What are these "tons" of defensive options you have in DOA, after being hit? You named 2; holding or slow escaping.

I see what you're saying, sir.

There is nothing difficult about guessing, and I do it better than most.

Guessing means you lost intelligent "control" of the situation. Guessing is stressful especially in competitive play. You can manipulate that guessing to an extent, but in the end a guess is a guess and you cannot force it to work in your favor.

Now take that same logic and apply it to the attacker. Why should the attacker ever feel like he has lost control of a situation when all he did was counter-hit his opponent? That's punishing a person for being successful.

On the other hand, there are a decent number of people who will get salty when they make a controlled mistake and refuse to accept the consequences of that action. When the DOA system offers constant backdoors out of that logical mistake, its basically telling the player they don't need to play too carefully, they can just guess and everything will be OK. It is the players with this exact mindset which prefer DOA -- they simply don't want to deal with the consequences of their decisions.

Well I play Bayman. All he can do is use holds efficiently.

So naturally, 99% of the match all I'm doing is guessing. I've guessed my way to tournament wins with this. It's proof it can and will happen against the best of the best, despite anyone from the pro-DOA 4 camp claiming it doesn't.

Guessing like that is flatout bad gameplay and there is absolutely no reason I should be able to do this.

Bill always would say that Luck was his greatest skill.

Hah, that's like him.

I think I feel where he's coming from, I feel kind of the same way. Even with more solid fighting games, I go for the characters that get big damage from high-risk guessing like astaroth. Kind of a crutch I've developed from so many years of playing bad fighters like DOA, and I've noticed most of the other "good" DOA players gravitating towards him as well. Old habits die hard....

And I don't mind it. When I'm playing unsolid with crazy high damage/guard damage potential, my opponent can play very solid and punish me while staying within a reasonable margin. It's my choice to play a character that way and it doesn't fuck with the rest of the game. That's how guessing SHOULD be implemented.

Trying to learn Mitsu though. He seems much more solid and less gamble crazy. I'll refocus my efforts post-patch.

In the meanwhile, DOA needs to make itself less bad so I can justify spending time on it.