Advice Best way to Practice - Training vs Online

[Predatoria]

Clearly, the ideal way to practice is to fight other opponents in real life. Sometimes, however, this isn't always easy to meet up with others to play, especially on weeknights after work.

I'm curious what people find to be the best way to practice Smash solo.

I noticed that when I started meeting more experienced opponents, most of the stuff I tried to do in training mode didn't really translate well to a real match. Combos I'd practice wouldn't connect in scenarios with real opponents who DI, or worse, actively avoid my combo-starting moves in the first place or position themselves in scenarios where it's difficult to really string moves together. I rewatched a few matches I did on a stream and realized immediately the parts of my game that needed work the most were not things I could really learn by beating on the CPU in training mode. These were things such as my tendency to whiff attacks and get punished, a poor neutral game, my spacing and character movement, use of moves in the right or wrong scenarios, ledge trapping and reading my opponents preferred recovery methods, and other topics I'm finding not useful to sharpen up on in training.

I had foregone playing online for a while, but have recently been taking another look at trying to get back into it mostly because I want to find an easily accessible avenue to practice these kinds of things. Last night, it took me about 2 hours to finally adjust to the latency (with a wired connection) and I finally started feeling better about it again. Thankfully, as was the case before, my luck with online was quite good. Out of all the matches I did (around the low 4M's in GSP if you're curious), all of them were my preferred ruleset (or close enough to be acceptable to me) and I ran into several opponents who were quite close to me in skill level that stuck around for full sets of matches. Perhaps this is a better source of practice than I had believed before, as it definitely was presenting to me many opportunities to work on the things I really do think I need to practice most right now.

I suppose my question here is, how do you all like to practice these kinds of things? Do you find training mode or online quickplay to be a better source of practicing between times you're able to find people to play with in real life.

 

[Sean²]

1. Boot up game
2. Contact friends who are good at the game
3. Set up online arena and practice until we get sick of it

Add the periodic long-ish training mode session to master more difficult combos and leave it at that for the most part. As well as the periodic public arenas to test what I learn against people who aren't quite as adapted to my playstyle.

 

[ZephyrZ]

I do both.

In training, I practice combos and fundamentals. I micro space my aerials, empty short hop around the stage, dash dance, ect. To practice combos I set CPU shuffling to "high" to randomize the DI, and I experiment with different weight classes and percentages so I can get a better feel for how the combo works in a real match.

When I play online I not only focus on putting those skills into practice, but I also focus more on the things I can't do against CPUs - mind games, conditioning, match up interactions, and reading habits. I pay more attention to the strategic, adaptive and mental side of smash. It's easier to do this the more confident you are with your execution and can do what you need without thinking about it, so that's why training mode is more important.

While online play is not perfect and a lot of things will be harder to punish, a lot of these skills will still transfer over to a local match. It's not as worthless as some people say. Just try to make sure you have a good internet connection.