Step 1 play the character you have the most fun with(classic Zangief or you did this step wrong).

Step 2 play ranked(This is to keep getting opponents im similar skill range and not wildly easy or wildly hard matches)

Step 3 don't give a sh*t about rankings

Step 4 have fun (also referred to as spd)

Step 5 wonder at how you improved/ranked up so much

I'm not happy, unless I'm getting angry lol

Jokes aside, this is sound advice. I went on a skid earlier and was getting well pissed off. My reflexes blow, I cannot jump on the Ken gravy train because I cannot string together complex combos and finally fuck JP and fuck Modern Gief even harder.

After I took a break I won a few games and got back into Platinum 3 where I think I'll live forever at best.

I pause after almost every ranked set, but I always thought it put me at a disadvantage compared to the hard grinders. Maybe I'm looking at it wrong, I don't know.

I took about 170-180 hours to reach Masters. I started playing litterally day 1 on launch (June 2nd) and reached Masters in September 20th.

I tend to do something similar to this but only after losing 2 sets. If I'm winning I don't want to lose that momentum but if I lose 2 sets, I stop take a quick break, grab a snack/drink and then watch the match back and see where I was getting hit then try and lab that exchange.

I can't say I do this all the time as we all get lost in the "just one more" mentality when we lose but this is good advice overall.

I can use my experience with Street Fighter 6 as an example of this. Ever since i started applying this rule, i managed to climb from Silver 1 all the way to Masters. Not only that, but i stopped seeing this game as a way to trigger my anger and started looking forward to play it more and more! And if that's not having fun, then i don't know what is.

Posting a replay is the best way to tell what your problems are. From what you’re saying, try focusing more on what your opponent is doing. By Diamond (congrats, by the way), you should have pretty much automatic control over your own character, so you can focus on what your opponent likes to do and adapting to their habits. So if you see they keep jumping, get ready to anti-air; if you see they like to whiff punish, walk forward at them to force them backwards and make them give up space, etc.

This video is a great starting point and can help you get to at least master.

Also playing long sets against high ranked players in battle hub helps too. You will lose a lot but going back to ranked after will feel 10x easier

Too much brain processing power going towards being frustrated and thinking about how your opponents tactics are lame. Means you're autopiloting too much and not finding solutions.

Your brain can only do so much at one time. Every negative thought is lost potential for an idea to beat your opponents.

Not saying you have to be immune to frustration. But I can tell you I turn the game off the instant I feel frustration happening and I usually can go for hours without that happening.

You've played and watched a lot. I guarantee you have the knowledge rattling around in your head somewhere. You just need to have a couple of moments where you contextualize some of that knowledge within one of your own matches.

Same, I have no idea what to do. Its like people download me from nothing. If its a consolation i spent looooooooooooooooot of time in diamond before getting to master. This game is so dumb, you put so much effort for some things and lose because you guessed right or because instead of blocking low you blocked high. I feel like im flipping a coin every match.

> I got mad about myself every time I lost ...

This is your only problem.
Even in a perfect matchmaking situation you are expected to lose half of your matches. If you tie your fun to winning you will have a hard time. The fun is in facing someone, matching their skills against yours, and even taking their blows. Losing can be fun if you learnt something and you should let the gameplay decide if you had fun, not the result.

It's pretty difficult to give general advice at this level, because in my experience Platinum is about shoring up the obvious holes in your gameplan and that journey varies for everyone.

I have a general checklist I run for each character I play, but to broadly answer your two questions:

When should I use lights?

• Oki and the 3 Lights rule: When you score a knockdown that leaves you close enough for a meaty throw, you can also use your lights. For most characters, you can do 3 lights before you get pushed out too far for a 4th, and you need to either stop or use a safe special ender.
• Tap the toes: Lots of people hold back to walk away when they're getting hit, so you commonly see players do something like 2LP 2LK 2LP to catch it.
• Fish for mashing: Since most lights chain into other lights, you can usually find a sequence of 3 lights that leave a gap less than 4f for your opponent to press buttons. Use this to stop people from pressing buttons, and learn to react to a hit on the first or second light with a good combo ender.
• Tick throws: Once you've established that your opponent can't mash, you can now threaten to throw before any of the three lights. So walk up, throw, or walk up, jab, throw, or walk up, jab, jab, slight walk, throw.
• The shimmy: Advanced players may start doing delayed tech to beat both lights and throws, although in my experience these players are pretty rare until high Diamond. If you fight someone who always blocks the lights and always techs the throw, then you shimmy. Walk in like you're going for the throw, walk out, press your whiff punish button. Notably, it's pretty hard to react to the whiff animation, so most players just autopilot walk forward, walk back, hit a button.

How to handle blockstrings:

• When do I stop blocking?: In general, when I'm blocking, I only think about two buttons: my 4f light and my 6f medium. While I don't really know most characters' frame data and block strings, I can usually just wait for them do the 3 lights rule or just wait for round 2 when I can recognize their pressure strings, decide "okay they're probably minus now," and press either the 4f or the 6f to see if I can get myself out. A.K.I. is notorious for mashing 5MP to get out of everything. There's a whole game around frame traps and spacing traps, but the first step is learning when to leverage these two buttons and establish your turn.
• Spacing traps: When you're on offense, every character has buttons you can press that leave you minus, so technically the end of your turn on paper, however they leave you at a range where your opponent's 4f and 6f will whiff, and you can OS block / whiff punish them if they press anything. You really need to lab these, but once you know one or two for your character it gives you a nice autopilot offense and lets you devote a few more brain cycles to adapting to your opponent.

Pick a main to train seriously. If your opponent does something you have no answer for, use replay takeover and lab out the answer. 

That's a lot of characters to play especially when you're first starting out. There's nothing wrong with that of course if you're having fun but if you're really trying to grow I would try and pick the one you have the most fun with and really invest time with them.

When I first got the game, I did the same thing, tried to get every character to Platinum at least.

What I learned was that I got conditioned to playing at Gold/Low Platinum level. At that level, random DI runs rampant, OD invincibles without reason, jumping in like maniacs, etc.

Advice would be to choose a main. Slow down. Put extra vigilance into anti-air and counter DI. Eventually your opponent will do something ill-advised and sabotage themselves. Have your best punish counter combo ready. Practice it until it's 2nd nature. Stick with the gameplan and you'll definitely win more than you'll lose. Even so, learning and instilling muscle memory is much more valuable than any win.

Choose one character. 

The only expectation you should have of yourself as far as improvement is to be better than you were before. Ive lost 100MR straight before but still considered it a "good" session because I pulled off some new tech.

Also sometimes its purely out of your control. You'll get a series of matchups you hate, back to back, and then when you finally get a W they'll rage quit or one and done. In moments like that you just gotta laugh at your luck or take a break.

My best suggestion is to post a video! Let us see how your gameplay is progressing. Especially where you feel you could have won but didn't, or did win but shouldn't have. Those tense moments help us help you.

#How to get to your replays #How to record your videos
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Enjoy your road to Master. Once you get here, ugh

Same boat here! I finally just got the game after my friend's have been telling me to get it since last year lol. Did my placements into rookie today and then made it to iron, it's fun to see all the little improvements

Fellow Bronzer checking in! Being able to see improvement from practice is what I like about this game.

Me too, but what stops me spilling salt is to take a moment to reflect on why I was losing and know that if I address that, I’ll be even better than I was before the losing streak.

Waddya buyin? #gets hit with low fwd into corner carry into guess fighter 6#

Is it wrong to tell myself that I shouldn't be too upset losing to another player because they clearly have more time to play than I do? Idk why, but it feels like I'm admitting to something that I don't want to admit to. I've been playing SF6 for well over a year now, and my gametime doesn't even remotely compare to someone who plays 2-3 hrs every day. Because of that, why should I expect to improve as quickly as someone who does play that much? I used to make a LOT of effort to improve my game, and it showed in my growth - something I'm proud of.

But I did it because I knew I was going to fall behind the curve since players around would get better by doing the same while playing more hours than me. And now that I hit a milestone, I decided to relax and subsequently found myself stagnating due to lack of effort. And now that stagnation might be causing me to be less skilled overall because players around me are getting better.

It feels unfair to me. But it's also dumb to think this way. I spend the majority of my life working, while others spend more time playing. It's not simple to have both. I also have other life goals to meet. Logically, I shouldn't be upset at all. Of course, the folks who spend hours every day are going to beat me. But the emotions are there. They are real, and I have difficulty managing them. Jesus, do I need therapy to manage my salt in SF6? lol

jump into ranked as early as possible, it's not scary and it's 100 times better than losing to random people who are so far outside your skill it doesn't even make sense nor is fun

Modern or classic does not matter in the slightest. SF is a mental game.

How about people play how they want? Modern is a great way to get into fighting games.

In the meantime, you can try to improve your own play and mindset to the point where you won't have to use your opponents' modern controls as an excuse as to why you lose.

Deplete the enemies health before he depletes yours.

And be ok with sucking for a while. There is a huge amount of new mechanics that definitely take time getting used to.

Nah, you don't need to anti air if you are the one airing. If you suck at defence, just attack more.

Time and practice. That's it. I started from scratch with SF 6. I tried SF 5 before but didn't understand a thing. I just had to learn everything. I just kept playing and eventually started to learn and improve. Also I get hit by DI's and jump ins too after like 700hrs into the game.

I have one tip for you though. Keep doing those combos in practice so you can build up your muscle memory. When you don't have to focus too much on your execution and punishes it's easier to focus anti airing and such.

Don't give up. If you keep practicing you will improve.

start with simple stuff like antiairing, having 1 good poke/counterpoke, 1 reliable bnb combo, 1 easy combo to sa3

then intermediate stuff learn delaytech for defense, mix different wakeup options, learn some kim can mixups. if you have strong offense that relies on throws/cancellable normals you can beat random DIs.

grind rank to play same skill people, when you hit plateaus learn your matchups and character specific stuff

In your settings turn up the sound for drive impact up higher. Turn the music down lower. Go in training mode. Set drive impact training. You’re going to counter drive impact for 5 minutes. Then you’re going to close your eyes. Do it based on the sound for 5 minutes.

Then your going set anti air training. You are going anti air jump ins until you can hit 10 in a row on both sides.

For parry your going make 3 recordings on ryu. One for light fire ball, medium, and strong. You’re going to turn on all 3 recordings set them to random. You are going to practice parrying fireballs. Until you can do it 10 times in a row. You’re not going to just hold parry. You are going try to get a perfect parry. I don’t really care if you get a perfect or not. I want you to able to parry by just tapping it.

You’re then going to hop in ranked. You are going fuck all this shit up that you just practiced. You’re going to do this every day for two weeks. It’s going suck and you are going to tough it out.

In the end you will get better.

Just focus on neutral play. Anti air, defense... Combos isn't even necessary. This dude got to diamond doing no combos

Play the game and you'll improve. You just have to play the game

I've found a few things to be true on my attempts to get better.

Significantly better people can coach you, analyze your replays and give you feedback, and give you advice. They are not good to play against. You learn very little if they're significantly better than you.
You will get better by playing people slightly better than you. This, imo is the fastest way to get better but you might not be able to identify why. You'll need them to explain or someone better to explain. Don't stagnate here by doing the same things, understand why those same things work, or alternatives that can do better or win in interactions where you're losing.
You can also get better by teaching someone less skilled than you. Thinking about how to explain something and answering questions forces you to really understand what you're talking about.

One difference no one mentions is the speed vs tactical elements.

Tekken is slower and has more options where as SF6 is much faster and is a lot more straight forward than Tekken.

this doesn't mean that SF6 is just simple mashing but sometimes when you are under fast constant pressure it is easy to feel lost in the mixer.

It's both easier and harder in a way.

You have much less to worry about in terms of matchups (since you don't have to memorize 50+ strings per character) and execution of movement is simpler (no KBD, Wave dash etc).

Combo execution is way more difficult if you're used to Tekken, linking together moves takes a lot of practice to get down if you've never played a game like this before. Also special moves and supers can be a barrier of entry execution-wise.

I'd say it's harder to get going at first, mostly since you have to be way more controlled with your inputs (in Tekken at least for beginners you can sort of just mash and cool shit happens, in SF that doesn't happen), but once you get comfortable with the game it's a whole different beast. As someone else here said, it feels more like fighting a human player than a character, you have way less moves so the focus is more on pure footsies and outplaying your opponent instead of pushing overwhelming offense, but I guess it can feel more "basic" or simpler in a way, but it's not easier :D

I was grinding Tekken for the past 7 months and got to fujin, first ever fighting game. Was fun but Street Fighter feels way more fluid, less combo times, and overall enjoy the game better. It’s very weird to get use to from Tekken but after a few days you’ll adjust and really like the system Street Fighter has

It's a different game, but at least to me, below diamond level, the game has become more fun than tekken.

It feels most of the time, that im fighting against human instead of characters. Thats the biggest thing why Im starting to understand sf6 more than tekken.

I think that learning how to play a game without plus frames is definitely the biggest challenge when transitioning over, but learning how to play around spacing instead of frame advantage will make you better at fighting games as a whole.

That's good for you, but I remember I haven't used my Ryu in so long, and I already got gold rank and then instantly got platinum. Taking breaks definitely helps every now and then. I was still playing the game and learning it. I only been playing for a month and my highest is a plat 5. You could do it too. I suck at most fighting games.

you won’t be stuck in silver -gold for long with ken ^^ and with the bonus point capcom added i’m sure you will be gold - plat pretty soon good luck fren

Keep it up.

Playing to improve vs playing to win will help you rank up faster. The points are meaningless. Gotta focus on those fundamentals.

And 50 hours is nothing. It took me 300 hours in sfv to escape bronze for the first time.

You gotta get washed before you can get clean.

Congrats! And good job taking those lessons to heart!

Small breaks are extremely powerful as they let your brain shuffle the nonsense to the side and reinforce what works. And don't fear any plateaus! As long as you're eagerly searching out new challenges, and new solutions, you'll never be stuck for long!

Onward and upward! 

fighting games are a skill, you have to practice a lot and play other people to get better

First steps online https://youtu.be/7b6QICGLnw0

How to start playing fighting games https://youtu.be/mCUlBX8E2BU

General fighting game mechanics https://youtu.be/_R0hbe8HZj0

SFV basics https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLs4LjNCY15zOyz0Or1Za7yKZ6EkXIKMej

Glossary (definitions and video examples of any fighting game term) https://glossary.infil.net/

Play ranked only. Avoid lobby and casuals, not for beginners.

What character to choose ? Simple : pick the character you like.

Godspeed.

Don’t be shocked WHEN you get destroyed at the lower levels of ranked. It’s just a developed player pool that basically every other fight is against a Smurf who has opened a new account so they can beat on the new fish.

It’s kinda pathetic. And the new people don’t get to learn from them. Just a tip…so they discouraged.

Everyone gets destroyed. It's a learning process, have fun whiles doing it.

Play a lot. Expect to lose a lot.