Improving as a player

[Sabre]

Hey everyone, so I'm someone who has been attending tournaments for about half a year now, and I play melee, PM and Smash 4 all competitively, but I consider PM my primary game. As a rule, I try to keep my games separate(play different characters and even develop different playstyles so as to be able to switch easily), but I certainly understand that particularly between melee and PM there's a lot of fundamental skill that can transfer between games. One thing that I've noticed recently is that whenever I express that I need to improve in PM, even if I know exactly what to work on, the suggestion that is always made by training partners is just that I need to play more melee and it'll make me a better player.
Here's my problem with this suggestion: if I wanted to get better at melee, I'd play melee, and while maybe playing melee will make me somewhat of a better player, it's unlikely that I'll improve as much at PM by playing melee as I will by playing PM. The perception by a lot of people seems to be that PM is more based on what character you play and using their "jank", while playing melee will actually make me a "better player" with better fundamentals and neutral. The idea seems to be that by playing melee, I can improve on these things and then apply them to PM, but I object to the idea that I can't learn these things by simply getting good at PM.
I'm posting this in the hopes that anyone who has heard this in the past won't get discouraged from playing the game they love, whatever it is. I don't care if you're being told to play smash 4 to improve your neutral, or melee to get better tech skill, or PM to deal better with a wide matchup spread, or whatever, just play the game you want to improve in and you'll get better. While some games may emphasize certain skills over others, every smash game requires all of these things to play at some level or another, and if you want to focus on getting better at a certain game, then in my opinion there's no better way to do so than playing that game. I've talked to friends in the past about improving my neutral game with ivy in PM, and their response was "you know what you need? We should play some melee marth dittos and that'll help your neutral get better." Yes, that may help me get better, but you know what else will help me get better at PM? Playing PM.

I apologize for the long post, but this has been really getting to me for a while now, and I thought I'd put it out there and see if anyone else has any thoughts on the subject.

 

[Jamble]

I feel like the best way to improve at PM being to play PM is almost tautologous, so yeah. People who say you should play melee to get better at PM are full of it. Honestly it's just Melee snobbery.

 

[Flippy Flippersen]

I would say the best way to improve is to focus on 1 character in 1 game first and if you don't want to drop the other games just enter them sometime as a side thing. (If you main fox marth falco sheik or falcon in pm you can prolly still do stuff with melee for obv reasons) but having a focus on 3 games means you have your practice divided by 3 and more importantly you have to theorycraft multiple games which makes having certain breakthroughs just happen so much later than it could. I don't think there are smashers out there that got good focusing on 3 games (or 2 for that matter)
The people saying just play melee prolly hope you'll see the light and accept melee as your lord and savior instead of pm cause they'd rather play that with you.

 

[Life]

The real reason playing Melee to get better at PM works is because people are just that much better at Melee.

Playing against better players will help you get better faster. Given how many skills transfer between the two, it's perfectly valid, provided you also play enough PM to learn the new matchups/a new character.

 

[GHNeko]

Playing Melee to get better at PM is not untrue, but it begins being such after a certain level.

So like if you're fresh to smash, if you learn to wavedash and L-cancel and shuffle with....Marth...

You learn how to pivot smash/grab. You learn your spacing with Marth. A whole bunch of fundamental melee **** and fundamental marth ****.

That will transfer over to PM. How much of it will be 1:1; I personally cant quantify.

And like wise, the vise-versa is true. But generally playing one to get better at the other is not a statement that's made by elitism and snobbery even if sometimes the person giving those words IS elitist/snobby.

However, once you've gotten all the transferable skills under your belt, at that point, I feel you're better off keep practice for one game to one game.

 

[Deleted member]

http://smashboards.com/threads/drastic-improvement.311129/

 

[Sabre]

http://smashboards.com/threads/drastic-improvement.311129/

That was really helpful, thanks for linking it! After reading that thread I definitely have somewhat of a plan on how to improve.