Saw this tweet and wanted to reply to UltraDavid
[big ol' nice reply]
Thanks for the response.
While of course I agree that Dudley didn't have the optimal set play style that top/high tier characters had in AE2012, I don't think that meant he was bad. He had really good pursuit tools for option selecting against backdashes and quick-recovering mixup buttons that allowed those pursuit tools to work in option selects, as well really good corner carry reaching 2/3-3/4 stage movement on any decent confirm, so I dunno why everyone (including me) thought that his pressure was solved with backdashing.
I don't want to claim that he was great before, but I remember thinking he was down with DeeJay and Dan in 2012. In retrospect I don't believe that. And I didn't mean to say that he was good in Super or AE, I don't even remember, but it's been nearly three years since AE2012 came out back in December 2011, and during that time I think he was already pretty good. The buffs he got in Ultra are great and they bump him up to, I dunno, top 10-15 area imo. But the core was already there and already good.
I don't think it's just Smug, in the same way that I don't think it's just Snake Eyez, or Bonchan, or whoever. When a player maximizes a character, it's still happening through the character itself. Well the character itself is really good now and has imo been viable for years. But somehow almost all of us (again, including me) missed it.
Edit: I think Viscant was right when he said that in part this is because there are so many characters. I do think that's true. In Ultra I've pretty much given up trying to investigate everyone; I can't find everything about 44 characters, I can only find things about the characters I play and hope that other people find things about the rest. There are only so many top level players or top scientists to go around I guess.
I feel like it's kinda what happened with Gen. There had been some great Gen scientists going back to Vanilla, but no one had applied everything together in competition until Xian. So if you'd paid attention to Gen, you knew he was already good, but most people didn't. I only knew because I used to play against and talk with Yeb a bunch. I think the same thing is still going on with Hakan even now.