We’ve all been there. We’ve all been living our merry lives, climbing Street Fighter 6’s Ranked ladder and crumping every Rookie and Iron player we’ve come across. You became the ‘Noob-Killer’, the ‘Ender Of Streaks’, the ‘King Of Bronze’. Suddenly, as if from nowhere, you approached – and subsequently collided with – the dread ‘Wall’.
Walls (huh, yeah), what are they good for? Keeping you from ranking up, that’s what. These dastardly metaphorical constructs formed of cognitive brick and mortar are there to be the bane of newcomers. Getting through them can be difficult – even time-consuming – but we have the sledgehammer to break that wall down, and we are gifting it to you. This is what you can do to rank up and break down that wall.
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Learn To Walk
This might be the most obvious thing upon reading, but trust us, we have climbed enough ladders to know that anyone stuck behind a wall doesn’t know how to walk yet. How do we know? Because you won’t stop bloomin’ jumping. New players love to jump, and so do you. Why? Because you are encouraged to jump.
What do we mean by this? Well, you’ve likely been doing Combo Trials and a staggering number of these trials require a ‘jump in’ to start. Since you’ve been focusing on learning combos, you have picked up one of the worst habits you can, and that’s jumping too often.
That’s not to say jumping isn’t powerful – because it is. It covers a large distance, it can be used to ‘cross up’, many techniques incorporate jumping in some way (neutral jumping throw locks for example), and it avoids projectiles. Jumping is GREAT, but it is far from safe. Jumping in leads to people using anti-airs, and this leaves you with a health deficit.
How do you get around this? Walking. Stop jumping as much and walk towards your opponent. Not only do most people in your rank also jump too much (allowing you to punish them in the same way), but they will also be baffled by the horizontal movement on display. Implement more grounded movement techniques like this, and you will be hitting Gold in no time.
Start Learning Frame Data In Street Fighter 6
During our Beginner’s Guide, we told people to get out of the Training Room and play the game. Learn by experience, not by grinding the lab. Now you have hit the wall, it’s time to get back in the Training Room and learn Frame Data.
Frame Data is the backbone of all fighting games, and if you want to make your own combos and interrupt your opponent’s pressure, learning the basics of Frame Data is essential. Thankfully, Street Fighter 6 has this as an easily accessible feature so you can learn everything you need by experimentation.
Simply go to the Training Room, go into the settings, and turn on the Frame Meter. This will tell you how fast any attack you do is as well as whether you are plus or minus in Frame Advantage. With this information, you can create custom combos and learn what moves are unsafe when your opponent uses them. Sometimes it looks like a character is just unleashing an endless tirade of attacks when in reality, they are playing unsafe and leaving gaps where you can interrupt and kickstart your counter-offensive.
Frame Data is not hard to grasp, but it can be time-consuming to learn and then implement into your play.
Stop Pressing Buttons
New players have an awful habit of pressing buttons non-stop. The idea that pressing buttons will fix a situation is logical but incorrect. Even if you’ve been hitting the ladder and nabbed a few promotions, that doesn’t mean you’ve shored up your tendency to mash, and this is likely one of the reasons you have hit the wall.
Pressing buttons means you aren’t blocking, and blocking is sometimes what you need to do to weather the storm. If you keep on waking up from being knocked down and getting smacked in the head, it’s because you are being predictable and your opponent is punishing you for pressing buttons.
The solution is to stop. Defence is not the best offence, but defence keeps you alive long enough to go on the offensive later on.
Don’t Abuse Drive Impact In Street Fighter 6
Drive Impact is a noob trap. It’s a powerful new mechanic that catches other newbies out because they haven’t developed their reactions and they aren’t using safe attacks (which leaves them wide open). Now you are climbing the ladder, players are more likely to punish you if you are abusing these mechanics.
Drive Impact has so many counters we could write an entire guide going over all of them. It is fundamentally an unsafe form of attack, and overusing it will result in people countering you and comboing you into oblivion. Drive Impact should be used as a gambit or a punish when others throw their own Drive Impact.
The trick is to not be predictable. If you have your opponent in a corner, they are likely waiting for your Drive Impact. A similar case when they are stunned. People will start to prepare for obvious uses of Drive Impact, and this leaves you open to a sneaky counter.
On the flip side, if you are making this mistake, so are other people. Once you stop falling into the trap, you can start punishing others for falling into that same trap. Use safe moves so you can cancel into Drive Impact to counter people who overly rely on it to ‘get out of jail’, so to speak.
Pay Attention To Your Opponent
Every character has a game plan, and every player has their own way of executing that game plan. Not only that, but everyone – even higher-level players – has quirks and flaws that you can exploit if you pay attention. How do they initiate their attacks? What is their go-to method of approach? What are they spamming? How do they pressure? How do they get out of a bad situation? Etc. These, and many other questions, can be answered by opening your eyes and watching your opponent.
There is a reason Street Fighter 6 allows for a best of 3, both in terms of Rounds and Matches. This gives you 4-9 Rounds to crack your opponent’s code, figure out what makes them tick and then implement counters to their strategy. It can be something as simple as a Ken always starting the round with a Hadouken, or Cammy constantly jumping in.
In the first example, you can punish them by using a projectile-immune attack, and in the second you can prepare your best anti-air. Small reads can tip the balance in your favour. Just be aware they are doing the same to you, so don’t use the same counter every. Counter the counter-counter, if that makes sense.
That’s all we have on Street Fighter 6 for now. Be sure to check out our other lists and guides for more Street Fighter content.
