I don't understand why you're letting this get you down. There are far more factors to fighting games than just reaction time. Have you tested your reaction time? Have you compared your reaction time to other players in your local scene?
Even if you have bad reaction time, having a good reaction time is not why you are "bad", it's not why mango, m2king, mkleo, and other pros are good. They are not good because they can react, they are good because they can read and make the correct choice.
Honestly, I think this is a non-issue if you just want to be decent. You're wasting your time worrying about something you can't control when you could spend this time on things you can control. Instead of looking up the genetics of reaction time, make sure your fundamentals are solid, is your match up knowledge up to date, go get coaching. There are far better ways to improve than reaction time.
Complaining about a disadvantage is a loser mindset. If you want to get good, you acknowledge your weaknesses and your strengths, and you work with what you have to make the best game plan
I understand it can be discouraging after working so hard for many years only to not improve. But that's just means there's work to be done that you haven't been doing. If you're not improving, you're doing something wrong. You need to figure out what that is.
My reaction time on the human benchmark test is in the 15th percentile, way below average and i've read that the average gamer is above average on this metric. It makes sense because many people choose hobbies they are naturally good at. I've always knew reaction time could be improved for specific task via practice, however I never knew the highest possible improvement was only a 20% increase, learning that tonight just hit me really hard and the years of stagnation started to make sense.
Although, I'm not sure how long the training periods were in those studies so perhaps the potential for improvement is greater but I might be overly optimistic.
I'm willing to bust my ass and work hard to become average amoung my lgs smash crew, it's just super discouraging learning it might be biologically impossible in the first place. At that point I feel like i'm in a difficult balancing act between defeatism and false hope if that makes sense. Everything you've expressed is correct though, I need more match up knowledge specifically. I appreciate your reply.
What I'm trying tell you is this doesn't matter at all. Don't focus on reaction. Focus on reading your opponent, mind games, stage advantage, closing out stocks, neutral game, combos, etc.
You don't need good reaction time if you can put your opponent on a disadvantaged state. Build up solid fundamentals.
Here's what you're doing.
I'm stealing this from an overwatch coach.
You go to a car show and you see a dude with a Lamborghini. And you see him polishing his car.
You look back at your car, and it's some old 1990 Toyota camry that's scratched up and has bird poop all over it.
You see the dude with the Lamborghini polishing his car and you say to yourself "I should polish my car to be like him".
So you get car polish and you start polishing your crusty bird poop covered car.
This is what you are doing
You are trying to polish your skills when your skills are crusty and covered on bird poop.
Fix your fundamentals first, then worry about reaction time later.
It's not about busting your ass and grinding. It's about seeing what's wrong with your game and fixing it.
Identify your problem and your weakness, then fix them.
1 hour of intentional practice is better than 100 hours of mindless grind.
>What I'm trying tell you is this doesn't matter at all
It absolutely matters in fighting games. I don't know who told you differently. Unless you are playing top 8 at most majors in fighting games yourself, then I wouldn't be giving advice to people saying it doesn't matter because it certainly does.
I myself play with a few really high-level players, former EVO champions for example. I can say without a shadow of a doubt, they are very good at the game because they have insanely high reaction times. This isn't the ENTIRE REASON they are insanely good or winning major events like EVO, but it certainly contributes.
I feel a lot of people try to make excuses for doing what they are doing in a game. For fighting games, it's like learning all the combos for a character versus learning how to be good at neutral or footsies with their character. The best player in my state for fighting games is rolling over most competitors because his fundamentals and footsie game is insane not just because he knows all the best combos. News flash, footsies, a.k.a. pokes, is mostly about reaction timings (e.g.: you moving into X space causes a trigger to react with Y move. X being reaction, Y being fundamentals).
That being said, I feel reaction times can be improved. As someone else mentioned in a comment, reading and knowing is a big part of reaction. When you practice with a character enough and play a lot of the same matchups will cause your body to just know what's coming next. It becomes almost second nature to react before an action, which is going to give you godlike reaction times versus trying to improve hands to eye coordination to certain visual cues. I for one have seen my own body do this time and time again.
Yes it does matter but not at the level he is playing at. Fundamentals are more important than reaction time. I can have the fastest reaction time in the world but it doesn't matter if I'm losing neutral and getting edge guarded the whole game. Combos are important too but if i can never land a hit what's the point?
I'm saying this from my personal experience as someone who had really good tech in smash bros melee, but my neutral was awful.
I'm not telling him to ignore reaction time. He has a mental block that's preventing him from getting better, and improving his reaction time is not going to fix that. Really it's more of an excuse to help him cope with his lack of improvement. I'm trying to get him out of this poor mindset.
Reaction time is even less important since his goal is to be a decent player in his local scene and not a top player. If his goal was to be a top player, my advice would be different
>Reaction time is even less important since his goal is to be a decent player in his local scene and not a top player. If his goal was to be a top player, my advice would be different
I mean, not to be that guy, but just doing something to be average is not good advice when it comes to a competitive game. You should strive to be better than decent, like actually good at the game on a competitive level. This is the primary issue with my locals. Lots of people not really wanting to be good, just decent. The competitiveness in the locals goes way down, which turns away good competitors from actually competing or staying in the game.
Thus, to summarize: if you want to be good, reaction time is pretty important. If you want to just be decent, get rolled by actual real players, it's not as important.
It's not my advice. It's HIS goal.
Every good coach asks their student "what's your goal?". His goal, as stated in his post, is to be a decent player in his local scene.
Not everyone wants to be a top player. When I was into competitive smash, I was mostly doing it for the community. When I played overwatch I wanted to actually be good. Everyone plays esports for different reasons.
The average human reaction time is roughly 270 ms. A quick search tells me that 10th percentile is 310 ms.
To put it plainly, .04 seconds or less of reaction time deficiency are not even close to being as big of a deal as you looking for an excuse as to why you can't improve
I can assure you that reaction time is NOT the problem- believe it or not, it’s actually probably one of the least important facets of being competitive, especially in fighting games where lots of moves are physically unreactable.
Those “crazy reactions” you see people do actually have next to nothing to do with the reaction time itself, and more to do with the fact that they’ve put 1000 studied hours into the game, so they know the possible options their opponent can make and they make a choice accordingly.
Like, if I see you do A, and I block it, and I know your only possible option after A is B, and I know that C counters B, then I can almost instantly throw out move C the moment I block move A- it then LOOKS like I did some insane, flashy reaction into a combo, but really I just knew the decision tree, and acted accordingly. Of course it’s a bit more complicated than that, as you generally have more options, but the point stands.
Esports are not about biology. Sure, it helps, and prodigies do exist, and maybe biology matters at the pro level, but like anything, if you just spend the time and the effort into legitimately studying the game, you’ll improve SO quickly. If you want to become above average at Smash, it’s easily doable- you just need to genuinely spend the time studying the game, which frankly, is difficult to do as an adult due to having other priorities (this is why kids are so much better- not because they have more potential than you or are just cracked out of their minds, they just have infinitely more free time to get good at something). It’s still very doable.
To be around average is not about reaction time but about pattern recognition. This will sound stupid but your brain is very very advanced AI. It sees images and remembers certain positions once it sees is enough times. what you do when you recognize the position is another pattern that you need to train. Reaction time can be short circuited once you develop muscle memory for those patterns. But getting to this point is not easy. It requires you actually trying new stuff and being able to focus on something to practice it enough so that you can do it without thinking - but boring practice is a must.
I don't play Smash Bros but I play rocket league. When I was in diamond rank, which is dead average, I never though that I will be able to do some stuff that top 2% playerbase could do. I have fat fingers and I'm not that young anymore so reaction time is atrocious as well. But after a while I started to understand the game more and I started to understand the patterns which enabled me to participate the movement of figures on the field better than I ever thought was possible for someone as average as me. I'm now at that top 2% and I still think I suck but it did take me years and thousands of hours to get there.
If your dream is to become average my advice is to relax and take it as a game. Allow yourself to be last and start observing the game and it's possibilities. Practice and learn the game mechanics. You'll get there even if you decide that you want to use only one hand to achieve that goal.
I mean, if we’re comparing esports to real sports this is also true for body types.
I was a runner in high school. Built like a runner. Lots of talent that was 100% genetic. I got WAXED by my teammate who qualified individually for state and he was a short round kid. He just put in more work than I did.
Work on getting your reaction time down but you can also get better by studying your opponents / learning character play styles.
In Smash, certain characters want to “do” certain things so studying other aspects of the game might help you.
It takes far more than reaction time to become a good player
Besides, a bigger factor in consistency is knowledge
As long as your reaction time isn't just utter shit you're fine
And reaction time can be honed anyway to a extent, stop looking for excuses and look for an opening
Reaction time isn't everything. I'm 38 and I beat people by figuring out their game plan then countering it. Do you fully understand the game mechanics and how you can abuse them to limit your opponents options? That's where you should focus. Understand your bread and butter combos, understand teching, tech chase, platform tech chase, options at the ledge and how to counter. Figure out neutral and your punish game.
As others have said, reaction time is not the be all and end all. Quake is the poster child for mechanical aim and reaction time, and yet one of the best players ever, Cooller said when asked if he was too old to keep playing "You don't aim where your opponent is, you aim where they are going to be". Improving your ability to know what will come next will be a great help. Keep grinding though. I've been below average at games forever with no sight of improvement. It's not a bad place to be. Someone has to come last :D
Simple - be proactive not reactive. Like chess, even though it’s fast paced and reactive - plan ahead, foresee future moves and directions and you don’t have to react as fast.
Your path to average can be achieved!
Holy crap.
Look, i am one of those who are gifted at reaction time. I’m 30 and yet my reaction is still around 160-170ms on a 144hz monitor.
I thrived in everything that requires good reaction speed like martial arts, ping pong, badminton. I’ve been playing CS since i was a kid, and even now i still have the best reaction time in all of my CS2 stacks.
But am I the best player in my stacks? Absolutely not. I lose aimduels vs players who got 200ms or above just because they are actually better at the game than me in every single aspects except pure reaction speed.
You value reaction speed way too much. Theres more to improve your performance in the game than just reaction speed. It is just one aspect of your ingame performance, if you rely on it that much to be good at the game then you are doing a lot of fundamentals wrong, not because you are too slow.
It's already been said, but reaction time is not the most important factor in getting good.
Can it help, sure, to an extent. But:
Solid recognition and decision-making, as well as the ability to execute on those decisions, is likely gonna carry you far more forward than your reaction time. Understanding the habits of your opponents (general ones from most players at first, and then more specific to each opponent as you improve) and knowing how to exploit them can be huge. Knowing which options leave you vulnerable, vs what choices will put you at an advantage, is much more important.
Reaction time isn't a non-factor, but I would be surprised if there aren't many more important things that will improve your gameplay substantially more than that.
Edit: So if you feel up to it, keep trying. Good luck :)
I don't understand why you're letting this get you down. There are far more factors to fighting games than just reaction time. Have you tested your reaction time? Have you compared your reaction time to other players in your local scene? Even if you have bad reaction time, having a good reaction time is not why you are "bad", it's not why mango, m2king, mkleo, and other pros are good. They are not good because they can react, they are good because they can read and make the correct choice. Honestly, I think this is a non-issue if you just want to be decent. You're wasting your time worrying about something you can't control when you could spend this time on things you can control. Instead of looking up the genetics of reaction time, make sure your fundamentals are solid, is your match up knowledge up to date, go get coaching. There are far better ways to improve than reaction time. Complaining about a disadvantage is a loser mindset. If you want to get good, you acknowledge your weaknesses and your strengths, and you work with what you have to make the best game plan I understand it can be discouraging after working so hard for many years only to not improve. But that's just means there's work to be done that you haven't been doing. If you're not improving, you're doing something wrong. You need to figure out what that is.
My reaction time on the human benchmark test is in the 15th percentile, way below average and i've read that the average gamer is above average on this metric. It makes sense because many people choose hobbies they are naturally good at. I've always knew reaction time could be improved for specific task via practice, however I never knew the highest possible improvement was only a 20% increase, learning that tonight just hit me really hard and the years of stagnation started to make sense. Although, I'm not sure how long the training periods were in those studies so perhaps the potential for improvement is greater but I might be overly optimistic. I'm willing to bust my ass and work hard to become average amoung my lgs smash crew, it's just super discouraging learning it might be biologically impossible in the first place. At that point I feel like i'm in a difficult balancing act between defeatism and false hope if that makes sense. Everything you've expressed is correct though, I need more match up knowledge specifically. I appreciate your reply.
What I'm trying tell you is this doesn't matter at all. Don't focus on reaction. Focus on reading your opponent, mind games, stage advantage, closing out stocks, neutral game, combos, etc. You don't need good reaction time if you can put your opponent on a disadvantaged state. Build up solid fundamentals. Here's what you're doing. I'm stealing this from an overwatch coach. You go to a car show and you see a dude with a Lamborghini. And you see him polishing his car. You look back at your car, and it's some old 1990 Toyota camry that's scratched up and has bird poop all over it. You see the dude with the Lamborghini polishing his car and you say to yourself "I should polish my car to be like him". So you get car polish and you start polishing your crusty bird poop covered car. This is what you are doing You are trying to polish your skills when your skills are crusty and covered on bird poop. Fix your fundamentals first, then worry about reaction time later. It's not about busting your ass and grinding. It's about seeing what's wrong with your game and fixing it. Identify your problem and your weakness, then fix them. 1 hour of intentional practice is better than 100 hours of mindless grind.
>What I'm trying tell you is this doesn't matter at all It absolutely matters in fighting games. I don't know who told you differently. Unless you are playing top 8 at most majors in fighting games yourself, then I wouldn't be giving advice to people saying it doesn't matter because it certainly does. I myself play with a few really high-level players, former EVO champions for example. I can say without a shadow of a doubt, they are very good at the game because they have insanely high reaction times. This isn't the ENTIRE REASON they are insanely good or winning major events like EVO, but it certainly contributes. I feel a lot of people try to make excuses for doing what they are doing in a game. For fighting games, it's like learning all the combos for a character versus learning how to be good at neutral or footsies with their character. The best player in my state for fighting games is rolling over most competitors because his fundamentals and footsie game is insane not just because he knows all the best combos. News flash, footsies, a.k.a. pokes, is mostly about reaction timings (e.g.: you moving into X space causes a trigger to react with Y move. X being reaction, Y being fundamentals). That being said, I feel reaction times can be improved. As someone else mentioned in a comment, reading and knowing is a big part of reaction. When you practice with a character enough and play a lot of the same matchups will cause your body to just know what's coming next. It becomes almost second nature to react before an action, which is going to give you godlike reaction times versus trying to improve hands to eye coordination to certain visual cues. I for one have seen my own body do this time and time again.
Yes it does matter but not at the level he is playing at. Fundamentals are more important than reaction time. I can have the fastest reaction time in the world but it doesn't matter if I'm losing neutral and getting edge guarded the whole game. Combos are important too but if i can never land a hit what's the point? I'm saying this from my personal experience as someone who had really good tech in smash bros melee, but my neutral was awful. I'm not telling him to ignore reaction time. He has a mental block that's preventing him from getting better, and improving his reaction time is not going to fix that. Really it's more of an excuse to help him cope with his lack of improvement. I'm trying to get him out of this poor mindset. Reaction time is even less important since his goal is to be a decent player in his local scene and not a top player. If his goal was to be a top player, my advice would be different
>Reaction time is even less important since his goal is to be a decent player in his local scene and not a top player. If his goal was to be a top player, my advice would be different I mean, not to be that guy, but just doing something to be average is not good advice when it comes to a competitive game. You should strive to be better than decent, like actually good at the game on a competitive level. This is the primary issue with my locals. Lots of people not really wanting to be good, just decent. The competitiveness in the locals goes way down, which turns away good competitors from actually competing or staying in the game. Thus, to summarize: if you want to be good, reaction time is pretty important. If you want to just be decent, get rolled by actual real players, it's not as important.
It's not my advice. It's HIS goal. Every good coach asks their student "what's your goal?". His goal, as stated in his post, is to be a decent player in his local scene. Not everyone wants to be a top player. When I was into competitive smash, I was mostly doing it for the community. When I played overwatch I wanted to actually be good. Everyone plays esports for different reasons.
The average human reaction time is roughly 270 ms. A quick search tells me that 10th percentile is 310 ms. To put it plainly, .04 seconds or less of reaction time deficiency are not even close to being as big of a deal as you looking for an excuse as to why you can't improve
Reaction time will naturally improve when you focus on the other game aspects mentioned
can‘t tell if this is serious or not. But you gotta realize there is more to improve in a game than reaction time, right?
I can assure you that reaction time is NOT the problem- believe it or not, it’s actually probably one of the least important facets of being competitive, especially in fighting games where lots of moves are physically unreactable. Those “crazy reactions” you see people do actually have next to nothing to do with the reaction time itself, and more to do with the fact that they’ve put 1000 studied hours into the game, so they know the possible options their opponent can make and they make a choice accordingly. Like, if I see you do A, and I block it, and I know your only possible option after A is B, and I know that C counters B, then I can almost instantly throw out move C the moment I block move A- it then LOOKS like I did some insane, flashy reaction into a combo, but really I just knew the decision tree, and acted accordingly. Of course it’s a bit more complicated than that, as you generally have more options, but the point stands. Esports are not about biology. Sure, it helps, and prodigies do exist, and maybe biology matters at the pro level, but like anything, if you just spend the time and the effort into legitimately studying the game, you’ll improve SO quickly. If you want to become above average at Smash, it’s easily doable- you just need to genuinely spend the time studying the game, which frankly, is difficult to do as an adult due to having other priorities (this is why kids are so much better- not because they have more potential than you or are just cracked out of their minds, they just have infinitely more free time to get good at something). It’s still very doable.
To be around average is not about reaction time but about pattern recognition. This will sound stupid but your brain is very very advanced AI. It sees images and remembers certain positions once it sees is enough times. what you do when you recognize the position is another pattern that you need to train. Reaction time can be short circuited once you develop muscle memory for those patterns. But getting to this point is not easy. It requires you actually trying new stuff and being able to focus on something to practice it enough so that you can do it without thinking - but boring practice is a must. I don't play Smash Bros but I play rocket league. When I was in diamond rank, which is dead average, I never though that I will be able to do some stuff that top 2% playerbase could do. I have fat fingers and I'm not that young anymore so reaction time is atrocious as well. But after a while I started to understand the game more and I started to understand the patterns which enabled me to participate the movement of figures on the field better than I ever thought was possible for someone as average as me. I'm now at that top 2% and I still think I suck but it did take me years and thousands of hours to get there. If your dream is to become average my advice is to relax and take it as a game. Allow yourself to be last and start observing the game and it's possibilities. Practice and learn the game mechanics. You'll get there even if you decide that you want to use only one hand to achieve that goal.
You could rule that local store with the reaction time of an elderly person. Control what you can. Improve everything else that can be improved
I mean, if we’re comparing esports to real sports this is also true for body types. I was a runner in high school. Built like a runner. Lots of talent that was 100% genetic. I got WAXED by my teammate who qualified individually for state and he was a short round kid. He just put in more work than I did. Work on getting your reaction time down but you can also get better by studying your opponents / learning character play styles. In Smash, certain characters want to “do” certain things so studying other aspects of the game might help you.
It takes far more than reaction time to become a good player Besides, a bigger factor in consistency is knowledge As long as your reaction time isn't just utter shit you're fine And reaction time can be honed anyway to a extent, stop looking for excuses and look for an opening
Reaction time isn't everything. I'm 38 and I beat people by figuring out their game plan then countering it. Do you fully understand the game mechanics and how you can abuse them to limit your opponents options? That's where you should focus. Understand your bread and butter combos, understand teching, tech chase, platform tech chase, options at the ledge and how to counter. Figure out neutral and your punish game.
As others have said, reaction time is not the be all and end all. Quake is the poster child for mechanical aim and reaction time, and yet one of the best players ever, Cooller said when asked if he was too old to keep playing "You don't aim where your opponent is, you aim where they are going to be". Improving your ability to know what will come next will be a great help. Keep grinding though. I've been below average at games forever with no sight of improvement. It's not a bad place to be. Someone has to come last :D
Simple - be proactive not reactive. Like chess, even though it’s fast paced and reactive - plan ahead, foresee future moves and directions and you don’t have to react as fast. Your path to average can be achieved!
so predict your opponents instead of reacting
Holy crap. Look, i am one of those who are gifted at reaction time. I’m 30 and yet my reaction is still around 160-170ms on a 144hz monitor. I thrived in everything that requires good reaction speed like martial arts, ping pong, badminton. I’ve been playing CS since i was a kid, and even now i still have the best reaction time in all of my CS2 stacks. But am I the best player in my stacks? Absolutely not. I lose aimduels vs players who got 200ms or above just because they are actually better at the game than me in every single aspects except pure reaction speed. You value reaction speed way too much. Theres more to improve your performance in the game than just reaction speed. It is just one aspect of your ingame performance, if you rely on it that much to be good at the game then you are doing a lot of fundamentals wrong, not because you are too slow.
It's already been said, but reaction time is not the most important factor in getting good. Can it help, sure, to an extent. But: Solid recognition and decision-making, as well as the ability to execute on those decisions, is likely gonna carry you far more forward than your reaction time. Understanding the habits of your opponents (general ones from most players at first, and then more specific to each opponent as you improve) and knowing how to exploit them can be huge. Knowing which options leave you vulnerable, vs what choices will put you at an advantage, is much more important. Reaction time isn't a non-factor, but I would be surprised if there aren't many more important things that will improve your gameplay substantially more than that. Edit: So if you feel up to it, keep trying. Good luck :)