Wow this was really interesting. As a semi-competitive player during the Tekken 3/TTT1 days one of the under appreciated parts of getting good at an international level is diversity of arcade "cultures".
What this means is that your arcade generally provides the same players again and again, and performing well against those players provides little guarantee against players in another arcade who've developed entirely different techniques and playing styles.
So you have to play, a lot, against a huge range of players. You can't really just play against your arcade's local players and get to a level that's competitive on even a regional level. I remember the first time I emerged, after a few months of heavy playing, into an arcade in a neighboring city, and getting crushed the first few matches.
I've since played TTT1 in arcades around the world and I've always found somebody who does something I've neve seen before.
That these guys can pull off winning, against ultracompetitive leaders in ultracompetitive hypermarkets like Japan or Korea is absolutely incredible.
It'd almost be like Pakistan fielding a Superbowl winning American Football team after only getting together enough guys for the offensive and defensive lines and only playing those lines against each other.
Well it works both ways though doesn’t it? The isolationist nature of Pakistan also means outside players have a hard time playing _them_ as well, and thus, something of a blind spot in their own skill set.
Granting your point that having more exposure is better than less, maybe the Pakistani players have just developed some really keen play styles that work really well against the unadapted.
This is exactly what it was. As more people have began to adapt to the Pakistan meta, they are not as dominant. It was just a new skilled style that no one outside of Pakistan was aware of.
You see similar things with Black players in the US. They are often isolated and hyper-competitive, and thus are over represented in the top tier based on population numbers.
Edit: Interesting. Why was this downvoted? Any competitive players here? I'm speaking from my own experience playing in US, South Korea, and Japan. Also, just take a look at the current rankings. For some reason, Tekken is huge in the Black American community.
Downvote all you'd like, but it doesn't change the facts: 3 of the top 6 professional Tekken players in the US are Black.
I made it to the round of 8 in Namco's TTT1 world tournament. This is all absolutely true - you must travel and play against the best to improve further once you reach a peak. And you have to play a ridiculous amount to keep your skills up. I recall playing with friends starting friday night after work at 5pm and not stopping until late Sunday afternoon, nearly 48 hours straight with no sleep! Dedication...
Seeing Arslan win EVO was such a great underdog story. His play style was different than most - not the most flash but incredibly strong fundamentals. He could have done well with any character.
For anyone not in the Tekken scene (the video explains better than I will) Pakistan came out of nowhere and took the world by storm. Usually, it was Korean and Japanese players that dominated, with a few Americans sprinkled here and there.
But little did we know, Pakistan was brewing up a new type of player that we had never seen before, and were completely defenseless against (regarding the meta at the time). Arslan was and is a force of nature. The funny part is that when he first began to get fame, he made it clear that he was in no way the best player in Pakistan.
Top level players in Japan and Korea now regularly fly out to Pakistan to practice.
I was a (semi-)competitive player two decades ago (Tekken 2, 3, TT) during the golden age of Tekken; for the uninitiated, the challenges are multiple layers:
1. The vocabulary of the game: there are two dozen or so characters, each with dozens of moves. Each move comes with its own attributes (e.g. hit points, latency). If you are anywhere near competitive, you need to memorize all of the moves and attributes, in the hundreds. Some of the detailed analyses count the latency in frames (60 game frames in a game second), and a few frames difference does make difference in match results.
2. The grammar of the game: the game boils down to predicting the opponents next move and the best to counter it. There is a path dependency in the game but it's weak i.e. what your opponent did ten moves ago may not affect your current decision aside from the current state of the game (hitpoints left, location on the stage). Weak path dependency means that you can model the game as a Markov process
P(opponent's next move| your character attributes, opponent's character attributes, opponent's style, game state)
If you are competent, the only unknown on the right side of the pipe is "opponent's style". Based on your observed probability of the opponents moves thus far in the game, his regional background (i.e. Japanese), etc, you are supposed to estimate opponent's style. The more accurate the estimate is, the better you can counter or parry his moves.
3. The meta game: Once you know the opponent's style and the opponent knows you (given everything else in the probability function above), what should you do? You need to choose a different character, so that the opponent has to learn your style again. Any learning comes with its sampling cost, and your goal is to deal maximum damage while the opponent is learning your style. In order to do so, you need to prevent any kind of shortcut in opponent's learning, e.g. transfer learning. Transfer learning is possible if your new character is similar to your first character. Thus, you need to master completely different characters. Another is to adopt a completely different fighting style for a given character, but this is easier said than done -- people are surprisingly predictable unless something (i.e. different character) forces them too.
Another aspect of meta game is the psychology. Players get stressed, nervous, shocked as humans do, and make sub-optimal decisions.
Overall, the game is fun but surprisingly complex and competitive. Of course, I wrote above can be applied to other games and 'games' (e.g. starcraft or trading). Knowing how difficult it is to compete on the international level, I am truly impressed by the Pakistani team.
That's like the exact opposite of rocket league. There's an ex rocket league pro who made a video series about climbing to the top of the rank ladder while using the bare minimum mechanics, letting his mind games carry him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhoplG8Cm_A&list=PLaVDH5Sevb...
I love the analysis quanto gave though in reality it may not be so predetermined. Some very skilled players are essentially character specialists, and while Arslan has mastered multiple characters, at least during the last Evo Japan even he stayed with one the entire time rather than strategically switch up. (But what do I know, I'm relatively new to the game and currently just an orange rank scrub slowing working up. 44274498 on steam for the off chance any HNers want to fight sometime.)
The arcade shown in the video is a lot fancier (those high seats) and cleaner (even with all those electric meters) than the ones I have been to around 20 years ago.
There were two small arcade shop in my village bazaar. Each with 6 machines. They were dark and small. I went there once as a kid and then was strictly told by my father to never go there again because 'bad people' go there. Found out lot later about the betting scene. Kids use to play tekken. Expert ones use to choose King and won money. My cousin got addicted to the betting scene and ran away from home because he owed lots of money to some other kids.
Anway, I got older and went to city and there me and another cousin use to go to arcades every once in a while. I was never good at tekken and was more interested in 'Dinosaurs and Cadillacs' and 'Ninja turtle' and 'Metal Slug'. I use to play tekken with him and use to choose Eddie or Yushimitsu or Gunjack. Yushimitsu was my favorite.
Arcade shops started going down when people got computers and later with DSL internet. There use to be (probably still are) CD shops were you could go and buy a pirated game CD for the price of a blank CD. Been playing games on PC since then.
Well now I work in gaming. It was good memory trip.
Thanks for sharing, of course. I think your story would have been even more relatable for some readers (definitely myself) if you had mentioned roughly what year, and which country or at least part of the world you grew up in. I have no idea if that is radical of me (doxxing etc), just wanted to mention it.
The local arcade in bazar has to be 90s to early 2000s. Then it was around 2010s when I noticed absence of arcade shops. And I am from Pakistan and have lived in Punjab (which is size of UK) for almost all my life in its different cities. Lahore is one of the largest cities.
A fun saying about Lahore is that "if you haven't seen Lahore, you are not even born yet" (original line is in Punjabi).
Wow, thank you for sharing. The complexity of my home country is astounding - this is all happening during an economic meltdown, that itself only a year after the largest cumulative period of venture capital raised by founders in the country.
A similar story took place with checkers in the mid 20th century. People discovered that Senegalese players, who played a similar but not identical game, had transferable skills and knowledge that allowed them to instantly compete with top professionals. One of them eventually won (or tied for) the World Championship: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baba_Sy
I think you’re fighting a losing battle here, mos-co will sound as wrong to an American as mos-cow sounds to us. I presume both US and UK both used “mos-co” originally, and the US broke away with the newer bovine pronunciation at some point. I’m curious why and when this happened though - maybe the advent of TV or Radio there were some prominent announcers who used that pronunciation and it stuck?
What puzzles me are the elongated “aw” some use in place names like Milan, Prague and Hamburg (“Milon”, “Prog”, “Homburg”) - because they’re not correct in either English or the local languages. I wonder if that came from the realisation that "France" uses that "aw" vowel sound in French, so the assumption is other European languages would be the same (i.e. it's a misguided attempt to be more correct)?
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What this means is that your arcade generally provides the same players again and again, and performing well against those players provides little guarantee against players in another arcade who've developed entirely different techniques and playing styles.
So you have to play, a lot, against a huge range of players. You can't really just play against your arcade's local players and get to a level that's competitive on even a regional level. I remember the first time I emerged, after a few months of heavy playing, into an arcade in a neighboring city, and getting crushed the first few matches.
I've since played TTT1 in arcades around the world and I've always found somebody who does something I've neve seen before.
That these guys can pull off winning, against ultracompetitive leaders in ultracompetitive hypermarkets like Japan or Korea is absolutely incredible.
It'd almost be like Pakistan fielding a Superbowl winning American Football team after only getting together enough guys for the offensive and defensive lines and only playing those lines against each other.
Granting your point that having more exposure is better than less, maybe the Pakistani players have just developed some really keen play styles that work really well against the unadapted.
You see similar things with Black players in the US. They are often isolated and hyper-competitive, and thus are over represented in the top tier based on population numbers.
Edit: Interesting. Why was this downvoted? Any competitive players here? I'm speaking from my own experience playing in US, South Korea, and Japan. Also, just take a look at the current rankings. For some reason, Tekken is huge in the Black American community.
Downvote all you'd like, but it doesn't change the facts: 3 of the top 6 professional Tekken players in the US are Black.
Seeing Arslan win EVO was such a great underdog story. His play style was different than most - not the most flash but incredibly strong fundamentals. He could have done well with any character.
But little did we know, Pakistan was brewing up a new type of player that we had never seen before, and were completely defenseless against (regarding the meta at the time). Arslan was and is a force of nature. The funny part is that when he first began to get fame, he made it clear that he was in no way the best player in Pakistan.
Top level players in Japan and Korea now regularly fly out to Pakistan to practice.
1. The vocabulary of the game: there are two dozen or so characters, each with dozens of moves. Each move comes with its own attributes (e.g. hit points, latency). If you are anywhere near competitive, you need to memorize all of the moves and attributes, in the hundreds. Some of the detailed analyses count the latency in frames (60 game frames in a game second), and a few frames difference does make difference in match results.
2. The grammar of the game: the game boils down to predicting the opponents next move and the best to counter it. There is a path dependency in the game but it's weak i.e. what your opponent did ten moves ago may not affect your current decision aside from the current state of the game (hitpoints left, location on the stage). Weak path dependency means that you can model the game as a Markov process
P(opponent's next move| your character attributes, opponent's character attributes, opponent's style, game state)
If you are competent, the only unknown on the right side of the pipe is "opponent's style". Based on your observed probability of the opponents moves thus far in the game, his regional background (i.e. Japanese), etc, you are supposed to estimate opponent's style. The more accurate the estimate is, the better you can counter or parry his moves.
3. The meta game: Once you know the opponent's style and the opponent knows you (given everything else in the probability function above), what should you do? You need to choose a different character, so that the opponent has to learn your style again. Any learning comes with its sampling cost, and your goal is to deal maximum damage while the opponent is learning your style. In order to do so, you need to prevent any kind of shortcut in opponent's learning, e.g. transfer learning. Transfer learning is possible if your new character is similar to your first character. Thus, you need to master completely different characters. Another is to adopt a completely different fighting style for a given character, but this is easier said than done -- people are surprisingly predictable unless something (i.e. different character) forces them too. Another aspect of meta game is the psychology. Players get stressed, nervous, shocked as humans do, and make sub-optimal decisions.
Overall, the game is fun but surprisingly complex and competitive. Of course, I wrote above can be applied to other games and 'games' (e.g. starcraft or trading). Knowing how difficult it is to compete on the international level, I am truly impressed by the Pakistani team.
There were two small arcade shop in my village bazaar. Each with 6 machines. They were dark and small. I went there once as a kid and then was strictly told by my father to never go there again because 'bad people' go there. Found out lot later about the betting scene. Kids use to play tekken. Expert ones use to choose King and won money. My cousin got addicted to the betting scene and ran away from home because he owed lots of money to some other kids.
Anway, I got older and went to city and there me and another cousin use to go to arcades every once in a while. I was never good at tekken and was more interested in 'Dinosaurs and Cadillacs' and 'Ninja turtle' and 'Metal Slug'. I use to play tekken with him and use to choose Eddie or Yushimitsu or Gunjack. Yushimitsu was my favorite.
Arcade shops started going down when people got computers and later with DSL internet. There use to be (probably still are) CD shops were you could go and buy a pirated game CD for the price of a blank CD. Been playing games on PC since then.
Well now I work in gaming. It was good memory trip.
A fun saying about Lahore is that "if you haven't seen Lahore, you are not even born yet" (original line is in Punjabi).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Centre,_Karachi
What puzzles me are the elongated “aw” some use in place names like Milan, Prague and Hamburg (“Milon”, “Prog”, “Homburg”) - because they’re not correct in either English or the local languages. I wonder if that came from the realisation that "France" uses that "aw" vowel sound in French, so the assumption is other European languages would be the same (i.e. it's a misguided attempt to be more correct)?
Using Cyrillic it's pronounced in neither of those two ways that you've written.