Move Spamming in Online Play

W

warble

[09] Warrior
Lately I have noticed a lot of hostility about spamming moves into the queue in online play, most of the anger coming FROM the move spammers toward the rest of the community. I thought I would clarify the issue for everyone to discuss and hopefully we can keep this discussion away from personal attacks and insults and on the subject of online play for the purposes of this thread.

Online play has a latency and a synchronization issue that is truly awful. I think by now we have all discovered this. If you play a 5 bar, there should be no complaints, 4 bar probably a half a second to a second of delay and anticipation is required. 3 bars fluctuates from roughly 1 to 2 full seconds of delay. That's 2000 ms, far beyond anything playable and removing even the idea of counter-hitting and parrying from the game. I got a parry off against a 2 bar once and I was so pleased with myself I immediately move spammed him to death. But that's a 2 bar, there's no saving that match.

What I'd like to discuss is the evaluation of the latency and the way you change your gameplay for online play accordingly. I personally will "walk the high road" against a 5 or 4 bar and refuse to try to beat my opponent with move spam. If I cannot play the normal aggressive, read and react game I'm going to lose, but after 500+ ranked wins online playing the move spam game, I find myself completely incapable of descending to the depths of that again. I know that some of you enjoy changing your play according to latency and when you see a full second of latency immediately switch to move spam mode. Indeed, this was my old attitude, so I would like to hear some reasons that people like to "stick to this" while others may "walk the high road" without all of the personal attacks and childish nonsense.

If we can discuss this logically maybe we can make some progress on understanding our community and accepting all different attitudes and styles of gameplay. If we can't and once again descend into the depths of personal attacks and childish insults it would be a huge disappointment to me, because we won't gain anything from that. Once again, I'm hoping to gain some insight into the players online who both love and hate move spam so please let me know what you think of this phenomenon that occurred because of online play being added to Soul Calibur 4.
 
warble said:
Online play has a latency and a synchronization issue that is truly awful. I think by now we have all discovered this. If you play a 5 bar, there should be no complaints, 4 bar probably a half a second to a second of delay and anticipation is required. 3 bars fluctuates from roughly 1 to 2 full seconds of delay.
Click to expand...


Online play has a slight latency and synchronization issue which happens from time to time, but most of the time, it can't be noticed at all, or your inputs are merely 2 frames late. I think by now we have all discovered this. If you play a 5 bar, there should be no complaint. 4 bar, if there's a difference, you probably won't notice it. 3 bars, if you're lucky, you will again notice no difference at all, but if you're unlucky you will experience a half of a second lag.


Here, I fixed it for you.

Now if that wasn't constructive enough for you, I'll say that lag threads are doomed, because some people simply can't play this game online, and other people can play this game perfectly well almost all the time.
And honestly some people like me might even believe that some people like you will exaggerate, because I never saw anything worse than a half-second lag with 3 bars.
Maybe you have no idea how long a second is, or maybe you're right and can indeed get a 2-seconds delay. If that's the case, then the difference between the kind of lag that people get is even bigger than I thought.

And when I lag, I simply try to input my things in advance and play mostly normally.
 
^ YUP

I don't like it when it starts going all slow motioned on me though. I want to break my fucking TV at that point - because I wish the other person would just leave the goddamn room. I just had it pretty bad so I just jumped in the water all 3 rounds so they won then kicked them out after the match.

I don't know if its my net, or if someones stealing my net (thanks housemate for NOT putting a password on router, and NOT restricting IPs), or if its cause they're halfway across the globe....but when it says 4 bars and it turns to shit in a matter of seconds I just want to hunt the fuckers behind this online setup.

My strategy doesn't change in lagged situations - and you're a cunt for spamming; end of. You can justify it any way you like...but I seriously goddamn hate spammers. You can be forgiven for using the same move about 3 times in a fucked up laggy environment because the game doesn't know any better, but if you just spam because thats your only means of winning then you're scum in my books. Sorry to be so blunt but i've just had some of the worst connected games i've ever seen.
 
i do not change my play to compensate for the lag because i don't want to develop bad habits. i play online to expose myself to different playstyles and more importantly to people who play a wider selection of characters at a higher level of play.

ive ranked up quite a bit and im basically bored of it now, i probably only faced around 10 truly decent players in my ~400 ranked matches and that was a bit slow going for my liking... i ended up adding most of the those players to my friends list and play with them regularly, which was always my aim.

i generally don't have a problem with spammers as in most cases such as cervy psycho crusher, kilik A+B crap as they get utterly destroyed. the problem is with blocking on reaction and it can get pretty damn annoying when someone really abuses slower lows like mitsu/liz/soph 1a which can be very very hard to block even on 4 bar matches. in ranked matches i just accept that i'm gonna eat more lows than i'd like and get on with it. i main asta anyway and most of the spammers cant break my keep out game anyway so its not a problem :p

these days i mainly host unranked games or play private matches as i don't really get enjoyment out of it unless learning by playing players better than me or by playing people or a similar skill level to me.

edit - just read the above and the delay in 4 bar matches IS NOTICABLE. its generally not an issue really for your moves and inputs but you can easily tell when you block/duck or anything which is based off reaction.
 
Plume said:
honestly some people like me might even believe that some people like you will exaggerate, because I never saw anything worse than a half-second lag with 3 bars.
Maybe you have no idea how long a second is, or maybe you're right and can indeed get a 2-seconds delay. If that's the case, then the difference between the kind of lag that people get is even bigger than I thought.

And when I lag, I simply try to input my things in advance and play mostly normally.
Click to expand...

Well that issue would be even worse than I suspected, I had thought that lag was at least symmetric. If you've seriously not even gotten above a half second spike from a 3 bar connection then the game is far more broken than I had realized. On my system, playing a 3 bar player is a complete risk, sometimes the lag is reasonable but on the whole it's not even a game worth playing. I am totally not exaggerating but if the system difference is actually preventing me from online play I'll buy a new PS3 today. In fact, I had considered buying an XBOX because my friend said the latency was better but when I went to his place it still was pretty bad.

I can see how there might be a huge difference of opinion if people think that these are some sort of made-up complaints. The complaints are not made up, I can assure you that a 3 bar connection is a complete queue battle for me 99% of the time with about a second of delay. I hadn't thought the fact that online play lagged was really even debatable but I can assure you at least from this particular individual sample that I am very disappointed in the online game mechanics and latency issues and that my opinion is very well justified by a lot of laggy online play.
 
When I see three bars there is no way i'm playing.... 4 isnt that bad at all sometimes and 5 seems iffy... its like sometimes its good but sometimes 5 is worse then 3.... its very weird how they rate the connections for this game... but mostly the best games i've had were 4 bars... I have some friends that I added that are correct 5 bar connections and its pretty much the next best thing besides being at their house... which is good when you have no soul calibur community in your area....
 
I don't think you're over exaggerating, because I can relate. It's each to their own experience, because comparing your experience doesn't necessarily make it a general fact to everyone else's case. A couple years of online fighting was slow and defective most of the time for me. You'll be lucky enough to get a decent enough connection with someone in your own state. It must be the person's connection or both maybe. Try to find someone who plays this in your area if it's that much of an issue.
 
I'll only play on 5 bar connections, because I will try to make the experience as close to offline as possible.

But because I limit myself to that, I can't find many players who actually try to strategize a whole lot and they just use totally unsafe shit which is easy to block and punish (I.E. Kilik's 33_99AA? I think that's the move). Even though I'll win the match, in the end I feel like I'm still losing because I'm not learning anything from it.

As for my own habits online, I just conciously do my best not to spam anything or use anything unsafe that isn't likely to work offline.
 
I don't mind spamming. It is sometime easy to anticipate and to beat.
Honestly, the online has been a boon as far as my own game goes. I'm infinitely better as a player than just beating up CPUs all the time. Ranked or no, I still get a few really awesome and close matches. I would not blame lag everytime I get caught, though I do think it's a bit of a factor sometimes.
 
On lag:

Only play 5 (maybe 4) connections:
If i play ranked, i choose "custom match" and look for a host with a connections of 5.
Ussually it takes a couple of tries before i find one that isnt full or "failed to connect". but my online play is ussually lag free...

On spamming:

I dont mind people spamming, it makes the fight easy when you know the moves he is using... at first i kept losing to the "spammers" but overtime ive come to learn the patterns and read the moves. Kilik spammers are no problem at all anymore, i block and counter everything if the opponent is only spamming his most obvious combos.
Cervantes is a tad harder for me... his up-down teleport is very easy to dodge via side step and punish with Nightmare's (my main character) 88B. But i screw up on the timing sometimes and lose... my own fault... i kno what to do though.
Sophitia and Mitsu can also pose a problem to me, as her moves are harder to read, but im getting a lot better already, and they wont win most fights over me.

On aggression:

Ive had a few people abusing the live-message system to send me some pretty bad messages. ussually for beating a spammer with ringouts, or as a reaction to a "polite"message send by me too disconnectors (happened twice in 400 ranked games). My response is a bad review, and i dont curse back... they r probably just kids anyway.

Since im new to this forum, i thought id post my opinion on these often discussed matters, so i dont have to in the future :).
 
Hey LordHerpes!
we had some good games on live a while back, I think im still in your friends list!
I wanna see how much better you've got... fancy a game sometime?
 
Spammers are fun to beat in my mind... Yesterday, I met a player that used Cerv - Rear Air Smash Non-Stop and had a 10 game win streak. I had lots of fun showing a real Cerv player could do and I was very happy to show him a few of my 10-12 hit wall combos with Cerv. Next time I saw him, he was very quick to end the room.

ZyX2323
 
I really wouldn't say 3 bars is half a second of latency, unless the connection greatly fluctuates or you're generalizing. It seems to be ~100ms for each bar under 5.
 
Plume said:
Online play has a slight latency and synchronization issue which happens from time to time, but most of the time, it can't be noticed at all, or your inputs are merely 2 frames late. I think by now we have all discovered this. If you play a 5 bar, there should be no complaint. 4 bar, if there's a difference, you probably won't notice it. 3 bars, if you're lucky, you will again notice no difference at all, but if you're unlucky you will experience a half of a second lag.


Here, I fixed it for you.
Click to expand...

You are right when you say some people cannot play this game online... since you volunteered that yourself, why do you try and correct him like this? In my own personal experience, a 5 bar game has a lag of 2-5 frames, 4 bar game 10-20 (1/10th to 1/3 of a second), 3 bar game 45+ (almost a full second). I can only get playable online games by hosting my own player matches..
 
Plume said:
Online play has a slight latency and synchronization issue which happens from time to time, but most of the time, it can't be noticed at all, or your inputs are merely 2 frames late. I think by now we have all discovered this. If you play a 5 bar, there should be no complaint. 4 bar, if there's a difference, you probably won't notice it. 3 bars, if you're lucky, you will again notice no difference at all, but if you're unlucky you will experience a half of a second lag.
Click to expand...

Wow your pretty much wrong on all of those... The lag is noticeable even in a five bar much less 3... and i've had way worse than one second of lag... half a second is the minimum for 3 bar.... I've had people lag out for like 5 seconds at a time because their connections are fluctuating from 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 and back to 1.... Thats probably the worse connection you can get.... one thats going up and down because it usually means they are doing something on their computer or someone is on their internet without their knowledge....
 
sakeido said:
You are right when you say some people cannot play this game online... since you volunteered that yourself, why do you try and correct him like this?
Click to expand...
Because of the way he put it. He was saying it as if everyone suffered from bad lag. It's not true. Heck at one point he says "I think by now we have all discovered this". So I decided to do the opposite, write my experiences in the same way, as if I "knew" that everyone gets the same experiences as me. But yeah, my strange ways to bring a point tend to get misunderstood by many... meh.
Luckily he did get my point.

RedDjinn said:
Wow your pretty much wrong on all of those... The lag is noticeable even in a five bar much less 3...
Click to expand...

RedDjinn didn't get it, though. He's like warble in his very first post. But UNLIKE warble, RedDjinn did NOT understand my post. At all.
He still believes that everyone has the same lag problems as him.
 
Plume said:
Because of the way he put it. He was saying it as if everyone suffered from bad lag. It's not true. Heck at one point he says "I think by now we have all discovered this". So I decided to do the opposite, write my experiences in the same way, as if I "knew" that everyone gets the same experiences as me. But yeah, my strange ways to bring a point tend to get misunderstood by many... meh.
Luckily he did get my point.



RedDjinn didn't get it, though. He's like warble in his very first post. But UNLIKE warble, RedDjinn did NOT understand my post. At all.
He still believes that everyone has the same lag problems as him.
Click to expand...

There wasnt much to understand... there should just be a sticky for one online complaint thread instead of 100 threads about the same stuff over and over... and i'm pretty sure 3 means 3, 2 means , 2 and 1 means 1 If you play on a 3 bar connection and you can still move around fairly decent well you have the miracle connection... and congrats...
 
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