been playing since SFII champion edition. Still suck.
I dunno, I feel like I never have fun with things if I’m bad at them. But getting good at fighting games involves being bad for a long time, so I never really stick with it. 
Good is relative to your competition. Online I would be considered good because I am always in the upper 50% of ranked players in whatever Steet Fighter Game I play, but I am still terrible when I go to my local weekly I throw in Detroit (Walraven Weekly Detroit) I ALWAYS go out 0-2 because for years we had F3 alucarD andeven tho he is gone there is still cR Footwurk, the CORN BOYZ (JDM, Devil Chipp, Sethlolol, Bootleg Winner), the SRM team (White Beast, Mad King, McDougie, AkumaZX, Marshmellow, Slinken), JWE Kiu, and about 30 others I can’t beat. If I leave Detroit and go somewhere else then poof I am good again and can win matches
the more you learn any skill, the more you realize your preconceived notions of “being good/competitive/tournament level” don’t mean anything. they are too ambiguous. there’s also this weird thing where as you learn more, you become more aware of the things you don’t know. theres a good chance that by the time you reach this benchmark you have in your head right now of “being good” you’ll be even more dissatisfied with your skill level than you are now.
the best advice here is to give yourself discrete goals and stop focusing on trying to reach x amount of practice time. 30 minutes drilling a bnb you’re not solid on is worth way more than 2 hours taking the piss out of scrubs.
win/loss ratio is also a misleading statistic too. avoid trying to measure success by hours played or win/loss ratios
It takes a lot of time and “good” is a very… subjective term.
I’ve been playing Super Turbo from 1996 and not nearly as “good” as Snake Eyez who started in 2009.
I’ve been playing Tekken since Tekken 2, which is before top player AK was born.
Getting “good” depends on a few things -
One is your devotion to it. It will take time, no matter what.
Two is your practice habits. Are you actively focusing on problems in your game? Execution issues, matchup issues, etc. Are you watching other people play for ideas. Are you playing a good cohort of opponents, etc.
Three is what is your level of “good”. Where do you want to go? Do you want to win Evo? That’s GOOD. Do you want to just beat your local friends and do moderately well on online ranked matches? That’s GOOD.
casual for…bout 13-17years still pretty below average.
Sf2 world warriors and KI.
played a crapton of fighters plus mugen since then too.
Most difficult being…I’d have to say from what I’ve tried personally, KI and mugen/sf2.
easiest being tekken, doa and virtua. also marvel. everything marvel.
For qcf 2x go and practice it in training. Do ten times in a row from each side. Then learning how to set it up is the next hurdle, knowing when it’s safe to attempt. Crush counter v trigger qcf x2 works great for chun li
Just to refine your question, you should probably ask how long it took you to get to a defined level online, like 2000PP in SF4 or Silver in SFV. Sure online isn’t a perfect measure, but at least it’s pretty standardized.
Also, instead of asking how many months/years, you should measure in hours. In general, someone who plays 30 hours a week will learn a lot more than someone who plays 3 hours a week.
Just to share my experience, I played about 300 hours (?) of SF4 a few years ago, but never got past around 1000pp. Then I didn’t play fighting games competitively for years (although I played through the single-player campaigns of a few). With SFV I’ve been trying to get back into it. I’ve played about 5-10 hours a week since the game came out, so that’s about 70 hours. Online right now I’m about 1500LP (super/ultra bronze).
If you consider, say, Silver ranked to be decent, then maybe it would take a few hundred hours for the average person to get decent? That’s not including the time browsing these forums at work 
Anecdotally, some people are a lot more naturally talented than others. For instance, Luffy supposedly won his first local SF4 tournament a few months after he started playing, and even as a pro he only practiced a few hours a week. (Take that with a grain of salt of course.)
played since 08, Still hate sfv
I started playing ever since the very first Street Fighter, even the cabs with the pressure sensitive buttons. I am not at all any good at SF5, but I do enjoy playing.
I played SF2 back on SNES, Killer instinct on SNES I think it was or N64 one of the two. I’ve played Tekken. All those games. Right now I’m trying to learn SF5. It’s just a learning process bro. Just keep playing and try to learn. For example, I just played an Alex that beat me in fight 1, I took fight 2 and fight 3 he started turtling his butt off. I use Necalli and I kept trying to get inside on him. I lost the match and post match I realized I should have used my ground pound to make him start moving. It’s not the first time it’s happened but I just learned from that match. The more you play the more you learn and can apply to other fights. Keep blazing…
I was the 3rd best Yie Air Kung Fu player in the world. But it’s mentioning that I won the national tournament that ran on a faulty revision board.
10 years and I’m still not good.
5 plus years on and off and I still struggle, I plateau and lose interest. Its all about the fundamentals, commitment and patience.
I’ve been playing fighting games for over 25 years and you can never ever assume you’ve learned or mastered it all.
I’m good. But I’m older now and I choose which games suit me in my life over what’s hot new dem streets.
Maybe in anorther 25 years I can answer alot more better then I can now but it takes a lot of very very hard work, practice, patience, knowledge, truth, wisdom, understanding with a bit of luck to be great. But don’t sell yourself short nor compare yourself to others who have made it far beyond what you can do now.
Compare yourself to the dude you beat and the next dude you face.
Then raise your bar from there.
I’ve been playing for as long as anyone else here and I still can only consistently beat people who have no idea what they’re doing.
Been playing about 7 years and I still drop easy shit.
I’m still not good, and I’ve been playing fighting games since Tekken 3. To be honest, depending on what you consider to be “good”, you may never reach that level. A lot of time goes into learning match-ups, memorizing every single move and what you can use to punish them, and set-ups. If you mean good enough to beat people who only play fighting games occasionally, it’s rather quick. If you mean being able to use solid fundamentals that are universal to virtually every game, I’d say six months to a year of putting serious work in. If you mean being able to regularly beat most people and learning the intricacies of the game’s specific systems, that’s hundreds and hundreds of hours grinding it out in every specific game.
I don’t have the time or patience to be truly good in any given fighting game, so I’ve settled at being good enough that I can sit down and just play without needing to polish off the rust in practice mode every single time. I can hit a few BnBs in KoF/Garou/SFV/Skullgirls/Yatagarasu, and I know the basics of fighting game fundamentals, and that’s good enough for me.
That feel tho. That feel tho, man.