Hey, I'm what I believe most would call a moderate player. Certainly on the lower end, but of the type one can't necessarily write off for a certain reason...
Simply put, the biggest problem I have with playing the adrenaline rush that is KOFXIII is that 90% of my gameplay revolves around the concept of "blinking". All round, every round, I'm evaluating whether or not my opponent is pressing a button of some sort, because if they are I firmly believe there should be one I can press that'll beat it, although I count blocking in order to punish DPs as being the same thing. This means my favorite place to be is at poke range, or varying long range fireball timings/spacings (Go-go XIII King! Air venom strikes are the best) I'm good at stuffing things with far
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or Tornado kicks, and know King's combos inside and out (my other chars are Flame Iori and Terry, whom I am less proficient with, although not quite dreadfully or equally so) but what all this means is that at the end of the day, I can make strong reads and blow up lower-level players, but my mental muscles are trained to do almost everything intuitively as opposed to consciously reacting to what I see (I rely on instinct more because my conscious reaction rate is simply below average) and as a result I tend to do things like randomly blow an EX rising tackle when both of us are holding down+back, even though my opponent didn't actually do anything (they were waiting for the other player to react, just like I was) and consistently lose to the stronger players (who are more patient by default.) What is known in my area simply as "the hold trick" is both my greatest weapon and my biggest weakness, as I tend to 50/50 when it comes to following up midscreen hits (I catch myself hopping at the opponent out of runs after resetting them more often than I'd like to)
Well, that's enough life story I guess. I'm guessing that the advice pros would have for a player like me would simply be to learn patience, but as you folks might guess I didn't make the effort of writing this post just to hear what I already know. What I do want to know is as follows:
What's a consistent way of training my eyes? Not my mind's eye, but my physical visual receptors. I can't help but suspect that my yomi (which I believe is already fairly strong) would be better off backed up by a set of muscles that didn't have to "guess" between getting thrown and eating a combo due to a baited reversal. When I commit to blocking, I feel any given opponent's chance of opening me up without a throw is reduced to 10%... but I can't react to the holes I see in my opponent's pressure, because by the time I realize I could beat that move with the reversal I didn't just throw out on wakeup it's too late to input it (and just barely so) because I'm back in blockstun. That's why I tend to get thrown, because the mindscrew from not being able to properly punish flawed pressure is such that I can't tech the throw (or worse, I'll eat command throws forever.) I don't think it's a matter of situation-specific things, just that the rush I get from simply playing the game makes me slow. Thus, again my basic question is: How do I train my reflexes to pick up the pace like the rest of me does?
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