I wasn’t able to play Smash very many days this week, and the days I did play I had very little time. Which kind of gave me a bad taste overall.
On Night Two I had a few minutes to play so I jumped into Ultimate Online Quickplay. I just wanted to play about five matches and see if I had improved any, and see what I still needed to work on.
This was a mistake on so many levels. I hadn’t played Ultimate in a while and I didn’t even warm up before jumping into the matches since I was in a time crunch. I was setting myself up for disaster.
The first match I played was a Yoshi spamming their down B and up smash. I was trying to avoid those two moves and punish with my own smash attacks, but in retrospect, I shouldn’t have been so quick to punish with retaliatory smashes. It was also super frustrating because Yoshi can pull his down B out in a heartbeat and it seems like that has priority over nearly every move. I tried to avoid it and attack with aerials but I would avoid one and get hit with the next one. Tried spacing with Pkfire and PKThunder but was destroyed during Ness’s recovery period. I lost easily and was on full tilt.
I should have shut the game off there, but instead had to complete my arbitrary number of five matches. But I was too frustrated to enjoy any of them. I would do my best at first, but as soon as I started to get juggled I would give up and self-destruct my remaining stocks. I had a one 2-3 stock loss, but the rest were 0-3. I lost five games in a row, didn’t enjoy any of them, and didn’t even focus on what I should be learning.
I don’t want to be one of those annoying Online Ness players, I want to practice my actual technique to prepare for SuperSmash Con. These two goals probably can’t co-exist in the current Online quickplay. Even if the majority of players aren’t trying to cheese their way to Elite, you run into enough to find it frustrating. If I want to reach Elite, I would have to cheese my way in, since I’m not super great at the game. So maybe the answer is don’t bother with Quickplay, don’t worry about Elite, and practice using Arena matches?
I’m not sure, but I know I can’t use Quickplay online to prep for the tournament, I need to find another way.
I played some more World of Light later in the week, but the majority of the time I didn’t have the time or inclination to play Smash. I’m going to take a week off Smash, I obviously need a break from it. I’m going to take a little sabbatical and come back fresh.