving myself in matches which was compounded by the consistent back to back nerfs the character has gotten since the game came out. it certainly hasn't helped that ive had to relearn one character 3 times in one game over the course of less than two years. now im not feeling that sense of hopelessness as much and even though i worry i'll have to relearn sol all over again for the 4th time when the winter patch drops, i've had enough personal moments in the last week or so where im recognizing that i've actually internalized the things that ive learned and have made a very important step in my development as a player overall and it's one of the best feelings i've had in fighting games for a very long time

This was incredibly useful on a mindset level. Thank you sir

Good video, thanks Diaphone

Have mostly been watching your content because I play guilty gear casually and like Bridget a lot. I do play Magic: the Gathering competitively though, and this feels like a video with a lot of crossover application for anything competitive or improvement oriented! Thanks for the great video!

Even after all this time the vid is still valid and helpful, thank you.

This is dope @diaphone! Please do some guess the floor level vids also. These are awesome

The first thing I really improved upon was fighting games. I'm a decently high level player now in my local scene and I definitely took time to get there. (Still got nothing on ChrisCCH tho lmao) But in recent years, I've taken up a new skill - music (specifically piano). I was really enjoying it so I decided to go all in and now I'm in school for it. It's definitely a long process and I've had to fight my own self-esteem a number of times to keep going. That being said, the improvement is showing. I'm really proud of myself for being able to keep at it and see the improvement, since I've given up on myself a number of times with a number of things in the past. Awesome video Diaphone. I can say wholeheartedly this has reinforced my choices to keep at fighting games and music and I'm still making progress, even if it's a gentler climb nowadays.

great vid ty !!

I have massive fighting game anxiety and it doesn't seem to get any better even if i try to play more. I love fighting games so i keep trying and just feel miserable because of the stress. I also feel like because i am a woman i am obviously supposed to be worse(i know it's not the case) but it also kinda makes it harder to calm down, i am afraid of being judged purely because of being a woman.

My biggest issue is often breaking muscle memory. If a frame trap or such works, I'd keep using it. Then, when it stopped working, I struggled to switch to other strategies I'd tried. I knew them, I'd practiced them, but in the heat of an actual match I would, and still do to a much lesser extent, automatically do what I was used to even though logically, I knew better. I don't have that problem nearly as much now, but its time-consuming to fix since its really just repetition until you start doing better.

These are words to live by. I agree with this message.

I hit a wall against a friend earlier this year where microdash grab/frame trap mix during stagger wasn't working a single time. I found out he was using a grab tech OS and I ended up having to learn to properly tick grab and delay grabs by a few frames, since their grab tech is disabled for 30f in Blazblue if they throw tech, even when using the Throw Tech/Block OS.

Nice vid!

I find it funny this video drops when I was just debating with myself and my friends if I’m plateauing or not. After my run at dreamhack atl this weekend I was thinking of why I wasn’t able to close out or get some stuff down with Axl or a matchup. later came to the conclusion that It might not be a plateau, but I’m most likely just not doing enough of what I should. Was probably just being too hard on myself cause I wanted to do well, but I simply just gotta put more work in cause I am slightly better

Well spoken

KOF13 still looks so good. 🤐 I like 15, but those 13 HD sprites and the stages ... wow

3:28 This is so true, I experienced a thing with body building where there was a clip of a Chinese Olympic athlete exercising with," bad form." Everyone on reddit or whatever was insulting this guy even though he was trying to train his muscles to move in a system as a whole rather than isolate a muscle and train super hard at it. I don't exercise idk how tf it ended up being explained by a guy on my feed.

everything you said makes sense. i needed to hear that story around 4:22 ... theres a player i cant beat (lifetime im 1-13. 13 Ls in a row 😬) that plays a character i havent understood (palutena - smash ultimate). everytime i lose to him, it just feels like im guessing wrong all game. ive had trouble switching perspectives, so i think i should vod review with others more... gaining new perspectives is definitely the move since ive vod reviewed on my own and havent figured it out yet. i need to make it 2-13 😂

Good topic. I've played a lot of games since fighters started, and am always wondering about my rate of improvement. I'm not sure when I hit plateaus & if I overcome them, but do training, get tips in Discord, watch good players to learn, etc. I've never gone above intermediate in a game. People who do are impressive. Wish I could play more. After 5 years I got gold in SF5. Have yet to rank up in KoF15. Got to 10th floor in Strive, but dropped to 8th. I sometimes lose to better players, so it can be tough.

One really bad habit I had was never really using my P buttons (except for 6P), and it wasn't until I started playing Tekken that I really learned the importance of jabs and I've definitely gotten better because of it. In my case, trying a bunch of different fg's gave me different perspectives, and it helped me learn overall

I’ve been playing a lot of P4A recently and have hit a hard plateau with Mits. I got combos but my neutral is not functional vs higher rank players, especially in some matchups. I’ve taken a break from the game to play MBTL, so hopefully when i come back i have a different frame of mind to improve my neutral and get rid of bad habits holding me back

This should be a standard video for all players. Like part of a fighting game curriculum of sorts.

What sucks is knowing how to break the plateu but not being able to do it. My issue is I need to get better at stagger pressure but the execution is so tight and it only works on high level players. If I'm on floor 8 or 9 people mash so stagger doesn't work, but once I get to floor 10 I forget my original goal and never actually practice the stagger pressure.

my plateau be looking like Olympus Mons rn

Bruh Jug is so good, so happy to see him mentioned. One of the most underrated players in the USA.

Been in a big plateau with SFV, stuck in gold forever. Took a pause long enough to assess my strategies and criticize my own play. Determined I need to hit less buttons in general and play less risky. And my anti air normal needs to become true muscle memory not something I even think about. Less focused on wins and more on improving long term, and I'm already feeling the wall break down a bit :) A smooth and steady style for consistency is the aim. My goal is to reach platinum before SF6 launches

I need to get way better at beating multiple options instead of trying to guess right, in general. Ever since I hit Celestial in Strive (at least two months in a row now, so 'yay'), I'm getting my ass handed to me so often ...^^ My winrate in Celestial is probably 10% at best, cause everybody is so much better at covering multiple options. 😂 They walk in and out on wake-up, they stagger pressure and then burst bait me, on CH etc. It's wild.^^

As a low-level player who likes improvement, my first plateaus where actually mental shackles. Myths and ego. I didn't start to improve until I let go of both of those. Ego is something everybody has too some extent. I don't care how low your self-esteem is, it's there. The moment you start respecting your opponent's skill and/or recognize that you don't understand the game as well as you think you do is the moment you can begin to truly improve. As for myths, the common one my local friends believe is "The fastest and most efficient way to improve is to spend hours on end practicing the same combos over and over again until you can pull it off consistently." For the record, I used to believe it too, but Laugh's Theory actually helped me dispel that myth. Along with the existence of BrolyLegs and Desk. One has average to below average level of execution, yet places very high in major tournaments, the other has execution that is better than most professional players and doesn't do well in tournaments. Thank GOD for these players!

Strangely i think besides matchup knowledge ny main issue is panic even tho im not being pressured or anything, online i find myself missing inputs and i end up mashing to get some combos off

one of the biggest issues is shirking on system mechanics. besides things like anti-airs or fuzzies, going back to system mechanics and labbing new ways to use/exploit them or using mechanics you rarely use can be very helpful. Like YRC. Or backdashing on certain attacks *after* a string starts rather than always trying to backdash the first hit.

this does make me realize i should enter a tournament since I've never done it before. in season 1 I was at about 1700 elo with gio when she was considered top tier, now i'm 2000 elo with gio when she's mid and I do feel like I've hit a plateau sorta. i hit a downward trend and dropped to 1800 due to poor mental, then I bounced back, so yeah mental is incredibly important to get over plateaus. i think the thing that helped with my improvement was changing my playstyle with gio constantly. instead of being hyper aggro i'd slow it down, then i'd go hyper aggro and finally find a sweet spot. there's also getting into the right state of mind knowing you're a strike/throw and that sometimes you'll just guess wrong and you gotta be fine with that. also stealing tech from other gio players certainly helps.

I can't understand. I tried to improve, played every day, at least an hour, but i didn't get better, i was getting worse. Training was just a waste of time since i didn't know how to do it and i was just feeling like shit after it. Trying other games didn't help because they are so different and i couldn't adjust. I just given up.

I don't have any other beginners to play/learn with, and I feel like online is dominated with people who comparatively know way more than me. I'm so new that just hitting a combo consistently feels good, but playing online to try and get better is just a masochistic exercise. Is it just gonna have to be like Dark Souls was for me and I've got to suffer for a hundred hours before enough basics finally click and I can keep up? Also I've tried community Discords and I do not recommend..

My biggest plateau in SFV is me being stuck in Super Diamond. Specifically the 19000/20500 range. I feel like I’m just not consist enough. Sometimes I can play god like and even takes sets off UGM/Warlord players but most times I feel Iike I’m floundering about. I know I’ve got a big patience issue and I will often times go on the offensive when I don’t need to. But then there’s also the issue of super defensive players that make me squirm because they won’t do anything lol It’s a cacophony if issues but they never feel really pronounced until they do and then all of a sudden I’m titling hard.

Grad school? What's your degree in? 👀

Try to understand why people do dumb shit, try to have healthy lifestyle, don't blame your character, trust the process, small progress adds up

Pretty big ego - such a problem for learning

bros first advice is do what pros do cuss they know more than you no duh man, wtf of course, youre the only one who would have thought u know more than people better than you tf least u changed

This isn't good advice for fighting games. It's just good advice in general.