How to introduce someone to Melee?

[Varist]

Two propositions for you guys, one general, one specific.

Specific: I know someone who's completely new to Melee.
They've only played Brawl on the Wii, always Items On, always Time match, only really used Peach.
They have never played any game competitively.
I play Melee hours everyday, and every time they come over to my house, I'm playing it at least a portion of the time.
I feel like I'm neglecting them, but there really isn't that much to do at my house.

It's really important that I get this person into Melee.
How would you recommend I go about it without scaring them off?

General: How can you introduce a very uncompetitive person to a competitive game?
If they have something to gain from playing Melee, and they know they do, but it has not (up to that point) been in their nature to play competitively, how can they be shifted toward competition?
Observe that everyone enjoys doing something competitively, in some aspect of their life, however minor.

 

[t3h Icy]

Play Falcon. Play fast.

 

[Warhawk]

Maybe they'll be more into it if, in addition to having you to play, you find someone as similarily unskilled at the game as them so that they don't feel as overwhelmed by the long road they'll have to travel for this game and they can try to grow and learn together and have more fun doing it that way. I really can't think of anything else to suggest for that... I mean pretty much they have to be competitive and they have to want that improvement. Unfortunately if they don't then they don't and that's usually it with nothing else you can do to try and convince them better of it seems.

 

[Krynxe]

Though you are right about having another person Warhawk, there are big downsides. The first problem is when they play one another, they'll both make very bad mistakes and either not learning anything, or pick up bad habits that only work on other bad players. The second is the mindset, they'll only want to play one another because it's "the only way they'll win" and every time they play you they'll walk in with an "I'm going to lose, anyways" attitude. This is what I've experienced with my friends, anyways.

 

[choknater]

i think allowing them to watch tournament footage and high stakes matches w/ good commentary is very very exciting.

you'll also discover their competitive drive by playing them and beating them. if they get salty, or complain, or say "i don't play this game" or some kind of noob johns like that, just let it slide because you know you have practiced. if you tell them no johns and stuff, it might just demotivate them.

however, if it actually makes them wanna get better at the game, you know you have a winner.

 

[KingClubber]

Some are just not competitive video game players, but since they already know how to play smash the long process of teach them how not to kill themselves is out of the way.

What you have to do now is inspire them. Do a bit of show, and tell without forcing them to play. You can do it yourself by showing them the best moves and tricks you've learned, or showing them how effective they're favorite characters can play in Melee compared to brawl without just out right saying melee is better.

Your going to get complaints about the differences between the two games, and you might have to play the friend card just to get them to try it out, but do it discreetly.

Once you do get them to play, don't go wiping the floor with them across FD, choose a pretty okay character from the mid tiers and let them choose the stages they want to try. Now is going to come the hard part for yourself more then them, your going to have to wait for them to ask " You " if you want to play melee, that's when you'll know they interested in playing more, if they don't ask you might have to repeat the precess few times, going to be up to your own patience from here on how long your willing to do this.

Once they do start asking you to play, you can step up your game a bit, but try to give them a healthy dose of victories, take a few hits, take a fall. Trust me giving your friend the illusion of beating you sooner or later will help a lot later. When i play, my bro's always try to have me a one stock before they lose. If you do things right, teach them new things, and keep them on the edge of they're seats they'll soon enough get to the point where you don't have the hide the fact your taking it easy on them.

Once they reach this point, destroy them, and keep doing it. This will be the point of no return, they either will climb or fall. It's going to be up to them to get better or not. My bro's choose to fall, which lead to me not having no one to play with with all my friends either quitting smash (Still blaming Brawl) or moving away. Hope you get better results.

Also no Melee Slang, saying things like Scrub, Johns, or **** will only discourage them. Besides the community will never get better if you keep going around saying such things. I can just see it now, Flyers with the word **** at a High-School Sport game. LOL!

 

[Sinji]

I showed a SSF4 player the Armada movie and he said he wanted to take up peach as his first main.

 

[Krynxe]

Idk Chok, I think it's better to get the notion on "no johns" in their head asap. Knowing how to have good mentality is one of the most important things when trying to get good.

 

[General Heinz]

Some are just not competitive video game players, but since they already know how to play smash the long process of teach them how not to kill themselves is out of the way.

Once you do get them to play, don't go wiping the floor with them across FD, choose a pretty okay character from the mid tiers and let them choose the stages they want to try. Now is going to come the hard part for yourself more then them, your going to have to wait for them to ask " You " if you want to play melee, that's when you'll know they interested in playing more, if they don't ask you might have to repeat the precess few times, going to be up to your own patience from here on how long your willing to do this.

This is probably the first part to realize. Some people just aren't going to want to play competitively at all because they either find it stupid to begin with to play a video game competitively (after all, how could a "child's game" POSSIBLY require so much skill? Don't make me laugh!) or just have to make the excuse that it's a dumb game because you beat their *** so hard.

Both of those are true for what happened with me and my roommate. To begin with he doesn't really play video games (unless it's NBA 2K11) and he definitely doesn't play them competitively (unless it's for money, and he'd never be stupid enough to MM me in smash). That coupled with the fact that he somehow thinks Brawl is far superior (based solely on the evidence that "Kirby suckssss in Melee"--and what, he's god-tier in Brawl?) and the fact that I almost never gave him a chance to win in any of our matches (which, to be fair, was entirely my mistake) means that basically the only time he'll ever play is when we're both high as ****, and even then he ragequits after I take his first two stocks every match until we've played...three matches. Then he says "this game sucks" and goes to bed.

So to be perfectly frank, if you have to TRY to get someone into this game, I personally think it's almost guaranteed not to work. There's too much mental and technical practice that has to be achieved to be any good, and to do that you have to WANT to play. That said, I guess there are things you can do to encourage people (like not beating the piss out of them at the outset), but for the most part if they won't do it themselves they won't do it at all.

 

[Acryte]

Who knows, I tried showing a kid the ariquenuubs vid and he got bored of watching and started playing cps... uuugh. Guess he wants to play but damn I thought he was gonna **** himself. I was kinda sad.

 

[kevo]

I'm a competitive person by nature, and I kinda picked up Melee alongside my friend after we watched tourney vids and stuff. We didn't have too much direct guidance, we just read about techniques and tried them out. The thing that got us hooked was that we wanted to be better than each other.

 

[dettadeus]

@Specific:
I recently became the "Smash expert" in my area, and a lot of my friends ask me about competitive smash on a regular basis. Things like "who would win between *insert character here* and *insert other character here*?", often followed up by "but can't *insert character here* do *insert attack/strategy here*?" and stuff like that. A lot of times, I'll have them come over to my house and I'll show them how the match would actually play out. As they flail to do whatever they said they thought would be game-changing I beat the crap out of them. However, I do it in a fun way. Oftentimes I start them off with a match they're more likely to win (having two friends on a team against me, items on but I won't use them etc). When they realize the feeling of winning against someone you know has years more experience then you is pretty awesome, I force them to work harder at getting that feeling. I turn items off, set the match to 4-stock 8-minute, restrict stages to those on the legal stage list, play as better characters, things like that.
In short, you have to make winning so much of a reward to them that they'll work at it until they can do it on your terms.

@General: Again, being the best smash player in the immediate area (within reasonable biking range) my friends challenge me often. It's pretty easy for them to see that they're not going to beat me any time soon if they don't become competitive-minded players. However, they all want to beat me (eventually) on relatively equal playing grounds. During normal matches, I'll often tell them ways to take advantage of the weaknesses of whatever character I'm playing so they have a better chance of winning. I'll also point out things they have to stop doing or do much less, as well as things they should do more often. I actually converted one of my friends from Casual to semi-competitive recently. Before, we used to play a lot of "Giant heavy curry metal flower fast 99-stock on Bridge of Eldin" matches, which were freaking hilarious to watch but obviously not competitive in any way. Nowadays he's interested in beating my R.O.B. with his Pikachu or ZSS, and often asks for help with finding strategies and such. I recently showed him how to Glide-Toss (the first real AT he's trying to learn) so he could better abuse ZSS's suit pieces and R.O.B.'s Gyro.


Super tl;dr just make it fun or rewarding for them to win against you then make them work for the win.

 

[Massive]

I know someone who's completely new to Melee.
They've only played Brawl on the Wii, always Items On, always Time match, only really used Peach.
They have never played any game competitively.
I play Melee hours everyday, and every time they come over to my house, I'm playing it at least a portion of the time.
I feel like I'm neglecting them, but there really isn't that much to do at my house.

It's really important that I get this person into Melee.
How would you recommend I go about it without scaring them off?

From the (bolded) evidence presented and the lack of gender pronouns, this appears to be a girl.

Good ****ing luck with that.
Most girls will never express enough interest in the game to be competitive. Many times they'll play just to make you happy, but it rarely goes much further than that.

It is a sad, sad state of affairs I wish was not so.

 

[kevo]

haha nice read, Massive. Can't get anything past the eyes of Smashers.

I know exactly what you mean. While there are undoubtedly girls out that that kick serious butt, I've never really met one that has that drive to be really good. My girlfriend doesn't "get" how I can play the same character on the same stage for hours on end. "But... but every game is different!"

 

[King5280]

This is probably the first part to realize. Some people just aren't going to want to play competitively at all because they either find it stupid to begin with to play a video game competitively (after all, how could a "child's game" POSSIBLY require so much skill? Don't make me laugh!) or just have to make the excuse that it's a dumb game because you beat their *** so hard.

Both of those are true for what happened with me and my roommate. To begin with he doesn't really play video games (unless it's NBA 2K11) and he definitely doesn't play them competitively (unless it's for money, and he'd never be stupid enough to MM me in smash). That coupled with the fact that he somehow thinks Brawl is far superior (based solely on the evidence that "Kirby suckssss in Melee"--and what, he's god-tier in Brawl?) and the fact that I almost never gave him a chance to win in any of our matches (which, to be fair, was entirely my mistake) means that basically the only time he'll ever play is when we're both high as ****, and even then he ragequits after I take his first two stocks every match until we've played...three matches. Then he says "this game sucks" and goes to bed.

So to be perfectly frank, if you have to TRY to get someone into this game, I personally think it's almost guaranteed not to work. There's too much mental and technical practice that has to be achieved to be any good, and to do that you have to WANT to play. That said, I guess there are things you can do to encourage people (like not beating the piss out of them at the outset), but for the most part if they won't do it themselves they won't do it at all.

i loled at this. When he gets high he'll always play like two games with us and quit. and the whole time he'll insist that falco's up-b is an amazing attack.

 

[commonyoshi]

Massive just won this thread and several threads around it.

 

[Hydro_Smasher]

I'd take the egoraptor approach and be all like

WANT A FIGHTING GAME THATS FUN DIFFFERNT CHALLENGING AND REWARDING-
BAZAMMMMMMMMMMMM

MELEEE

OH MAH GAWD THIS GAME IS SO FRIGGIN FUN ITS GOT 26 CHARECTERS AND SOME COLORFUL GRAPHICS THAT DIFFER FROM ALL THE HD BRIGHT CRAP THAT BRAWL OFFERS

THE MUSIC OH DAAAANG SON

DREAMLAND 64

DUN DUN DUNDUNDUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUNDUNDUNDUNDUN DUN DUNDUNDUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUNDUNDUNDUNDUN DUN DUNDUNDUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUNDUNDUNDUN

PLAY THIS GAME ITS GOOD

 

[JonnyW]

Play Falcon. Play fast.

couldn't.agree.more.

 

[Popopidopop]

Make a scene!

Alright, Ill tell you how I got my friends into melee, when I was really the only one who totally wanted to play it...

Step 1.

Take your gamecube to your highschool xD
During the god damn long lunchbreak when all ur friends are hanging in the cafeteria, u and your closest friends are playing smash and having a blast...
BANG every1 wants to be good at smash cuz its the cool thing xD.
OBSERVE!!!
This would prolly not work unless you happen to be in a natural science highschool or something similar xD.

Step 2.
I happened to be the best, still far below any community or advanced tecniques but still a very competitve person can get far with good spacing and mindgames, (Hell I bought the game in the first place cuz I kept losing to my best friend while trying it at his place )
and so I just made little noob tournaments with another guy who liked brawl aswell (yawn) but with both games it was sure to be a success!

After a while though only one of my friends was really ready for taking it to the final lvl... seeking out the competitive scene in Stockholm Sweden.

 

[Thanos828]

Last year one of my friends who's into the competitive scene of Smash 64 used to bring in SSB64 to school to play in the mornings and afternoons. He graduated last year, so I decided to continue the tradition, but with Melee (considering those are the only humans I can really get to play [hooray for living in the middle of nowhere!]). Just by playing really well (against them, obviously) and just noting the community and good players a couple of times I've sparked interest in some of the better players (the ones that play smart and don't SD every thirty seconds) about the competitive scene.

 

[EthereaL]

I was going to make some dry comment about it being a girl, then I read further and saw Massive's post. Jerk.

That said, melee can be a girl's game. However, from what you've said, she doesn't have much of a competitive drive...so...haha.

 

[SpeedyJ]

I have kind of the same problem. Here's my two cents.

How would you recommend I go about it without scaring them off?
Don't completely own them. Don't be mean and give false hope by letting them think they are winning and then own them anyway but don't just completely destroy them or spam cheap stuff a newbie won't be able to get around like laser spam or chain grabs.

How can you introduce a very uncompetitive person to a competitive game?
Just expose them to the game and play with them a lot. Its what I did and as you go, guide them. Like if they find themselves just spamming one move, explain to them why it is bad and then recommend what other options they have. Also show them some competitive videos and if they find them interesting, show them more.

What I did was after my friend became genuinely interested I offered him "help" and he was happy about it. So I sent him lots of youtube tutorials on the ATs like JCG, wavedashing, etc.

If they have something to gain from playing Melee, and they know they do, but it has not (up to that point) been in their nature to play competitively, how can they be shifted toward competition?
Once they get good, ask them if they want to go to a tournament with you. If you're like me and have a really crappy smash scene then you could just have competitive sets with him at home. Like explain the concept of random stages and counter-picking and play first to 3, first to 5, etc.

But most importantly, they have to like it. If they don't really like it, and I know its painful for someone you're close to to not share that same passion as you, there's really nothing you can do about it. Just play uncompetitive Melee or play the B word <--- sounds like blasphemy I know. Just don't force it haha.

 

[c2!]

Being a veteran mvc2 player, I had that misguided perception of competitive smash that alot of the more conventional fighting game players seem to have. 'it's kiddy' or 'coherent button smashing' or something along those lines, so I never really had any interest in playing it. All it really took for me to see how awesome this game is, and what I could be capable of in this game was to see a few crazy videos of Mango / DrPP / M2K. My buddy just happened to be showing someone a video of Mango vs Fly Aminita, where Mango gets pissed and 4 stocks IC with Falcon, and ever since I've been very curious about melee.

I may just be getting into it, but at least that's a good example of what it takes to get somebody to want to play it. Gotta give them something to work towards.

 

[Varist]

Thank you everyone for the input, and thank you Massive for being gay.

**** you massive

(JMoney's post was great btw. i took the most from it.)

 

[rawrimamonster]

From my experience a casual player will never stick with melee for long, they have to be someone who has seen youtube vids (on their own), seen awesome gameplay and says to themselves "oh **** i wanna be that good" and trains themselves hard and is ready to get destroyed at tourneys until they get better. OR they've started brand new to the game (repeat youtube) with a friend and they both came up playing together in skill. You're probably only gonna anger the kid into ragequitting since hes a brawl casual.

Best suggestion ITT was let him watch youtube vids and slowly egg him on into getting better. Since hes a peach player show him armada vids. Its good that he already has smash experience with brawl (though thats honestly the worst place to start) it'll help since he already knows the basics. Balance your playtime between brawl and melee and slowly nudge them into melee.