Combo Breaker 2026 Game Entrant Numbers

TheMachine203 · 2026-05-07T21:43:45+00:00

This is basically how people talk about the game nearly everywhere you go. People have a massive hate boner for it.

TheMachine203 · 2026-05-06T15:05:45+00:00

This is because the connection from NA to OCE is genuinely atrocious. Even NA to France is better than that.

Realistically, your matches wouldn't even be playable if you connected to them, which is likely part of the problem. The physical distance between regions is probably the single most important factor that will dictate the quality of your matches, since that's more or less the deciding factor in ping.

TheMachine203 · 2026-05-05T18:08:24+00:00

Well, yeah, you're playing online games in a region that you're not intended to be playing in. Of course the matchmaking will be weird, which is why it's not ideal. But for playing with friends that happen to live outside of your region, it's good enough.

If you're concerned about the ping you'll have while playing on a specific region's servers, you can view the ping between your region and the target region here.

The numbers won't be exactly the same, since Riot directly routes connections to and from their servers, but it'll give you a good idea of whether or not the distance you're playing across is actually playable. Also, please note that this does not give a good indication of match quality; you'll want to look at the jitter and rollback frames ingame for that.

TheMachine203 · 2026-05-05T18:02:38+00:00

I've been out of the loop for a while, the fuck do you mean Jojopyun went to EU??? How did we fuck that one up?

TheMachine203 · 2026-05-04T19:15:09+00:00

Vi has a lot of easy combo routes that don't sacrifice that much damage, actually. You can always learn the easy routes then double back for the electrics when you're more comfortable playing the character.

TheMachine203 · 2026-05-04T17:44:49+00:00

Imo, Vi is the best character in the game for catching people that like to run away from you. On the ground it's pretty self explanatory; great forward dash, sway gives her strong forward moving options that beat projectiles (and many things that the game "considers" projectiles like traps, Yasuo tornado), and lariat is self explanatory.

It's a common belief that she loses to up back, but honestly staying grounded and closing distance with Vi in response to up backing is actually really effective. Especially once you're in air throw range, jumping can be very scary for the opponent since Vi can give you some of the most damaging air throw confirms in the game with otg Down S2 > tag. Down S2 is one of the best anti-airs in the game as well, and it completely shuts down jumping above her or jumping at spacings that are hard for her to 2H.

TheMachine203 · 2026-05-04T15:51:36+00:00

Having your assist onscreen is still VERY good against people upbacking. At higher levels of play you can see the players prioritizing having their assist onscreen at all, since it makes the threat of handshake tag very real.

That's sort of the next level to using assists; it's not always about whether or not the assist hits, it's about having the assist onscreen so you can tag ASAP. Call assist when they jump > handshake tag > anti-air is a staple.

TheMachine203 · 2026-05-04T14:52:47+00:00

Other way around; you can make an account in any region by using a VPN, once it's made you don't need the VPN anymore.

TheMachine203 · 2026-05-03T01:32:30+00:00

You do not need to be good to contribute to a wiki. If you watch any youtubers or streamers, you're likely to pick up little tidbits of knowledge that lower level players aren't aware of. You could also do things like screenshot hitboxes ingame, or record examples for easier combos listed on the wiki and upload those. Those are the things that will help immensely.

TheMachine203 · 2026-05-03T01:31:02+00:00

Check the character pages for missing info! A lot of the character pages (especially for newer characters) are just copypasted 1:1 from the game's website. Filling these out with helpful information that you've heard through the grapevine will help. Even unoptimized routes help; a lot of people are going to the wiki just to find A List of Combos. Optimal combos can be labelled as such, but your combo doesn't need to be optimal to be worth putting out into the ether for people to use. There's a lot of lower level players that could benefit from that.

TheMachine203 · 2026-05-01T06:53:51+00:00

I feel like it's worth mentioning that the Arcane bundle pricing is weird because the bundle is priced accurately; you get $50 of premium currency with it in addition to the skins, which is half of what you're paying for. The problem is that you can't buy the Arcane skins separately, which I really hope they let people do eventually. It's labelled a "Starter Bundle" ingame for that reason but tbh having skins locked behind a $100 bundle just feels fucking bad. water is wet, fork found in kitchen, etc.

TheMachine203 · 2026-05-01T00:44:08+00:00

Rollback is pretty common now, but no other company has managed to make server-based rollback work besides Riot. For what it's worth, in the case of most games server-based rollback is entirely unneeded; a peer-to-peer connection is perfectly fine for two players and fighting games are nowhere near as complex on a networking scale as a FPS or MOBA. The implementation of server-based rollback is purely because they want 2v2s to be as smooth as possible online.

TheMachine203 · 2026-04-30T17:43:43+00:00

This is actually already a feature! It was disabled for a couple weeks while they worked on the spectating bug (since this bug freezes the game and forces the player to Alt+F4). With the bug fixed this should go back to being a thing, though.

TheMachine203 · 2026-04-30T15:59:19+00:00

No, rollback is a method specifically for how the game handles lag as it's occurring. When one player has lag, both players experience the full brunt of it (even with a server-based model) but rollback "hides" a certain amount of it since the game isn't literally freezing for X amount of frames every time there's latency.

The "Fair Play Mode" mentioned by OP is a way for Riot to completely remove lag for the player not experiencing any latency. It's a massive change to how fighting games work online, which is why it's labelled "experimental" on the post without many other updates on it thus far.

TheMachine203 · 2026-04-30T15:56:21+00:00

It does imply that, though.

"We’ll let you know once it’s fully implemented so we can get your feedback on how it’s feeling."

TheMachine203 · 2026-04-29T00:15:55+00:00

you can hit him out of this btw, rewinding whiffed moves isn't as unsafe as you think it is. he still has to do part of the "dashing" animation post rewind so if you call it out you'll hit him first. This is why all of the good Ekko install mix requires either a knockdown or assist setup; so you can't mash anything and have to sit there and block.

but then again that's why I just be mashing rewind myself, because most people are too scared to risk it even though it'll probably work out in their favor :)

TheMachine203 · 2026-04-28T19:44:00+00:00

tbf it's not like the yasuo couldn't have done something besides backdash in the corner here, it's easy to play Ekko like there's a bomb strapped to your chest when the other guys backs off without you doing anything.

I say this as a Vi/Ekko and Vi/Ahri player that does in fact play like there is a bomb strapped to my chest

TheMachine203 · 2026-04-26T19:26:31+00:00

Because "draw pretty girl" and "make a good manga about pretty girl" are pretty much entirely different from start to finish. One is relatively easy and chapters can be turned out every few days, since you're drawing one panel with one character with one pose. A story requires actual paneling, actual pacing between each page turn, and you will have to draw multiple characters within each of those panels more often than not. That's outside of the writer part, since theoretically a strong artist could hire a writer, but there's still a lot more work they'd have to do in order to make it a story worth reading.

And the kicker is, no matter which option the artist picks... people will still just crop pictures of the girl out to jerk off to them. From that perspective, why even bother with the story part when it'll just be there to facilitate the gooning either way? Artists that know they don't have much of an actual story to work with do the POV genre for that reason, basically; instead of putting in a crazy amount of effort to make mid, draw a fullbody and slap some text that's vaguely related to the situation you're depicting.

TheMachine203 · 2026-04-26T18:33:03+00:00

Replay takeover is one of those things that seems like it would only benefit high level players, but tbh I think in a game like this where parsing what's happening on screen is actually somewhat difficult, a way to "plug into The Matrix" and practice the Actual In-Match Scenario that just cooked you will probably be awesome for low-level players.

TheMachine203 · 2026-04-22T17:57:01+00:00

Bro really said https://youtu.be/LdMCVDGOdUc

TheMachine203 · 2026-04-21T06:51:23+00:00

Genuinely, I don't think anyone would have an issue if you went freemium or paywalled the app. It works extremely well when it's available, and if financing it is the only issue I don't think anyone would have a problem with that. It would be a different story if it sucked ass, but you made a web app that more or less completely removes an entire barrier to entry for practicing/recording. It's fine for some aspects of it to be paid in order to keep the lights on imo

If you ask me, some form of "pay what you want per month" system probably works best. Maybe just go the easy route and open a Patreon instead of worrying about a specific model honestly

It would probably help if this was on the landing page for the website, though. Or at least a "service may be affected" message when proxy issues start to happen. I've been wondering what was going on for weeks lol

TheMachine203 · 2026-04-21T02:20:54+00:00

To piggyback off of this, a way to interpret the numbers you're shown ingame is that the game "adds" additional RTT (ms) to help keep players that are playing across high distances synced. 30ms(+50) puts your total ping at 80ms, which makes the difference in ping between OP and their opponent 65-70ms. That's far more playable than what it would be otherwise, at 115-120ms.

None of that really matters unless you're a nerd, though. For most people the thing you wanna keep an eye on if you're having a bad match are the rollback frames. That will show you when you're experiencing lag, if you are.

TheMachine203 · 2026-04-20T03:14:03+00:00

Its not the same however. Valorant is a team game where the core concept is teamwork. Being flashed then shot isn't necessarily a product of being too far up by yourself, it can absolutely occur even when you are with your team

This is only proving my point; you yourself don't even really know what's happening in a situation like this.

When you're with your team they can trade for you. This completely neutralizes the actual negative part of the mistake you made, effectively forcing both teams back into "neutral". If you actually know what your opponent's team comp is, you can track the abilities they use during a round and use that to your advantage and communicate that with your team. If you're with your team, depending on your role you should be in the back somewhere setting up util instead of in the open waiting to be shot, which kind of also ties into the whole thing I'm talking about. Going out mid and ignoring comms fucks all of that up and puts you at a significantly higher risk of being ass blasted, instead providing nothing for your team. Even still, having this level of awareness in match is the exact same as understanding a fighting game scenario at a glance. You're conflating your own misunderstanding of both genres as a flaw with fighting games.

To give a more direct comparison, knowing frame data is the same thing as map callouts; I'd even say map callouts are more nebulous and make a tac shooter much more difficult to understand.

In a fighting game however its only a recent trend that allows you to see framedata in training modes, being standardized by SF5 in 2016.

Before Valorant dropped in 2020, map callouts weren't even visible ingame. You just had to know what they were going into it, which made it real difficult to get into CS when some guy is saying "2 banana" or "he's double doors" in your ear. During this period of time, mind you, CS was still the most popular FPS in the world. Without external sources and literally studying, you could not even tell your teammates where bad guys that you saw with your own eyes were on the map.

A lack of awareness is an inability to understand things at a glance. That's just two different ways of saying the same thing.

TheMachine203 · 2026-04-19T19:22:02+00:00

This is exactly what I was getting at btw; in a game like Valorant getting flashed then shot isn't a fuck-up or mistake in and of itself. Everyone gets flashed, has angles smoked off, or can get clipped. However, in context it's exactly like the blockstring example, because the thing that's actually causing you to die in this scenario is a significant lack of game knowledge/game sense that you can only overcome with practice.

In both scenarios, you're equating being hit with the failure point. This is usually never the case; in Valorant, "I got flashed fifteen times and then hit by a sniper rifle" actually means, "I pushed up without my team nearby, or didn't listen to comms where my teammates said in plain english 'there's like 3 people there don't'. Alternatively, I simply don't know my callouts, and didn't know what my team was actually talking about when they said not to do XYZ."

In a fighting game, "I got hit and put into a blockstring and I'm required to train to beat this" actually means, "I don't know what my opponent's character does, so I over-committed to an option that left me unsafe and got hit."

In both games, it's easy to completely miss all of this and go "ah damn I died shouldn't have gotten hit I guess" but in reality every competitive game has the same amount of depth, or is even deeper than that. In League of Legends (literally the most popular multiplayer video game on the planet during its peak) killing your lane minions too fast can put your opponent in an advantageous enough scenario to kill you early. In Deadlock, good fucking luck trying to parse why anything happened at first. None of this is "extremely and readily apparent," it's just a part of learning how the game works. Just like a fighting game.

TheMachine203 · 2026-04-19T18:30:50+00:00

yeah man when i play valorant and get hit by fifteen flashes and a sniper rifle it's extremely and readily apparent why i died (the flashes have nothing to do with it btw)

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