A few questions for overused character players and some insight

Current Fighting Games Fighting Game Discussion
1

First off, I want to get a couple of things straight before I start spewing out questions. I posted something like this on gamefaqs like a couple of weeks ago but I got flamed to hell and called a scrub by pretty much everyone even though I believe I worded myself pretty well and with respect. So here goes.
I am not the greatest player out there.
I do not have the time, due to work and such matters, to play much SFIV. I’ve been playing SF since the turbo days but for the same reasons as now, I never really had too much time to play. Because i’ve been playing for so long though, I know all my fundamentals and I find myself holding up quite decently to the B+ and A ranks. I watch tourneys, I play a couple of other fighting games, and I do well with a variety of characters. I can do 1 frame links, I don’t jump in mindlessly towards shotos and I know my footsies, so no, I don’t believe I am a ‘‘scrub’’. Oh, and I main claw, just putting it out there I guess.
Ok that’s out of the way now.

I get about 3 hours a week to play, so as usual I go online and face the imminent barrage of kens, ryus, akumas and a few others. I know that’s just what it is so I never really expect to see crazy variety when I play online. Its been in the last few weeks that I started thinking of what I’m posting here, mainly because for some reason I have almost exclusively been facing ryu and ken players. Out of 20 matches on average, 16 have been of such characters. A spinkle of cammy, fei long and akuma here and there but mainly the iconic shotos.
But why is this so prevalent? I could answer my own question as I think I know the underlying reason but I wanted to know what all of you people think about it. It is astronomically easier to win, play mindgames and pull off more damaging/dizzying combos and kara grab the day away with ken than it is with vega…that is what I discovered when I just started casually picking ken about a year ago before dropping him. But is that the only reason as to why he is picked? Because it is easier to do everything and just win in general?

When super first came out, the 10 new characters were crazy popular and everyone was trying them out. Everyone was trying EVERY character out. About a month later, things had gone down the vanilla path again and the opponents I faced went back to being mostly ryu and ken. I can say the same for AE and I infer it will be the same for ultra. Here’s the thing: Capcom goes through the trouble of making up new characters, going through hundreds of designs before finalizing the characters, making up a move set, balancing the moveset, giving the character a theme, a story(ok maybe not so much a story), and you get the idea. I picked vega because I though he looked goddamn cool when I first saw him in the original SF and I stuck with him for that game and for IV.

So what is the main reason that fueled you to use such characters in the first place?
A) You thought they were cool
B) You found it easier to win
C) You enjoy using the character…however I can tie this to B), as I doubt anyone dislikes winning a lot.

Either way, in my experience as someone who is not serious yet not casual, I find this mostly hurts the community, or more accurately put, affects the potential community. I have only 2 friends who play SF at my level, and i’ve tried to get several of my other friends(by several I mean nearly everyone) to learn, but they ironically quit because of what i’ve been talking about. Because when they’d try to play online, they would quickly get bored and annoyed of only facing the same characters. It is hard to get new people into a community if the most prevalent characters are undeniably powerful yet easy to use, which results in just way too much frustration for many when they are just trying to play with a character they picked because it was the one that caught their eye, be it the design or character theme(one of my poor, poor friends really wanted to start out as guy). It is also not very hard to understand why more of these overused characters keep rolling in. Because new players either can’t win or just get too frustrated by being beaten by the same characters over and over again, they end up picking those characters themselves. The same effect can be seen on melee where everyone picks fox/falco, on sfIII with chun li and ken and pretty much any other fighting game.

So to close I reiterate: If you do pick these characters just to win more easily, good for you, I am not insulting anyone for it. I will ignore any and all comments that are unpolite. I will not get into a ‘‘just block the shoryuken’’ sort of discussion because I see torney players eating fierce shoryukens, rekkas and spiral arrow all the time, furthermore those discussions never end well. And I hope you guys dont TLDR this!

2

I see you carefully avoided reading the “read this first or you will be banned” thread:

That being said:

So? What’s your point? If your thesis is “People Should Not Pick Characters They Enjoy Or Find It Easier To Win With”, then I hope you can pretty readily see how ludicrous that position is.

Instead, let’s take a step back. What you are really saying is along the lines of “I personally don’t enjoy playing this particular class of people”. SO PLAY DIFFERENT PEOPLE. It turns out that you will meet terrible, trolly, and boring people online: find the people that you enjoy playing against. If you have established zero standards for whom you want to play against other than “this person is capable of connecting to the internet in this modern era”, you are going to run into a lot of assholes.

I personally am kind of in your same boat. I’m perfectly capable of providing a reasonable game to most people on the planet, but prefer to instead play the game a little more casually: I prioritize playing people with excellent connections and not creepy over skill. If I was going to Play To Win, I would understandably need to compromise on this and instead roundly show each and every Ken and Ryu player how my character choice and skills trumps theirs.

As re the “character investment argument”: so? If you want to be the modern Viscant (RIP!) you can indeed show everybody how awesome each character is and how it is indeed possible to win and perhaps dominate with that underused character, but most of us have a lot of stuff going on and don’t have the time to be that kind of character archaeologist.

Net net, you might not be *playing *as a scrub, but your scrubby mentality is holding you back from enjoying the game. You’re assigning blame to other people when what you should be doing is realizing that YOU don’t like playing them and that YOU should take ownership of that. If you cannot find people that you enjoy playing against you either need to work on building your network / community of like-minded souls OR you need to adjust your expectations.

3

There are no chun players playing online in sf3. Please don’t name drop games you don’t play.

The general answer to this is that no one else is responsible for you having fun with the game. Make friends with talented character specialists then play them in lobbies. Really easy solution.

4

If it ain’t broke…

5

I’m specifying SFIV as it’s the game I play the most, but I am using it as an example for my thesis. Speaking of that, it’s not that I have a thesis, I was asking a few questions and then talking from my personal point of view. Is it not ok to express my opinion on a board for discussion? You are giving me a reply which is in essence what I had recieved before from other users on gamefaqs only that being polite about it(why I do appreciate btw). I clearly mentioned in my last sentence that I am not insulting anyone and I do understand that people can play with whomever they want to, as much as they want to. I also mentioned that I ‘‘really never expect to see much variety’’. It does bother me from time to time but I manage to play a few good rounds here and there and that makes up for it, but I was never imposing my personal preference as a fact. I wouldn’t play the game if I were not enjoying it…however when the moment comes that I am not having a total blast well, I can’t really go ‘‘hey billy wanna come over at 10 pm after work to play street fighter?’’ and then I stop playing. The internet is really the only option for a large part of the community I can guarantee. Or for places in the world where is is no such a thing as a fighting game community.

My questions to the general audience stands and I quote myself:

So what is the main reason that fueled you to use such characters in the first place?
A) You thought they were cool
B) You found it easier to win
C) You enjoy using the character…however I can tie this to B), as I doubt anyone dislikes winning a lot.

And i’ll add D which would just be: anything else or in between.

I cannot be clear enough about how I am in no way or form berating anyone in their character choice or preference. I am mostly curious as to see see what it is that makes the overused characters precisely what they are: overused. I can see how it can be hard not to see statements such as these as insults but I’m really not blaming anyone. I believe the game’s lifetime, variety and general enjoyment factor would benefit greatly from the rest of the cast being used and explored just as much but I am not passing up that opinion as a fact.

Let’s also take a step back here on what I said about potential community members. I never said that anyone should pick characters other than ryu or ken(not like they are the only ones, this is just for the sake of simplicity) in order for newcomers to get into the game more easily. I merely stated that the fact that so many people use these characters is a downer for most if not all. Whether you think thats, bad, unfair, acceptable, cheap, too bad, acceptable; it doesn’t matter. I myself am not assigning a term for it, it just is what it is.

The general answer to non of my questions. Your answer is not relevant to anything I stated in my first post and it is now less relevant due to my clarification on it, and while I do admitedly play less third strike I’m also quite sure that these kens and chuns I see online were not a figment of my imagination.

6

Like everyone said, add more specialists to your friends list and get some games in.
Also, if you’re bored for playing against Ryu or Ken it is mostly due to your gameplay.
Playing them often should mean you have a serious understanding of the matchup, so instead of playing them the same way, you should explore the different strategies and options you have to approach them. Sounds more like you own gameplay got stagnant and because of that you are bored.

To answer your question, I main Ken in SF4, its my very first game where I main a shoto (Ive mained all different types of characters throughout my time playing fighting games), and I really like him because of his footsies style. Playing footsies with Ken is actually complicated, and I enjoy the challenge. You never have to show massive respect against him like you would against Fei’s rekkas for example.
Its far from “easy” to win wit Ryu and Ken, they are not Vortex characters and need to choose their mixup except for a few situations where you can use an unblockeable, but other than that, they are far from being anywhere as powerful as lets say Fei, Akuma or Cammy. If you think its easy to win with them is because you’re still at a very low level, that’s really all I can honestly say. They do have a “scrub killer” quality, but thats about it.

7

If it’s a poll, polls are banned.

If this is you saying, “I merely stated that the fact that so many people use these characters is a downer for most if not all,” then that’s a pretty uninteresting personal opinion. Opinions are like assholes: everybody has one, and typically there’s really no need for you to share them in large venues.

I respect that you are brand new on SRK and immediately posting in a forum which specifically states “do not immediately post in this forum or you will be banned.” Because this is a huge forum, we need to establish certain criteria of usefulness for threads. Since this falls into the category of Poll or Personal Blog Entry, this doesn’t belong in the FGD forums. You can at best resurrect this discussion in the FGD Lounge, but while JD and I have arguably been polite I would suggest that the general SRK forum-goer has already left your mentality behind years ago and isn’t interested.

/thread