A bot in Tekken 8 is demolishing players by only pressing one button over and over
Of course it's Eddy
Button mashing is advised against in fighting games if you want to climb the ranks. But those of us who've been destroyed by unpredictable little brothers going ham on a joystick know a secret. Sometimes spamming works. One Tekken 8 player is proving this point. They have programmed a bot of Eddy Gordo, the whirling Capoeira fighter, to slap the same button repeatedly, and nothing else, while broadcasting its performance against real players on Twitch. The bot is doing surprisingly well.
The bot has been affectionately named "3ddy", after the single button it presses - a 3 on the joystick, which corresponds to a Tekken character's left leg. He has reached the orange-coloured titles in ranked mode, sitting on "Vanquisher" at the time of going to press. That's perseverance many human players lack, myself included. You can watch the bot's progress on the Twitch channel of the bot's creator, Jimmashima.
"He's doing way better than I expected," said the bot wrangler on Reddit, adding that programming the bot took "exactly 21 lines of python."
In many ways, Eddy is the perfect character for this funny experiment. In his case, slapping this kick button over and over actually results in a workable combo which mixes launchers and high attacks with a low kick part way through the manoeuvre. It's the low attack that seems to be catching even seasoned players off-guard.
Eddy is the first of four DLC characters for Season 1 of Tekken 8. And... what's this? The next character was just announced this morning. I don't want to have to make a whole separate news post for that. So look:
Lidia is Tekken 8's next DLC fighter. She's coming this summer, say the developers on Twitter.
Other DLC characters haven't been formally announced but a dataminer has done some sleuthing which suggests that the other upcoming biffers may be Marduk and Fahkumram. This dataminer was certainly right about Lidia, so... maybe?
As I said in my Tekken 8 review, it's Miguel and Lei I really want. Without them, how could I possibly allow it to dethrone Tekken 7 from our list of best fighting games on PC? Hmph!