I've been playing this game for years now (About 7). I've spent countless hours training to get better at combos, practicing my spikes, and spot-dodging. I've watched competitive videos and all, learned different techniques and all. But problem is, I'm still a scrub.

When I make online rooms, mostly newbies join. They're easy and all to beat. However, I occasionally get really good players to me who can predict every move I make and absolutely demolish me. I know someone will say "There will always be someone better than you" and that's not wrong. However, any recognizable player can combo me 0% to death in 5 seconds. They simply overwhelm me.

I have a hard time processing fast-paced players/matches. It just sorta overloads my brain. I really want to join the competitive scene. So my question is, are there any competitive players that used to struggle with the fast-paced nature of these matches, but got used to it over time, or should I just play casually for the rest of my days?

I'm similar but just play casually haven't tried online. For me to play against other players I need to practice everything to the point of like muscle memory requiring pretty much no thought. Doesn't help that I switch back and forth between SSF2 & Smash 4 which makes it hard to get good as they have different pacing and a different feel. Also I'd been on 4 for a long time due to Cloud Strife being a perfect main for me. They got him close to perfect, play style fits like a glove. Only real problem is Limit having a 15 second timer which is really dumb.

Biggest problem for me with trying SSF2 online is I work off of visual cues so if there's significant lag I don't really understand how to adapt to it(Only tried Brawl online a few times). I figure out timings and follow it exact, it's really hard to try to be .5 seconds ahead of what I'm seeing.

I was okay at Brawl, did win against friends easily but I played literally 2000 hours vs CPU. Might try playing Smash Ultimate & SSF2 full version more seriously.

sounds cliche but it's seriously just practice. playing fights against at least semi decent people will eventually improve your perception and reflexes over time. you'll learn moveset interactions, like eventually you'll learn or be able to guess kill confirm or combo percentages for most if not all characters, and you'll figure out knockback angles and how to DI and once you're able to see things fast enough to react, you'll start doing a lot better. it just takes time to learn things and tbh there's a lot to learn in this game, but once you figure things out on a reflexive and perceptive level and can just see exactly how the game plays, all the combos and kill confirms you've learned will become much much easier to use.

you might think after 7 years you'd be better but to be fair this game has changed a whole heck of a lot over time. you're relearning things every so often so no one is really an absolute champ