In 20 years of playing fighting games I never saw the words "upplayers" or "downplayers" used once. That's because in other fighting games when a player makes a statement like "Ryu is low tier" people simply ignore him and call him a scrub or listen, nod and think "that's interesting" or "that's crap, this man is refusing to acknowledge that he's winning because his character is strong" if he's a top player.
Talking about this kind of stuff was simply a matter of getting to understand the game better or massaging personal prides.
In the NRS community, however, the stakes are much higher. Everyone, fairly or unfairly, believes that if their character is popularly accepted as "too strong" then he is likely to get nerfed in the next patch, and vice versa if he if "too weak".
Stakes are hella high. For some people, their tournament careers (or self created titles like "zoning master" are at stake.
So the NRS community invented terms like 'upplayer' and 'downplayer' to give expression to a simple phenomenon- players will be vocal in making their characters sound weak and strong, not simply because it makes for good discussion... but because NRS might be listening. In fact it's important to them that NRS listens to them.
Higher stakes call for modified, conditioned behaviors.
Now, I'm not "proving" anything, but if you wanna fund me to do some research or, volunteer to be my dog, just let me know.
