'Not A Villain' Webcomic - Bandit argues that Kat V8 isn't 'her'.

‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 133

This will be Bandit's first loss if he complies with Dr. Grace.

I'm in an area with spotty/unreliable internet so comments will be slow in showing up.

32 Comments

OOOOOH, clever move on his part.

I really hope our new side-story with Annie will give some more clues about Kleya’s past.

Nice plot twist! So they’re taking the “retaliatory” aspect of her special as a sign it’s not her? Speaking of specials, Kleya/Kat had better get her special first in the next match against Bandit if she wants to have a good chance at winning!(well, she’ll win for sure if she gets it) Even though the last battles were handicapped or had problems in some way (poor avatar, being hacked) Bandit still seems to fight well.

I’m guessing that the ‘her’ they are talking about isn’t known for letting others harm her, she’s to aggressive for that. So unless ‘she’ has turned over a new leaf then Bandit is right and it can’t be ‘her’. Of course, going by Kleya’s internal monologues I’ve got a feeling it is ‘her’ and that she has turned over the new leaf.

Let’s list all the mentions of people on this page that have yet to be confirmed, and their possible answers!

1. Insane user = Bloody Mary? Possibly Kleya’s mom?

2. They don’t want HIM getting involved. = Saisuke?

3. Bandit doesn’t think it’s HER. = Hacker Girl

Arghh! I can’t wait for more! This is honestly one of my favorite comics.

<3 Dr. Grace. He's so clever.

“She’s not masochistic.”
“And how do you know that?”
“I… uh… can we change the subject now?”

so Bandit found out how it works, ’bout time someone did.

One of the reasons I do get so uncomfortable commenting in this comic. While I do understand Kleya has a major advantage in terms of overall skill and hacker or player-power over most of the players here, I am finding it annoying that everybody’s first experiment is to perform attacks that cause such issues.

Sorry, I play videogames a lot, and the first sign not to attack and to start prepping some crazy dodge tricks is that the other person is standing still with a smile on their face. It’s like the judo pose of videogaming.

That said, people don’t tend to like thinking about my comments and tend to not like the format or style I put them in and immediately argue without noting anything worthwhile, so I’m just going to go ahead and say sorry everyone for insulting your sensibilities and a factor of this comic that may be liked by everyone. That was not tongue in cheek, that was an honest apology.

I disagree. In most of the video-games I play, but that’s mostly Player-vs-Environment. In player-vs-player combat, there’s rarely an opportunity for that sort of ace in the hole.

If someone backs off and stands still in a fighting game, I expect that they’re prepared with a mid-range attack as soon as I try to close the distance, so either I answer with a long-range attack or by closing to close range as quickly as possible. In either case, I’m attacking.

If someone backs off and stands still in World of Warcraft (back when I still played, and if I were playing a melee class), I’d try to get back into my attack range as quickly as possible to keep up the pressure.

The only situation even close is Starcraft, but even then, I’d just maintain periphery scouting to try and figure out where there resources were going, while devoting most of my resources to pressuring their main.

To use non-videogame example, the correct counter to a lot of very powerful combos in Magic: The Gathering is to chip them down early with your early-game creatures.

Maybe I played different video games than you, but my response when someone attempts to disengages is to re-engage, and when someone does something I haven’t seen before (thinking mostly of Starcraft here), my first assumption is that the reason no one else does that is because it doesn’t hold against a direct frontal assault. The risks of not attacking greatly outweigh the risks of attacking. After the match, I’d review the replay to figure out what to look for next time to see if someone is doing the same thing, and how to properly counter it.

Backing off and sitting there with a smile is a mistake in almost every game that I’ve played. If I saw a special like Nice and Kleya’s reaction to it, I’d assume that Nice is just a delayed attack special. Why else would it ask me not to attack? Kleya isn’t a game designer trying to make a good experience for me, she’s a competitive player trying to win. There’s no reason for her special to tell me its own weakness, so I’d assume it’s lying.

I’ll agree, though, that it’s unrealistic that -all- of her opponents fall right into the trap. At least one person would probably think the way you do, rather than the way I do.

Backing off from a fight and sitting there with a smile on your face is the judo pose of anime, and it’s often used by scripted enemies in a video game because it’s recognized, but I’m not sure I’d call it the judo pose of PvP video games.

I think the reason why Nice works as well as it does is that most players don’t think that such a special is possible. That’s Kleya’s advantage.

I apologize, I mainly play turn based games, where most enemies make this big announcement “COME AT ME”(Legend of Dragoon, the one enemy with straight red squares, cannot remember his name. I think he joins your team near the end of the game and that was the first fight), laugh and hold their weapon behind their head(I’m not entirely sure where, but I distinctly recall one game with this, might just be imagining things. I think it was a flail.) or, in the case of Wild Arms 4, make some big announcement(Every single one of the last bosses except the last boss himself, who just sorta goes nuts) that they’ll be able to kill you before you even attack. Oh. And then there’s fighting games with scripted counter-throws like Soul Calibur 5, but I never got the hang of those and those are more mid-combat things where you don’t want to give them the time to really respond.

That said, I have never played WoW for any significant amount of time, and probably never will.

I do appreciate that you gave my comment some thought, and that you responded with a great deal of precision instead of outright discounting it as nonsensical or ignoring points in their entirety, and I do appreciate that you did not outright disavow my idea as entirely stupid.

Your examples are all from single-player games, though, except for Soul Calibur. The game designers in those games script their bosses to tell the player how to beat them – they’re playing to lose. Players are (usually) playing to win, so if a -player- acts the way a scripted boss does, I assume they’re either a rookie, bluffing, or both. They aren’t normally able to adopt a stance that counters all attacks – if they are, that’s a problem with the game’s balance. They also aren’t playing to lose, and so would be adopting the counter stance in a position where it’s already too late for me, such as in in Kleya’s fight against Danni.

When a game designer designs a boss, they have (essentially) unlimited resources. If they wanted the boss to be unbeatable, they could just crank the numbers up super high. Scripted bosses, though, are designed to be beaten. Any move that requires a response from the player exists so that the player can feel clever for beating it, not to trap the player so the boss can “win.”

The counter-throws in Soul Calibur (and other fighting games) tend to only be used in the middle of melee. If you back off and give your opponent the initiative, s/he can come at you with any variety of attack, and each counter throw can only block a subset. Again, like Kleya’s fight against Danni, those counter throws only get used in the space between when the player sees the attack and when it actually hits.

Kleya is using it suboptimally, but because the ability itself is overpowered, she’s able to win with it anyway. I wonder if The Game gets balance patches to fix overpowered abilities like that…

Maybe I’m really dense, but I don’t see why you’re apologizing for that comment… what you just said was a valid point. Indeed, it’s something experience learns you the harsh way in video games…

One of the possible explanations is that The Game is the only fighting game left in this apocalyptic world, and if there was a long time since the last really talented and vicious enough player (2 years that Kleya was playing dead, if memory serves), it’s possible that people just lack that kind of experience.

But because I love to shoot myself in the foot, I must add that in an apocalyptic world, the risks of meeting that kind of opponent in real life should be fairly high too…

I’m just going by patterns. People didn’t tend to like the way I phrased things normally as I try to avoid the black/white “One person is good, or this action is evil/wrong” that people have been doing. Last time I did that, people outright ignored 3/4ths of the posts’ statements to instead claim that I was wrong just ‘because.’

Thank you for your politeness and thought in your statements.

I don’t think it’s that obvious the special is working like that, you really have to think about it, and it seems most people try to attack fast, since they don’t want the opponent to do anything. Just hit hard, hit fast, win fast. Thats a normal behaviour for gamers in deathmatches, right?

After seeing how the special works my first thought was, that trick should get old rather fast, but if your opponent doesn’t know, it should still work once, thats all you really need anyway.

There is also the big question, how experienced are her opponents? Danny saw the special mid attack, so there is nothing she could have done anyway. The first two fights we saw where against rather simple minded people as far as I would guess. Loser grid, guess it takes some time to get a real opponent on this side of the games.

The bandit knows how it works, then again, he is cheating, he watches the matches, and he gets the knowledge about how the specials work, this advantage, just like Kleyas glance at the stats of her opponent is a minor form of cheating, they still have to use the informations.

No, it isn’t obvious in the slightest and I do give credit that you realize that it is not and still thought about my statement without just directly denying it. My complaint is that peoples’ first experiment is always to attack, and not to attempt to observe or prepare a dodge. Especially given that all of the specials’ hitboxes seem to be based on the graphics and as such have a relatively clear area of where you need to go to avoid being touched.

In most Deathmatch games, if I see something I haven’t ever seen before, especially something with quite so much flare as that special of Kleya’s I tend to burn some miles as I go in the opposite direction at maximum speed. Especially if the person is renowned for a one shot kill, but then again I prefer long games and learning the stage/player.

And yes, I understand it’s not horribly far-fetched that they might all do the same basic strategy and fail miserably. This is the loser row, the players here are NOT the top-of-the-scoreboard people. I personally would probably be amongst them simply due to just how much I prefer to know what the other person can do in this game.

That said, thank you for your time and insight.

One thing you’ve got to remember is that we only saw 3 matches completely. The others were just shown to us with the user getting hit. Its probably possible that in some of those matches, the opponent waited a while and tried to figure out what the item is. But the match is still a time match and so after a while, they probably decided that it was a broken special or to trust their luck and try and win.

The first match we saw, the person had no special ability, just raw strength. His goal is to hit hard fast and he probably wasn’t all that great. The second was a little cocky. She knew how to make specials and she thought that specials should do awesome things. Danni knew what she was up against but again, she got caught in the middle. I bet she would have obeyed since she knows that Kleya can make a one hit special.

Another point you need to remember is that specials are confusing. So most people only know specials that they’ve seen. And based on Danni has said, one-hit wonders are not normal. Kleya’s “Let’s be Happy” special was probably a shock to a lot of people and made her famous. And considering that the one-hit kill was immediate (not just sitting in air), if you met her in a match, that is the type of special you’d expect. It would be hard for you to accept that she’s brilliant enough to have TWO one-hit kills.

But considering that the Bandit knows, the question is, how will that fight go? Will they just sit and chat with each other with no one doing any damage? What happens if no one does any damage? Is it vote-based like when they didn’t even get to fight because of the hack?

I’m not sure that glancing at the stats is really a cheat… Maybe I’m wrong, I don’t know the in-Game tools, but it seems quite possible that those are available for who knows where to look. If it really was a cheat, Kleya would try with all her might not to do it…

ya i had forgotten bout that. thanks for the insight, been a while since i played straight up fighting games. i think the last one i played where it was easy to do that was the dbz fighting games.

I can see your point, but I’m not sure that the reasoning follows all the way.

I’m not much of a gamer, but I do fencing and I can recognise the apparent tactic. It’s fairly common, particularly in epee, to wait for your opponent to attack and then hit them with a counter-attack or parry-riposte. They’re off-balance and concentrating on their attack, so they may not react in time to parry, and even if they do you learn about their preferences. This scenario also makes sense from the attacker’s perspective: you know your opponent’s waiting for you, so you can observe their preferred parry-riposte. You know it’s a trap, and you know there’s a chance it’ll work on you, but you want to see how your opponent builds traps. The analogy breaks down slightly when you consider that fencing bouts are generally to at least five hits, so you know you’ll have time to recover from losing the first point or two. However, given the apparent rarity of one-hit kills in The Game, I’d probably still consider walking into an evident trap with my eyes open, as a form of reconnaisance. Since it seems that no-one gets to observe their potential opponents’ previous matches, I would be going into the fight knowing very little about Kleya’s abilities and without the pre-warning that she had a damage mirror special. I would therefore use a strong attack in my reconnaisance, to maximise the return for potentially getting hit.

Or it could be a manifestation of the ‘beginner syndrome’: all-out attack so that your opponent is kept busy reacting to you.

Bandit has the advantage of having seen it more than once.

Remember that The Rules forbid the participants from watching each others’ matches, so most of them go into battle unaware of Specials used in previous matches. An open question goes along the lines of: do they actually “see” the participants’ stats, or is that something only Hackers get to see?

d*** kleya has so many ppl after her, i know she knows Tenka is involved but i bet she must of pissed off other groups

Well, first loss except the times he fought Kleya…

Naw, he “won” both of those. The first time because Kleya was bullied into forfeiting after the match, and the second time because the fans voted him to victory after the match was canceled.

I like how contestants aren’t allowed to see others’ matches, yet he is.

They aren’t forbidden, it just usually makes it impossible with the back-to-back format. I think a lot of people have friends watching other matches and feeding them info like Mina did for Kleya about Bloody Mary

Page 121 makes it seem like it is forbidden. Bandit mentions that the rules state something when his boss makes him watch the fight.

Hmmm I always thought that was it was forbidden to leave the death match area /deliberately delay a match (both of which Bandit did to talk to Dr. Grace)

Interesting idea. But doesn’t that still mean that watching the deathmatch is more or less forbidden? Because if you can’t leave the deathmatch area, you can’t view the other matches. Not because of the back-to-back format.

Though, I also would expect fans to tell the player about their upcoming player. So, even if the player can’t watch the match, they would still have an idea of what they are up against.

wow a lively discussion indeed…yay fan speculation!!!!

Zounds, aneeka, you have GREAT commenters. (they go nicely with your comic 🙂 Congratulations

Not A Villain Webcomic

Webcomic of a semi- reformed hacker trying to redeem herself in a post- apocalyptic world she may have created.

‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 133