Episode 1-9: The Warrior's Path ft. SSB Pro Tips

In this episode, AV and Peon are joined by SSBProTips. He is a community veteran and well known content creator. They explore learning about a defined path to greatness, how to travel it, and where you can often get lost and led astray.

## Questions

### **AV:**

> Personally, I try not to think about other people’s expectations of me because that will create lots of pressure for you. Especially against players that people think you’re supposed to win against. I don’t really think about it that much, although it is a very, very common thing for people to be very hung up on, what other people think of them. I think, personally, I deal with it by just not thinking about it, which is a really, really bad answer in terms of giving advice to someone. You can’t just say “just don’t think about it”.
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> I think that the way you should handle this, and if I were to tell someone how they should handle other people’s expectations of them of their performance, is either to set your bar higher than theirs, or to understand and contextualize their expectations of you. You need to realize that people mess up sometimes, especially in such a game like Smash 4. Understanding that the game is extremely volatile, so just because their expectations didn’t hold up in one scenario doesn’t mean, on average, that their expectations weren’t completely out of base. I’d like to hear your thoughts on this too.
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### **Peon:**

> Yeah, sure. Well, I think there’s two kinds of people. Maybe this is an over-generalization but a lot of people really love the pressure that expectations places on you. Some people don’t like it, you know, and it isn’t so binary, but let’s just oversimplify it, for the sake of it. I’m the kind of person that really thrives when pressure is placed on me. When people expect me to excel and to do well, I actually think it makes me play better because I want to live up to their expectations, and I try to find a way to do so. It really pushes me. It motivates me but I want to contextualize it in a sense, you know.
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> If people expect you to do well, it’s probably because they like you. It’s probably because they see something good in you and when you do well, they feel validated in their initial beliefs. If you under perform, because they were invested in you in the first place, they will very easily write it off. They’ll say:
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> *“Oh it’s okay, he had a bad day but he’ll do better next time. That’s still my boy up there. He’ll do great next time.”*
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> You know, your supporters are really quick to forgive you. On the contrary, if you have haters that say:
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> *“This guy’s gonna do terrible.”*
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> and you do really well you can shut them up. If you mess up, just laugh and move on. You know, I think people really over focus on the importance of those expectations. I think really, they’re quite fickle when it comes down to it.
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### **AV:**

> Interestingly enough, I think people overestimate how much other people are thinking about them. I think it’s really that we have this idea that people are always thinking about us. The mind is very self-centered when in reality people are likely only thinking about us for very short, ephemeral moments, which is just a really interesting concept.
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### **Peon:**

> As far as the future goes, I hope anyways, that for instance in the 3DS versus the Wii U release of Smash 4, we saw a different kind of gameplay philosophy. Because the 3DS version was mobile, we saw Smash run. It was a very pick-up-and-play bite-sized replayable bit of content. Where Smash 4 was more suited to the console on Wii U to sit down and play with friends all around the same TV.
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> I hope that implies, for the future, that because the Switch is portable we get a bit-sized kind of replayable game mode, but that’s my prediction of course. The Switch is a hybrid console, you know it’s hard to say for sure.
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### **AV:**

> I think I agree with those points and, to answer some of the latter aspects of that question, specifically, as a former TO, what would worry me a lot about running tournaments is the security of Switches at events. That’s something that we’re going to have to look out for in terms of best practices in running events and making sure that everyone’s consoles are secure.
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> Like you said, with the portability in this hybrid console, people’s consoles are way less secure than they used to be, I think. Also, because the Wii U was not a good console. I think this is not an unpopular opinion. The Wii U was a very underperforming console in terms of what it could do with games it offered. People didn’t really steal Wii U.
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> The Switch, on the other hand has outsold the Wii U. A lot of content has been developed for it and it’s an extremely successful console so far. People are going to be looking to, unfortunately, capitalize on events like this. I think that’s probably what’s going to worry me the most as someone who looks through the TO lens.
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> I think on the other side we’re going to get a lot more setups because of how portable it is. I’m really excited for that aspect because people are actually going to bring their setups more as long as they trust in the infrastructure that we set up for them.
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