You guys using netplay as an excuse for not having a scene around is bullshit.
The netplay scene has hurt this community. When it was on the PS2 back in 2007 we got close to 50 people for Evolution, about the largest number we've ever got for a tournament. We ended up playing on the pc port at the time, but that was with the guise of actually using it to practice. A year later we held it again on the PC and the numbers decreased. We didn't even bother with a tournament this year. There are countless cases of people who netplay religiously that are in perfectly reasonable traveling distance of an arcade cabinet that haven't done so, let alone attend a tournament that didn't take place infront of their monitor. There are still people in my damn STATE I can't get in contact with to play. How did we have a room full of 100+ that's 3/4 full of people that I've never seen at all in the past three years?
There's 307,263,610 people living in the United States right now and TRILLIONS more in the world. Trillions. If you sit on your selfish ass all netplaying all day and never bother to go to a tournament, then yes, you are severly hurting the community. The two PS2 releases of this game have garnered the most attention and new players that stuck around, not the PC ports. The 'netplayers' that came in at EVO or what have you have not increased in population, they're the same handful that have come to tournaments for three years now.
It's just evident that many of you think that someone else is going to do the work to create a scene in your area, so you contiously default back to netplay. It took years to get where we're at now, we barely reached a two digit status for the number of people the 'MB community' had. Zar is jaded because people think he just walks out of his apartment and yells "YO WHO WANTS MELTY" and niggas come running. The amount of time, work, and devotion he put in just to get people INTERESTED in the tri-state area makes some of you look like spoiled brats (and I would know having been there for each occassion).
It's not a viable excuse anymore. SF4 tournaments are all over the damn map. Talk to the organizers, ask them if you can bring a set up, and start shit up. Then do it again. And again. Hold casuals, push for a tournament. I don't believe Europe running that excuse either, there was a point where I wanted to travel to the middle of god damn Russia to enter one tournament. We hold our tournaments in the middle of a fucking park infront of two god damn Snapple machines. Go ahead and tell me you guys can't do better, please.
Don't act like it's impossible and start crying for a PC port when it's obvious you people are already giving up with what you have now.