Foxy
Smash Master
(NOTE: Please, please, if I've gotten anything wrong here just let me know and I'll fix the post. I do not believe that I'm really technically solid or that I'm always right.)
Before I begin my brief post, I want to clear up something some people may not understand yet:
Lag is when the screen is jumpy, the framerate has issues, when the game slows down and speeds up to try to align with real-time, and other visually obvious things. This usually happens in situations with poor connections (like on dial-up or when someone is torrenting).
Latency (usually referred to as delay or input lag by Brawlers) is the amount of time it takes for input given by the player to actually occur in the game. A lot of players on online games will know this as their ping, or the time it takes to "talk" to a server. This is always present in online games, and especially in Brawl due to it's lack of prediction scripting as a fighting game rather than a racer or FPS. Though it can be lower on great connections (green/blue ones) it can never be eliminated like on LAN play. Additionally, latency is variable; it will fluctuate during a match within a small range.
So what am I saying? Lag is when the screen gets all screwy, and latency is the time that you notice between when you tell your character to do something and when they actually do it (a source of a lot of frustration). So, without futher ado:
The Mind
My first point is about the way your mind adapts to latency. A lot of good players who place well in offline tourneys at high levels of play but who do not go online frequently will be frustrated by how they are beaten solidly by players who have no tourney experience but play a lot online. Even average players who may partake in online bouts often but haven't played recently will see this. The question is: why? Why are these players losing, even if they are amazing players, simply because they haven't played recently online?
Well, offline play takes place in real-time, with your inputs being computed and produced on the screen as soon as you press the buttons (excluding **** buffering). This means that you must be thinking quickly to react as things happen on the screen to your character and the surrounding environment. However, thanks to latency, that kind of thinking isn't so viable online, and trying to play like there isn't any latency won't garner much success. And unfortunately, you can't train your mind into thinking the right way. The only real way it happens is with time.
So these players who never compete in offline tourneys but have hundreds of ladder matches under their belts are actually used to thinking about what they want to happen in the next quarter of a second instead of what they want to happen right now. I can't explain how this directly influences the game and why the player thinking with latency accounted for always has the upper hand, but it's easy to see. Luckily, plain knowledge and skill are beneficial even if you're still thinking in the offline-style, so if Mew2King and Azen went and played doubles on GameBattles, they would probably be really successful.
So that's a bit about why it takes time online to really become competitive on ladders and such, and why good players find themselves losing to "noobs" who simply play often. But that's not what you wanted to read, is it?
Overpowered Moves
This is what you opened the thread for, I guarantee it. You want to know why you can't beat spam-tastic Wolf player online, why you keep getting hit by that god**** down-smash or forward-smash, even when it's the only move in your nubile opponent's repertoire. Well... you're in luck.
Basically, it comes down to this: we can only react to what we see on the screen, because that's all that is actually happening. Let's go through a quick theoretical series of events to see the repercussions of this, knowing that Brawl runs at 60 frames per second, assuming that the players have a connection with a latency of 200 milliseconds (12 frames), assuming that Wolf's fsmash hits in 10 frames from the minimal testing I did, and using an impossible reaction time of 1/12 of a second:
So, Ganon saw Wolf fsmash, and he hit his shield within 5 frames (1/12 of a second) of the attack beginning. However, the input didn't register until 12 frames later, thanks to latency, and by that time the fsmash had already hit him. Of course, the Wolf is also disadvantaged because he had to start the fsmash hoping that Ganon hadn't input a faster attack or a defensive maneuver previously, but the one who really suffered was Ganon, because he had no way to dodge the fsmash, even if he saw it and had the skill to avoid it.
Let's see that in an offline setting:
See? Without latency, the fsmash didn't hit.
However, players don't really have the reflexes to shield Wolf's fsmash simply by watching it start. Let's say that, this time, Ganon can only react in twice the time it took him before (10 frames, 167 milliseconds, or 1/6 of a second). Let's also use a slower attack that players still find landing too often online, with the same latency conditions and assumptions we used in the first example.
With minimal testing (a stopwatch in 1/4 speed showed that the hitbox appeared in about 1 second) I'm going to assume that Pikachu's fsmash hits in 15 frames, rather than the 10 for Wolf's.
It was once again impossible for Ganon to block the slower smash even if he saw it coming. Essentially, the latency more than doubled his reaction time from 10 frames to 22 frames.
Finally, one last example, this time with Ike's fsmash - something that people complain about a lot in Basic Brawl; we'll use the same assumptions again, and with my limited testing showing that it takes about 30 frames for the move to hit.
So, in 200 millisecond latency, Ganon needed to react within 18 frames of the exact start of Ike's fsmash to block it. This isn't impossible, it's almost a third of a second, but there are a lot of other factors:
-Ganon probably wouldn't know it was an fsmash until the beginning of the move had passed and the motion was obvious
-Ganon is probably waiting for another action to end before being able to shield, as two players aren't usually just sitting next to each other. He may be finishing a rolldodge, a spotdodge, an aerial, a missed grab, etc, so he's probably mashing his shield buttons to pull one out as soon as he can. This would successfully block the fsmash offline, but online the recovery lag from his last movement combined with latency makes it impossible.
-Ganon may not be focusing on Ike's exact movements. He could be playing offensively, could be distracted, or it could be a free-for-all.
-A slower connection would make the fsmash even harder to avoid.
Conclusions? Even Ike's fsmash can become very hard or impossible block unless you've predicted an attack from your opponent and are shielding already.
So, that's it. That's my idea of why we find a lot of spammed attacks so aggravatingly hard to avoid when playing online. Knowledge is power, no?
And once again, if some of my numbers are pretty far off, if my guesses for reaction time and latency are unrealistic, or if I have anything flat out wrong, correct me and I'll update the post to reflect it. You could end up teaching me more than I wanted to teach to you!
Before I begin my brief post, I want to clear up something some people may not understand yet:
Lag is when the screen is jumpy, the framerate has issues, when the game slows down and speeds up to try to align with real-time, and other visually obvious things. This usually happens in situations with poor connections (like on dial-up or when someone is torrenting).
Latency (usually referred to as delay or input lag by Brawlers) is the amount of time it takes for input given by the player to actually occur in the game. A lot of players on online games will know this as their ping, or the time it takes to "talk" to a server. This is always present in online games, and especially in Brawl due to it's lack of prediction scripting as a fighting game rather than a racer or FPS. Though it can be lower on great connections (green/blue ones) it can never be eliminated like on LAN play. Additionally, latency is variable; it will fluctuate during a match within a small range.
So what am I saying? Lag is when the screen gets all screwy, and latency is the time that you notice between when you tell your character to do something and when they actually do it (a source of a lot of frustration). So, without futher ado:
The Mind
My first point is about the way your mind adapts to latency. A lot of good players who place well in offline tourneys at high levels of play but who do not go online frequently will be frustrated by how they are beaten solidly by players who have no tourney experience but play a lot online. Even average players who may partake in online bouts often but haven't played recently will see this. The question is: why? Why are these players losing, even if they are amazing players, simply because they haven't played recently online?
Well, offline play takes place in real-time, with your inputs being computed and produced on the screen as soon as you press the buttons (excluding **** buffering). This means that you must be thinking quickly to react as things happen on the screen to your character and the surrounding environment. However, thanks to latency, that kind of thinking isn't so viable online, and trying to play like there isn't any latency won't garner much success. And unfortunately, you can't train your mind into thinking the right way. The only real way it happens is with time.
So these players who never compete in offline tourneys but have hundreds of ladder matches under their belts are actually used to thinking about what they want to happen in the next quarter of a second instead of what they want to happen right now. I can't explain how this directly influences the game and why the player thinking with latency accounted for always has the upper hand, but it's easy to see. Luckily, plain knowledge and skill are beneficial even if you're still thinking in the offline-style, so if Mew2King and Azen went and played doubles on GameBattles, they would probably be really successful.
So that's a bit about why it takes time online to really become competitive on ladders and such, and why good players find themselves losing to "noobs" who simply play often. But that's not what you wanted to read, is it?
Overpowered Moves
This is what you opened the thread for, I guarantee it. You want to know why you can't beat spam-tastic Wolf player online, why you keep getting hit by that god**** down-smash or forward-smash, even when it's the only move in your nubile opponent's repertoire. Well... you're in luck.
Basically, it comes down to this: we can only react to what we see on the screen, because that's all that is actually happening. Let's go through a quick theoretical series of events to see the repercussions of this, knowing that Brawl runs at 60 frames per second, assuming that the players have a connection with a latency of 200 milliseconds (12 frames), assuming that Wolf's fsmash hits in 10 frames from the minimal testing I did, and using an impossible reaction time of 1/12 of a second:
Code:
Frame Ganon Input Wolf Input Ganon Wolf
0 standing standing
10 c-stick forward
22 fsmash start
27 press r
32 launched fsmash hits
39 airdodgeLet's see that in an offline setting:
Code:
Frame Ganon Input Wolf Input Ganon Wolf
0 standing standing
10 c-stick forward fsmash start
15 press r shield
20 fsmash hits shieldHowever, players don't really have the reflexes to shield Wolf's fsmash simply by watching it start. Let's say that, this time, Ganon can only react in twice the time it took him before (10 frames, 167 milliseconds, or 1/6 of a second). Let's also use a slower attack that players still find landing too often online, with the same latency conditions and assumptions we used in the first example.
With minimal testing (a stopwatch in 1/4 speed showed that the hitbox appeared in about 1 second) I'm going to assume that Pikachu's fsmash hits in 15 frames, rather than the 10 for Wolf's.
Code:
Frame Ganon Input Pikachu Input Ganon Pikachu
0 standing standing
10 c-stick forward
22 fsmash start
32 press r
37 launched fsmash hits
44 airdodgeFinally, one last example, this time with Ike's fsmash - something that people complain about a lot in Basic Brawl; we'll use the same assumptions again, and with my limited testing showing that it takes about 30 frames for the move to hit.
Code:
Frame Ganon Input Ike Input Ganon Ike
0 standing standing
10 c-stick forward
22 fsmash start
40 press r
52 shield fsmash hits shield-Ganon probably wouldn't know it was an fsmash until the beginning of the move had passed and the motion was obvious
-Ganon is probably waiting for another action to end before being able to shield, as two players aren't usually just sitting next to each other. He may be finishing a rolldodge, a spotdodge, an aerial, a missed grab, etc, so he's probably mashing his shield buttons to pull one out as soon as he can. This would successfully block the fsmash offline, but online the recovery lag from his last movement combined with latency makes it impossible.
-Ganon may not be focusing on Ike's exact movements. He could be playing offensively, could be distracted, or it could be a free-for-all.
-A slower connection would make the fsmash even harder to avoid.
Conclusions? Even Ike's fsmash can become very hard or impossible block unless you've predicted an attack from your opponent and are shielding already.
So, that's it. That's my idea of why we find a lot of spammed attacks so aggravatingly hard to avoid when playing online. Knowledge is power, no?
And once again, if some of my numbers are pretty far off, if my guesses for reaction time and latency are unrealistic, or if I have anything flat out wrong, correct me and I'll update the post to reflect it. You could end up teaching me more than I wanted to teach to you!
