Reacting

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Revision as of 12:44, 3 August 2021 by RogerDodger (talk | contribs) (rewrite lead to emphasize broader context; remove text saying that anything can be 100% reactable)

Reacting to what your opponent does and behaving accordingly is one of the most important skills in Tekken.

For example, when you block a -9 move, you want to respond with a strong mixup; whereas when you block a -1 move, you still have an advantage to press, but you have to contend more with challenges and movement. When a throw connects you need to respond with the right break. When you block a string, you want to duck, sidestep, low parry, interrupt, etc. as appropriate.

Many moves are balanced around it being possible for the opponent to see them before they're active and guard accordingly. However, it being possible doesn't mean it's practical, nor does it mean the move is useless. A move can be reactable in some contexts but not others, and there's never a point at which a move is 100% reactable. Similarly, the threat of a reactable move can occupy enough of the opponent's focus to let other threats passed by unanswered.

Types of reaction times

There is a distinction made between types of reaction time experiments:

  • Simple reaction time experiments study how fast the subject can react to a single stimulus, such as a light going from off to on.
  • Recognition reaction time experiments study how fast the subject can react to a single stimulus, with the addition of some distracting stimulus that they should not react to, such as a screen showing a coloured dot, and only reacting if it's red.
  • Choice reaction time experiments study how fast the subject can react to multiple stimuli with a different response for each one, such as pressing the right number on a numpad when it appears on the screen.

Average simple reaction times for college-aged persons are ~190ms for visual stimuli and ~150ms for audio stimuli. This number changes based on a number of factors including age, gender, fatigue, distractions, and psychoactive substances. For age, it peaks at around mid 20's, increases slowly until the 50's and 60's, then increases very quickly. Critically, this cannot be improved via training.[1]

Recognition and choice reaction times are proportional to simple reaction times. Recognition times are longer than simple, and choice times are even longer.

Choice reactions are proportional to log(n), where n is the number of valid choices—not the number of stimuli. This can be substantially improved with practice, but not to the point where it's equivalent to simple reaction times, except when there's only 1 choice.[2]

When is something reactable?

The main factors affecting how reactable a move is are:

  • The player's simple reaction time
  • How much input lag there is
    • Gaming set up: controller and monitor inherent delay
    • Base game necessary processing delay, varied between platforms
    • Online ping
    • V-sync
  • How many different choices there are to make
  • Whether the cue being reacted to is a visual or audio cue
  • When the cue becomes distinct
  • How distinct the cue is and how much training the player has with it

Given the variety of factors, there's no clear point at which a move becomes reactable. In addition, even when all of these factors are accounted for, there is still a lot of variation in how quick the response is, i.e., a move can be only occasionally reactable. This is almost always the case—everyone gets hit by Snake Edges sometimes—so a more precise question is, “When is this move reactable enough that relying on it is a bad idea?”

As a rough estimation, if we assume that the cue is visual and that the player's simple reaction time to these is ~190ms, that there is roughly 110ms of input lag (roughly 57ms from Tekken 7[3] and 50ms from other sources), that the cue becomes distinct at ~70ms (Tekken animations are tweened, so the first few frames are not necessarily distinct), that there is only one choice being made (blocking low if the player sees a low move), and that the player is well-trained, then the cue should be reactable at ~350ms or ~21 frames.

If a move has a distinct early audio cue it could be reactable a few frames earlier.

If an animation is very distinct and a player is gifted and stimmed up, theoretically moves as fast as ~18 frames could be occasionally reacted to. Thus 18 frames is the lower benchmark, nothing faster than 18f can be ever considered reactable.

However, 21f is a very rough estimation to begin with. Some moves have less distinctive animations; being well-trained against all ~100 moves that 1 of 50 characters can do is not practical; this is an average speed and will be slower than that at least half the time; this only applies to offline play with no ping between opponents. Most importantly, this estimate is only applicable if someone is only looking for lows. If they also want to react to frame advantage, throws, whiffs, stances, or strings, then their reactions won't be this fast.

References

  1. ↑ Kosinski, R. J. (2008). "A literature review on reaction time". Clemson University.
  2. ↑ Hick, W. E. (1952). On the Rate of Gain of Information. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 4(1), 11–26. doi:10.1080/17470215208416600,
  3. ↑ Nigel Woodall (2018). T7 1.14 Vsync off 56.9ms. Twitter.

External links