My local arcade has fortnightly tournaments. The winning prize is something along the lines of $80(guess with an expected deviation of 30%). That’s not a livelihood, but it’s still “serious”. Even getting top 8 at something like that requires a lot of time, money and effort. If you’re doing that, you better be taking it seriously.
Of course people should choose characters who match their playstyle. If you want to play balls to wall rushdown and you’re playing 3s, you should choose Yun, or Dudley, not Chun, but if you prefer a defensive footsie style, maybe Chun’s for you, but if there’s two characters who play similarly, but one is “better”, tournament players will pick the better one. It’s why you* see more Guile than Ken tournament players, it’s not that Ken is worse, or even as bad as Guile, it’s because most tournament players who started playing Ken, and liked his style, ended up switching to Akuma and Ryu, because they’re similar, yet have more tools.
High level players who use “low tier” characters, often do so because they believe the character is undervalued. JiBbo and Yeb think Gen is high tier. The serious tournament Chun players I’ve met believe she has the tools to go all the way. If they didn’t think that, they wouldn’t play her. If the other guys using Sagat, and you think your character doesn’t have the tools to go all the way, why would you intentionally give yourself a handicap? If other people are starting off with 3 wins, why shouldn’t you?
No. I’m not saying you need to choose these characters to win. Tournament results very much show otherwise. I’m not even saying it’s a huge advantage, it’s often a quite small advantage, but what I’m saying the low tier hero sentiment is a lot rarer among serious tournament players. They people are playing to win, when they sit down at a money match or a tournament match, they’re there to win, they’re going to choose the tools they think give them the biggest advantage within the rules, no matter how small. To them, the character that’s the most enjoyable is the one that gives them the win. Not because a tier list on eventhubs or some dude on gamefaqs told them, but because they’ve played the game enough to know which character give them the best chance. Many tournament players do learn low tier characters, to know those matchups (because they’re rare), to have an ace in the hole if the character isn’t as bad as other people say, or just for fun & casuals, but in a tournament environment, they’re not going to pick Dan because it’s more honorable, or because it makes the win “mean more”, because that kind of low tier hero mindset with it’s romantic ideas of moral superiority just isn’t one that’s conductive to becoming a serious threat to those kinds of players.
Of course, if you play Dan in casuals, but pull out Ryu for tournies because you know he’s a better choice from experience, is that the same as some scrub who always plays Sagat even against his little sister because eventhubs told him he’s the best character in the game?
*okay, in my experiance. I have done no worldwide testing on this.
