HDR Missing Persons Thread

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.

The European scene is fine.

We had SVB a few weeks ago and now VS-Fighting in a week or two.

And Neo Kumite coming up in November.

I went to SVB, and so did a lot of others, but I got the feeling that they won’t bother in future, more like it was a one off thing. As for VSfighting, it sounds like not too many are going, and most of those are the same guys who went to SVB, or the same guys who have been supporting the scene for years (eg Fulan).

This Neo Kumite, is that the French ST/Cabinet tournament PlanetRV was telling me about? I think I’ll probably go to that one too lol.

Yeah, event wise it’s not so bad, but actually getting good matches in so you can improve is difficult. I know GGPO is slightly better, but the setup isn’t for me. For some reason I’m getting dropped frames even on good connections like as if it was a 100 ping match on Xbox live. It might be my CPU maxing out (though the emulator is single threaded, it’s a 2x2GHz A64 mobile, which should be good enough), or more likely the oboard graphics being a piece of shit, Windows 7 or even all of them.

I turned off Vsync and hooked up a CRT to it which was a bit better, but still got occasional stuttering. The other thing is I don’t like ST Ken or Gief a great deal, so it’s not as fun for me.

BTW the Neo Empire guys are trying to organise 4-6 weekly HDR ranbats in West London if anyone is interested. They need 32 names but only have 12 so far.
HDR Ranking Battles - Neo Empire Forum

I have to laugh at this thread and even some of the others that relate to this same thing man. Unfortunately tis the way of life. Everything has to die. I mean I started playing games back in the 80’s on my Coleco Vision and ultimately got a NES. I still play Super Mario Bros and many of the other classics on all of the systems I have. But the new stuff will always detract those from the old. Kind of like toy story. You still love your old toys but you cant deny yourself the new stuff either.

Sure the numbers will go down but keep in mind there always will be some playing. And really when you think about better technology has allowed to keep this game in play much longer. With GGPO, 2D Fighter and who knows what else, the fighting scene actually is more active then it ever has. It just seems so divided due to console wars. I assure you if HDR was on GGPO you would see more people playing on it.

Anyhow just do what you can and support it when you can and it will live on.

PSN has more competition than XBL, NHC members keeps HDR alive and Hostile, i can’t tell the same thing on XBL, HDR is almost dead.

Hey Zero,

Im still around but havnt had time to play hdr or any xbox game in a while, been ploughing alot of time and money into my car. I should be back online around the end of the month so I can my reclaim my ‘King Of UK HDR’ title lol.

I hope the euro players come back cos we had a good range of characters, good and bad, and lots of laughs some of less desriables were:
the obnoxious smq,
that french guy who threatened to put ppl names in his bio (forgot his name),
killa liam - cool guy but a serious sore loser and a regular source of rage mail
fall of chaos
SF Prodigy 91

Really? I have HDR on PS3 but I feel its the exact opposite, and having PSN’ers like you, Reno, and OGMole on my XBL friends list means I have no reason to play it there. Aside from that it has some pretty serious online issues (at least for me). Actually, anyone wanna teach me something and post the best PSN players? I’m a bit curious.

I’d advise against making threads with titles like “HDR is practically dead”. Imagine a player coming on the HDR forum for the first time and seeing this title among the top-listed threads. Regardless of what the thread itself contains, what do you think his instinctive reaction will be?

It just a matter of numbers, you can go whenever you want and you always find out peeps playing HDR, despite bugs and shitty netcode. sometimes you have a ton of invitations to a lot of rooms, i miss old days :frowning:

IMO this is the Best of PSN:

Ryu: DGV, JohnChoiBoy, Hadouken696969, EST_1991_, Hado-King, DOTA_wickedsick
Ken: EST_1991(this guy is our psn version of damdai), GNX84, Coth_X, Hadouken696969
E.Honda: MisterEgoTrip, Str8Crazy87, Madpossum, RenoMD, dbostick
Chun-Li: Cauldrath, GNX84
Blanka: Str8Crazy87, RugalBernstein, djreign
Guile:hbk12341(aka Marsgatti), TecmoSuperBowl, SP_Wesker215 , superdood, Sock u_up
Deejay: Binstone, dbostick, EST_1991
, ironDD
Zangief: Rashid-O, TheGreatMole, elkipor
T.Hawk : GNX84, VIIXIII
Fei Long: Rice247, kaospider, kzunedo
Cammy: Rice247, SLEZv1, ktm0066, Shezbot
Dhalsim: ktm0066, Welcome2Troyland, Pacloc
Boxer: Hadouken696969, 1hitparry, Str8Crazy87, Vestax aka djmassif
Claw: Blueblood, Branta(aka Ganelon)
Sagat: EST_1991_, Welcome2Troyland, JohnChoiBoy
Dictator: T3R_Dictator, RenoMD, GeoSRK

Right now iam in vegas, iam very interested in these neo empire ranbats, sign me up if you can. Vegas arcades aint all that…

Norieaga, you might want to look at this thread.

I don’t have HDR for 360, because I don’t have a controller converter for my Dual Shock 3, but I agree with Philcito. PSN HDR seems to be doing just fine. I will admit that its hard to find certain characters, though, like Cammy, T. Hawk (especially T. Hawk), Chun Li, and Blanka. If you’re looking for Ryu, Ken, E. Honda, Fei Long, Dictator, or Zangief, you’re pretty well covered, though.

Ironic, the worst version has more competition(quantity and quality), don’t get me wrong XBL has great players!, but XBL doesn’t have the quantity :(, idk why.

Im interested in this.

Good point. Title changed. Damn you and your “yomi”.

I’ve put your names in the thread as interested, but it would be great if you could just sign up and confirm it. I know it’s a ballache, but it would be good if you could, so it’s come from you and not a third party. They need 32 names to make it viable (financially I presume), so serious enquiries only. I don’t want to look stupid saying, “X, Y and Z said they would come” and no one shows up.

Be good to meet you guys in person. SVB was awesome. No attitudes or anything from our UK live players, even SMQ was cool. This was my first time meeting any of them in person, but we all got along instantly talking about the game and stuff like we had known eachother for years. Really proud that so many of our online players went down there and showed Neo Empire that there is still love for SF2 and that they were more than just bedroom champs.

Especially when this came up the same day PSN has HDR for sale lol

I’ve been keeping track of traffic that comes through for weekly rankings (Before it resets and posting them in the General Discussion thread) and it usually hits on average of 1900-2000 players a week on XBL.

Maybe someone can keep track of PSN weekly rankings and check the traffic there.

Either way, that’s a lot of people to consider the game dead.

It’s unfortunate that we can’t see how many lobbies are available. There could be ten lobbies that are created but you can’t tell if they exist because they’re full.

Aqua Snake, I looked into doing the same for PSN, but it seems like it doesn’t have weekly leaderboards.

EDIT: Oh, and most of the PSN traffic is in friendlies. Ranked does wind up dead once in a while.

HDR needs a PC release.

The good news is, I don’t see Microsoft dropping XBL support for 360 games in the next five years.

This is the problem. There are so many people who play ranked who I’ve never seen in player matches. Presumably they play ranked for the sake of e-peen, realise they suck and move on to something else.

Seriously where the hell are all these players? Just today I sat in a lobby for 7 minutes and no one joined. I only ever see the same faces in player matches.

That’s true about the full lobbies. Although on PSN seeing lobbies that you can’t join gets annoying sometimes, it would be nice to have the option to see where your friends are and stuff.

It makes me wonder if the majority of these players are from the U.S.

If it is, then they may have a higher ping with you (Since your in Europe) and makes them more hesitant to join your lobbies?

It’s pretty easy for me to get matches, but that may have to do with our differences in time zones.