Hadoken again!? That's the 12th time in a row! (Cheeseballing: Valid or Cheap?)

[MonkeySage]

I've been playing Dragon Ball Xenoverse, and on occasion if I'm doing the parallel quests, I'll spam my most powerful special to speed up the fight. This is a tactic I try to avoid in story mode, and I resisted the urge to do it in PVP. One of the other players took a less... honorable approach, I guess. Rather than make a fuss about it, I thanked the person who invited me, and left the room.
What I'm hoping is that cheeseballing is not a thing most players do in PVP; I feel like it's a cheap way to win a fight, and it takes all the fun out of it. By the end, I'm not thinking GG, I'm thinking about how cheap the player was.

But what do you guys think? Is cheeseballing a fair tactic in pvp? Is it cheap?

If the reason you lost is because your opponent spent the entire fight beating you down with the same attack, what do you do? What do you feel?

[Zevox]

If the reason you lost is because your opponent spent the entire fight beating you down with the same attack, what do you do? What do you feel?
Assuming the game isn't massively unbalanced, that would be your own fault, and what you should do is try to learn from it. Any decent fighting game won't include a move that can simply be spammed for a win. To use Street Fighter as a basic example, spamming Hadoken gets you killed by any decent players because your opponent can jump over it from the right distance and get a free combo on you, or because plenty of characters can respond with something that's projectile invincible to go right through it and hit you (albeit that often costs meter), or because other characters can respond with moves that beat projectiles in other ways (ex projectiles with multiple hits to them or reflect moves, for example), or because if the spammer is behind on life all the opponent has to do is neutral jump each one and they'll win by time out. Spamming Shoryuken gets you killed because Shoryuken is insanely punishable on block. Get predictable with either one and even if you're not actually spamming you can lose, because when your opponent knows what you're going to do, they can exploit and counter it. That's one of the basics of playing fighting games, reading the opponent, and it doesn't get any easier to read than someone who always does the same thing.

If you lose to spam in such a game, it can be frustrating, but the reality is that you simply need to learn what the counter to that move is. Look it up somewhere: the internet is full of resources for that type of thing these days, to the point where you can probably find full frame data for most fighting games if you look for it, in addition to places where people have discussed to death how to handle every little situation that could come up. The opponent may have been an idiot who thought that spamming that move was a genuinely good way to play, or they may simply have been someone that noticed you didn't know how to answer the move and thus intelligently decided to exploit your weakness; in the end, it doesn't matter, because the problem was your lack of knowledge, not their actions.

This of course goes out the window in a badly balanced game where something genuinely is so good that there's no answer to it: Marth's grab-release infinite on Ness and Lucas in Smash Brothers Brawl, for example, means that if he gets a grab on them at any point, they lose a stock. There it's the game's problem, and you can certainly blame the opponent for exploiting it (unless it's a big tournament or something where there's money on the line, anyway, but that doesn't seem to be what you're asking about).

Which category your example falls into I can't say - I've never played Dragon Ball Xenoverse and have no knowledge on it whatsoever, and you didn't specify what move was being spammed anyway. But I will say that it's much more often a case of the loser needing to learn how to handle the move they lost to than the move being genuinely that badly unbalanced, at least in my experience.

[MonkeySage]

I'm not sure the level of my opponent, but I could chock it up to my inexperience in pvp. Super Saiyans in that game are able to spam ultimates ad infinitum, and if you have enough stamina, it means your ultimates can't be broken. Add to that that whatever attack she was using, it was an aoe with a powerful blast back. Couldn't get close to her before she'd hit me with another one, and she seemed completely immune to my own attacks.

[Zevox]

*shrug* Like I said, with no knowledge of that game whatsoever, I can't help on figuring out whether your particular situation is a matter of the game being broken or you just not knowing what to do. For all I know it's entirely within the realm of possibility that this DBZ game has some genuinely broken things in it that can't be countered, in which case, yeah, it would suck to run into someone willing to abuse them. My point was mainly to address the topic in general, as it applies to most situations in most fighting games. Frustration over the inability to deal with something is a very common experience with the genre for anyone who isn't already a very high-level player - I deal with it myself quite a bit, too. You just need to learn that usually there is a way to handle it, and it's better to go out and learn what that is than to let your frustration ruin the game for you.

[JohnTheSavage]

Personally, I dislike cheeseballing in pvp on principle. Regardless of the game in question and whether or not it's balanced, it shows a lack of sportsmanship on the part of the cheeseballer. Spamming a single attack isn't fun for either party, so the baller's just ruining the other person's fun for the sake of a win. If you can't enjoy a game without winning, you shouldn't be playing it.

I've played a bit of Xenoverse and I can say that cheese saiyans come really really close to broken. If I'm right in guessing about the MonkeySage's particular case, I'm assuming it's a super spamming electric strike (big green energy wave, hits a large area). With most ultimates, you can just dodge them and wait for the saiyan to just exhaust themselves with the ki drain from being super saiyan. With electric strike, newer players can be caught by the fact that it's almost impossible to dodge by moving horizontally, like most ultimates in Xenoverse. To dodge electric strike, you need to dodge up or down. Problem is, the vertical movement controls in Xenoverse are rubbish, so it can be hard to dodge. The answer to this and super saiyans in general is basically to wait them out. The super saiyan transformation doesn't last forever, so just dodge and run until they're out of ki or they have to stop and charge up. They're vulnerable in either state so move in and attack then and only then.

[Psyren]

Some of these moves are included in fighting games on purpose. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EitZRLt2G3w) But as Zevox said, unless he game is horribly designed, the truly skilled players can play around them even if they might occasionally get pressed, or even lose a round or match to a spam-tactic like this. Spammable moves like this are an important part of game design because they increase the odds that a newer player can pull off that lucky victory, particularly against the AI, and that encourages them to stick with the game long enough to increase their skill and eventually graduate to more complex strategies.