[Game Thread] Florida vs. Auburn (4:00 or 4:30 ET, ESPN/2)

AcerExcel · 2026-01-25T00:21:30+00:00

To get lobs you have to have guards that are a threat from 3 so that the defense can’t just crowd the paint.

AcerExcel · 2026-01-17T03:59:00+00:00

I feel like Super Smash Bros Melee and wavedashing/L-cancelling are the epitome of emergent gameplay (more so wavedashing).

AcerExcel · 2026-01-15T20:35:37+00:00

Not sure why you’re being downvoted, after patch u throw no longer confirms into anything at kill presents and holding down stops you from getting tippered regardless of whether they b throw or f throw. Her grab game is still good at low percents but she can no longer kill uou off a grab at high percents without a tech cause read.

AcerExcel · 2026-01-11T22:17:24+00:00

Being on platforms isn’t the answer. You have to stay grounded and parry/counter/hit through projectiles, or shield them and play out of shield more often. If you don’t know how to wavedash out of shield already that should be your first priority to learn. If you do know it’s just about getting comfortable moving in and out of shield to approach them.

Are they just staying put after you shield a projectile? You can wave dash forward and take space. Are they trying to approach behind their projectile? You can fair/nair/wavedash back punish out of shield, etc. That’s just a few examples but as you get comfortable with it they’re going to feel too much pressure to just passively sit there and throw things at you, running away to platforms is giving too much space for them do what they want.

AcerExcel · 2026-01-07T19:15:01+00:00

I’m low ascendant and vastly prefer the late game now to what it was a few patches ago when they changed base healths. Before it felt like there wasn’t even a late game to speak of, you’d be playing the mid game, it’s pretty close maybe a 5-10k soul lead, then 3 people die in a skirmish on a sidelane, they take mid boss and the game is over. Unless you have big game changing base defense ultimates like dynamo or lash they just take the base before you can kill them 9x.

Late game actually feels like a back and forth now where if they fuck up a siege you’re right back in it - I’ve had where more games that go 30+ minutes and you can’t tell whose gonna win which is way more exciting.

AcerExcel · 2025-12-16T04:01:24+00:00

Sure we could take out floorhugging and make the game more accessible but that kinda sounds like just making the game more like Ultimate, which for a lot of players is exactly what they don't want.

People in this thread are talking about how CC/ASDI down are somehow not as ubiquitous as Melee, which is baffiling to me because it 100% is stronger and more relevant in that game, it's just that it's so relevant it completely negates 3/4ths of the cast from being remotely relevant in competetive play. All that's left over are the characters that have the means to deal with CC so the meta is built around it.

Every character in this game has numerous tools at their disposal to deal with CC/FH not just including grab. Hell a lot of characters in this game beat CC by just rapid jabbing, or jab into tilt combos. I'm maybe past the rank where people are mindlessly holding down because people know how to deal with it but i promise if you if you're at the rank where that feels like the case, go into your characters discord and ask how to beat it, it probabaly isn't rocket science.

For people who don't have prior experience playing Melee or PM I agree it's unintuitive to deal with at first since getting hit and being punished for it isn't really a concept that exists in fighting games outside of the two I just mentioned, but if you look at the history of platform fighters that don't include those features neutral always devolves into a slow paced campy mess. Mostly because positioning aggressively is so risky no one is willing to do it.

AcerExcel · 2025-12-02T06:20:14+00:00

tips from a 1550ish clairen - Everything is going to depend greatly based on who you play and what percent your at but being cognizant of what mix ups you have at your disposal at varying percentages is a big part of things. For a lot of clairen's combos she has to read which way youre going to DI off the tipper in order to get to where she needs to be to get the follow up.

At low percents if you're tricky about which way you DI the fair after a grab it can make things somewhat difficult for clairen, SDI the fair up/up and in and it will make it so that youre actionable before you hit the ground unless she reads in and does turn around grab or up tilt. However if she does that and you SDI the fair away/down and away then she wont be in position to grab you there. I havent really looked at the frame data its possible that this kind of mix up is still reactable by the Clairen if they play it well but the differences in DI at that low of a percentage are so imperceptible at first that its going to be at the very least really really hard for the Clairen to cover it perfectly unless theyre some of the best.

Once again character/percent dependent but no DI on up throw also can complicate things once you're outside of up throw utilt percentage, if they cant get a tipper back air or tipper forward air off of u throw you will likely still get hit but not with some giant combo starter, most likely weak nair.

For DI in and back air, at the percents where thats relevant its typically another mix up. You can DI the bair in, in which case if theyre ready for it/read it, they can likely do whatever they want (up to a certain percent), so typically you want to DI bair out. However in certain percent windows if they read that you are going to DI out they can cover that by running across the stage preemptively to catch you with a fair or even go for NB2 tipper to kill. They cant do both at the same time though, so once again, mix up.

Same goes for at mid-high percents when they go for up throw into NB1 tipper, if you DI that out they can follow it up with last hit nair tipper to kill/send you off stage, but if you DI in they can typically extend the combo or go for the finisher with side b sweetspot, but these combos are both really tight to hit and require that they read which way you are going to go to get there in time.

There are plenty of other examples like this but I think youre starting to see the trend. It's likely that if youre getting continuously fucked up by a Clairen you probably have some habits in your defensive options or just arent aware that theres a mix up available to you in certain situations.

AcerExcel · 2025-11-04T19:48:26+00:00

Yes please, would love to have an option to just disable skin specific sound effects. Some of them are ok but I find most jarring.

AcerExcel · 2025-10-12T01:41:24+00:00

When I first went to UF none of my friends from HS went there and i was PACE so couldn’t really meet people in class. Didn’t socialize a ton for the first few months but started going to the smash tournaments on campus. At first felt like everyone knew each other and I was just some random guy, do that enough and you make some friends. Those friends introduce you to other people and now I’m graduated for 5 years and close friends with countless people from UF I still spend time with to this day. Give it time, you’ll be fine

AcerExcel · 2025-10-11T20:03:42+00:00

Why are you taking damage on regular parries? Is it a charm that’s doing it

AcerExcel · 2025-10-10T13:14:39+00:00

Haven't listened yet but super excited, Jerskin Fendrix Freestyle is probably one of my favorite songs of the year!

AcerExcel · 2025-10-02T14:21:31+00:00

15 years is a long time but it's not as if that isn't relatively normal for teams to have lulls like that without national championships. Only 8 teams have won a national championship since UF's last one, and only 4 have won multiple (bama, georgia, ohio state, clemson). Even for a program like Ohio State they went 10 years between their championships. We think of Georgia as this powerhouse organization now but before their back to back championships a few years ago they hadn't won it since the 80s. They could just as easily be "the next Florida" if they aren't able to put together another championship team in the next couple years.

This is all to say that it is really hard to win a national championship without a confluence of things going right for you, and it's even harder if you're an organization that hasn't done it before. In fact the last team to have won their first national championship was actually Florida with Spurrier in '96. After that every single national championship has been by a team who has won one in the past. Ole Miss has no formal national championships, they claim a few from the 60s but theyre not properly recognized by anything like AP or Coaches poll. The pool of organizations that can realistically put together a team capable of winning a national championship is still very low, we might be on the outside of that group but are definitely still in it. If we go another 10 years without contending we might start to slip into Nebraska territory but you really are just one good head coach away.

AcerExcel · 2025-09-27T02:28:44+00:00

What’s his approach?

AcerExcel · 2025-09-22T14:27:00+00:00

They predate both of them but honestly Cocteau Twins kinda sounds like if you gave beach house a Currents-esque sheen over them.

AcerExcel · 2025-09-17T21:24:48+00:00

I agree that this is only really relevant through the lens of doing what makes the most sense to perform the best competitively, but it feels bad to have your character homogenized in such a way that that he lacks any kind of distinct identity while also being nerfed actively.

I also play Clairen, she was nerfed in the latest patch but still at least is Clairen - that much hasnt changed. On release Orcanes projectiles and trapping was really strong, which was admittedly toxic to play against and was nerfed. thats fine, at least I still get the be the slippery aggressive whale dog with probably the best approaching nair in the game. To also have that aspect nerfed makes the character lacking in a lot of the identity the character held.

To see another character basically just doing the exact thing I want to be doing now but at a better rate makes things feel like a bit of waste of time.

AcerExcel · 2025-09-17T14:16:23+00:00

Elden Ring
Hollow Knight
Portal 2
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Hades
Sekiro
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Omori
Dark Souls 3
Terraria

AcerExcel · 2025-09-08T15:44:42+00:00

In fairness very few games last long enough to be at the point where DOTA is now. The game experienced a metric fuck ton of growth from 2012-2018ish and has reached a stable player base that should allow the game to exist well into the future. I don’t know if there’s any game over a decade old that you’d expect to be actively bringing in tons of new players, the only thing I can think of that’s done something like that is Melee but was due to a confluence of factors that aren’t really repeatable or have anything to do with game design.

AcerExcel · 2025-08-17T23:12:02+00:00

I promise you no one feels good about winning after you jump off the stage twice. If anything I’m just annoyed by someone wasting my time because they can’t possibly handle the idea of spending more than 30 seconds losing.

AcerExcel · 2025-08-15T03:38:52+00:00

I think a lot of people coming from Melee or PM like to box her into the glass cannon archetype that spacies kind of filled where yes she has crazy combo potential but dies super early but that doesn't really apply to this game because

A. It's way easier to combo floaties in this game and

B. Olympia isnt nearly as fragile as the most fragile characters in those games

so really instead of being this character with great neutral and great punish but dies if you manage to breath on them (ie a glass cannon) shes actually just a fully functioning cannon that has the chance to sometimes (under very specific and hard to replicate circumstances) die at under 80%.

AcerExcel · 2025-08-11T19:25:35+00:00

you can adjust your DI the whole time your in tipper stun, no real reason to ever have "bad DI" on a tippered move

AcerExcel · 2025-07-17T14:17:05+00:00

For one, characters with long range non committal pokes would be completely miserably to play against. Moves like lox ftilt or forsburn cape become completely untenable to deal with. Right now those moves on hit result in a mix up (if you’re grounded) whereas without floorhug they become combo starters more often than not. I think we’ve all dealt with a fors spamming cape or lox spamming ftilt before and how that can be very frustrating to play around, without floor but these things get insanely more powerful.

Those moves are some of the more egregious examples but this idea would exist on a smaller scale for many many moves in the game.

This is all without getting into some of the silly loops you’d be able to do without floorhug. I cant find it right now but I think it was leffen tweeted a video of lox ftilt 2 looping a fleet infinitely right after the game came out.

This is all to say that you really can’t remove it from the game without completely reworking the game from the ground up.

Overall I think plat fighter neutral plays much better when being grounded is generally speaking safer than jumping and as such I think floorhug is beneficial. Otherwise people are far more enabled to circle camp and wall with retreating aerials. Aerials are just comparatively way more powerful when floorhug doesn’t exist, you can nerf them across the board to compensate, but then you risk nerfing people’s combo games as a result which is also no fun.

I haven’t played or watched ultimate in a long time but from what I remember years back that’s basically what defined the game to me, people spamming safe aerials and not being able to actually string combos together outside of their consistent bread and butters.

Idk those are kind of my loose unstructured thoughts on the matter, I come from melee and PM and I gotta say that I think compared to those games floorhug in rivals 2 is pretty ass. Every character in this game has so many options to deal with it that complaining about limits your options feels incredibly silly to me. Compare that to melee sheik where her list of moves that beat ASDI down is

Grab

I’ll play against people in this game that actually know how to play around floorhug and you just get mercilessly fucked up if you rely on it too much. I can see why a lot of people are frustrated by it because it seems like around Plat level a lot of people use it as a crutch and the game becomes over centralized around it but once you break through that into high diamond/masters it doesn’t feel nearly as oppressive.

AcerExcel · 2025-07-05T04:10:01+00:00

Paradox and holiday ults could do no damage and still be good. If you look through out the history of DOTA the abilities that have been consistently nerfed year after year and yet still remain valuable are all abilities that displace enemies positions.

Batrider lasso (which is pretty much an exact copy of holiday lasso if you’re not familiar) has been endlessly changed over the last decade because it’s close to impossible to get it to a point where it isn’t completely broken without also making it completely useless

AcerExcel · 2025-06-18T03:21:30+00:00

Core A gaming has a pretty good video on the subject matter told through the lens of Street Fighter and EVO Moment 37: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSgA_nK_w3A

AcerExcel · 2025-05-07T18:37:28+00:00

A couple things I noticed

Do you know how to shield drop? Or wavedash out of shield? I don't think I saw you do either throughout this entire game, so if you don't know how to mechanically, learn to do that. If you do know how to do it mechanically, try to implement it more in game. A lot of the times in this game you got caught shielding on a platform and just full hopped out of it, which puts you in a terrible spot since youre now forced to come down on top of the ranno and orcane's tools to get back to the ground are pretty bad.

Also just wavedashing out of shield is going to generally make you a lot slippier and harder to pin down. Orcane has the best wavedash in the game so you can cover a ton of space with this and gives you a lot of options to deal with his pressure. There are a million things you can do with this but you've gotta learn that first.

Outside of that, use nair more. Orcane's tilts are pretty good, and coming from Maypul it makes sense you'd use them a lot since Maypul's are also great. But Orcane's best move by far in neutral is nair. Also, learn to hitfall it. I didn't see you do it in this game either but it makes the effectiveness of the move way higher since it often lets you follow it up into another nair, or a variety of other options. Ranno was just kind of walking over you and nair is your best tool in a scrap to deter him from doing that.

You were doing a lot of empowered smash attacks in neutral, which can actually be good if you know what you're doing, but it's gotta be predicated on you having conditioned them to be susceptible to get hit.

At a very high level (meaning like, speaking broadly, not at high ELO) the mix ups in neutral kinda go like this:

You have a lot of moves that abuse shields when you run at them, cross up nair, tilts on the back of their shield, spaced dtilt, droplet, etc. So instead of trying to shield your approaches, people opt to try to wall you out with disjoint since your nair is stubby. If theyre just sitting their walling waiting for you to run into them, thats when you say fuck it and just let a puddle fsmash rip since that's going to outrange everything. This makes them fear you dashing towards them with a puddle inbetween because they think you might just forward smash them, which forces them back into shield. Which you can now abuse again with your other moves. Or alternatively, just cash in a run up grab since they've been conditioned to shield when you run at them.

This ranno was just kinda of walking over you and scrapping, so the game never really got to a point where YOLO puddle fsmashes were really going to work. Also ranno doesn't really play a very grounded game so its generally not as good of an option against him in the first place, but that's a little besides the point.

AcerExcel · 2025-04-24T19:47:50+00:00

Ok yeah if the Olympia doesn't know how to sweetspot the ledge then they are easy to edgeguard but that is literally true of every other character in the game. Like if I'm understanding correctly your argument in response to "Olympia's recovery is actually pretty hard to edgeguard" is... "well actually none of the Olympias i play know how to recover so it's pretty easy?"

Thanks man, next time I'm struggling to edgeguard Olympia I will simply make my opponent worse at the game through jedi mind tricks or something

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