In the end all the knowledge and theory fighter is good at mid level, but when all the best players are there, ST players fall in line and lose to the best player with a top tier character, or if your lucky, one of the few people that can play Ryu. Maybe it’s just that no player on earth is working hard enough… or maybe it’s that the game is really being misrepresented on this thread.
If you treat ST as a social game or a spectator sport, it’s really good, we can watch japan on youtube, we can have gettogethers and use the entire roster, but the question is, are we talking about social play, are are we talking competitive play? ST has a clear advantage as a social game because of the players that played it, but that allowed it to get a pass as a competitive game that games like A3 and 3s (the first time) didn’t get.
Lets ask ourselves: what game would actually look bad if it were played like ST? ban the top character, softban the next character, probably frown on another characer, and limit your group to experienced players you all personally know? Lets also run mostly single game or team events. How does 3s look? A3? MvC2? CE? WW? Does any game look bad in that scenario?
I don’t think it’s a bad thing necessarily, letting ST stay in the limelight kept a key group of players active in the scene through the console transition and while there were no new games coming. My problem is that it’s being twisted now to be something totally different than it really was in an effort to turn SFHD back towards an image of ST seen through rose-colored glasses, not the actual game.
I would rather just let the past be the past, we can remember the great times of ST, we can pretend that all the people here really cared about fei long and t.hawk as if they were in the game, we can pretend that all the people that cared about 3-7 matchups were actually practicing instead of searching youtube for a japanese player that did it for them. We don’t have to actually drag ST through the mud for another 10 pages.
We don’t need to go into all the hypocrisy here, people that suddenly hate throw whiffs after defending them in SF3 and SF4. People that hate easy execution but love a single command crossup, people that say that the top tier didn’t change, then that certain characters were OP.
I would rather just take the high road, and remember ST as the great game we can choose to remember it as, and continue to explore SFHD, aka the main event that is only temporarily overshadowed by SF4’s mainer event, and continue working to bring the series to the competitive level of a CS 1.6 or a SC 1.16.
I know a lot of players are also concerned about our Japanese friends, but rest assured that once they have SFHD 1.X installed on their viewlix cabs they will be back in full force and won’t take long to catchup, in the meantime we should continue to forge ahead, for them, as they would have done in the arcade era, for us.