Why online mode is poisonous to competitive play

[Talazala]

I think it's ok to play online as long as you as a player realize what you are getting into and can extract experience from it.

-Know that the other player has lag too. Smash is at its core a battle of minds and online only takes a fraction of a second away from that.
-Don't do what is easy, do what you know is right and will help you get better. Use online as practice and not just to feel good.
-The your "micro lag" you're describing is packet loss. Accept that this is out of your control and don't take it into consideration when adjusting how you play.
-Acknowledge the strengths of your opponent's plays. If you try to shield and your opponent still hits you, it just means your opponent thought about hitting you a split second before you thought about shielding.
-Don't *****.

 

[Blazerator]

This is why we have so many links

 

[TheYukon103]

First off, let me just say that this is not a ranting thread
This is a serious discussion about why online mode for smash is poisonous to competitive play
I wanted to create a thread for a long time on why online mode is a poison to sm4sh

I have been playing smashbros competitively since N64 release
I've been to hundreds of tournaments and won quite a few
I'm not saying I am the best playing, however

Anyway. my first point, which is the most obvious is "lag"
Now anyone who says something like "Oh I never get lag" is probably not a skilled player
All games lag online, even if it is hardly noticeable to you
Furthermore, if you can't tell the game is lagging, I don't advise you play competitively because you clearly lack the skills to notice such fine things

Second, because of lag and the way the game was designed, players will experience what I refer to as "micro lag"
You know, when youre playing an online match and it seems like there is no lag, and you press "jump"
and nothing happens sort of scenario?
Well thats because you have just experienced a "micro" lag
Now when the game lags, your input won't be received, this is certainly common sense for most skilled players
What has just happened is the game has just lagged for a split second, during that exact time the game was supposed to receive your input but didn't

Now smashbros is a game of extreme precision, the slightest failure or mistake can land you in a huge combo or worse, it can cost you to lose a stock
When players are unable to block, jump or move properly it can present a huge annoyance to your competitive edge
Players will compensate for this and develop a completely different play style than that of an unlagged environment

Players will tend to react slower or assume that a certain move has priority when it really doesnt
Plays will start to become dependent on this environment which will slowly chip away at their competitive game
Players will actually start to become "worse" then they were before they started playing online

I highly advise all players to reconsider playing the game online
and if you think youre "good" at for glory mode, you should definitely reconsider your priorities

I wouldn't say its poisonous, I think that if you can play well with slight lag, then you can play probably better without lag. I havent noticed a difference in both of my online play and offline...

 

[Kapus]

Playing online is fun though

 

[vangerz]

There have been many players who developed their skills and moved onto becoming some of the best players shortly after.

If you're simply saying already-professionals won't get better from it, then yeah no crap, they already know well enough.

I play CS:GO online, and have been gaming online since 1998. In short, I will say that if CS:GO can be played competitively online, SSB4 can also.

CSGO has client side hitscan and movement so you're playing without any network lag
fighting games are the only genre that can't be played online without grievous problems because they cannot have client side anything

 

[Turrin]

First, there are tons of competitive tournaments held online. Even ones that big-name players have entered. If online was that detrimental to competitive play, not a single competitive player would bother. Obviously some do bother, so what does that mean? Second, local play isn't available all the time. It's not even available very much at all. The only local I can manage to get to occurs twice a month. If I want to be seriously competitive, does that mean the only practice I can get is two Fridays a month? That's not enough to get competitively good. Take Anther's Ladder, for example. Almost everyone on there is trying to get good from a competitive standpoint. I've even seen pro players from big tournaments on that site. If online was that big a waste of time competitively, why would any of these people bother with it?