As we sadly draw close to the end of Street Fighter 6’s second beta, those who managed to partake are walking away with special memories from this rare occasion — while others continue to grind out like there’s literally no tomorrow.
Like we did back at the end of the first closed beta test, we’ve gone through the top 100 players from SF6’s online rankings this weekend and figured up which characters they ended up using the most from the limited cast.
Since there’s still just the same 8 fighters available this time around, it’s pretty easy to make comparisons as to which of them were most likely to reach the high Diamond and Master rankings in just a few days.
One noticeable change right out the gate is that Ryu is most certainly not the most common top-ranking character like he was last time with his numbers dropping by half from 22 to 11.
Ken’s power, however, only apparently grew with the red Shoto filling out the most spots at 22, which means that nearly a quarter of those highest ranked players mained him.
It’s not hard to see why with his series familiarity like Ryu while also having a bunch of different ways to rack up some big damage.
The community seems to have caught on to how strong Guile is in these betas considering he’s the character that saw the largest leap in terms of results going up from only 9 to 15.
• Ken – 22
• Kimberly – 18
• Guile – 15
• Luke – 13
• Ryu – 11
• Jamie – 7
• Juri – 7
• Chun-Li – 7
That’s even more apparent too when looking at just the top 20 players where 6 of them ended up being big fans of chucking Sonic Booms.
Although she doesn’t appear to be nearly as popular among the lower ranks, Kimberly is once again right up there by the top performers and doing so better now.
Since a character would need to have at least 13 players in the top 100 to perform better than the statistical average, that means Ken, Kimberly, Guile, and Luke players had themselves a pretty good weekend.
It also unfortunately means that Ryu, Jamie, Juri and Chun-Li all underperformed a bit with the first 3 falling from the first beta.
This isn’t to flat out say the top half of characters are inherently better or stronger than the bottom 4 because of all the variable factors that go into which players reach those heights, especially time invested.
The ranks do though show correlation as to the beta characters with whom strong players are finding quick and consistent results using in the span of 3 days.
And unlike Street Fighter 5, the CFN rankings for SF6 have separate League Points for each character a player uses, so it’s easier to see which picks are working best for them.
• Guile – 6
• Ken – 5
• Kimberly – 4
• Jamie – 2
• Luke – 2
• Ryu – 1
Note that Chun-Li and Juri were not played in the top 20.
Capcom will most certainly continue to adjust the game balance in SF6 up until launch with at least some decisions being impacted by these beta results, but there’s more that goes in to that beyond just ranks.
At the time of reporting around 5:30 p.m. PST, a user going by the handle of DiegoV_41 is the top ranked player in the world for SF6’s beta, stacking over a whopping 27,000 LP with Ken as one of the few Master-ranked users.
The rest of the top 100 had to reach at least 21,800 LP and Diamond Rank 3 with flags from all over the world.
Looking at those who’ve gotten the results this time, you’ll probably notice some familiar faces like Graham Wolfe, ISDD, DaFeetLee and even our own Velociraptor representing with Jamie.
There’s still a few hours for these numbers to change, so I’m sure there’s going to be a battle for the best ranks to come.
Meanwhile, the rest of us will be on the far corner cabinets testing out combos and setups that we’ll probably never get to use at this point.