Pittypat1408
Smash Rookie
- Joined
- Mar 7, 2021
- Messages
- 0
First of all, HI! Im new here 
I play Link and Dark Pit.
nice to meet you!
I have noticed something about smash and it’s community, but I want to make a few things clear. This is from the perspective of a person who has grown up watching and playing smash ever since Brawl. It’s the reason I love so many video games, and many of my absolute favorites were ones smash exposed me to.
As such, smash has mostly been a pleasure for me in it’s simplest sense: the crossover aspect. That is, until Ultimate came out, and I tried to actually improve. This post is my thoughts from my journey with Ultimate.
I adore video games, and a series like smash has always intrigued me because of just how much video game it is, and how much video game it represents. I love seeing who they’ll add next and playing against my friends is a huge treat.
Just one problem.
I suck.
Every time I boot up online mode I find myself raging HARD. Not because I find my losses to be undeserved or because I find the opponent to be worse than me (most of the time at least), but because I just suck. My play is consistently below what I want it to be, and I can’t help but get angry because I just want to be better.
I have a full time job and college, so I can’t just spend hours grinding away to “git Gud” as they say. And I don’t want to do that. I just want to feel confident in my movement and options. I honestly do feel myself improving very gradually as I practice, but it’s at little more than a snails pace. I’m not looking to become a competitive player, or rise to the top of the online ranks, or even just make it to elite smash, or any of that. I just want to be better. I want to feel my improvement at a consistent pace and I want to understand the game and it’s meta on a deeper level as I play. You know, like how a video game works. Unfortunately, it is absolutely never that easy.
When it comes to fighting games, or really, just competitive games, there’s this weird dichotomy for bad players. Because the skill ceiling is so high, and because the competition is FULL of great players, it can feel a lot of the time like the better player is picking on you or snickering on the other side of their setup. It can be really hard for players who are bad, like me, to get past that mindset enough to just play the game and analyze your strengths and weaknesses.
Even more that that, though, the vast number of players means there’s a vast, VAST number of skill levels to encounter, which means there are dozens of walls for unskilled players to bang their head against as they learn and adapt to more advanced play styles.
To add to this, bad players who maybe wish to improve by studying others can’t when it comes to smash, at least not effectively. Studying highly skilled gameplay can probably help a small amount, but if you’re anything like me, that stuff will just make it seem all the more impossible for you to climb any higher. And in my experience, attempting to study advanced play doesn’t work at the lower level. If I were a Pikachu main, I don’t think watching ESAM would help me learn my fundamentals. Watching play like that is incomprehensible to a player who can barely pivot cancel or RAR consistently.
Add to this that fact that the smash entertainment community has placed such a stigma on being a bad player that only worsens your self shame with each loss, the fact that a global pandemic has made it virtually impossible for some players to even think about practicing offline friendlies, an abundance of characters whose sole purpose is to just hit you with projectile after projectile... the list goes on and on.
My point: being a bad player is really frustrating.
It’s so easy for better players to just say “git gud” and move on, but it can be genuinely difficult for some to even come close to consistently winning, because of their circumstances, and their lack of ability to change those circumstances. In addition, constant stigmatization of bad players in the community only worsens the problem.
I’m not saying we need to pity them. They’re bad. I’m bad. I accept that. But players who are bad but really want to get better are in a very tough spot in smash right now. Especially ones who just don’t have the time to be able to grind WiFi or watch vods, or ones who have been rendered a lone smasher by the pandemic.
We need more people out there who are understanding of the mindset and the lack of resources bad players have, and we also really need more tools for players to learn more about the game and it’s meta.
If you really want us to “git gud,” show us how. Make it possible for us to access the resources we need to learn just what we’re doing wrong.
Stop stigmatizing us as “scrubs” if you’re not willing to help people improve.
Right now, all I see when I look at the best players in smash are people who love the game with a passion, and that’s great, it’s the reason Ultimate is thriving!
But until those people realize that there are a lot of people out there DESPERATE to get better, and until they see the hurdles in their way and help as much as they can to take those hurdles down... The game just won’t change. The meta won’t evolve. Viewers will grow bored of seeing the same players at the top of every bracket and just... stop. And one day, the lifeblood of the game, the bad players, will get sick of losing and move on the next thing.
All at once, and seemingly out of nowhere, the game will grow stale and boring. Bad players will have no choice but to just stop, mid level players will continue to bang their heads against that elite wall that they just can’t enter because they’re not willing to grind or play competitively, and the top will just keep grinding away until the next smash comes along and resets the cycle.
I hate to say it, but just look at brawl, PM, and sm4sh. All are games defined by their power struggles between top players and... little else. Because bad players never got better, and nobody ever made a huge splash. The best they could hope for would be a game or maybe even one single set to get taken off a top player, but even that was exceedingly rare. The same names were on the top of every major bracket. The metas only lasted as long as their game did.
Someone has got to do something about this. We need people willing to redefine “badness” for what it really is: a lack of game knowledge.
I don’t know what the answer is. After all, I’ve watched guide after guide on the basics of smash’s meta, and I still find myself improving slower than I would like. Point is, though, something has to change. I love this game to pieces and I want not only to get better but to watch it’s meta flourish, too, but that won’t happen Unless the people at the top realize that we, yes, even the people at the very bottom of the ladder, are part of the games ecosystem, and that we aren’t supposed to stay at the bottom.
Come on, guys.
Help us climb.
I play Link and Dark Pit.
nice to meet you!
I have noticed something about smash and it’s community, but I want to make a few things clear. This is from the perspective of a person who has grown up watching and playing smash ever since Brawl. It’s the reason I love so many video games, and many of my absolute favorites were ones smash exposed me to.
As such, smash has mostly been a pleasure for me in it’s simplest sense: the crossover aspect. That is, until Ultimate came out, and I tried to actually improve. This post is my thoughts from my journey with Ultimate.
I adore video games, and a series like smash has always intrigued me because of just how much video game it is, and how much video game it represents. I love seeing who they’ll add next and playing against my friends is a huge treat.
Just one problem.
I suck.
Every time I boot up online mode I find myself raging HARD. Not because I find my losses to be undeserved or because I find the opponent to be worse than me (most of the time at least), but because I just suck. My play is consistently below what I want it to be, and I can’t help but get angry because I just want to be better.
I have a full time job and college, so I can’t just spend hours grinding away to “git Gud” as they say. And I don’t want to do that. I just want to feel confident in my movement and options. I honestly do feel myself improving very gradually as I practice, but it’s at little more than a snails pace. I’m not looking to become a competitive player, or rise to the top of the online ranks, or even just make it to elite smash, or any of that. I just want to be better. I want to feel my improvement at a consistent pace and I want to understand the game and it’s meta on a deeper level as I play. You know, like how a video game works. Unfortunately, it is absolutely never that easy.
When it comes to fighting games, or really, just competitive games, there’s this weird dichotomy for bad players. Because the skill ceiling is so high, and because the competition is FULL of great players, it can feel a lot of the time like the better player is picking on you or snickering on the other side of their setup. It can be really hard for players who are bad, like me, to get past that mindset enough to just play the game and analyze your strengths and weaknesses.
Even more that that, though, the vast number of players means there’s a vast, VAST number of skill levels to encounter, which means there are dozens of walls for unskilled players to bang their head against as they learn and adapt to more advanced play styles.
To add to this, bad players who maybe wish to improve by studying others can’t when it comes to smash, at least not effectively. Studying highly skilled gameplay can probably help a small amount, but if you’re anything like me, that stuff will just make it seem all the more impossible for you to climb any higher. And in my experience, attempting to study advanced play doesn’t work at the lower level. If I were a Pikachu main, I don’t think watching ESAM would help me learn my fundamentals. Watching play like that is incomprehensible to a player who can barely pivot cancel or RAR consistently.
Add to this that fact that the smash entertainment community has placed such a stigma on being a bad player that only worsens your self shame with each loss, the fact that a global pandemic has made it virtually impossible for some players to even think about practicing offline friendlies, an abundance of characters whose sole purpose is to just hit you with projectile after projectile... the list goes on and on.
My point: being a bad player is really frustrating.
It’s so easy for better players to just say “git gud” and move on, but it can be genuinely difficult for some to even come close to consistently winning, because of their circumstances, and their lack of ability to change those circumstances. In addition, constant stigmatization of bad players in the community only worsens the problem.
I’m not saying we need to pity them. They’re bad. I’m bad. I accept that. But players who are bad but really want to get better are in a very tough spot in smash right now. Especially ones who just don’t have the time to be able to grind WiFi or watch vods, or ones who have been rendered a lone smasher by the pandemic.
We need more people out there who are understanding of the mindset and the lack of resources bad players have, and we also really need more tools for players to learn more about the game and it’s meta.
If you really want us to “git gud,” show us how. Make it possible for us to access the resources we need to learn just what we’re doing wrong.
Stop stigmatizing us as “scrubs” if you’re not willing to help people improve.
Right now, all I see when I look at the best players in smash are people who love the game with a passion, and that’s great, it’s the reason Ultimate is thriving!
But until those people realize that there are a lot of people out there DESPERATE to get better, and until they see the hurdles in their way and help as much as they can to take those hurdles down... The game just won’t change. The meta won’t evolve. Viewers will grow bored of seeing the same players at the top of every bracket and just... stop. And one day, the lifeblood of the game, the bad players, will get sick of losing and move on the next thing.
All at once, and seemingly out of nowhere, the game will grow stale and boring. Bad players will have no choice but to just stop, mid level players will continue to bang their heads against that elite wall that they just can’t enter because they’re not willing to grind or play competitively, and the top will just keep grinding away until the next smash comes along and resets the cycle.
I hate to say it, but just look at brawl, PM, and sm4sh. All are games defined by their power struggles between top players and... little else. Because bad players never got better, and nobody ever made a huge splash. The best they could hope for would be a game or maybe even one single set to get taken off a top player, but even that was exceedingly rare. The same names were on the top of every major bracket. The metas only lasted as long as their game did.
Someone has got to do something about this. We need people willing to redefine “badness” for what it really is: a lack of game knowledge.
I don’t know what the answer is. After all, I’ve watched guide after guide on the basics of smash’s meta, and I still find myself improving slower than I would like. Point is, though, something has to change. I love this game to pieces and I want not only to get better but to watch it’s meta flourish, too, but that won’t happen Unless the people at the top realize that we, yes, even the people at the very bottom of the ladder, are part of the games ecosystem, and that we aren’t supposed to stay at the bottom.
Come on, guys.
Help us climb.
