If you’re going to state something as a fact it usually helps when it’s correct or you at least have some information to back up your claim.
According to an August 2009 Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing survey, HD displays are in 53% of U.S. households, meaning most households have at least one HD capable display. And according to a December 2009 Leichtman Research Group survey indicates that 46% of households in the U.S. have at least one HDTV. So the number of HD capable households is somewhere between 46-53%.
The year before in the U.S. (2008), 35% of households contained at least one HDTV according to an August 2008 survey (done by CTAM). Since then, all over the air broadcasts are now in HDTV, meaning there is another incentive to move to HDTV. I used to work for one of the biggest broadcasting stations in the world and I worked there during the switch from analog to digital over the air. The first day after we flipped the signal the phones were overloaded with calls from people who couldn’t get the station tuned in (because they were using SDTVs). I was working as a writer and producer at that time, and the station had me working overtime to man the phones because there were so many callers. Pretty much every person I talked to said that they would probably just get a new TV rather than use a signal converter box.
Now if you extrapolate the numbers for HDTV use to next August (the time of EVO), roughly two thirds of our country will be using HDTVs by then, if the pace between 2008 and 2009 remains constant. And that second survey, which reported 46% adoption, was done before Christmas and the Super Bowl (the two biggest events that lead to HDTV purchasing). And this Christmas a lot of HDTVs were sold (including record amounts for some companies as linked).
And gamers are shown to be more likely to own HDTVs than non gamers. Meaning the HDTV adoption rate of gamers exceeds the current 46-53%. So the fact is that the majority of gamers in this country, and certainly the majority of gamers on this site, have HDTVs and use them for gaming. Even some of the 4:3 votes in this thread come from people who own HDTVs but play on 4:3 instead. Meaning the number of people who vote for 4:3 doesn’t even indicate that they don’t own an HDTV.
So the idea that the average gamer in the U.S., EVO’s biggest audience, is stuck playing on a 4:3 TV is no longer reality.
Well, hot damn. My bad. Guess I’m still living in the stone ages, which is what I guess old folk like me tend to do. I stand corrected!! Thanks for that enlightening post, VFF.
And I really like what Vintage said, actually. It’s true, using 4:3 on the 16:9 setting just gives you a big black box around the WHOLE thing, right? Considering most tourneys use consoles for multiple games, doing that would be worthless, IMO. If that’s the case, it almost seems to be a foregone conclusion to use 16:9 at tourneys from a presentation standpoint.
So now, as I said, if everyone can agree to that as a standard, then maybe we can get everyone who plays HDR to stop using 4:3. This is the part that is tough. But if we can establish it early on as the standard and get everyone who plays 4:3 to finally just go with 16:9 and learn it that way, then the “getting used to it” problem will be moot.
I like this virtua fighter guy. He speaks in numbers and I like it. (It’s an accountant thing) And now that you have said that I cant think of any of my friends who dont have HDTV for their gaming needs.
And the the picture of Captain was funny too EA. Good stuff. You have to love the street fighter family and its members.
I can’t speak for anyone else but I’m fine with that. It doesn’t look ideal with such blurred and stretched images but the camera is 100% true and that’s the main factor that counts for me. The only strike against it would probably be that it’s an unorthodox configuration but it’s a fair compromise between 4:3’s consistent camera and 16:9’s picture filling up the entire screen.
Yeah, the problem with converting the SFIV players to HDR is as jchensor said; HDR being unforgiving and SFIV being casual friendly. I’ve seen a few new people online in HDR lately, only to quit and go back to SFIV when they get beat. You can teach people how to play the game, but you can’t make them have patience. I’ve attempted to guide a couple of guys in the right direction, giving them little bits of info as to why this works the way it does, or what you should do in X situation, but they simply moved on to other games.
I am relatively hopeful that when the new Xbox hits that we will still be able to access stuff from the current marketplace, so hopefully HDR will still be available. I’m dreading the release of SSFIV as HDR may lose a few more players. I guess I just feel a little frustrated.
IMO, I see the switch to 16:9 as just another change that makes it a different game from ST.
Agreed. I don’t want to start a big anti SFIV rant, because there are plenty of those already, but i think that rewarding people for failure in a game is pandering to the masses and alienating the good players, and it’s retarded. Somebody called them “welfare combos” about a year ago on some other SRK thread, because a welfare cheque is what you get when you fail in a job, and i’ve been calling them that ever since.
Doesn’t anybody approach a game with a sort of “who will i main in this game” mentality? Is that just me. Every time i pick up a new street fighter, i look at the characters, try lots of them out and look for one that feels right, and try to balance that off with tier lists and stuff like who seems to be the best characters, and then start learning from scratch again. I main Dictator in HDR, but i took one look at him in IV when it came out and figured he was garbage, so went looking for another character and started the learning process again.The idea of sticking resolutely to one character through several games seems kind of silly to me, especially in SF2, because individual character properties change so much from game to game you’re just limiting yourself.
I would put more stock in trying to only play a character that’s at the top of the tier list for the game in question than i would sticking with a specific main all the time.
Your entire post is right on the money IMO. I think i’ll use the new “contribution” system for the first time to rep you up for an excellent post. We have to welcome players like this into the community with open arms, and let them know that we want to help them to learn and climb the ladder, because if you look at the big picture, these guys are the player base from which the next generation of daigos, jwongs, valles, etc are going to come, and we have to help to keep as many of them in the scene as posible and give them as much of a chance to learn as we can, not rep them down, push them away, and piss them off until they get so tired of being negged they just turn their back on SRK, or EVO, or street fighter, or whatever and move onto the next halo or call of duty game.
I feel pretty strongly about this, i think ostracising newer players is eliteist, and is biting the hand that feeds you in the long term, and SRK has definitely been guilty of this in the past, and it’s only going to be detrimental to us. The fighting game scene is small enough as it is without us turning potential new players off. I was on another smaller website last year, for the fighting game community close to where i live. It was right at the time when SFIV was reaching the height of it’s popularity, and they were listing all of the key resources on the web for new IV players to visit to learn and improve their game. There was a short synopsis of each site, and SRK’s synopsis was basically something like “SRK is the holy grail of street fighter knowledge, you should definitely check it out, but whatever you do don’t join up or post there, it’s eliteist and nigh on impossible to penetrate. If you’re anything but a street fighter veteran you’re asking to be flamed”.
This really hit home to me how important it is to welcome these guys, not shun them. Sure they’re scrubs now, but weren’t we all at some stage? When i started playing street fighter circa 1992 there was no web, no online multiplayer, no training mode, no SRK, no Wiki, no readily available info on how to do just about everything in a street fighter game, i had to figure it all out by myself with friends and with limited resources like old 4th generation VHS combo videos. It’s likely that a lot of these new players will play street fighter for a while and then move on, but the ones that don’t have the potential to become phenomenal, far more potential than people my age had back in the day, and i think we chould be keeping as many players as possible interested so that more of them have a chance of getting really serious about it instead of pushing them away before they ever get a chance to become great.
Agreed. It’s really not that big of a deal to adjust to either one. It’s only minor niggles between the different aspect ratios. I just don’t want to see street fighter in it’s purest form die.
Agreed. ST, and to a lesser extent HDR is the only game i’ve ever played that still, after 15 years, occasionally makes me want to smash my joystick into tiny little pieces, and then throw it out of the window in frustration. But to me, that’s it’s appeal over SFIV. I hate easy mode, and i think that there has to be a minority of Street fighter IV players out there that want a challenge that’s tougher than IV, and will appreciate the tougher mechanics despite the more lacklustre graphics if they get a chance to get into it and get a feel for it. I can’t put any value on it, but to me there’s no comparison between the level of satisfaction you get in IV when you pull off a 15 hit flashy easy mode ultra to win a round versus how good it feels in ST to nail an opponent with a perfectly timed wakeup super reversal with that TINY execution window, when you had a sliver of health left and couldn’t even afford a bit of chip damage from the fireball that was coming at you. It’s tougher and more frustrating, sure, but it’s also a hell of a lot more rewarding when you get your mojo working. The graphics don’t even come into it once you get to playing at that level, it’s all about payoffs like that for me.
I swear i laughed so hard at your post a little pee came out.. A picture speaks a thousand words. :tup:
Yeah, at a price. We’ll all end up buying it again if capcom are anything to go by.
Nope me too, it makes almost no difference at all to me in terms of what i can get my dictator to do.
I felt dirty the first time I landed an Ultra and won the match after being thoroughly dominated by a player that was clearly better than me. And not the good kind of dirty I fell each time I knee bash.
Mack you didnt read my post. I said everybody typically wants a character that can easily dominate and win matches. Obviously though it comes down to what you consider easy I guess but there is no arguing that some characters right out of the box have it easier than others. I stand by my comment though that it does take more skill to use SFIV ken over HDR ken. It was no disrespect to Golden or any other Ken player but it is what it is. And speaking of knee bash’s that sh*t is such a joke. I will leave it at that. Anyhow if you can enjoy playing more than one character more power to you and many others who can as well. We are all different. I get tons of enjoyment using my primary character and then playing against the other cast.
From a purely statistical viewpoint. Use of survey data, particularly phone interview data (which the survey likely was) should always be taken with a grain of salt. There’s actually some really great work in Entertainment Economics detailing the rate at which HDTVs are in use. Most survey’s of this nature tend to be poorly done intentionally in order to advance numbers that my produce a marketable (commercial) effect. For example, if we can say that 53% of people are using HDTV’s now, then really the other 47% need to jump on board and climb out of the stone ages. Of course when we talk about possible ways to maniuplate the data they can over survey urban areas (where technology adaptation is noticably higher), areas with multiple television providers (where there may be more competition to lower HD Packages and hence induce buying HDTVs) and so on. Everything I have seen suggests that national adaptation of HDTV’s is not near as high as those survey’s would indicate. Now it is true with the delayed switch to strictly digital signals some people may decide to buy something with a digital tuner built in, usually an HDTV. But how many people as a matter of percentage were either not connected to a digital source already and didn’t have a TV with a digital tuner? In terms of percentages that number was shown to be quite low, low to the point where people took coupons for digital tuners, bought them, and then tried to sell them back at a higher price but many couldn’t because demand had been largely fulfilled by then.
This entire rant is to say, that I do not feel we should be accepting HDTV as a tried and true standard based on possibly biased survey data. Especially when we have data sources based on live interviews of entire communities in research being done now that suggests the number is somewhat lower, particularly inbetween the coasts.
I must be in the minority in this. I think as a matter of the technical barrier to actually playing the game, HDR is infintely easier to me than SF4. I mean sure SF4 has flashy things like ultras (soon to be 2 ultras) and supers and bosses with 17 hit juggle combos but how much execution does it take to do a 17 hit combo? I would think, that it would be harder to be a top level player in SF4 than in HDR beause HDR can be so much more of a mental chess match whereas many times SF4 can be stripped down to execution barriers. I can set up the trap in 4. I can know what I want to do. I can even know that it is possible to do. But you try Gouken’s Fourth Hard Trial and if you can do that, there’s NOTHING (with the possible exception of DGV’s crazy 9 hit crossup super…) Is it more that people who came in SF4 are more comfortable with that? Perhaps I feel more comfortable with HDR because my first real game was SF2? Just a thought.
Anything that involves bringing people in, means giving them something to play for. Whether its a title, money, respect, pride, fun, whatever. That also involves separation and uniqueness. To really bring people in its the task of the community to differentiate itself in a meaningful way. Have something that no one else has that’s interesting. Short of having some millionare say that he’s going to sponsor an HDR only tournament with a 50K grand prize, it has to start with community. I think we’re on a good start on that but i know there’s more we could do in that regard. So, not meaning to derail but I think at least the first part was topical.
No, i read it, i wasn’t disagreeing with you, i was just wondering does anybody actually approach different games with the mindset of “i only play characters from the top tier” rather than “i only play ken” or " i only play guile" or whatever? I suppose it’s a bit cheesy to always give yourself the best player on the board, but hey, play to win, right? It was more a general wonderingment than anything that was directed squarely at your post, so sorry if it came off like that.
I guess i’ve always just been open to using whoever gives me the best advantage in the game relative to the skills i already have, and trying not to lock myself down to a particular shoto, or charger or whatever, so people saying " i hate street fighter 4 cause insert x character sucks in it" seems a bit wierd to me. I’ve always played with a nice mix of different types of characters since the early days of playing world warrior, so If my main in one game is as accessible as my main in another, great, i’ll pick him up and learn the intricacies of him specific to that game, but if he sucks i will switch rather than maining a character i think is garbage, or giving up on the game in favour of something else.
I honestly don’t know enough to agree or disagreee with anyone on that topic, i don’t have enough experience with HDR ken or SFIV ken to be any kind of authority on the subject, but i will say this. I had always considered ken my strongest character in Hyper Fighting, and i just couldn’t pick him up for whatever reason in HDR, until very recently when i got the PSN version, and the stock PS3 control pad just seemed to bring back all the muscle memory i had from playing on a SNES pad (my fave pad of all time) and i started pulling off all my old fave TOD combos and tricky shenanigans. I mained ken in SFIV for a bit after it came out, (mainly because i loved how his ground target combo could cancel into absolutely EVERY other move he had, and it was a laugh to string a MP into a HP into a DP into a Super into an Ultra, and get about 30 hits from a tiny mistake by the opponent).
From comparing the 2 kens, i think once you take the difference in ease of move execution out of the equation you’re totally right, IV ken is definitely more complex and probably would be more difficult to learn than HDR ken partly because of the game mechanics and all the extra stuff, and partly because of the character’s more complex design, but regardless his shenanigans just don’t seem as much FUN to pull off. I went online on PSN last night and had more fun inside 10 minutes with HDR ken than i ever had in the month or two it took me to give up on playing street fighter 4 ken.
It’s totally only my slant on things, but i love being tricky and playing mindgames, and ken is a tricky bastard in HDR.
And again I’m not picking on Ken. I dislike all the characters. They all have some type of tactic(s) I despise. lol
And Silver Rain, virtua fighter did say as a whole that the country using hdtv was low but he also stated that strictly from a gaming perspective that the percentage is higher for those who do have a HDTV. I would have to agree with that. You can take the age median for those who play this game and it probably is what in the 30’s. I would bet 90% probably have a hdtv. I actually am playing on a 4:3 tv but only because my HDTV inputs were fried due to something my little one did. That tv is upstairs and I still get HDTV through the tuner. I will get another one but I have to finish Troyland first. Also look how Microsoft and Sony are marketing their consoles. You would be silly not to have a HDTV to play some of these games.
???Dont know how to respond to that one. Poor…probably not. Does not want to spend money he doesnt have…yes. I could have easily purchased one a while back. I mean I waited over 12hours to buy a laptop on Black Friday. (I wont do that again…maybe ) Like I said I wasnt expecting my HDTV to go out. I have a project that needs to get done so my funds are going towards that. Also I dont know if I want a projector or plasma. I’m leaning toward plasma but even still what sense does it make to buy a television and not be able to use it for months? By the time I am ready they will have gone done in price even more.
I hear you man. Just save your stuff and dont throw it away. Time is key bro. You will get one eventually and like they say, “If it aint broke dont fix it”. So if your set is working dont sweat it.
