More than half a year ago I posted about the popularity of the character forums in SF4, and tries to compare it to the popularity it had a year ago. This way you could see some trends developing.
I started of with this top10:
That was notably Abel on top, Ryu only 5th and Akuma 9th. The discussion at that time centered around lower-tier characters like Sakura, Gouken, Vega, Fuerte and the likes. Not even a mention of Sagat.
I also concluded that chars like Gen, Sagat, Cammy, Akuma and Chun were on the rise a few weeks later.
Let’s see where it ended up:
- Ryu 18828
- Akuma 16622
- Chun Li 16540
- Abel 13114
- M. Bison 14187
- Cammy 11477
- Vega 10583
- C. Viper 10571
- Guile 9793
- Balrog 9202
A bit closer to real character usage now, with Ryu and Akuma being very commented upon. Abel dropped off and Chun, Viper and Cammy got some more attention. Maybe women eventually always get the attention in the long run? Whatever the cause, it seems that some people opened up a chatclub around chun’s place.
Lets look a the losers:
21. Dhalsim 5167
22. Gen 4691
23. Dan 4495
24. Rufus 4122
25. Seth 3556
No love for minorities. Old people, fat people, stupid people or sketchy people with orbs in their chest are largely avoided.
Still numbers are just a snapshot; lets see who really came on strong since May and who has lost traction:
SF4 ranking according to post rise percentage:
We clearly see Chun, Akuma and Ryu taking their stage spots. Also a bit more love for the minorities, which actually doesn’t mean that they will get a top spot anytime soon, but just proves that they were even less popular during launch.
This, ofcourse, is pure discussion related and SRK centric. I do hope that it somehow relates to character usage on SRK (because SRK member is not the typical flowchart Ken), but since a poll can not have 25 options, that’s very hard to find out 
That’s unfortunate, but not surprising. As far as I know, there aren’t a whole lot of Seth users on SRK, at least not many serious ones.
