>The game can't reward risky play but also at the same time
>have unfavorable guessing situations where one wrong move will
>have you face serious consequences. That contradicts itself.

my opponent fishing for a crush counter or command grab on my wakeup is pretty risky and very rewarding if it works. if i guess wrong in that situation i'm screwed. if i guess correctly i can get a punish

>If you get hit with a jump in after AA'ing 4 times in a row,
>then you got outplayed plain and simple. It sucks and it can
>get frustrating, but you gotta be able to take the L and learn
>from it so it doesn't happen again. Don't put stock in the
>leagues, put stock in getting better as a player. Don't play
>to win, play to learn. The wins will come. You can't blame the
>game for having bad players. You can't expect everyone to play
>your game either.

i figured this out when i was picking up guilty gear last year. my goal in playing fighting games is to get better at them and to learn what i can from every matchup. winning is a byproduct of getting better (paraphrasing daigo)

i don't necessarily mind losing if i learned something in the match. the problem is that i don't always feel that i gained usable knowledge when i lose against someone who is playing weird or gimmicky or mashy. i didn't figure out something new about that character, just how that one person plays that character

>Everybody loses to gimmicks until they learn how to deal with
>them. It happens. You have to lose to them in order to counter
>them later on. At the end of the day, let them keep those
>little bullshit wins, because it's not gonna teach them how to
>be a better player.

i realize a lot of this is growing pains stuff and learning the animations and blockstrings of a few dozen characters takes time. it's exacerbated by the fact that i keep playing against ryu and akuma over and over. i know what those characters can do. give me a rashid (6 matches out of 1k+) or juri (~15 matches) so i can learn something new