Mental Stack in Fighting Games and Why it is Important
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- čas přidán 10. 09. 2024
- Mental stack is the concept that fighting game players should know. You rarely need to have exceptional reaction speed in order to play fighting games. What's more important is to learn what you can and cannot react to and prioritize your mental stack. Then, you can create your gameplan around that.
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This is also where the concept of ‘conditioning’ takes hold. Conditioning is basically about manipulating your opponents mental stack to prioritize watching certain things and using the least predictable option you know you have, although the mind games do go further than that. Characters with more options than their opponent have to watch for less options, but also have to keep their own list of options in mind at the same time to remain unpredictable. The key to adaptation is to stay open minded, pick apart your opponents options, and simply do the best counter options relative to your character, which takes practice if you wanna do it on reaction, but lets you focus on deeper mind games and more creativity then you would trying to keep in mind all of your options at once. If you are by default doing the best counters you have, then you can base your mind games around that and keep information like your opponents playstyle in mind.
me: "they are trying to condition me."
them: "did i just eat cereal without milk?"
This is why HiFight and Sajam are some of my favorite content creators, they just do such a great job of concisely explaining universal fighting game concepts in ways that people of all skill levels can easily understand.
My mental stack fell over and broke, so I put a doily on it and use it as a decorative flourish in my mental space.
I admire the resourcefulness, good job.
Fantastic video! One of the hardest things to explain to people who don't play/only watch FGs is they assume everyone playing at even an intermediate level is ultra instinct reacting to every stimulus on screen and running millions of mental calculations every second, which is obviously not true.
When I was very first getting into fighting games with SF5 and doing the tutorial I was under the impression I was suppose to tech grabs on reaction and was wondering why I was having such a difficulty with it
FGs are just rock paper scissors on crack cocaine
Unironically the best short tutorial for fighting games
The best option is just to go Unga Bunga and force your opponent to focus on this.
This is one of the best videos on the topic, thank you very much!
Thats why characters with many options like Akuma, Rashid, Birdy ... create natural mental stack, cause its not only about dash and jump. Its not about trying to react to everything, its about radnomizing.
Is that why i love Akuma but fucking blow with him? Feel like this true.
It's always scary to me fighting a Birdie player. Every move is a guessing game.
Birdie is easy to whiff punish and has a slow dash, you can always neutral jump his ex forward command grab move. Not nearly as bad as the other two
great video! never thought of throwing out dash checks while looking for an anti-air, thats smart
This is the same thing you do when you are playing the fireball game. You throw a fireball and, _while_ you are doing that, you look for a jump-in. That way, if the opponent actually jumps in, you are ready to anti-air them.
I find that when a video is so well done such as this, it’s an entertaining watch even if most of the info is known to me. Great job, and keep up the good work!
well said. lots of people focus on being "optimal", but they don't realize people's mental stack have limited resources, choosing where to allocate those resources is what matters the most.
2:23 YOOOO! That is insane! I never thought of using moves in that context. Thank you for the new perspective.
To note, Mental stack is more important for certain archetypes (zoners/ grapplers) than others (rushdown/ gorillas)
it depends because characters like seth have like 5 different ways to approach and pressure you
First time I heard this term was from Sajam. Thank you for giving us a more detailed explanation. It's one of many things that happen in fighting games that still don't have a name.
2:44 shameless plug :P 4:32 very polite :D
You can eliminate the mental stack by simply recording the training dummy to do 5 different options (e.g. jump attack, dash attack, crush counter, etc) and practicing reacting to all 5 options. Daigo uses the same thing.
that's not eliminating the mental stack, it just increases the size of your mental stack. it's basically training your mental resources rather than removing some essential function of human cognition. this is illustrated by the fact that it is still possible to jump in or dash in on daigo, it's just less likely to be successful
Way easier said than done
At the end of the day you're never going to anti air or dash check 100% u can only train to be ready for one option or block the other. There will always be guesses and 50/50 situations.
All we can do is use our game plans to dominate the situation and limit ur opponents opportunities.
a good way to train your reactions and improve your execution
thanks for making your videos text-based, english is not my native language and i struggle alot trying to understand videos commented with audio only, but this way i can understand everything
My mental stack is basically nothing. I just go NEYAHHHH and autopilot through everything... which sucks because I know all the things I should be doing but I'm just never mentally present enough in the match enough to do them.
That can actually be good if you autopilot with your characters good options. Just do whatever you think is going to work on your opponent without any mental strain, and your brain will naturally take care of whatever your opponent does without you having to focus on any particular options your opponent has. As long as you have a clear head patterns will form naturally as the match goes on, and you can end up picking apart those patterns without thinking as well.
@@warriordinag3921 That might be, but I've got so many bad habits that keep me in high bronze low silver. Random sweeps, committing buttons that don't give me time to anti-air when I get jumped on, doing *nothing* in neutral, throwing out random DPs because hot damn am I sure he's going to jump right now... or random unsafe moves for *no reason*. Once I've reined in my autopilot I think I'll have a decent path to at least gold, because I know my character really well on paper and in the training room, but it's putting that stuff into actual matches that I struggle on.
I also realized that I struggle transitioning from my standard neutral buffer into DP, but a little practice in the lab at least helped me acclimate to QCB->DP, which is a combination I didn't even know I struggled with until I actually tried it.
@@kevingriffith6011 Practice mindfulness. Keep your habits in mind and try to break them during matches. Do it one habit at a time.
@@warriordinag3921 I've been making attempts at that. I'm trying to remind myself to go one step at a time: watch your opponent, do they quickrise or backrise? I don't even get that far, but eventually I think I'll get there.
thats because your goal is to "Just win" and "just be better".
I was there for years also, until one day it hit me.
forget about winning. I mean, stop caring about it,
caring about it makes you rush to "just win".
in other words, you lose patience.
Pushing forward too much is exactly what makes people predictable. because then they can say "something is coming... ... Now" and it probably does.
I notice my cody is much much stronger when he is juggling patience defence and offence. hes great at pushing, but if he pushes three times in a row, he got predicible.
if he pushes even every other chance, and waiting 50 percent of the time, its still pretty predictable.
when I add 5-10 full seconds of "fake looking pressure" while focusing on just defence, stopping what ever the other guy is, my cody win rate goes up nearly double.
once they notice im one of those strong wall defenders thats putting in some pressure, with rare jumps, after they think "shit this guys not a jumper"
sometimes I like to try and switch it to crazy jumper.
I actually suck though, I never get past silver. i just understand the basics.
Thank you for this. I've always struggled with reacting to the opponent and this broke it down for me.
This helped so much. I'm still practicing Guilty Gear Online and still have a lot to learn. Forgot about footsies cause I focus on other stuff too much. Still learning defense, mix ups, when to bait, mind games ect. I can see why some people don't want to play fighting games. It's a lot to learn and experience.
This is too Good to not have more Views, amazing work
Love when subconscious concepts like this are explained in clear terms, great vid!
Also is this stage in the game?
Two years later, rewatching to remind myself the importance so I can deal with SF 6 pressure.
Amazingly educational video.
Excellent video as always, keep it up
please do a video on air dashes and their utility!!
this has a lot to do with scenarios : we can react to things which we can predict. One major weakness most players have in fighting games is that they do rely on their natural fighting game experience and instinct. While this has more to do with the ratio risk reward : what can be optimized ? What decisions will lead me to lose more life than another ?
That's why this is very difficult to get better in fighting games, because every fighting game has their own exploit or rules, which you need to perfectly understand in order to progress. Just like chess : the more games you know and understand, the better you become.
and then add in tournament pressure and bam you got yourself the shakies
This is solid
lol, you used 5 EX bars at the end there... 2 EX moves and a super! cheeky blanka 😏
Potemkin: Pls jump.
Ky Kiske: Ok
Great video! It's cool to see a concept that you kind of just have a "gut feeling" about be explained so well
Great vid! But like few people use fordward dash....is more like footsies and jump, imo
Nice vid HiFight!
"The invisible gorilla"
U also have a natural inclination towards one kind of playstyle.
For example a high level Alex player might not be able to play a shoto or zoner as they have a natural inclination towards dominating footsies and anti airs in close ranges.
Keeping people out and winning with pokes will be unnatural to those kind of players at first in higher levels.
Assuming u want to reach the highest level means understanding ur weakness, for example I'm a reactionary player and I play guile and zangief.
My natural weakness is zoners and grapplers who play balls to the wall.
My adjustment would be to play keep out but my mental stack is very weak towards grapplers and zoners because I'm more worried about what they're doing instead of keeping out the grappler or slowly whittling down the zoners.
Tilt factor in my opinion is more important than having ur own reactionary flowchart that naturally comes from experience.
Good music
Epic
Explaining Kyo to a new nen user
Hey, you have more stuff to react to but don’t worry about it ok?
0:09 block
Bronze: Jump-in city
Silver: **MENTAL STACK**
Gold: Jump-in city
Free yourselves from the shackles of execution!
Good video!
What song is being used in this video?
SFV Holly Jolly Beatdown stage theme
@@HiFightTH thanks 👍
You are credit to fgc. I am heavy wpns guy and this is a channel.
Really important notions here, especially in SFV where there is a consequent delay when you play online
But there's an online delay in every fighting game.
@@gamer9720 Not every fighting game has the same delay
私はまだ日本語を勉強しています。英語から日本語への翻訳が間違っていることをお詫びします。私はあなたが作成したビデオを本当に楽しんでいます。メンタルスタックビデオは大いに役立ちました。詳細なガイドを作成することを検討していただけませんか。初心者として、ニュートラルなゲームの「フッティー」や、シミーやディレイドスローなどの他の概念を理解するのは非常に困難です。ビデオはたくさんありますが、すべての格闘ゲームに適用できる一般的で基本的なものはありません。人々は、キャスト全体ではなく、キャラクターにのみ適用される特定のガイドを作成します。読んでくれてありがとう。
What costume is Karin wearing?
Can someone tell me the name of the song?
That’s why I play chars whose neutral buttons double as anti airs 🧠
Karin got the best legs in the industry.
What's the name of the song??
Holly Jolly Beatdown stage theme
you wont find me reacting to any 16 frame dashes online those 16 frames translate into 265ms to react and with most of us probably sitting around 200ms on a pure reaction.unless your looking for the dash its gonna be a tough reaction for the avg person. it also doesnt help with how some of the dashes are animated so even if your hair trigger ready for the dash you will probably have to preemptivley press before you even physically are reacting to it as the movement of the dash that you will reconize may start later then the actual dash nash is pretty good example on that. but there are gods among men with low reaction times out there
I think most people react to that quick "forward, forward" input before the actual dash
also "mental frame advantage"
Why didnt the mental stack effect me much in sf4 or sfxt but is SUPER potent in sf5?
There are less "Get out of jail" situations in SFV. You guess way more than any other street fighter game ever.
music?
I can’t say I’m a fan of how they changed the lighting in game. Makes everything look like it’s covered in oil.
Everyone is Hakan now.
That’s just a special costume to look like that
@@des6801 I’ve seen that effect on the original guile costume before. Maybe it’s the stage.
Fundamentals.
Then theres character that can dash check & anti air with the same button 🤢🤢
Use a flow chart. Got it! 🥴
Then you have me, who, due to having mental health issues out the wazoo, has the worst mental stack in existence and shouldn't even be thinking of even playing the game.
Yo, fighting games are kinda sick, no other game has this kind of Trinity. Like, we’re actually fighting, just not physically but everything else is a real fight.
It’s a mental fight. That’s why I like fighting games so much, it gets me thinking and every player plays different. So figuring them out is kinda like a puzzle
Yeah but you play Blanka in both games
I want to thumb up twice, but it wont let me do it
cool video! now please don't use that blanka skin ever again thank you!
With enough practice you don't need to react at all. DPs and Dash checks become muscle memory and that is why it always feels impossible to get in when fighting a top player.
Nitpicking here but I think it's still a reaction, it's just so ingrained that it feels automatic. Muscle memory is a bit different, that is basically how doing a DP motion feels strange and awkward at first but eventually it is natural. Or even more simply, playing a scale on an instrument, you are not thinking about each note, your muscles remember the motion of moving through the scale. To be fair, the term muscle memory isn't a medical or technical term, it's a colloquialism that means different things in different context, so you are also correct in calling automatic reactions muscle memory. Again, I was just nitpicking a bit XD.
@@no_nameyouknow 'Muscle memory' refers to automated movement meaning that the cognitive aspect (the decision) is bypassed completely. The brain receives the visual cues and the fingers execute the motion without decision making/reacting. Daigo recently referred to his antiair dp as 'automatic' meaning that it was executed without reaction/thought/decision. Similarly Brain F in a recently clip of his was surprised that his 'dp came out of nowhere', so where is the reaction there? In fact a lot of higher level play revolves around exploiting muscle memory, like interrupting a frame trap with a dash to surprise an opponent that has only practiced dash checking in neutral.
Hey what’s the song being used?