I fear that in a few months time, getting a game on HDR will be next to impossible. As it currently stands, you can easily wait a good 5 minutes for a match outside of “peak” times. During the day, you would be lucky to find one or two lobbies open, that’s disregarding the ping and whether the game would actually be playable.
The community has diminished greatly since the release of SFIV, MVC2 and again with SSFIV. I notice players leaving one by one to play SFIV and it’s leaving HDR with a very small player base. I fear that once 3rd Strike launches, that it will be the final blow for HDR.
The original purpose of this thread was to identify what players were doing these days. There are guys I used to run into on a regular basis even though they were not on my friends list, who I never see anymore. The European scene pretty much is already dead. Guys I used to see regularly :-
Billjmninja - now plays on GGPO more often
orf33 - I presume plays GGPO too
Guile75 - is currently offline
diceman078 - is now living in Japan (short term I believe)
markyboy81 - now plays SFIV
Mr Irepressible - is currently offline
ScarGfx 360 - seems to be playing SFIV more often
SMQ - now plays SFIV mostly
Elton Chong - doesn’t play often, but seems to play SFIV now
Kubz Da Kockney - now plays SFIV
MackDaddi - now plays SFIV
Fei Lee - plays SFIV more often
Other guys I haven’t seen for a while are Quaristice, Madin Aoi, dav35, jenovaswarrior.
Now that’s a hell of a lot of players to lose (and there maybe 5-10 more players who weren’t as good who moved on to SFIV) when you consider how dead HDR is these days - that’s easily 5 or 6 lobbies worth of players from Europe who now no longer, or rarely play.
If there are any American players MIA or have moved on to SFIV, let me know and I might add them to this “missing persons” list.
So what can we do to preserve the scene? I’m not sure. All I’d say is shoot out invites to people who used to play HDR but now play SFIV. Get them in a party and harass them to play a proper game.
Create small lobbies, but most importantly be patient and populate those lobbies even if it’s dead. Go browse SRK or something while you wait. One of the problems we have is that players come on to HDR, see there are no lobbies and cannot be bothered to wait, so they play SFIV instead. If we create that lobby, then that player can get a match. If everyone just thinks, “I’ll leave it to someone else” then no one ever does it. Similar thinking is also why the HDR players left to play SFIV. They think that one person leaving won’t hurt, but if everyone has that view, then everyone ends up leaving!
I’d also maybe suggest people forget about ranked matches. I think it’s fair to say that player matches get the most traffic, and ranked matches just fragment what’s left of the player base. Not only that but the last few times I went into ranked it was just filled with Akuma scrubs and ragequitters, so the better players do tend to hang out in player lobbies. If you don’t like the wait, just set up a 2 player lobby.
Finally, and this is a big ask, but if any PSN players have a few quid going spare, get a second hand 360 and play HDR please. There are a good few PSN to Live converts on here and they will echo the fact that the game is a lot less glitchy and the overall experience is much better.
Other than that, I don’t see what we can do to keep it alive. People seem pretty set on playing SFIV, as I’d have expected the majority of them to have returned by now, but they haven’t. The thing that stinks is the amount of people playing SFIV that have something derogatory about it in their profile, like “Shoto jab masher 4”. It seems these people don’t enjoy the game fully but they still play it. Why?
HDR is dying and we need to do something to keep it going, preferably by bringing back some of the good old players.