Why veterans/pros lose interest playing 3s?

Classic Fighting Games Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike
1

i find it odd , i have a friend who is considered very good with ken in 3s . after a few months or a year so on , the 3s scene just died .

no more top players competing each other , only to see akuma or ken scrubs .

but my friend now plays CVS2 and SF4 often , but mostly CVS2 is because SF4 cabinets are always occupied with better players than him or maybe he wants to give a chance for beginners or averagers .

so can you least any reasons why people not play 3s anymore . 1 of simple reason i have in mind is that they got bored with ken , chun and yun beasting .

and 2ndly , this reason is quite sensinble , i think the top players can’t find any worthy players anymore , they got sick and tired of fighting with my alex because i hardly able to win a match against such top-players that use urien ,ken or chun .

so any thing else to know why they no longer interested with 3s ?

2

Because Street Fighter 4 cameout.

3

people are willing to drop a game at the drop of a hat for the sake of it being old and antiquated in their eyes. SFIV attracts the oldschool crowd that liked SF2, which thought SF3 was a big mistake. So it doesn’t seem too puzzling.

If we talk about japan it seems like a whole different story, though.

4

I think the greater american scene is quick to jump ship to the next game because they don’t have the same love for the game japanese players do. guys like boss, KO, rikimaru, pierrot etc. are 3s players for life. I won’t knock one way of thinking, but it’s sad to see games to lose their playerbase like that.

5

do what you inspires you.

but i find sf4 joyless and 3s overflowing with passion.

6

i should not say “quit” in the title , more like " no longer playing 3s " .
because if quit means to retire from it forever .

2 years ago i heard a comment in srk about 3s scene in HK, said that people in HK prefer to play single player than VS with any players :frowning: .

for my case is that , no ones playing 3s at the top-level and so no competitiveness .

7

becoz sf4 is rising and 3s is declining

there is almost no point in playing 3s anymore unless for the love of the game…if you take out the love of the game…then 3s is a waste of time.

8

Would love be moving back to socal just to go to denjin and play 3s?

be back in 1 month :frowning:

9

i realized another reason people quit 3s is that they got bored playing same ole’ mid-top-tier characters and got turned off with using other characters .

there are more characters that people don’t like to use in 3s than in sf4 .

10

I was hoping to begin playing 3s mainly from sf2 in the past and sf4 recently, do you think I’ll have any one to play in nyc? Anyone know how its doing at chinatown fair?

11

People just moved on, and alot of people I know just got sick of the fact that for every 10 people in a tournament. 7 of them are chun, 2 are yun and ken mixed then there is one guy with a dudley or a necro.

Competitively its not as diverse as some games.

Though I dont care 3s will always be my favorite. I just suck at it now.

12

Go fridays and saturdays and you’ll run into us playing 3s all day. (night time)

13

Word.

14

Are there 7 chuns on the entire east coast? From my experience, tournaments almost never consist of a chun. And if they do, it’s not a very strong chun unless it’s at a major. When’s the last time you’ve seen a chun in the top whatever of a tournament that wasn’t Justin Wong?

15

I wish people played on the other cab. I can’t play american style cabs to save my life. I played 4 people in 4 days at CTF last week…and they complained about how hard it was to play on japanese set-ups…

16

Alright I’ll try to make it if I can Friday night. Sorry about the suck in advance.

17

(Keep in mind this will most likely be a TL;DR post)

The OP keeps saying that people quit over certain characters or tiers, but I don’t think that’s true at all. If people were sick of tiers, the 3s scene probably would’ve died around 2005, nobody would still be playing ST, and SF 4 would already be recgonized as the garbage that it is. Here’s why I think a lot of players (not just pros/vets) are no longer playing 3s:

1. It’s an old game.
3s came out back in 1999, exactly 10 years ago. The pros/veterans have been playing it for a long time, and either:

A) They have already reached the top, so they don?t really have anything left to prove or achieve.
B) They have grown up or gotten into a certain point in their lives that doesn’t permit much game time.
C) They are tired of playing an old game (they?ve ?learned everything? already and have no more motivation to play). We now have plenty of games like SF 4, STHD, Blazblue, KoF XII, and other new games that—although not nearly as godly as third strike—are new, quality fighting games that anyone can learn and enjoy.

**2. The FFA 3s scene died quickly. **
I think a lot of people in the U.S. were motivated to play 3s by seeing the strength of the FFA scene between 2004 and early 2008. There were always plenty of tournaments, plenty of entrants, most people played at a pretty high level, it had excellent videos and commentary, and there was even a podcast dedicated to leveling up your game. All of these things displayed how much everyone loved 3s in socal, and it motivated/inspired players to try and get good like the stars of FFA. Even if you didn?t play or care about 3s, the hype and activity of the scene was intriguing and made you at least want to watch the videos, listen to a podcast or attend a ranking battle.

Soon after SBO 2008 last year, SF 4 came out and Denjin Arcade opened. With the opening of Denjin Arcade, all passionate 3s players said ?fuck FFA? (for good reason) and swarmed to the new hot spot of socal. Unfortunately, we lost some important figures in the process: Rockefeller, Pyrolee, Amir, Arlieth, Shadini, and a lot of other really good players/supporters of the scene. A lot of regulars at FFA did not join the transition from FFA to Denjin Arcade, and thus there were a lot less tournaments and a lot less entrants. FFA Ranking Battles were no more; Tom C., Gootecks and Shogo did most of the work for the brackets and videos but each of them were onto bigger and better things. Gootecks changed his 3s podcast to a ?Street Fighter Podcast? (nice way of saying ?Im gonna stop 3s and mostly cover SF 4 now?).

There was little awareness of the first Denjin Arcade Ranking Battle season. There were only a couple videos recorded, they weren?t edited, and there was no commentary (the only one with commentary had extremely terrible audio quality and you couldn?t hear anything). Although the Denjin 3s scene was amazing, from an online perspective it seemed like it was nowhere near the level of hype of FFA back in 2006. At this point, a lot of people in the U.S. saw that the 3s hype was dying, and I think this made many of them lose the motivation to keep playing. They assumed that 3s had already reached its peak, and now it was time to move onto something else.

3. 3s has an extremely high learning curve.
Most likely, the biggest reason why we don?t see very many new players is because of the time and dedication it takes to get good at 3s. Even if you have a general knowledge of Street Fighter, if you put a quarter in a 3s cab at Denjin Arcade on a Friday night (without ever playing 3s before), you?re going to get owned no matter what. It?s not an inviting game because it forces you to lose for a long period of time before you really start leveling up.

With SF 4, pick Sagat, pick Zangief, throw out some fireballs/uppercuts, press 3 punch buttons, try to do that ultra thing, and you already have some wins under your belt. It?s flashy, has nice graphics, and when you win the game makes your scrubby ass look pretty cool. A game like that makes everyone want to play it. But as far as 3s goes, you have to know the game to appreciate the game, and as time goes on (with much less attention on 3s and a lot more on SF 4) it becomes harder and harder to find new players that want to learn and play 3s.

18

this thread has been enlighten , thank you sir .

is true what you say , is because of pride . they don’t want to feel like a scrub for a long time to be pro .

might as well play marvel or sf4 which has a fast and easy ways to be experienced and be good at it .

i still love 3s is because Dudley is the blithering fighting gentlemen !

dudley : " GOOD BYE AND FAREWELL MY GENTLEMEN " :sad:

19

Good shit, this is all so true. I actually remember being really hyped about the 3rd strike podcasts, I wanted to hear Pyrolee talk about the game so bad. I remember how hype the FFA scene was and loved the videos, but it never occurred to me that that scene died because of Denjin Arcade. Why did everyone leave FFA exactly?

Either way looking back on this game from an SF4 point of view…3rd Strike is just too fucking hard. There are fucking infinite levels of skill in this game. At my peak I could beat some decent players but could still get owned once in a while by scrubs who whiff throws and down parry afterwards. It was frustrating as hell.

Then you have awesome players like Justin, Ricky, Pyrolee, Issei, who can’t really be touched by US players, but then they go to Japan and are just okay players. Its just frustrating. You can put hundreds and hundreds of hours into the game and still suck major ass.

Also execution is such a big deal in this game. For most of the characters you have to do some really advanced shit every round. It feels nice to pull off really difficult techniques/combos but learning to do it and learning to do it in tournament are totally different. Learning Makoto is gay because every time I land tosanami I’m not playing to my full potential unless i can do the goddamned 100% stun combo.

And I’m not even going to get into the balance issues of the game or how gay Yun and Chun are.

SF4 is really great. I don’t really understand people who don’t like it. Can you imagine a better combination of old school and new school SF? Also the balance is awesome, it’s not just “Top two chars beat everyone, top 3rd and 4th beat everyone below them” so you can really pick whoever you want and win, and there’s a character for everyone.

20

who quit 3S?Not me.