POLL: Epee, Sabre of Foil?

[counter riposte]

</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Helvetica, Arial">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Helvetica, Arial">Originally posted by Saber Girl:
<strong>My user name is what people call me when they want to fence, so I guess I'd have to say Saber (or Sabre) is the BEST!

BTW, This is my first time posting here.</strong></font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Helvetica, Arial">You go sabre girl!

[counter riposte]

</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Helvetica, Arial">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Helvetica, Arial">Originally posted by oiuyt:
<strong>According to profile responses (now THERE'S a scientific measure if I've ever heard of one...) we have the following as primary weapon:
None or no response: 1023
Foil: 258
Epee: 106
Sabre: 72
3-Weapon: 15
Foil/Epee: 8
Foil/Sabre: 5
Epee/Sabre: 3
Other things receiving votes include:
Gun, AK-47, dirk, katana: 2 each
Automatic pistol, bow & arrow, brain, chopstick splinters, computer, drill, fairytale dragon, fart, glove, gurney, G's spade, HK MP5, HK usp40, kids, pen, pouting, pulse rifle, sarcasm, wit, words, 19th Century foil: once each

As you can see there was less than a 1/3 response rate. Other factors include people here being "clever" in their responses, inactive accounts, and people who've lost old passwords ad so therefore have multiple accounts.

-B </strong></font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Helvetica, Arial">Apparently, you have a lot of time on your hands.

[oiuyt]

Was waiting for a program that I wrote to finish a run, had some time to kill

-B

[3ngu4rd]

That was fairly ambitious, oiuyt! You must have had quite a bit of time to kill.... there are a lot of users on this discussion board to check out. <img border="0" title="" alt="[Wink]" src="wink.gif" /> Later Mr. Smartypants! <img border="0" title="" alt="[Wink]" src="wink.gif" />

[Zelda]

My prolific post rate may explain why I am still writing my thesis with a week to go!!! However considering I have been a member here since Feb 1999 making 1796 equates to 42.76 posts per month, which is approximately 1.5/day which isnt that bad really!

[oiuyt]

Yeah, I was going for the easy way and counting total posts rather than posting frequency. At that I had an error somewhere, I missed Inquartata who's currently at 892. Ah, I just figured it out. My method missed people who didn't give any of the profile information other than the built-in bits. I had 7 people (I believe) where that meant my post count wasn't included. Inq is one of those people. I might well have other problems with my method, but it's probably fairly close. Off to update the above list.

-B

[oiuyt]

Okay, here's the list of the highest post volume per day people:

D'Artagnan1673: 6.61
135711: 4.48
epeefencer74: 2.59
arcon: 2.20
Inquartata: 2.16
DamedEscrime: 2.05
Moonitic: 1.94
shyHeidi: 1.90
Iwant2bafencer: 1.79
The Crazy Wacker: 1.77

Zelda, you're in 18th place with 1.40 posts/day you've been registered.

I made a few assumptions that made the calculations easier. 365 days/year and 30.5 days/month.

-B

<small>[ 08-30-2002, 02:49 PM: Message edited by: oiuyt ]</small>

[oiuyt]

Okay, correction, people not adding to their profile affected WAY more people that 7 (not surprisingly). My post counts miss a lot more people than my program said it did. Ah well, it was just for fun and to give a basic idea anyway.

Back to work (on my real work not fixing the results above).

-B

[Luca Blight]

Sorry Latenight, anyway, Cloud had Blond hair, not Black. The man you are thinking of was ONCE Cloud's friend, Zak. By the way, Sephiroth rules...

[Zelda]

So does that make me not totally obsessive compulsive? I reckon this has got to be one of the better examples of topic drift I have seen!

[latenight]

You've got that right, Z!

Major drift. But when the topic drifts to you, well ,I'm OK with THAT!!

Luca, Haven't played too much FF. I'm more into resident evil, fatal frame, silent hill, eternal darkness........and oddly enough, Pikman.

If you look at my profile, You can always tell what game I am currently playing... <img border="0" title="" alt="[Wink]" src="wink.gif" />

<small>[ 08-30-2002, 06:57 PM: Message edited by: latenight ]</small>

[Bebop and Rocksteady]

Anyone who accuses epee of being too slow might want to try watching epeeists who have been fencing for more than 2 weeks.

[3ngu4rd]

I think when your fencing epee time slows down. The people who are fencing think the action's moving fast. The average on looker is falling asleep from lack of motion. <img border="0" title="" alt="[Wink]" src="wink.gif" />

[latenight]

Actually, videoe tapes of high level Epee make it seem quite dynamic and fast moving.

Of course the foilist in me suspects they are just shaking the camera like on the old Star Trek..

[epeefencer74]

Originally posted by Luca Blight
Latenight, you said that the Foil is a toy compared to the Epee, I find that as the largest opinion stated by anyone in a long time. It's not a toy, and yes, it's practically a fact that Foil IS more complicated than both. People that I know(and in many more areas) turn to the Sabre and Epee more because it is easier to progress much faster in those blades than it is Foil.

I have to say that epee is by no means easier to master than foil. If anything it is harder, I would wager that even sabre is harder than foil. The reason being that there is a larger target area to be concerned with in both of these weapons as compared with foil, therefore the mental calculations of when to do what is much more complex than foil. It is for this reason that foil is used as an introductory weapon because of it's reduced target area and clear conventions.

[epeefencer74]

Originally posted by 3ngu4rd
I think when your fencing epee time slows down. The people who are fencing think the action's moving fast. The average on looker is falling asleep from lack of motion. <img border="0" title="" alt="[Wink]" src="wink.gif" />

I beg to differ, you should really see me fence last night , there were multiple lunges, counter attacks, parrys galore, and fleches thrown in for good measure. My opponent and I utilised the whole 14m of the piste, pushing one another to the last line and back again. I'm actually a very mobile epee fencer, I threaten and invite very actively when I'm fencing. One of my favourite counter attacks is to actually invite a compund attack, stay just out of distance, and to hit when the opponent has completed his attack and is just starting to recover. There are a lot of such epeeist in Singapore, possesing very strong footwork and who are very atheletic and mobile in their fencing.

[latenight]

Well, you posted Luca's quote, so I feel it necessary to point again that I was not calling foil a toy. I'm a foilist. My point was that in the hands of an epeeist, it would look like a toy. Just like sabre does when I do sabre.

[epeefencer74]

Originally posted by latenight
Well, you posted Luca's quote, so I feel it necessary to point again that I was not calling foil a toy. I'm a foilist. My point was that in the hands of an epeeist, it would look like a toy. Just like sabre does when I do sabre.

Sorry latenight, wasn't my intention to disagree with you in my previous post. I agree that foil is not a toy, but indeed it feels like one when I handle it. I'm an epeeist myself and very rarely do I pick up a foil, and when I do, I can't control the point. I get very effective parries but I can't seem to get the point to go where I want it to.

My point was that in fact epee and sabre are as tough if not tougher to master as compared to foil, feel free to disagree here Luca . This is my own opinion, I've trained with all three weapons and I find that in both sabre and epee, because the targets have more depth than that of foil, the strategy to consider becomes more complex and thus these two weapons are harder to master. Of course if you are just talking about the technical aspects of the weapons, I feel that they are all the same.

Cheers mates

[Inquartata]

Bah, all of this civility!

A foil IS a toy! So there!

[latenight]

yeah, yeah, yeah......