Get rid of the "dud" rashakuken

What was there to discuss? He was certainly going to be closed to the rationale you were putting forward.

Maybe I need to start ignoring anyone who trots out that “FIGHTING GAMES ARE MEANT TO BE SKILL BASED AND NOT ABOUT LUCK OR GUESSING” garbage, for the sake of my mental well-being.

Fighting games are about the skill of balancing risk and reward, the skill of gambling your lifebar on things like unreactable oki and whatnot. If the skill required to manage variance is not something you regard as a skill at all, then you should probably give up on this whole fighting game thing (and particularly on KI), because your idea of skilled play is going to be constantly broken up by random ■■■■ occurring and people getting lucky guess [insert thing here].


:sweat_smile: Ah, so I misunderstood you. My bad!

There is nothing wrong with random in a FG. In fact,every FG already has random. What you may ask? There is no random? Oh there is. It is in the form of the opponent. Now KI is adding another layer of Random. Nothing wrong with a random based character having a random and small chance of getting a bad fireball and a huge chance of a good one especially when you can turn the wheel of luck 3 times in a single move.

You should probably just see a doctor for the sake of mental well-being. It seems to have flown far before now. I do find your rudimentary concept of reducing reads and mix-ups to simple luck adorable. More so that you think that aspect of the genre actually encompasses the entirety of a fighting game.

I guess this spells the end of any constructive debate about the properties of Omen’s fireballs in this thread.


Nope, still 1 in 11 chance. But you are making a commitment on a single fireball similar in frame data to tapping a Medium Punch button.

Low risk, low reward.


Re: your edit:

I’m not sure where you got this impression from – the post you’re responding to argued that gambling your lifebar and managing variance is a skill. There’s even a deep mathematical discipline dedicated to it. The point is that whilst we can make good decisions in aggregate and get into opponents’ heads to some extent, variance in the moment (i.e. luck, outcomes which diverge sharply from the expected) is a reality of the genre, and your invocation of the “fighting games should be as skill contingent as possible” argument in response to Omen’s random dud fireballs tells me that you’re not terribly happy about said variance.

wrt aspects of the genre: what else are you referring to? KI isn’t really a high-execution game.

Player decision =/= in-game RNG. Comparing the two is pure fallacy. Luck is, by definition, success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one’s own actions. Players making decisions which are highly situational and infrequently successful doesn’t make them luck, it just makes them highly situational and infrequently successful.

Other aspects of the game aside from reads and mix-ups? Footsies, reactions, optimization, resource management, execution (still extremely relevant in KI), timing, match-up knowledge, patience, etc…

There is luck in any fighting game, regardless.

50/50 Mixups.

Missed Inputs.

Random Rashakukens.

Mashed DPs.

Right? :slight_smile:

Omen’s fireballs can’t be compared to tripping, because tripping does not add variance to a character designed to have variance.

When you dash in Brawl, you expect to dash. There is exactly one expected outcome, so when 5% of the time you get something that instead kills your character, that’s frustrating.

When you pick Omen and throw fireballs, you are accepting that you will get a random fireball pattern 100% of the time. There is no “sure thing” here. In fact, as often as you throw a dud during zoning, you probably also throw a super amazing fireball pattern that shouldn’t exist because it’s too good and gives Omen a totally free approach. Omen forces you to weigh the risk/reward of throwing something that is often very good, usually “pretty good”, and sometimes (but vary rarely) bad.

And duds aren’t even really that bad. As said, during pressure they are equivalent to other fireballs. During zoning, even if you throw 2 duds out of 3 during a HP rashakuken (extremely rare), you probably aren’t getting punished, because the opponent also doesn’t know what’s going to happen. But the time he realizes it, Omen has recovered and probably that 1 other fireball is enough to keep him safe. If anything, it just marginally slows him down. If you trip in Brawl, you can actually lose your entire stock.

The OP’s notion of variance is misguided. Variance works with Omen because the chances of him throwing something really good offset the chances of him doing something bad. That is, variance comes into play each time you use the move, and it often works in your favor too. It is not at all the same as doing a move with only one expected outcome and having it fail 5% of the time at random, where the only possible variance is negative and there is no reason for it to exist.


None of those are luck and are completely contingent upon player action except for one.

What is the difference between making a commitment on a dash, in which you know there’s a chance to trip, and making a commitment on a fireball in which you know there’s a chance for it to fail? Nothing.

[quote=“Infilament, post:51, topic:4756”]

This is a fair rationale, but you’re using it to combat the wrong part of my argument. My argument is, primarily, that the dud is useless in general and that Omen’s fireballs are varied enough without the need for it. And secondarily, that the dud can actually cause a failed input if the RNG gives you all duds, which the odds increase for, based on the strength of your rashakuken input.

If you trip in Brawl, you can actually lose your entire stock.[/quote]

A full dud rashakuken can lead to a huge punishment, just as a trip in brawl can.

So by this logic, if there were a chance to lunge forward at a higher speed as well as a chance to trip in brawl, the tripping would be justified? Bad and good here are subjective. Some fireballs are worse than others. Some may consider some good that others consider bad.

But to the other person would be considered Lucky, as they dropped said combo, or did something wrong.

[quote=“TheNinjaOstrich, post:53, topic:4756, full:true”]
But to the other person would be considered Lucky, as they dropped said combo, or did something wrong.[/quote]

That’s not luck. That’s your opponent’s skill level effecting the match. If the player that fucked up is calling the other player lucky, that’s just him being salty. The other player is just capitalizing on the mistake of the player that messed up.

But that’s still luck, or Probability. There is still a chance that someone will mess up an input. No one is perfect, so that chance is there. :slight_smile:

So in other words, it’s not random or by chance because it’s two people making decisions, even if those decisions coincide to within close enough an interval of time as to make it impossible that one action directly motivated the other? I’m willing to admit a little bit of leniency for reading the player and whatnot, but the idea that comparing simultaneous-choice interactions to RNG is “pure fallacy” is the point at which you lose me.

Footsies is very much a probabilistic contest: predicting positioning, threatening space, baiting, counter-baiting, etc. There’s a reasonably well-known footsies handbook that details a whole lot of this stuff. It’s certainly not raw execution. Reactions, in particular whiff-punishing, often require you to make good decisions amidst uncertainty to place you in a situation where the opportunity for the reaction is accessible.

Many of the other things you mentioned fall under research and practice, and I’m not downplaying that aspect. These things bolster the list of pure strategies you have access to in a given situation, as well as maximizing their payoffs or minimizing losses. But you’re still generally playing a superposition of these strategies. Managing the risk-reward of deploying those strategies is still the core of what fighting games are about.

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There’s a huge difference if you only get one possible dash but you get 11 possible fireballs of various strength and utility.

Well, of course Omen’s fireballs are varied enough that the dud doesn’t serve him. The dud is designed so that Omen doesn’t always get 100% broken fireball patterns.

I’ve also never seen 3 duds thrown and Omen dying for it. Obviously it’s mathematically possible, but it happens so rarely as to be a total non-factor. Even if you throw 3 duds randomly, I bet you the defense won’t be ready to punish anyway. As a defender fighting against Omen, you have to assume that he’s going to get some meaningful pattern, and fireballs recover way too fast to react to duds being thrown.

That’s the main reason why duds aren’t really a problem. They don’t actually get Omen killed in practice. And if you try throwing a LP rashakuken and get a dud, well, that’s fine, because LP rashakuken recovers as fast as a sonic boom, so good luck doing anything about it as the defender.

Nah dude, I don’t believe it. This doesn’t happen in practice. Tripping gives the defense something like 2-3 full seconds (often at point blank range) to land an attack. A full dud set of HP rashakukens, as impossibly rare as it is, leaves Omen at mid screen as if he whiffed a fierce attack, about 40 frames. As a defender, you have no chance to see that all of them were duds AND start a punish in time to get over there.

If the character was designed around unpredictable movement, such that he could move full screen and be on top of you instantly in addition to not going anywhere with their dash, then yeah I could see it. Such a character would be much more frustrating to play than Omen, though. Where you position your character is of much more consequence in fighting games than which 10 of the 11 amazing fireball trajectories that all take up very similar space are given to you.

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No it’s not. If a person messes up an input, that is their fault. Luck leaves no one at fault.

In fighting games, you are making several decisions a second. Those decisions effect ones made much later in the match. I can play as Ryu and throw out a seemingly “random” dragon punch that tags a Dhalsim throwing out a cr.HP that he threw out within frames of my attack. That’s not luck, that’s me making decision based on the tendencies and decisions of the Dhalsim players.
RNG giving me a projectile that leaves me open to an attack another projectile would otherwise cancel IS luck. There’s nothing you can do to effect what projectile comes out.

“Decision” is the key word, and the one that removes it from the realm of luck. Everything in footsies is a result of a decision made by a player. If it were luck, then the player could not effect it.

I guess…

How about we say this, since we are talking about missed Inputs?

Omen just gets tired of throwing Rashakukens over and over. Being a bit drained due to him being in his own form instead of a host, he cannot keep throwing them perfectly with a consistent hand movement, because nobody is perfect, so he messes up just an inch, and a dud comes out.

(This would be great if this was the true explanation)


Is there also, in some measure, the possibility that your DP might’ve encountered empty space or a blocking opponent? Can you dstinguish between those possibilities before throwing out the DP?

Which factors into the expected outcome of throwing the projectile, and should in turn affect whether you decide to throw it. Managing that uncertainty is a skill.

I’m going to bed soon (Super Bowl is over), but the discussion has become more stimulating with recent posts. I appreciate that. It’s unfortunate that, regardless of whatever comes of it, that it can’t have any meaningful impact on the actual game.