Been playing this for... a couple of weeks now maybe?

So I've been playing ranked matches for a week or two. Opened the game up a couple of times when it first came out but then I spent a couple of months almost exclusively on XBOX. Didn't really pick this up until I came back to the PS4.

Ranked is... an interesting place.

This probably becomes less of an issue the higher up the ranks you go, but most of the matches I get don't feel like great matches. There's a lot of things that seem to be going into this.

Like, right now I'm at 1st Kyu to 2nd Dan, depending on my character. In theory I should be decent against people say, 3rd Kyu to 3rd Dan maybe? But as it happens, there are players at my level or just above my level that I can beat like they're nothing, but then, I'll sometimes get my ass kicked by people who the game is trying to tell me are newbies. It doesn't happen that often, thankfully, but there are times where I've been like "that dude's definitely not new at this, I should not be fighting them, why the heck have I been matched up with them."

And it's not like it's even anyone's fault. It's not the other player's fault that they've possibly been playing 15 years but couldn't take their rank with them. It's not Sega's fault player's ranks don't reflect their actual skill, especially at lower levels. But it's still annoying as heck.

If there's one thing I feel I CAN be sure about, though, it's that if I run into someone 5 ranks of more above me, I'm GOING to get my ass kicked. Ideally I'd be able to avoid those by keeping to similar ranked matches, but, nope, sometimes the game just throws me in anyway, and with your last chance to back out being before you know who your opponent is, and a penalty for disconnects even if you get thrown into a fight you didn't want to be in, it's like "well, just take the loss, maybe you'll take a round and that'll feel good but you're out of your depth here and there's nothing you can do about it."

And then of course there's those times where you get matched with the same person again and again even when you declined rematches. Again, once you know who it is, no backsies.

I think I'm probably getting like 5 "good" matches an hour, by which I mean matches where we both seem to be pretty evenly skilled and neither of us is completely steamrollering the other. Sure, wiping the floor with THEM does feel a lot better than the other way around, but neither situation is one I'd call good. It's great when a match goes to a 5th round, or when even if one person never quite takes a round they always manage to get to within a jab or two of doing so.

Apart from that, some random things I've noticed:

Training mode is a useful tool, but if I stay there for more than like 20 minutes at a time, I get bored. Some of you will probably hate reading that, but it's true. I basically learned Kage in Ranked itself. I actually kind of feel like I should have played Akira sooner, gotten a feel for him back when I was still a 10th Kyu with him rather than when I ended up with a 5th Kyu Akira despite never having played as him. I went for trying to win at least one match with each of the VF1 veterans and I think Akira was the only character where I didn't manage it my first try. I guess I want training mode to be more... interesting somehow? Or maybe other single player modes geared towards better play? I'm not sure exactly what I'm looking for here but the basic training doesn't seem to be it. I'll still go there for a bit most days I play though.

Spamming. Spamming works. More than I feel it should. I've been on both sides of this. I've had it happen TO me and lost a good chunk of health before being able to regain composure and make the appropriate counter, assumingI know what it is. At that point turning the tables is the more common result, but I've sometimes still lost because I guess the spammer wasn't really a spammer they were just trying to fool me into thinking they were, and now they're actually using other strats? And then there are times where I've turned entire matches around by going into spam mode and it's like wait, they were doing so well against me before, they had answers or the jump on me nearly all the time, and this is what they can't deal with? It feels weird. Like, Ill take the win, but it doesn't really feel deserved.

Throws seem almost non-existent. I've managed to get a few in, but as for opponents I've been, it seems only the very lowest ranked players tend go for them. Guarding doesn't seem to happen all that often either. It kind of feels like even though there doesn't seem to be much of a throw game going on, the fact that throwing exists at all is making people wary of guarding unless they absolutely have to. I guess with how online works, there's no guarantee you'll be able to drop the guard in time, even if you're good at that in an offline setting.

When guarding DOES happen, it's quite often both players facing each other and guarding at the same time. At that point it's like, what do I do? Like there's a few options - wait and see what the other person does and as long as it's not a throw then counter at the right time, drop guard and try and go for a throw before they go in for an attack, drop guard and see if they do the same and then attack them first, just run the heck away? Technically there's always a correct answer but since that depends on someone who I can't even see because they're in some other country somewhere and I've never gotten into situations like that enough times with any particular person to get a feel for what they'd do, it just feels like a big guessing game. There's a lot of that in other situations as well. What, I should have gone for this move there? Sure, but next time I'm in that situation if might be with a completely different player and this move is exactly what they wanted. Mindgaming or being mindgamed by all-but anonymous opponents isn't exactly my favourite thing, I suppose.

Down attacks. It seems really easy, once you've gotten one down attack in, to get two or free more in before they can do anything. Again, been on both sides of this. It's like the stun from the first hit is just enough to let them get the next one in. I don't know how long you're actually helpless for, of course.

There's been at least one person who could have been wiping the floor with me, but I managed to 3-1 them because I got around them and got a ring out on them one or two hits away from them taking the round. Three times. They took second round where we ended up going nowhere near the edge. It was a big "what the heck is going on here" moment.

Guess that's a lot of disparate points there. The game is fun when the matchmaking works out.

 

I'm by no means a veteran, but here are some of my thoughts on some of your points.

If you're talking about the 2P, it's most characters fastest move, aside from the grab. It's advantageous on hit, but not enough that the opponent can't block the next attack. On block it's disadvantageous, so with a fast move the other player can attack you back before you'll get the next one out. I think the thing is that atleast at first it can be hard to think quickly and answer in an appropriate way to it. I think it's one of the things you should try and learn to quickly identify and look up what approaches are available to your character. Eileens 9P crushes it and lets her combo for example. So if you block one 2P against a spammer that is sure to repeat it, that's a great answer for her.

Ring Outs are an incredibly important part of VF in many stages, and that's something you need to keep in mind. What people do or will try to do will most likely change the closer to the edge you are. In low level scenarios especially people often become quite predictable. Since they want to get away from there, the most logical move would be to try and dodge around the opponent. However, in the scenario you described he could've tried to use circular attacks or grabs to stuff your dodge attempts.

I'm not saying it's always easy to do all of this, and if the player knows you might react like this they might try to counter in some way, but that's kinda the name of the game.

 

Man I feel you, currently stuck at level 21 myself.
When ever you match up with a good person (same skill level)
If they win the first set, they never rematch you (so they won't lose their rank)
For me, playing since the release on PSN, level 21 feels like my skill level.
Unable to win in ranked matches...I only feel like I can improve in room matches.
I still play ranked, but no matter how many times I get to a rank up match
A very skilled player matches up with me and I get demoted to stay at level 21.
I think you will have a better time, once you reach level 21
As that is where the real online battles begin (because of the rank down)

 

Checking back in.

So, about the down attacks, what I was actually referring to was 8P while they're on the ground. I've had more experience with this, on both sides. Get-ups seem a lot faster in training, but in an actual online match, unless your character has a slow 8P you just keep using it with good timing and win most of the time. I've had the input drop on me quite a few times, and there's been times where I've probaby just been late on it but otherwise, yeah. Lion and El Blaze seem particularly good at it.

On the other hand I've taken so many rounds to being knocked down myself and KO-ing them on getup. Maybe they forgot to get out of range, maybe they were moving too slow. Maybe they were trying to use 8P and the input dropped. Whichever way, I've pulled it off a ton of times and only had it happen TO me a few. Or at least, most of the time when I actually get hit by a getup attack it doesn't KO me.

I'm starting to feel the lag a lot more now. It seemed fine for a while and then I got hit by a really bad laggy match where it felt that I could basically do nothing. Can't even remember which character I was using. Probably Kage. Luckily those matches are very few and far between. I could still probably count on my fingers the matches where I could say "yeah I lost that to lag." Incidentally one of those was a few hours ago. Got a clearly lag-ridden match against a Lei-Fei - there was obvious stutter and pausing throughout the match but we were both managing to hold our own, and then at a critical moment the game decided that I should take longer than usual to block. GG.

More frequent though is me losing and not knowing whether I got hecked by lag or not. Sometimes you know it's your fault, sometimes you're just wondering whether that was how it was supposed to work. And of course that's definitely going to be working in reverse as well, though that's even more difficult to get a read on since there's no way to tell what inputs my opponent was trying to do when I got a punch in their Akira's gut.

My block game in general has gotten alright. Mainly because I can't get comfortable with evades. Offensive moves are a struggle as well. I can do them consistently, but only offline. Dropping blocks without getting punished can still be an issue though unless they throw a move with a decent amount of endlag, and there's always the risk of being thrown though I'm not getting thrown anywhere near as much as I probably should be. Just as well, because as far as I can tell, once they hit P+G, there's no time to drop guard and jab unless there's lag in my favour.

In terms of progress, I've now gotten everyone to at least 1st Dan from no lower than 5th Kyu. Kage and Sarah were my first characters so they got some matches in at lower rankings as well. Got Kage to 4th Dan and a few other characters to 2nd. Akira, Lau, Shun. Possibly Wolf and Jean as well, can't remember right now. Still having matchup issues, like getting the same opponent over and over and over again, or getting weirdly mismatched ranks. While using Kage I ran into a Barbarian. I don't think I'd come across any named ranks in gameplay before, and here I was against someone at least 10 ranks above me. Thanks, Sega. I just did something else for a few minutes.

In terms of characters, they all feel sort of alright to play, although there are some characters where I feel locked out of a ton of their moveset since I can't get the "on hit" or parry timings down. That REALLY limits my Akira, for example. Either way, I got from 5th Kyu to first Dan without much trouble with everyone. Except Taka-Arashi. With every other character I played some matches, won more often than I lost, and got a feel for some of their moves along the way. With Taka-Arashi it was more a case of get owned and hope for a really weak player every so often so at least I had a chance. He might well be the only character for whom I got a rank-up on a loss. The only reason he doesn't have my worst W:L ratio is because I've only done like 20 or so matches with him. My worst, I think, is Kage, but he's also my highest ranked character.

My overall win rate right now is at like 67-68%.

 

Most spammable moves have openings. Or leave the opponent open and vulnerable. However, it is difficult to deal with spammable moves, in online lag.