Honda is top tier in my heart.
It gets a little on the boring side to fight the same jumping fierce kick Ryu all day. I had one tournament where every person I fought picked Ryu, and played him the same exact way. I just kind of rolled my eyes and went with it. This game has bunches of characters in it! Use 'em!
this has nothing to do with top tier, (ok, a bit, i mean it’s why everybody chooses ryu over ken)
however, it has a lot to do with people picking the most braindead characters because it’s easiest for them to win with. Now when i say braindead, i mean i can spend all of 2 seconds using them and win using them. this includes balrog(mash jab all day and win, watch me play sometime), gief(OOOORRYAAAAAA), and ryu (). Sagat seems a bit less braindead, but for now all i see is tiger everything.
so i have no problem with people choosing those characters because they WANT to, more power to them. It’s just that i hope they looked through the entire roster, or at least tried one other person before just sitting on the player 2 side and just pressing X/A.
I mean, i’m like the super awesome good guy amongst a bunch of friends JUST because i use [a lot of] charge characters. i mean what’s up with that? i can hold back for 2 seconds and suddenly i’m pro? all i did was press directions at the character select screen
in championship mode today i went 15 wins and 6 losses. my last 10 games were vs. Kens. So I figured what the heck, ill try him out. I played my 22nd game with ken, and won. He is very easy to play as. I main Blanka and second Chun.
Maybe who people pick in street fighter reflects what our society thinks about diversity. The announcer guy even says it “The weak lose (not sagat) and the strong win (sagat), which of these players (the guy who picks sagat) will prove the old axiom (of sagat always winning) today?”
What I’m getting at is people may want to play a different character, but since they hear just a couple are really good in theory, they won’t give a second thought about who they’re going to pick.
In short, God bless you Guiles for being so patriotic. And damn the communists!
being a guile user is the most trialing part of your life, and i couldn’t stand up for myself, so i switched to bison. i feel so ashamed (yet not really, bison makes me happy in ways guile never did)
Damn the terrorists! One small Bazooka knee step for the sonic boom kind.
I used Sagat in an actual match for the first time yesterday.
I won 2-0 vs a good Akuma player. It’s good to secretly practice as him. XD
But yeah, character diversity sucks. But today, I played Dictators and Goukens and other characters and only 2 Ryus. 1 Sagat, no Blankas.
Odd day.
Point being that the better the character you play is, the more chances you have of winning, generally. Nobody plays to lose, though not everyone wants to win just as badly (i.e. putting everything possible in their favor, starting with the character). Only when winning do you get the feeling that you reap what you’ve sown.
Amongst the arcade characters, if you wish to play a motion character, you are left with Dhalsim, Zangief, Abel, Viper, Rufus, Fuerte and the Shotos+Sagat. Of these characters, only Zangief and the Shotos are easy to pick up and play. And these characters also happen to be high tier (except for Ken). So really, why go through a steeper learning curve only to jeopardize your chances at winning? Those that do pick other characters do so because of preference, built from experience in the SF scene, which is not a luxury every noob has. And no newcomer wants to go through what is depicted in this thread only to start enjoying the game~
I hate when i see the character select of the other player heading across towards ken/ryu… UGH
Is that to say you think if a person has never played a first person shooter, gets one, and first thing he does is go online, and gets laid to waste, he DID expect to win? That’s why those games are so big because it’s solely skill with the only variables being weapons you find.
There’s a reason for single-player campaigns & arcade mode in games: To understand how the game is played and be somewhat proficient at it. I can’t imagine a noob’s skills to translate well from online play into arcade in fact; which would be quite contrary to how FPS evolves. Actually now I’m interested to see if those lame tactics would work on hardest mode. Maybe it’d have to come down to time running out, it’s so inefficient. If only I wasn’t so far along the fighter’s path, I could understand what a noob thinks works, doesn’t work, and why. :bottle:
Obviously you’re not terribly far along the “fighter’s path”, then 
FPSes are intuitive. You move the mouse to aim, you left-click to shoot, WASD to control your character. At its core, that’s all FPSes are. Even if you do get raped in FPSes, it really doesn’t take long before you get comfortable with the game itself. You can’t expect to win duels anytime soon but the nature of the game itself is much more friendly to newcomers. As you’ve said, the only variable aside from skill are the weapons themselves, generally speaking. Accuracy translates well from single player to multiplayer.
In SF4, the arcade mode won’t teach you anything that won’t get punished online. SF4 requires of you to react to patterns based off experience you can only gain from playing real players. But to be able to punish anything with something more substantial than a throw, you need to work on your links. The “best” way to get into the game would be to go through challenges and practice combos in training mode and then start playing online. Seeing as this game is very execution based, you might have to clock a lot of hours in training to be able to fend for yourself in the real world.
But what if you just want to pick up the game and play casually, who would be the most intuitive and rewarding character to play? Any shoto. Why is it that all the Kens on live follow almost the same patterns and execute the same simple combos over and over? It’s because at lower levels, they work, and that’s all they need to win, to enjoy the game. In that Viper thread, I believe there’s a guy that says he clocked 450ish games and only won about 30; someone who might not be as dedicated would have quit the game long ago. Could you blame such a person?
TLDR; I don’t expect to beat J.Wong anytime soon, but I shouldn’t be expected to be at his level to enjoy playing the game. Shotos also happen to be good at teaching the basics of SF4.
But Bison is sexier <3
Dude, it’s not like “shotos” have the smallest learning curve. Sure you can do a hurricane kick, but should you? I would consider C.Viper to be one of the easier characters to learn while Gouken one of the harder. CV’s just not popular due to culture influencing minds to tenaciously pick a character featured on the cover, or made into an action figure etc. while other good characters remain overshadowed.
I envision most scrubby shoto players to be roughly 12-15 years old who are more susceptible to that sort of influence, and the only fact that they can combo/counter anything is because of turbo magic. While I’m not one who would have fun using turbo to win, there are plenty of jackasses out there who get a kick in their pants simply from that cheating function.
If it takes a win to have fun, then fuck what skill stands for. let’s all mash out DP during block strings.
Noobs aren’t real players. they’re scrubs. they scrape by with the greatest luck and unfairness money can buy. it’s shameful for me to think in all likeliness I’ll play one of them next time I go online. I don’t care if they’re a casual player. you want casual, then just play arcade mode. Casualness can’t intertwine with competition no matter how you cut it. If this could be done, then handicaps could be enabled online.
Long story short, your arguments are flawed based on the idea that you won’t learn anything useful in arcade mode and somehow shotty tactics, even if you lose, if you’re playing as a shoto, will bring you enjoyment. Get off your jump-to-conclusions mat.
Side note: Bison, Eh? I figured you for an assman, French-Canada.
Awesome thread
:looney:
How am I jumping to conclusions? I am merely explaining the shoto scrub phenomenon the way I see it. And I do believe that Shotos scale very well with time and experience, while characters like Rose simply won’t bring you as far in the long run. If you believe Viper is easy to pick up, more power to you; fact of the matter is, the majority of the community would beg to differ; she IS the most tight execution based character in the game.
It takes results, good and bad, to gauge the effort you’ll have to make to step up your game. But there is no denying that losing consistently simply isn’t fun. Winning in itself drives quite a few people to excel and strive for perfection.
DUDE. You’re going crazy in mixing up the definition of LEARNING and MASTERING. I said “learning C. Viper” - meaning basics. But you act as if a newcomer knows the challenge of linking her moves. so what if she has tight executions? What, a casual player cares about combos? They start up the game, pick any character of characters, and play.
As far as depth is concerned, I don’t think that matters much to a noob. they probably saw some “My Ken totally owned this guy” video on youtube and were like “Hell yeah! Ken Rocks!” They wouldn’t go through each character and realize “weaknesses” about them - meaning things good about that character, but beyond their skill level. Or even read… anything.
It’s all in the popularity/hype of a character that a surplus of lame people play those characters.
In my world, I refer to those people as drones.
/end
:wtf: You’re welcome???
When you’re right you’re right. Everyone at Chinatown Fair is a (in order from first to last) Balrog, Sagat, Ryu player.
I manage to have fun there because I play Guile. But I can imagine how a Balrog would get frustrated going there.
Viper has, by FAR, the steepest learning curve of any character in SF4 with the possible exception of Gen.
By steep learning curve, I mean that a person who puts 10 hours into using CV will perform way worse than that same player who puts 10 hours into say…Ryu or any other character whose moveset is “simple” to understand.
Part of what makes the curve steep for viper is that many of her best moves have a lot of startup…burning kick, seismo…both of these are not “instant punish” moves and need to be carefully set up and timed. Her thunder knuckle comes out fast, thank god…if it weren’t for that, she would be VERY hard to use.
And that says nothing about her combo setups which are quite advanced.
Hey, I think that was me. Yeah, Gen can sometimes score off the surprise factor. Add me if you want some rematches – Blanka can actually shut down some aspects of Gen’s game, but as always there’s a counter for that, and a counter-counter, and the system is complete.