First and foremost, you get experience points and Fight Money from playing other people online through the game's network battle modes (Ranked, Casual, and Group). You can rack up a small fortune by having a good day of Ranked battles. You get a little Fight Money from wins, then again in larger amounts when you level-up from gained experience points. Of course, after you play against the computer enough in the other modes, it's human nature to want more of a (fair) challenge, and going online fulfills that. It's amazing to see some of the stuff people can pull-off, and some of the incredible replays they can create. However, the more you get matched with disrespectful bastards and punks, the more it feels like Capcom isn't giving enough Fight Money and experience points for having to put up with their shit. If it wasn't coincidentally-bad connections that always ruined your matches, then it was top-tier scrubs who abused blatantly-overpowered and/or busted characters and/or moves (or both), making matches over quicker than it took to load them. There was no honor, and there was no decency; only desperation. There were more disrespectful players than there should have been, and they taunted and sabotaged matches in any way they could. I disconnected on scumbags like this, and had absolutely no problem doing so. Now, before the angry mob is summoned, hear me out. The way I see it, if a player is going to be disrespectful by taunting and acting like an asshole, or manipulating the connection to get an unfair advantage, then I don't have to be respectful, either. I don't care, I'd rather miss the Fight Money than to give some idiot another minute of my time or energy.

Again, you can make a small fortune by fighting online; that is, up until you start to lose your sanity. More than previous SF titles, this one is absolutely infuriating, and it's bound to send even the most patient players into a fiery rage. I think Headquarters can vouch here, and he's a lot more calm than I am, yet he had nearly stopped playing the game entirely until SFVAE came out. Adding to all the frustration was the revolving door of balance changes Capcom made to SFV, making the things you took so much time to learn instantly obsolete. A great example of this was the "anti-air Jab" update that completely ruined the balance and made the game not fun to play at all. Fools on Capcom's forums deny these rapid-fire balance changes, but it's true, and it was just another thing that made SFV so frustrating to play competitively. With the point system being so strict, and the online community being pretty bad, I was absolutely against them making any changes (at all) to the balance. For this reason, they really should have given points and/or Fight Money for multiple single-player mode plays. Capcom seems to have known what they were doing in regards to the addictive allure of fighting other people online to level up, get points, and unlock things. It becomes very routine; getting matches in whenever you can to get as many rounds in as possible toward that next charcater or item unlock. Nonetheless, some players online are nice, and there are a lot of nice players out there offline who just want to have fun and enjoy the artistry of the game without being thrust into a desperate scene of vultures and hyenas starving for attention. Not all fans of the series are starving for top-tier scene recognition. The scene makes it hard to believe, but there are fans of this genre who care little about propping-up a "Fighting Game Community" built on imitation.

Beating Story mode only nets the player points the first time around, is totally unfair and unnecessary, considering they could have at least given a few points for each time the player played through its incredibly short affair. Seriously? Capcom couldn't have given players even a small amount of points for having enough interest to play through these single-player more than once. Wouldn't Capcom and their artists want players to see all the work they put into it more than once? The player can't even get points for beating the Extra difficulty level in the game's main Story? Some of those fights are pretty tough (since you only get one round), and really deserve rewards. Even Capcom VS SNK gave a small amount of points for time spent in single-player modes. SFV did have Missions that rewarded the player for playing in single-player modes, but they weren't consistent. Sometimes, Missions were entirely based on the online multi-player, and sometimes they'd be entirely single-player. The single-player Missions would involve playing Survival mode, a bitter-sweet Capcom staple since Street Fighter Alpha 2 Gold. Adding to the frustration is the Survival mode, where all progress is lost if the network connection is somehow lost. This can be infuriating, since the game didn't save your Survival mode progress in any way. Now, it wouldn't be such a big deal if the rules of SFV's Survival mode didn't stack the odds against you so unbelievably high.

They don't even give points after each Trial Mode part you complete, which really sucks because you eventually get stuck on one of the upper-level ones, unable to go any further. They could have at least divided the amount of points given at the end of all the missions and redistributed them accordingly so that the player at least got something for the time they did put in. Instead, they opted to give points only when you complete all 10 trials for that character, which is pretty brutal. It seems pretty unfair, considering how much it takes to get some of the mid-level ones done (some of which have zero to no practicality in actual fights). The Trials probably could have creatively been rolled into the Story mode to make things flow more, but I guess Capcom keeps them separate for consistency with previous games. There is something they did with the Missions that they've never done in any Capcom fighter before, though, and it has to do with the stages.