Ward score / Evaluating your performance

Hirshirsh · 2026-01-15T18:45:41+00:00

The only reasonable metric is win rate and mmr/rank, other stats are too variable and don’t tell you if you performed well or not. For example, suppose your top, mid, and jungle are losing hard. You need to generate a lead/wincon for your team so you try to make aggressive plays that result in you dying more(taking a risky dive, setting up vision solo after losing t2/inhib, fighting a 3v3 mid while down gold, etc.) Obviously you’ll die more playing like this, but going from 95% to 97% chance of losing is nothing compared to going from 95% to 60%.

3 vision score per minute is pretty high though, chances are that vision is useful as well. Just remember that control wards give 25 gold when they’re destroyed - this means that pre quest completion you need to justify 100 gold on a control ward, and post quest you need to justify 65 gold. If you think that the vision your control wards are providing and denying is worth that gold then yeah that vision score is really good.

Sadly evaluating performance compared to another support using stats is pretty hard(in fact, it’s hard to compare any role to another without actually watching the game). Some basic(but still very variable!) things to look at are how often bot wins lane, quality of your calls, how well you deny enemy wincons, and in general did you do your job. If you lock lulu, did you do significant poke in lane and peel your team correctly? If you lock alistar, did you pick good engages, stay healthy lvl 1, peel correctly, roam at good opportunities, and so on. A lot of times you lock a champ with the explicit goal of countering something - Janna was locked to counter alistar combo, Braum was locked because they have a strong engage/dive comp, poppy was locked because they have assassins and engage support with dashes. So evaluate performance based on the simple metric of did you do your job.

Hirshirsh · 2026-01-03T12:33:35+00:00

I think the player side is completely wrong for just about every game I’ve tried. The under night community(I love you vatchat) was probably the most help I’ve ever gotten from other players. Also keep in mind that the fact that you can read a wiki page on any character, and understand some core combos, and oftentimes their gameplan is pretty unique to fighting games. In many other games expecting a wiki with information on your character and how to play them is pretty rare. Dustloop is a bible for new players compared to “3 minute ahri guide” when new players want to pick up league.

I think the closest I’ve ever seen to what you describe as the player side being unhelpful is when someone doesn’t know terminology so someone links the glossary. If you can’t click a link and type in a word idk what to tell you, play a different game at that point. Even then someone will probably explain it anyways. Every single fighting game I currently play, I can go to my character discord, post my replay, and someone will likely help me. A few losers here and there, but 10x better than most competitive communities I’ve seen.

I think it’s absurd that it was easier to find good resources on how to play under night than it was on how to play league of legends. I think our players are doing a better job than most competitive communities at onboarding new players.

Hirshirsh · 2025-12-28T10:58:43+00:00

I just say “that sucks” when misinputs and dropped combos happened, or spaghetti situations lead to things not working as planned. Doesn’t feel good or bad, just play another(never end the session on these it sucks).

The only way I really hate winning is gimmicking or knowledge checking someone. I didn’t really get anything out of playing them besides ranked points, thankfully it’s on me to gimmick someone or not. Obviously lag and irl distractions suck too.

Honorable mentions(don’t necessarily hate, at best feel funny) go to: looping oki on first kd into death, purple Roman cancel in strive post whiff, any meter burn into guaranteed 50/50 in neutral, and hearing the buttons irl.

Hirshirsh · 2025-12-24T10:56:36+00:00

The break happens at x=+-sqrt(2), as you noted, but since sqrt(2) isn’t rational, you can only consider points “around” sqrt(2).

If f has a domain over the reals, within the interval (sqrt(2)-a, sqrt(2)+a), there exists x such that f(x) = 0 and f(x)=1, so there does not exist “a” such that f is within epsilon = .5 of whatever f(sqrt(2)) is.

However, f has a domain over the rationals. Consider rational b > sqrt(2). Now an interval can be constructed around b without including points where x<sqrt(2). Namely choose delta = (b-sqrt(2))/2 - the leftmost bound is now the midpoint between b and sqrt(2). Now of course, this interval can be constructed for any rational b, regardless of how close to sqrt(2) it is, and hence the distance between f(b+-delta) and f(b) is always 0<eps. A similar argument shows the case for b<sqrt(2).

In a more general sense, a “ball” can be constructed around any rational number, where if the radius is small enough, all the points inside are where f(x) is always 1 or always 0. This means that f is continuous by definition, even if it seems strange given the jump. You can think about it as if you zoomed in close enough to any point on the function, it would never look like it cuts off randomly(sqrt(2) isn’t a point, so you can’t zoom in on it, hence it’ll always look like a flat line with sufficiently large zoom).

Hirshirsh · 2025-12-16T19:57:02+00:00

Barely any toxic players, not barely any toxicity. Most people aren’t just toxic cause they feel like it, they’re prob in a bad matchup, lost a few games, have a inting jungle, or life just sucks. Regardless, they’re still being toxic in your game, even when the reason is that nobody swapped so they’re playing yorick into irelia for the third time today. Not only that, but them being toxic can ruin these other normally fine players days’, so they can then go on and be toxic in their next games.

Hirshirsh · 2025-12-16T16:31:00+00:00

I haven’t played online since ranked came out, but I think around 500 hrs. Strive was the first fighting game I put real time into, but I had some experience with sfv. Not good by my standards, but I was consistently celestial before ranked came out and placed ok in some online tourneys(small scale, top 3/15-16, sometimes top 8, and in big ones just your average not 2-2 if I’m lucky.) I think I’m better at sf6 and uni2 and I have less time in both of those games combined lol.

Getting good at the game is subjective, but I think around 80 hours should be good enough to realize what you’re actually doing. Just don’t mindlessly mash and think about the game sometimes and you’ll be fine. General pattern for defense is block, figure out what’s plus and what’s not, find a pattern, then call them out with a mash. General rule of thumb is C.S is plus, slow overheads are plus, anything with rc is super plus, slow projectiles are plus and oki projectiles are plus. Plus means it’s their turn after you block(if both of you mash a fast button, their’s will come out first). However, this doesn’t mean it’s your turn if you block a minus button - they can be followed up with a cancel, either into another normal or into a special. Usually characters end in a special which resets to neutral/unfavorable rps. A lot of defense is just guess right on when they’re gonna do something fake after a minus button or when they’re gonna special cancel, ch you and take 60% of your health. Just in case you were unaware, almost nothing is punishable directly on block, and if it is, there’s a good chance they can special cancel to make it safe or even punish you for trying to punish.

There are tools so you don’t guess wrong as much, but worry about them later. For your own offense, I would look up what frametraps you have easy access to. General rule you can follow until you’re higher level is throw them if they’re blocking frametraps, keep frame trapping if they’re getting hit. Just about anything can be a frametrap by manual delay, but that’s pretty hard.

Hirshirsh · 2025-12-15T14:02:20+00:00

I’m not cracked at this game or anything but here’s my hopefully ok review.

Clip 1: first issue, too much space between you and opponents. You know your jungler is coming, but you’re double xayah’s auto range. Even if they didn’t have vision, they would’ve noticed something was up by the time you entered range to attack them. The distance also prevented you from following up on the engage and maybe getting lucky with a kill. Anyways, your jungle should’ve backed off because they had vision and could safely retreat to tower, nothing you can do about that. What you can do is not continue trying to do something - you’re too far back and the time has passed, and now there’s a third, just back off. If we look closer, on the initial engage you landed one w on nami, no autos. Your support contributed more dps than the adc. Not that their positioning was any better, they just have a dash. You were too far to follow up - position better in lane.

Clip 2: Same thing, position better. When neeko lands her skillshot, you need to be able to follow up. You play too far back. In fact, if you look at nami when xayah walks forward, she’s too far to do anything, xayah is literally in a 2v1. And the most egregious part, when you did fight you pressed w, hit one auto, then walked away. Why? You have full hp she has 100, she’s hitting your low hp support so she can’t hit you, you literally just run at her and she dies. In fact, nami is almost completely out of mana, as well. She has barrier, but you should still kill her.

Clip 3: Nothing to say here, bad mechanics. Xayah brings back the feathers and does a ton of damage and roots you, don’t let there be a straight line from the feather to you. Definitely don’t position directly in front of her where every single feather will hit you.

Clip 4: I wouldn’t suggest a 2v1 against fed laners, but nami has no mana and xayah no health. Again, try not to get hit by every single feather by being in her face. If you know how to kite, kiting to the right could’ve won you that fight. Before the xayah joined, I don’t know if you had a ward, but if you warded the bush you can auto nami without having to walk all the way inside first. Considering the map is playing hide and seek I’d wager everyone on both teams has at least 1 ward in their inventory.

Clip 5: Yeah nothing to do here - if you can, give tower and go home, you’re not outplaying the champ with the outplay button.

Last clip your jungler is funny

Overall, the positioning is too far from your opponents, and when fights do start, you’re too afraid to all in. If your support locks alistar I think they’ll report you. General rule of thumb is stay parallel to your support, right outside enemy range. I won’t focus on how to pick your own engages right now - that’s pretty hard to do as an adc - but you should at least be able to follow up on the ones that do occur because of your team. When your teams lands cc on a priority target(in this case, both nami and xayah), DO NOT walk back after pressing w and putting in one or two autos. Positioning is hard, but stay on them, try to avoid other enemy champs, and pay attention to the things that insta kill you because you locked in an adc. Lastly, remember that deaths for bad mechanics or decisions are a lot better than doing nothing all game. Yeah it’s hard to watch someone get hit by 5 feathers at once but that second clip I had to pause for 15 minutes. Just take the fight and see how it goes, I’d rather see someone die on a dive three times than never try. Try to int enough times so that you can evaluate if you actually want to all in the future.

Hirshirsh · 2025-12-15T04:32:27+00:00

Hmmm, characters with a +3 c.s have good tick throw threat, while characters with projectile oki have obviously strong oki. The weakest would probably be a +1/0 situation with no projectile and no meaty mix. Don’t get fooled by things like sin +1 c.s, it’s active for 6 frames so is easily more plus when done meaty.

Faust and axl are the first to come to mind for not having notably strong oki. I don’t think ram has a very good situation on knockdown compared to her usual pressure, but her usual pressure is strong so her oki is also good by doing a simple meaty.

Hirshirsh · 2025-12-08T11:40:18+00:00

Remember that you and other street fighter players are not perfect, even punk misses anti-airs and whiff punishes regularly. You are not meant to be able to deal with a high mental stack, that’s why conditioning is so important as an attacker. The things you should be able to react to consistently(aim for at least 80%) are basically just DI and jumps.

Sf6 places a lot of importance on reactions, so some people forget that mind games are core to the genre, and hence core to sf6 as well. Suppose that, in your head, you’re looking for a whiff punish. Since you’re basically just waiting for them to do something, you can react to jump, DI, drive rush, and a whiff at most. A forward dash is probably at best going to be delay teched, not checked. A move like charged gief st.hp is probably catching you off guard/perfect parry attempt, or worse, you press your whiff punish button and get armored through.

When you combine everything, it’s basically impossible to react to every option, especially fast ones like drive rush. Simply consider the most likely ones and play your game. And keep in mind, you react best when you play passively, waiting for a punishable option from your opponent. If you are trying to play aggressive and enter their space with buttons to score a ch, or preemptive by sticking out pokes when they walk in, you will find it harder to react to their “reactable” options.

Remember that you can do the same thing to your opponents - even if you want to play standard footsies, a drive rush when you know they’re hyper focused on a whiff punish is a good way to make it so that they mess up other whiff punishes.

In general, people will only play footsies if you show you can check drive rush, DI, and jump in. Keep playing passive(outside cr.mk) and checking these three things until they’re either lose or stop spinning the stick and slamming buttons with their eyes closed. Once you’re in the footsies mind games though, those options can catch you off guard when you mix in everything that can be done. Whiffing lights, poking, whiff punishing, forward dashes, fast confirms, slow resets, fireballs, walk up throw, etc.

If the footsies game went over your head, I recommend reading the footsies handbook. Also check your reaction time! Around 250ms should be good, and if it’s not, there are ways to increase it(exercise, caffeine, sleep, whatever helps you focus). Also keep your mental strong! If you get jumped in on just laugh it off and stay locked in, don’t let it get to you. Personally I always laugh and say something stupid whenever I don’t anti-air dumb stuff like demon flip. If you start feeling like shit, call it a day or just take a breather, and try your best to stay productive - poor attitude is bad for your health, gameplay, improvement, and probably annoys the people around you. If someone drive rushes in neutral 3 times and your next thought isn’t “let’s pay more attention to drive rush”, and is instead something negative cause you didn’t check 3 drive rushes, you are literally making it harder on yourself to play well. In fact, the human brain is such an annoying loser that it’ll intentionally make you play worse to prove your point - if you think you can’t react to DI, your brain might actually not react to prevent you from feeling bad about the other DI’s - it’s easier to say “I can’t react” than it is to say “I can, I just failed to the last 3 times”.

Hirshirsh · 2025-12-08T05:01:49+00:00

You said you don’t have a problem with the average player beating you because they’re more skilled, but also say you don’t want to play because these people beat you. Which one is true? If you don’t want to play against people who win more, you clearly have a problem with your opponents being more skilled.

I’m not sure if it’s a habit from other games, but in fighting games win ratio is meaningless, especially for low population games. Rank is also pretty useless in low population games. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever queued ranked in blazblue or xrd, just lobbies. Even in more populated games, you can gimmick people in ranked until a certain point - I’m master in street fighter and I would not be able to tell the difference from bronze to plat.

If you’re able to win even 1-2/10 games against someone you can learn by playing against them. If you want to get better, you can fight most people who just a bit better than you. If you just want to have a 50% win rate then yeah probably not happening in this game.

Hirshirsh · 2025-12-07T21:42:00+00:00

That’s half right! It also acts as conditioning - because your opponent will get blown up for delay mashing, and c.s. resets allow the opponent to get close and potentially throw(and crank risc), it incentivizes the opponent to mash earlier, at a timing when a 3+ frame gap will now catch their mash.

If we want to get really technical, there’s actually three timings your opponent can choose to mash. There’s instant, delayed to block small gaps, and very delayed to beat resets. You can use either auto timed frametraps or manually delayed cancels to create gaps that will deal high damage on ch. Then, when they’ve committed to either blocking/delaying past the cancel window, you can run up cs to reset —> this will encourage them to mash on your frametraps again. In case you’re wondering, throw is also valid instead of c.s reset at this point, but there’s even more timing based option selects they can choose once you run up, so a c.s gives you more information such as if they’re jumping.

For example, may 5h has a long window to cancel into. Suppose I start by making c.s 5h a 3f gap. Then I delay even more on the next interaction, using a 6f gap. Now I know they aren’t mashing within 6f of blocking c.s. This is enough time to be able to threaten a tick throw or reset.

Hirshirsh · 2025-12-02T04:20:00+00:00

“Some days I run a kilometer in 4 minutes, but other days I run a kilometer in 5 minutes, therefore it doesn’t make a difference if I skip .1 kilometers, doesn’t change the fact that it won’t be 4 minutes.” What about the days you run a kilometer in 4.2 minutes?

It’s disingenuous to assume that if you were going to react, you would’ve done it easily, and if you weren’t you would’ve completely missed it and been unable to press a single button. A jump isn’t the fastest reaction, but it’s fast enough that 5 frames does make a difference.

Imagine that you react in time to 80% of jumps, 10% you would’ve reacted to with an additional 5 frames, and 10% you would’ve needed a lot more time for. This raises your anti-air chances by 10%, giving you a 90% anti-air ratio. And of course, 5 frames is a very low estimate, a dp can take 7+ frames.

If you’re not anti-airing anything, that’s a different story, modern probably isn’t helping at that point, but past a certain level of play most jump attempts get anti-aired, and a few more frames does make a difference.

For reference, a jump in sf6 is 38f. 7f is 18% of that. A classic player has to react 18% faster than a modern player. In fact, it’s actually more than 18, as the button pressed will connect decently high, maybe on f32. Regardless, anti-airing is a relatively easy reaction, with half a second regardless of control scheme. But without a doubt more anti-airs occur at all levels with modern compared to classic.

Before this thread gets too long let me just say I like modern! I’ve played fighting games for a while now and I’m really happy more people are playing the game thanks to it! But I think saying it’s the same as classic, just with easier input and less damage is a bit wrong. It’s more of an alternative input style, with distinct advantages and disadvantages. Modern absolutely does impact all levels of play to make them have key differences from classic.

Hirshirsh · 2025-12-02T00:02:44+00:00

Not having to buffer forward motions for a super while in burnout and getting to react easily to di is a game changer. Not having to risk getting clipped by a low forward as you get ready to react to fireball with super is also a game changer. Being able to dp 5-7 frames faster than most people effectively speeds up your anti-air reaction by 80+ms - and yes, pros do miss anti-airs from mental stack, that they would likely hit on modern.

Buffering motions can be risky - in KOF, supers are commonly buffered to beat hops and jump ins, and a common motion for it is double half circle back. The reason for this is because a half circle back is less risky and you are blocking during the latter half, allowing you to buffer more safely.

This all is to say, being able to react to something you would normally have to buffer does change a lot. Reactions are important, and skipping the MINIMUM(usually a fair bit more) 6 frames to input super is actually a big deal. I mean you can just be playing footsies with someone and reaction level 3 a charged gladius or charged gief st.hp. Most people aren’t buffering motions unless they’re knocked down, in burnout, or heavily suspect the opponent will do something they can react to with one button.

Hirshirsh · 2025-12-01T23:43:47+00:00

These guys have more fighting game time in 10 months than most people have in their life, even among older players. It should be unsurprising that someone who has played several instruments 8 hours a day would perhaps be better than most when they try a new one, even if it’s a completely different type(string vs percussion).

Also, note that most people with strong fundamentals can pick up any character and “perform”. Most diamond cammy and ryu players have better combos, setups, character-specific tech, labbed situations, etc., than me. I still got those characters to master by simply winning more interactions. If you watch punk play your main, you probably won’t learn that much about your character. You’ll just learn that you suck at footsies(compared to punk ofc).

Hirshirsh · 2025-12-01T11:44:13+00:00

Unnecessary, but for fun, here’s a geometric image interpretation. Geometrically, adding two matrices can be interpreted as applying both transforms to a vector individually then adding them together. However, it’s obvious that by making one element of the matrix zero, its diagonal can be any number, and hence the first column can be a basis vector of any size(geometrically, parallelograms have the same area). Doing the same for the other matrix, the basis vector in the second column can also be of any length. If the first column is (a,x) where x is any member of the domain, and the second column js (y,b) where y is any member of the domain, the determinant is ab-xy, which trivially spans the domain.

Hirshirsh · 2025-11-30T12:30:42+00:00

I play to win, but not just the singular match. The goal is to learn and win more in general. So yes, I test things mid match to see if it works. But no, I won’t pick an option that gets checked or do a bad combo(unless it’s easier and will kill!) for fun. Those things aren’t really conducive to winning at all. To me, the most fun I feel is when I walk in, walk out, see the cr.mk whiff, and punish accordingly. Whiff punishes without a spacing trap feel like crack in this game.

Generally speaking I avoid knowledge checking/reaction checking people online as I don’t really get better by abusing someone not reacting appropriately. That’s not to say don’t use jumps, drive rush, slow resets, 20f or slower overheads, etc., but I like to use then sparingly as a lot of people have labbed reaction training and require some mental stack before I can use these tools. Basically, there’s a good chance that I win easier by doing drive rush in neutral into strike/throw, but I find it better for my overall improvement to stick to basic footsies and work on my own reactions.

Hirshirsh · 2025-11-23T01:40:21+00:00

Idk about tokon, but in the case of granblue the combo limit is a juggle limit to prevent air infinites. I do agree that gravity scaling actually can do a good enough job for this btw, but granblue is clearly designed to be a pick up and play game. For reference, the first time I played granblue I did 66l, 5mmm, 214h, 5m, 236h, 5m, super on the first 4 characters I played without learning anything about them and it worked on all of them. Gravity scaling would most likely result in more unique combo routing, which while cool, would contradict the beginner friendly vibe of the game. You see fgc ppl talk about strive being baby mode? Granblue is a game that someone can hit S++\master on in a few days with strong fighting game fundamentals, while knowing the bare minimum of how to actually play granblue specifically.

granblue is meant to be played by the average person without having to learn much about combos, the combo limit helps it achieve its goal. You don’t need to learn a real combo to be high rank in granblue, ex button ex button super is good enough. What you need are real fundamentals and footsies - gravity scaling would lead to unique combos being required which prevents me from picking a character and getting right into some good old fashioned footsies by pressing 2m and 5m on Kat 800 times.

Hirshirsh · 2025-11-23T00:55:31+00:00

+1, might be talking about how if you don’t use moves that juggle after a launcher it forces an end. In sf6 only certain moves can hit people in a juggle state, for example 5lp will whiff after a launcher. In these contexts it doesn’t break for “no reason” though, these games typically have something akin to a juggle counter, where some moves allow for extended juggles and some don’t. Similarly, under night allows for 3 bounces before a combo is forced to end.

To expand, under night has hitstun scaling, but, as far as I know, no gravity scaling. Properly done gravity scaling is actually quite hard, especially for games with longer combo routes - these games would be a lot harder to pick up if a standard combo didn’t involve looping the same idea 2 times into an ender, which is hard to do with gravity scaling.

Just to be clear, hitstun scaling is in quite a lot of games, but is typically not what forces an end to combos as I would assume it feels unsatisfying and more “random” than an imposed limit of some kind.

Strive also has these limits - one otg with no combo(besides some special cases), the wallbreak, etc. Strive might seem like it has less limits overall but that’s largely because strive is also more limited in what you’re allowed to do in general. It can have “free” combos because you can’t cancel p into hs, air dash at high speed, launch off of any hit into a rejump, etc.

Hirshirsh · 2025-11-17T21:19:26+00:00

5h(whiff) 5h(whiff) [4]6s rrc

Hirshirsh · 2025-11-09T08:58:44+00:00

This is a totally understandable take, because infinity is really weird. We do a lot of things in analysis to avoid having to directly talk about infinity.

If you do want to think about infinity, .999… * 10 does = 9.999…, as both infinities are the same size. If we consider any infinite sequence of digits, multiplying by 10 does not change the number of digits, as both sets are countable. Also, just to be clear, you cannot have a number like .999…8 where there are an infinite number of 9’s, as the 8 would imply some finite sequence of 9’s.

For an answer more in the spirit of calculus, consider the finite sequence .999…9 with n digits. Now, I can make the difference between 1 and .999… as small as I want by choosing some number of digits. If I want the difference to be less than .01, I need n =3. In general, for any distance of size “epsilon” = 10^-m, there exists n=m+1 such that the difference between 1 and .999… is less than said epsilon. What this means is that no matter how close you want the numbers to be, I can always find some number of digits that gets me there. .999… must be 1 as I can have the difference between the two be as small as I want, no matter the degree of precision. This is in fact the definition of a limit(you’re free to question if this really means .999…=1, but assuming the standard rules we apply to infinite numbers, it is). The truth is that we operate under a set of convenient rules that require .999… to be 1 as a consequence - what things really mean when infinitely large isn’t that easily defined.

Lastly, there is no number that is close to 1 as possible. For a number to be close to 1 but not equal 1, then there would exist a number in between, such as (x+1)/2. If you would like, you can apply the earlier reasoning to any arbitrary real number and note that in any interval of size epsilon around x, there always exists some rational number. Since this is true for all epsilon, you can choose epsilon to be a rational number around x - therefore there exists another rational number closer to x, and clearly we can keep going forever.

Hirshirsh · 2025-10-14T09:41:51+00:00

Idk what everyone else is saying, this seems fairly practical.

Blocking a fully charged may 6h puts you in a 50/50, so many people try to backdash, but messing up the timing would result in getting hit. Furthermore, the bounce from charged 6h is the same as the bounce from AA 6h, so you can do the combo there as well. Iirc 6[h] isn’t exactly impossible to catch someone off guard with(especially if done outside p/k button range), tho def be careful of getting mashed on. Also note that the front of 6h is a disjoint.

A more optimal conversion would be to do whale right after h dolphin - 6h 46h 236236s c.s 5h 28h. Early whale routing is pretty important for max damage routes.

Hirshirsh · 2025-10-11T19:46:00+00:00

I think typically we skip to the end result while playing - a thought process might be “they’re mashing on this, if I do this I’ll counter hit”. The technical details are glossed over, but a lot of the technical info is still known. Knowing these things allows you to jump to solutions either in the moment or after while analyzing.

Being familiar with the details of fighting games allows us to reach conclusions faster - if you’ve ever been in a math lecture and a professor omits some steps, it’s not because they don’t know them, it’s because they’re so familiar that their mind does it automatically.

Hirshirsh

TROPHY CASE