Yeah. I love playing Kasumi more than anything, but sometimes I have to just stop because the only way to play her is to use online tactics. It literally takes 10 minutes or less of playing offline to see the difference. I love getting punished for the dumb stuff I do, as weird as that sounds. I only play online to mess around, because there's sadly nothing good you can learn from it. In a perfect world the netcode would be perfect and Kasumi's stuff would come out smooth, and I could actually outplay someone instead of just beating them out.
I don't think that she can only be played online properly by abusing the weird frame data there. As soon as you start to do such things although you know you shouldn't do that, you're only cheating yourself. I always hear people saying "I'm only messing around online, because I can't learn something there." Indeed, things like outplaying someone with frame advantage or punishing his hasty actions might not work and cannot be learned this way, however, playing with the right people online can still help you to learn what to do in which way and which situation and to improve basic things like guessing or reading the opponent.
When I go to play some matches against the AI offline, I also get beaten hard and mess up combos the first rounds because I need to accustom the frame data there,
but this does not change the way I play Kasumi in any way in terms of using which move when and how. That means, once I know that (e.g.) I'm at disadvantage after my 4PK got blocked, I won't try to mash out PPP after it immediate, neither online, nor offline. You can still see people doing it online, although they claim to know about how unsafe it is and the point that is worth a second thought is, that they do not realize that it is not good for themselves to do so. While playing on a 5-3 bar connection, you still can consider yourself to be in advantage after you blocked 4PK, and as soon as you realize that (after you tried throw punishment for example) your opponent is not respecting his disadvantage, you will retaliate with attacks instead. And I can tell you, on such a connection I mentioned above, my 6P will still land a counterhit if the opponent tries to mash after a blocked 4PK, which means I can still punish him for using unsafe stuff careless.
The sad part of this story is at first, that people who are using these online tactics get salty if the things I mentioned above ruin their game, and second, that yourself might get the habit to retaliate with attacks a lot, by what you may miss a lot of guaranteed damage in offline matches. Therefore, it is up to yourself to take care still trying to throw punish unsafe stuff.
90% of my time with DOA5, I've played online because I only have one friend around to play offline with at times. Nevertheless, I might be still able to assert that I still learned a lot about the game just for doing it there. I'm sure,
Tenryuga and
J.D.E might agree to that, because these guys taught me a lot and may have noticed any improvement on me (I really hope so =P).
Those who may be convinced that everything I wrote down here is dumb because I said I mostly play online and use online tactics too according to that may take a lock at some of my replays and tell me in which way I'm doing so. That does not mean I consider myself at a legit offline master, but I personally try not to lapse into using online tactics and I'm open for any kind of criticism in matters of that. A lot of people online and even around FSD are not or don't take it serious, unfortunately.
I agree with you guys that things might come out smoother offline (of course they do, in almost every game) and timing is different, but that does not mean there's nothing good to learn from it. In fact, learning combos with their online/offline differences is something you also can do in the training mode it's nothing you need to do online while playing other people. So the question is, why some people are playing online then? I highly doubt it's just to mess around, everyone wants to improve some MU experiences by playing online. Sometimes, it just looks like they don't want to get rid of their bad online habits.
Just to add my two cents.
@Allan Paris
Thanks for your opinion. So do you think this is something special in reference to Christie or may that happen while fighting any other character too? Since I actually never had such kind of a plain whiff with H+K in any other situations (only when the opponent SE in time, did a low hold or used a low sweep/crush) I was wondering first if this might be an "Christie only issue".
Not saying I would be worried so much about it, I'm just curious because it already looks like Kasumi would have quite a lot of hitbox problems with several moves.