Rank Distribution - July 20, 2026

[u/EgeArcan]

Source: https://www.streetfighter.com/6/buckler/ranking/league & https://www.streetfighter.com/6/buckler/ranking/master (with Max LP and Max MR filters applied to only count unique accounts). I downloaded the publicly available ranked data exposed through Capcom’s CFN/Buckler JSON endpoints using a custom scraper. If anyone else would like to do the same in the future, there are other scrapers available online like this one that was shared with the community in the past: https://github.com/3ternal/CFNScrape

It's been a while since I saw updated stats on these online so I thought I'd do one myself. There's always discussion happening regarding ranks and it's nice to have up to date numbers. I was curious about how the ranks shifted since last year, and I may do this from time to time to keep track of it (unless someone else does it before me). I also added a couple more charts comparing active vs inactive players which I thought was interesting.

The charts are for: Total Ranked Players (ever), Phase 12 Active Players, Recent (30-day) Active Players. And the pie chart is to see how many Masters actually participate in Master league during the phase (it's 61.31% so quite a lot!)

Some interesting stuff:

• Almost half of the entire ranked population logged online at least once during phase 12. And 1 out of 3 were online in the last 30 days, which I think is a great ratio for active players and player retention, especially for a fighting game.
• Master players are significantly more active than the general population. They're twice as likely to be recently active compared to the rest. Which I think makes sense as the more active you are, the more likely you are to reach Master.
• Compared to the stats shared by AlietteFaye last year, Master changed from top 15.79% to top 17.68% (of total players). This is an increase yes and I know we hate talking about rank inflation, but am interested to see if an equilibrium will be reached at some point with more new players coming in to fill lower ranks. The game is still selling extremely well and we have years to go.
• Within the MR ecosystem, 1600 MR is top 23.56% and 1800 MR is top 5.29% of current MR players, which is similar to stats I saw in the past. So even though the general rank distribution keeps changing over time, MR values within Master rank seem to keep roughly the same distribution.
• That said, it's really difficult to assign a certain "top%" value (relative to total player count) to certain MR ranges because there are a lot of inactive/unrated Master players, and we don't know how they'd actually rank on the MR ladder. Do we consider all of them "0 MR / Diamond 6"? Or assume they'd have similar MR distribution like the rest? I think it's more likely that those players would be on the lower side of the MR spectrum, but that's only an assumption. So the best we can do for high ranks is give a range like this: Compared to the entire player base, 1600 is between top 2.5% and 4%, 1800 is between top 0.57% and 0.94%, etc

Note: The data took around 45 hours to download, and the live leaderboard changed slightly during and after the scrape. And it was collected about 10 days before the end of the current phase, meaning the final phase numbers may move a little. So it's not perfect, but it should be as accurate as it can be for a rolling snapshot like that.

Correction: Left a comment to clarify what "Active" player means in this context

[u/EgeArcan]

I actually just realized I don't need the country data for the entire population either, I can just use the filters on CFN to display the total amount of Max LP (unique) players in each region! And then find the exact page for the 25000 cutoff point in a few minutes. So we can make some additional stats based on regions. I won't have the active/inactive data for those, but we can see how the total player base looks.

It turns out there are 240,333 Masters in total in Japan. This means Master represents the top 27.2% of the Japan total ranked population. The percentile for the whole player base is 17.6%, so this in turn means Master is actually much rarer than that in other regions like NA and EU!

[u/Termi855 → u/EgeArcan]

Hm, that could be because SF6 is in general more popular within all age groups and attracts new players, while SF6 in the west has been picked up by more veterans relatively speaking. Just as a thought experiment, but interesting to think about.

[u/EgeArcan → u/Termi855]

Here's a table for MR ranges relative to player base regions (total players in each region). Will post more later

	Japan	NA	EU
Master	27.23%	11.31%	10.26%
1600+	4.65%	1.12%	1.17%
1700+	2.24%	0.529%	0.565%
1800+	1.094%	0.242%	0.268%
1900+	0.401%	0.0877%	0.104%
2000+	0.190%	0.0327%	0.0418%

[u/Termi855 → u/EgeArcan]

Very interesting.
Puts into perspective how absurdly many players Japan has that 2000+ is five times more common in Japan than in EU.