USF4 – Menus are just black screen

I can only answer from my experience of playing on the PC, some of this may or may not apply.

1. The timing of everything in SF is based on frames rather than actual elapsed time. If you are on the PC like me, the first thing you'll want to do is to make sure that vsync is on and that you are getting a steady frame rate of 60 fps. If your frame rate fluxuates, it will become extremely hard to land any difficult combos with any degree of precision.

2. I've found that while getting the timing down (to build up muscle memory), it helps a lot to look for specific animation motions rather than trying to sense the time. Specific example: for Fei Long's bread and butter Rekkukyaku - standing fierce - Shienrenkyaku combo, it was extremely difficult to get the combo down until I started watching Fei Long's legs during the Rekk recovery. I eventually learned that at the exact moment when his legs crossed after the attack was the moment I should be hitting the fierce to continue the chain. After a few times of watching that to get the timing down, it became much easier to do.

3. For linking, you may want to practice them outside of really long chains in order to get a feel for them.

4. There is a technique called plinking that can lengthen the number of frames to link your combos but the only way you can get this down is by pure habit and muscle memory. Plinking doesn't really apply for trials as the extra buttons will consider the chain lost, but it should be used in actual matches.

5. Finally, when in an actual fight you have to decide ahead of time the combo you are planning to use should your initial hit succeed. There is really no time to decide you want to work in a FADC into the combo once you've started.

Here is an example for plinking:

Character tiers are used to describe the strength of every character in comparison the rest of the cast. Basically someone (or a community of players) rates or defines the outcome of every possible matchup between two equivalent opponents.

This is usually done with the best players of the world in mind. This means the rating assumes you know your character by heart, you know how to play every matchup and your execution is top notch.

Then these ratings are entered into a matrix and the sum of all matchups for a specific character is their overall "strength". The characters are ordered by their strength. Then different groups are defined, based on their strength. If there are big gaps, then this is considered the border form one tier to the other. Otherwise the border is arbitrary.

In SF the tiers are usually S, A, B, C, D,... S being the highest. Sometimes people even differentiate within a tier and the best within a tier are considered for example A+ and the worst A-.

A tier only tells you how good a character is on average against the whole cast at top level.

Here is an example of a tier list for SSFIVAE2012 taken from Eventhubs. It is not considered completely accurate anymore, as new "tech" was developed that changed the ratings.

As already stated only the ratings of specific matchups are relevant for the tiers, still here are a few important attributes that most of the top tier characters have in common.

• Very good mixup game
• A lot of ambiguous mixups
• Many unblockables against the most common characters

One more thing: Tiers are only important for tournament players, as they cannot choose their opponents and 1 or 2 losses mean elimination. Average Joe that plays against his buddies and online is not concerned by these. Online you can always choose not to play against your opponents. Say you are T.Hawk, you can select your opponents only to be Balrog, Ibuki and Adon then you would even have the advantage.

Just to put this in perspective: While the result for a best of one is stated in the table, the results of longer set are way more extreme. Most tournaments play best of 3 up for qualifications, then switch for best of 5 or best of 7 in the finals (or round of 8).

• Matchup 7:3 Best of 3 chances are 78.4% that player 1 wins.
• Matchup 7:3 Best of 7 chances are 87.4% that player 1 wins.
• Matchup 8:2 Best of 3 chances are 89.6% that player 1 wins.
• Matchup 8:2 Best of 7 chances are 96.7% that player 1 wins.