I've been playing on-line 3S on and off for about a month now and I've been enjoying it quite a bit. I don't get any other type of competition, so it's the best I can do. I've been given fair warning about the bad habits and messed up timing playing with lag can give you, but that obviously hasn't stopped me. And the lag isn't even that bad. Some guy I played against managed to parry the second part of my Chun super meant to chip him to death. I actually managed to parry the first half of the same super AFTER the super freeze in one of my recent matches, but of course I screwed up and lost anyway.

I play Ryu when I play on-line and under a different nickname than ZenFire for various reasons. I wanted to play Ryu before I started playing on Kaillera, but picking him over Makoto on-line has turned out quite well. One of the issues I have when picking Makoto is timing a S.HP after a Karakusa. You can get pretty far with double tapping it or just being psychic and guesstimating the latency but that usually ended up screwing up when you want to cancel it to SA2. Also, players on Kaillera mash a lot. It's something universal among the less experienced players, but it really isn't all that bad an idea when playing over lag. Parrying itself is not as hard as you might thing because the timing doesn't change that bad and your lag is their lag meaning parry and attack timing discrepancies compensate each other. However, punishing something on reaction to the blue flash does become an issue for me. Mashing is also good because blocking things on reaction is also substantially harder. A few days ago I kept getting caught by Chun's DF+HK which is not hard to block on reaction at all when playing without latency. The same goes for UOH. Mashing prevents you from having to look for anything like that and let's you luck your way out of a war of the normals. Jump-in combos are harder for me as well because it turns out I use a lot of visual cues. When I stun someone with Ryu now I actually do the jump-in with my eyes partially closed so I rely only on muscle memory. Don't worry, I only close them for a split second. Parrying as you jump in is doable, but again, reacting to the flash isn't. So if nothing happens you might get thrown and if something does you'll touch down before you can do anything.

So, Ryu's been working out well. I've been getting better at using my EX's and scaring ppl into blocking on wake-up. There's a lot to be said about non-combo characters on-line. Ryu's C.MK into EX Hadouken is brain dead simple and there is almost no worry about retaliation. EX Hadouken has also become a great mid-range attack for me. DP'ing jump-in's is not always as easy with lag, but it's doable if you do it from crouching and buffer it like you were buffering a Raging Storm as AA in CvS2. I occasionally sit there waiting cus I "know" they're going to jump. It's much easier that way. So when hey stop doing that EX Hadouken really catches a lot of people walking forward or max range poking. It's not unlike the way Dan uses RC Hadouken in CvS2. Theoretically it's a risk, but most of the time you get away with it because jumping on reaction at that distance is impractical, especially with lag.

Besides EX Hadouken, I've also fallen in love with HK Tatsumaki. In cases where I want to preserve meter and I'm far enough away from a corner, I'll cancel C.MK into HK Tatsu instead of EX Hadouken. Allow me to explain. Most characters can crouch under it and to block C.MK they have to be crouching anyway. If they stay crouched while I pass over them I'll land far enough away that a lot of characters can't punish me without super. It's situational to say the least, but it has been working well for me. Another thing I've really enjoyed is using air born Tatsu to cross people up. At the same distance that a J.HK would hit frontally, doing a HK tatsu at the apex (possibly a fraction passed it) of your jump will cross them up. This is something really hard to react to with lag. This works even better against characters that are tall when crouching, because the timing is less strict then.

Another generic tactic that happens a lot on-line is throwing after someone jumps in on you. Due to the aforementioned difficulty doing jump-in combos with lag, most jump-in follow-ups are late and leave room for the defender to throw you. Throws in general are strong in on-line play, because you can mash them and they're fast. The flip side of this of course is that throw countering also becomes very strong. Dashing back with Ryu into C.MK x something works very well and so does jumping in then dashing away or jumping again. All in all I play really cut and dry but it's given me quite a bit of success against the anonymous masses of the interweb.

In closing, what is up with the unmerited bragging? Players that are mediocre at best accusing you of sucking then proceed to a sequence of losses. Others will tell you how great THEY are before even playing. This happened once and then he dropped after his second loss. I really don't get it. I understand youthful angst, prepubescent insecurities, but I don't remember it being that bad. I wish I could be in the room while the spouted such nonsense to look at their facial expression trying to understand what they're thinking. I'm intrigued yet turned off by it.