One, maybe-but-doubtful more unique issue for me is thinking too hard while playing fighting games.
What does this look like?
It's effectively the reverse of flowcharting.
With everything from Ryyudo's post in mind, I've learned there's one additional layer added to my mental stack:
Is my opponent having fun?
Why does that matter? It doesn't. When does it matter? When you're teaching someone how to play the game.
Growing up in small town, the pool of players that are even remotely interested in fighting games is a mere handful at best. When you're someone who has decent pattern recognition skills, it becomes pretty easy to beat your friends whose go to combo is jump in HK > Sweep and throw fireballs at full screen.
So just doing basic Street Fighter stuff like anti-airing, zoning with fireballs, or just throwing is labeled as 'being cheap'. By the time I really got into fighting games (Capcom vs SNK 2 and SoulCalibur II era) if I wanted to play anyone at all, I had to sandbag and basically turn the game into a turn-based RPG:
Ok, I landed my combo, now it's your turn to land yours.
In my mind, hitting someone with the same combo over and over, that's on them for not blocking it. But again, that was seen as 'cheap' so I stopped doing it so they'd keep playing.
It is something that still affects the way I play to this day. Additionally, people would only play me if I stuck with certain characters (basically limited to main characters and Shotos). Picking grapplers like Zangief was off the table with most the kids straight up refusing to even play against him. Even characters with a command grab like E. Honda were 'too cheap'. As a result, I found myself waiting to see if one of my normals connects before I continue into a combo.
Luckily I've found myself breaking away from these habits in Street Fighter 6. With the way the game handles inputs, I already need a combo queued up in my mind the moment I input a Drive Rush.
