KP,
I agree with you completely. If the Blanka player doesn’t make any mistakes and can consistently knock him out with s.Strong and Elec, then both versions of the Dive are completely useless.
Jiggly,
if the Blanka player is playing it perfectly, then do you still think that the new dive is better? I’d like to hear you thoughts, because playing your Hawk is my frame of reference here.
BTW sorry if this is a waste of space. I’m just curious is all.
I’m fairly certain it doesn’t actually combo, unless its deep and hits them crouching. My point is I don’t throw hados(unless Im n a bad mood) when the range is compromised, and you can dp a lk cw on reaction, it seems more telegraphed then his jump. What’s the point of lk cw thru fbs if the threat range is a range where the opponent isn’t going to throw one because a jump in combo would do half a bar of damage and score a knockdown.
Mk cw thru fbs would have made more sense.
If the Blanka is playing perfectly, Safe Dive. If he happens to block the knock down Dive instead of stuffing it, he can just roll into you. Knocking down Blanka isn’t that huge either.
I just wanted to comment on your little golden nugget here with a small tidbit, I train in combat sports, and our sparring are practices yes, but they are practices that are as close to actual competition conditions as possible, which includes resisting opponents, not a doll that sets there while we unleash combinations or execute moves on it. Which would go along with VF’s point about actually doing combos in games and stuff, for which training is absolutely useless for, it’s good to learn the basics of your character, button inputs, and getting used to the game’s system, but as far as actually using the combos in a realistic scenario, um no.
anyways, personal opinion, I like ST more, but I haven’t even played HD, so meh. GGPO ST for me
Just wanted to say that I personally think Fei Long is better. Not by much, but he’s better. I don’t think he’s changed any positions in the rankings, no, so when I say “not by much”, I mean REALLY not by much. I do think the Short Chicken Wing is really good, mostly because it does hit as an Overhead. So being able to mix that with tactical low hits really does cause headaches for pressure when you get in. I also like using Fei Long more, because he’s waaaaaay more shenanigan based, and I loves me my shenanigans. But yeah, he’s more a wear-down character now. He’s lost his one-touch-means-death style that he used to be. I’d still prefer to see Fei Long play more like he used to, to be honest.The Rekkas was his thing. Now his thing is the Chicken Wing, and I just don’t like that.
And a comment about Bison: a lot of people talk about DR being good for avoiding tick throws. I don’t even care about that. What about the fact that the new invincible legs have all but COMPLETELY SHUT DOWN the Shoto’s corner Fireball trap? Before, it was their goal: get Bison into the corner, Fireball him to death. Now that doesn’t work at all. On reaction, you can almost always get away with an Up/Towards Devil’s Reverse whenever you see a Fireball, and escape the corner trap. It’s made the fight for the Shotos infinitely harder, IMO.
I also believe that people are undervaluing Vega’s Fake Wall Dive. The problem I always see is people always try to use the fake in mid flight. The Fake’s best application is going to the wall and immediately dropping down. What that does is mask your intentions. By going to the wall and dropping immediately down, you’re completely halved the time an opponent has to react to your Wall Dive. For example, with Cammy, I could 100% do a Roundhouse Cannon Spike and hit it every time just when I see him go TOWARDS the Wall. Now, I have to wait to see what happens after he touches it. You can feel it if the opponent does this all the time. You get into this tense situation where you’re like, “Is he gonna come off the wall, or drop straight down from it?” whereas at least when you saw him go towards the wall, before, you were confident he was coming at you. The tension and guessing game wasn’t there at all. Now that Vega can mask the entire first half of the Wall Dive, it’s MUCH easier to get in with surprise Throws and surprise cross-up stabs. The Fake Wall Dive is extremely good, IMO. Not to mention that Low Jab into Fake Wall Dive gets you away from any close-up pressure for free.
I personally prefer ST. It’s definitely a more complex game, but that’s one of those double-edged swords. It’s more complex because things were harder. Honda had a harder time against Ryu. Bison had a harder time against Shotos. Cammy had a harder time against anyone. Etc. Etc. But what that did was call for creativity. I don’t like that the solutions presented in HD Remix, the majority of the time, seem to have been the most direct solution. I make no qualifications, here, that they are a good or a bad solution, only that they are extremely straight forward.
Honda - Instead of trading block damage in VST (he blocks dive, you block fp headbutt), you know can hit and follow up with nothing because he pushed you right back out or have him block and follow up with anything he fuckin wants (hands, headbutt, buttslam) and still be 99% safe. If i hit with the dive in VST I accomplished something, I got damage (Generally) without takin any damage in return (block or hit) and i knocked him down and if I want to, can close the gap or stay back.
Boxer - You’re knocked down so much in this matchup, it really doesnt matter. Id be willing to take that risk. One knockdown against boxer ends it anyways because safejump kills him.
Guile - Do I really need to go over this?
Blanka - Almost doesnt matter because he can stuff it with like everything, but new dive is slightly better in this match.
The only real matches it helped was against Dict and Sim. Dict didnt even need it because one knockdown (which you can get with old dive) and its GG for both of them.
All I really trying to say is that old dive helped more in his crucial matchups than the new dive does. Sure some of his not as hard matches got easier but is that really what bothered you as a hawk player? No, you wanted something that would help against his toughest matchups, honda and guile. We got nothing.
Doh, just had to go through 14 pages, ouch.
I think Honda got wayyy better. Right now I think I’d put all his matchups somewhere between 3.5-6.5 and 7-3, which is considerably better on the losing side and not worse enough to complain about on the winning side. I don’t really care about the nerf to the hands hitbox because it comes up very rarely and I don’t really care about the nerf to ochio because I preferred O Honda in ST and honestly think that Honda’s regular grabs were often already better than his command grab even in ST. Even as Honda player, I wanted to see his good matchup opponents get better and to get a bit more nerfage on the ochio and/or the headbutt, although I don’t think that’s a huge oversight. I think he’s high tier now.
I think in general it’s a more balanced game. Yeah, I agree that Dictator is probably top tier now, and I also think Fei is more competitive, even if relative to other characters he’s not in a better tier position. If we’re just talking about balance, so far I prefer HDR.
My complaints about HDR are about its methods and goals.
I don’t like the emphasis on special moves in the changes, for one thing. I really wanted some of O Honda’s normals for R Honda, I wanted to see Cammy get a bit more range on some of her normals, I wanted Gief to get a couple of slightly better hitboxes on his two jumping knees (one to make his hitbox much smaller and another to make it hit stronger) and range buffs on a couple of his ground normals, etc. Instead there were almost no changes to normal attacks, and I think that’s weird.
I also don’t like changes that just added mind games instead of really addressing underlying problems. Gief is now a considerably better predictive character; if he guesses right, he can hop over your low normal into spd or knock you down by hitting your normal with his lariat. He can guess better, but… so? Is that an interesting way to change him? Can he get through walls significantly better than before (I think a bit better, but not significantly, especially against certain characters)? Is it more strategic to guess a hop than to have better footsie or air tools?
I also kinda think some changes tend to remove some of the charm and individuality of the characters. Like, I liked that ST Ken was kind of a weird modified shoto-grappler with his sick knee bash, and I was cool with the fact that he wasn’t as good a “shoto” as Ryu. I wanted to see some of his shoto-iness buffed, but to be honest I would have been totally cool with an even BETTER knee bash, not a worse one. He’s really just a shoto now, and I think that’s kinda sad (and much less interesting to me personally). I also liked that Dictator was such an all-or-nothing character, whereas with the new standing jab and dr he’s more like an all-or-still-some kind of guy now. I also think it’s weird that Honda’s jab headbutt goes through fireballs, I don’t like that chicken wing doesn’t combo, and I think safe cannon drill is a cop-out; I don’t think any of those things fit those characters. Man, I would love to have seen Chun and DeeJay lose their upkicks and Claw lose his flipkick.
But mostly, I don’t like changes that were inserted for basically no reason. Juggling tiger knee? New roundhouse flash kick? Fake slide? Fake fireball? Fake wall dive? I don’t think anyone was clamoring for things like these, and I think they were inserted just to drive home the point that this game is NEW more than for any actual gameplay reasons, which is just about as bad a reason as you can get imo.
Anyway, because right now I think HDR is a bit more balanced, I guess I prefer it. But I’d really like to see a Re-remixed HDR with a lot more community input than this one had.
It’s a shame that further changes will probably not go into this game. Because I think while some of the ideas were creative, some of them just didn’t work. I know they were able to fix at least one bug with the last update but I think that this is as far as it’s going to go. It’s too bad that Sirlin probably won’t be called back to make any further changes to the game, even though he’s more than willing to offer his services if they asked him. But in doing this, they wouldn’t see any more money from the game, so I doubt it will ever happen.
UltraDavid, the only thing I’d pick up on (as pretty much a n00b) is that RH flashkick gives Guile a way to stop my Claw just sliding him all day. I’d prefer him not to have it (:D) but it makes that fight a bit fairer.
Also, I do love the fake wall dive, but the better Guiles I’ve played don’t fall for it (as in flashkick), and if they do you really have to work to punish them for more than a cr.Fp FACECLAW or a st.Hk.
The rest of your stuff I either agree with or don’t know enough to comment on 
I’m back to playing more ST than Remix. Being a RYU player I can say ST RYU is more fun for me. I can’t stand the remix dumbed down DP motion as it messes with my buffered super combos. In remix during a combo I’ll get a DP instead of a super 50% of the time. In ST it might happen 10% of the time. Wish there was a dip switch in the option menu to get the old DP back. I have tested this extensively with arcade ST and remix side by side and its always the same. I should post a vid showing exactly what I mean but at this point it won’t matter as it changes nothing.
What bothered me in ST was that if the Dive got blocked, I was pushed right back out. It was awesome actually hitting someone with it, but against some people like Honda, it wasn’t that huge because you’re crazy if you jump-in on Honda when he’s down (unless you jump in front of him and do a DP). I’d rather have a zero risk Dive against Honda with no knock down than Hawks old Dive. I really do believe Hawk vs Honda is 8-2 now rather than 9-1, and that little difference matters because I can actually beat him now. With the new Dive, you don’t knock him down, but you damage him, close the gap, and you have more opprotunity to bait something.
Guile probably wouldn’t be any different. He could hit Hawk every time with the new Flash Kick if he ended up blocking the Dive, so unless you REALLY predict and get lucky with it, most of the time it won’t be hitting him thanks to his ultra gay fireball recovery.
Dict can also kill you with one knock down too. 
This is very much how I feel about the game. ST had much harder matchups, and much more dominating situations, but that was its flavor, and as a result, you’d frequently see people using very creative methods to escape those situations, or to avoid them altogether. Usually those creative methods were not remotely the “optimal” way of handling things, but in a game where gaining advantage with positioning or a knockdown can mean the round, the non-optimal move that your opponent isn’t expecting can be more valuable than the optimal answer he’s come to expect, and is ready for. If the tradeoff for that is a game of more lopsided matches, well then bring on the lopsided matches. They’re well worth it for a game that can still surprise me after playing it off and on for fifteen years.
Add to this that being in one of those uphill battles and scraping away for that advantage is one of the most tense, and enjoyable experiences in fighting games for me. I mean, there are limits to this (Cammy vs. Honda is a fight I am rarely able to enjoy for example; meanwhile, HDR has helped this matchup’s numbers, but not made it more fun), but again, it’s a tradeoff that I’ll gladly take. The frustration that I’ve felt when on the losing end of a bad matchup is almost never bad enough to overshadow that feeling of getting Cammy’s offensive pressure/mixup game rolling through a tough match (as opposed to the Drill-happy character she has since become), or catching someone with that fatal Blanka bite right when they weren’t expecting it. Those ecstatic moments are born out of the difficulty of those uphill battles, so even if we acknowledge that HDR is a more “balanced” game (and I’d agree that it is almost certainly more balanced), changing the balance does have an effect on the gameplay beyond balance.
I can absolutely see how some folks prefer the tradeoff in HDR’s favor, and there’s no way I can fault them for that. For me though, it’s like if you go to some place that serves really awesome ribs and is famous for its extremely hot barbeque sauce, and you ask the dude at the counter if they have a more mild sauce, and he sort of sneers and pulls out a different bottle of mild sauce but can’t even look you in the eye when he hands it to you. There are plenty of places that serve ribs and have mild sauce, but if you’re eating at Smokin’ Bob’s, you expect the hot sauce damn it. That’s how I am with ST. If I want a better balanced fighting game, I can find that elsewhere. I understand that there are folks with less extreme palates, who want that ST taste with a little less burn, but when I play ST, I expect that heat. So, to make sure this overly-long, nonsense analogy is perfectly clear: ST is the hot sauce, HDR is the mild sauce, and I’m the sneering, elitist guy behind the counter.
Also: Why do my SF2 analogies always revolve around food?
His rekkas are better than before. Why are they no longer his thing?
Because in this thread, Theory Fighter is king.
this.
everything in HDR screams this.
jab headbutt through fireballs
foot invincible hop and safe horizontal ball with blanka (not even in CVS2 was this move safe why change it at all?)
gief as you mentioned.
Sirlin took hard situations and gave players guessing game solutions
lol, I don’t disagree, but I do find it funny that the two examples you supplemented UltraDavid’s point with are not particularly mindgamey (well, maybe Blanka’s hop, but I’ve never had a Blanka player succeed in hopping over a low). No hate, I just thought that was funny.
**Super Sirlin Fighter.
**
blanka has a hard time hopping chun’s lows since they recover so fast which might explain why you haven’t seen it.
but jab headbutt through fireballs is totally a guessing game. it’s 1/4 screen don’t throw a fireball threat. honda can only headbutt and make contact with ryu if he guesses ryu’s fireball. It’s pure prediction payout. the reaction pay out of headbutt sucks cause it must be done so early and therefore only accomplishes anything (albeit nothing more than what sumo splash/jumping would have done) from max screen.
same goes for deejay’s MGU. It’s payout comes from prediction in the fireball fight. Deejay must MGU early to charge overlap and gain time/space via MGU->max out. DJ can’t reaction MGU and accomplish anything. It’s a prediction payout.
btw prediction = guess. It’s not a visual/audio reaction from a situation (i.e. I guess you’re going to wake up uppercut so I sit on your body and whiff low forward before walking backwards and then see you do the uppercut and react and punish when I see it happen)
Safe horizontal ball promotes the really dumb game of random psychic blanka balls. Because it’s safe to do it pays off to psychic it because even if they block you’re safe. risk reward for that element of blanka is way in blanka’s favour. if you’re opponent is trying to footsie you just throw out the damn ball. it goes over low pokes and builds space.
Does this make sense?
If I draw a time line of a situation it would be divided into two sections. one is guessing the second is reaction. Actually the middle point is sort of a grey area.
A--------------B-C---------------D
point A would mark guessing before something happens i.e. your opponent is predictable and walks into a certain range where he throws the same poke every time so you react to that range and assume the predictable opponent will throw the same poke again so you psychi counter with a dp/jump/whatever.
point B is twitch reaction. this is how ricky ortiz low forward hit confirms supers people in 3s. he sees a range and waits for a twitch and then low forward supers your twitch because it’s safe to throw it out like that.
Point C is visual confirmation. it’s ah ha you just missed your super. or I just did 2 hits and can now verify my combo. or you just jumped I guess I’ll dp.
Point D is the back end of the situation cause people’s reaction times differ, and D basically means a new situation has come up (i.e. one player is no longer committed to a sequence of events for a certain time)
the whole of this is when you use the moves. and what I got from ultradavid whether he implied it like I see it in my head or not is that giefs new moves are very useful before point C, but not very useful otherwise. And I’m merely adding my own sentiments about the changes made to the entire game and how much better games are when the majority of it is fought after point B.
/end horribly theory fighter. I have no idea why I just wasted my time writing all that shit up.
I think this is a pretty good assessment of how I feel for the most part.
The biggest issue most people had with ST was the character balance and from what I see so far, HDR seems to be noticeably better. (That being said, I still wouldn’t expect to see a major surprise with the top 2-3 at EVO for example though).
I can only really speak about the characters I mainly use (Honda, Zangief, Hawk and Ken I suppose but my Ken is still mediocre IMO). But overall, I feel that the matches that I was supposed to win in ST, feels a bit more difficult and the matches that I was supposed to lose in ST, feels a little easier now.
I see a lot of T Hawk hate in various threads here but I think he is so much better in HDR now and fun to boot. His new dive and his options afterwards add a lot of mind games IMO. I feel like I can win against any character with him now.
Ditto for Zangief. I was never a godly Zangief player in ST but he was my second character and I think I did pretty good with him overall but there were matches where I could put up a good fight but it was just delaying the inevitable loss. I also feel like any match is winnable when I use him now.
However, I will say this about Honda, I agree that his win-loss field has condensed a bit in both directions (more 6-4 and 4-6 rather than 7-3 and 3-7 matches for example) but I think in the end, at the highest level of play, he still dies terribly to projectiles. But he has better options now which is good. But I think that’s just a fundamental flaw between the two character styles and there is not really an easy way to fix it without completely breaking something. And I think the loss of his ability to dizzy after the oicho setup is his biggest loss. For me, I would gladly trade retaining that and losing the stored oicho. I think that could help his odds against projectile characters but unfortunately it would once again make him stronger against non-projectile characters. But in the end, I think his changes were good overall. It’s addressed more issues than it hurt IMO.
But yes, I agree that there are some things that really don’t make sense to me, like the Sagat juggling Tiger Knees or fake Dictator slide, etc. Some of those things are cool but maybe unnecessary (fake slide) but some of them are brutal (Tiger Knees). You can have Sagat cornered and he take you to midscreen by hitting a Tiger Knee.
The balance is the biggest thing for me. That’s what is making this game so enjoyable for me right now. I’m normally a cranky old die-hard when it comes to Street Fighter because I just feel that anything past ST just didn’t live up to the old classic but in this instance I think the game took a good step forward.
What mind games? Walking up? Thats it? Where he lands on hit or block, there is no mixup unless you let hawk walk up which no solid player is going to let happen. His DP rarely hits crouching normals so its almost 0 risk for them NOT to try and push you back out.