A look at some of BBCP's overheads and how they're animated

[TheRealBobMan]

That was a great episode.  I actually didn't wind up working overtime last night and I had plans to spend my extra few hours on something else, but I watched/listened to the whole thing while I was working on my post instead.  Good stuff dude.  Anyone that hasn't seen it would benefit from watching it, and anyone that has already watched it should watch it again.  When I get more time I'm totally going to watch the rest of your show.

[Airk]

It may be shitty but I was always make the awful mistake of expecting and then immediately getting it confused for her 6b animation wise.

 

I hate to give away super secret tips and make my character even lower tier, but this overhead is crap and the only way you can get confused is if you watch the wrong thing.  Watch the book.  When it floats over towards you, you are getting overheaded.  Otherwise, just stay low regardless of how much twirling she does.  Tsubaki's mixup is complete garbage.

 

I suspect very strongly that the only reason Tsubaki isn't placed in Makoto tier in the tier lists is because no one actually understands how she works.  Listening to Brkrdrv try to explain her gameplan and why she was low tier on the UltrachenTV BBCP episode was painful.

[Errol]

where is that episode airk

[mAc Chaos]

 

I hate to give away super secret tips and make my character even lower tier, but this overhead is crap and the only way you can get confused is if you watch the wrong thing.  Watch the book.  When it floats over towards you, you are getting overheaded.  Otherwise, just stay low regardless of how much twirling she does.  Tsubaki's mixup is complete garbage.

 But the book moves towards you in both the high and the low. wry

[Airk]

 

 But the book moves towards you in both the high and the low. wry

 

Not really, no.

 

 

where is that episode airk

 

Here is the Youtube of it, timestamped to the start of the Tsubaki section.

 

If this is what most experienced players think of Tsubaki, they have no business including her in a tier list at all. :P  Starts right off with the ol' chestnut about her being the 'fastest runner in the game' when Makoto and Bang have higher max speed and Bang and the Murakumos have a higher initial speed, and it only gets more wince inducing from there.

[Errol]

it's not that bad, but when it comes down to it tsubaki is low tier and people don't need to learn about her to fight against her so they don't. he is basically correct about why she is low tier though, bad average damage, bad normals.. and why the normals are bad is accurate too. 

 

people that spend the time can distinguish 6a/6b but people that don't will get hit. still the bigger problem is not that it's not possible to mix people up, but that tsubaki is weak to getting mashed out and getting barriered out, or upbacked out. 

[Airk]

Then they turn around and say "No no, she's B tier! She's fine!"

 

I dunno though. "Her whole game is going to revolve around using shield rush to get in" was pretty facepalm.

 

 

 

still the bigger problem is not that it's not possible to mix people up, but that tsubaki is weak to getting mashed out and getting barriered out, or upbacked out.

 

This is super true too.  And it has only gotten worse as time goes on as they inexplicably make her normals WORSE and increase barrier pushback with each game.

[Errol]

yeah, it is obvious that they don't know much about the character. i've never even heard of a tsubaki on the west coast existing. huey played for a couple months. I find it hard to care though. 

[Blade]

Not that anything I have to say is important but...

 

The school of thought I was lead to believe is:

 

[Either always assume a low is coming and expect overheads to come out intermittently]

 

OR

 

[Always assume mids and overheads are coming frequently, and expect lows every once in a while]

 

These "types" depend on the player's offensive style.

 

But it's because of this school of thought I've been able to block all kinds of mess without thinking too much about it.

 

I just look at what my opponent's habits are, and react to them accordingly.

 

That includes crossups and stuff that you'd typically "block the wrong way".

[Errol]

in my experience blocking high as a default just makes you easy to open up. it depends on char I guess but if you're just blocking high most of the time the other side can see that and just press a low.

 

Numbers on other overheads would be interesting.

[Airk]

Yeah, the only time I'm aware of when you want to block high by default is when block Noel's drive string, because inexplicably her drive overhead is super fast but her drive low is like 24 frames. @_@

[Daramue]

I'd personally never recommend to block high and then react to lows if that is what you're suggesting, Blade. Given that, assuming your opponent is grounded, most attacks are mid or low and come out much faster than overheads, it's a safer bet to block low and react to overheads. You kinda get the sense of when to expect an overhead when you're being pressured and you've blocked low for a certain amount of time. 

[Errol]

he's not recommending reacting to lows. he's recommending to guess high or low. 

[Airk]

 You kinda get the sense of when to expect an overhead when you're being pressured and you've blocked low for a certain amount of time. 

 

Which is why Jab > Overhead seems to work so well even though by rights it should be much easier to mash out of than chaining from a heavier attack.

[Blade]

he's not recommending reacting to lows. he's recommending to guess high or low. 

 

Like I said, depends on the opponent and their style.

 

If, say, you're fighting against someone who likes to use overheads a lot, then just look for lows.

 

Normally most people don't fight that way, so the general rule is to block low and expect an overhead once in a while... it just depends on who you're fighting against and their style.

[Sashi]

There's no way you're gonna be looking for lows unless you can somehow react to 10f stuff consistently. Unless something is almost always gonna be canceled into a overhead (strings like Haku 6A 6B) or the high is somehow faster than the low (jump ins or Noel drive strings), it's hella risky to block high and react to lows.

[Angel-tastic]

Re: reacting to lows.

 

Honestly, I don't think reacting like that is even possible. Just going by some informal studies I've seen, a typical person's reaction time is around 200ms - 250ms, which is 12f - 15f, while lows are typically 10f or faster, and that's not even accounting for any lag there might be when you play online or other factors that could increase your reaction time. I don't think you really have a choice other than to either block low and react to overheads, or try to anticipate when the opponent will use a low instead of an overhead, but I'd be astonished if anyone could actually "react" to lows.

[TheRealBobMan]

Like I said in my post, a simple reaction is in the 200ms range, which is about 12f.  If you know EXACTLY what move you're looking for, AND it telegraphs on frame 1, you could react to it in the 10-12f range, though 10f is really pushing it and you wont be consistent at it.  You also wont be able to react to anything else for the period of time that you're committed to looking for that ONE thing, because if you did look for more than one thing, that would be a complex reaction type, which would have you reacting in the 380+ms range.

 

Now, also consider how much inherent input lag there is.  PS3 has 3-frames of input lag minimum.  This is different from display based lag or connection based latency.  It does not affect move start-up speed since both players have the delay, and you can't work around it by pushing the buttons early relative to what you see on the screen when you have display lag.  That said, you have 3 fewer frames to "react" to what you see on screen since it takes that long for the PS3 to recognize that you pushed back/downback to block.  Even if you 50/50 guessed it and blocked low that way, you have 3 frames less time to perform the input.

 

Pretty much all monitors now have 1+ frame of display lag, though you could still be using CRTs to avoid that (as far as I know anyway), so if you pushed the button early in anticipation you would actually compensate for that.

 

 

 

That said, there are some cases where you can react to lows.  Akihiko and his 6 overheads to his 1 low (14f sweep) is an example from P4A, and I-No in GG has a 20f and 28f low.  That said, if I-No uses STBT specifically because it hits low and not to low profile under attacks to CH she's doing it wrong, kind of like how you should never get mixed up by Bandit Bringer, but you might get CH by the hitbox or caught out of a backdash.

 

 

The timing on some of these moves aren't quite perfect for reacting, but keep in mind that they're making these games for arcades first, which have different hardware.  I think AC/+R only have 1-frame input lag in the arcade version, and that probably goes for all of their games.  +R actually made dusts slower to compensate for this and online play, probably because they're supposed to be reactable by design, unless you really mixed someone up (caught them trying to react to something else, using an action that doesn't also beat the dust).

 

 

 

So yeah, most of the time you don't want to try to react to lows, but in some circumstances it can be done.

 

 

Back on topic for this thread, knowing that the moves have such shitty telegraph time explains why it's still hard to block the mixups on reaction when they have so much start up time compared to what I'm used to from GG, besides the fact that I'm not really conditioned to block them on reaction yet.  Not sure what I think about that as a design choice... on the one hand, there's more time to block if you're 50/50 guessing, so that you don't do your input late when you're a newb and get hit anyway.  On the other hand, it strengthens mashing buttons to get out of pressure if you think the other guy is going to run a mixup, which I think is dumb gameplay (not necessarily bad, but I don't like the idea of making it easier to do something that's generally a bad idea since it encourages newbs to not learn).  Unless you play Izayoi like I do, in which case your shit is too slow to counter poke out of anything anyway. 

[shimedaiko]

This is actually something that I have a problem with. I've ingrained it to a point where it becomes my default (and therefore makes me predictable to someone attacking) but also to a point that I get repeatedly hit by overheads or I don't react to jump-ins properly because I'm looking for overheads. My main characters are tager/haku/labrys and I spend about 99% of the time blocking and 1% getting counter hit when I try to get out. I've noticed that I get better at blocking lots of mixups to the point of frustration for some players (even online) but it's lopsided; I don't know when I can get out. I always thought that it was possible to do a reactionary and downloading game play style a la spark, but I'm starting to think that something like that isn't feasable without hours and hours of experience. I always try again, I don't give up, but sometimes I feel like I'm giving up too many rounds/perfects/free damage because of the age-old adage to "block low until you see an overhead." Combined with my mentality of playing defensive until the opponent makes a mistake, I think I end up looking for stuff that's not there instead of pressuring my opponent to do something that I want him to do. I don't know how much this is actually related to the original post, but I know that, in part, my habits stemmed from the idea of playing a reactionary game and looking for overheads.

[Midnight-Zephyr]

My blocking habits are so odd due to always eating overheads. I default to blocking high, and after seeing the way they mixup (usually by the 2nd round, because I always lose the first...), I most likely will default to blocking low. Oddly enough Ive IB'd my fair share of overheads on pure instinct, but despite that, my defense is pretty bad lol.

[Pen_Ninja]

Default blocking high and switching to low when you guess that a low is coming seems like a terrible idea. You're turning every high and every low into pretty much a 50/50 situation as opposed to blocking low and reacting to highs which lets you actually use reactions to block as opposed to pure blind luck...

 

As for learning how your opponent pressures and blocking according to their habits: A good player is going to mix up in a way that shows little/no habits. If you spend the first round getting a read on whether you should GUESS high or low in any given situation then there's no guarantee that a good player is going to stick to the mixup path that you seem to have imagined is present...

A good player, in fact will take advantage of the fact that you've pretty much made it as simple as possible to condition them into expecting one thing and use that to hit you with the opposite ever time.

A player should have to put in work if they want to condition you into something... not have you do it for them.

[JMof]

when you looked for telegraphing frames were you just comparing the overhead to any other move, or the overhead to only lows?

[Midnight-Zephyr]

Default blocking high and switching to low when you guess that a low is coming seems like a terrible idea. You're turning every high and every low into pretty much a 50/50 situation as opposed to blocking low and reacting to highs which lets you actually use reactions to block as opposed to pure blind luck...

 

As for learning how your opponent pressures and blocking according to their habits: A good player is going to mix up in a way that shows little/no habits. If you spend the first round getting a read on whether you should GUESS high or low in any given situation then there's no guarantee that a good player is going to stick to the mixup path that you seem to have imagined is present...

A good player, in fact will take advantage of the fact that you've pretty much made it as simple as possible to condition them into expecting one thing and use that to hit you with the opposite ever time.

A player should have to put in work if they want to condition you into something... not have you do it for them.

I'll take that advice, but keep in mind that I never said it was a good thing that I blocked this way.

I developed this bad habit due to eating overheads for about a year straight.

Unfortunately...defense comes very hard to me.