The thing is that almost everyone I've ever played a fighting game against has been an extreme beginner. I say this because In almost every fighting game I've ever played, I've never exited the realm of "extreme beginner", and I tend to play against people at my level
I say "almost every fighting game I've ever played" because technically Holly was like top 50ish iirc in a fighting game with an extremely small playerbase. I'm not trying to absolve myself of "extreme beginner" in Melee
(And even then, I think there was possibly a bigger skill gap between the players in the top 10 and the players at rank 50 than there was between, like, rank 50 and Bronze II)
People do get upset with me when I talk about being bad at the games I like, and they tell me to my face that it's because "You're better than me at the game, and you keep calling yourself bad, so what does that say about me?"
And. I am better at the game than them, in the sense that 0.05 is a bigger number than 0.04. We're learning together, right? That's what I thought. I thought we were all down here at the bottom of the ladder having fun and learning
(I'm also told that I downplay the struggle of playing against me which I don't intend to do, I am working on that)
I think part of this also probably stems from, fighting games are a genre where your goal is to prevent the opponent from playing. So when two players with like a 5% difference in skill play, it looks like a blowout, because one of them is going to prevent the other one from playing enough to push that advantage
I think a lot of the time skill gaps in fighting games look much bigger than they are
@amy I would argue that learning new information about a game as a beginner has much larger returns than it does for more experienced players, so small gaps in knowledge result in relatively significant skill jumps at the beginner level
It's not that the skill gap at beginner levels isn't significant, it's that the effort require to clear it is usually not severe
