In Vanilla Sagat considered the easiest top-tier in the game. Players would already speculating that Vanilla Akuma was better and would’ve overtaken him had Vanilla been allowed to continue. In Super Akuma was considered one of the best. In AE Akuma was still considered one of the best. In AE 2012 Akuma is still considered one of the best (he is not considered the absolute best, that belongs to Cammy).
You speak as if Akuma wasn’t nerfed from Super -> AE -> AE 2012.
The Yun nerfs are overstated. Sure he’s no longer head and shoulders above the competition but Yun’s archetype alone makes him a bad matchup for Akuma.
You make the fallacious assumption that Infiltration played the same style from Vanilla -> AE 2012. In fact he was much worse in all major aspects except for okizeme. That’s why even though he played a stronger version of the character for three years he never had a consistent string of results. Again, this is his first fighting game he has ever played. Consider everything Infiltration lacked at the beginning of his career: experience in high-level tournaments, familiarity with basic character archetypes, inclusion in a community and access to other players with such experience, knowledge of how to deal with setbacks, etc. This is a much more sensible reason rather than “he is winning because of other characters’ nerfs”.
If AE Yun/Yang was never nerfed, Infiltration would’ve picked up one of them. The option would have been too attractive for a player who extensively uses counterpicks.
I honestly wouldn´t say that Hugo used the wrong tactic against the Hakan of Infiltration, Infiltration even used the 720 Ultra, not the AA U2, which might be a better choice against Yun, by the way the matchup should be very much even(Hsien Chang thinks it is 5,5-4,5 for Yun) the SRK matchup list says 6-4 for Yun, but even when Hugo101 wasn´t really great with Yun, he was still able to win 3 games(ok he lost both sets against Infiltration) against his Akuma, which is not bad. Hugo played in the right way against Infiltration, he stayed mostly close to Hakan, so he can´t oil up, however he some mistakes and a top player like Infiltration will abuse them, I will tell your the mistakes of Hugo:
At 6:25, while Hugo has a lifelead, he tries to open up Hakan with a Target Combo, I am not sure, which one exactly used there(I will update later), I assume it is the one, which is -8 on block. The question is, your opponent uses a grappler, what is the worst thing you can do against a grappler? So Infiltration now does a punish with a Step Low(4f startup) into EX Slide combo and deals around 200 dmg.
Then Infil does a setup with J.HK and Yun´s LK Upkicks whiff, which are punished by F.MK(80 dmg), lifelead is gone(^^). Giving away a nice lifelead is dumb, why? The one, who doesn´t have a lifelead, has to take riskes now and open up himself, his opponent can bait him into situations, he wants to have. Anaway, what happens next? Hugo jumps and Infiltration counters with his air throw, Infiltration sees that Hugo likes to do neutral jumps, even after Hugo gets countered, Hugo still does them. This is one reason or maybe the main reason, why Infiltration has won this game against Hugo, Hugo has a certain habit(neutral jumps), Infiltration adapts into them. Honestly, if Hugo does the same old shit, his opponent finds a way around this tactic, but Hugo still uses the same tactic, then nobody needs to wonder, why Hugo lost. Hugo´s end came through …guess what? By the way, Infiltration even did not really had to rely on setups, he just won through pure fundamentals. And Hugo was actually very lucky in the last round, cause Infiltration tried to do something flashy, oh Hugo even sucked Infiltration´s Akuma, just Infiltration did need some adaption towards Hugo´s style, then after he got infiltrated, he was destroyed. Honestly his Yun looks in generally clueless, not only against Hakan, just using Bison alone, isn´t going to help him at all, using different characters is smart in a way, playing them smart is something different.
I will say it again, Infiltration does not only defeat the characters of his opponents(Yun), he also defeats the opponent(Hugo101).
I personally would hope, such fraudulent excuses like “he did not had matchup knowledge” would die out, Hugo lost, cause he was simply:
No, in vanilla Sagat was considered the absolute best. Yes, now some speculate that Akuma might eventually have taken the reign in vanilla. But that fact is - in vanilla nobody doubted Sagat was the king.
No, in Super Akuma wasn’t considered one of the best. People arestill debating who were the top tiers in Super.
Check it out a japanese tier list from Super: http://www.eventhubs.com/guides/2012/mar/29/tier-rankings-super-street-fighter-4-and-older-versions/
Akuma was ranked on 13th.
In AE there was Yun, Yang, and Fei. And then the rest.
In AE v.2012 Akuma is considered by many THE best character in the game, better than cammy.
Yes, Akuma was nerfed in v.2012. He lost aaa… 10 or 20 dmg for his st hk. And something for his throw that doesn’t even matter
On the other hand, Yun nerfs weren’t overstated at all. He lost 235 dmg. His divekick is a shadow compared to AE. His cmd grab lost invincibility and got more start up. Super has 1 less second. He lost 50 points stun (now 950). His TC4 became almost useless, his moves are much more unsafer, deals less dmg, build less meter. Yun is a far cry from how he was in AE.
Everything you say doesn’t explain why Infiltration suddenly started to win every major he enters in v.2012. Why not in AE ?
Btw, Infiltration is not the only one dominating with akuma. Tokido won 2 majors - WGC 2012 and WGC 2013 in AE v.2012.
Eita won SS. Both of them travel far less then Infiltration. Eita and Tokido won together the same number of majors as all cammys, seth, Fei long and adon players put together.
I think that shows enough that there’s more than just Infiltration leveling up tremendously.
His talent is unquestionable, the same that he leveled up a lot. But I believe there’s more than this. Yun and Yang were nerfed teribly. Fei Long was weakend considerably, too. Almost no cammy mainer sticked to cammy since Super to v.2012, so very few of them have the continuity Infiltration has. Alioune dropped cammy in AE for Yang. Chi rhitty was playing Yang in AE. Banbaban and Kindevu were playing Yun in AE.
For some reason very few people picked Seth and Adon. These all factors played an important role why akuma players started to dominate in v.2012.
I will post some statistics about how many tournaments Akuma won before v.2012. It’s quite surprising.
I’d be interested in the statistics. Looking at tournament results, which are the ultimate measuring stick, it does seem Akuma is without a doubt the best.
Here they are.
I made a statistic based on kuroppi.com site - I checked which characters were winning tourneys in vanilla, Super, AE.
Remember that not every tourney was counted - some of them might be missing. Also, I don’ take into consideration the size of the tournament, so some of them might be smaller, others - Evo. But I still think is interesting:
I wonder whether Emil is actually serious or this is some kind of hyperelaborate higheffort troll? Every single of his posts I’ve seen anywhere was just “Japan masterrace”. So many laughable statements…
P.S. A big part of Infiltrations success is that he never meets his characters bad matches. How often does Infil fight against highlevel Yun/Cammy?
P.P.S. But yeah, he’s an amazing amazing player. I’d love to see him on a different character, I just don’t enjoy watching Gouki. AE13 Ryu buffs and EVO14 Daigo-Infil Ryu mirror, please.
akuma is now seen as the best because everyone got hit harder with nerfs. speaking of which, a lot of us knew this was gunna happen. ppl talked about just buffing the bottom and mid-tiers, leaving top tiers alone, how so many ppl were yearning for a different approach to balancing…and look where we are now. balancing is quite the vicious cycle
Nobody doubted that Sagat was the best character in a game that was barely more than a year old by the time Super came out. This again can chalked up to him being the easiest top-tier, as the easiest strategies are the ones that dominate the beginning of a game’s lifespan. Does that mean that he would’ve stayed at the top spot if Vanilla was allowed to mature? Maybe. No doubt Sagat players would’ve found new technology to make him even better.
“Are still”? That list is from 2010. I’ll admit though, I thought Akuma was top 10 in Super.
Obviously.
Akuma is unquestionably at least top 3.
His st.hk damage was changed from 80 + 40 to 60 +40 and he lost 2 frame advantage on the second hit, making him -2 on block. This was actually a major nerf because even back, Akuma only had two strong pokes in st.hk and cr.hk. In addition Demon Palm was changed from an overhead to a mid attack, removing one of his main high/low mixups. The 2 frame shave off forward throw was a strange attempt at fixing something, it just made it supremely annoying to relearn all his setups off the hard knockdown. Meanwhile he got EX Demon Flip -> EX Air Fireball, one of the strongest buffs any character has ever received. eyeroll
And all the nerfs made it so that Yun could finally be considered a part of the cast instead of a god among men. Yes, his moves are now much more unsafe, deal less damage, and build less meter. AE Yun’s moves were much too safe, dealt too much damage, and build too much meter. Considering how ridiculous AE Yun, it was completely warranted. However the nerfs were once again overrated in terms of how it would affect Yun’s viability in tournaments. He will never be a dominant character in the current metagame but people were too quick to drop him and rate him a mere mid-tier character. And yet once the crying was over, Yun stands as a top 10-15 character (and still one of Akuma’s worst matchups). On the flip side, top players like Humanbomb thought Akuma was a lost cause in AE 2012 and dropped him too. They were proven to be wrong.
The majority of that damage (145 total) was shaved off his target combos and fierce Tetsuzanko.
Going from 1000 to 950 stun is…not really that bad. I don’t think he really needed to be nerfed in that area in the first place.
Good question.
It’s important to note that Infiltration was never a mediocre player in AE. He took second at NCR 2011 (lost to Daigo’s Yun), second at LG Cup KR Qualifiers (lost to Poongko), and took second at NCR 2012 (lost to Ricky Ortiz). But he was never a consistent threat to win tournaments and if you watch his games from 2011 you can see why. Infiltration played a very vortex-heavy style like Tokido and did very risky things in order to fish for hard knockdowns. He would run/jump into opponents frequently based on reads. You didn’t see any usage of EX Air Fireball for corner pressure, cancels into tatsu to break focuses, or the small things we commonly associate with his safe playstyle.
Overall, nerfs to some crucial members of the cast helped stack the board in favor of Akuma. But his nerfs going into AE 2012 also diminished the character’s ability to dictate the pace of the match up-close.
Eita won Shadowloo Showdown and has had very inconsistent success since then. He got top 4 in the SF25th Japan Qualifier and took 1st place in 2nd Topanga League B group stages; just recently he had 3rd place at Stunfest 2013. He also didn’t make it out of pools in EVO; he followed up his B league success with an abysmal 2-9 (-13 game differential) in Topanga League A.
Tokido has also had inconsistent success as well. He failed to make top 8 at SEA Major. He didn’t make it past top 32 at Evolution. He performed badly in the 1st Topanga League, almost finishing at the bottom of the rankings. He has won more tournaments than you mentioned, but most of them were not against his peers skill-wise.
If a character/race is superior to its contemporaries to the point where its inherent advantages has a visible effect on competitive standings, then this will be reflected in an overall increase of top placements by the entire population of said character/race. For example, the main argument that zerg was overpowered in WoL was that players who had little to no relevance in tournaments suddenly became major threats, and they all coincidentally played zerg. The dominance of zerg in premier and major tournaments was mirrored by zerg dominance in smaller weeklies and monthlies. So we should expect a similar trend to be occurring with Akuma players: top players as well as mid-tier and low-tier players should be performing better. From the information I’ve gathered any effects of AE 2012 have only worked for Tokido and Infiltration.
Individual player placements are not very reliable for this. Not only must you take into account who was at the event (and implicitly who wasn’t there), you also have to separate player skill from character potential. If Justin Wong wins a tournament with Rufus, does that say more about Justin’s skill or Rufus’ options? How do you make a judgment without falling prey to pre-conceived bias regarding the strength of the character?
Fei Long’s nerfs were mostly damage nerfs besides the changes in frame advantage after the second rekka (which was a major nerf).
No surprise considering how good Yun and Yang were back then. However Banbaban was still good enough to get second at Shadowloo Showdown last year.
I would attribute the lack of Seth representation to a lack of overall players and the fact that Seth has some significant weaknesses that prevent him from getting consistent results. Problem X actually dropped him in favor of C. Viper a little while ago stating the same thing. As for the lack of Adon players, it might be that he doesn’t appeal to the vast majority of gamers. It makes me somewhat sad being a Adon main.
I already have the vast majority of statistics on Akuma representation in AE 2012. He is by far the best represented in terms of wins due to Infiltration and Tokido. However his placements in top 16-32 are pretty mediocre. I would even say they are worse than mediocre; without Infiltration and Tokido, his presence is almost nonexistent in the U.S and barely relevant in the EU scene. Oddly enough he gets good showings in South America.
Cammy didn’t have enough advantage on any of her normals save for close mp. Her far normals are average compared to the majority of the cast. Low strike was our best footsie tool actually. She was designed and defined by strikes as an approach.
tkcs was the base of her close pressure. Her whole close mixup was dependent on it. Watch any super match of cammy and see how often it was used per round. Lol. Believe me it was fully explored. What wasn’t explored was actually ex tkcs and low ex strike. Because we had the regular version… No one wanted to waste meter on ex strike. We preferred to save it to fadc on dropped combos or for spike fadc ultra or ex arrow thru fbs.
Alot of negativity came along with it thu. Being called Spammy was one of them. People whined and complained to no ends. To the point that they completely removed it from the game. We had so many setups that were based on whiffing tkcs. Or the option to meaty tkcs os ultra/arrow/spike. All of this was removed.
Looking back at super. It was a boring game to be honest. The only rush down interesting characters were cammy and Rufus. The game was a turtle fest. And fei had that 400dmg meter less ladies only combo into instant corner push.
Overall ae2012 is the best version of the game IMO.
I’m not a Cammy player but I personally see the option of tkcs is more than enough to make up for frame advantage normals, just curious, would you honestly pick AE Cammy over SSFIV Cammy if you had a choice?
I do agree that v2012 is the best version of SF4:
Vanilla > Horrible balance
SSFIV > Very good balance
AE > Horrible balance
AEv2012 > Excellent balance
Let’s just hope that trend won’t continue with V2013 and the game will actually turn out great without necessary patches lol, knowing how this is pretty much Capcom’s last opportunity to milk the SF4 franchise, there’s a very high chance some SFxT characters will be added, my worst fear would be to see someone like Rolento being a broken S tier for the rest of SF4’s life considering how v2013 might be the last patch this game gets.
Rolento oh plz no. I hope they don’t add him or any obscure 3s characters… Or clone of existing characters. Im more open to rmika or Karin … For clones lol how about juni/Julie and have them be a mix of super/ae cammy.
Lol
Back to super. Yeah she had to use tkcs. It was the base of alot if not ALL of her gameplay. They had to redesign the character to make her useable without tkcs. Hence. The buffs to her close normals. But she still received nerfes as well to overall damage reduction on her arrows across all versions except ex. And hk arrow no longer hits twice. Except if u cancel from close normals or from far hp/mp (always a 1flink).
Hk arrow nerf removed her current oki. But what most people didn’t know was if u get hk arrow to hit twice… You get automatic true 50/50 crossup strike. And Many true unblockables… Lol
Fei yun elf and vega were seriously screwed vs cammy in ae. 1bnb if they quick stand = strike unblockable. No quickstand = 50/50 crossup strike. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Strike was safe.
The easiest way to remove those Ridiculious unblockables was to revert the move back to its original form. 1 give fans what they want. 2 remove the unblockables with minimum effort/system or character design change.
No, in vanilla Sagat was considered the absolute best. Yes, now some speculate that Akuma might eventually have taken the reign in vanilla. But that fact is - in vanilla nobody doubted Sagat was the king.
Wrong. http://blog.livedoor.jp/magopizza/archives/51557760.html
This is from Mago in July 2009:
Even late during the game’s life the Ryu/Akuma matchup started shift more and more to Akuma’s favour as his oki game evolved (“progression of setups” - Fuudo, 2nd best Ryu in Vanilla).
This wasn’t just low-level speculation about what Akuma may or may not have become. The consensus among TOP players was that he would easily become top tier. The only problem was that the only player putting in the effort was Tokido. Remember, when Akuma was unlocked, everyone in Japan thought he was mid/low tier because noone was utilizing oki because of auto-correct reversal. His only perceived strength was defense. Sako unlocked his combo potential early in the game (roundhouse loops), Tokido (and Eita to a lesser extent) unlocked his oki game later in the game (vortex).
The tier list was never solidified but there was no doubt that Akuma was top tier. In retrospect he was probably the best besides Cammy.
If you check the link I’ve posted, you see a bunch of tier lists from vanilla, too. All of them, without exception, put Sagat as no.1, and even in a separate tier. Based on the technology that was available back then, Sagat was the dominant force.
Regarding Super - I know that tier list. You can see is quite different then the one I’ve posted - which proves my point - we don’t know exactly who were the real tiers in Super.
Btw, I don’t think Cammy was no. 1. People forget that Super Fei was really good, and that charge/defensive characters were much stronger.
Sagat was, hands down, the most dominant force of vanilla SFIV. There’s very little doubt of that. Maybe Akuma could have taken it later, but we’ll probably never know, since the level of technology at the time allowed Sagat to own the game. I mean owned it. He had his own tier by many lists.
