I grew up with SF, started playing Champion Edition in the arcades every day and played every iteration of SF. I was at Chinatown Fair all the times and was one of the countless victims of Justin Wong. I am now 37 and hovers around high silver / low gold SFV, playing one or two nights a week. I am glad Capcom took pages from Riot’s playbook with skins, character purchases, and the bronze to diamond leagues. They should have went all the way and made it freemium honestly.
Before SFV came out I played League of Legends with my wife. She eventually got herself to gold ranking playing support and my top could never make it past low silver. She is a huge fan of Faker and we went to Madison Square Garden to watch Faker and two Korean teams playing in the semi-finals. The entire presentation was top notch, comparable to an NBA game, just an amazing experience and really made pro-gaming look good.
When I play SF it is just so comfortable, it is like 1v1 basketball, just you and your opponent. I played top in League as it is the closest thing to SF style 1v1 but it is just a totally different animal when you not only have to know your individual match-up inside and out, you also have to pay attention to the entire map, where the enemy jungler may be, where your own jungler is, and very complex team dynamics around pick/ban/counter. In group fights you literally need to know where all 10 players are and I just get totally disoriented and can not keep up with that much information on the screen. I tried very hard to be a suitable teammate for my wife but I just did not have good court vision and I eventually gave up.
When I watched Evo 2016 this year, it was a very warm and fuzzy feeling to see fellow Long Islander LI Joe made it to top 8. The way players sat together and gave each other thumbs up’s was goofy but cozy, the stage in Vegas was great, it is pretty amazing to see how far Evo came from early days even if it is still very amatuerish from commentary to production value compared to LOL. Yet I couldn’t help but notice pro SF players are much older than pro LOL players in general. I looked up and no surprise:
SF:
Daigo: 35
Justin: 31
Infiltration: 31
Fuudo: 31
LOL:
Faker: 20
Doublelift: 23
Smeb: 21
Without any question, at 30+ your reflex starts to decline, it is extremely difficult to keep up with younger players. It seems like SF is just not gaining enough fresh blood compared to LOL, and young talent with aspiration for e-sports (my wife laments all the times that if she is 17, she would be in LOL e-sports scene for sure) are going to pick LOL first, which allowed older players to hang around and compete. If SF had bigger prize pools and attracted younger players, the idles we worship will all look like Ric Flair at Wrestlemania 24.
Do you agree LOL is the more demanding of the two games overall? Obviously, SF requires way more finger dexterity to be able to perform a Daigo full parry into super combo finish, which unfortunately, is what kept it from growing as it was really, really hard to teach my wife to fireball dragon punch consistently compared to say, press QWER. But LOL just demands so much more overall from the player. It is like going from 1v1 basketball to 5v5 full court. The amount of things you have to do to be good at 5v5 is enormous even if you do not need as much 1v1 intricacies.