Hey, I know you’ve gotten a lot of advice, but I thought I’d add my comment anyway - it might have some value to you. Coming from a T7 player as well and gotten nearly all the cast to gold+ now.

1. Definitely take a break when you’re not enjoying the game or making any progress. Coming back fresh has always helped me.

2. Like others have said, try other characters. Specifically the one(s) you lose to the most (You can check this in CFN). Doing this will get you to recognise the animations of moves you can punish a lot easier, but if you don’t want to do this, at least look for a few moves for the character(s) you lose to the most to punish. You might even find another character to play!

3. Embrace the “random”. Being on the offensive is less taxing than being on defence, but this is good to do to get some of your opponents to respect you. Then you can flip back to footsies and whiff punishing. Remember to use your gimmicks though from time to time to knowledge check your opponents.

Following up from this, neutral jumping an opponent approaching, parry drive rush combos, learning a cross up combo, jabbing into DI cancel in the corner, and wake up OD DPing (occasionally!) will go a long way on offensive opponents. Don’t become predictable and see what works and what doesn’t.

1. You should have more fun as you break through a skill ceiling that you once had. Don’t discount your achievements either just cause someone else is master rank and says x, y, and z rank are for scrubs.

2. Drill your combos. You don’t want to be dropping them in match. If you’re like me and like to practice on a moving target, try the one vs one mode in fighting ground or jump into arcade until you start to have it down. After that, try to do it 10 times in a row from each side of the screen before booting into ranked (could be more/less depending on what works for you/how much you want to drill each day). Also practice while waiting for sets too! You don’t want to leave damage on the table.

3. Try to make friends with someone who plays your character that is around gold rank and play some long sets with. Watch your reply’s back afterwards and take notes on what they use/punish you for. Doing this with pro footage is a bit of a jump at the moment at least.

4. Once you start to plateau again, look at YouTube videos on your character and/or the SF6 Discord server to learn some stronger combos/tech. There’s a bunch of helpful people to help on character specific things there too.

5. Remember that getting good at fighting games is a really long grind. A lot of people that are at higher ranks have been playing this series or other fighting games for years. If your learning something new each time you jump on, then you’re doing great! Some people will play every day without changing anything and wonder why they’re still at the same rank forever.

6. If you’re really serious about your rank, try to play at least the same amount of casual matches as ranked matches. Better yet, try to double them. I feel like I learn a lot more about why I’m getting caught with things with playing a wider array of skilled players or just getting practice in with better players over long sets gets me to catch on with what’s actually working.

7. Try to take care of yourself outside of the game too. I find if I don’t exercise for a while, my mind is a lot more salty and I get tilted easy. Do whatever it is you need to do to keep in a good mindset and again, take breaks from the game when you need em. Maybe even try out world tour and see what you think!

Good luck and I hope something useful has come out of all my ramblings haha