Looking for an fgc for my friend in Martinsburg.

Is there any reason why EsLaf++ never garnered the same amount of popularity?

The current build of the game (that gets updated weekly IIRC) costs $5 AND there's a free demo with 3 characters

The artstyle is amazing and the character designs are fantastic as well

It has pretty decent QoL features, and the gameplay feels quite smooth

I think it actually has a fair shot of having upwards of a hundred players at all times if it gets a solid release

What holds this game back? I genuinely can't understand

When i was a kid me and my brother used to play this fighting game but the title wasn't in our native language (so it might have been in english) but here is what i remember

1. Pretty sure it was on Playstation 3 (might have been in 2)
2. We used to call it "KO 2" because it was in the end of the title
3. There was a guy with a long stick, and it was pretty annoying
4. I remember the art of the character being pretty japanese like

I tried google with the stuff i remember but never found it

I mainly play SF6 nowadays but STRIVE is what got me into the FGC and the new patch looks interesting and fun. I wanted to be able to compete at both games, but I feel that I tend to gravitate towards one or the other and one skill set ends up taking a hit because of it. I used to a be a decently solid STRIVE player but stopped playing to try and hit master on SF6 (one rank away!). Now I came back to play a bit before the patch drops and didn't know what to even do.

How can I balance both games? How do you find the equilibrium?

Title. I started to play fighting games back on SNES and arcade, in the nineties. Understanding safe and unsafe moves was all about intuitive feeling. After several years without playing FG "seriously", I came back to Street Fighter 6 and frame data is the most important concept. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate it and totally see the advantages of studying it. But, when people, in general, started to care about it? Street Fighter IV?

First of all, sorry if this sounds like a dumb question but I'm curious about the general opinion.
Recently I'm studying a little bit about the fighting game genre and my attention turned onto these two archetypes: grapplers and zooners.

My personal feeling (and again, I want to highlight that is a personal opinion) about playing/watching these two archetypes in various games is that they are kind of boring/unfun from a lot prespectives:
- playing with them is like usually play a different game, in one case you have to chase the opponent while in the other case is the complete opposite (spam from distance and run away if it too close).
- playing against them can be very frustrating and particularly against zooners, it's just not fun! You can spend the whole game try to land a hit without success!
- extra point about watching them: a match with one of these two archetypes is soooo boring and even watching the chat it seems is a shared sentiment (again, probably is more evident with zooners).

In general I feel grapplers are less problematic than zooners but still can be quite boring/unfun.

So I was wondering, is it only me? and if not, why do you think is necessary to always have in a game these two unfun archetypes? for sake of diversity in the gameplay style?

Thanks to all who wants to give their insight on this topic

I was wondering about Zoners with installs but the only two examples I can think of are MVC3 Morrigan with Astral Vision and DBFZ Frieza with Golden form but I really don't like either of them. Astral Vision is absolutely insane and makes morrigans whole gameplan build meter get super, and Frieza is barely a character outside of Golden(mostly because of the game he's in) and I was curious about what a well designed(in my opinion) zoner install would look like, then I realized that I have no ideas so I decided to make a post about it on reddit

Anji is my favorite character in any fighting game ever, I’ve never gotten super into other fighting games and I think it’s cause I have a hard time finding Anji-like characters. Anyone have any recommendations for characters in other games like Anji? New strive patch looks ultra ass even if anji didn’t get gutted and I kinda don’t wanna play it anymore

At 44 years old, I tried MK11 and MK1, but they are way to complicated for me. I just can’t enjoy them. Mortal Kombat, to me, was a cultural turning point in my gaming life, so I have always had a fondness for the series.

Whenever I emulate games, I always enjoy playing Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. It’s a good mix of easy to learn combos, and a decent challenge.

Has there been any fighting games released in the last 10 years that elicit the same feeling?

I didn’t enjoy the 3D fighters. I still like the 2D aesthetic. I’ve played Smash, and that seems to be a little too frenetic for me.

Edit: I know I misspelled MODERN but the app won’t let me edit my title.