I was playing Frankie3s few nights ago. I told him I hate Elena’s stage through the mic. Not sure if he heard me but after the match, I chose “change characters”. He proceeded to click on Elena stage. What a fuqqing troll!
I’d agree with this general sentiment as well. Matchups in practice are so nebulous and hinge on so many variables that distilling them down to some unambiguous metric entails making a huge battery of assumptions that not everybody in the world will share. Even the idea that a matchup details the outcome of 10 games involving “two good players of equal skill performing at their best” is shaky at best because not only does the notion of how good those two players are change over time, but no two people will ever have the same concept of those two hypothetical competitors in many key aspects (namely things like playstyle and yomi).
This makes it really hard to usefully gauge matchups (which by definition are not objective and depend hugely on the players in question), even for someone as insightful as Kuroda. While I wouldn’t dispute most of his evaluations, I do think his personal capabilities and bias may have caused him to overestimate characters like Q: Loses hard to Chun, loses to Ken, loses slightly to Yun and Urien, goes even with the rest and slight advantage with the bottom-feeders? I mean, Kuroda basically thinks the character’s half-decent, and maybe in his hands Q does do half-decently or better against great players. Like, Kuroda’s Q could probably perform competitively at these ratios he provides given how much of a fucking god he is with that character.
Nevertheless, I seriously doubt anyone else could convincingly put up those numbers over time playing Q in Japan, maybe not even against opponents of lesser skill (whatever that means). Kuroda’s view of the character likely isn’t the best reflection of how the character would fare holistically in the hands of another because he views the game and its characters in a way that is exclusively his own.
In a game like 3s, where success hinges so much on the tendencies and characteristics of the actual players, it’s just too difficult to say anything meaningful about the game’s cast at a high level independent of the people playing. Without sharing some set of baseline assumptions and consistent “ground truth” between players, evaluating matchups is almost a fruitless exercise.
Incidentally, Kuroda’s chart posted on the new WPB article has some updates and inconsistencies. For instance, just glancing through it, it’s weird how the Chun-Yun matchup is listed as 7:3, while the counterpart Yun-Chun match is 4:6. Or how Makoto-Yun is 5:5, while Yun-Makoto is 6:4. Likely just bookkeeping errors (the recently posted article reinforces 7:3 as the correct revised ratio for Kuroda’s view of Chun-Yun in the matchup descriptions), but some of these changes are interesting.
Also, next issue in the series is going to be versus MOV in 3s. Yes, please.
wow, he’ll have to bring out a big gun for that! exciting
How do you know it’s Vs MOV?
I would love to see 2014 Ken vs Chun personally
also are you reading the chart right? I’m looking at it right now and it looks like Chun-Yun is listed 6-4 on both sides consistently. Yun-Mak is 6-4 consistently also.
Yeah. I mean, I think he’s gotta go either Ken or Gouki as his prospects of victory are slim otherwise, and I’m guessing he doesn’t think too highly of the latter option considering he has Chun-Gouki at 7:3 on his chart. 
Revised chart accompanying the most recent article. A few changes were made since the post that introduced the matchup chart; biggest revision I’m seeing is Oro-Alex, which was initially 6.5:3.5 Oro but has been updated to 5:5 this time around (wonder what motivated such a huge change…). The errors likely come from forgetting to change both cells of a particular matchup.
The changed value from before is almost certainly the new, intended value. The article does explicitly mention 7:3 for Chun-Yun in the matchup descriptions, so…
Blurb at the end of the last page of the article always teases the next issue.
ah gotcha! thanks for the info. yeah I’m curious what lead to some of these changes as well! further reflection lol? I mean people have been playing Chun-Yun a lot for 15 years.
Kuroda’s gonna need to bring out that Ken if he wants to stand a chance against MOV’s Chun in a best of 5 round FT10.
Might as well ask here, but why is Alex vs Twins considered to be 5/5? Yun I could see but Yang? That’s a hard match, there’s nothing Alex can really do against his frame traps. And the Twins can easily bait you to jump at them and walk under and wreck your shit.
the new chart… wtf? are you sure it’s by Kuroda? He changed idea on a LOT of matchups in such a brief time - to mee it looks like a more “general agreement / common thought” chart compared to the unique Kuroda flavour. It also shows a vision of the game where Chun Li and Ken are totally broken but the rest of the cast apart from the very bottom is super balanced (loads of 5:5)
EDIT: I did the totals, it’s quite interesting:
SSS
Chun 131
**SS **
Ken 119
S
Yun 100.5
A
Makoto 94
Ryu, Elena, Necro, Urien, Dudley 91
Yang 90.5
Alex, Gouki 90
Oro 88.5
Hugo 88
Ibuki 87.5
Q 85
B
Remy 73
Sean 71
C
Twelve 57.5
Always thought that Hugo and Q were WAY better than Remy, and that Twelve was the worst.
Also, take away the top 3 and the bottom 3 and you have what’s like the most balanced game ever
Chun has always been super broken in the game. Not really a surprising vision =p
On another note, I’m so astounded how creative is. How does he come up with all these new techs, ideas, genius setups for so many chars? He Even revolutionized Sean’s game and made him look really strong with SA2.
I guess Kuroda’s philosophy is that Parries even everything out? Maybe? I mean, sure, you can Parry everything but who can do that (besides Kuroda)?
I would think so.
Parry makes a lot of situations much less mechanical. There’s a lot less ‘this beats this’. Even when that is the case it’s really 'this beats this…if they don’t do this, this, or this’
Parry muddles RPS which creates room for a lot more creative solutions, which in turn muddles RPS, etc.
Necro above Yang, equal to Dudley. Don’t think I’ll ever be good enough to comprehend that.
guess it is nice to see another “updated” diagram
but , at this point , it would be far more interesting to understand why he thinks what he thinks
aka translation of those notes
maybe some of those reasons are valid and meaningful not just at kuroda level but can be useful for every 3s player (with a brain)
i am still kind of gutted the guy over at eventhubs stopped translating the “kuroda story” , btw
kuroda yun vs mov chun / ken would be pretty sick
we’ll probably end up watching kuroda sean vs mov elena é_é
this 2nd diagram is for the revised version of 3rd without unblockables lol
Well Uriens and Oro’s replacing makes sense now but what about Makoto?
What replacings for makoto? I don’t see any except vs oro/urien(unblockables)
Like others pointed out not sure why chun yun is 7-3 but yun chun is 4-6. there’s 2 more articles that are going to finish writing out the short summaries of the match ups so maybe they will fix typos/errors.
Edit: oh I see. Makoto yun is now 5-5 but yun mak is still 4-6. I wouldn’t put any more thought into this chart compared to the last for now since they released it as new version/ no unblockable version of 3rd strikes tier list.
stun
Ah, I see it; it’s the new type chart. Now most of the changes make sense (honestly can’t believe I didn’t notice that considering the wholesale across-the-board dive Urien takes in the revised chart, haha), but I still wonder why any matchups without unblockables were altered at all. Does anyone know if new type makes any significant changes to characters like Chun/Yun/Mak?