New Player Challenges

[Veskah]

So here's a little backstory of the tale of Veskah. Sometime recently, I got the urge to compete again. It had been a while since I went to tournaments for anything, (last big thing was the WoWTCG) and had never competed in video games. Smash Bros. had the following I was looking for and enough of my favorite characters to keep me interested. So I took the plunge and gutted my wallet for a Wii U and Sm4sh.

Since then I've picked up what seems to be one of the harder characters to play (Olimar), and began my conquest to be a Pokemon Smash Master. I began reading up on all of the words to know and the special tech. Obviously some are easier to catch on to and perform than others. During my training with the world's smallest astronaut, I start each play session with some time in training mode to run through various combo strings and tech to get warmed up.

However, when the match starts something strange happens. My hands completely betray me. It does take some time to get used to combo strings and knowing what move works best in each situation. However, I end up seeing the opposite of what I expect. During my matches online, I find that I can get a decent read about 50% of the time. I'll see a person rolling and think "Okay. Take a step to the right, pivot, and smash to the left." As I go to perform these actions, I will only perform a smash to the right. At this point, I go "why did I even do that" as I get punished.

This can lead to getting flustered and frustration, which is what I think is a smasher's worst enemy. The moment you get frustrated, you stop thinking and start doing without any plan. This leads to bad moves and easy punishes from the enemy, which will then compound the frustration. Rinse and repeat until a rage quit occurs.

There may be a better way to combat this, but at the moment I only believe that practice and continuous play will resolve this issue. This seems to be the transition that a new player has to go through to get into the mindset of quick thinking and quick decisions. It is especially harder for players who have not played many games like this before. I do notice that as the weeks go on, I will go from an average of 10 stupid mistakes to 9. So what I've learned is that you can spend all the time in the world watching videos for strategies on certain matchups and character guides for combos and whatnot... but that won't get you anywhere if you don't spend as much time if not more practicing.

I am curious to see if there are any other things you guys have experienced as you were just getting into the game and what you did to combat it.

tl:dr Practice, practice practice.

 

[TheRealBlueBlur]

Only about 20% of my moves actually hit when I was first getting into Smash, but that isn't a problem for me now. I went into training and set a LV 9 Pikachu to run away from me, and I practiced spacing and landing safe, guaranteed hits on him.

I also relied too much on dash attacks and stronger, laggier attacks long ago. I never thought of using weak jabs and pummels to my advantage.

 

[Raijinken]

Attack accuracy can give you an idea of how you're doing, but remember it's influenced by just throwing it moves for lulz, too (available somewhere under player stats). It's also important to remember that training doesn't account for stale moves or DI (in most cases). What works there won't necessarily work elsewhere.

Anyways, personally, especially when I was younger and only had my brother to compete with, I honed my skills doing the single-player modes and challenges. By time I finished those in each game, I generally had a very solid grasp of all of the basic mechanics. Past that, it's just getting used to playing against different people and characters, which you can only really do by playing a lot of people.