Hey,
I’ve been playing SSF4AE for slightly more than a month now. I’ve gotten decent, but feel like I’m no longer progressing. There’s still a lot to learn, as in many matchups I have no idea what the fuck to do against certain things.
So I was just wondering if someone that also experienced this (I’m guessing everyone) could tell me what they did/what helped.
Play a ton more. You’ll feel like you aren’t going anywhere for a while, then at some point usually you’ll have a realization that the whole time you were getting better but you didn’t recognize the progress. That’s what happened to me at least, I spent a lot of time thinking “Damn I’m so bad, might as well just play for fun right now.” Then I stopped caring so much about the progress I was making, and then after a few months I realized I was making progress all along.
Identify where your problems are, then grind it out.
You just said it yourself. You don’t know matchups, ergo, your gameplan probably needs work.
Go learn some matchups, bro.
That’s what I’m currently trying. The problem is, online is really not enjoyable. It’s just laggy. I have pretty good reactions, but online, they mean nothing 
I guess I’ll just keep going for now.
About that, how do I do this? Ocassionally I get people with loads of points that just dominate me, and I can then exclude certain moves against whatever they used, but most the time, people are just kind of push-overs. And I suck at training mode, I just use it for learning my timings.
Never play people that don’t have green bars. If you can;t find green bars something is wrong: maybe your connection sucks, maybe your internet is being used for other things, maybe your router is too far away, maybe your router sucks, maybe your router isn’t set up to recognize your XBOX as a priority device. Also if you have an old xbox and use a wireless adapter you will get some lag.
Connections are quite good enough online. It isn’t perfect, but certainly not any worse than the lag you might get on an old (new?) TV/LCD. A bad connection is where you are putting in combo “links” visibly before you see the first move complete. A good connection is where the first move looks almost entirely complete and its hard to tell.
Reaction Flashkicks online (I’m using stick and I suck with both stick and Guile):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qIF4CWYnq8#t=3m22s
As far as plateaus go. I have one major piece of advice. STOP CONCENTRATING ON WINNING AND START CONCENTRATING ON LEARNING. Seriously, try new/wierd shit out. Copy another player who plays entirely different. Try and have fun, troll people instead of just trying to win. Try to rely on really difficult things to do, then try to rely only on the simplest of simple tactics. Tank your rating, start all over, and work your way back up. Don’t care about points wins or losses, except at a tournament or when you tell yourself you are playing only to win.
@Meteo2
I actually play on PC, my connection is great and my monitor barely has any delay. Nor is it the FPS since I don’t play the game on max. settings since I really dont need it to look all that great. So no, it’s not me. Oh yeah, I don’t play anything below a green bar and A-class PC 
Yeah, thanks for telling me the stuff about plateaus. I know this stuff and even practice it, I just kinda forget it at times, which ends up with me being bored of the game 
But yeah, it’s a good point. Thank you.
Get more valuable experience in playing the game. You’ve been at it for a month. That’s nothing. At least you know that there’s still a lot for you to learn in a variety of matchups, so I would start there. Start working at each of your bad matchups until you feel like you’re doing well. Be sure to use resources such as these forums, youtube, etc etc, for ideas on how to handle those matchups and how to use a variety of strategies to beat those characters and player types.
If you don’t know “what the fuck to do against certain things,” practice against those certain things using record and training mode until you know “what the fuck” to do. Punish on block, react and punish before blocking, punish on whiff, etcetera.
“Sucking at training mode” is the equivalent of “I’m lazy, tell me what to do so I can magically get better.”
Some things, like Ryu cr.mk, are always going to be good no matter how good you get at the game. A certain amount of acceptance is required. You might have to block an occasional walk up cr.mk, you can’t do high pokes because of cr.mk, you can’t walk past Ryu’s cr.mk range, etcetera.
Stop playing online unless you literally live in the middle of nowhere, spend time in training mode and find people to play offline.
Some of the main things I did that helped me:
Learned about fighting game and SFIV specific terminology and game mechanics. The term glossary on option-select.com is a great source for this.
Watched lots of videos of high level players of my character. Noticed a ton of things I wasn’t doing and started trying them.
Started heavily practicing more difficult combos so I could do max damage in a variety of situations.
Started to use training mode to figure out how to counter things. After getting beat by a certain move, I’d go into training mode and set the dummy to do that move, and see what moves countered it best, what the recovery frames were, etc.
Regarding your connection, are you using wireless?
Nah, I dont use wireless.
Regarding online, I live in Germany, which simply has very few players. And I don’t really know anyone that lives here and plays, so online and training are my only choices, sadly.