You know it's fucked when I can find more people to play Guilty Gear here than Skullgirls.
The only people I've been able to get into the game are people that aren't really into fighting games. They like Skullgirls cuz it has nice art and music and the controls are simple and all this other stuff, but nothing I can say will ever get these people to try and learn it at any higher level. It's depressing when I ask my other friends what they did yesterday and they're like "I sat in training mode for 5 hours" versus the ones I introduced to Skullgirls who go weeks without touching it. Then I try to get the actual fighting game people into it, but none of them actually like it and it makes ME not want to play because they only time I get to play people is online with my shitty connection or once a year at Evo.
So, yeah, I don't know what's next. How do you take someone from "appreciating the game" to "competitive"? How do you make someone practice? Is it even possible? I just want a local scene, man ;_;
First off, Amen on the shitty connection thing, love not being able to see hit confirms.
As for learning, what I've experienced with Squigly and Eliza and a little "Extra Credits" video about fighters, is that the bar is pretty high, regardless of fighters.
I'm pretty much on the 'in it for the art' end of the spectrum but I got a lot better after Squigly came into beta because her tools were limited and made me learn what she actually had and I had time to adjust to her mechanics and such. (Although my Eliza is way worse since I couldn't find people online to play with.)
Most people don't really have the patience to learn the game at a competitive level, especially with fighters, you have to memorize a lot of shit such as priorities, hitboxes and common strategies, Skullgirls arguably makes this worse because a lot more characters are really viable and with different team and custom assists so even something as a uncommon assist can knock you down.
Marvel (Feel free to correct me on this.) has...maybe a handful of characters and some common strategies so it's a little easier to learn at a competitive level since you only really need to study the top tier characters.
Pokemon's even the same way, while it does leave a lot of room, people do tend to go for about 1 or 2 different sets and even then you can usually tell what the top-ranking Pokemon in it's respective tier can do.
So, I guess we need people to take baby steps with learning fighters, but Skullgirls does do a lot of good thing, such as Render said earlier, a good tutorial that actually informs you of what shit does and not just "do this combo", although I think it needs to get everyone to learn a simple combo so you can practice it and try online to work on your game.