Paero

Honestly every class is good at the moment. Monks arent great at soloing high Greater Rifts (80+) but it's unlikely you'll make it to that level in this patch. Also when you make it to level 70 and start getting into Greater Rifts, there's a legendary gem that drops that you can put into a level 70 weapon, and allows it to be equipped by a character of any level and gives a fuck load of XP. So levelling your next characters is piss easy. If I was you I would go with Crusader, because their best build (Using the Invokers set) is easy to get, and easier to itemise for iirc. So you'll progress faster

inc memes

Its been marketed more widely. When SF4 released in 2008 the last game that had been released was Street Fighter 3 3rd Strike in 1999, so the SF name was a little less known than it had been. Now with places like Twitch giving SF4 a platform to attract an audience its continued to grow and has received more support year on year from events, people on youtube/twitch and by Capcom themselves (by hosting Capcom Cup as the SF equivalent of Worlds or The International). More people know about it, are interested in it, and the whole scene of fighting games has grown colossally since Street Fighter 4s release. Before it fighting games were played competitively, but SF4 really boosted the number of people playing them competitively. In 2009 (the year that SF4 was first played at EVO) it received more than 1000 participants, which was 3 times that of any other game (Guilty Gear XX: Accent Core, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike, Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix). Next year SF4 got 1800 participants. Next year EVO set record viewership numbers. In 2015 SF4 (at this point, a game that was 7 years old) got 2257 entrants into it, and the finals received the highest concurrent viewership of any game in EVOs history. The simple fact is that more people are going to play SFV because Street Fighter, and Fighting Games as a whole are more popular nowadays. So what you're saying is you're not the target demographic for fighting games.

Dunno your financial situation mate but I'm gonna be honest if it's a game I like then I don't mind dropping money on it. Sure I probably won't pick up the season pass (at least not right now) but I know that I'll enjoy the game, and will want the DLC characters and costumes that come out Asap, so it's a worthwhile investment for me. It sounds steep if you're not a SF player, but I mean I don't understand people who spend loads of money on really new top of the line phones but hey if they can afford to and it makes them happy then who am I to tell them that they shouldn't like them.

Skullgirls' combo system is easy, because it's a group fighter where you're meant to get really long, high damaging combos. SF on the other hand has a system in place where for every consecutive hit in a combo, each attack does 10% less damage. So say your opponent is Ryu andhas 1000 HP. If you use an attack that does 100 damage, it'll take 100 damage off his life bar and leave him with 900 HP. Simple. Now let's say you did a combo before that which did 300 damage and had 4 hits in it. If you used that same move at the end of the combo, it would make it 5 hits, giving that attack 50% reduced power, making it do 50 damage, and giving your combo a total of 350 damage. This system means that SF promotes smart play and knowing where and when to use which moves, as opposed to promoting execution based play (not to say that games like Skullgirls and Marvel vs Capcom 3 don't require smart play, and SF doesn't require execution, it's simply a different balance.) Also Skullgirls has one of the best tutorials around and the basics apply o a lot of fighters. However the counter hit system is hard to practice with bots because they don't play like real people. The guy I usually fight in SF, I know how he likes to attack and defend, and which moves he likes to use, so I know when I can throw in something to get a counter hit off. I don't think "Oh, Tom's going to use X move here, so I can counter it with Y move", you just get a feeling of what's more likely to work and go with it.

It's Street Fighter. Stuff like Mortal Kombat didn't have a big competitive scene in previous games, so it didn't stick around. Street Fighter is the most popular fighting game series in the world. Even if you count Smash as a fighting game, I believe the majority of comp players are western whereas SF is popular all throughout the US, Europe and Asia. SF has also had a competitive scene since the late (or arguably, the early) 90's with stuff like 3rd Strike being played at Super Battle Opera. SF4 has slowly grown year on year, and keeps attracting more and more attention (each year at EVO it sets a new viewer record). But you only notice this stuff if you're involved with the game, and the scene. It'll never be like LoL, Dota or CSGO in terms of popularity because (so far) it's more inaccessible than them. But you meet players, learn from them, they learn from you, play more, get better, meet more people, and if you want to 'git gud' you just naturally get involved with the community. There's no "5 easy steps to not be shit at SF guide" like there is for games like LoL. You just have to play. Other games may have bigger playerbases, but they can feel like they don't have a 'community'. SF isn't some watered down corporate 'Esport'. Its just a video game. A video game with immense amounts of depth, players who love it, and which just so happens to be played competitively. Like I say to everyone, don't buy it expecting to go online and 'maybe win 1 in 10 matches'. You won't. Other players are gonna fucking destroy you. Pick a character you like and play them, go out of your way to learn them, and (its easier said than done) try not to care about losses. SFV isn't going to be 'popular', but its not designed to be. its designed to be a new SF game, for old players, which can hopefully attract some new players. And so far its doing exactly that.

'oh boobs'

I watched a fair bit of Fairy Tail a few years ago (as in, years before MLM). I don't remember much of it but I know that what I did watch I enjoyed. I know the two things I really liked were the setting and the music. Especially the music, the music was/is fucking great.

Fuck been waiting on this track to drop for months and its still fucking great. I'm convinced Darren Styles and Gammer can't release any bad music.

Not a whole lot of builds are really interesting me this season, Invokers looks cool but I get the feeling it would get dull really quickly. Shadows Mantle. Only ones that look kinda fun is the Wizard group DPS Twister build. I just cant be fucked to level again tbh.

Gunz was fucking great, I still remember going into games with my mate and us practicing K-style shit like the Butterfly on eachother. The shit people came up with was mental, like equipping 2 shotguns and doing a fucking reload wall jump double slash shot and just destroying you in like 2 shots because shotguns were balanced.

Lmao yeah there were some really dumb mechanics like that, but hey, it's an old MMO so it letting you be a retard is what adds to the fun kinda. Nowadays you don't need to split your AP between anything, you just dump it in your main stat since you don't need an accuracy bonus from.your secondary stat anymore. I play on an old school private server as a Corsair a little bit, and it feels so strange putting points into 2 stats just so I can manage to hit stuff. Also yeah, Ludi Pq is SSS tier OST

Maplestory Lets go back to 10 years ago. Little Paero is 8 years old and likes runescape, but wants something a bit more 'gamey' than it. I had heard about World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 1, and decided to look up stuff on them. I was going around the internet and I stumbled upon a site called GameOgre which at the time was essentially a directory for every MMO ever (even the really fucking tiny ones). I looked at WoW and saw that you needed a subscription to play. I asked my dad if I could get it, and he told me to fuck off because he wasnt going to pay £10 a month for me to install Viruses on the family PC. Looked at Guild Wars as well, saw you had to pay and didn't even bother asking about it. I looked at other games (including Everquest, Everquest 2 etc etc) and finally found the page for Maplestory. I saw it was free and because I was a fucking badass I signed up and installed it without asking my dad. I started the game up, logged in, and created my first character (called Tokyo359, because I was a weeb) on the Khaini server. I had no fucking clue what I was doing, but I found it fun. I got to attack stuff, see numbers, and level up. I made it off of Maple Island (the beginner Island) on the boat and got to Lith Harbor and hearing this soundtrack. It was fucking crazy, I walked up to the NPC there that told you about Job Advancements (which at that time were only Warrior, Thief and Archer which you advanced to at level 10, or a Wizard that you advanced to at level 8). I thought the NPC looked fucking baller as hell (he was some barbarian looking guy) so I chose to be a Warrior. I went to Perion (the warrior town) and leveled up on the Stump monsters around there until I hit level 10, at which point I went into the Town Leaders room and went to job advance. But before I did I noticed one thing. In every town/class leaders room there was an NPC that was an exact replica of whatever player was the highest level on that class. Now in the Warrior room was a character called Tiger. The earliest screenshot of his character I can find is this one from 2007. That wasn't how he looked when i first saw him, but I was fucking blown away. At the time he was about level 120, which in the old days of Maplestory meant you were a maximum no life (as a rule of thumb leveling from level 1-30 took roughly a month) and was the highest leveled player in the entire game. His name was known by literally everyone who played Maplestory around 2005-2008. But in early 2008 (February from what WayBackMachine is showing) his character, alongside the character of Suuushi (who he was good friends with) disappeared from the leaderboards. To this very day, nobody know what happened. Some people suspect that he got banned for hacking, other people say that Tiger was a group of people account sharing to get the highest leveled character in the game, other people say that a rival guild on his server (Scania) managed to hack his account and delete his character, and some people say he just got bored and deleted it himself. So far nobody has ever gotten the full story of what happened to Tiger, and it's something that myself, and so many other old Maplestory players really want to find out, but I doubt we ever will. (I even got the oppertunity to ask a player called Dray86, who was a big Maplestory Machinima creator, what happened to Tiger, as he made some videos with him, but even he doesn't know) Alright so yeah. I saw Tiger and that fucking hooked me, I was definitely a Warrior. I advanced and just went back to levelling in the hopes I could some day be like him (Or FangBlade, or Paladin, who were other high levelled Warrior players). Some things I remember was a higher leveled player (I think he was around level 45 when I was level 18) buying me a brand new set of armor and weapons because I was so poor. I remember this one time I took a teleport to an area called Mushroom Shrine because it sounded cool, there was only me and one other player there. She was around level 20 and had not 1, but 2 of the 'Snowboard' weapons. Everyone wanted one. She had a level 10 variation (called the Sky Snowboard) and a level 24 one (called a Silver Snowboard). I began talking to her and we leveled together. After a few days she actually gave me both of her snowboards. I dont know what happened, but I dont have the level 10 one anymore, but I still have the level 24 one and keep it on my character just because (even though I dont play him anymore) Here's a photo: Not long after my computer broke, and I pretty much didn't get to play Maplestory again until about 2009. I never made it that far on that character, I got to about level 25 I believe, and never got to level 30 to advance to the Spearman class so I could be like Tiger. A few years later I became friends with a guy at my school called Jamie (still one of my best mates to this day). We had really similar taste in games. We both loved Korean MMOs (because we were kids) and ended up playing Flyff, Tales of Pirates, Gunz: The Duel, and Exteel together. I showed him Maplestory and we played that a fair bit. From then until now I kept going back to it every now and again, on both the American and European servers. Playing loads of different classes but never really sticking around. Around Summer last year I went pretty hard on the European servers and progressed further than I ever had before (this time playing the 'Zero' class). Most recently (as in, right now) I'm back on the American servers, as they've released a server called 'Reboot' where all Monsters hit 4x as hard, have 4x the health, and give 4x the XP. But more importantly they disabled trading, so people botting are only ruining the game for themselves, and the removed all the items from the cash shop that made the game Pay2Win. It's really revitalized the game, and some many people from the old days have come back and are loving it. This is how popular it is. Each server is divided into 20 'Channels' so certain maps dont get crowded. The 2nd most popular server 'Scania' currently has this many people playing: Reboot, has this many: So yeah, its popular. Anyway that's the end of that. I love Maplestory, it's fucking great, its the defining game of my childhood and I still play it to this day. I could talk about it for hours and hours because despite all of its problems (and trust me, around 2010-2014 there were a LOT of fucking problems) I love it more than any game I've ever played, and I'll continue to play it as long as the servers are up, and probably on Private Servers after they close. Here are my favorite pieces of the OST, from the Cygnus Knights storyline which was a story that lasted 2-3 years, and in ways still continues to this day. Edit: I just realised I didn't elaborate on why I like the actual gameplay. So if you don't know, Maplestory is Very grindy. You grind to level up. To get gear. To get money. Its perfect for me because I've always loved that gameplay style. You pick a class, you level, unlock new skills, keep levelling, increase your damage etc etc. All the classes (there's about 35-40 of them) play really crisply, and the vast majority are very balanced, so you play what you like (although some classes can be objectively better if you're one of the very few people who can make it to the damage cap). Its fun. Every class has similarities but they all work slightly differently, and Nexon re-balance, re-book send sometimes completely overhaul classes to bring them up to par.

B A N G E R A N G E R

Try to VAC ban me now faggots.