NC Brocator Thread!

[Dr Peepee]

uh.......wow. I don't even know what to say about that.

 

[ph00tbag]

Wait, really?

 

[ph00tbag]

what has been so unhappy about it?

I guess unhappy isn't quite the best word. I just get mentally exhausted quickly, and my desire to play gets greatly reduced, and I get flustered even more easily than I do in friendlies. Long story short, I like watching tournaments more than I do playing them.

 

[SK919]

I think what you lack is a competitive drive and a love for the thrill of the fight.

Winning is one thing but I think the intensity of a tournament set is what makes the experience worth it.

 

[Dr Peepee]

I guess unhappy isn't quite the best word. I just get mentally exhausted quickly, and my desire to play gets greatly reduced, and I get flustered even more easily than I do in friendlies. Long story short, I like watching tournaments more than I do playing them.

Hm, well that seems easier to solve if you play more often, which I'm not sure you do at the moment.

It's entirely possible to have a good time and still have some serious tournament matches, but it just helps to come in prepared is all I'd suggest for that.

 

[ph00tbag]

I think what you lack is a competitive drive and a love for the thrill of the fight.

You think correctly. I'm kind of a pinko liberal like that. If everyone could win the tournament, I think that would be ideal.

But then, if the players have an awesome battle, I think everyone wins. Although I thought Hbox vs. Armada was pretty awesome, and not everyone liked that battle.

 

[Dr Peepee]

The best way to have a chance at everyone winning is building yourself up to that level so you have a relatively equal chance of winning, right?

 

[ph00tbag]

Maybe in NCAA football.

Just get the BCS committee to make another bowl game.

 

[Dr Peepee]

It's worth a shot if you haven't tried it anyway. Not sure how you'd know to brush it off if you didn't give it a solid try before.

 

[lord karn]

I think James' relationship to smash is like mine with Starcraft II. I like watching it and understanding it, but I don't really have any interest in playing it.

 

[ph00tbag]

Alex pretty much gets the idea. I like the people, and I like to see if I can understand what's going on, but playing smash at the highest levels just isn't something I want to spend time on.

 

[Dark Hart]

Would you enter for the sake of supporting the tournament and the community?

 

[Dr Peepee]

I think James' relationship to smash is like mine with Starcraft II. I like watching it and understanding it, but I don't really have any interest in playing it.

You don't attend SCII tourneys though, so I'd think that's not quite the same thing.

 

[Lightsyde]

You cannot get a true understanding of SCII or Melee or almost anything else just by watching. The great deal of understanding to be had comes purely from the experience of playing it at varying levels.

Watching without participating leads and limits you to appreciation, not understanding. There is nothing wrong with just appreciating things if that's what you want to do, but I think the term "understand" is used far too liberally in general.

 

[OmniOstrich]

IMO part of the magic of watching high level play (in either game, since i play both although not near a top level) is that you can't fully comprehend the players thought process, making them that super human that people idolize.

It's kinda hard to make a role model out of someone that you feel doesn't do anything special.

 

[ph00tbag]

I disagree wholly and completely that you need to play the game at a high level to understand it at a high level. In fact, it's the other way around, in my opinion. You need to be able to sit down, watch matches and analyse them, and think about possible responses to those situtations. If you have the game with you, it can help with that particular process, but all you really need is data.

 

[lord karn]

You don't attend SCII tourneys though, so I'd think that's not quite the same thing.

A lot of SC tournaments are online, and I watch livestreams when I have time. I was also going to go to MLG Raleigh but I didn't have any money.

And yeah, I meant understand mostly as appreciate. Of course, the greatest understanding comes through playing, and I just don't have the time to devote to starcraft, but I think it is an amazing game. That being said, I think you can understand a lot about a game even if you are not very good at it. It's all about game knowledge and decision points.

 

[AlcyoNite]

I disagree wholly and completely that you need to play the game at a high level to understand it at a high level. In fact, it's the other way around, in my opinion. You need to be able to sit down, watch matches and analyse them, and think about possible responses to those situtations. If you have the game with you, it can help with that particular process, but all you really need is data.

just playing devil's advocate here but

How would you know any of this?

 

[Lightsyde]

I disagree wholly and completely that you need to play the game at a high level to understand it at a high level. In fact, it's the other way around, in my opinion. You need to be able to sit down, watch matches and analyse them, and think about possible responses to those situtations. If you have the game with you, it can help with that particular process, but all you really need is data.

just playing devil's advocate here but

How would you know any of this?

That's pretty much exactly what I was thinking though. Unless you've played a particular game at a high level, you only think you understand what is going on. In almost any game the things that separate low/mid from high/top level play are the things you literally can't see. It is normally obvious to someone at the top level of a game exactly how good the people below them are because they have passed through all the lower levels of skill and can look for similarities/patterns/habits indicative of different levels of skill.

Data is useless to you in competitive gaming if you do not have a feel for the underlying feeling/processes going on past what you can see on the screen. This is demonstrated well in Smash by the fact that pretty much no matter how many videos you watch and no matter how much tech skill you have, it will not necessarily make you a good player as there are things to be known which lie outside of your realm of experience.

Experience with any given medium is demonstrable and is a tangible show of understanding. Talk, theory and any other such claims of understanding are unverifiable and likely relatively low in comparison to an actual high/top level player who understands the process intuitively.

 

[stingers]

understanding things intuitively is the most important thing in smash because that is the only way you can really react to things in time

and the best way to do that is to break things down enough into their most simple forms

i think

 

[Dr Peepee]

I personally find the joy in Melee to be breaking down the complex game into the way I get it best, then trying to reassemble what I just broke down into something complicated again for use against others.

I really understand and appreciate Melee more through watching by doing that because I get to see how other people have done it and compare decisions.

This is not really on one side or the other of the discussion but I wanted to personally expand on what Stongers said because I haven't posted it/verbalized it until now and I always wanted to lol.

 

[Chocolate Chip Cookies]

Hey all. My name is Bryan I'm a melee player from Reidsville, NC

AIM: ChocoChipToons
Mobile: 336 451 2569

I've been out of the game since 09 but if someone from gboro or the rest of the triad wants to hit me up and play I'd love the chance. I won't have a car until January so you'd have to come here but I'll happily treat you to some food and let you stay over if you need to rest if you come over. (Cookies are plentiful) I also like Project:M so if anyone has an Alpha copy and wants to play too, I'm game.

 

[Dark Hart]

Mr. Cookies

get your friends

http://www.smashboards.com/showthread.php?t=312519

 

[ph00tbag]

This is demonstrated well in Smash by the fact that pretty much no matter how many videos you watch and no matter how much tech skill you have, it will not necessarily make you a good player as there are things to be known which lie outside of your realm of experience.

This is the same in either case, though. If you have won serveral tournaments relying on a certain knowledge and skill set, then someone gives you something that lies outside your realm of experience, unless you know your character's options well enough to adapt on the fly, you're going to lose to this new thing.

And ultimately, all you have for knowing your own character's options is data.

 

[Divinokage]

We could go a little extreme here and say that you might know every advanced technique in UFC on TV.. but if you start to fight yourself, you'll get crushed in 2 seconds. Inside rigorous training, they create inner strength and experience to understand how everything is connected just like a kick where you have to harness the power of your hips and proper positioning to do real damage. There's like an incredible amount of conditioning involved in something like this, obviously. Which is why simple knowledge is one-dimensional.. you can know about that but you can't really use it for yourself without a purpose.

 

[ph00tbag]

That's the physical conditioning, though. Not the understanding. A UFC fighter also has to spend endless hours in the video room watching his opponent finding openings.

That second aspect is really all I care about developing, and it doesn't have anything to do with physical development.

 

[Lightsyde]

That's the physical conditioning, though. Not the understanding. A UFC fighter also has to spend endless hours in the video room watching his opponent finding openings.

That second aspect is really all I care about developing, and it doesn't have anything to do with physical development.

You missed the point of his post; he was just offering a more extreme example about the concept of conditioning. A huge part of understanding higher levels of Melee is about mental conditioning (you conditioning them, them conditioning you) and you can't learn that just from watching it either. It's something you feel.

 

[Bl@ckChris]

you're both right.

josh and others are probably more right.

but you're both right.

 

[0Room]

Conditioning is kind of everything in matches in essence
If you were ever fully aware of conditioning and how it works
And really pay attention to a match

You'll realize how much conditioning really goes on

 

[Lightsyde]

Exactly. And conditioning is something that most people are like "yeah, I see the conditioning going on" and they generally don't take note of most of it. It takes soooo long to develop of a sense of all of it and even longer to really implement and abuse it. Again, experience.

EDIT: And let me clarify and say that in between levels of skill it's even more difficult to see. When I play people worse to dramatically worse, it's much exponentially easier to condition/induce new habits and punish old ones. When I play Kevin (or anyone much better than me) despite seeing a lot of it, there is undoubtedly more that I don't see, otherwise they wouldn't be much better than me.

 

[Dark Hart]

Conditioning isn't real lol

 

[Lightsyde]

Yeah man, just like gravity and time.

 

[ph00tbag]

Conditioning is manipulating the tendency all players have to observe and exploit patterns. These patterns and the adaptation to them are just as observable over the course of the match to someone watching as they are to the players. Most people just don't watch hard enough for it if they're not the ones playing.

 

[DJRome]

that's like saying if you look at a foreign language for a while, you should note the patterns in writing and be able to learn the language without having ever used it. how can you begin to understand without use?

 

[ph00tbag]

You can actually learn comprehension of a language without needing to use it on a daily basis. In fact, it's called Rosetta Stone.

 

[Lightsyde]

You can actually learn comprehension of a language without needing to use it on a daily basis. In fact, it's called Rosetta Stone.

Comprehension =/= Understanding

You're still missing the point. It's like in language if you knew a large amount of vocabulary and grammar rules. You could put together sentences and speak it decently, sure.

But you can't learn true accents or any kind of fluidity in phrases or have a true understanding of the modern usages or connotations of things. There is a metagame to speech, a natural ease of usage and structure that comes along with a great deal of exposure to a language. And you'll never catch the humor or subtle nuances (like sarcasm) that native speakers and natural use can provide.

Translate that to Melee: You can know every move and every combo and every technique but until you can feel how and when and why to apply it, you're not watching the same game; just like you're not speaking the same language in the above example. Humor (or the instigation of any emotional response really) in language works largely in part to varying degrees of conditioning to the thing that makes you laugh, hence why some people laugh at some things that others don't. Again, translated to Melee, certain tactics and techniques which someone studying the match might say ("This is dumb" or "That shouldn't have worked") won't be able to realize that those subtle nuances of things that "don't work" or weird combos/DI's etc can and should work with proper conditioning.

No offense intended but seeing you talk about this kind of explains to me why you would get frustrated with not improving at the game, as it seems there is a seriously important aspect of understanding Melee that you've underestimated.

EDIT: For language, you could say that, you are listening but not hearing.
For Melee, you could say that, you are comprehending (or appreciating) but not understanding.

 

[Bl@ckChris]

yo phoot, you seem to understand this game a lot better than i do.

condition my ganon for a dollar?

 

[0Room]

No
Well

Not necessarily

Conditioning is associating a response with a stimulus
So you have your unconditioned response [UR] of feeling aversive to getting hit [Unconditioned stimulus, US]
Then you have the conditioned response [CR] of feeling aversive to being in shield [CS], taught to you by shield pressure and choosing the wrong option


So for example
You are in shield and your opponent is standing just outside your grab range
They walk forward, and you grab
Then WD back and Fsmash you

You have then associated shield grabbing when your opponent walks towards your shield [CS] with the aversive feeling of being hit [CR]
(Conditioning the neutral stimulus [NS] [shield grabbing when they walk towards your shield] to the aversive reaction of being hit when you get out of shield [UR])
So you are more likely to choose a different option, or stay in shield next time [Operant Conditioning]

That's what conditioning really is, in the more scientific terms

When you condition them they create patterns, but conditioning itself isn't necessarily looking for patterns

 

[Bl@ckChris]

tip of the iceberg man, tip of the iceberg.

 

[Dr Peepee]

yo phoot, you seem to understand this game a lot better than i do.

condition my ganon for a dollar?

LMFAO

I'd reasonably hype this