Sajam Talks Setplay & Misconceptions of "Degenerate" Strategies 

Incredible

This made me laugh more than it should have

On the other hand, with more knowledge players. I think it's that they were originally street fighter or more grounded style players and have a hard time adjusting to the chaotic style of some anime fighting games, same could probably be said vice-versa though. Maybe Arcsys is trying to capitalize on the Street Fighter 5 players, since it seems like it's in it's last years. I won't lie, I kinda perfer a certain feel to fighting games over others. Street Fighter and Tekken were the games I grew up with. SF4, Tekken5 and KOF 13 were ones I decided to take serious though. When branching out, I wasn't a big fan of Marvel 3 or Xrd. But I felt resonance with Blazblue, Under night and GGXX(Whatever). Not to say I hated Marvel3 and Xrd, I still enjoyed the games but on a casual level instead of a serious one. So that's my reason and maybe similar to others on why they don't mind the change or that they'd put neutral on a high pedestal, because that's when they have their best chance at winning.

neutral's biggest draw is that the offense momentum is balanced. It's not a rich gets richer scenario. And yes, people do dislike being hit. Loss Aversion means that for every second you are getting kicked, you need twice as longer time kicking back for it to feel good. Obviously this is a problem in a 1v1 game, but the frustration of loss and a wall that occurs when both going offensive and defensive happens in their training is enough to make most people quit. Defense is innately harder than offense, and it's pretty obnoxious that a test of your defense skill is basically a 100% pass or fail test.

Neutral is literally when you aren’t getting hit or in blockstun.

@@HellecticMojo The only way for momentum and neutral in general to be balanced by any stretch of the imagination is for every character to have the same options, but that's not how any fighting game I'm aware of works. Every tool a character has is not going to have equal applicability or utility in a given situation. To put it more succinctly, it's a misconception to think that. Your ability to leverage your options is entirely relative to both the options of the character you're fighting and the other players ability to make use of them. You don't have to be getting mixed up, comboed, or put in long air tight block strings to be at a disadvantage. An easy example is that most characters are typically disadvantaged against zoners at round start because they have no options to leverage at that range, and even if they do they're usually way too risky and can only work as a hard call out. The onus is on the non zoner to work their way in and make the most of the opportunity that arises if they manage to succeed. Someone might get the illusion that they have a wide variety of options to choose from at neutral, but a good player is going to put you in a tiny box all the same by punishing you for ever trying to do anything other than block when you're outside your effective range. On the flip side, a more footsie based character could have a really hard time with a rushdown character because their buttons may be good for poking and controlling a certain space, but that doesn't matter if they don't cover the angles that a character with superior movement options can attack from. By that same token it's not accurate to say defense is inherently harder than offense either. If you for example manage to score a knockdown on a character that has a flash kick style reversal you can't just go in hard because they're always going to be charging down back. You have to be very careful about how you structure pressure, and that's not saying anything of whether or not your character has good tools for pressure/mixup in the first place. If your character has extremely linear options for mix up it's going to be a lot harder to open someone up off of pressure because you're going to have take big risks just to get something started. That's only going to be compounded further if the defender has options they can leverage like guard cancels,bursts, or defensive option selects. Neutral honestly isn't even really a good term. It doesn't accurately describe the state of the game at any given time because things are almost never actually neutral.

@@mrn6t450 The distinction is that there's a degree of disadvantage. Potemkin being poked by Ky at distance is not the same disadvantage as being knockdown and getting a seal grinder on. One has disadvantages with options for mitigation while the latter has no options other than just eating it burning resource or the defense being futile. Also, the defense is inherently harder than offense. In your flashkick example, it's still in the attacker's court whether it becomes relevant at all. The attacker determines the engagement and the counter. Also neutral is fine as a term.

He couldnt gold split aris warframe

lmao i typed omito speedrun and google showed me his arcrevo america matches

Justin plays neutral but a specific type of neutral that is not enjoyable to watch

The Inquirer Daigo is a prime example

i praise *neutral* because i wanna see umeshoryus and i haven't seen one in a long time.

Who can hate seeing Wong being parried tho

@@Restless_Gambler777 the counter argument against daigo would be that hes just a spammer. Not even best can escape the negative backlash and connotations that are tied to the weak mentality of scrubs who talk way too much and just want to complain and whine

If there's one thing I know from card games, it's that players are driven to find the most uninteractive strategy, as fast as possible.

virtua fighter is broken boss what do we do now

Virtua Fighter adjusts a character's damage, combos, properties of attacks all based on the character's perceived Yomi potential. All whilst retaining fundamental tools to keep up. It's not like SFV where you could have bad normals and a lack of a invincible reversal. In VF everyone has a 14F mid, 12F 2P if their jab is slow by a frame to counter 11F jabbers.

What? There's serveral good games that are not broken: SamSho, FEXL, T7, UNIST. And what exactly are considering as broken here? Is it just having 1 or 2 busted characters? Or the overall game system being broken and severely skewed to a specific strategies?

@@MrOzzification samsho LUL. FEXL LUL. T7 and Unist ill give you that, they are good enough for me to say less broken.

T7 is pretty broken because of dumbass juggles. But that's a series thing.

Justice is so weird. Plus R is extremely setplay heavy and she is just there doing the missile wall. It's like she is playing a different game. I wonder if Zato will get into Strive to open the Oki gates just for a little. I always liked when devs add a character that completely goes against the rules of the game. Makes the cast more unique.

Stun edge yrc

@@goldengoldy0197 You know how they gonna do Zato? Eddie moves are doin by motion plus button. Like Dizzy Bits. Maybe if were are lucky, eddie moves get Follow ups like Dizzys in Ac, ACR. But all joking besides, next characters are gonna be interesting. Cuz of the core characters, only Zato and Millia havnt been revealed so far

Goldar Rag This dude’s playing GG, I’m roleplaying as a Touhou boss

+r isnt that setplay heavy imo, way less kd overall than xrd, and more neutral after air teching, and dizzy is definitely a setplay char

That move is the bane of my existence.

Yun and Chun Li building meter by whiffing buttons in 3S neutral say hi.

Oh my god, I almost forgot Brawl Meta Knight using Dimensional Cape (Down B/Teleport Slash) and having full invulnerability until the MK player decides to stop holding B. They could hold that shit for minutes at a time. Or MK throwing out 3 frame SWORD Normals.

This. Fighting games should be designed so you can play them however you want. This means the game will have a much more interesting learning curve as you can constantly master new techniques or strategies with your character. The goal should always be to leave yourself in a more advantageous position, since having frame advantage, zone control, or setplay is way more valuable than raw damage unless that raw damage is enough to end the round.

@@Zadamanim yea dude I totally agree Heck I just got back from being 0-20d by a way better player than me and I feel like I deserved all them Ls and I feel like I have a lot of room to improve Why? Cause there is so much shit to learn that makes the game rewarding and gives it it's sense of fulfilment when you do something correct. I'd go on but I don't wanna make this any longer

No, strong =/= degenerate. Scissors is not degenerate because it's the best move to spam against paper. It IS degenerate when not everyone gets access to rock, and you can infinitely spam scissors so the opponent is in constant lockdown.

@@HellecticMojo even if not degenerate, no one wants to play with only limited options.

@@James-pb8xu and variety without value is just bloat. The launch version of Mk11 is a perfect example of that. Tons of low tier character with page scroll amount of strings but only around 2-3 actually usable and many of them not having good mid or low strings or starters. Guile is an example of a character with extremely limited moveset, but each of them strong and purposeful, and this is why he's managed to endure and never dip to bottom tier. variety = automatically good is just a hoarder mindset.

Exactly. There are times that playing the old game isn't an option. Remember what happened to Smash Melee in Evo 2019?

@@DuoMaxwellDS Well that's something else entirely. That's just one tournament not hosting one game. Not an entire franchise being radically changed

i just bought rev 2 to learn about GG and get ready for strIVe; i will suck but hope to see some players online.

accent core has rollback now, maybe give it another try?

That's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. There aren't enough players in my game, so I'll stop playing it, thus having even less players in the game. It's a shame because I don't know how one would fix that kind of cycle.

No one says there's something wrong with having neutral heavy games, there's a problem with ONLY having neutral heavy games, which modern 1 on 1 fighting games are worryingly moving towards.

Took a meteor to kill you guys. These neutral worshippers are going to kill them selves

Dinosaurs are cool tho

Imo depends on the game. Look at my comment up top.

I strongly disagree not with your observation of what people say about SF5, but what those people are saying. I loved SF4 (Cody/Ryu) and never picked up SF5 because they gave everyone strong combos and pushed the links down to 3 frames minimum. When practically everyone and every character can pull off a high damage optimized combo and neutral means maintaining optimal positioning only, what's the point of going through the motions when personal input and creativity means so little?

The other way is to make blocking more engaging, which is what unist and well, GG did. You wouldnt have the meter to turn anything around in GG if you couldnt Instant Block, and shielding in unist stops everything from jump-ins, ending pressure, to actually making some invincible moves punishable (looking at you merkava).

Agreed, you put it really well

@@turbogeschwindigkeit6180 Some games definitely have more going on with the defence, but I wonder if it's possible for fighting games to capture the more fluid dynamic between offence and defence that you see in, say, boxing or muay thai.

@@Noelle808 I can't think of any game right now that quite does what you're describing. Tekken would be close if you were somehow able to sidestep with zero startup out of block. High low crush moves in BB and Unist sort of are close to what I think you mean, but those are all character specific options and most of them aren't moves you'd be able to mash to get out of a blockstring. Soul calibur's GI might be the closest. EDIT: As I was typing this out I realized 3rd strike is probably the game you're looking for.

@@turbogeschwindigkeit6180 The older samsho games were so defense heavy that you'd have whole rounds of people doing absolutely nothing. Having more defense doesn't make a game more enjoyable to play. Oki doesn't seem to exist in 3D games right now either, not in doa, not in sc, not in tekken.

I don't know anime fighter, but in 3ds and classic fighting combo are the think you use to catch your breath / ease That is why games like old kof and samsho are way more stressful than tekken etc when you have like 10 sec of pure muscle memory

@@stylesheetra9411 Tekken combos don't usually have high execution. However, the player has to think a lot during the combo to get the perfect wall carry. Combos have to be modified every time you use them, even starting with different attacks after the launcher sometimes. For some characters this is very easy with practice, but for others it can be quite difficult to consistently get the wall every combo in game. Anyways the point is it's a lot more than just muscle memory

Mauling your opponent in the corner isn't neutral tho..

@@egrassa1480 most of my defense is played in neutral, a habit from playing tekken and anime

@@nyxterra2888 neutral is fun ofc, but removing every other playstyle from the game is not a good idea

@@egrassa1480 he isn't disagreeing with you

Doing well in neutral is rewarding *because* of the threat of getting mauled in the corner if you fuck up.

*laughs in Athena crouch C*

I agree to the reverse of this. As a Sin main I have no idea what to do in neutral with other characters but since my oki is already ass I got somewhat better at okizeme setplay heavy chars

The biggest lie in guilty is that Ky is an honest character.

Faust makes me unable to stand GG, but for a totally different kind of degeneracy. I hate when moves have random properties.

Grant Larson it’s not like it’s that bad. People think he’s wacky RNG but really he’s good cuz he has busted ass pokes and drill cancel mixup. Meteors and mini Faust only supplement that

@@NeoBoneGirl I know it's not, but to me, it's that a random-properties move ever gets used at all. My brain says the whole match is tainted because of butterfly theory from that one random-properties move, and it just ruins it all for me. I know that's anal-retentive. It's just how I am.

Nah fam, opposite is true. Set play is the RPS and neutral is the chess

@@Restless_Gambler777 Chess is literally setplay, you have to set your pieces in the right places and trap the opponent until they run out of options. The only goal of neutral is to get to an advantageous position, which means it's not neutral anymore. If you stay in neutral forever, then you are playing RPS because there is almost no way to gain an advantage.

@@Zadamanim i can agree with that type of setplay being strategic, but this is mostly trap setplay type, about just pressure mix up , and oki setplay when they need no preparation other than have your opponnent block a move it is the opposite in my opinion . i don t say it s bad gameplay but when a game favors too much setplay (if powerfull without risk and easy to implement aka guilty xrd, dbz,mkx,mvc) i don t like it

@@cyanure1320 That's a good point, games have to have equally robust defensive options to compensate for oppressive offensive options. Guilty Gear has faultless defense, dead angle, wake up super, and burst for example, which can all get you out of otherwise unfair pressure situations. I think a lot of players fail to recognize the importance of good defense and they only use training mode to practice combos.

@@Restless_Gambler777 That makes no sense. RPS is a game where you either win or lose a match and that's it, you just move on to the next match. That is essentially what a game that is all neutral is. Now chess isn't just neutral OR setplay. It's is a whole game with both of those elements.

DiveKick and early street fighter 2 are probably the best contenders for that

@@Restless_Gambler777 didn't mean for it to be a serious suggestion lmao

I like a lot of neutral heavy games/characters in general. Injustice 1 is the game I started with, and it's a super slow crawl of a game at a high level for most characters. I loved SF4, and I play 3s on Fightcade often. Unless you mean ST, which I don't play that often. I enjoy neutral based games a lot, but I think I worry about the current obsession of resetting constantly back to neutral as an overall focus for games.

Also I forgot to mention, the first thing Rynge said to me after he tried the new Guilty Gear was, "You're going to like playing this game a lot, it reminds me of the things you enjoy in MK/SF"

@@SupermanSajam well, you clarified pretty well and sounds good to me, i respect that. i still think the industry is far from fully leaning in the opposite direction, but i getcha, I'm not gonna like it either if it swings from one prevailing trend to another. truth be told i profiled you since you're so closely associated with dbfz and sfv so my bad dude

i still feel like there's a fair reason why people are up in arms about neutral lately and that they feel that there's something being neglected in fgs that they're looking for. people may say we need more neutral simply because that's the first thing that comes to mind, but regardless of what people are saying i understand the sentiment that something has been missing for a while

Samsho is also hella mix up/oki based evem if it has strong grounded neutral. The game's offense runs on the run up grab\dash attack mix up and many character have devastating high low mix. Furthermore recoil cancel turns ever weapon block into a 50/50 will he, won't he cancel mix up.

That's a common misconception and not always true. Having more options in a game does mean more variety but necessarily mean more depth or even control. Having too much can lead to decision paralysis and increases the likelihood of "fluff" mechanics

jay kj true, fluff mechanics or gimmicks can be frustrating at first. But if the mechanics of a game are left broad enough with enough time little optimisation happen. Fire example wave dashing in melee is 100% not something that devs wanted but they left the game mechanics wide reaching enough with something that at first might look like a gimmick, in the hands of pros, can be an awesome tool. With patching these days if something isn’t as intended it gets removed before it can be fully explored.

hey past me, turns out you're a degenerate setplay lover

Idk about rush down, but mixups and zoning are definitely gonna be weaker purely because scrubs do not like these playstyles at all. If you want to draw normies in you have to make it neutral/reset focused, and rush down fits just fine in that kind of games. Like DBFZ is a successful rush down game that that has continually removed mixups every chance it has. Smash is also a successful party game that has removed zoning because scrubs never stopped running their mouths about how they hate "spamming."

@@Snowyy201 Wait, how did Smash remove zoning?

@@blackpants7385 There was a patch earlier this year for Smash Ult that nerfed projectiles across the board iirc. People were all like "ZONING IS DEAD." But not like I know shit about Smash at all so I could be wrong.

I like setplay hell. It's not like Guilty Gear lacks in defensive options.

this is a stupid comparison. Crouching medium kick>hadouken is a blockstring, not something you throw out in neutral. It doesn't whiff cancel into itself and you certainly dont gain any noticable advantage on the opponent from whiffing a crouching medium kick. if your opponent is constantly "throwing out crouch medium kick " just jump and hit them. If you're talking about it on block, every game has moves that are safe or plus on block. Even tekken, your example of a premiere neutral fighting game has moments where good moves are being used constantly. I can cherry pick several high level gameplay clips of dragunov doing running 2 over and over, just as you say people can just throw out crmk>hadouken and no one can deal with it. Or should I link the jdcr video where he talks about how powerful jab is? are you going to call that degenerate too? Delayed wakeup isn't exclusive to tekken either. SF has it too. Even guilty, which is oki city has 1fr throws to check the opponent if they fuck up and a myriad of defensive options like blitz (hold or tap), IB (which can give you your turn back), FD (pushblock) and alpha counter. You've missed the whole point of what sajam is saying. Instead of trying to preach a single game as the premiere le epic neutral, we should learn to accept the fact that no fighting game is going to be fun without its own fair share of degenerate strategies. I'm a huge fan of tekken as well but this is a really bad take.

I think you're overestimating new players a lot considering the massive amount of people that whine about zoning in Injustice, or simple fireball zoning + DP anti airing back in SF4. It's not any easier to deal with or figure out somebody's fireball timings and realize that they're baiting you into jumping at them than it is to simply block something high or low. If anything it's much harder because you actually have to know how to get a read on someone's habits, and depending on the game you might need to know frame data just to be able to pick your spots well enough to inch your way in. That's a tall order since new people tend to just button mash/jump all day and never block. I've seen just as many people if not more rage quit a fighting game because a character like Hilda in Unist,Deadshot in IJ2, or Dhalsim/Guile keep them locked down on the other end of the screen with long normals and projectiles. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what people are losing to when they have no desire to learn how to win in the first place. They're going to quit regardless.

@@mrn6t450 True. What I said applies only if you are genuinely interested in getting better and having more fun in the game.

I saw a guy complaining about cross-ups in sf4 awhile ago. People will blame anything and anyone but themselves. I know I do!