P4U2 Evo Prep 2015

[Anne]

So Evo 2015 is coming up, P4U2 is a main game, and Japan is sending a hit squad our way. I would be lying if I said I didn't think we are unprepared and should be worried. BUT, we have time to work on things best we can to help all of us improve. This isn't to say we are bad, but it is to say we can be preparing better for our chance to shine in the world's largest fighting game tournament. With community effort and hard work, we can put together a community of strong players and work to win this thing. And more importantly, we can foster a community with better resources and competition for us all to continue playing and getting the most out of the game. I'm just going to put down a few things I think we should work on here, but please feel free to offer practical things in this thread as well.

1. IMPROVE OUR RESOURCES

Currently, the resources at our disposal to study the game are lacking. The wiki he is incomplete or inaccurate in areas, and that needs to be improved on. Bananaken has put together a thread on this, go look at it and help out if you can. It's important for players of all levels to be able to easily and quickly find this information. It makes everybody's lives easier when studying the game and training moding, and it can help save time of testing things that we already have out there. On top of the wiki, the character boards need some work. If you have information to put there, go put it there. Don't put it on your twitter, don't stash it in a secret evernote, go put it somewhere we it can be found easily. It benefits us all to have more understanding and knowledge of what's going on in the game. If you come across a Japanese evernote or source of information, post it as well, share it, get it out there. There are enough people here who can read Japanese to help us get through it. The big take away here is to put stuff up so others can quickly gain knowledge and start building a better understanding across the board. We have a whole forum and wiki here dedicated to organizing info. We should be using it.

2. PLAY EACH OTHER TO IMPROVE

Unfortunately, a lot of us are spread out across the country and can't play together offline. Fortunately, online is a good tool to still practice and learn about characters and situations. We should be taking advantage of that to get practice and start learning about MUs, especially ones for players we know are coming. This would mean when we play online, we need to be somewhat organized in how we do it. It also means we need to put egos aside and play each other to improve and critically think, not to just beat each other. Right now most players just gather in Junes and play what they can. Unfortunately, that means a lot of players are spending play time against non-competitive players or not playing to improve. An easy solution for this is to designate a lobby where we can tell players to go who want to work on this. A better solution is to organize player match lobbies, since those can be more directed and offer the ability to spectate. We can talk in this thread about selecting a lobby and organizing player match rooms. The big thign here is to spend our play time more productively, and to work with each other to improve and lift each other. No put downs, not playing simply to win, playing to improve ourselves and others around us.

3. ORGANIZE ORGANIZE ORGANIZE

At this point, the theme should be pretty constant. Organize our shit. Use the forum. Use social media to keep each other more accessible. Also, it helps to be able to have visibility be high. I know basically everybody here has multiple alt accounts they play on in lobbies. We should probably stop doing that so we know who we need to be fighting for what MUs and XP. It also makes finding matches and recording them way more difficult than it should be. There's probably like 5 different skype groups of different players. Why? If you want to win and be better, we should organize social media in a way where we have places to when it's time to talk seriously about the game. I'm not saying ditch your friends, stop goofing off in whatever place you do, but we should have a place for serious time where can come together and productively get stuff done. No divides, none of that. We all need to be together somewhere.

SUPPORT EACH OTHER IN EVENTS

Everyone wants to win an event. That's cool, I do too. However, we shouldn't do that to the detriment of other players. We should work on getting more people at events, and also helping each other be able to perform in that environment. Play to win, don't play to put down somebody else. Make that experience as best as possible for everybody. Also, for people who it is feasible to help get people around, do it. It costs a lot of money to go to events. Let's start organizing hotel rooms. Let's start organizing regional car pools. For people in regions, do what you can to make it easier to get people there. It isn't feasible or realistic to get everybody everywhere. We have school, jobs, life etc. It's also a lot of money. But doing things together is always way cheaper and can be made easy, so let's work on that.

These are just the first ideas. I do not have the solution for everything. If you have more to add or want to do, I can add it to the OP. Post in here, use this thread and htis forum, make it happen. This is an open discussion for all of us to put aside anything else and just work on being the best community we can possibly be.

[Anne]

PLAYERS WE KNOW ARE COMING:

 

Aguro- Narukami

Pet- Adachi, S.Junpei (2.0)

Okusan- Sho/Minazuki

Tahichi- Yukari/Margaret

MAD- Teddie, S.Teddie (2.0)

Mokke- Yosuke, Minazuki (2.0)

DIE-Chan- Rise

Mui- Aigis

Damosu- Adachi

Souji- Teddie

Yume(rumored)- Aigis, Marie (2.0?)

[Radori]

Wanted to post first.

 

I had no idea Tahichi-san was coming...

 

Welp, time to really brush up on my Margaret.

[BananaKun]

I'm doing what I can to help improve our resources.

There's lack of recent, high level P4AU 1.1 footage. There's sets being recorded all the time for Xrd, see https://www.youtube.com/user/TypicalEastCoast/videos . Sure, Xrd is the current flavor, but all that really needs to be done is to have a dedicated streamer that can feature P4AU every now and then and is willing to help organize these sets. Hell, Jiyuna (ANIMEILLUMINATI on twitch) could do it even if he's on the other side of the world.

Tournament wise, it's just TSB and majors where we can see some good P4AU action. There's smaller events going on (like 8 on the break in New Jersey), but they aren't streamed and I'm not sure if that can be fixed..

[PK Gaming]

Alright then, let's get serious.

 

First, we need to address the fact that many of the P4U2 wikis are downright anemic. These are the wikis that are in dire need of attention:

-Akihiko:

-Chie

-Elizabeth

-Margaret

-Naoto

 

And these are the wikis that could still use some filling out:

-Labrys

-Rise (mainly the images)

 

Here's the deal; The Dustloop wikis are easily some of the best fighting game related resources on the internet (they're what motivated me to join this site in the first place), but there's been a distinct lack of drive lately. Many of the character wikis are barren, and there are filled out wikis that have vague or inadequate info. This is extremely unfortunate, since the dustloop character wikis are some of the best resources on the internet for newcomers. And there's another problem. There aren't that many (if any) knowledgeable players who are actively working on the wiki entries themselves. I've even seen a people on Twitter decry the wikis for being "inaccurate" which shouldn't be happening, ever.

 

So our problems are 2 fold. We don't have enough people working on the wikis, and we certainly don't have enough knowledgeable players working on them either. This is something that absolutely needs to change. We need more people working on the wikis, and if top players are too busy/disinterested to work on them, then we need wiki writers to cooperate with top players in order get down accurate information. I know i'm not in the position to talk, but I do feel that this conversation is something that is absolutely necessary to have. 

[Bloo561]

There's lack of recent, high level P4AU 1.1 footage. There's sets being recorded all the time for Xrd, see https://www.youtube.com/user/TypicalEastCoast/videos . Sure, Xrd is the current flavor, but all that really needs to be done is to have a dedicated streamer that can feature P4AU every now and then and is willing to help organize these sets. Hell, Jiyuna (ANIMEILLUMINATI on twitch) could do it even if he's on the other side of the world.

 

Don't xrd players have like a website full of links to match videos for them to search players and matchups? Would it be too difficult to do one of our own?

 

Edit: yeah they do its called keeponrockin (awesome website design btw )http://keeponrock.in/match/search_form#content but we can get something like this maybe not as complex but get the general idea of having everything in one spot that would really help the matchups forums as it would all be organized into one spot.

[Buttface]

Don't xrd players have like a website full of links to match videos for them to search players and matchups? Would it be too difficult to do one of our own?

we DO have one

http://horibuna.web.fc2.com/P4U2/index.html

[Bloo561]

we DO have one

http://horibuna.web.fc2.com/P4U2/index.html

I wished I knew about this. Thanks!

[mixedmethods]

In the interest of compiling Evernote data, here are two known ones, and I'll add links to more as they're posted:

Margaret's 1.1 Gatlings and Pressure (written by LK)

Margaret 1.1 Pressure Strings (written by Will of Fortune/KarzeonFortune, not a 100% databank but a possible jumping off point for labwork)

[muerto]

something i bookmarked a while ago, not sure if all of this is on the wiki https://www.evernote.com/shard/s330/sh/b061d834-cdda-4587-90fe-736022f3734b/9a0a004319b268fe0786e685688b13f2

[mixedmethods]

something i bookmarked a while ago, not sure if all of this is on the wiki https://www.evernote.com/shard/s330/sh/b061d834-cdda-4587-90fe-736022f3734b/9a0a004319b268fe0786e685688b13f2

I added certain info from LK's doc to the wiki awhile ago, but it's still a good resource.

[mixedmethods]

I'm giving everyone one warning to remain on topic right now. After that, it's an automatic infraction. This thread is for collecting resources and building the community, finding solutions, etc., for Evo, so off-topic posts and derailment completely undermine the purpose.

[Fortune]

I'm actually in the process now of transporting Margaret information from the above. I will be revisiting them, as some of those are likely outdated/replaced.

 

I don't have any credentials to be "knowledgeable" by any means but I have continuously added and re-edited notes during the process of learning her to contribute.

 

Also, I have set-aside a thread in the Margaret forum for this.

[Anne]

I'm going to go ahead and make an executive decision on something

 

IF YOU'RE WANTING TO PLAY NETPLAY MATCHES WITH SERIOUS PLAYERS TO IMPROVE, USE TARTARUS ROOM 10

[Red]

^ I really hate to be that guy but I think that's actually going to hurt you on the long run.

 

I am not against the idea of using Tartarus Room 10, nor any other one for that matter, but people are just going to end up going where most of the other people are. 

 

If I enter the lobby mode and see that there are 29 players on Tartarus Room 10, I'm going to go there (because that's where I'm most likely to find a match) without any idea that it's EVO training grounds / people looking for very serious matches to improve with (There are a lot of net players that don't even know about DL). I can just get there and try my day 1, 0 bar Netplay Kanji.

 

Same thing goes about the trolls / role-players in Junes or whatever. They're pretty much going to end up being where other people are and ruin their fun/training.

 

To me the best option to solve this and train in a proper way would always be the Player Room matches. Yes, I know, anyone can join them and they have only 8 slots to fill, but they fulfill the role, even better if you set them in Arena Mode where you can just keep playing and not stuck watching (which is also another great way of learning). Just set them so no one under 2 bars can enter them, set most of the spots private, and start inviting the people you wanted to practice with.

 

You could always just pick them up on the Tartarus room, then invite them for serious practice.

 

Of course, this is all just my opinion on the matter. You're all free to go to whichever lobby / room you want of course, but I think it's highly likely that people you don't want in will end up being there and knowingly (or not) ruin your experience.

 

Sorry if this was a bit off topic / misleading / against the motivation to learn and play the game, but It was the first thing I thought about when I read Anne's post. I just wanted to let you know my thoughts on the matter.

[BananaKun]

The thing is, anything with a description other than Junes would be a better place, IMO. The chances would be higher to meet people that actually want to play and improve if you choose a designated spot, specially if the word is spread through DL/Twitter.

I still prefer player matches but it wouldn't hurt to try this as a starting point, I think.

[Anne]

This ^ it's a starting point, and if there aren't player lobbies happening it's a place to go for now. The JP do this as well, and LK has put forward the idea before. Worst case scenario is the RPers start to wander in and we just outnumber them enough or we move elsewhere.

[PhilTCasual]

For those playing each other to improve, be sure to have some form of communication with your opponents. It makes it so much easier to learn if you can just ask questions/give suggestions to the person you are playing. The dustloop chat is an easy place to share thoughts on fly. Skype is probably a better option though.

[Fortune]

There's going to be some bad with the good.

 

Right now, I'm having a set with PhilTCasual and he brilliantly thought to discuss the Marg/Shab MU on the DL chat.

We actually tested some things out / talked about some habits. And both of us feel better for it.

 

(And there you go, Phil and I had the same mind! Definitely favor active communication. Here, Twitter, Skype, PSN pms...we can do that.)

 

A friend of mine was playing a more experienced Aigis for mirrors and advice was given through Twitter. 

 

However, another friend of mine was playing a good player but then told of "A button Teddie" and others he was legitimately dissatistified with. So there's minimal ways to discern who's "wanting to improve" or "acceptable".

 

But yes, I think the everyday player may be inclined to gravitate toward Junes. Even if there's less players in Tartarus, we can start building expectations of serious matches.

 

The room is still going okay as of now imo, just things I'm noticing.

 

(Yes, we need to keep Room 10 because that's the Fortune room fk P3 :< )

[Syklone]

So can tartarus be used by poor netplayers looking to get better but once they get money they'll go to a tournament? Cause I honestly don't really care about losing I just wanna fight strong players.

[Radori]

There's going to be some bad with the good.

 

Right now, I'm having a set with PhilTCasual and he brilliantly thought to discuss the Marg/Shab MU on the DL chat.

We actually tested some things out / talked about some habits. And both of us feel better for it.

 

(And there you go, Phil and I had the same mind! Definitely favor active communication. Here, Twitter, Skype, PSN pms...we can do that.)

 

A friend of mine was playing a more experienced Aigis for mirrors and advice was given through Twitter. 

 

However, another friend of mine was playing a good player but then told of "A button Teddie" and others he was legitimately dissatistified with. So there's minimal ways to discern who's "wanting to improve" or "acceptable".

 

But yes, I think the everyday player may be inclined to gravitate toward Junes. Even if there's less players in Tartarus, we can start building expectations of serious matches.

 

The room is still going okay as of now imo, just things I'm noticing.

 

(Yes, we need to keep Room 10 because that's the Fortune room fk P3 :< )

 

Yeah, I did the same thing with BananaKen after we played for a while. Shabrys is something else.

 

Alright, to Tartarus Fortune it is. 

[Anne]

Shit's 1.1, plan accordingly.

[mixedmethods]

At the risk of playing captain obvious, since we're playing 1.1 at Evo, there are a few tasks that stand out for mods and interested parties to take on:

• 1.1 video threads, not 2.0 ones. I'm especially guilty in this regard, as not only have I not finished coding everything to update Shab's 2.0 video thread, her 1.1 video thread was never formally organised due to the forum being modless until 2.0. Suddenly/not-so-suddenly, this is an actual issue (and something I see taking up many hours of my life), as footage offers insight on how MUs developed, what solutions Japanese players found, and, for matches featuring players confirmed for Evo, tape to review to study player habits blah blah blah. That... needs to be organised; matches featuring players confirmed for Evo need to be flagged -- is it worth having a general video thread for matches featuring the squad Japan is sending?
• Alex already posted a list of US players who can help our top players learn crucial MUs. Just adding that Okusan is likely playing Ken, so that's another MU we need to learn.
• Frame data stuff is already on the to-do list. Ideally, we'll get a breakthrough there.
• Japan already singled out the MUs they think we're going to have the most trouble with, so keeping in mind that we're dealing with 1.1, not 2.0, tiers... well, it is what is and we know where we're lacking.
• I mentioned to Jose that I was working on an article to understanding Titanomachia and some other issues people have with Shab and he mentioned that this wouldn't be a bad idea for other characters, particularly for the characters that are most likely to give us trouble.

I believe we can do it and put up a strong showing against Japan. In terms of collecting resources, I'm all ears, as that's what I'll be focusing on to help make life easier.

[RurouniLoneWolf]

Updating the 1.1 video threads might be complicated because of the usual issue with character threads on Dustloop: A lot of them were started by people who've lost interest in the character or the game. If people are interested though, gathering all the 1.1 vids of JP players coming to Evo into a single thread is something I could do this weekend. Alternatively, if people really want organized 1.1 Video threads, I could make new threads with the OPs organized.

Here's Alex list for people who didn't see the tweet
http://pastebin.com/As9WfMtk

Didn't hear/see anything about the troublesome MUs pointed out by JP players. Mixedmethods, would you mind posting which ones they are?

[Balguna]

One issue I can think of is that there isn't very much 1.1 play of console characters - Rise, Ken, Adachi, Marie and Margaret. It might be quite hard to find gameplay footage of them.

 

Has there been any confirmed list yet of non-JP players attending? Hoping Brkrdave attends again, his EVO matches are always amazing.

 

Another thing I'd be wondering would be if any JP players that jumped ship to another character after 2.0 (like Damosu going from Liz to Adachi) will be going back to their 1.1 character or adapt.