Maintaining expansion?

[DrakeAldan]

OK- this might sound a little weird, but here goes.

Me, as a normal (I'd like to think) person, I resign myself to only maining one character.
Helps me keep focus and all.

There are other players who play two or three mains on a tournament level however, or a large portion of the cast (say, Oof, for example).

And then there are people who are tournament-ready for multiple games.

Considering that being good at one game, one character, requires memorization of data and patterns, how is it that people can keep all of this stuff in their heads?
How can they juggle from character to game to character without confusing any of it-
and then still go to work in the morning without telling their boss the properties of 3A on counterhit instead of the weekly report?

Seriously man, I ain't seein' it.

 

[Suirad]

Adaptability probably, if you're the type that learns slow and forgets quick then its all you can do to focus on one charcter in one game and you might still not be good at it. If you pick stuff up fast then you barely need to do anything to keep your game up.

The other thing is generalization, how is playing some characters in some situations similar? how are some situations similar in different games? if you can figure that sort of stuff out the transitions can be much smoother and it's easier to keep a handle on everything.

 

[iKotomi]

It's not really that hard. Playing games are sort of like riding bicycles, once you are really good at it you can pretty much pick it up whenever, given you stay up to date with the strats. Execution is all muscle memory, its not really hard to switch between games because of that, given the amount of time they spend on each game to get that muscle memory.

The real problem is just getting good at the games, not the switching in between. Fighting games for the most part share a lot of the basic principles, so if you have strong basics, you can hold your own in most fighting games given a little time to learn combos. Having strong basics also makes it much easier to actually learn the more in-depth properties of the games, since you can just jump in and start with the mind games rather than being punished for stupid things.

 

[The Landslide]

Basically you just have to play a lot...