My thoughts on SGOCE and whether I want to keep playing Skullgirls
Be prepared for a lot of winding and twisting and turning.
It may come as no surprise to anyone, but I think Skullgirls is one of the most fun and deepest fighting games I have ever come across. Every matchup is a unique challenge, whether it may be any combination of solo, duo, or trio teams fighting either one of themselves, and also the different assists for the duos and trios change approaches to the neutral and combo game rather significantly. It manages to provide unique experiences almost every time I play the game, and I appreciate the game for it.
It may then come as a surprise to at least some people that I don't currently actively play Skullgirls, and have not done so ever since SXU2018. I like to call myself "retired" or "casual" as a gag however I do see it somewhat as such, being that I don't practice the game as much as I used to back in the day when I was playing the game a lot and putting in a ton of effort to get better.
I think the biggest reason as to why that happened was due to JediLink's rise in skill. Unlike all other top players in SGOCE, JediLink started off as a new player where he was clearly worse than me and most other top players, then he surpassed me in skill. I tried really hard to catch back up but I couldn't for some reason, and now Jedi is clearly better than me.
I used to cope with this by blaming the character; preaching that Squigly was a dishonest character whose neutral played for itself and that there were no counters to the strategies used by Jedi with the character. There was a time where you could not talk about Skullgirls without Mao and I gushing about how awful the character was for the game, and Mao has mostly gotten over it and is actually able to delete Squigly at times, whereas I have just slumped and not gotten past it. I still feel resentful about that to this day. I feel like if my mentality was better I would have been able to fix this issue while it was still preventable, and due to that I would not have had my ego destroyed so badly to the point of not wanting to play seriously anymore. However, while hindsight is 20/20 I cannot see a way to fix the issue now.
I think I want to continue taking a break from ranbats, partially due to being able to work tons of hours and making fat stacks of cash, but also because this break is helping me look at the game in a different light, making me focus on aspects I didn't notice about my play that were weak.
Another reason I do not find it very fun to play Skullgirls is that I feel like I have failed the scene in terms of helping them improve. I have advertised myself as a source of guidance to tons of players and invested a lot of my own time to help them improve, but none of them have gotten really that close to beating any of the top players, with the only marked exception being Demise where he beat me in bracket once before I beat him back in losers side, and now even he has stopped playing Skullgirls as seriously as before, plus he doesn't enter brackets. Due to this, I find it difficult to not think that my guidance just was not as good as I thought it is, which I find quite disheartening, since I often prided myself on my ability and willingness to help newer players. I don't mean to use this to place burden on the newer players, even though it will come off as such.
So overall I feel that I failed as a competitor and as a mentor in recent years. I don't really have a clean way to close this post and I've been struggling with a good ending for a solid few hours now. My writing has degraded due to not using that skill for several years at this point. I feel like I have achieved some level of closure but I am not sure. I don't know if I really want to invite a lot of public discussion about this, because this isn't really something that I'm proud of.
I guess here I am.
It may come as no surprise to anyone, but I think Skullgirls is one of the most fun and deepest fighting games I have ever come across. Every matchup is a unique challenge, whether it may be any combination of solo, duo, or trio teams fighting either one of themselves, and also the different assists for the duos and trios change approaches to the neutral and combo game rather significantly. It manages to provide unique experiences almost every time I play the game, and I appreciate the game for it.
It may then come as a surprise to at least some people that I don't currently actively play Skullgirls, and have not done so ever since SXU2018. I like to call myself "retired" or "casual" as a gag however I do see it somewhat as such, being that I don't practice the game as much as I used to back in the day when I was playing the game a lot and putting in a ton of effort to get better.
I think the biggest reason as to why that happened was due to JediLink's rise in skill. Unlike all other top players in SGOCE, JediLink started off as a new player where he was clearly worse than me and most other top players, then he surpassed me in skill. I tried really hard to catch back up but I couldn't for some reason, and now Jedi is clearly better than me.
I used to cope with this by blaming the character; preaching that Squigly was a dishonest character whose neutral played for itself and that there were no counters to the strategies used by Jedi with the character. There was a time where you could not talk about Skullgirls without Mao and I gushing about how awful the character was for the game, and Mao has mostly gotten over it and is actually able to delete Squigly at times, whereas I have just slumped and not gotten past it. I still feel resentful about that to this day. I feel like if my mentality was better I would have been able to fix this issue while it was still preventable, and due to that I would not have had my ego destroyed so badly to the point of not wanting to play seriously anymore. However, while hindsight is 20/20 I cannot see a way to fix the issue now.
I think I want to continue taking a break from ranbats, partially due to being able to work tons of hours and making fat stacks of cash, but also because this break is helping me look at the game in a different light, making me focus on aspects I didn't notice about my play that were weak.
Another reason I do not find it very fun to play Skullgirls is that I feel like I have failed the scene in terms of helping them improve. I have advertised myself as a source of guidance to tons of players and invested a lot of my own time to help them improve, but none of them have gotten really that close to beating any of the top players, with the only marked exception being Demise where he beat me in bracket once before I beat him back in losers side, and now even he has stopped playing Skullgirls as seriously as before, plus he doesn't enter brackets. Due to this, I find it difficult to not think that my guidance just was not as good as I thought it is, which I find quite disheartening, since I often prided myself on my ability and willingness to help newer players. I don't mean to use this to place burden on the newer players, even though it will come off as such.
So overall I feel that I failed as a competitor and as a mentor in recent years. I don't really have a clean way to close this post and I've been struggling with a good ending for a solid few hours now. My writing has degraded due to not using that skill for several years at this point. I feel like I have achieved some level of closure but I am not sure. I don't know if I really want to invite a lot of public discussion about this, because this isn't really something that I'm proud of.
I guess here I am.
Comments
Post a Comment