For the longest time, I used to wonder why pro Street Fighter IV players would bash online play so much. It seemed like every single one of them would complain about how the game doesn’t play the same online as it does locally. As an amateur player who had spent the majority of Street Fighter IV time online, I thought it worked fine. Sure, there were instances where the game would clearly slow to a crawl, but I thought that I could play this game online the same way I would locally.
However, I’ve gotten a lot better in the last few months, and I’m really starting to see what many of the pro players were complaining about. As I’m learning new techniques, combos and tactics, I’m finding more and more that they don’t consistently work online, even with a great connection.
The difference between playing the game locally vs. online is lag. Even under the fastest connections, lag is at play. What I was always focusing on was the lag you could see on the screen. For the most part, Street Fighter IV’s net-code has done a good job of minimizing that under yellow to green connections. However, input lag is the silent killer of the online experience. Even under the best connections, you’ll never know whether or not your inputs will register properly (if at all). There will be times when I mean to do a special move and a normal move will come out because some of my inputs got lost along the way.The way my play-style worked early on, this usually just meant I whiffed a fireball now and then.
However, more advanced tactics require more strict timing. Under the current online structure, these tough-to-execute tactics and combos really fall by the wayside. I’ve been incorporating more links into my play-style, which often requires players to hit a sequence of buttons within 1/60th of a second. Playing locally, I’ve gotten a lot better at consistently linking together moves with tight timing. Trying to use these links online is a whole other story. Even when I input what feels like the exact same sequence that worked locally, it oftentimes doesn’t work online, due to inputs getting lost or delayed along the way. Dropping a link can often cost you a match if your opponent is quick enough to counter, even if you have a large life lead. As much as I’d like to play the game ‘properly’, the net-code and Internet infrastructure of my country makes things difficult. Even with everything moving fine on the screen, the input delay can make it feel like you’re playing the game under water. It’s disheartening as a huge fan of the game to know that I can’t play the game the way it was meant to be played.
Making things worse are the players that exploit input lag. If you’ve ever fought a Ken player who did nothing but light uppercuts repeatedly, you’ve fought someone exploiting the game’s online flaws. Due to the nature of the move and the way the game interprets inputs under an online filter, that move becomes way more powerful than it should be. It frustrates me to no end that I run into people who abuse these gimmicks to no end and think that they’re good at the game because of it. There are ways to beat gimmicky online tactics, but it requires you to stoop to their level and fight back with your own gimmicky online tactics, which won’t work the moment I play for real with a local opponent.
I still love playing this game will continue to do so regularly. Having the option available at all is better than nothing, and it sure works better than online fighting games of the distant and not so distant past. However, it sucks to know that the better I get at this game, the more my main form of play falls apart. I won’t hold my breath for a better online experience, due to the fact that such a fix would require not only a game update, but an update of the world’s Internet infrastructure. I’ll continue to enjoy it for what it is and try and get more local games elsewhere, either through meet-ups with friends or maybe more tournaments.
In Third Person 