The reason I created this poll was because recently when analysing my gameplay, I’m starting to see that if my opponent gets the better of me over multiple matches, it’s because I’m doing too much of something, or there’s other things I could be doing more of that I’m just not doing.

I came into Tekken 7 after years of not playing, but I played a massive amount from Tekken 2 to Tekken 4, and my training partner was a relatively high-level player. So I was pretty good for the time.

When I came into 7, I used my previous main, Paul, and I was only really focused on offence. That offensive style got me to Genbu. But at that point I realised my defence sucked and I was being carried by the character and my legacy skill and knowledge. So I started learning other characters in order to focus more on defence and movement. I’ve managed to get myself to a comfortable Overlord rank now, but I’m struggling to improve from there.

I recently had a lot of matches in ranked against a guy who was using his secondary. He was a purple rank with his main. The first two matches were close, 2-3, but after about eight matches, the results were all 1-3 and 0-3.

When I analyse the replays, I see that his punishment is almost perfect against me, so he’s always capitalising on getting free damage. But the other things that stand out are that because he shuts down a lot of my stuff that works on lower ranked players, I switch to being overly defensive, and that’s where he just picks me apart, getting in those good launchers at the right moment or getting me to second guess what he’s going to do next.

So I got downloaded and was unable to adjust. And also, I realise that I’m not implementing any sort of game plan. I’m trying to be totally reactive to what he’s doing, rather than being more active about what I could be doing.

This morning, thinking about the poll, I’m wondering if the importance or relevance of these attributes is more rank dependent? Like offence for silvers and teal, defence and movement for greens and yellows, adjustment and downloading for reds to rulers, game plans for higher. I dunno exactly. Or maybe, that you can rely on having one disproportionately better than the others to win at lower ranks, but as you progress, you need to work on the other ones.