I love your mentality of not using for glory stats as a barometer for how good you are. I'm also glad you realised early that for glory is
not an ideal place at all to train for high competitive play. Before going into translating from for glory to competitive play, let me note one quick distinction that traps a lot of people in every competitive game ever, ever. And that is..
Your goal in becoming a competitive beast, unless you are currently in a tournament, is to learn and not to win. Winning tournaments is often the result of growing the most competitively, which is done through consistently applying learning and not through merely winning your training matches! Foregoing a stronger training option or opponent because you will be winning less during training makes no sense! Focusing so hard on winning while training that learning and sharpening core mechanics takes a mental backseat makes no sense! Stop training to win and start training to apply learning, people!!
okay. now that that's settled,
In order to become a smash god, as someone whose played other games hyper competitively and has been playing smash literally 12-16 hours a day currently trying to breakdown the most effective route to tournament play, I can't say I know everything. But, the most solid pattern to godlike growth if it were to be broken down would certainly be these three things:
Find the right people to practice the right things with. Then condition yourself in the right environments.
1) Who are the right people to train with?
This point is perhaps most controversial (and most crucial), but I'll explain why doing it this specific way will undoubtedly help you grow literally months ahead of other players and therefore is far superior. Put simply,
The "right people" are people who can body you (defeat you effortlessly)! You want to befriend and make these people your constant training buddies!
Why? Your goal should never be to consistently play where you're evenly skilled with your opponent- unless you're playing merely for entertainment. You want to get sparring partners who you will decisively lose to! You want people who attend or plan on attending tournaments, the people who master high level techniques while winning/placing highly if possible.
One of the biggest reasons being: If you want to become a god, befriend the gods. If you wanna go Super Saiyan faster, befriend the people who know how. Isai befriended Ken and became his training partner, then placed third in his first melee tournament
two weeks after being brought into melee. Zero became M2k's buddy and they trained together, and look at him now pretty much full god-mode over the sm4sh community.
Yes both were competitively tempered already but the constant conditioning they got and WE can get, and free training via consistent games with these people or even highly skilled people, is infinitely more valuable than even 20 or 30 lukewarm sparring partners who probably wouldn't make it out of lower tournament bracket anyway.
It's classic KoreanDJ strategy. Find the best, play with the best, learn from the best. The coolest thing is that there's so many ways to reach highly competent players online and via forums nowadays that you don't even have to money match to get access and advice from greatness!
A valid case people make opposing this strategy "Well, people will get discouraged playing strong people who are too good and should play people more even to keep themselves motivated; they'll feel less pressure and have more room to self-improve and actually know what's happening and why they're losing". That's why it's helpful to befriend these godlike/skilled people or at least add them beforehand. They'll be much more open to play you consistently, it'll be much less intimidating and discouraging for you playing with a friend, and if they're really good you have easier access to them!
As for the second part there's indeed less pressure in weaker matches which is well-meaning, but to be fair people sparring with those of equal skill don't commonly think, "Ah, I see! I lost because of this and this, and I'm forced to notice mistakes because there's less to notice. Time to improve~". The more usual response is, "Oh bleep bleep, I lost. I coulda won and I lost.. this person got me with a cheap shot, and it cost me... gosh.. I was doing good.. coulda won.. [insert more focus on the outcome rather than growth]".
But aside from that, getting too discouraged over losing during training usually means
you're over-prioritizing winning as a permission to feel good. Free yourself from this trap, and get excited over strong players teaching you correct habits for free.
Those who already are the right people, who know the right things, and who play in the right environments. Look for these people, and seek to befriend them for constant matches. Become aware and hungry to master this alone, and you will blow other people out the water in terms of speed and results.
(Hoo... hah. Now that that's taken care of, we can get to the other significantly important yet smaller parts.)
2) What are the right things/how should I practice them?
"The right things" goes much broader than mere character mastery- from core fundamentals like short hopping and shield grabbing to advanced pivots and mixups to having an unpredictable gameplay style while simultaneously being able to predict your opponent's patterns and using it to your advantage etc etc depth, so I'll stick to a tl;dr version:
The "right things" are things that will place you first in tournaments.
It's
not things that beat all your high school buddies.
It's
not all the tactics that work in for glory.
And that's why making sure you're playing with
the right people is
crucial; another important benefit of playing with competitive level players is not only the strategies you learn you can get away with through training sessions, but also
learning what you cannot get away with! I, for example, played 2 years in past iterations of smash using dash attacks and unsafe aerial attacks and things I would get easily punished for if I was playing with tournament goers and not casual buddies. Later I got my butt kicked and learned which approaches were merely working because my opponents weren't good, not because the approaches were reliable.
I was being
conditioned into doing the wrong things, and things that weren't optimal ways to play. I also
wasn't being forced to learn what oos(out of shield) options or fast falling or auto-cancelling even was because nobody around me was using them.
That's why For Glory, to a certain degree, isn't a good place to train. The majority of its players aren't trying to use competitively viable strategies. For glory's lag often promotes smash attack spam and roll-spamming tactics, which would quickly get you deleted if emulated in tournament play. A lot of the people are doing the wrong things and will teach you to do the wrong things.
Unless you just want some laidback games, "rolling the dice", looking for gems who know what they're doing when you can just go to them directly online. never add you straight from for glory if you're getting dominated. In fact, they usually just instantly leave. So you're left conditioning the wrong things with the wrong people, in a subpar laggy environment. If you're not the "right person" yet, for glory is mediocre training outside of basic character mastery; yet if you are the right person, you don't need for glory.
Lastly you must not only learn the tryhard spacing and core fundamentals and pivots and such, but also
adapt them into your gameplay so that you can rely on them. If you let your learning lead to "knowledge", yet can't reliably perform the techniques you know about, then you're only hurting your game.
"yeah yeah, I know about pivot grabs" is worthless. "Have I adapted pivot grabs to the point where it's comfortable and something I can rely on performing competitively?" is a worthy question.
You can read every guide and get a baseline mental understanding all you want on short hopping, but until you can
consistently short hop/auto-cancel/pivot grab/etc to the point where you can depend upon performing it in clinch situations then you need to keep practicing it
consistently to adapt it into your play. Then and only then does it truly belong to you.
(P.S. Use youtube how-to videos from top level players for characters and competitive strategies as a bridge into doing the right things! Also you don't want to do the right things every single time or you become predictable, but you'll learn about that in making reads and becoming unpredictable~)
3) Which environments should I use for conditioning competitive play?
Tournaments, online and offline.
Wait, what? Going to tournaments for practice??
Yes, actually.
Signing up for a bunch of online tourneys would do you very nicely and is quite easy! Getting into playing offline to get used to the initial sensations of playing outside the comfort of your own place around lots of other people!
You can also "condition" yourself in consistent practice with a competitive sparring partner in a friend-made room. sort of. Though there is a slight difference between practicing and mastering the game through consistent sparring partners, and competing in a tournament environment.
Real tournaments, and anything that can give you the feeling of "oh shoot this is ranked and this matters and the pressure is too real" will help lots with mastering the subtle psychological pressures of actual tournaments you decide on dominating. And again,
the right people will have conditioning in the right environments and will be more likely to help you! Notice a pattern?
So yeah, that's pretty much it~!
To summarize,
- Play matches to LEARN and adapt learning, not to win. Also study tournament match replays and sparring replays where you get bodied to learn and adapt learning.
- Find the right people, ideally Zero or M2k or Mr R or Dabuz or Nakat or some OP tournament level player/people who win or place highly and tournaments! And befriend these people for consistent sparring
- If Little Mac trained with a generic beginner/intermediate boxer for comfort reasons rather than befriending and training with Doc Louis, one of the greatest fighters of all time, would he have learned the star punch as quickly- if at all? Learn from Little Mac. Get your Doc Louis. (punchout reference, lol)
Stop using For Glory!! Please for the love of- Train consistently with high level buddies, and add them to make sure you have access to train with them often (repetition 2 strong!)
- Don't just learn the right things to do mechanics and character wise, adapt new these strategies into your gameplay so that it becomes natural and comfortable
- Sign up for tournaments. Yes, right now.
- Main Mii Swordfighter on Palutena's Temple stage with max item pokeballs on unless you're casual
See you at the top friends.
