Look, Verbatim, this is what Fighting Games are. You’re basically saying that Fighting Games are all luck UNLESS everything can be reacted to. But that just isn’t true. Fighting Games are about reads. Sometimes hard reads, sure. But that’s the essence behind them. Without that factor, Fighting Games would cease to function as a competitive genre. The best players are the ones that make the best reads. Sure you may never know if the opponent was going to throw a Fireball or whatever, but people fall into patterns. And you can learn to read that. If a player does the same pattern repeatedly, YES, it’s a bad Fireball. Again? I’m not discounting your concept that no Fireball can be a bad Fireball. But people fall into involuntary patterns all the time. Fighting Games are largely about tension. Think of not Throwing a Fireball as a rubber band you keep stretching. When the tension gets too strong, you cave and Throw the Fireball. People can READ that tension. Instinctively. Especially once you gather more information on the player from other interactions. So while there’s no way to know if your opponent would actually throw a Fireball at a given moment, that doesn’t mean there’s no bad Fireballs. Because most people will throw Fireballs at given tension points. The best players are the ones that can stretch that rubber band just a tiny bit further, or even not wait until it gets to the tension point at all. I call it syncopation. Fighting Games have a rhythm, a beat. That’s the first thing I try to learn about a Fighting Game: the rhythm and beats of a Fighting Game. And then you have to learn how to not do everything in those rhythms. That’s what makes a player strong. In a vaccuum, we can’t ever know if a player will ever throw a Fireball. But when you have played so many players and have gathered information on player archetypes, you understand their rhythms. And thus they become predictable: you can make reads on them. And so the Fireballs they always throw on beat, when they reach the same tension points, those are bad Fireballs. The thing is that it always comes down to psychology. Talking about Fighting Games in a bubble of isolated moments never tells even a fraction of the true story. You are ALWAYS fighting another human, so there will ALWAYS be reads and patterns to detect etc. There’s always a story told across games, rounds, etc. that lead up to the decisions you make. You even admitted that many Akuma players you’ve fought tend to throw Fireballs in similar patterns. That doesn’t make you LUCKY that you Hazanshu’ed over them, that means the Akuma players played predictably, and that means the Fireballs they threw were not good Fireballs. The main point here is that it has to be understood that the human brain is very flawed. And people fall into patterns, even in groups. That doesn’t make the “guessing game” bad by nature. There’s so much information that can be used for psychological pattern recognition, and instincts oftentimes bear fruit. Don’t view every interaction in a Fighting Game in a vacuum. It does a massive disservice to the genre as a whole.