Picked up AE recently (took a long break from vanilla SF4) and took me a couple of weeks to find a main. I wanted to be a bit different and choose someone not a Shoto, and after experimenting with three or four characters over a couple of weeks I decided to stick with Cody.
According to Eventhubs (or specifically the data of their users), Cody is the second most used character online. Is this true? Doesn’t seem to be so in my experience, but I’m just a beginner.
Online no, offline no. Cody online is ~mid level popularity in my experience. Not UNPOPULAR but not really an exceptionally common character to run into. Offline you hardly ever see him because he doesn’t win you tournaments unless you are significantly better than your opponents at fundamentals since he doesn’t really have any strong “gimmick” or go to moves like a great fireball or safe special.
I think a lot of the people who put Cody as their mains or 2nd strings don’t actually play SF4 on any regular basis. Even in SFxT when Cody was arguably top 10 and had some seriously abusable stuff he wasn’t that common to see (and now pretty much only 1 person plays him offline thanks to them turning him into garbage tier lol)