As some of you may or may not know, I had placed an order for the Wii Ethernet adapter so that I could play online, potentially getting better so that I can get out of my 6th worst in Ottawa hole. It arrived in my mailbox yesterday, so I thought I'd take some time to try it out. Setup was straightforward, and I thought I'd try a couple of 'Play Anyone' matches to warm up and see how it worked out.
Unfortunately, input lag was still about 0.3-0.5 seconds even though I was using wired connection (my cable is at least 7MB down, potentially 10MB if they upgraded it like they said they would; basically, it's not my connection speed...). Despite the lag, my beastly green Ike mindgame forward smashed many a noob; in one game I had 7 kills in the 2 minute match
Confident that I could play online, despite some input delay, I proceeded to All is Brawl to look into registering for the ladder. To get used to the system, I thought I'd do a free play match first (ie: just a friendly, doesn't count for anything). I played a Toon Link from the States with my Marth three or four times. The matches were pretty close, but he would always go for a dair spike offstage on his last stock, and I was always able to see it coming and dodge (for those who don't know Toon Link: missed dair off the stage = dead TL). He seemed like a pretty nice guy when we talked a bit afterwards, so I was hopeful I would find similar people on the ladder.
I go through the AiB ladder rules, FAQs, etc. and sign up for the ladder. I log in to the ladder chat, expecting things to go smoothly. Big mistake; despite clanning in various FPSes for a couple of years in the past, I somehow forgot the magic formula of teenage boys + online + competition + anonymity = *******s. In addition to this, there was also what I call 'skill elitism'; the way the AiB ladder works is that everyone has a set 'skill' rating. Unfortunately, when you start out (like me), your skill is 0.
Long story short, no one wanted to play me because on the off chance that I won, their own rating would plummet. Reponses ranged from just being ignored, to one guy flat out saying "I'd play you, but my rating would drop too much if I lost". It took me at least half an hour to get a match; eventually, someone in Florida set up a game with me. During the chat, his connection dropped due to some router issue, but he showed up again a minute later. We started the first game; I went DK, he went Ike. Thanks to playing Derek/playing a bit of Ike myself, I knew the spacing and combos and was able to eke out a win. Immediately after the first game, he said one or two things in chat then mysteriously dropped. I waited 5, 10, 15 minutes...no reconnection. I filed a match cancellation, because I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt that he would return (I could have reported a win...but I didn't want to screw over the first person who actually played against me...maybe I'm too nice).
5 or 10 minutes later, he did actually show up again (how many of you were expecting him to never come back? I'll admit that's what I was thinking). He counterpicked Link on FD (!). I stayed DK and lost; basically, he was very good with projectiles and I couldn't deal with it. For the third game, I counterpicked YI. He changed to Fox, I stayed DK. This set was also very very close, but I won at my last stock at 160+%!
I filed the match report and gave him good feedback and comments. Unfortunately, the system kept my initial match cancellation message instead, so I think it makes him look bad now
I might have unintentionally screwed over the first person who actually wanted to play me, and who was actually a nice guy, so I feel kind of bad about that.
Anyways, playing online teaches something very important. You are probably all thinking, 0.3-0.5 second input delay? That's useless! However, you have to take the fact that there's input delay, and turn it around. If you know that you have, say, half a second input delay, it means you have to know where your opponent will be in half a second. If you can accurately predict where they will be and what they will do, you can get in a combo, or block an attack that you knew was coming. Now, if you can predict what your opponent will do in half a second, based on their character and position, that's a pretty useful skill to have offline too, right?
Also...I think he's kind of laying low here, so I don't want to give all the details, but I found Moses yesterday on AiB. Basically, I'm now 100% sure that no one hacked Moses' account; it is actually Moses. I don't know if Moses has always been like that and was just holding it back, or if something happened recently and he's trolling out of boredom, but it's definitely him. As for why he's not showing up...he didn't confirm anything with me, but I believe his mom took away his Wii (dunno if it's for good or not) so I don't think he can play right now. He's most likely been grounded from Smash. Moses, I know you're reading the boards; you should probably confirm all this for everyone.
Interesting times on AiB last night, at any rate. I won my first ladder match, and I think I understand why training online is important now. However, I was reminded that online people = *******s, and I saw that the 'real' Moses is indeed a troll, which kind of saddened me.
tl;dr version:
- Online is laggy even with a wired connection
- Playing online teaches you prediction skills
- Internet people are stupid
- Moses' account wasn't hacked, I confirmed it is actually Moses.
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