A few years ago, when SF4 first hit arcades, I happened to live in Arizona where we were lucky enough to have an arcade cabinet. I happened upon it rather casually, but as a fighting gamer, it was hard to contain my excitement. Needless to say, I was ready to dive head-first into it and begin practicing. It was a fresh game, and it was obvious to everyone that this was going to be a big deal. Nobody really had a grasp on who was good or bad. We were just happy to play a new fighting game and explore options. As a frame of reference, this was before anyone knew that Boxer had an overhead rush punch. This is how new the game was.
So of course, the first thing I did was call all of my local scene and tell them about it so that we could practice, play, and just in general have a good time. Things were great. We were all exploring characters, trying to figure out how they worked. One of my friends, Mailorder, had deigned to try the new characters before looking into any of the characters that had returned from other games in the series. He remarked after standing up at some time with the words "I really like C. Viper. I think she could be good." Promptly, somebody I had never seen before (but was obviously a fighting game player) chimed in from the side with a snide remark: "Viper is C-Tier."
