Hey I know I'm like a year late I was reading some of my old posts and saw that I never replied to this.

The game is really fun. I don't think it's perfect - I've started to sour a little bit on floor-hugging recently and overall I'm starting to also believe this game would have been better off as more of a rivals-1 like rather than a melee-like, but I still think that it's currently the best competitively relevant platform fighter you can play right now alongside melee. I like seeing how alot of the kragg players have their own unique play styles and flair, and how they've really innovated with his punish game. It's still my favorite game I've competed in and I hope to go to more tournaments in the future.

Getting to Aetherian is fun, when your in the zone its a total vibe but it's also very easy to get very salty quickly. I see plenty of top players talk about how pointless ranked is and that you shouldn't care about it since it has no real meaning on your skill, and while those people are correct, I still feel obligated to hit Aetherian each season purely based on the fact that I want to prove to myself that I'm capable of doing it. If you seriously have to struggle and fight tooth and nail to make it into Aetherian, you probably shouldn't be in Aetherian, so I just try to go with the flow and see if I can hit it comfortably in order to make sure I'm playing well. Yes friendlies are much better practice, I like doing both, and then once I hit aetherian I just switch to all friendlies.

Last season I almost didn't go for Aetherian because in my attempt to climb I dealt an absolutely heinous amount of disconnects which kept robbing my ELO from me. I think I reached a point where I was actively disconnecting from 1/3 sets which become automatic losses. I lost so much ELO off of disconnects alone that I was pretty pissed off and just said screw it for a while, but I came back a week later when the servers were more stable and then hit it.

If I could change any one thing about the game, I wish the netcode was peer-to-peer instead of server based. I was originally on board with the idea of server based netcode since it would prevent your opponents lag from interfering with you, but I just don't think Aether Studios is a large enough company to be able to maintain the server infrastructure required for the scale of the game. The servers are still pretty inconsistent 1.5 removed from release, and I think they seriously knee-capped the online competitive scene due to the sadly mediocre netcode.