Even in the Highest Ranks, The Skill Gap is Massive 

grats bro

Because of your avatar , i imagined Mugi going to Evo.

​@emperormegaman3856 i could see her making it far tbh

As ‘jam says, “I love that for you”

​@@scottv5587"Love to hear it"

What a beautiful person. Truly. He just wanted to get his workouts and not fuck up anyone's fun by posting triple doubles in a pick up game. That kinda shit is discouraging to casuals. However I'm not sure how this reminded you of that. Still thanks for sharing. 🙏🏾

@@JermaineCausticxArmaCrawford Just the perspective of how good “the best” are compared to “good” compared to a common hobbyist. The average player doesn’t really get to experience “very good” let alone “the best” for a comparison.

Thats why whenever you see these pros vs regular people hoop vids, the pros aren't even defending at all, they feel it will be unfair lol

Do you come to locals here in SLC?!

@@Timmcd wrong coast friend. 🙏🏾

"In 2013, in response to criticism over him being in a bench role throughout his career and to claims that many would beat him one-on-one, Scalabrine stated, "I'm closer to LeBron than you are to me", suggesting that there is a huge difference between any (active or retired) NBA player and those outside the league. In an event organized by The Toucher and Rich Show selected volunteers had the chance to play one-on-one against Scalabrine (until 11 points with a margin of two). The format was called the "Scallenge" and Scalabrine played four games, one against each of the voluntary contenders. Scalabrine won every game with a combined score of 44-6. In an additional game Scalabrine played against the three hosts of the show and won 11-1." just found this on his wiki

@@KingChewyy This reminds me of my local gym here in the Salt Lake City area. About 15 years ago, I would play basketball at the county rec center once a week. There was one guy who was good. Really good. He was about 6'6" and would only play if needed to balance numbers on teams. Even then, he would only pass the ball around. I watched him take up a challenge once and play 1v5 with a team of regulars and he won 11-7. I talked to him one day and found he was a bench player for the University of Utah 6 years prior. He wasn't good enough to start on a D1 college team, which only produced 3 D-League players and 1 NBA bench player in the 4 years he was on the team. And yet he felt it was unfair to the "guys who were just there to have fun" if he played 100%. That was eye-opening.

​@@JCintheBCCinteresting story! And good on the guy for not smurfing lol

Who?

and you earned it 🥂

@@user-et3xn2jm1ufacts only, drink til you pass out, bruv

Exactly! I won a single time in a 15 match set which means I officially beat the game

30-1 time to quit the set and brag about it

@@hands-ongaming7180 Actually I'll usually lose one more time AND THEN I'll quit and brag about it 🍾

This needs to be on a shirt. Every now and then I need to be reminded that growth and enjoying myself are more important than a win streak.

​@Bushidoblacc it especially is above platinum. Because win streaks don't get you more points

Huh that... I'll try that. Thanks.

*This the most satisfying thing of fighting games for me is seeing progress doing shit that I wasnt able to do before

But if I don't compare how better/ worse I am from others how can I determine how happy I am

It's funny, it's not just fighting games this outlook helps with... good on you, self-improvement is an endless path, but ultimately a pretty worthwhile one!

Most correctest take, honestly a life lesson in general

that's actually something to be oddly proud of :D

@@phillipfry8141 its pretty frustrating I feel like im not making much progress. Itd be nice to have people to play with to learn from without focusing on wins and losses

Please don't be a Honda player, please don't be a Honda player.

@@t3hmaniac rashid 🤣

Same except I’m the gatekeeper that only shows up once every two weeks

Aka nuckledu. Sits around ~ 1800 mr. Yet i see him in multiple grand finals or top 4s weekly

Having a mix of long sets and ranked play are both beneficial to grow as a player

I dont really agree , i mean the top 20 mr is litteraly almost only tournament players .

Brian_F's comment was regarding LP, I believe. The new MR system is a zero-sum metric and more reflective of relative skill.@@lolilol5346

​​@@lolilol5346I said this in sfv. MR is the most accurate ranking we've ever had and tournament winners are at the top. MR is an elo based system rewarding good win rate against other good players. Old ranking systems were infinite point inflation systems that rewarded endless grinding vs. Lower rank players. MR is the best system we've ever had.

As a fellow grown man with responsibilities I appreciate this comment. I'm pretty much hard stuck at Plat-3, and I'm finding its more bc I only get to play a couple times a week, which means I'm pretty much always rusty, and even then often my mental game is cooked from a long work day. Does it mean I'm trash? Maybe if I compare myself to streamers and pros, people who play games *literally all day for income*. But compared to your average casual fighting game enjoyer, I feel alright about where I'm at.

I'm with you. I played a weekend BH tournament (open bracket) and made top 8. Beat two Diamonds on the way and lost 0-2 to a Master Cammy with 650+ hours played. They won the tourney and never lost a match. I was okay with it. I win some and lose some to Diamonds/Masters, but my improvement is based on the time I have to invest.

Yup. Basketball version of this is when Brian Scalabrine, a NBA player known more as a meme, than for his play, as he was a bench warmer, set up an open challenge for anyone to take him on in a one on one game. Brian washed everyone and stated very simply afterwards, "I'm closer to LeBron, than you are to me."

@@KiraDaBeastNY Hype as FUCK. Sick story

Jon Bois ❤❤

@@kylefields3951 There's a lot of hype stories like this. Some of the funniest stories were when basketball players, particularly ones who played pretty high level high school or college basketball realized they weren't gonna make the league. Off the top of my head, there's a guy on RU-vid named Ryan The Crash Dummy, a basketball player from Texas who talked about his "I'm not making it to the league moment" was when his high school played Cypress Lakes High School just outside Houston. The school at the time had De'Aaron Fox, recent first time NBA All-Star. Ryan and his team basically spent the whole four quarters chasing De'Aaron around as he used his speed, fitting his last name, to turn the game into the world's most miserable track meet. For Ryan and his team at least🤣.

More like a gap between the top 1% and top .01%.

As a casual player why do you care what pros are saying? If you enjoy it and want to get better just keep playing. What's pros say should have no bearing at all on your progression in the game.

That is with plat 1 included. If you manage to go to plat 2 you are already in the top 20%.

@@Genesys1040 All the more reason to get back to grinding.

Gold was top 20% or something ridiculous in sfv

Even if you did just reach the same percentile as in SFV like Sajam said it just means you hit your skill level and now you have to figure out how to level up your game. Basically, the game is done correctly assessing what you can already do compared to other players and now you have to learn to do new stuff to progress from there.

I literally just stopped playing because of all of the ranked trash talk people do. Took me over 100 hours to get Manon to Plat, and that means nothing? Whatever.

Would be nice if you could switch showing your rank as a graph of progression. Instead of just a number. Although it might get disheartening after a bad day. (my dream game would show, what you could have done better right after every match) Don't know if other games do it like that, but Planetside 2 has graphs for that. Level there is only going up, so it's not a valid measurement. It's nice that they've thought of it, plus achievements.

Especially since playing like that is a particular skill. Not everyone can. I sure as shit tried. U have to really have a mentality that matches that playstyle to climb with it. It's part of what makes them so terrifying. These are the kinds of players that can take you out in a tournament if you make a mistake or underestimate them.

The rule in league is, shitlow is any rank or division below challenger, you're in masters? Absolute shitlow dog, anything other than rank 1 challenger is shitlow on the Internet and to toxic pricks

Angry bird is unranked - won EVO, second place at gamers8. Big bird is like diamond 1 and won red bull kumite and went pretty far at EVO.

An unranked player won evo tbf lmao

Ok but logic still doesn't make sense, if an unranked player can win majors and big tournaments it's because they play pro level players in custom rooms all the time. If they decided to hop into ranked they would make 2000MR easily so they still are a 2000MR caliber player so this argument doesn't prove anything. Now if someone was a struggling 1200MR master and just showed up to a tournament and won that's a different story which will almost never happen unless the tournaments competition was super weak.

Unranked players play pros

​@@ryuhoshi2774 Playing ranked is a different kind of game, a different kind of grind. Ofc it's still 99% street fighter skill, but at this very top where you compete against the other top 100 ranked players, this other 1% means a lot. If you play mainly ft10 and ft20, even against top players, does mean you can consistently pull off 70-80% wr in ranked.

I’m glad to see People that feel like this helps. Learning fighting games has helped me improve other things in my life more than I could have imagined

@shatteredteethofgod "of course they won. Nobody's ever heard of them, so we can't see what their strengths and weaknesses are. So, it's pretty much free."

I used to think that as well but ultimately you have to decide what you want for yourself. My mentality was so bad a number of years ago that I actually had anxiety attacks at tournaments, sometimes before having to play matches. I thought I had to give up fighting games in general but after taking a step back and putting much less pressure on myself and playing similar games to the aspects I was interested in like Monster Hunter for frame data and mechanics and whatnot I was able to progress past those feelings. Only your personal values should determine if you are happy where you are because ultimately if you don't actually enjoy the games you play then there's not much point in playing

Good outlook on the situation. You have the right attitude that will see you consistently improve at the game.

I mean not everyone can be Cristiano Ronaldo, but playing in the Serie A it's still a big achievement.

Man I hate the tower system in strive. I got vip pretty much based on luck(everyone who happened to challenge me was doing the 5/6 challenge too) then afterwards everyone would either dodge me or be absolute monsters. Not to mention people who just dodge certain match ups or connection issues. I soon after quit strive because it was really hard to find anyone at my skill level

You can keep improving and stay the same rank also. Everyone else is improving too.

If there's 1 thing I learned from years of playing League it's that whenever someone insults people of a specific ranked bracket that means they themselves are only just above that rank, i.e. "Silver players are scrubs" said the player who just reached Gold. All they have is ego. It would be almost too cruel to take it from them.

@@snowys4168 That's saying that everyone would stay the same rank you as you forever too. Eventually you WILL get a rank up

Hard disagree lol ranks were way too easy to farm cause you can rematch people as many times as you like, rage quitting never had any penalties until like season 3 and even then it was negligible. and all the names of the ranks are way too arbitrary. After playing T7 for like 4 years I can confidently say that that system is ass.

T7 has a LOT of issues that bubble up after you've engaged with it for long enough. It seems cool at first but the problems mainly kick in around mid ranks. While you generally will find a consistent rank for your skill level, the fact that it doesn't use an MMR system is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it means that any losses aren't actually a big deal (frequently games with MMR will drop it heavily if you get a loss streak, causing you to make much smaller gains on the way back up) since you can guarantee the amount you'll win back, but it also means that it naturally pushes you slightly upwards, and this gets more aggressive if you play against someone who you just happen to hopelessly outclass in some fundamental way, because if they choose to keep rematching for whatever reason, you keep getting the same points over and over again. And because rematching requires that consent from both sides, the "easy" way to climb in T7 is to only take rematches that you 100% know you can win, or at least win in the long run, so that you can just choose to not play against the people who beat you. And because of the game not having any kind of reliable disconnect punishment, it's not even the case that if you get INTO a game you have to take any losses. The save data is all stored locally so any losses can immediately be cancelled out by savescumming, and there are many many players who are too bad to actually get beyond purple ranks so they sit smurfing around orange to claw back a scrap of self-worth. The other thing is that yellow-orange is around the point where you start regularly seeing very high level players working on alt characters. Having separate ranks for separate characters makes sense and I don't generally blame them for going the way they did with it, but it is a little absurd that you can have a character who you played once in like Dans, demoted on, and never touched for 2 years while you played other stuff to TGO, and because of that ONE demotion, that character will never get the same compensation rank all the non-played characters will get. It also doesn't link Kuma/Panda despite them having the exact same kit, which means the rare TGO bear mains get to stomp their way up through blues a second time for free. These aren't super gamebreaking, IMO. The fact is, while prowess doesn't do much, it *does* at least let you know when your opponent is extremely experienced relative to whatever alt they're playing on, and it's completely your choice to play into a smurf over and over again. Hell, you might even find that they suck enough on the character to let you farm them. It's just a little grating that the expectation of playing ranked is that you will play against roughly equal skill opponents, like it's the entire reason that people will avoid sitting on player match (especially when they're newer), and then you just get the most random matchmaking anyway thanks to all these different factors.

It's ultimately a time vs skill argument tbh, if we value positive(or even slightly negative) win rate then that then that definitely cuts down the amount of time needed and lowers the skill gap but as someone who used to ladder Pokemon Showdown that ranking system just shows positive win rate as well because rather than a specific percentage it's just points so you can get to the 1400's by having +30 or 40 wins, it doesn't matter whether that's 30-0 or 550-520 the result is a similar ranking. It's why I absolutely hate laddering in basically every game because it's just a time sink that I ultimately don't care about

I think that's previous fgc experience, but less time with sf6

Anyone lacking specific matchup knowledge is that.

Diamond rank definitely feels like I’m in the 7 layers of hell

I mean, it's an achievement, but everyone who puts any amount of time in this game will get there eventually. Because of the LP inflation with time higher ranks become worse and worse skill-wise. I stopped grinding sf6 after the first month, after I got to diamond. Now I only play on weekends - every week or every other week. I literally gain 0 knowledge and do 0 practice between these sessions. Still, every time I log in, it's a cake walk for me in ranked (60% wr). It feels, like the players of the same rank are getting worse with every 2 weeks. If in June diamond 1 players felt like an impassable wall for me, now it's like I'm back to platinum. Like, I'm not complaining, but I think right now the game is kinda split into two parts - below master with constant rank ups and dopamine hits, and master, where I'll have to face the reality, that I'm 1200 mr trash lmao (E: and I WILL be 1200 mr, until I put actual practice in the game).

@@StepanCaveman I'm glad you're doing well and hope you can flex that you're higher than a 1200 master once you get there. But frankly, I'm interested in strictly the data we get from Capcom. I don't want the ranked system based on the feelings of individual players, I want it backed by the numbers.

yeah, I feel like people see "45% winrate" and assume that someone with 45% winrate in gold will still hold that 45% win rate against diamonds and masters....

@@martingutierrez2665 this, exactly. This is just under winning half your sets - no Plat 1 skilled player is going to casually get half their games as wins in diamond or masters.

@@integratedfrost435 ​ @integratedfrost435 YT doesn't like links. Posting without them, you can find them at the top of the google search. Ok, one more time. The data is out there. It's scraped from the official CFN leaderboard. If you doubt the results, you can take an existing scraper, collect the data and do the math yourself. More and more people are getting into higher ranks with every passing month. Let's look at diamond 1 for example. june 7th july 6th. 95th septemper 6th. 93th

Even the people who ARE the absolute best get downplayed. "They just grind games. Not impressive." FGC brainrot has no cure. You just have to ignore them.

Honestly this is true of a lot of other communities too. With skateboarding, the bar has been raised so much that when it first got popular in the 80s and early 90s, only a handful of people in the world were doing things like Ollies. Now Ollies, pop-shuvits, and even kickflips are seen as standard if you wanna be considered a “real” skater. In reality these things are hard as fuck and take a ton of practice, and all the crazy skate videos you see are such an incredibly small portion of the very best

The good news is that one of two things will happen now: either you'll keep winning and eventually get to Master or you will plateau. You ain't getting to Master any time soon unless you're winning close to 50%, as the number of matches increases greatly the more you fall below that threshold.

At least you can

And LTG

I’m just not built for it unfortunately

To be fair, this isn't really just fighting games. It's most games. I recall trying to pick up Teamfight Tactics a few years ago, got to Platinum far faster than I imagined, and when I commented that "hey I did this, this was cool", the immediate response was that I should uninstall the game because "good players would get to at least diamond by that time". And TFT is overall a pretty chill game compared to, say, the game it was built on.

This is why Guilty Gear Strive made the mmr invisible and ranking system something to be cheese around instead of an objective score of value

That’s not exclusive to the fgc. Go to an overwatch, rocket league or valorant thread and you’ll see people using rank as a social credit score

I've played SF for years. I have 2 chatacters at master rank but I'm nowhere near as good as top players. I'm an average player and I don't care if pros say I'm trash. I want to get better at the game so I play it regardless of what others say about my skill level. Knowing your own flaws is the only way to get better. If someone saying your trash makes you feel sad then I'm sorry but you don't have the mentality to be a top player.