Author: Patrick Miller

It’s no secret that Patrick Miller, a past contributor to Shoryuken, has been on the forefront of providing fighting game knowledge for newcomers and veterans. Hell, he dropped a whole book on the subject back in 2014. It’s really good, too.

Following up on previous subjects like general improvement strategies and learning from a loss, Pat recently shared a handful of tips for quickly learning to play Street Fighter V’s Laura. He’s graciously given us permission to republish it in full, so check it out below or in its original form on Medium.

When Street Fighter V came out, I decided I wanted to play the field a bit and learn the game from all angles before deciding on a main character — I don’t really care about trying to optimize for tournament performance, and I figure since we’re probably going to be playing SFV for several years, it’s worth getting a broad base of experience early on. So I started with F.A.N.G. the first week, Ryu for the second, and I picked up Laura for this last week, but this time, I decided to document my journey a bit better.

Keep in mind that this is by no means a comprehensive guide on being a Laura master. Think of this as a guide to help you get started learning her basics and giving you a foundation to work from.

How I learned Laura

First off: Analyzing replays in CFN is quite possibly the most powerful learning tool we’ve ever had in fighting games, so I highly recommend doing a lot of that! I streamed some sessions where I studied VRyu and AutoMattock (aka JiBbo)’s replays, and the VODs are embedded below. The AutoMattock one was especially cool because he actually stopped by the stream chat while we were going and helped out!

Of course, there are lots of good Laura guides out there currently. These are the ones I used:

The GLHFtv Laura Character Guide is a solid introduction to the character’s basics.

Dandy J’s Laura Mixup Starter Guide was super helpful for seeing some of the potential applications of her meaty fireball and crossup/crossunder mixups.

Bafael’s Laura BnB Guide is useful for learning some of her basic strings and interactions between moves, so once you feel comfortable enough with her moves to start working on combos, definitely check it out. There’s also a video version here.

AutoMattock is working on a Laura tutorial and has a few commentated match videos on his YouTube channel, so check it out and give him a follow. Also, you can find his CFN replays under player name AutoMattockMusic.

VRyu made a great Laura intro video as well.

And if you want to swap tips with other Laura players, ShowdownGG’s Carolyn (MamaDao) Dao started a Facebook group. It’s closed, though, so you’ll have to ask for permission to join.

You should play Laura if…

Laura feels very similar in play pattern and toolset to Makoto from Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike; her movement is fast and explosive, and she has some pretty powerful damage opportunities with her frame traps, throws, and high/low/left/right mixups, but she’s really only scary when she’s standing next to you with a frame advantage.

She has a lot of tools to get close, but they’re all situational and dangerous, so a smart Laura player will be patient with footsies, fireballs, and vigilant anti-airs while she waits for an opportunity to close the gap. You can play wild and reckless to get in, but good players will be looking for every opportunity to knock you down and put pressure on you — and Laura’s wakeup tools aren’t particularly good. So if you play her because you like the in-close shenanigans, know that you’re going to have to play patiently to get there. (Interestingly enough, this is the part of Laura’s design that I like because it really evokes the way great Brazilian Jiu Jitsu fighters win: Methodical, patient, gradual advantages, then a quick finish when the opportunity presents itself.)

As far as execution goes, she doesn’t appear to really be one of those characters that locks a lot of power behind difficult execution gates (she doesn’t even have any Dragon Punch inputs in her kit, which is nice). However, once you get past the basics, your damage output will require you to learn how to link her normals, especially off counter hits and crush counters.

8 Laura newbie tips

1. Be aggressive with her standing LP and LK; they both combo into her QCF+LP Bolt Charge, which gives her the frame advantage (+2) to continue pressuring if it hits, and is safe (with a slight disadvantage (-2) on block. Once you hit the QCF+LP Bolt Charge, you can go for a command grab (which can’t be teched but can be jumped out of), a regular grab (which can be teched and jumped out of, but you can recover from your whiffed grab in time to punish their jump with an anti-air), or more jab pressure to beat their counter-throw or poke attempt and combo into another LP Bolt Charge.

2. Laura’s V-Skill is probably the most interesting part about her kit. Use her dash to constantly change your range, and occasionally throw out the overhead to punish people who try to react to her dash somehow. You can use the dash to cancel her normals, meaning you can dash forward to catch people with a surprise grab, or dart out and bait a counter-poke. Also, if you hold the V-Skill buttons down after a dash, Laura will immediately go into the overhead, which is handy (V-Skill backwards into overhead can beat people trying to chase you down and poke). Also, her V-Trigger buffs her dash and her overhead, so don’t be afraid to activate it just to give yourself more opportunities to get in!

3. I know I’ve said this already, but be patient. Take your time counterpoking. Throw some fireballs out at midscreen just because. You can do a lot of damage in a very short amount of time, so get comfortable waiting for that time to come. And if you’re patient and they jump at you, you should be ready to anti-air with standing MP or her QCF+HP Bolt Charge and then you get momentum for free!

4. When you’re being pressured, be comfortable blocking for a while. Getting thrown three or four times isn’t the worst thing in the world. Be ready to counter-poke with standing LP at close range, standing LK a little bit further out, and standing MK a little further from that, but don’t get caught pressing buttons too much.

5. Get comfortable using her LK command grab after a connected QCF+LP Bolt Charge, a standing LK (on hit or block), and after her MP, MK target combo (on hit only), but don’t get too comfortable. Once they start jumping out, switch to your other pressure options for a little while. You’ll need to pay attention to which of your many damage options they’re most concerned about at all times, or else you won’t be able to convert her pressure into damage.

6. Her mixups are nice at midscreen, but she gets real scary once she puts you in the corner. Be careful about risking your screen position for crossups, as it’s usually more advantageous to slowly much them into the corner meat grinder. This means that you shouldn’t go for, say, meaty jump-in crossups after a knockdown unless it also puts them closer to the corner, and you should make sure you’re using the right P or K followup to her QCF+MP Bolt Charge (P makes you switch sides, K stays on the same side) to push them ever closer.

7. Use her fireballs. EX Fireball in particular is really good for covering pressure strings up close (cancel pokes into EX Fireball to stay all up in their grill), forcing them to block after a knockdown, and just letting you walk forward. One EX Fireball stays on the screen for like 3 seconds and goes for like a half screen, so even if they never get hit by it, you get a lot of screen space and pressure for one EX stock. Also, lots of people feel compelled to do something stupid when they see that fireball (like jump over it or DP through it) so be ready for that.

8. Her standing MP and crouching MP are great pokes that can lead to damage; I will cancel them into her fireball for pressure, or her QCF+LP Bolt Charge if I’m not sure whether the poke will hit, or her QCF+MP Bolt Charge if I know it’ll hit (say, hit confirming it off a jump-in or something). Her crouching MK is also very good; even though it feels a little slow, I consistently manage to catch people with the tip of its range, and then I cancel it into QCF+LP Bolt Charge to start the shenanigans.

That’s it for this post! Next up: Vega!

You can stay up to date with Patrick’s work by following him on Twitter, Twitch, YouTube, Tumblr, and Medium.

It’s no secret that Patrick Miller, a past contributor to Shoryuken, has been on the forefront of dropping fighting game knowledge for newcomers and veterans. Hell, he dropped a whole book on the subject back in 2014. It’s really good, too.

Following up on previous subjects like general improvement strategies and learning from a loss, Pat recently shared a handful of tips for teaching someone else how to play Street Fighter. He’s graciously given us permission to republish it in full, so check it out below or in its original form on Medium.

My five tips for learning how to learn Street Fighter seemed to go over well, so I thought I’d do a followup piece on learning how to teach Street Fighter.

Fighting games are hard to learn. Most things that are hard to learn have people who teach them — martial arts, music, math, whatever — but fighting games don’t have a whole lot of that. There is a lot of advice and knowledge sharing — “Don’t jump” or “Check out these bread and butter combos,” for example — but there isn’t a whole lot of straight-up teaching. When I wrote From Masher to Master, I wanted to create a textbook that people could work through with their friends for exactly that reason. (Plug: It’s a free download over here.)

This is understandable, because teaching is work, and it’s a different skillset than playing, and most of us aren’t any good at it, and besides, you probably got together with your buddy because you wanted to chill out and play some games, not spend time Explaining Stuff! But if you really want your buddy to get into fighting games and see what you see in them, stepping up your teaching game is probably the easiest way to do that. If you’ve been around in fighting games for a while, you know that it can take months to get semi-decent at a game — good enough to start having fun — but I think a lot of that is because we mostly force people to learn these games on their own.

I’ve been teaching my girlfriend Irene to play Street Fighter V, and I streamed one of our sessions; you can see the video below, if you like. I don’t really recommend watching the whole thing, because it’s two hours of us in Training Mode, but if you skip around a bit you can see some of the things I like to do when teaching someone.

So: Seven tips for teaching fighting games!

1. Take your time

Be prepared to spend an hour or more in a decent training session. It’ll probably take some time for your friend to translate your words into hand-motions, and it’ll take even more time to make sure it settles in and sticks in their brain after the session is over. When you explain a concept (Footsies 101) and give them a task (walk back and forth and try to hit me with c.MK), give it some time to breathe. Let the drill get a little bit old before switching to the next thing so you can make them feel like they’re ready to move on — “This lesson is going too slow, hurry up” is a better feeling for a student than “I can’t keep up with all the things you’re teaching, slow down.”

2. Simplify the game, then add layers

Imagine playing Chess when you don’t know what all the pieces do, and you have to learn what they do by watching your opponent crush you with them. You’re not really playing against the opponent in this scenario, you’re playing against the game. Well, that’s basically how fighting games work until you have a fundamental understanding of each matchup, and it’s not a whole lot of fun for new players — which is why your goal is to get your friend to the point where they know enough that it is fun.

Rather than tell your friend to learn every character’s moveset, I like to try playing simple competitive drills that reduce the game to a few moves, so they feel like they’re playing against you. After all, that’s the part that’s fun in fighting games, and if we learned anything from Divekick, it’s that you don’t need to have dozens of moves to make a fun fighting game! For example, I always start out every first-time training session with a few minutes of sweep-only sparring in a Ryu mirror match, where the only thing you can do is move left and right, block, and sweep. After a few minutes of that, I’ll add crouching medium kick, and then I’ll introduce the fireball and get them practicing that motion, and then eventually add jumping and Dragon Punches.

If you jump head-first into a fighting game, you’re going to feel like you’re drowning in the sheer volume of stuff you need to know. Your job as a teacher is to introduce that stuff at a much more reasonable pace and give your student the conceptual tools needed to understand why someone would want to use X move over Y in any given situation, so they can study this stuff themselves at their own pace.

3. Explain execution.

With a new player, you may have to explain how to do a move in more detail than “Do this.” I don’t teach a fireball motion by saying “Do a quarter-circle from down to forward on your stick,” I say “Hold the stick in the down position, then gently roll it to down-toward and toward, and hit the punch button as soon as you hear the toward switch click.”

Fighting game execution requires careful coordination between both hands! In that respect, it’s a lot like learning a musical instrument, and indeed, if people are playing on a stick, I often suggest that they think of a move or a combo as a series of notes that they need to reproduce. I’ll do the move myself, ask them to listen to it, and then let them try to recreate it. Also, make sure you take some time to explain how to hold a stick, and don’t let their hands fly off the stick when they’re done performing a move.

Once you get into more complicated executional tasks, you can start using stuff like “Chunking,” where you break a sequence down into individual parts, practice them, and then try to put them together. In that video above, I have Irene doing Chun-Li’s s.MP, c.MK xx MK lightning legs, and I had her practice the first part and the second part separately until she could hit those parts on both sides five times in a row without stopping.

4. Don’t practice one thing for too long.

Artwork c/o Jonathan Kim

I think it was PR Balrog who talked about the way he practiced things in Training Mode: He’d work on one thing for a little bit, then move on to something else, then go back to that first thing. I don’t really know why this works, but it does feel like your brain will get on stuck on something if you can’t do it quite right, and when you switch tasks and come back to it a little bit later, you’ll find that you can do it a little bit better.

So, try this out in your own Training Mode as well as your teaching time. Do a thing for a few minutes, then do another thing, then go back to review the first thing. You should find yourself improving at each task more quickly per minute of practice than if you just spent the whole time working on a single task, and you get to spend less time throwing yourself against a wall feeling like a failure (which is not a good feeling for a new player).

5. Make this a habit.

Just like any other hard-to-acquire skill, you won’t see godlike gains in a few cram sessions; getting good at fighting games requires habitual practice. So if you’re really trying to help your friend play fighting games, get together with your friend as consistently as possible, and when you’re not there, make sure they have a few things they can practice for a little while on their own. Give them Training Mode homework, even if it’s just reviewing stuff that you’ve worked on together. The only guaranteed way to get better at fighting games is by practicing and playing, so if you encourage them to put in some improvement-minded training mode time before playing some online games, you’ll get them to level up that much quicker (which means your teaching sessions can get to the fun stuff!).

Drilling stuff in Training Mode is one of those things that feels like a drag and a pain in the ass until you turn it into a habit, and eventually you can come to enjoy it and look forward to it. It’s rewarding to see yourself improve, after all, and you’re more likely to feel your improvement when you see your training mode homework getting easier every day than you will in online PvP.

6. Gradually escalate the intensity.

The best teachers I’ve had in martial arts use a three-stage process to teach a new skill. First, they teach the move slowly, explaining each part step-by-step, and they make you drill it against a compliant partner for about 10–15 minutes. Once you feel like you have the motions down, your partner starts to exert a little bit of resistance, starting at 20% effort and then maybe moving up to 60% or so. This is important because without that resistance, you don’t learn to develop the sense for how it actually feels to do the move against someone who knows what you’re trying to do, meaning the move would only be useful against untrained scrubs (and generally, we don’t practice martial arts to beat up untrained scrubs). After that, you move on to using the move in a friendly sparring session, to see how it can integrate into the rest of your toolset — maybe this move fits into this other series of moves you’re already comfortable with, for example.

I like to do this in fighting games, as well. If you’re teaching a Dragon Punch, phase 1 is “Practice this motion until you can do it five times on each side without messing up,” phase 2 is “Okay, now hit me with it while I jump at you over and over,” and phase 3 is “Now let’s add some sweeps and fireballs to the mix.” To put this another way, they don’t actually learn the move when they execute it, they learn the move when they can consistently perform it against a resisting opponent. And the best way to get there is to gradually add intensity.

7. Talk!

As anyone who’s ever done a martial art or watched Kung Fu Panda 3 knows, at some point, the only way you can level up yourself is by teaching other people. Teaching forces you to turn the things you know in your brain and hands into words. It’s really hard, but it’s kind of neat because it makes you realize that you might not know things as well as you thought you did — which gives you a list of things you can practice and improve for yourself. Also, once you get good at teaching, you may find that having to explain stuff actually makes things more simple for you, too.

However, none of that happens if you don’t talk to the person you’re trying to teach. I wouldn’t worry too much about whether you’re saying the right thing in the right way or not! Just talk about the game. Explain what you’re doing and why; explain what they’re not doing and why they should be doing something else. I don’t think you’re really playing a fighting game until you can understand what decisions you’re making, what decisions your opponent is making, and why both players are making those decisions, and the best way to develop that analytical skill is to talk about it. Without the why, these games aren’t nearly as fun.

You can stay up to date with Patrick’s work by following him on Twitter, Twitch, YouTube, Tumblr, and Medium.

It’s no secret that Patrick Miller, a past contributor to Shoryuken, has been on the forefront of dropping fighting game knowledge for newcomers and veterans. Hell, he dropped a whole book on the subject back in 2014. It’s really good, too.

Following up on previous subjects like general improvement strategies and learning from a loss, Pat recently shared five tips for new Street Fighter players. He’s graciously given us permission to republish it in full, so check it out below or in its original form on Medium.

Congratulations! You’ve been watching the tournament videos and following the hype for a while now, and with the release of Street Fighter V, you’ve decided to dive in head-first into one of the most intensely competitive game genres out there. You’ve got your brand-new fightstick sitting on your coffee table, you’ve got the official game guide pulled up on your phone, and you’re Ready to Go.

Relish this feeling of pure enthusiasm and anticipation — the feeling of being able to daydream about one day being the best — because it will fade as you lose over and over, and as it fades, so will your motivation. And learning how to work through it and keep it alive through countless losses has been one of the most important things I’ve learned from fighting games.

Through fighting games, I learned how to work hard and push myself past the point of “Man, I suck at this, this is no fun,” and I hope that you have a similarly impactful experience. And I want you to know that everyone goes through that I-suck-at-this-it’s-no-fun phase, and it’s the main thing that stops people from continuing to play and really get good. So, let’s talk about a few strategies for dealing with it.

1. Treat every match as a chance to learn.

You will play against people who are much better than you, people who have no idea what they’re doing, and every now and then a person who is just right at your level. Each of these are valuable — but you have to approach them with the right mindset, or else you’ll get bored or frustrated.

Think of the easy matches as a chance to experiment with new characters or strategies, or a chance to focus on a single aspect of your game — footsies, or anti-airs, or throw mixups, or blocking, or whatever. If you’re that much better than someone else, try winning by Time Out every round.

For the hard matches, don’t worry about winning, worry about surviving. Do your best to try your A-Game stuff — the parts of your game you feel the most confident in — and use the great players as a chance to identify holes in your game that you can patch later. If you can survive to Time Out against these guys — even if you lose — you’re probably doing okay.

And for the just-right matches, well, they’ll be the most fun anyway, so just enjoy them. They get harder and harder to find as time goes on.

2. Focus on improvement, not wins and losses.

Fighting games are complicated. There are hundreds of things you need to learn how to do, and simply not doing one of them well can be the reason you lost — even if you did all of the others just fine. This is one of the major reasons that fighting games can be super intimidating and frustrating for new players. “I think I’m getting better,” they cry, “but I keep on losing!”

It takes a while to get good enough to beat someone who knows what they’re doing, and in that while, you’ll be losing a whole bunch — even though you’re getting better. So, if you want to get good at fighting games, you’ll need to stick around through a lot of losses, and one way to make that less frustrating is to not focus on whether you’re winning or losing, but whether you’re learning how to do new things and successfully executing them in a game.

If you just learned a new combo, make your goal to hit that combo. If you’ve been practicing your footsies, make your goal to keep the fight in footsies range for more practice. If you’re trying a new character, then your goal is just to try to survive with them.

As you improve, you’ll win more. But the thing about fighting games is that winning shouldn’t be your end goal. Improvement is your goal; winning is a happy byproduct.

3. Treat this as a skill, not a game.

Artwork c/o Jonathan Kim

Street Fighter is a game, but it’s no fun until you’re kind of good at playing Street Fighter. Make no mistake: This is a skill you’re learning, so treat it like one. Practice regularly. Warm up your hands with a pre-game training mode ritual before sparring online. Study match footage, watch new tech videos for characters you don’t play, talk about the game with your friends. Learn to find this kind of stuff rewarding on its own, and it’ll make the rest of the game feel like more fun, too.

Fighting games are every bit as hard as learning a martial art or a musical instrument, and we pay people to teach us those in classes. We don’t really do that for fighting games (yet, anyway), but that’s the kind of work you should be prepared to put in to get the most out of it.

4. Champions don’t quit.

Consistency is more important than short-term intensity. There will be other fighting games besides Street Fighter V, and we’ll probably be playing this one for several years.

Short-term, playing a little bit every day is more important than getting in extended grinding sessions once a month. Make this a habit and you’ll get good with significantly less effort.

Long-term, learning to deal with the frustration and stay with it is the most powerful thing I’ve learned from fighting games. Don’t be fooled: True gains in your ability are realized over the course of months and years, not the first few weeks of a new game.

5. Learn how to learn.

Personally, I’ve never been good at learning a skillset if I don’t feel like I have a strong understanding of how the things I’m practicing day-to-day map towards long-term goals and the big-picture view of Getting Good at Fighting Games. It’s not enough for me to learn a new combo or setup; I need to learn why this combo or setup makes me a better player.

This is the kind of thing that a good teacher usually has; in fighting games, we have to be our own teachers. In order to make the most of our training time, we need to get good at breaking down these games not just in terms of frames and inputs but in terms of concepts like gameplans and footsies and controlling space.

This is the work that I really enjoy doing! So, if you feel like you’re running into a wall and you don’t really know how to get better, I recommend checking out some of these things that I’ve made. They’re not specific to SFV, so no matter what fighting game you’re into, you can get something useful out of it:

• From Masher to Master is a free guide to fighting game fundamentals.
• “Leveling up your fighting game mentality” is a video on getting yourself into the right frame of mind to learn a fighting game without getting frustrated.
• “Why you lose in fighting games” is a video/essay combo that will help you learn why you lost a game.
• “Developing a fighting game gameplan” is a video/essay combo that talks about how to make the right decision in-game by planning for it beforehand.
• “Why I play fighting games: Leveling up IRL” is a video that will help motivate you to keep playing when you feel beaten down.

Thanks for reading, and good luck!

You can stay up to date with Patrick’s work by following him on Twitter, Tumblr, and Medium.

It’s no secret that Patrick Miller, a past contributor to Shoryuken, has been on the forefront of dropping fighting game knowledge for newcomers and veterans. Hell, he dropped a whole book on the subject back in 2014. It’s really good, too.

Following up on previous subjects like general improvement strategies and learning from a loss, Pat recently shared five tips for new Street Fighter players. He’s graciously given us permission to republish it in full, so check it out below or in its original form on Medium.

Congratulations! You’ve been watching the tournament videos and following the hype for a while now, and with the release of Street Fighter V, you’ve decided to dive in head-first into one of the most intensely competitive game genres out there. You’ve got your brand-new fightstick sitting on your coffee table, you’ve got the official game guide pulled up on your phone, and you’re Ready to Go.

Relish this feeling of pure enthusiasm and anticipation — the feeling of being able to daydream about one day being the best — because it will fade as you lose over and over, and as it fades, so will your motivation. And learning how to work through it and keep it alive through countless losses has been one of the most important things I’ve learned from fighting games.

Through fighting games, I learned how to work hard and push myself past the point of “Man, I suck at this, this is no fun,” and I hope that you have a similarly impactful experience. And I want you to know that everyone goes through that I-suck-at-this-it’s-no-fun phase, and it’s the main thing that stops people from continuing to play and really get good. So, let’s talk about a few strategies for dealing with it.

1. Treat every match as a chance to learn.

You will play against people who are much better than you, people who have no idea what they’re doing, and every now and then a person who is just right at your level. Each of these are valuable — but you have to approach them with the right mindset, or else you’ll get bored or frustrated.

Think of the easy matches as a chance to experiment with new characters or strategies, or a chance to focus on a single aspect of your game — footsies, or anti-airs, or throw mixups, or blocking, or whatever. If you’re that much better than someone else, try winning by Time Out every round.

For the hard matches, don’t worry about winning, worry about surviving. Do your best to try your A-Game stuff — the parts of your game you feel the most confident in — and use the great players as a chance to identify holes in your game that you can patch later. If you can survive to Time Out against these guys — even if you lose — you’re probably doing okay.

And for the just-right matches, well, they’ll be the most fun anyway, so just enjoy them. They get harder and harder to find as time goes on.

2. Focus on improvement, not wins and losses.

Fighting games are complicated. There are hundreds of things you need to learn how to do, and simply not doing one of them well can be the reason you lost — even if you did all of the others just fine. This is one of the major reasons that fighting games can be super intimidating and frustrating for new players. “I think I’m getting better,” they cry, “but I keep on losing!”

It takes a while to get good enough to beat someone who knows what they’re doing, and in that while, you’ll be losing a whole bunch — even though you’re getting better. So, if you want to get good at fighting games, you’ll need to stick around through a lot of losses, and one way to make that less frustrating is to not focus on whether you’re winning or losing, but whether you’re learning how to do new things and successfully executing them in a game.

If you just learned a new combo, make your goal to hit that combo. If you’ve been practicing your footsies, make your goal to keep the fight in footsies range for more practice. If you’re trying a new character, then your goal is just to try to survive with them.

As you improve, you’ll win more. But the thing about fighting games is that winning shouldn’t be your end goal. Improvement is your goal; winning is a happy byproduct.

3. Treat this as a skill, not a game.

Artwork c/o Jonathan Kim

Street Fighter is a game, but it’s no fun until you’re kind of good at playing Street Fighter. Make no mistake: This is a skill you’re learning, so treat it like one. Practice regularly. Warm up your hands with a pre-game training mode ritual before sparring online. Study match footage, watch new tech videos for characters you don’t play, talk about the game with your friends. Learn to find this kind of stuff rewarding on its own, and it’ll make the rest of the game feel like more fun, too.

Fighting games are every bit as hard as learning a martial art or a musical instrument, and we pay people to teach us those in classes. We don’t really do that for fighting games (yet, anyway), but that’s the kind of work you should be prepared to put in to get the most out of it.

4. Champions don’t quit.

Consistency is more important than short-term intensity. There will be other fighting games besides Street Fighter V, and we’ll probably be playing this one for several years.

Short-term, playing a little bit every day is more important than getting in extended grinding sessions once a month. Make this a habit and you’ll get good with significantly less effort.

Long-term, learning to deal with the frustration and stay with it is the most powerful thing I’ve learned from fighting games. Don’t be fooled: True gains in your ability are realized over the course of months and years, not the first few weeks of a new game.

5. Learn how to learn.

Personally, I’ve never been good at learning a skillset if I don’t feel like I have a strong understanding of how the things I’m practicing day-to-day map towards long-term goals and the big-picture view of Getting Good at Fighting Games. It’s not enough for me to learn a new combo or setup; I need to learn why this combo or setup makes me a better player.

This is the kind of thing that a good teacher usually has; in fighting games, we have to be our own teachers. In order to make the most of our training time, we need to get good at breaking down these games not just in terms of frames and inputs but in terms of concepts like gameplans and footsies and controlling space.

This is the work that I really enjoy doing! So, if you feel like you’re running into a wall and you don’t really know how to get better, I recommend checking out some of these things that I’ve made. They’re not specific to SFV, so no matter what fighting game you’re into, you can get something useful out of it:

• From Masher to Master is a free guide to fighting game fundamentals.
• “Leveling up your fighting game mentality” is a video on getting yourself into the right frame of mind to learn a fighting game without getting frustrated.
• “Why you lose in fighting games” is a video/essay combo that will help you learn why you lost a game.
• “Developing a fighting game gameplan” is a video/essay combo that talks about how to make the right decision in-game by planning for it beforehand.
• “Why I play fighting games: Leveling up IRL” is a video that will help motivate you to keep playing when you feel beaten down.

Thanks for reading, and good luck!

You can stay up to date with Patrick’s work by following him on Twitter, Tumblr, and Medium.

Editor’s note: This article was originally posted on Patrick Miller’s personal blog, but he has graciously given us permission to repost it here on Shoryuken. It’s an informative, funny read, so if you want to see more of this column in the future, let him know!

First off, I play Ryu and that means I can read minds, so I figured I’d take a shot at writing an advice column. Today’s topic is: how do you start a scene? I don’t really have to worry about this because I mostly just travel around fighting the world’s strongest nerds, but sometimes I stop over in some boring town somewhere and I’m disappointed when I can’t find anyone who is willing to let me sleep on their couch in exchange for a few hours of Super Turbo Ryu mirrors. So, here is some advice for future Ryu players/Evo champs living in Scrubsville.

Step 1: Are you SURE YOU CAN?

Every fighting game local community origin story starts with something like a group of people meeting each other in an arcade somewhere and forming fast friendships in the heart of battle. This still happens, except arcades are dead, so it’s kind of unlikely.

Fortunately, fighting games are bigger than ever, and we have a lot of excellent tools at our disposal to bring people together. Seriously, just check your local Craigslist for a whole bunch of awesome perverted stuff — if those people can find love on the Internet, you shouldn’t have any problem finding someone to play anime games with you. (Unless you play Arcana Heart.)

Before we get to the advice, though, I want to ask you a question: What are you fighting for?

If you want to build a scene for selfish reasons — you want to take people’s money, you want to get better at the games, or you want people you can beat up on — you probably won’t get anywhere. Being a community organizer means putting your players before yourself. There is a reason tournament organizers usually don’t win their own tournaments — all that time you spend trying to find players, organize events, line up casuals, travel to other cities, and level people up is time you’re not spending in training mode.

That isn’t to say you won’t find it rewarding — you’ll undoubtedly make lots of friends, learn new skills, and earn the respect and gratitude of your peers. But there is a reason why most top players aren’t scene-builders, and it’s because their first priority is winning, not building.

However, if you want to see other people find themselves in fighting games the same way you did — spreading the gospel of Ryu, of course — then you’ll do just fine! And as a side note, most of the work involved here is highly relevant to work in marketing and event production, so you’re not just having fun, you’re developing career skills that are way more likely to pay off than the time you spend playing video games.

Organizing for fighting games vs. organizing for your favorite game

If you live in a fighting game wasteland, starting up a scene for Guilty Gear might be tough, because the game is basically designed for people who have been around fighting games since they were conceived in a 7-11.

Fact is, Street Fighter and Smash have the broadest appeal and a relatively low barrier to entry, so you might want to start with those if you don’t feel like there is a lot of pre-existing interest in other stuff; on the other hand, maybe you’re a bunch of metal anime nerds who wear too many belts, in which case Guilty Gear might go over well and Street Fighter would be a tough sell. If there is an existing fighting game community in your area but no one playing your preferred games, then you have a better shot at finding converts who at least can understand the fundamentals without having to learn from complete newbie status.

In my experience, Street Fighter is for people who wish they had the balls to get into actual fighting, Smash is for people who never grew out of playing with dolls (sorry — action figures), anime games are for people who love women too perfect to be real, and Marvel is for people who don’t have jobs and are too broke to play poker for a living. Figure out which shallow stereotype most closely resembles your local community and start from there!

Step 2: Build your channels to create discoverability

The first step in building a fighting game community is figuring out how to make it so the other people who are already out there looking for one can find you. This is the “low-hanging fruit” — you won’t really need to sell people on coming out to play because that’s exactly what they’re looking for. Ideally, you want to be so easy to find that when I am hitchhiking and get dumped in your miserable hamlet, I can just Google “who is free in [name of miserable hamlet]” and the first ten pages are just your name.

At the very least, you’re going to need a Facebook group, some kind of Twitter presence, and maybe a Shoryuken thread in the relevant Regional Matchmaking board, just in case (if you can still remember your login, anyway). You should also look for Facebook groups for neighboring regions, because there will be invariably be some people who live on the outskirts of one local fighting game nexus and don’t want to drive two hours each way to get bodied.

You’re also going to need a place to play. Ideally, you can find a public community center or place of business to meet in, so people don’t feel weird about going to a stranger’s house and no one is at risk of getting their gear jacked; if no arcade, I’d recommend other centers of nerd combat, like LAN cafés, hobby stores, or restaurants and bars that you have an inside connection with (you’d be surprised how often this happens). Note that hosting at 21+ venues mean you won’t be able to get blown up by anyone younger than Super Turbo is — you decide whether that’s in the plus or minus column.

If you can find a business that benefits from having you and your new crew show up and play games every week or so, that’s great! Remember to be gracious guests: respect the space, don’t be jerks, don’t take their support for granted, and keep your players in line so the venue staff doesn’t have to. If not, find someone who is willing to host at their house, cover the beer money, and don’t do anything sketchy, because it’ll probably be documented and posted to r/Kappa.

The last thing you need is a stream. It doesn’t need to be fancy, because no one is actually going to watch it — but you’ll want to have someone who knows how to run a stream for when you start hosting locals, and it’s a good way to spread the word about your new scene. It’s also kind of fun and validating to play for an audience, and it makes events more entertaining.

Step 3: Recruit new players

Once you’ve scooped up all the existing local players, it’s time to reach out and find other new people to join your nerd gang.

Since I can read your mind, I know that you were about to think this: “Oh godlike Ryu player, why do I need new players? I just want to play with people who are already good—ow!”

That “ow” is from me interrupting your scrubby thought with a Dragon Punch. See, you need a wide range of skill levels to have a healthy local scene and keep people coming back for more.

I’d bet a wakeup DP that the number one barrier to entry to fighting games is “intimidatingly large skill gaps.” Fighting games typically don’t have internal progression systems in the same way that RPGs like Call of Duty or Battlefield do; your key performance indicator is “am I beating X players more often than they are beating me,” and early on that KPI definitely doesn’t look very good.

Some people will be driven to get good no matter what. Those people are awesome (and probably play Ryu). Everyone else is going to need a few incremental steps to godlikeness, and that is best served by having a wide range of sparring partners. You need people who are worse than you so you can experiment with new stuff in a low-pressure, low-ego setting; people who are better than you so you can tighten up the holes in your game; and people who are roughly your level so you can benchmark your progress against a peer.

In other words, you need a Dan, a Ken, and an Akuma; I’d say you can consider your community stable and self sustaining if most people can find other people that fit into those tiers relative to themselves, and if they can’t, you’ll need to do something about it or people will fade away and do other stuff. (This is probably a topic for a future column, though.)

And for the love of Ono, don’t turn away unskilled players. Not only does that make you a dick, it makes the rest of us look like dicks by association. Yes, there is some scrub at your home session who is hopelessly bad, talks too much, and doesn’t seem to be getting better. Guess what? You were once that scrub too, and people had the decency to put up with you until you got better, so shut it and just tell them to download a copy of my book.

So where can you find new fighting game players? Well, I’d recommend starting by combing through your local communities with interests orthogonal to fighting games: competitive games like Magic: the Gathering or League of Legends, general-interest video game conventions, and other areas of interest that run in parallel to fighting games (if there is a competitive scene devoted to not showering, I’d say that’s your best bet). Once you’ve exhausted the easy sources, look elsewhere. Reddit has lots of regional subreddits where nerds go — post there and see if anyone is interested in trying it out (the downside to this approach is that you then have Redditors in your house and they can be hard to get rid of).

Honestly though, I think the answer is actually “everywhere” — I found people looking to play Guilty Gear Xrd on an anonymous mobile messaging board called Secret which is mostly used for soliciting gay sex, for crying out loud. But the easiest place to find new recruits are probably among your existing players’ friends. A surprising amount of people play fighting games or are open to the idea of learning how to play them, but need a person willing to function as an ambassador to the game and the community (that’s you).

The difference is not in the activity itself, but the offer you’re extending. Consider that “Hey, you should come to a stranger’s house and play video games you are bad at” is less compelling an invitation to most people than “Hey, come meet some friendly nerds and learn how to play a game that is a lot of fun.” If you can, try reserving a dedicated setup for newbies to play each other and have more experienced people coaching and teaching. Man, that’d be a cool way to get new people into fighting games, instead of just throwing them to the wolves.

That was way longer than I intended! In any case, if you have more questions for me (fighting game-related or otherwise) feel free to ask me on Ask.fm or hit me up on Twitter. Enough people ask me questions that I think I’ll try and just make it a regular advice column thing.

Last week, someone asked me a question:

What percentage of wins do you think you should have against your ideal sparring/training partner in order to improve? Do you want someone at your exact level, someone better than you to beat out your bad habits, or someone worse in order to test things?

Great question! The answer is, of course, that there is no ideal training partner, for exactly the reasons stated in the question itself: you need different people so you can practice with different mindsets. If you don’t have a variety of training partners at different skill levels, you won’t be growing and improving as quickly as you should be. There’s a concept that shows up a lot in martial arts training called “gradual resistance” that I think is highly relevant to fighting games as well.

Experienced martial artists know that learning a new technique isn’t a one-time event, it’s a gradual process. You start by learning the basic series of movements that compose the technique or combination, and you practice that against a cooperative partner until you can do it without having to think about it step-by-step. Next, you get your partner to slowly escalate their involvement in the drill; at first they might just put a little bit more weight on you, then they might actively resist your technique at 40% effort, and so on. After that, you try the move out in live friendly sparring, and then eventually you feel comfortable enough to do it in a tournament. Only once you’ve executed your move against a resisting opponent in a competitive context can you really say you “know” the move.

In this picture, Ryu is going at approximately 70% intensity. (You can tell by all the shadows and energy aura visuals in the background.)

The idea here is essentially that when you’re learning new tech under gradually escalating levels of resistance, you’re learning different things about the tech. First, it’s just working out what you need to get your body to do, but eventually you’re learning how you might need to wait until your opponent’s weight is in just the right place, and the kind of speed and timing you’ll need to successfully catch someone with it, and then you’ll start recognizing common answers to your move and figuring out how to counter them. If you skip a step, you’ll have an incomplete understanding of the move, which means you’re not going to have as much success with it in live competition — and that means you probably won’t use it much, because you think it sucks.

The same applies for fighting game tech, whether it’s mastering a setup, or a combo, or the ideal spacing for a poke, or even a new character. Starting out, you learn how to do it in training mode, then you try it out against the CPU, and then against gradually better and better opponents until it becomes tech that you’re confident in using as part of your Real Game because you’ve vetted it against a range of players. If you bring a strategy straight from training mode to a set against your local top players, it’ll probably get exposed so badly that you’ll just think it’s junk and not use it again — but that’s not necessarily fair to the tech, because you haven’t spent the time trying it against other people to find the best possible version.

So when you’re playing against people you can beat for free, use that as an opportunity to try new stuff out. When you’re playing against people who blow you up, use that as an opportunity to get your A-game ripped apart so you know what you need to fix. And when you’re playing against your rival — the Ken to your Ryu — take the tech you’ve been working on for a little while and see what you need to do to get it into your A-game.

Of course, if you don’t have a variety of training partners to go up against, you’ll have to make do. Try introducing the concept of gradual escalation into your practice sessions by playing against each other in training mode for 30 minutes specifically to test your new tech before diving into Vs. Mode. And if you have other tips for experimenting against opponents at different skill levels, share ‘em in the comments!

Hope you enjoyed this week’s Lab Notes! As always, hit me up on Twitter @pattheflip with questions and feedback, and feel free to ask questions there or on my ask.fm.