“How can I get better at applying my training mode practice in a match?”
Hey Pat!
I’ve been playing fighting games for quite a while now, but only in the past 2 years have I really made an effort to deliberately improve at them. I play UMVC3, and I review VODs and practice basically everyday, but I seem to be having trouble applying answers to situations I come up with in actual games.
It’s not that I’m not willing to do this stuff. I literally have a sticky note to remind myself to make sure I apply the things I’ve learned. I just can’t seem to figure out when to expect it, which leads to me not executing my answer at the correct time. Even for seemingly common situations, I’m having a lot of trouble figuring out when to anticipate it. I even try looking at the situation that occurs before the one I want to work on but then 1 of 2 things happens: I either react at an incorrect time and I flub my execution, or the previous situation doesn’t occur and I have no other frame of reference for when the situation I want to work on will appear.
The only time my answers seem to work 1:1 is at round start because….it’s literally the first situation in the game. I feel lost a lot of the time even when I have only one situation I want to work on for the play session. I suppose my question is, how do I accurately translate my VOD review answers to real matches? There is definitely some sort of disconnect there.
Best Regards,
Labbed Out
Hey LO! This is a fantastic question that I think will be helpful for many others. It can be hard to maintain discipline and consistency with labbing, especially if you rarely feel like your work is bearing fruit, so thanks for giving me an excuse to write about this topic.
For starters: Not all games are equally labbable, and different games reward labbing in different ways. Capcom vs. SNK 2 rewards you primarily for grinding execution for combos of all kinds (even ‘easy’ combos are kinda hard) as well as for advanced tools like roll cancels, Parry, and Just Defend; Guilty Gear Xrd heavily emphasizes practicing defensive options against your opponents’ strings; Melee adds a bunch of extra variables to the fighting game formula that make it much harder to lab situations (stage-specific, percentage-specific, directional influence, stale move proration, etc.) but grinding movement pays off big.
UMVC3 is a very complicated and dynamic game with a high execution ceiling, and most players will see their UMVC3 power grow consistently just by labbing their team’s combos and setups without ever having to touch specific situations. If you are better than your opponent at converting hits into kills, you can play the rest of the game like an absolute idiot and still win just fine.
So while picking specific situations and labbing them out is still valuable, there is so much in this game going on — character matchups, team matchups, assist selection, resource management — that it can often be hard to figure out which situations are common enough and deep enough to merit labbing. Sometimes it’s a team that fucks you up (hello, MorriDoom), or maybe a specific player.
I don’t know what team you play or who you play against, so I can’t get specific here, but I’d recommend focusing your VOD review on the most common situations — round start, incoming mixups, fullscreen neutral with both assists, post-combo setups, mixups out of blockstrings, etc. — instead of picking something to work on that doesn’t come up reliably enough for you to try it in a real match. (And if you’re not seeing any particular patterns, then maybe just work on improving your offense.)
As you get better at working through more common situations, you’ll also get better at understanding what kinds of situations lead to uncommon situations, which will make it easier for you to see them coming during a match and use your labbed answers. (You can read more about using your games, especially your losses, as a search strategy for figuring out which situations would benefit the most from labbing in “How do I use Training Mode?”)
Thank you for answering!
I play Wolvie Doom Vergil and I frequently play against Magneto’s, Nova’s, and some Vergil point teams. I think the problem I’ve been having that I am only now realizing is that I always lab the situations that occur after I lose/don’t gain an advantage on round start, which are usually disadvantageous situations especially vs characters like Magneto.
It’s good to know what to do in those situations, don’t get me wrong, but Wolverine’s biggest advantage is at the round start and I should probably be the most familiar with those situations vs. common characters. I have studied some of those situations but I eventually gravitate towards studying the disadvantageous situations after round start. Usually those disadvantageous situations are when I am half screen or more away from my opponent. A lot of the times though, the conclusion I come to is that I shouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.
I’m starting to realize that I probably had a fixed idea on what “neutral” is because UMVC3 isn’t my first fighting game. In every previous fighting game I’ve played, I couldn’t just go up to people’s faces before the match even began. I think I was actually refusing to accept that Wolvie’s round start will dictate the next 3 or more situations and only thought about what to do at a half screen distance most of the time. I have gotten comments from people who watch/play me saying that I’m good at being patient and evading my opponent’s stuff but I don’t seem to see when I have a clear advantage (my opponent whiffed assist, got hit by my beam, used up all their flight options, etc) because I don’t go in at those times with a character who has very good aggression.
The root cause of this might be because I mainly study the disadvantageous situations and then I get too comfortable being there so I always return to being at half screen even if its not good risk reward for me if that makes sense. Anyways, all of this is a long winded way of saying, you are right that I need to focus on the most common situations and the situations I know better than my opponent; which in this case, would be round start since that’s where Wolvie is the scariest. Thank you for the insight!
Fantastic!
It’s great when labbing a situation uncovers some new tech or insight that makes it easier, but frankly, learning to recognize
“I shouldn’t be in this situation in the first place”
is one of the best things you can learn in the lab.
If you are in a situation that is so difficult for you to win that you need to recreate it in training mode and explore it at your own pace, you probably made a couple decisions that dug you in that hole. It doesn’t take much to put someone in a bad spot in Marvel, but at the very least you probably got your ankles broken in neutral or failed to punish an assist or dropped a combo or something. So you may very well just be served by getting better at doing that stuff so you can put your opponents in bad spots more often than they do it to you.
With regards to the specifics: Wolvie Doom Vergil is pretty all-in on the first couple exchanges because he’s gonna have a hard time chasing down a good Magneto or Nova, and you’re going to have to make every opportunity to attack count. I don’t know who’s using that team now, but from what I remember of seeing PR Rog playing it, he often bet heavily on snowballing early. You may have a hard time contesting their aerial movement, so you want to make sure that when they do come down from the air they’ll have to hold some mix with your Doom beam and Berserker Slash. There are times where you have to be patient with Wolverine, but you really have to recognize the times where you have to pounce.
Also, you might want to consider switching to Doom missiles to deal with point characters with high air mobility. Beam is great for controlling the ground, but if they’re not going to be there much, it won’t be as useful to you. I play Zero/Doom/Vergil and against good Magnetos I’d often pick missiles just to make their life a little harder there. You do have to relearn a bunch of different conversions though.
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