i have this same 50/50 vs read argument with a friend all the time about fighting games. a 50/50 is a random decision, a read is an educated guess based on what your opponent has done, what they have yet to do, how you've conditioned them to react, how they've conditioned you to react and a bunch more facets that make a read a lot different and interesting then a guess or 50/50.
yea in this context read means perceiving your opponents option then reacting accordingly. e.g. a read in other genres would be thinking "my opponent feinted twice and it didnt work, he probably wont feint next time" then early parrying. in melee read means properly visualizing that your opponent hasnt feinted, then reacting with a parry in that miniscule timeframe.
@@thestralner6335 so you spent all of those words to literally just say reading = reacting. Reading is as OP stated, an educated guess. To use an FPS game as an example. If you see an enemy run behind a wall, and there's bullet penetration, then you would shoot where you think they are around, even though you can't actually see them. A pure guess is just running around a corner and automatically shooting even though you have no reason that an enemy should be there.
Healthy disagreement: bear calls stouty braindead and impossible to argue with, because he didn't agree with him after he repeated the same bad argument like 10 times
Man I appreciate that yall are experimenting with this stuff and are still working on deducing what's not skill/best for the mechanics in the genre. Best of luck on your game homie.
It doesn't even matter if you fall for one feint every now and then in this feint spam experiment, in a real fight you're just going to punish them instantly after reading the feint. Bear was hard coping.
Every time someone called me a gambler for not falling for fakes made me just have a brain aneurysm, is it really just super dumb luck if you can do it consecutively? Honestly never thought too deep about it because it just seemed like something all the whiners spouted when losing, but thought most people would agree that drags are honestly just unfair. I never felt cheated out of a fight because someone killed me by faking.
You are right, some people are better at reading than others. In mordhau I have fought a player who would always enter with a stab to overhead morph in facehug range. I would kick him every time he entered and he lost every fight. After a couple weeks he just refused to fight me, he never learnt. I met someone that would always gamble stab with rapier and shield, I would just chamber and quickly accel overhead and catch him every time. He never changed and stopped playing when updates ruined his play style, he would ONLY play that and had 600 hours, I never saw him in a duel or 3v3 game.
That's an interesting point if I am understanding correctly. I think duelist (you) see the game in a different way than average players (shield guy). I hardly care enough to try and analyze an enemy's attack style. I may after like our 10th isolated battle if they have unique armour on, but for the most part I would imagine the average player is reactive to the person in front of them and does not assume much.
Do you also love the part where he keeps eating the feints then tells him not to do it like that like an aikido instructor getting smacked around and wanting to change it to his own terms so he can apply the fabricated facts?
I’m not sure what he means. Having the patience to wait that split second to read if an attack is truly committed is definitely a skill. Seems like homie is used to spamming counters. It’s crazy how often I’m able to mix someone up by not countering or riposting, just a simple block followed by some footwork or a feint baits out so many misses.
I do this from time to time because I recognized it as a flaw of my own, definitely underrated to occasionally give up an initiative play like a riposte. Totally can melt your opponents brain for a second
It’s sometimes impossible or very hard to expect a feint due to the amplified speed of some weapons bc of accels especially at a higher skill ceiling like stouty’s, and many more times it’s based on reaction time- and for some the grunt sound effect. Predicting a feint is pretty situational. (Also, I’m not sure if I repeated some of your statements, just saying how I feel about it).
This is why (with a fast enough weapon) chambering can dominate feint situations. I read most of my opponents swings and if I see a crazy accel overhead coming, I go for the overhead chamber. Whether they actually follow up on the feint with a swing or not, you now have initiative and your opponent has to either parry (or, if they’re fast enough) chamber your swing back. Chambering is not the absolute best option for every encounter because it can make you easy to read/feel out in combat, but it’s a great way to put acute pressure on your opponent and can help you put them on their heels very quickly.
The idea feints are rng is wrong but I have to agree with Accel/decel being borderline RNG particularly when you can do both in an animation. The whole thing could be resolved with speed based damage but apparently losing a limb to a sword lightly touching you is fun.
I can see the commits too - you can read them. It's a "50/50" until you see it. The trouble is that the window of opportunity to parry is like .2 seconds.
Feint reading in Mordhau pushes the limits of human capabilities, but ripostes and drags are simply not competitive. Two handers/large weapons have 250ms between feint lockout and damaging release, which gives you 250ms to read the attack. (50ms before windup ends = feint lockout, 200ms after release begins = damaging release) So far I have tested Greatsword, Poleaxe, and Rapier. Rapier has 225ms. Every weapon's feintable windup is the same, windup minus 50ms, but early release times may vary, such as rapier's. Its early release lasts 175ms instead of 200. I will do more testing on more weapons tomorrow. 250ms sounds like more than enough time to read an attack, human reaction time can get down into the 150ms, right? True, however this is for simple reactions. Complex reactions like feint reading are a different story, add about 50-200ms to your usual reaction time depending on your skill, and, of course, add your ping to it as well. Most players are playing on 20-40ms, because that's really the best you can ask for if you aren't lucky enough to live next to a server. A simple reaction is what human reaction time is generally measured with, and is a straight path, like clicking a button when a color flashes on your screen. There's a linear pathway in your brain: yielding for color > color flashes > ... > CLICK!!! A complex reaction is not linear, it has conditions. In Mordhau, you are not waiting for a color to flash to click, you're looking for a condition. If they feint, don't click. If they don't feint, click. It sounds simple, but it's not. Your brain needs to have a good sense of the timing and rhythm of the particular weapon you're dealing with so it can recognize the moment the attack is committed. That's not the hard part, the hard part is everything that your brain has to do that comes after that, you need to analyze a lot of visual information and a lot of different factors and ambiguities come into play, your brain makes last moment second guesses such as "was that a wiggle or did the feint animation begin?" "is that movement normal? wait what point of the windup am i in again?" which just add on more and more precious milliseconds to your reaction. Once your brain has made its decision, there's still more to do. It needs to tell your nervous system and the muscles in your hand to either STOP or GO, and POISING to do one or the other is one of the big reasons complex reactions add a lot more time than simple ones, because when you're clicking a button when a color flashes, your finger is poised and ready to slam down that mouse button at the earliest signal, but the process of telling it whether or not to in complex reactions takes more time. For simple reactions, your reaction time is: sensory input processing time + "did the color just change? yes? okay" + FIRE For reading a feint in Mordhau, your reaction time is: sensory input processing time + timing errors + confirmation for visual ambiguities + final confirmations + sorting which signal to fire + FIRE The point is, reading the unreadable in Mordhau is absolutely possible, but it's definitely pushing the limits of human capabilities. Riposting and drags are too liquid to break down analytically like this as they contain many more variables than a feint. When parrying a riposte, you are basically guessing how they're going to footwork, counter footworking accordingly, and then timing your parry to protect you as close to right before the earliest POSSIBLE moment they could hit you in the next instant, as well as adjusting for other factors like how do they tend to footwork, do they have any patterns, am I even reading their animation correctly, they're human so what are the chances they're ACTUALLY going to hit me at the earliest possible moment they can if they accel, etc. Ripostes are an extremely complicated attack to defend against, and while they are fun, I don't think they belong in a competitive fighting game that wants to take its competition seriously. Because while reading feints as it stands right now is extremely difficult, it's at least one dimensional. Drags are not competitive, broken down they are far too chaotic.
Considering average reaction time of a gamer who plays every day is around 180-200ms, doesn't that prove some things are just literally unreactable in the heat of the game? Let's say you're a god level CS player with insane reactions. You can hit the CTs crossing mid doors on dust 2 EVERY TIME. You need around 170-180ms reaction time for that. And literally nobody keeps up that level of reaction time every single time they react. So even with those reactions, you are unable to react to stuff in Mordhau for example. And I think there's only one big culprit to this. The animations are WAY TOO wonky and goofy. You have to condition yourself to literal excrement level in terms of animation and gameplay design to be good at Mordhau. It's no wonder people quit.
@@Inaluogh Yeah basically. There's two sides of this argument, there's those who believe that this inherent masking of animations is part of the game and what makes it skill based, and there are those who don't understand how something like this can be skill based in the first place. Which, both sides are right in their own way, but the real conclusion is that Mordhau is niche, and likely always will be.
That's starting to make sense now, I literally cannot parry any of those ripostes because they just seem to be instant, especially the accel ones. I try to wait for it and see if they drag or accel but the accel one is so quick its impossible for me. I do better with the drag ones but still not a great success rate. I am learning to read feints, I think that just takes a lot of practice and learning the animations. So I'd say I agree with you Stouty.
I don't understand how a person could watch the whole video, or better yet be present for the entirety of this "test", and still come away with the opinion of "yep both are 50/50"
Reading feints IS something higher skill players can do. It's another form of skill gaping, and it's definitely a real thing. It's even a thing irl hence why there are things like world champion fighters and journyman fighters.
Reading a feint is way easier than reading a riposte-drag just because a feint has one outcome - the opponent's animation stops. With a riposte, there are a dozen ways the animation could go in an analog of WTF is happening - are they dragging to my feet? Acceling to my head? Faking an accel but pulling back a long drag? And with the riposte, you have a split second to find out the flavor of their response. But once your mind can see an animation stop, you can simply not parry to survive a feint. It just takes some focus to identify the event.
In Mordhau, When someone feints you and it gets read, the bookworm gets a bit of stam advantage, as well as initiative (depending on the speed of the response). Also, in the taking of initiative, you can start a feint matching storm, where the duelers hot potato initiative back and forth to each other. Note: If someone tries to steal initiative after reading a feint, they are still susceptible to a kick if they're within range (Maybe this is considered a gamble, but others call it footwork gaming, and I consider it that too). At the end of the day: Mordhau has a lineup of mechanics that are based around feints and reading that revolves around the initiative and tempo system (buffers). So this makes feints more skill based than all of the mitigation going on with swing manipulation. Personal note: I found that once I grasped the fundamentals and started to get a feel for how high level mord players abuse these very fundamentals, I was able to read their feints but not their swing manipulation, even after hundreds of hours in the game.
@@000Mazno000 Pattern recognition is still important in duels. In a casual match not nearly as much. However when you are fighting best of 5 you absolutely will key in to your opponents fighting style and tendencies if you are skilled. This becomes even more important at the highest levels... Not as much with Mordhau because it's relatively small, but with any competitive sport, including fighting games, studying your opponents matches is a crucial component of success. Because of pattern recognition among other things.
Sadly, IMO the red parries sort of makes it more RNG based to some degree, as there is a window of it happening depending on the server and the two opponents pings will decide how big that window will be. But that accounts for most, including feinting.
Glad to see you're doing some Mordhau content. You have some awesome reads. Feints are harder for me to deal with. Drags I feel like I can mitigate easier with footwork
Even in Chiv 1 feints were readable with most of the 2h weapons and that was so cancerous for feints that people vote kicked you for using them in pubs. Never going to work 100% of the time but there's clear skill gaps in feint reads just like with anything else in these games. "reading" your opponents mind is another big part of feint reading as well
The true answer to repost drags is early chamber as though they're going to accel and if they do you get the chamber , if they feint you get tempo, if they kick you can kick or ftp, if they drag you can feint, footwork and chamber again.
@@Stouty well if you're a true degenerate (like me) you might consider using the dodge perk. When your opponent swings you try the early chamber and dodge sideways towards their swing, if they accel you get your chamber, if you don't get your chamber because they footwork or drag you immediately dodge again in the opposite direction forcing a hit before the drag hits you. It's not an optimal strategy but I've been vote kicked numerous times by players who don't know this trick as it looks like I've removed the turn cap from their perspective. btw its great that you comment and interact with the community :)
i think there is a massive miss understanding regarding feints. Feints are inherently not readable they are however predictable. There is no visual que nor a audio que that would indicate a feint. Drags and feints aren't comparable, With drags you see the intend before it happens via the body positioning, By repeating this over and over and again, You eventually gain muscle memory and you will more or less automatically react to certain clues. We however can predict feints, I think that's what people fail to understand. You will for example find it much easier to read feints from someone that you have fought a billion times, Hence in the video you also required some time to adjust to it, So you find a pattern in the way the person will attack you and then you can make a calculated guess for when the feint is coming, Though its still a guess and not actual reading, Since well there is no way to tell whether you are going to be feinted or not. It may appear when you have played these games for thousands of hours as if you can read feints. However its an illusion, All that is happening is that you have memorized many different play styles and because of it you are in a much better position to predict feints.
@@Stouty I already explained that, Its du to your experience. Sometimes you will have moments like that, Where you can predict consistently, We all have them. But more often then not, That's not the case and it will be kind of like that first section of the video. What your implying is that you have the ability to react within a single frame, Process it and make your decision on it, That is simply not true Stouty. That would make you beyond super human. Not only you, There are plenty of people that have these moments, I cant give much input on Mordhau but people in chivalry do have also those moments. So are we all super human? I don't think so, Its all within our past experiences that we can make calculated guesses which allows us from time to time to deal with feints so well. Like as if we never get stomped, Because someone randomly start feint spamming un-expected, I know it has happen to me and im certain this has happen to you as well :P . Its not even debatable, Its just science and biology, We are not fast enough to see it, process it and then make a decision all within just a couple of frames time.
@@zanza8197 your argument is that it's unreadable hence a 50/50 guess and I somehow guessed correctly 20 times consecutively, take a stats course then get back to me
@@Stouty Again stouty its not even a debatable matter. You simply can not See, Process and react to it all within a couple frames. Those 20 feints are completely meaning less as well, As it was in a controlled situation. You where quite literally setup for them. Then you proceed on believing that you have super human abilities. So the real question is, Why are you playing these games? Obviously you are beyond any human, Surely you can be a yet fighter pilot or even a astronaut, I doubt that they would find the theory/studies important after all, You would be record braking when it comes to your reaction speed and awareness far beyond any elite unit that the world has seen, You also have a very unique brain, As it sends out signals far beyond any living creature, That exist and has existed. Perhaps you have a drivers licence. If so, you could be f1 racer, and easily out compete the other competitors.
@@Stouty A bit late just stumbled across this again, I never said its a 50/50 guess, i would argue that the odds are far worse then that, Initially it would be more like 0/100, you can increase the odds with experience, If someone attacks once and then feints and does this consistently well then its a fair guess that the next cycle he would do it again significantly increasing the odds and if he wont change his approach you can be 100% accurate. When you say that you read it that would imply that you have feedback and react to it, Which is simply not the case with feints, Same problem exist for handle hits you cant see them at all even in video replays its hard to tell. I dare say with confidence that whenever you fight with someone that does not feint he can feint you with 100% accuracy, Your own videos even demonstrate this perfectly as most of the times you do fall for them, You did this test in a controlled environment you know they where coming, You know the play style of the person.
@@Stouty this is an overly technical way of looking at the situation. What use case is there to stand still and hard hard read a feint? Even that situation isnt static, standing still is a way to bait a kick. Standing still is still a "soft" read in that sense
@@Stouty Not particularly, I feel like footwork allows for that window that players have to read swing manipulation. Double parrying is only able to be done if you parry early, or the enemy mistimes their next swing after the successful parry. Using footwork should be the standard, it allows for a higher skill ceiling in duels.
Only if you have bad internet. Mixing in a chamber every now and again really improves your skill, as well as parrying later if you read it well. Parrying early allows for more susceptibility for falling for drags
@@Stouty man wtf u talking about. I played an year or near at server which was in 1 kilometer from my home, that was 4-8 ping, AND STILL THERE WAS REDPARRYS
Did you not play chiv? You have to mitigate the threat of another players offense, Through creating distance or other means. Ripostes and Feints should NOT by any means be readable standing still not mitigating a single thing.
@@Stouty The difference is you can use directional footwork on ripostes, Because the riposte is stuck in the animation you can abuse movement to run into or out of the draw tracer, With feints you cannot be directional as the animation could be a feint, morph, ect. So distance is the only form of mitigation. Again I am not sure what comp mod EU uses, And in vanilla's current state i agree everything is 50/50, and the state of the game is terrible, But assuming offense is strong, All the ideals of Mitigation still apply.
@@colton204 I would recommend taking a stats course if you think feints are 50/50 after watching this video. What are the odds of guessing a coin toss correctly 20 times consecutively?
@@Stouty The problem with the video is you are not entertaining the reality of the mechanics. Feints are only readable given distance to the beginning of the animation release, Aka without any form of artificial mitigation or distance they are consistently unreadable. Ripostes travel on a consistent path meaning as soon as they windup a riposte we understand where the animation is going to start and end, If you force yourself into their bubble and punish neutral manip by threatening to run into every swing, You can consistently mitigate pretty much all manip especially opn 500 release weapons, Zwi feels best for manip because of the 525 all weapons used to have until the devs ruiend vanilla balance. I'd love to have another conversation on this in discord if you are willing, I cannot explain perfectly over text.
@@colton204 OK but how come I read 20 of Redblue's feints in a row whilst stationary? I can drag you in next time I'm streaming but I think the above question sort of ends the debate
but the thing is even if feints are more readable in a lan setting and stoutly could parry 75% of feints in a lan setting, that is not marketable to the public. Average ping is around 20 to 40 ping depending on your location, some people play even higher and will never get an opportunity to play mordhau at a lan. The only way to make feints readable for a feint reliant game is to have client side parrying. In the end, swing manip and feints need to be countered with proper use of footwork and reading, not just reading like shown in this test.
in my opinion drags are fun and rewarding and i just started mordhau 2 or 3 days ago and im just even learning how to throw them but already i think they are fun maybe for a top player like you they are dull and repetitive and i understand how a casual player might hate dying to something like that but i still think drags have a place somewhere in fpm and i also agree feints are quite readable and arent rewarding enough to be used over drags if someone could find a balance which i cannot and have both be in the game i think it would be a great fpm game for casuals and also comp players but your solution of removing drags or atleast limiting their effectiveness seems like the best option love you stouty youre my baby daddy
It just doesn't fit with what Mordhau was striving to be from the start. Their whole motto was "fights that look like fights" and decided to allow stuff like that to exist anyways
bro i cant watch the segment of trying to read feints imma punch my monitor lmfao Swing chose to swing or feint was it read correctly? score it reset swing - Not SWING SWING SWING FEINT SWING FEINT FEINT SWING SWING SLOW DOWN SWING SWING SWING
i think a common misconception of people who aren't familiar with fighting games is the idea that everything should be reactable. we've seen the affects of this in release for honor where high level matches would literally be two Warlords staring at each other because the person who makes a move loses. competitive fighting games *require* an element of guessing and unreactability, otherwise defense will always win. not to mention that, when you have 50/50 situations, you are still using data based on how the opponent has played to tilt the odds in your favour. i think this community using the word "gamble" has done irreparable damage LOL
It really sickens me when I see people using terms like reads, mind gaming, option select, footsies and such without even knowing where it comes from or the meaning of them. The 3000 hour Mordhau or Chiv "vet" would be demolished by a mid tier Sub Zero mixup in MK 11. But here's the thing, unreactable always existed. But it never was because the game's animations were designed so terrible it was basically abuse at that point. It was because of frame advantage, fast but less damaging light attacks that reset to neutral or shit like that. Being hit by something unreactable in a fighting game doesn't instantly take away half your health. The more damaging openers and setups are either more telegraphed, or easily avoided by using knowledge. I'll go back to MK 11 Sub Zero because the last time I played a fighting game it was that. Sub Zero ALWAYS wants to hit you low because that's the only way to open you up to a big damage combo for him. So blocking low the whole game, even eating overheads for the sake of keeping him from comboing is valid. Because as soon as you block, you are reset to neutral or can use a move with frame advantage. Mordhau is a massive clusterfuck in terms of what's neutral, what's an advantage or who's turn it is.
I think there's some misunderstanding of terminology, a read is a term used in fighting games this is where it comes from, a read is when you analyze patterns in your opponents behavior and you then act upon that behavior normally all fights start with guesses but better players will notice patterns and that's when they start to read. What the misunderstanding here is thinking read means it's reactable, reactable is when you analyze the animation itself to tell if it's one thing or another. It's pretty obvious that in Mordhau feints are unreactable they were designed that way same with many other games, but they are readable as to read someone is to know what they are going to do and act upon it. Reacting is visual, reading is mental. They are different mindsets and typically it's the people who can read the opponent that are better, while if you only look at the game visual and react most things are unreactable in all fighting games. I know it's semantics to point out the definition, but to me it applies better context, and I fully believe the misunderstanding comes from the fact animations need to be readable (in this context saying an animation is readable means it's not hyper jank and your brain can actually understand what's going on, your eyes and brain are better at understanding things that look like they come from reality) Sorry for the rant, just felt like adding the context and perspective. TLDR; Feints are Unreactable, but you can read them Read = Mentally understanding the opponent knowing what they will do, example being common patterns the opponent likes to do. React = seeing the animation visually and deciding what you will do from the visuals, in this videos case they define it as readability. Animation Readability = The animation is fluid and follows the confines of reality, making it easier for the brain to understand.
we call reacting = reading in this genre and the final chapter of this video proves without a doubt they are reactable. How else did I react to 20 in a row?
@@Stouty You're actually the only person I've seen it call it reading, and I say unreactable to mean most people its unreactable, the average human reaction time is around 300ms but really high level comp players in most games like you, rank 1, have a much faster reaction time. So they are unreactable to majority of people but you and a lot of the top players it is reactable, most people who use unreactable as a term have it standing for something along the lines of "faster than 300ms" some people go a little lower cause the average person who likes games has a faster average. I don't know about the Mordhau competitive scene as well as others just cause I rarely see stuff on it aside from really early footage, so I will admit if most comp Mordhau players call a reaction "a read" then I am wrong, although this is the first time I've ever heard someone in any genre call it a read instead of a reaction. Medieval Melee has been one of my all time favorite genres alongside all kinds of fighting games for years, and I like to follow it closely, so it is a little weird to hear it called read by one person and not majority. I love your content nontheless, to the point I thought I subscribed forever ago, keep up the good work, sorry for the long response hope it wasn't a problem reading.
@@beatdeath9962 np, we call the fighting game style "reads" gambles in this genre, aka guessing. Good players can gamble at better times through pattern recognition as you mentioned but the top players can read the animation itself
@@Stouty to me it mostly seems like Mordhau specifically twist a lot of terminology that has been set in stone for years, cause I even hear the classic terminology in Chivalry, M&B, and a few others, they just add on the genre specific terms like Drags. Otherwise its all fine just kinda funny to think about
omfg during the beginning conversation, i was thinking yall were talking in chiv terms and was confused. when it cut to mordhau it made a lot more sense (i was confused in understanding what yall stances were)
Hi legend Happy new year I played a lot of For Honor and there was a lot of feint to soft feint action and thought people often call it gamble to read its more like a psychology battle to try and understand what your opponent thinking "Ok so he threw 3 straight hits he'snot gona make the 4th" And my favourite thing in fights is to use acsels and drags among side feints to manipulate what my enemy expect and its really fun That's why i'm barely a violet diamond (idk the name) I also bought chiv 2 and its really fun! Thank you for all the videos you made about this game they made me buy it for a new year and i dont regret P.S. Do you have any vid on a comfortable controls to adjust after mordau?
For Honor is literal casino gameplay alas. The variables are so small that there is a good chance you can make a chain of 4 or 5 correct decisions, win and get biased that you "read" the enemy.
Every time someone cries about my feints again while using manipulation, i'll send them this vid link. I find feints to be an actual fun part of the game which even hands weaker players to stand a chance against better players. To be fair i'm not too much against wep manip either though i can see how it affects newer/worse players. I agree with Stouty on this one.
You'll send them a link in which the guy says multiple he's not giving him time to think and can't read the feints? Kinda like how it always happens lmao??
But what would combat without drags look like? Very hard to imagine in a Chiv / Mordhau environment, because everything is about timing and drags / accels are there for throwing the timing off. Remove them and you have "who has better ping to get least reds trying to read feints" left. At least on a high level. Also, how would it work? You literally can't stop drags from being a thing unless you remove swing manipulation completely. Lock the players viewport once attacking and even restrict his movement because you can still delay and accelerate by moving left / right. I think you'll need to come up with something completely different to actually get rid of them for good.
Feints cost stamina and can be punished heavily with chambers. If a player tries to chamber a drag he will either miss and get hit/parry and waste even more stamina or just chamber regulary and get hit by the next accel/drag
i think most of the time if youre fighting a good player their accels will be placed in such a way that it hits you as soon as it goes into release, so you dont realistically have a chance to read. most of the time when you parry an accel its because you can see where they are pointing and you can guess that its not going to be a drag/feint. if you want mordhau to have readable attacks you should probably have a bigger window after release and before it hits, during which you can actually read that its not a feint and wether its a drag or accel.
If a swing hits you directly after release, it isn't neutraled at all, and can easily be read by their body position and way their character is facing. I agree some weapons its very difficult to see though, thats why chamber-feints can work very well if you haven't been up against them a lot
@@True-Ru i dont think body position gives away everything, because although its hard, you can still move your body sideways for an accel and feint at the last second or do a late riposte drag that convincingly looks like you are doing a fat accel.
You can definitely make an educated guess if someone's gonna feint which could be considered as reading but it's also a little risky bc you could be wrong
I saw about a 50% chance of reading a well executed feint on display there by Stouty, which is what bear was saying...that said, I also agree it is probably easier to read feints than swing manipulations, but at a certain skill level--which most good players can attain--it's just guesswork.
@ different player with a lower skill level, thereby performing below the skill threshold where it becomes rng. I'm not saying you're totally wrong, just that very well executed feints become unreadable at certain skill levels, but below that they certainly are readable. You're probably one of the best out there to read them, and you were not able to read bear's beyond a random distribution. This is even more true in a live environment where feints are spammed
@@biggieboomboom was the rank 1 player at the time of recording. Not to mention I definitely read (either parry of accel or read of feint) about 65% of bear's, possibly higher
@@Stouty just because he was rank 1 overall doesn't mean he was best at feinting. We would need a counter as well as a clear definition of an accurately read feint to determine the exact success rate with bear in the video. Also, you were imposing a constraint on his feinting by demanding that he not spam it. Point is, it didn't seem different from random chance at any reasonable level of statistical significance with him.
@@biggieboomboom Are you suggesting you can reach rank 1 without knowing how to feint? It's absurd on its face, let alone how most feint opponents will say it's "just press Q". >not spam In a real duel, you wouldn't be able to spam feints because I'd punish them. Testing spam feints doesn't really prove anything when trying to identify whether feints in a vacuum are readable. >Point is, it didn't seem different from random chance I suggest you take a stats course then
5:19 "red parries, I'm counting those as reads because in a lan environment I would have parried that" 7:07 "the fact that I'm seeing red parry numbers means I'm reading it" Stouty smoking that sweet copium haha, if you red parry it means you parried too late whether you have 8ms or 80ms lmao
@@Stouty While this is true I imagine 99% of the playerbase isn't playing on lan which means you need to parry earlier. I just disabled the red parry notification so I won't over think it.
@@TheVocoderGuy its a measure of reaction time and whether or not someone could feasible react fast enough to parry a feinter. for the purpose of understanding swing manip client-side, it makes sense to compensate for ping that might offset results. though i agree that the argument being made by the mordhau players might hold up based on their personal experiences, there is an objective difference between luck and insane reaction speed
A read has you anticipating a move in your mind, you guess what they're going to do. A reaction is you seeing a move happening on the screen, with your brain registering it, followed by you countering accordingly. The latter is without making any prediction at all, purely your eyes and brain working together.
@@Stouty what’s it called when you learn someone’s patterns then? Why not just use the term react? What if I can’t react, and play solely off learning patterns?
Im going to agree with bear, if a feint is done by a half decent player it does feel like a gamble, all they have to do is fake accel and now i such little time to make an important decision in situation where its too fast too read, atleast with drags and accel's I can read the footwork and watch their weapon better. Feints feel like gambles. 10:00 yes he couldn't block the ripostes because he had to stand still, when you two did the same thing but bear could move you proved his point, yo u can't be this stubborn.
@@Stouty because feints aren’t nearly as dependent on movement compared to blocking drags, it’s significantly harder to avoid drags without movement for example jumping over a dragged out overhead.
Guys guys: you're both wrong and sound like goobers, it's ok. Both feints and drags (in Mordhau at least) are unreadable. Experienced players "read" feints based on patterns, opponent's movement/footwork, timing, etc. but not the actual animation (animation cancelling) by itself.
@UCn40CSex-AHhFufvz7vhT-g Sorry I'll break it down for people with low IQ: notice how I put "read" in quotes, that signifies that I use the term loosely and with scepticism, it conveys that I do not think that what proceeds this word is actually reading feints at all. This implicitly says that using prediction (patterns) and the opponent's overall movement and footwork, and overall timing/tempo of the fight, to predict/guess if a feint is coming is in fact not the same thing as reading the animation by itself. I hope that clarifies it for you champ. Edit: it seems they removed their comment in shame after they reread my comment 10 times and finally understood what I am saying.
You need to move during the read otherwise it's guessing, if you follow the animation of your opponant with your body, you will have more time to react at the last moment.
Great video, people calls gambles on me a lot but don't realize I'm analyzing them almost fully (7000 + hours chiv 1 player) I think reading is simply looking at what your enemy is doing and analyzing it fully, to determine if you can punish them for a slow drag or a situation where acting on their feint would be unfavorable given the movement happening or even potential map objects around you. Key example being when someone tries to LMB you with a wall on their right side. They hit the wall, instead of you.
I feel like you guys are using weird terminology. I'd call what you call "reads" reaction. If someone can parry a feint mixup everytime they are reacting. If you slowed the game to 50% you could simply see wether the swing goes past the feint point and then react with a parry, but that clearly isn't possible. "Reading" I guess would be when you suss out your opponents psychology and intentions, a lot of people aren't complete dice rolls. People fall into patterns you can notice, higher level players can suss out those patterns. Theres a spectrum where a player might use a combination of guesswork and reading, the difference isn't always clear. I think what really happens at high levels is mitigation. Mitigating is using some action to make it where you don't have to read or guess. If you think someone might feint but aren't sure, you can chamber, even if your wrong you don't get punished (unless they drag). With drags you can read them with footwork, making the drag miss, but still blocking in case they accel.
>"Reading" I guess would be when you suss out your opponents psychology and intentions That's gambling > If someone can parry a feint mixup everytime they are reacting. Nobody can do that without cheating, much in the same way no player will hit every headshot
One thing I saw with the feints is that it does look noticeably better to watch. Everything that's happening seems to make sense. The looking to the sky nonsense to slow down your weapon looks awkward and totally counter intuitive, idk how people defend dragging, jesus christ. ALSO: One more thing to note, an attack that's proper will have the character sound off when making a real attack. Something I noticed when watching this, when you feint, your character doesn't make a noise.
not exactly, reading a feint leads to more "gamble" punishes while reading drags has to be done with footwork and lucky extended parries. the game is busted in favor of drag/accel still.
If you read a feint you wouldn't get a riposte because there was nothing to parry. The reward is your opponent loses stam and you can potentially increase that stam gap further by punishing (attacking quickly with the small initiative window that occurs after a feint)
@@Stouty I'm referring to reading a feint then parrying their attack (if it comes) Also are there any lessons from chiv 1 that could be applicable in this scenario in regards to spacing as a mitigation tool?
@@thejhonnie That’s not a reward cause if you parry a swing you lose more stam than the opponent due to stam drain. You can not read a feint and still get the parry, but if the opponent doesn’t commit you will just get hit
I honestly really like Chiv 2's solution to feints and drags since you're still rewarded for reading and hitting counters, but if someone does their burger king spinny flip drag you can still safely block and take the hit to stam and initiative rather than health. Makes fights more dynamic than the classic "first to fail 3 reads dies." As for the argument of how hard reads and 50/50s are different, For Honor's probably the best example since its parry system is entirely unreactable- you parry attacks at the same time they would be feinted, so the whole game is about reads and efficient use of option selects. I get how someone might find that engaging and it definitely broke the unbearable comp turtle meta, but functional or not for some people it can feel really fast and loose to actually play. Skills like animation reading and good reaction times are virtually useless. There's no concrete way to be absolutely certain you're making the right play, because your opponent might just have, like, an aneurysm and act in an unexpected way you couldn't account for. Ultimately a melee game is forced to strike some form of compromise between everything being entirely readable and relying on players making mechanical mistakes for combat to not turn into a turtle-fest (something Dark Souls pvp does pretty well), and entirely unreactable, relying on players making incorrect reads of their opponent. There's finesse to designing in either direction but I'm starting to think it comes down to just two very different avenues of interest, and there's not really a good one size fits all solution for the melee slasher genre. Also ur mad cuz bad
@@Stouty I understand your interpretation. I think there should be a clear visible distinction between a resetting weapon coming off a feint and a weapon beginning to swing. Regardless of the angle from which you’re viewing it. The purpose of the feint is nullified if they look like they’re still committing to the attack when they’re not.
I agree with you but I think we can prove this. Gather some players and have them 1v1. Count every hit that isn’t blocked and see whether more hits come after a feint or after a riposte. This would Test during real fight conditions and if feints were so strong we would see them the most.
I have like 50 hours in this game and have stopped playing a couple years ago, so I’m not coming at this thinking I know what I’m talking about. This could all be dumb thought but what do I know. I feel like there’s a way to stop this argument and come to a conclusion. Statistics. You (or anybody really) should just record statistics. You could control for any variables you would like, then gather people for the statistics. Record/Stream for validity reasons, and then simply let people do their thing. After everyone’s done, go over the statistics and argue about the statistics. You could do this with differing skills for each player (noob, adequate, etc etc), you could make an ahk script that randomly faints or doesn’t for the purpose of the study, you could control for variables such as movement, no movement, jumping, no jumping etc etc, there are many things you could do and this would make the argument move forward from where it is now. The main problem I saw with your video is simply sample size. In this video, when you are testing if feints are readable or not, there are many variables that surround this that could invalidate the results. A majority of these variables could be corrected simply by increasing the sample size (instead of 10 swings, 100 I mean). Visibility, ping, UI, position, anything really, should be corrected for. And in this video, the statistics you come up with are pretty invalid simply because of the many variables that affect the gameplay. I don’t blame you for this. You did this on a whim, nobody should expect you to write up a whole fucking study out your ass while on stream someday. I just feel like this could all be finished by some good and honest statistics. If you are right, the statistics will follow. If you are wrong, the statistics won’t follow. Very clear cut straight to the truth. Then, everybody can come to the same conclusion instead of arguing all day.
whilst sporadically done, I feel the results were conclusive. We had the best players in the game feinting each other and whilst standing still we were able to read a significant number, including 20~ consecutive reads. That simply wouldn't happen if reading was impossible. Perhaps there's a brand of stab feint that once perfected is unreadable but that's what chambers are for I guess
@@Stouty you're probably right that you could read feints, I'm just saying if this was done with a good sample size with different people and differing skills etc etc, it would be more conclusive than this. I think this isn't conclusive enough because it was done on a whim and wasn't "professional". There's lots of variables that affect the results that aren't corrected for. The main problem is just the sample size for me though. With things like this, you have to test lots of people doing lots of things with lots of other people. This removes the majority of variables that could affect the result in a negative way. But maybe it doesn't need to be that "professional" to prove, I don't play this game so I wouldn't know.
@@Azeroh I don't expect everyone can read feints as well as I can, much in the same way I can't hit the headshots that pro fps players can. What we can see however is that a surprising number of feints can be read at the hardest distance possible (facehug) without any movement by top players. If the hardest feints can be read then no doubt the easier ones can be also, where less skilled players will fare better
@@Stouty cool, i don't know what this has to do with what I said though. I don't have a leg in this fight I'm just giving a solution that I think would allow both sides to come to a conclusion, or at least make the argument more honest and come closer to the truth.
I picked up Chiv 2 from the steam sale after dropping 1000. My biggest issue is how they changed morphs from mordhau. In mordhau you had a chamber which would punish a morph. If you attempt the chamber equivalent in Chiv 2 against the first part of a morph you get hit
@@scienceyo5064 Yes, especially when the mechanics in question do not promote interesting gameplay. As demonstrated in this video, ripostes are unreadable
@@scienceyo5064 The game's mechanics are dumbed down even with drags and accels. If you actually want to play a deeper pvp game that's taxing mechanically AND mentally, just play an actual fighting game that was DESIGNED to have two people go at each other for generations like Mortal Kombat or Tekken. SFV was the definition of dumbing down the game and EVERY pro hated that game. Nobody wants the game dumbed down. They want it to not look dumb and feel dumb.
So, yes. But I think there’s an argument to be made that mitigation and actual reading have very similar results in actual fights and both require similar skill.
Mitigating drags doesn't take much skill other than early parrying then running away, the skill cap for reading feints is seemingly much higher as demonstrated in this experiment
Fair enough to the first bit, but this experiment doesn’t say a thing about the skill cap for mitigating drags, it just says that they can’t be read like a feint can.
I really dont understand how can someome play Chivalry after Mordhau.. That physics is sooo wierd here and feels absolutely unreal. It can have a huge amount of other super stuffs, but is not a physics the main thing?
To be honest, nothing helps you read feints like listening to your opponent. It's the same rule as in the first chivalry, no shout = feint. Kisses Stouts!
Think you guys need to consider distance. The closer the enemy is to you while feinting the harder it becomes to read. Sometimes it’s impossible and does become luck based. But if you use footwork and keep distance from the feinter, I feel it becomes easier to read the attacks.making it not imbalanced.
@@Stouty sorry, I main executioner, so at close distance I usually go for a kick. Isn’t kick the fastest move on the game, making it the best option in almost every up close situation
okay lets be honest, the animation itself isn't what's readable, its the situation and the player. how far are they, what weapon are they using, is there a pattern, do they feint more often than other players, have you punished them for feinting before, how much stamina do they have, how likely are you to be able to hit a chamber accel punish based on positioning, etc. bears point blank animation here is genuinely unreadable just purely when it comes to human reaction time, fastest human reaction time is 87 ms... (not counting reflexive because visual/auditory input is necessary to consider it a "true read") in order to true read bears feint you'd need to make a decision based on all availible information on weather or not to parry at LEAST 87 ms before the hitbox connects with your character. if you rewind 87 ms or 5 frames from when bear hits, its well before release or grunt. unless bear has some sort of visual tell on weather or not he's feinting, then up until that point the animations an the sound are entirely identical. THAT PARTICULAR feint is unreadable, even by the fastest athlete in the world. you both have your points, but dragging is a crappy alternative to boring stam drain simulator and the weight of responsibility falls on the devs to come up with an alternative mechanic that's sufficiently nuanced in order to keep people entertained. simple as. TLDR you're both oversimplifying the problem.
btw this is specific the the 0 footwork point blank paxe overhead, just because the time between release and hit is so short its practically instant (you can make it readable with movement and leanback)
@@Stouty yeah sorry it needed clarification i was talking specifically about the paxe feint. all i meant was bear was technically correct with the 50/50 claim, but only in a vacuum. if you take footwork away from someone defending drags and take feintspam and mindgames away from the guy feinting, then you're testing something entirely different and the results have no practical application on real life scenarios. (i think it applies to both) in reality people have learned to adapt to the bullshit, and there's not an alternative game yet that makes up for mordhau's shortcomings and still remains engaging at top tier play, so i don't blame people who defend drags, they're better than stam duels.
@@noggin8216 Not sure, I think with enough practice I'd get to reading similar chains as I did towards the end vs Redblue as I started off vs Bear. Even so, I still chained together 5~ consecutive reads and Bear was being a weirdo missing half of his actual swings on top of spamming them. Either way, the success rate of me vs Bear's feints is leagues ahead of Bear vs my swing manip As for feint spam - in a real fight he would never get to spam 10 feints off, I would punish the first feint. Watch any of my recent duel videos to see it in action
@@Stoutyyeah, the argument was pretty pointless. it was interesting to see redblue squirm from a messer drag, i thought i was just bad for not being able to read overhead accels
I always wondered if a possible way to fix dragging and the high level back n forth counter feinting is a sort of "held counter". Pretty much, like normal counters in Chiv 2, when you attack while blocking your attack specifically becomes a counter. But now players can hold that counter attack as long as they want (maybe it drains STAM like holding block). The only way for the attack to actually go through into its release phase (when damage is applied) it must be hit with the correct countered attack from an enemy, otherwise its interrupted, or if the player never gets hit, the attack will go into a recovery when they let go of the button. This for one makes it so as long as you learn patience, you can hold your counter until a dragging opponent hits you, as long as you did guess the counter attack correctly. For second, this will practically replace the whole counter feint meta, as you just couldn't feint out of the counter anymore. its either you guess correct and hold until you counter, or you guess wrong and get hit while you're in recovery of canceling the counter back into block or whatever other action. Tell me what might be bad about this, cause I would like to hear if it can ever be a system in perhaps a future melee game.
i found you whilst you were playing darker and darker. i tuned in to your stream yesterday though, and all I heard was you and bear bickering and becoming argumentative over the simplest of things, are you 2 friends?
![I.N "HALLUCINATION" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/n5B5q1Hwt_U/mqdefault.jpg)
arguing with bear on his own terms
Lol
Are you Takara of 2009's FOnline?
@@smiechu47 yep played with /v/ and ran a big guns build
bear is a escaped lab experiment
@@KingTakara I was there as well, o7
it's literally insane how several people can read 10% of the swings in manip but then read 90% of the feinted swings and they can still argue about it
feints are definitely readable, but once read, the player who read the feint must be rewarded, if not, bad game design
well mordhau rewards you with stamina advantage
He said riposte are better than feint in every single way in vanilla
@@vBlue-someone should feint him with polehammer
@@felipdn3329 resourceful playstyle becomes obsolete due to stam on hit mechanic, it rewards bad players who chamber and feint all their stam away
wrong feints are not consistently readable 🥰
i have this same 50/50 vs read argument with a friend all the time about fighting games. a 50/50 is a random decision, a read is an educated guess based on what your opponent has done, what they have yet to do, how you've conditioned them to react, how they've conditioned you to react and a bunch more facets that make a read a lot different and interesting then a guess or 50/50.
reading in this genre doesn't refer to guessing
++++ yes yes especially the conditioning part so true
yea in this context read means perceiving your opponents option then reacting accordingly. e.g. a read in other genres would be thinking "my opponent feinted twice and it didnt work, he probably wont feint next time" then early parrying. in melee read means properly visualizing that your opponent hasnt feinted, then reacting with a parry in that miniscule timeframe.
50/50 chance of winning when you play the lottery, you either win the lottery or you dont
@@thestralner6335 so you spent all of those words to literally just say reading = reacting.
Reading is as OP stated, an educated guess.
To use an FPS game as an example. If you see an enemy run behind a wall, and there's bullet penetration, then you would shoot where you think they are around, even though you can't actually see them.
A pure guess is just running around a corner and automatically shooting even though you have no reason that an enemy should be there.
i love hearing stouty and who i assume is bear fighting for the time to speak waiting for each other to stop talking and listen haha
This Is What A Healthy Disagreement Looks Like
HI LOTH!!!!! (feints are readable)
@@Stouty Really wish this kind of discourse was more common in the US
stop farming me on hatchet
Healthy disagreement: bear calls stouty braindead and impossible to argue with, because he didn't agree with him after he repeated the same bad argument like 10 times
Man I appreciate that yall are experimenting with this stuff and are still working on deducing what's not skill/best for the mechanics in the genre. Best of luck on your game homie.
It doesn't even matter if you fall for one feint every now and then in this feint spam experiment, in a real fight you're just going to punish them instantly after reading the feint. Bear was hard coping.
Every time someone called me a gambler for not falling for fakes made me just have a brain aneurysm, is it really just super dumb luck if you can do it consecutively? Honestly never thought too deep about it because it just seemed like something all the whiners spouted when losing, but thought most people would agree that drags are honestly just unfair. I never felt cheated out of a fight because someone killed me by faking.
You are right, some people are better at reading than others. In mordhau I have fought a player who would always enter with a stab to overhead morph in facehug range. I would kick him every time he entered and he lost every fight. After a couple weeks he just refused to fight me, he never learnt. I met someone that would always gamble stab with rapier and shield, I would just chamber and quickly accel overhead and catch him every time. He never changed and stopped playing when updates ruined his play style, he would ONLY play that and had 600 hours, I never saw him in a duel or 3v3 game.
That's an interesting point if I am understanding correctly. I think duelist (you) see the game in a different way than average players (shield guy). I hardly care enough to try and analyze an enemy's attack style. I may after like our 10th isolated battle if they have unique armour on, but for the most part I would imagine the average player is reactive to the person in front of them and does not assume much.
the outcome of this experiment shows that reading the 0 stamina cost riposte drag isn't a 50/50 because it's in fact a 20/80
i love the double read at the end right after he says that you cant read lol
You mean after he gets hit like 30 times lmao?
Do you also love the part where he keeps eating the feints then tells him not to do it like that like an aikido instructor getting smacked around and wanting to change it to his own terms so he can apply the fabricated facts?
I’m not sure what he means. Having the patience to wait that split second to read if an attack is truly committed is definitely a skill. Seems like homie is used to spamming counters. It’s crazy how often I’m able to mix someone up by not countering or riposting, just a simple block followed by some footwork or a feint baits out so many misses.
How many fluke chambers this man got
I do this from time to time because I recognized it as a flaw of my own, definitely underrated to occasionally give up an initiative play like a riposte. Totally can melt your opponents brain for a second
It’s sometimes impossible or very hard to expect a feint due to the amplified speed of some weapons bc of accels especially at a higher skill ceiling like stouty’s, and many more times it’s based on reaction time- and for some the grunt sound effect. Predicting a feint is pretty situational.
(Also, I’m not sure if I repeated some of your statements, just saying how I feel about it).
This is why (with a fast enough weapon) chambering can dominate feint situations. I read most of my opponents swings and if I see a crazy accel overhead coming, I go for the overhead chamber. Whether they actually follow up on the feint with a swing or not, you now have initiative and your opponent has to either parry (or, if they’re fast enough) chamber your swing back. Chambering is not the absolute best option for every encounter because it can make you easy to read/feel out in combat, but it’s a great way to put acute pressure on your opponent and can help you put them on their heels very quickly.
will bear get %50 of this videos revenue
The idea feints are rng is wrong but I have to agree with Accel/decel being borderline RNG particularly when you can do both in an animation.
The whole thing could be resolved with speed based damage but apparently losing a limb to a sword lightly touching you is fun.
Drags should deal 60% less damage. Accels should deal 30% less damage
@@Paronakor drags could do less damage but take less stam and accels could be vis versa.
@@Paronakthat’s so retarded
I can see the commits too - you can read them. It's a "50/50" until you see it.
The trouble is that the window of opportunity to parry is like .2 seconds.
Which is a trainable skill like aim in shooters.
@@paintorian2064 tell that to people with like 250ms reaction time lol.
FYI the average is like 225.
@@spizC cant make game for everyone. Should we add generous autoaim in shooters for onearmed people?
@@paintorian2064 Ahh yes, so anyone with >AVERAGE< or just below average reaction time can go fuck themselves xD
bear doesn't understand what a scientific experiment is
Feint reading in Mordhau pushes the limits of human capabilities, but ripostes and drags are simply not competitive.
Two handers/large weapons have 250ms between feint lockout and damaging release, which gives you 250ms to read the attack. (50ms before windup ends = feint lockout, 200ms after release begins = damaging release)
So far I have tested Greatsword, Poleaxe, and Rapier.
Rapier has 225ms. Every weapon's feintable windup is the same, windup minus 50ms, but early release times may vary, such as rapier's. Its early release lasts 175ms instead of 200.
I will do more testing on more weapons tomorrow.
250ms sounds like more than enough time to read an attack, human reaction time can get down into the 150ms, right? True, however this is for simple reactions. Complex reactions like feint reading are a different story, add about 50-200ms to your usual reaction time depending on your skill, and, of course, add your ping to it as well. Most players are playing on 20-40ms, because that's really the best you can ask for if you aren't lucky enough to live next to a server.
A simple reaction is what human reaction time is generally measured with, and is a straight path, like clicking a button when a color flashes on your screen. There's a linear pathway in your brain: yielding for color > color flashes > ... > CLICK!!!
A complex reaction is not linear, it has conditions.
In Mordhau, you are not waiting for a color to flash to click, you're looking for a condition. If they feint, don't click. If they don't feint, click. It sounds simple, but it's not. Your brain needs to have a good sense of the timing and rhythm of the particular weapon you're dealing with so it can recognize the moment the attack is committed. That's not the hard part, the hard part is everything that your brain has to do that comes after that, you need to analyze a lot of visual information and a lot of different factors and ambiguities come into play, your brain makes last moment second guesses such as "was that a wiggle or did the feint animation begin?" "is that movement normal? wait what point of the windup am i in again?" which just add on more and more precious milliseconds to your reaction.
Once your brain has made its decision, there's still more to do. It needs to tell your nervous system and the muscles in your hand to either STOP or GO, and POISING to do one or the other is one of the big reasons complex reactions add a lot more time than simple ones, because when you're clicking a button when a color flashes, your finger is poised and ready to slam down that mouse button at the earliest signal, but the process of telling it whether or not to in complex reactions takes more time.
For simple reactions, your reaction time is: sensory input processing time + "did the color just change? yes? okay" + FIRE
For reading a feint in Mordhau, your reaction time is: sensory input processing time + timing errors + confirmation for visual ambiguities + final confirmations + sorting which signal to fire + FIRE
The point is, reading the unreadable in Mordhau is absolutely possible, but it's definitely pushing the limits of human capabilities.
Riposting and drags are too liquid to break down analytically like this as they contain many more variables than a feint. When parrying a riposte, you are basically guessing how they're going to footwork, counter footworking accordingly, and then timing your parry to protect you as close to right before the earliest POSSIBLE moment they could hit you in the next instant, as well as adjusting for other factors like how do they tend to footwork, do they have any patterns, am I even reading their animation correctly, they're human so what are the chances they're ACTUALLY going to hit me at the earliest possible moment they can if they accel, etc.
Ripostes are an extremely complicated attack to defend against, and while they are fun, I don't think they belong in a competitive fighting game that wants to take its competition seriously. Because while reading feints as it stands right now is extremely difficult, it's at least one dimensional. Drags are not competitive, broken down they are far too chaotic.
very useful information
Considering average reaction time of a gamer who plays every day is around 180-200ms, doesn't that prove some things are just literally unreactable in the heat of the game? Let's say you're a god level CS player with insane reactions. You can hit the CTs crossing mid doors on dust 2 EVERY TIME. You need around 170-180ms reaction time for that. And literally nobody keeps up that level of reaction time every single time they react. So even with those reactions, you are unable to react to stuff in Mordhau for example. And I think there's only one big culprit to this. The animations are WAY TOO wonky and goofy. You have to condition yourself to literal excrement level in terms of animation and gameplay design to be good at Mordhau. It's no wonder people quit.
@@Inaluogh Yeah basically. There's two sides of this argument, there's those who believe that this inherent masking of animations is part of the game and what makes it skill based, and there are those who don't understand how something like this can be skill based in the first place. Which, both sides are right in their own way, but the real conclusion is that Mordhau is niche, and likely always will be.
u are a great friend, I would lose my shit in front of a person like this and lose a friend in the process.
That's starting to make sense now, I literally cannot parry any of those ripostes because they just seem to be instant, especially the accel ones. I try to wait for it and see if they drag or accel but the accel one is so quick its impossible for me. I do better with the drag ones but still not a great success rate. I am learning to read feints, I think that just takes a lot of practice and learning the animations. So I'd say I agree with you Stouty.
Worst debate I've ever seen
I don't understand how a person could watch the whole video, or better yet be present for the entirety of this "test", and still come away with the opinion of "yep both are 50/50"
Reading feints IS something higher skill players can do. It's another form of skill gaping, and it's definitely a real thing. It's even a thing irl hence why there are things like world champion fighters and journyman fighters.
ify on in-game part reading isn't even close to the main diff between journeymen and champs lol
Reading a feint is way easier than reading a riposte-drag just because a feint has one outcome - the opponent's animation stops. With a riposte, there are a dozen ways the animation could go in an analog of WTF is happening - are they dragging to my feet? Acceling to my head? Faking an accel but pulling back a long drag? And with the riposte, you have a split second to find out the flavor of their response. But once your mind can see an animation stop, you can simply not parry to survive a feint. It just takes some focus to identify the event.
'you cant read this'' as hes reading it
In Mordhau,
When someone feints you and it gets read, the bookworm gets a bit of stam advantage, as well as initiative (depending on the speed of the response). Also, in the taking of initiative, you can start a feint matching storm, where the duelers hot potato initiative back and forth to each other.
Note: If someone tries to steal initiative after reading a feint, they are still susceptible to a kick if they're within range (Maybe this is considered a gamble, but others call it footwork gaming, and I consider it that too).
At the end of the day:
Mordhau has a lineup of mechanics that are based around feints and reading that revolves around the initiative and tempo system (buffers). So this makes feints more skill based than all of the mitigation going on with swing manipulation.
Personal note:
I found that once I grasped the fundamentals and started to get a feel for how high level mord players abuse these very fundamentals, I was able to read their feints but not their swing manipulation, even after hundreds of hours in the game.
I would love to see "read/reading/readable" defined because I have a completely different definition of the word in my head from fighting games.
In this case it's about possiblity to tell what's going on by looking on the enemy animations
No guesswork, it's being able to identify what the opponent's action is, after it starts, and react accordingly before their action finishes
In fighting games, reading is more like recognizing your opponents patterns and pre-emptively reacting to what you *think* they're going to do
@@000Mazno000 Pattern recognition is still important in duels. In a casual match not nearly as much. However when you are fighting best of 5 you absolutely will key in to your opponents fighting style and tendencies if you are skilled. This becomes even more important at the highest levels... Not as much with Mordhau because it's relatively small, but with any competitive sport, including fighting games, studying your opponents matches is a crucial component of success. Because of pattern recognition among other things.
@@ZaximusRex I never meant to imply it wasn't important, just meant to distinguish what Stouty means by "reads" in this case
Sadly, IMO the red parries sort of makes it more RNG based to some degree,
as there is a window of it happening depending on the server and the two opponents pings will decide how big that window will be.
But that accounts for most, including feinting.
How bear is able to still argue about this after all that is lowkey impressive
Good thing mordhau will never have a massive esports scene as so many mechanics are janky and broken.
Arguing with bear is like talking to a wall
Feinting is something you can condition and adapt. Dragging is deceptive.
Glad to see you're doing some Mordhau content. You have some awesome reads. Feints are harder for me to deal with. Drags I feel like I can mitigate easier with footwork
Even in Chiv 1 feints were readable with most of the 2h weapons and that was so cancerous for feints that people vote kicked you for using them in pubs. Never going to work 100% of the time but there's clear skill gaps in feint reads just like with anything else in these games. "reading" your opponents mind is another big part of feint reading as well
Gamble everything > all other options
This was like an Aikido master in a streetfight. No youre not supposed to hit me like that xD
My thoughts exactly. When Bear puts him in a feint vortex, he just tells him he's doing it wrong even though he's got him trapped...
i reached diamond 2 w/ 500 hours and im starting to see what yall are talking about now. when it comes to drags
The true answer to repost drags is early chamber as though they're going to accel and if they do you get the chamber , if they feint you get tempo, if they kick you can kick or ftp, if they drag you can feint, footwork and chamber again.
except chftp costs 30 stam (was nerfed over a year ago)
@@Stouty well if you're a true degenerate (like me) you might consider using the dodge perk. When your opponent swings you try the early chamber and dodge sideways towards their swing, if they accel you get your chamber, if you don't get your chamber because they footwork or drag you immediately dodge again in the opposite direction forcing a hit before the drag hits you.
It's not an optimal strategy but I've been vote kicked numerous times by players who don't know this trick as it looks like I've removed the turn cap from their perspective.
btw its great that you comment and interact with the community :)
i think there is a massive miss understanding regarding feints.
Feints are inherently not readable they are however predictable.
There is no visual que nor a audio que that would indicate a feint.
Drags and feints aren't comparable, With drags you see the intend before it happens via the body positioning, By repeating this over and over and again, You eventually gain muscle memory and you will more or less automatically react to certain clues.
We however can predict feints, I think that's what people fail to understand.
You will for example find it much easier to read feints from someone that you have fought a billion times, Hence in the video you also required some time to adjust to it, So you find a pattern in the way the person will attack you and then you can make a calculated guess for when the feint is coming, Though its still a guess and not actual reading, Since well there is no way to tell whether you are going to be feinted or not.
It may appear when you have played these games for thousands of hours as if you can read feints. However its an illusion, All that is happening is that you have memorized many different play styles and because of it you are in a much better position to predict feints.
>Feints are inherently not readable they are however predictable.
Now explain how I predicted 20 feints in a row in the final chapter
@@Stouty I already explained that, Its du to your experience.
Sometimes you will have moments like that, Where you can predict consistently, We all have them.
But more often then not, That's not the case and it will be kind of like that first section of the video.
What your implying is that you have the ability to react within a single frame, Process it and make your decision on it, That is simply not true Stouty.
That would make you beyond super human.
Not only you, There are plenty of people that have these moments, I cant give much input on Mordhau but people in chivalry do have also those moments.
So are we all super human?
I don't think so, Its all within our past experiences that we can make calculated guesses which allows us from time to time to deal with feints so well.
Like as if we never get stomped, Because someone randomly start feint spamming un-expected, I know it has happen to me and im certain this has happen to you as well :P .
Its not even debatable, Its just science and biology, We are not fast enough to see it, process it and then make a decision all within just a couple of frames time.
@@zanza8197 your argument is that it's unreadable hence a 50/50 guess and I somehow guessed correctly 20 times consecutively, take a stats course then get back to me
@@Stouty Again stouty its not even a debatable matter.
You simply can not See, Process and react to it all within a couple frames.
Those 20 feints are completely meaning less as well, As it was in a controlled situation.
You where quite literally setup for them.
Then you proceed on believing that you have super human abilities.
So the real question is, Why are you playing these games?
Obviously you are beyond any human,
Surely you can be a yet fighter pilot or even a astronaut, I doubt that they would find the theory/studies important after all, You would be record braking when it comes to your reaction speed and awareness far beyond any elite unit that the world has seen, You also have a very unique brain, As it sends out signals far beyond any living creature, That exist and has existed.
Perhaps you have a drivers licence.
If so, you could be f1 racer, and easily out compete the other competitors.
@@Stouty A bit late just stumbled across this again, I never said its a 50/50 guess, i would argue that the odds are far worse then that, Initially it would be more like 0/100, you can increase the odds with experience, If someone attacks once and then feints and does this consistently well then its a fair guess that the next cycle he would do it again significantly increasing the odds and if he wont change his approach you can be 100% accurate.
When you say that you read it that would imply that you have feedback and react to it, Which is simply not the case with feints, Same problem exist for handle hits you cant see them at all even in video replays its hard to tell.
I dare say with confidence that whenever you fight with someone that does not feint he can feint you with 100% accuracy, Your own videos even demonstrate this perfectly as most of the times you do fall for them, You did this test in a controlled environment you know they where coming, You know the play style of the person.
The whole skill in reading drags is footworking.
That's not reading, that's like saying I "read" a feint by double parrying after falling for the feint
@@Stouty this is an overly technical way of looking at the situation. What use case is there to stand still and hard hard read a feint?
Even that situation isnt static, standing still is a way to bait a kick. Standing still is still a "soft" read in that sense
@@Stouty Not particularly, I feel like footwork allows for that window that players have to read swing manipulation. Double parrying is only able to be done if you parry early, or the enemy mistimes their next swing after the successful parry. Using footwork should be the standard, it allows for a higher skill ceiling in duels.
@@True-Ru nobody uses footwork to read swing manip, they use it to run away after early parrying. That's gambling
@@Stouty and this is all Mordhau has become now
My conclusion on mordhau since 2020 , you need to early parry every single swings otherwize if you read correctly you will have a red parry.
Get optical internet - I thought I removed the red parry command when I first tried it
Only if you have bad internet. Mixing in a chamber every now and again really improves your skill, as well as parrying later if you read it well. Parrying early allows for more susceptibility for falling for drags
@@Stouty man wtf u talking about. I played an year or near at server which was in 1 kilometer from my home, that was 4-8 ping, AND STILL THERE WAS REDPARRYS
@@REtoX_NSK I know, that's why I said at first
"why do you want to remove a feature?" bruh, you also want to remove a feature
drags and accels can come out of a riposte but feints cant, just knowing when a person can feint already makes it easier to read sometimes
The Dark and Darker playtest is over... Stouty resorts back to bullying men with bigger foreheads than his own..
Bear = Avg 2023 mordhau cope machine
Did you not play chiv? You have to mitigate the threat of another players offense, Through creating distance or other means. Ripostes and Feints should NOT by any means be readable standing still not mitigating a single thing.
and yet we see that feints are readable at such distances, whereas ripostes are not
@@Stouty The difference is you can use directional footwork on ripostes, Because the riposte is stuck in the animation you can abuse movement to run into or out of the draw tracer, With feints you cannot be directional as the animation could be a feint, morph, ect. So distance is the only form of mitigation.
Again I am not sure what comp mod EU uses, And in vanilla's current state i agree everything is 50/50, and the state of the game is terrible, But assuming offense is strong, All the ideals of Mitigation still apply.
@@colton204 I would recommend taking a stats course if you think feints are 50/50 after watching this video. What are the odds of guessing a coin toss correctly 20 times consecutively?
@@Stouty The problem with the video is you are not entertaining the reality of the mechanics.
Feints are only readable given distance to the beginning of the animation release, Aka without any form of artificial mitigation or distance they are consistently unreadable.
Ripostes travel on a consistent path meaning as soon as they windup a riposte we understand where the animation is going to start and end, If you force yourself into their bubble and punish neutral manip by threatening to run into every swing, You can consistently mitigate pretty much all manip especially opn 500 release weapons,
Zwi feels best for manip because of the 525 all weapons used to have until the devs ruiend vanilla balance.
I'd love to have another conversation on this in discord if you are willing, I cannot explain perfectly over text.
@@colton204 OK but how come I read 20 of Redblue's feints in a row whilst stationary?
I can drag you in next time I'm streaming but I think the above question sort of ends the debate
but the thing is even if feints are more readable in a lan setting and stoutly could parry 75% of feints in a lan setting, that is not marketable to the public. Average ping is around 20 to 40 ping depending on your location, some people play even higher and will never get an opportunity to play mordhau at a lan. The only way to make feints readable for a feint reliant game is to have client side parrying. In the end, swing manip and feints need to be countered with proper use of footwork and reading, not just reading like shown in this test.
There are other potential online solutions, like roll back in fighting games
Watching two players with thousands of hours on a game telling eachother they haven’t encountered tutorial-level game mechanics is funny
in my opinion drags are fun and rewarding and i just started mordhau 2 or 3 days ago and im just even learning how to throw them but already i think they are fun maybe for a top player like you they are dull and repetitive and i understand how a casual player might hate dying to something like that but i still think drags have a place somewhere in fpm and i also agree feints are quite readable and arent rewarding enough to be used over drags if someone could find a balance which i cannot and have both be in the game i think it would be a great fpm game for casuals and also comp players but your solution of removing drags or atleast limiting their effectiveness seems like the best option love you stouty youre my baby daddy
It just doesn't fit with what Mordhau was striving to be from the start. Their whole motto was "fights that look like fights" and decided to allow stuff like that to exist anyways
bro i cant watch the segment of trying to read feints imma punch my monitor lmfao
Swing
chose to swing or feint
was it read correctly?
score it
reset
swing - Not
SWING SWING SWING FEINT SWING FEINT FEINT SWING SWING SLOW DOWN SWING SWING SWING
i think a common misconception of people who aren't familiar with fighting games is the idea that everything should be reactable. we've seen the affects of this in release for honor where high level matches would literally be two Warlords staring at each other because the person who makes a move loses. competitive fighting games *require* an element of guessing and unreactability, otherwise defense will always win. not to mention that, when you have 50/50 situations, you are still using data based on how the opponent has played to tilt the odds in your favour.
i think this community using the word "gamble" has done irreparable damage LOL
It really sickens me when I see people using terms like reads, mind gaming, option select, footsies and such without even knowing where it comes from or the meaning of them. The 3000 hour Mordhau or Chiv "vet" would be demolished by a mid tier Sub Zero mixup in MK 11. But here's the thing, unreactable always existed. But it never was because the game's animations were designed so terrible it was basically abuse at that point. It was because of frame advantage, fast but less damaging light attacks that reset to neutral or shit like that. Being hit by something unreactable in a fighting game doesn't instantly take away half your health. The more damaging openers and setups are either more telegraphed, or easily avoided by using knowledge. I'll go back to MK 11 Sub Zero because the last time I played a fighting game it was that. Sub Zero ALWAYS wants to hit you low because that's the only way to open you up to a big damage combo for him. So blocking low the whole game, even eating overheads for the sake of keeping him from comboing is valid. Because as soon as you block, you are reset to neutral or can use a move with frame advantage. Mordhau is a massive clusterfuck in terms of what's neutral, what's an advantage or who's turn it is.
I think there's some misunderstanding of terminology, a read is a term used in fighting games this is where it comes from, a read is when you analyze patterns in your opponents behavior and you then act upon that behavior normally all fights start with guesses but better players will notice patterns and that's when they start to read. What the misunderstanding here is thinking read means it's reactable, reactable is when you analyze the animation itself to tell if it's one thing or another. It's pretty obvious that in Mordhau feints are unreactable they were designed that way same with many other games, but they are readable as to read someone is to know what they are going to do and act upon it. Reacting is visual, reading is mental. They are different mindsets and typically it's the people who can read the opponent that are better, while if you only look at the game visual and react most things are unreactable in all fighting games.
I know it's semantics to point out the definition, but to me it applies better context, and I fully believe the misunderstanding comes from the fact animations need to be readable (in this context saying an animation is readable means it's not hyper jank and your brain can actually understand what's going on, your eyes and brain are better at understanding things that look like they come from reality)
Sorry for the rant, just felt like adding the context and perspective.
TLDR;
Feints are Unreactable, but you can read them
Read = Mentally understanding the opponent knowing what they will do, example being common patterns the opponent likes to do.
React = seeing the animation visually and deciding what you will do from the visuals, in this videos case they define it as readability.
Animation Readability = The animation is fluid and follows the confines of reality, making it easier for the brain to understand.
we call reacting = reading in this genre and the final chapter of this video proves without a doubt they are reactable. How else did I react to 20 in a row?
@@Stouty You're actually the only person I've seen it call it reading, and I say unreactable to mean most people its unreactable, the average human reaction time is around 300ms but really high level comp players in most games like you, rank 1, have a much faster reaction time. So they are unreactable to majority of people but you and a lot of the top players it is reactable, most people who use unreactable as a term have it standing for something along the lines of "faster than 300ms" some people go a little lower cause the average person who likes games has a faster average.
I don't know about the Mordhau competitive scene as well as others just cause I rarely see stuff on it aside from really early footage, so I will admit if most comp Mordhau players call a reaction "a read" then I am wrong, although this is the first time I've ever heard someone in any genre call it a read instead of a reaction. Medieval Melee has been one of my all time favorite genres alongside all kinds of fighting games for years, and I like to follow it closely, so it is a little weird to hear it called read by one person and not majority.
I love your content nontheless, to the point I thought I subscribed forever ago, keep up the good work, sorry for the long response hope it wasn't a problem reading.
@@beatdeath9962 np, we call the fighting game style "reads" gambles in this genre, aka guessing. Good players can gamble at better times through pattern recognition as you mentioned but the top players can read the animation itself
@@Stouty to me it mostly seems like Mordhau specifically twist a lot of terminology that has been set in stone for years, cause I even hear the classic terminology in Chivalry, M&B, and a few others, they just add on the genre specific terms like Drags. Otherwise its all fine just kinda funny to think about
Feints are readable? Ill cross out one bit of cope, swap it for another
omfg during the beginning conversation, i was thinking yall were talking in chiv terms and was confused. when it cut to mordhau it made a lot more sense (i was confused in understanding what yall stances were)
i've never seen so much copium 😭
Hi legend
Happy new year
I played a lot of For Honor and there was a lot of feint to soft feint action and thought people often call it gamble to read its more like a psychology battle to try and understand what your opponent thinking
"Ok so he threw 3 straight hits he'snot gona make the 4th"
And my favourite thing in fights is to use acsels and drags among side feints to manipulate what my enemy expect and its really fun
That's why i'm barely a violet diamond (idk the name)
I also bought chiv 2 and its really fun! Thank you for all the videos you made about this game they made me buy it for a new year and i dont regret
P.S.
Do you have any vid on a comfortable controls to adjust after mordau?
yessir check my guide playlist
For Honor is literal casino gameplay alas. The variables are so small that there is a good chance you can make a chain of 4 or 5 correct decisions, win and get biased that you "read" the enemy.
dragging in chiv 2 is soo much easier to read than in mord, its so unbelievably janky in mord
i support you stouty, keep up the fight
Every time someone cries about my feints again while using manipulation, i'll send them this vid link. I find feints to be an actual fun part of the game which even hands weaker players to stand a chance against better players.
To be fair i'm not too much against wep manip either though i can see how it affects newer/worse players.
I agree with Stouty on this one.
You'll send them a link in which the guy says multiple he's not giving him time to think and can't read the feints? Kinda like how it always happens lmao??
Bear crazy one swing manip
But what would combat without drags look like? Very hard to imagine in a Chiv / Mordhau environment, because everything is about timing and drags / accels are there for throwing the timing off. Remove them and you have "who has better ping to get least reds trying to read feints" left. At least on a high level. Also, how would it work? You literally can't stop drags from being a thing unless you remove swing manipulation completely. Lock the players viewport once attacking and even restrict his movement because you can still delay and accelerate by moving left / right. I think you'll need to come up with something completely different to actually get rid of them for good.
it would look like combat dev blog 2 presumably
This reminds me of the minecraft videos with Obama, Biden, and Trump all arguing but they're still great friends
Feints cost stamina and can be punished heavily with chambers. If a player tries to chamber a drag he will either miss and get hit/parry and waste even more stamina or just chamber regulary and get hit by the next accel/drag
This is why you chamber morph into feint into accel, then cry yellow tears of stamina ^^
wow they are in VC together so cute the community is healing
i think most of the time if youre fighting a good player their accels will be placed in such a way that it hits you as soon as it goes into release, so you dont realistically have a chance to read. most of the time when you parry an accel its because you can see where they are pointing and you can guess that its not going to be a drag/feint. if you want mordhau to have readable attacks you should probably have a bigger window after release and before it hits, during which you can actually read that its not a feint and wether its a drag or accel.
If a swing hits you directly after release, it isn't neutraled at all, and can easily be read by their body position and way their character is facing. I agree some weapons its very difficult to see though, thats why chamber-feints can work very well if you haven't been up against them a lot
@@True-Ru i dont think body position gives away everything, because although its hard, you can still move your body sideways for an accel and feint at the last second or do a late riposte drag that convincingly looks like you are doing a fat accel.
You can definitely make an educated guess if someone's gonna feint which could be considered as reading but it's also a little risky bc you could be wrong
that's a gamble, not a read. You can't gamble 20 times in a row correctly
STOUT THE GOAT
crushes brilliant game design at work
I saw about a 50% chance of reading a well executed feint on display there by Stouty, which is what bear was saying...that said, I also agree it is probably easier to read feints than swing manipulations, but at a certain skill level--which most good players can attain--it's just guesswork.
now explain how I read 12 in a row at the end
@ different player with a lower skill level, thereby performing below the skill threshold where it becomes rng. I'm not saying you're totally wrong, just that very well executed feints become unreadable at certain skill levels, but below that they certainly are readable. You're probably one of the best out there to read them, and you were not able to read bear's beyond a random distribution. This is even more true in a live environment where feints are spammed
@@biggieboomboom was the rank 1 player at the time of recording. Not to mention I definitely read (either parry of accel or read of feint) about 65% of bear's, possibly higher
@@Stouty just because he was rank 1 overall doesn't mean he was best at feinting. We would need a counter as well as a clear definition of an accurately read feint to determine the exact success rate with bear in the video. Also, you were imposing a constraint on his feinting by demanding that he not spam it. Point is, it didn't seem different from random chance at any reasonable level of statistical significance with him.
@@biggieboomboom Are you suggesting you can reach rank 1 without knowing how to feint? It's absurd on its face, let alone how most feint opponents will say it's "just press Q".
>not spam
In a real duel, you wouldn't be able to spam feints because I'd punish them. Testing spam feints doesn't really prove anything when trying to identify whether feints in a vacuum are readable.
>Point is, it didn't seem different from random chance
I suggest you take a stats course then
5:19 "red parries, I'm counting those as reads because in a lan environment I would have parried that" 7:07 "the fact that I'm seeing red parry numbers means I'm reading it"
Stouty smoking that sweet copium haha, if you red parry it means you parried too late whether you have 8ms or 80ms lmao
except on 0 ping the input would be accurate
@@Stouty While this is true I imagine 99% of the playerbase isn't playing on lan which means you need to parry earlier. I just disabled the red parry notification so I won't over think it.
sure but for the purpose of this test it made sense to count them
@@TheVocoderGuy its a measure of reaction time and whether or not someone could feasible react fast enough to parry a feinter. for the purpose of understanding swing manip client-side, it makes sense to compensate for ping that might offset results. though i agree that the argument being made by the mordhau players might hold up based on their personal experiences, there is an objective difference between luck and insane reaction speed
A read has you anticipating a move in your mind, you guess what they're going to do. A reaction is you seeing a move happening on the screen, with your brain registering it, followed by you countering accordingly. The latter is without making any prediction at all, purely your eyes and brain working together.
That's just now how we use the term in this scene, we have reads and gambles. Read = read animation = react
@@Stouty what’s it called when you learn someone’s patterns then? Why not just use the term react? What if I can’t react, and play solely off learning patterns?
@@mabyehesagamer that's gambling
Damn I would love to taste bears's teeth with my hands. Its like speaking towards a kid
Im going to agree with bear, if a feint is done by a half decent player it does feel like a gamble, all they have to do is fake accel and now i such little time to make an important decision in situation where its too fast too read, atleast with drags and accel's I can read the footwork and watch their weapon better. Feints feel like gambles.
10:00 yes he couldn't block the ripostes because he had to stand still, when you two did the same thing but bear could move you proved his point, yo u can't be this stubborn.
now explain how I read 12 feints in a row whilst stationary
@@Stouty because feints aren’t nearly as dependent on movement compared to blocking drags, it’s significantly harder to avoid drags without movement for example jumping over a dragged out overhead.
@@wiciwoo4268 you don't seem to understand what reading means
Guys guys: you're both wrong and sound like goobers, it's ok.
Both feints and drags (in Mordhau at least) are unreadable. Experienced players "read" feints based on patterns, opponent's movement/footwork, timing, etc. but not the actual animation (animation cancelling) by itself.
I’m just going to leave a comment here so I’m notified when Stouty responds.
@UCn40CSex-AHhFufvz7vhT-g Sorry I'll break it down for people with low IQ: notice how I put "read" in quotes, that signifies that I use the term loosely and with scepticism, it conveys that I do not think that what proceeds this word is actually reading feints at all. This implicitly says that using prediction (patterns) and the opponent's overall movement and footwork, and overall timing/tempo of the fight, to predict/guess if a feint is coming is in fact not the same thing as reading the animation by itself.
I hope that clarifies it for you champ.
Edit: it seems they removed their comment in shame after they reread my comment 10 times and finally understood what I am saying.
@@LaughingMan44 Damn throwing out insults right off rip, thats crazy.
@@happypunky4129 calling a stupid person being stupid and implying someone else is stupid isn't insulting them
@Fishy Go Boom thanks for the self portrait, but no one asked
You need to move during the read otherwise it's guessing, if you follow the animation of your opponant with your body, you will have more time to react at the last moment.
Great video, people calls gambles on me a lot but don't realize I'm analyzing them almost fully (7000 + hours chiv 1 player)
I think reading is simply looking at what your enemy is doing and analyzing it fully, to determine if you can punish them for a slow drag or a situation where acting on their feint would be unfavorable given the movement happening or even potential map objects around you.
Key example being when someone tries to LMB you with a wall on their right side. They hit the wall, instead of you.
19-33
I feel like you guys are using weird terminology. I'd call what you call "reads" reaction. If someone can parry a feint mixup everytime they are reacting. If you slowed the game to 50% you could simply see wether the swing goes past the feint point and then react with a parry, but that clearly isn't possible. "Reading" I guess would be when you suss out your opponents psychology and intentions, a lot of people aren't complete dice rolls. People fall into patterns you can notice, higher level players can suss out those patterns. Theres a spectrum where a player might use a combination of guesswork and reading, the difference isn't always clear.
I think what really happens at high levels is mitigation. Mitigating is using some action to make it where you don't have to read or guess. If you think someone might feint but aren't sure, you can chamber, even if your wrong you don't get punished (unless they drag). With drags you can read them with footwork, making the drag miss, but still blocking in case they accel.
>"Reading" I guess would be when you suss out your opponents psychology and intentions
That's gambling
> If someone can parry a feint mixup everytime they are reacting.
Nobody can do that without cheating, much in the same way no player will hit every headshot
I just chamber and footwork. Pros dont expect a chamber to their riposte-reliant gambling. Its a stamina management sim game to me
One thing I saw with the feints is that it does look noticeably better to watch. Everything that's happening seems to make sense. The looking to the sky nonsense to slow down your weapon looks awkward and totally counter intuitive, idk how people defend dragging, jesus christ.
ALSO: One more thing to note, an attack that's proper will have the character sound off when making a real attack. Something I noticed when watching this, when you feint, your character doesn't make a noise.
What if you're both right? Isn't the reward for reading a feint getting the riposte animation?
not exactly, reading a feint leads to more "gamble" punishes while reading drags has to be done with footwork and lucky extended parries. the game is busted in favor of drag/accel still.
If you read a feint you wouldn't get a riposte because there was nothing to parry. The reward is your opponent loses stam and you can potentially increase that stam gap further by punishing (attacking quickly with the small initiative window that occurs after a feint)
@@Stouty I'm referring to reading a feint then parrying their attack (if it comes)
Also are there any lessons from chiv 1 that could be applicable in this scenario in regards to spacing as a mitigation tool?
@@thejhonnie That’s not a reward cause if you parry a swing you lose more stam than the opponent due to stam drain. You can not read a feint and still get the parry, but if the opponent doesn’t commit you will just get hit
@@arkr1s482 but as stouty showed, if you drag off the riposte it's a free hit on your opponent?
I honestly really like Chiv 2's solution to feints and drags since you're still rewarded for reading and hitting counters, but if someone does their burger king spinny flip drag you can still safely block and take the hit to stam and initiative rather than health. Makes fights more dynamic than the classic "first to fail 3 reads dies."
As for the argument of how hard reads and 50/50s are different, For Honor's probably the best example since its parry system is entirely unreactable- you parry attacks at the same time they would be feinted, so the whole game is about reads and efficient use of option selects. I get how someone might find that engaging and it definitely broke the unbearable comp turtle meta, but functional or not for some people it can feel really fast and loose to actually play. Skills like animation reading and good reaction times are virtually useless. There's no concrete way to be absolutely certain you're making the right play, because your opponent might just have, like, an aneurysm and act in an unexpected way you couldn't account for.
Ultimately a melee game is forced to strike some form of compromise between everything being entirely readable and relying on players making mechanical mistakes for combat to not turn into a turtle-fest (something Dark Souls pvp does pretty well), and entirely unreactable, relying on players making incorrect reads of their opponent. There's finesse to designing in either direction but I'm starting to think it comes down to just two very different avenues of interest, and there's not really a good one size fits all solution for the melee slasher genre.
Also ur mad cuz bad
dude when it feints the weapon starts moving back to the static position but it sometimes looks like the swing is starting
Yup, there's clearly more technique to feinting than what most people suggest
@@Stouty I understand your interpretation. I think there should be a clear visible distinction between a resetting weapon coming off a feint and a weapon beginning to swing. Regardless of the angle from which you’re viewing it. The purpose of the feint is nullified if they look like they’re still committing to the attack when they’re not.
Stouty, have you tried PVKII? The combat system is similar to M&B but very different at the competitive level.
nope
Can you parry Copium?
Stouty can.
bear is such a mordhau goblin with that biased pov
I agree with you but I think we can prove this. Gather some players and have them 1v1. Count every hit that isn’t blocked and see whether more hits come after a feint or after a riposte. This would Test during real fight conditions and if feints were so strong we would see them the most.
I have like 50 hours in this game and have stopped playing a couple years ago, so I’m not coming at this thinking I know what I’m talking about. This could all be dumb thought but what do I know. I feel like there’s a way to stop this argument and come to a conclusion. Statistics. You (or anybody really) should just record statistics. You could control for any variables you would like, then gather people for the statistics. Record/Stream for validity reasons, and then simply let people do their thing. After everyone’s done, go over the statistics and argue about the statistics. You could do this with differing skills for each player (noob, adequate, etc etc), you could make an ahk script that randomly faints or doesn’t for the purpose of the study, you could control for variables such as movement, no movement, jumping, no jumping etc etc, there are many things you could do and this would make the argument move forward from where it is now. The main problem I saw with your video is simply sample size. In this video, when you are testing if feints are readable or not, there are many variables that surround this that could invalidate the results. A majority of these variables could be corrected simply by increasing the sample size (instead of 10 swings, 100 I mean). Visibility, ping, UI, position, anything really, should be corrected for. And in this video, the statistics you come up with are pretty invalid simply because of the many variables that affect the gameplay. I don’t blame you for this. You did this on a whim, nobody should expect you to write up a whole fucking study out your ass while on stream someday. I just feel like this could all be finished by some good and honest statistics. If you are right, the statistics will follow. If you are wrong, the statistics won’t follow. Very clear cut straight to the truth. Then, everybody can come to the same conclusion instead of arguing all day.
whilst sporadically done, I feel the results were conclusive. We had the best players in the game feinting each other and whilst standing still we were able to read a significant number, including 20~ consecutive reads. That simply wouldn't happen if reading was impossible. Perhaps there's a brand of stab feint that once perfected is unreadable but that's what chambers are for I guess
@@Stouty you're probably right that you could read feints, I'm just saying if this was done with a good sample size with different people and differing skills etc etc, it would be more conclusive than this. I think this isn't conclusive enough because it was done on a whim and wasn't "professional". There's lots of variables that affect the results that aren't corrected for. The main problem is just the sample size for me though. With things like this, you have to test lots of people doing lots of things with lots of other people. This removes the majority of variables that could affect the result in a negative way. But maybe it doesn't need to be that "professional" to prove, I don't play this game so I wouldn't know.
@@Azeroh I don't expect everyone can read feints as well as I can, much in the same way I can't hit the headshots that pro fps players can. What we can see however is that a surprising number of feints can be read at the hardest distance possible (facehug) without any movement by top players. If the hardest feints can be read then no doubt the easier ones can be also, where less skilled players will fare better
@@Stouty cool, i don't know what this has to do with what I said though. I don't have a leg in this fight I'm just giving a solution that I think would allow both sides to come to a conclusion, or at least make the argument more honest and come closer to the truth.
got bored after bears 1000th contradiction
I picked up Chiv 2 from the steam sale after dropping 1000. My biggest issue is how they changed morphs from mordhau. In mordhau you had a chamber which would punish a morph. If you attempt the chamber equivalent in Chiv 2 against the first part of a morph you get hit
morphs punish chambers in mordhau
Drags and accels are cool and a skill to learn, increasing the skill gap between noobs and good players as it should be
Except most players dislike drags and accurately see them as animation abuse, often citing them as a reason for quitting
@@Stouty should we really dumb down the mechanics so it’s more newbie friendly for player retention purposes? But I see your point, it can be annoying
@@scienceyo5064 Yes, especially when the mechanics in question do not promote interesting gameplay. As demonstrated in this video, ripostes are unreadable
@@scienceyo5064 The game's mechanics are dumbed down even with drags and accels. If you actually want to play a deeper pvp game that's taxing mechanically AND mentally, just play an actual fighting game that was DESIGNED to have two people go at each other for generations like Mortal Kombat or Tekken. SFV was the definition of dumbing down the game and EVERY pro hated that game. Nobody wants the game dumbed down. They want it to not look dumb and feel dumb.
So, yes. But I think there’s an argument to be made that mitigation and actual reading have very similar results in actual fights and both require similar skill.
Mitigating drags doesn't take much skill other than early parrying then running away, the skill cap for reading feints is seemingly much higher as demonstrated in this experiment
Fair enough to the first bit, but this experiment doesn’t say a thing about the skill cap for mitigating drags, it just says that they can’t be read like a feint can.
I really dont understand how can someome play Chivalry after Mordhau.. That physics is sooo wierd here and feels absolutely unreal. It can have a huge amount of other super stuffs, but is not a physics the main thing?
Debate aside, seeing Stouty wasn't doing so good in Chiv2's TO in the first clip actually surprised me
wasn't really playing, just running around whilst focused on the conversation
removing footwork from the equation makes this experiment pointless
not at all, as the final chapter demonstrates
To be honest, nothing helps you read feints like listening to your opponent. It's the same rule as in the first chivalry, no shout = feint. Kisses Stouts!
Wish that was true but doesn't apply as strongly in mordhau as it did in chiv 1
Think you guys need to consider distance. The closer the enemy is to you while feinting the harder it becomes to read. Sometimes it’s impossible and does become luck based. But if you use footwork and keep distance from the feinter, I feel it becomes easier to read the attacks.making it not imbalanced.
Watch the final chapter. Distance makes things easier but it's clearly possible for top players to read even at facehug
@@Stouty sorry, I main executioner, so at close distance I usually go for a kick. Isn’t kick the fastest move on the game, making it the best option in almost every up close situation
@@trymii5396 can be baited by walking back
@@Stouty hmm, light armor enjoyer?
Coming from mordhau where I would often feint, I’ve noticed that I don’t feint as much on Chiv because I just haven’t found it effective 🤷♂️
okay lets be honest, the animation itself isn't what's readable, its the situation and the player. how far are they, what weapon are they using, is there a pattern, do they feint more often than other players, have you punished them for feinting before, how much stamina do they have, how likely are you to be able to hit a chamber accel punish based on positioning, etc. bears point blank animation here is genuinely unreadable just purely when it comes to human reaction time, fastest human reaction time is 87 ms... (not counting reflexive because visual/auditory input is necessary to consider it a "true read") in order to true read bears feint you'd need to make a decision based on all availible information on weather or not to parry at LEAST 87 ms before the hitbox connects with your character. if you rewind 87 ms or 5 frames from when bear hits, its well before release or grunt. unless bear has some sort of visual tell on weather or not he's feinting, then up until that point the animations an the sound are entirely identical. THAT PARTICULAR feint is unreadable, even by the fastest athlete in the world. you both have your points, but dragging is a crappy alternative to boring stam drain simulator and the weight of responsibility falls on the devs to come up with an alternative mechanic that's sufficiently nuanced in order to keep people entertained. simple as.
TLDR you're both oversimplifying the problem.
btw this is specific the the 0 footwork point blank paxe overhead, just because the time between release and hit is so short its practically instant (you can make it readable with movement and leanback)
How come I read 20 of Redblue's feints in a row at the end?
@@Stouty yeah sorry it needed clarification i was talking specifically about the paxe feint. all i meant was bear was technically correct with the 50/50 claim, but only in a vacuum. if you take footwork away from someone defending drags and take feintspam and mindgames away from the guy feinting, then you're testing something entirely different and the results have no practical application on real life scenarios. (i think it applies to both) in reality people have learned to adapt to the bullshit, and there's not an alternative game yet that makes up for mordhau's shortcomings and still remains engaging at top tier play, so i don't blame people who defend drags, they're better than stam duels.
@@noggin8216 Not sure, I think with enough practice I'd get to reading similar chains as I did towards the end vs Redblue as I started off vs Bear. Even so, I still chained together 5~ consecutive reads and Bear was being a weirdo missing half of his actual swings on top of spamming them. Either way, the success rate of me vs Bear's feints is leagues ahead of Bear vs my swing manip
As for feint spam - in a real fight he would never get to spam 10 feints off, I would punish the first feint. Watch any of my recent duel videos to see it in action
@@Stoutyyeah, the argument was pretty pointless. it was interesting to see redblue squirm from a messer drag, i thought i was just bad for not being able to read overhead accels
I always wondered if a possible way to fix dragging and the high level back n forth counter feinting is a sort of "held counter".
Pretty much, like normal counters in Chiv 2, when you attack while blocking your attack specifically becomes a counter. But now players can hold that counter attack as long as they want (maybe it drains STAM like holding block).
The only way for the attack to actually go through into its release phase (when damage is applied) it must be hit with the correct countered attack from an enemy, otherwise its interrupted, or if the player never gets hit, the attack will go into a recovery when they let go of the button.
This for one makes it so as long as you learn patience, you can hold your counter until a dragging opponent hits you, as long as you did guess the counter attack correctly.
For second, this will practically replace the whole counter feint meta, as you just couldn't feint out of the counter anymore. its either you guess correct and hold until you counter, or you guess wrong and get hit while you're in recovery of canceling the counter back into block or whatever other action.
Tell me what might be bad about this, cause I would like to hear if it can ever be a system in perhaps a future melee game.
i found you whilst you were playing darker and darker. i tuned in to your stream yesterday though, and all I heard was you and bear bickering and becoming argumentative over the simplest of things, are you 2 friends?
can't stand him
@@Stouty sarcastic, i like it. been binge watching your videos, they're great! nice work