Street Fighter 3: 3rd Strike/FAQ

General

What does the tier list look like?

Please note: Tiers are HIGHLY debatable so all lists should be taken with a grain of salt. If a character is only a place or two away from where they "should" be, please refrain from wildly editing this section.

Representative Tier-list

When considering a tournament, with a large number of competitors, you find that there is invariably more people playing the higher tier characters. Almost to the point where very few (if any) lower tiers appear.

As such, it is sometimes improper to base a Top level tournament tier list on ALL the match-ups. After taking a flat tier list, and selecting those characters with the highest frequency of appearance (In this case, Yun, Chun-Li, Ken and Makoto). By ranking every character by their match-ups against those four characters, you end up with a more tournament based tier-list.

This list, essentially, ranks characters on their ability to place in a large scale tournament.

• Characters who have ranked up are marked by a bold font.
• Characters who have ranked down are marked by an italic font.

Top Tier:

Yun

Chun-Li

Upper Tier:

Ken

Dudley

Makoto

Middle Tier:

Akuma

Urien

Yang

Ryu

Ibuki

Oro

Elena

Low Tier:

Necro

Alex

Remy

Hugo

Q

Twelve

Sean

New Arcadia Tier List

S+ - Chun-Li
S - Yun
A+ - Ken, Dudley
A - Makoto, Yang
A- - Urien, Akuma, Ryu, Oro
B+ - Hugo
B - Elena, Ibuki, Alex
C - Necro, Twelve, Remy, Q
D - Sean

2014 Arcadia Tier List

Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike Tier List

Tier	Character(s)
S+
S
A
B
C
D

What general advice should a beginner follow? What general strategy?

Learning takes time, and its important to develop a learning strategy to play FGs with the most excitement and effectiveness if you want to improve. He are a few, universal tips:

• (if you are new to fighting games - learn some of the basic terminology, such as frame data, anti airing and poking, mixups, neutral, etc. There should be terminology guides in the internet, just look up "Fighting Game Terminology")
• Learn your characters' most important normals and specials first, it can be through sitting in training mode, watching tutorials or gameplan - everyone learn differently.
• Learn your basic combos - hit confirms, punishes from poke\pressure, super combos. This is pretty essential, as it gives you an idea of how your character plays and how you can use some of your normals
• Don't rush and try to parry - learn to block first. Blocking is safer, even if the reward is not immidiate, its worse than parrying all the time and either getting baited or missing the parry completely. Don't mash when you don't know what to do as well - you *will* get punished a lot if you do. Blocking is great, learn to love it.
• Play people who are only a bit better than you, and expect to lose many of your first matches, for a differing period of time. Losing is normal, you shouldn't blame yourself, nor the game or the opponent for it. Nobody is going to shame you for losing, and if you can learn from your losses you will only be respected. Learning from loses is exactly what pro player do.
• Talk with People! the best part of FGs is the community, learning, discussing and playing together is the fun. If you play on fightcade, join the third strike servers pointed out in the room for the game.

Any useful Third Strike links I can use?

• [1] Official Arcade Page
• [2] Japanese Wiki
• Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike Forums on Shoryuken
• C-Royd Teaches 3rd Strike - In-depth 3rd Strike tutorials
• The Shend's YouTube Channel - Thousands of 3rd Strike matches and miscellaneous videos
• Thongboy presents 3rd Strike Basics - The seminal 3rd Strike tutorial
• Street Fighter III Third Strike Frame Data - Frame data courtesy of ESN
• 3rd Strike Junkies Podcast - Strategy podcast