I am curious. Which characters are those?
I am not sure how long you have been playing Tekken as a franchise, but that feat is fairly impressive.
By the way, are you suggesting that getting games in rank takes a little longer now?
Haha thanks. Funny enough I feel so trash still when I see/play ranks in Gold. I've gotten these characters up above Fujin in Blue:
Leo
Jun
Alisa
Actual Fujin:
Azucena
Bryan
Asuka
So that's actually 6 not 7 I realize, then in Battle Ruler I have:
Lee
Zafina
Flame Ruler:
Ling (just started with her now and realized this patch is going to make it death lol)
If I had more time to play or didn't split multiple FGs I think I'd be better. I used to play T5 religiously, like infinite hours a day. I used to go to Chinatown Fair in NYC almost every day back when they had the "Tekken cards" that you were able to save your character data on in the arcade. At my peak I had a near 80% win rate with Wang and 70% with Steve and would only take Ls against top end tourney players. I didn't play as much Tekken from T6-TTT2-T7 though, but some of the legacy skills like movement and recognizing certain times to block/attack stuck and feel natural even after all this time. It's why I do soooo much better against OG characters like Paul/Law/Kazuya/etc than characters that came after T5 like Shaheen/Claudio/Lars/New Chars/etc. And the main things that I completely forgot are when to SS what on old characters and when to SS at all on Post-T6 characters so I suffer hard in some MUs from knowledge checks. Feel like I need to just keep playing more and learning more MU exp to break into King ranks.
For matchmaking, I think the new update is making the game tell say "oh you have these characters in Blue you must be awesome, so now you'll be facing these guys much more awesome than you" which wasn't the case before the stealth update. Trying out Ling is almost a waste of time in ranked now because the matches I'm getting aren't like before where I'm facing another random Flame Ruler, they're guys in Gold Rank going balls deep on my alt Ling. I hope they revert to the old matchmaking asap, it wasn't perfect but it punishes too hard for ranking up multiple characters and the wait times are much longer because the pool it's picking from is so much smaller (I used to get matches in 10-15 seconds always now it's a few minutes and sometimes the same person after a few matches). I'm assuming this was to not have higher rank alts stomping Garyu players or something but this isn't the way lol.
After T5, no Tekken managed to become a classic. The majority of Tekken fans hated T6 and never came back to the franchise. After TTT2 flopped, T7 managed to create a new breed of Tekken fans, and these people don't seem very happy with T8 for reasons I don't really understand. The game in its core is still T6/7 so if someone liked any of those I'm not sure what's stopping them from liking T8.
Even DURING T5 people complained. For example, I beat badly a pro player named Blood Red who was a top Lei player at the time. He refused to shake my hand and immediately after he went on to massively complain about how T5 was watered down and "catered to scrubs" etc, blasting the game. Back when Tekken Zaibatsu was up he made multiple posts right after. Many players agreed, and complained about the "broken top tier" and the "secret top tiers like Wang" etc. None of this aged well, and now we consider T5 as potentially the best game in the entire series and "the prime of Tekken". This is just one of hundreds of examples of comments that didn't age well during the T5 run.
Now translate that to games like 3rd Strike, KOF13 (#NeverForget), MvC3, etc and you get where I'm coming from.
All this to say that if the game is good/fun can't really worry about players complaining as they lose. This goes for Tekken, MK, KOF, SF, anything. These are humans. Many are sore losers. Some don't adapt well. Some get older and fall off. Many reasons, but the most important thing is to not fall into "this game sucks because this guy that places at Evo says so".