I used to be a card-carrying member of the "SG players suck!" club, but a guy who wins first in three games at Evo only getting fourth in SG when he treats SG as one of his "main" games DOES say a lot.
EDIT:
@ClarenceMage, go back and watch Sako vs. Ricky Ortiz, SnakeEyez vs. Fuudo, or Bonchan vs. Luffy. Sako couldn't finish a combo to save his life, SnakeEyez refused to stop jumping even after he got anti-aired literally every time (and that's not mentioning that awful Ultra 2 switch that even the commentators just said "yeah, this won't work" to), or Bonchan going back to the fireball strategy that failed early in the set in his last few games after getting flustered.
Sako vs. Ricky:
http://www.reddit.com/r/SF4/comments/1rrj5q/the_biggest_single_usf4_change_nobody_is_talking/
USF4 has added a frame of hitstop to every intance of hitstop in the game. This falls under "game changes makes players inconsistent", and in this case Sako is known for having frame perfect execution... but the frames got changed. Having your muscle memory suddenly not work would definitely put anyone on tilt, and since Sako keeps sharp with many characters it's unsurprising his E.Ryu timing is not as well-practised as it could be.
Snake Eyez vs Fuudo: Let's start off by acknowledging this is a shit matchup for Zangief. A REALLY shit matchup for Zangief, as long as Fei Long manages to maintain that spacing of -just- outside of Gief's effective range, which is -just- within Fei Long's effective range, where Fei Long has ways to convert off of counter hit c.MP and ways to counterpoke Zangief that Zangief can't keep up with.
One of the major ways to bypass footsies in sf4 is jumping, where you jump forward in anticipation of a button and you whiff punish with a jumping normal into full combo. It's understandable that Snake Eyez wants to go for the risk, since the footsie game is so stacked against him. This matchup is a consistent choice between bad options and other bad options, so SnakeEyez has to make either ludicrously good reads all the time or capitalise on mistakes, but Fuudo wasn't making any mistakes. He switched to U2 to try discourage Fuudo from doing uppercuts, but Fuudo adapted by not ever jumping and doing non-uppercut anti-airs.
This is one of the main problems in 2D fighting games, and in SF4 in particular, where because of the nature of the 2D spacing game, shit matchups occur where one character gives no shits about another character's options, and the only way for one player to win is to be stupidly risky and try make a lot of hard reads which naturally make mistakes happen. All Fuudo has to do to win is Not Lose since most neutral situations is winning for Fei Long, but what SnakeEyez has to do to win involves risky as shit hard reads which is going to fail more times than work.
Luffy vs. Bonchan: cbf going over this match but it's a bad matchup for sagat in the same way that Long vs Gief is bad for Gief, except take Sagat's shit walk speed making his footsies poor, Rose's fantastic footsie game, combined with Rose's way to compete with and take advantage of Sagat's fireball game puts Bonchan in a similar boat.
Sako is the only one Losing due to personal failure, because dropped combos are definitely Losing, but combo timings got changed and it takes time to adjust.
Snake Eyez and Bonchan, they didn't really Lose in-game, with what options they had available to them. Really, they lost at the Character Select screen.
Edit: Uhh, shit, how does this relate to Skullgirls? Fucken, it's more balanced, because characters have heaps of options, and assists are a great equaliser to patch holes in neutral game. Yeah, that'll do.
