I don’t know if it’s my network settings or whatever but 3S lags like shit whenever I play and I never see people with green ping. It’s virtually unplayable with constant rollbacks and skipping all over the place.
Do you just need to exclusively stick to locals or something?
ya, pretty much 
if you’re willing to live with the sketchiness that comes with online, and the people you’re playing against are making an effort to play like it’s offline (not abusing lag, mashing through shit that wouldn’t happen etc) it can be fun. otherwise online is definitely not ideal. whether it’s not being able to tech throws, teleport dashes, dropped parries, or not seeing the startup frames of moves, online can be frustrating at times unless the connection is great.
So basically, don’t play online and stick with offline mode.
Got it 
if you have no local competition, I think online is still better than nothing. there’s a lot of great players on GGPO. console is more of a crapshoot but there’s a handful of good players there too.
Try GGPO, some people find that it works better (myself included).
You have to deal with the trolls on there but yeah, it’s way better.
Sacramento? Where is @Phantomnaut ? Where is anywhere to play?
Seems I missed the Anime Tournament with a few 3s players this past weekend in Sac. You have a Ken, a Yun, a Q over there as regulars. Remy & Elena took 2nd 3rd last time… dont think Q & Yun played, didn’t want to watch the tape. Too many color packs.
no.
Ideally you need to find tags of people in your area, for instance everyone on my friends list is in the Western Europe area and the games are fine and pretty lag free, if you are new to the game it might be better to go on GGPO and find people in your area that way
it’s only lag free if you were always that slow.
play lag/ggpo delay set at 0.
Outside of that this game is pretty much unplayable. Those that tell you otherwise rely on this game for other easons. If they say it’s just for fun they don’t understand that you want to play it “legit”. All else is for the wolves.
I was in the anime tournament last week and took 1st with Dudley, but there really weren’t many good players. There was a Ken guy that was decent (he was part of staff) that was in the finals with me. Are there still a lot of 3rd players in Sac? I was surprised there was such a lack of showing at the tournament. 5 years ago where was a lot of comp here.
Alright cool.
Matt Ken there yeah. They told me they used to have sessions at one of the guy’s house. But they were now moving onto KOFXIII a little bit. If you have the time & resources, you would have to make it down to LA for more comp.
Nah I’m not really interested in doing that, plus I’m no where near good enough to make it worth my while. I’d be more interested in getting some decent comp here.
Yes, you can have a good online experience. It takes the cooperation of your opponent and a little knowledge of how the netcode works.
1.) Setting your SMOOTHING.
This is the most important thing you can do to make your experience more enjoyable.
Smoothing is pretty self explanatory:
raise it = smooth game, more delay.
lower it = no delay, jerky game play.
Finding the right amount of smoothing is situational to your opponents ms. The higher your opponents ms, the more you should raise your smoothing. But remember, GGPO is p2p, so your opponents smoothing will also be accounted for when the game starts. This is one of the many reasons why GGPO is the better experience, you can simply look at your opponents ms, set your smoothing accordingly and type in the chat for him to set his as well.
As you could imagine, leaving your smoothing on 0 and going to play ranked or lobby games on 3soe is a nightmare because you are matched up against people randomly around your country, you cant adjust your smoothing accordingly. I don’t think people understand how bad GGPO is on 3s, you feel every hiccup if there is no delay, its a terrible experience and I would have quit playing online 4 years ago if it weren’t for smoothing. SF4:AE has one of the best online experiences, why? Because the code automatically adjusts delay based on the competitors ms’.
To give you a general idea. (Both players)
Smoothing: 0 = 10-20 ms (amazing, as good as online gets)
Smoothing: 1 = 25-40 ms (really good)
Smoothing: 2 = 45-85 ms (great)
Smoothing: 3 = 85-115 (decent)
Smoothing: 4 = 120-170 (don’t even play)
Will it feel like arcade?! No.
Does it require you to adjust your timing? Yes.
**Is it hard to adjust? **Takes a few games to really get a feel for it, but it definitely isn’t hard. Nica K.O who has 110 ms to me has consistently hit every genei-jin combo on me (keeper/maeda/karapalms included), and he and I both play with 2-3 smoothing.
2.) Minor tweaks.
If you do decide to play on GGPO, obviously set your smoothing, but make sure you change these FBA settings.
Video > Auto Frame Skip = make sure this is UNCHECKED.
Video > Blitter Options > No Effects = make sure this is** CHECKED**.
If you don’t have a good graphics card.
**Video > Select Blitter > Basic **= This is the lowest blitter you can choose.
Playing full-screen helps a bit for those older pc’s.
MOST IMPORTANT THING IF ITS STILL JITTERY.
TURN OFF AERO THEME.
Right Click Desktop > Personalize > Scroll Down > Windows Classic = You have now disabled the aero theme, you’re a winner.
Optional: You can set GGPO when opened to disable aero theme, it will re-enable when you close GGPO.
Simply right-click on the shortcut and choose Properties, and then the Compatibility tab:
Now on the Settings block check the box for “Disable desktop composition” in order to disable Aero the next time you use the shortcut.
3.) Obvious stuff
Don’t play on wireless.
Don’t play people across country.
Don’t make excuses when you lose. (its p2p, they feel what you feel.)
Ryan is the best drunken 3s player in the world. (Honorable mentions: Yuuki)
Bullshit. Above 60ms, it’s too much. PERIOD. You guys seem to love some laggy ass matchs and some dirty rollbacks.
Your mom’s a dirty rollback.
Anything below 100ms is playble on smoothing 1 for me.
Also I still don’t fucking get it what’s wrong with my GGPO FBA since the Enhanced blitter just shows garbage in windowed mode and in fullscreen there’s major input lag and after a while it reports an error IF playing online on GGPO no matter what settings I try, but the Supercade FBA works completely fine with the Enhanced one offline or online… The only differance I’ve noticed between the two’s emulators is a single digit version diffferance; The GGPO FBA is v0.2.96.74 while the Supercade one is v0.2.96.73, so IDK if they changed the Enhanced blitter code in the newer version that just don’t comply that well with my hardware. Oh well, just no in-game chat or anything for me on GGPO.
The be all end all answer is: The only “legit” 3rd strike is the arcade version. Anything else isn’t really 3rd strike, it’s a cheap imitation… much like imitation crab or vegan meat, all other versions/rip-offs never even come close to the real thing…
Thanks metric for your post, a lot of good things here.
After played GGPO, i had weird things on my PC like bluescreens and freezes in the windows desktop, i don’t know why. I know my graphic card is shitty, an Intel Chipset or something like that.