If Daigo mained Akuma would he be the best player in the world once again?

Classic Fighting Games Ultra Street Fighter IV
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There is a legitimate reason why there is more qualifiers in the US than in Japan or anywhere else. 2 legitimate reasons actually.

  1. The USA is larger in size than any other region counted as a single region. Texas alone is larger than the entire country of France (the USA as a whole is almost twice as large as the entire western europe. California is larger than Japan (including all of the islands)
  2. The amount of players in the USA community is SIGNIFICANTLY larger than Japan. The USA makes up 60% of the entire SF player base according to Ono with europe being 30% and the asian countries including Japan being the rest. http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-10-25-ono-60-percent-of-street-fighter-players-are-american

Just because there is lower level players at evo as well doesn’t NEGATE the higher level players. Once you get out of pools the quality and quantity of players are the best in the world at EVO as well as the most varied in terms of location (which means more playstyle variations and a bit more of a gamble as you may not be familiar with your opponent’s style as you would be playing someone you see a local major tournament and regularly at weeklies.) Plus the sheer volume of players is higher so of course the percentage of top players is going to be lower. 5% of 10000 is more than 50% of 100

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This is the top 32 of last years EVO, I don´t know, why the level should be low.

If Infiltration would be a Japanese player, he wouldn´t receive much hate.

183

Just like the best teams don’t win the Stanley Cup? The World Series? The NBA championship?

No, those who win the hardest tournies are considered the best. Infiltration is the best currently.

The 25th anniversary tourney. Guys you listed couldn’t even qualify.

It’s a teams tourney and has no relevancy on determining who the best singles player is.

End of discussion.

This is nonsense. Risk for betting is irrelevant but I’ll play that angle. After Infiltrations performance @Evo who do you think was the favorite at the 25th anniversary tourney? If Infiltration continues as he is now who do you think the least risky bet at this years Evo will be?

Tournaments that contain more unknowns are tougher to win that Godsgarden, because at GG you know every single potential opponent and can prepare for their play. In fact Infiltrations style would be even more effective at GG because he would have notes on 90% of those players rather than 20% or less he had @Evo.

Because you didn’t. Excuses for why your “better players” failed is not valid, especially when they are losing to non Japanese players.

You completely miss the point. The point isn’t the ratio of who is losing to who, the point was that it doesn’t matter because the idea that the Japanese are significantly better at the competitive level is a myth as proven by their performance.

No that’s a myth as well, you’re just a deluded fool.

1 - I know virtually every player you listed.
2 - I’m not an American.
3 - You’re an idiot.

Nobody ever contended there weren’t other masters out there the point is Infiltration is the current best player. Why? Because he is proving it with his tourney wins and by more consistently beating the best players from Japan/Asia/America/Whoever you throw at him.

The argument isn’t that Infiltration is unbeatable or that no Japanese player could beat him, the argument is he is the best overall player right now.

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The only godlike players in sf4 in my unimportant opinion are Daigo, infiltration, and xian( in no order despite what you see. Lol) everyone else is just insanely good… I’m sure Gen is getting buffed in AE14 mark my words … xian’s gen… somethin… special bout it… I don’t need to talk about Akuma but he’s for sure going from A to B or B- tier… no lower then that just cause of his nature and moves… Yun was considered nerf to the ground when AE12 came out going from S to C… lol then everyone soon realized he was still easily a solid B tier character he even fid pretty decent against high tiers… I doubt they’re even gonna touch yun in the Ae14 update … if anything they would probably give him one or two buffs cause they’ll remember how long that nerf list was from vanilla AE… lol
I main Yun and love fighting Akumas online… all 3000+ pp akumas seem to play the same. Lol so when Akuma gets nerfed me and yun are gonna have more fun… Genejin!! Ayy aya yeeup yeeup yeeup aya ay yeeup aya eh tuu(hard knock down) its at a what 5.5-4.5? Maybe 6.5-3.5 later.

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Haitani and Kazunoko were asked to join (at least for the playoff to get in). Haitani declined because he felt he didn’t wasn’t worthy after his “poor” performance in the last Topanga League. And I guess Kazunoko was too busy.
And I doubt you’ll ever see Infiltration at a Japanese Tournament, mainly because it’s not where the money is. Maybe if it wasn’t 2 months before EVO…

186

I don’t really care for the argument, but I had to quote this for how funny (And woefully ignorant) this statement was.

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O yeah, also something I pointed out to James Chen during last years EVO. The top 8 weren’t just varied in character, it was 6 different COUNTRIES. It was as international as you can fucking GET.

There was 2x South Korea (Poongko, Infiltration) 2x USA (PR Rog, Dieminion, also notable for being west and east coast respectively.), Taiwan (Gamerbee), Australia/HongKong (Human Bomb), China (Xiaohai), and Japan (Daigo)

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Come on guys, we all know Shadowloo Showdown is a more higher-level tournament than Evo :wink:

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lol. SS has probably the 2nd highest level of players… other than the aussies themselves. ZING!

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EVO GONNA GO LIKE THIS:

  1. FEDEX/K BRAD
  2. PR RAG
  3. BIKE ROSS
  4. LI JOKE
  5. JAMES CHENG
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Nigga stole my Bike Ross

192

Lol do people actually hate on Infiltration? Dude’s godlike, and pretty humble from what I can tell.

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If we’re arguing from authority, Daigo also said he believes the US has caught up to Japan in terms of skilled players, now you may say the /average/ level or concentration of skilled players in USA might be lower than Japan, but as long as you have a consistent and similar volume of top players coming from both regions then you can consider the skill level being displayed at tournaments to be fairly equal.

I know there will always be great players in Japan or other countries that often cannot attend the big tournaments in the USA but you have to consider them to be relatively equivalent in skill to the ones that do attend, because if they were significantly better, then the sponsors would sponsor them to go so that they can win and rake in the marketing benefits.

I don’t doubt that there can be 20-30 Daigo level players at the local Japanese Arcade but unless you can tell me that they are regularly winning long sets or destroying the players who do get to represent Japan (some very strong ones like Tokido, Fuudo, Kazunoko, etc) then we can really only consider them equal to the ones who do make it out. At which point, if we can view results objectively and see that players like PR Rog or Dieminion can do well versus these players then the overall skill gap between top performers in the US and JP is not that far.

Do I think any of the lower profile JP players could beat Infiltration in a short or long set? Yes of course, just like I think that Daigo, Tokido, Fuudo, or Kazunoko could beat Infiltration in a short or long set, similarly like how I think many players internationally could beat Infiltration in a short or long set.

In a similar discussion, whether or not one applies the “best” label to Infiltration should really depend on what is being defined with that statement. I think over the past year he has had some very very strong showings with the SF25 and Evo 2012 wins (Especially the SF25 tournament, losing to Daigo in Winners and beating Fuudo in Losers to come back and beat Daigo in Winners is a big test of mental toughness) but he’s also demonstrated that he is fallible and that other people have shown they can be competitive with him. This isn’t like Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan being head and shoulders above the field, Infiltration’s done very well but he doesn’t necessarily have that “aura of invincibility,” and I think that’s a bigger testament to the overall competitiveness of the game than a knock on his ability.

Also I’ve been reading SRK for like 5 years and this topic made me make an account and finally post because I felt like both sides were missing part of the conversation :\

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Besides download speed and fundamentals how come no one mentions Infiltrations insane reactions! I mean in his match with Latiff he didn’t get hit by a single burn kick thats crazy. Have you ever seen another shoto player duck under every single burn kick like that against Latiff? Even Daigo was getting hit by burn kicks all day and Ryu has a better cr.mk for avoiding burn kicks than Akuma.

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True on first sentence, false on the second since Evo isn’t the hardest tournament.

More like, most of them didn’t TRY to qualify, or they couldn’t because in the end there was only one qualifier for them.

It’s quite relevant when the average level of each player easily surpasses that of Evo. The fact that SBO contains all these grandmasters and Evo is generally missing most of them, means Evo is simply not a basis for determining this…period.

Not really…note taking on top players is actually less effective than it is on lower players…that’s because the true grandmaster players don’t have a “style” and they don’t have exploitable weaknesses. The only notes you can take are on what kind of mixups they use (and these are things you should already know if you are a top player). Thing is that true top players have a whole bag of tricks that they save and store for key moments, so even then it’s difficult to take notes on this. These players also don’t really fall victim to using patterns that can be easily noted and exploited.

Like really, good luck on Infiltration “taking notes” on a player like Sako.

Lol? Their performance exactly shows how significantly better they actually are, the opposite of what you claim. Do you even watch matches or do you just look at a final scoreboard at the end of a tournament and draw all your conclusions from that?

Also your idol Dieminion shoots down your nonsense.

And the argument is extremely shaky, as already pointed out. Please, just stop talking…you have proven your irrationality and absolute lack of knowledge of what’s going on around the world.

Anyway, did anyone see the recent Topanga League results?

Poongko (Seth) vs. Umehara (Ryu) – 5-7 ○○●●●○●○●●○●
Xiao Hai (Cammy) vs. Bonchan (Sagat) – 7-9 ○●●○●○●○●●○○|●○●●
Xian (Gen) vs. GamerBee (Adon) – 5-7 ○○●○●○○●●●●●
Poongko (Seth) vs. Fuudo (Fei Long) – 1-7 ●●●●●○●●
Bonchan (Sagat) vs. Umehara (Ryu) - 7-5 ○○●●○○●○●○●○
GamerBee (Adon) vs. sako (Ibuki) – 0-7 ●●●●●●●
Xian (Gen) vs. Fuudo (Fei Long) – 2-7 ●●○●●●○●●

Pretty crazy results.

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I’m actually the best player in the world. I just don’t go to evi cause It’s a waste of my time you know… I have 550 PP in AE on the PC, But if the net code wasn’t so bad I’d have like 20.000+

And I only accept criticism on my post from people who haven’t stated something at least as illogical or speculative as what I just wrote.

A little bit on the serious side, I really think that the amount of money Daigo would get from prizes and sponsors would be enough to make him get whichever character makes him win. That should not only be valid for him, but to any other player with real chances. With all the talk here on the forums talking about how who doesn’t play to win is a scrub and stupid, I find it very awkward that people are pretty much calling Daigo a Scrub, cause that’s pretty much what he would be when he chooses to loose by not picking the best character.

Is this logic wrong?

Also, why don’t I see like 90% of the best players playing Akuma? Do they also choose to lose because they want to play a specific character?

Maybe that’s all true. But with thousands of dollars on the line I find this behavior very strange.

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Yeah the problem is that Daigo is known to tell people what they want to hear, especially when he is being interviewed by other Americans. It would be strange for Daigo to say something like “US hasn’t caught up with Japan yet”. Now Dieminion, on the other hand, was interviewed by another American, so he didn’t have to be humble. His statement is also quite different…because he isn’t asked about Japan, he is asked if the US needs to watch out for a specific person or country and Dieminion flat out says, Infiltration is the least of our worries, it is Japan that we need to be worried about and that they are currently way beyond the US.

To be honest, I don’t think Japan is “WAY” above the US…Japan’s best players are better than America’s best players, and Japan also has more of these kinds of players and their average skill level is much higher. But, while America’s best players are lower level than Japan’s best, US still has strong players that can make things competitive…but how well do you think US would do if they sent someone to Topanga League (why hasn’t this happened anyway?).

But yeah I agree with the rest of what you said.

198

Well if that was an SBO 32 man bracket, the following names wouldn’t belong there: MOV, iPeru, PR Rog(only if America had a qualifier, not if he had to qualify in Japan), Mike Ross, HumanBomb, Hsien Chang, Dieminion(same as PR Rog), Ibrahim, Poongko(maybe), Combofiend, Zeus, Alex Valle, John Choi, Ryan Hart, XSK Samurai, DRS Chris, CJTruth.

199

And why couldn’t PR Rog qualify into SBO? He beat Fuudo clearly at last year’s Evo and most Japanese players who have played him regard him as the best Balrog player in the world. Hsien Chang also is the guy who has gone the furthest out of all the Americans at SBO in Street Fighter. His team came in third and yes although he was in team Taiwan he held his own and IIRC even OCV’d a team. Also you’re seriously saying Ryan Hart couldn’t make it into SBO? Have you not watched him play recently?

GTFO with your bullshit.

200

I began flagging Emil’s bs as trolling, which it is.