I bought SF V today, since my stick arrived.
I don't have Fighting game experience.
I started reading the fighting game primer prior http://shoryuken.com/2014/07/07/learn-how-to-play-fighting-games-with-our-free-beginners-guide-ebook/
watched some tutorials.
I didn't have a console as a kid,
and fighting games always felt like button mashers to me,
playing friends who had consoles and 10 times the amount of practice was frustrating.
Now I am set out to learn how to play fighting games.
About playing with a stick:
I actually played some SF2 on an emulator and couldn't consistently throw fireballs with a gamepad.
It took like 30 minutes to get used to a stick,
it makes the game more fun, I am more consistent.
I am using a really cheap lioncast for 30 euros.
About SF V, the ingame tutorial is bad.
Glad I read up on lots of the mechanics before hand.
I decided to play with Ken, cause those firey kicks look sick.
Went straight into practice mode to get the moves down,
there aren't that many, but crouch medium punch into back medium punch into heavy punch into this spinning air kick is damn hard to land.
In a real game I am happy when I remember to hit heavy kick after landing a medium kick.
My second game was really fun against some russian dude, probably was his second game aswell.
Noone of us was blocking, just punching each other faces.
I lost, but it was like a standup MMA fight, no ground stuff which is only interresting for people who know what already is going on.
I lost some more.
I remembered what people sometimes tell starcraft newbies, don't focus on winning, just pick one thing, like constantly producing workers and make that the goal of the game, no matter if you win or lose.
Never had to do that in starcraft 2 because I spend all my life playing RTS games.
Now was the time.
It was against a Dhalsim player, my 9th match or something overall, hadn't won any yet.
So I lose the first round, and decide to get this forward jump into spinning kick down,
something that I had real problems with even in practice.
And I hit the right input with the right timting, we are both in air, and somehow it connects, and somehow it kills him and I win my first round by not focusing on winning.
Lost the match, but only 2-1, not 2-0 like all prior games. I jumped out of my chair when that stuff landed, dem feels.
Lost even more matches, then met a Karin player and found a strategy that won me my first match 2-0.
Just crouch and back + medium kick.
See the great thing with Ken is that his crouch medium is really fast,
and if you hold back while crouching you block, so you only open up for a second.
Once the enemy gets down to block it you can just go into back medium kick, still blocking, but it is an overhead,
or you just go into normal medium kick, which is a high attack, making this a nice mix up.
Kens VSkill of just running forward into a throw is nice to mix in aswell.
I won tons of games just using that one medium kick button. xD
SF V is fun, even when losing, and almost always when winning (except the match lags, then both players just wasted 2 minutes of their time better spend in practice mode).
I tried to play through the survival mode, where you have to defeat 10 cpu's in a row with 1 life bar (but you can buy lifebar for score points).
On EASY I wasn't able to get through stage 5. Now after 4 hours of practice mode and online matches I beat all 10 in one try unlocking a new color for ken.
SF V is not finished, does not even support fighting game peripherals nativly, had to do some trickery to get it working.
But the fun is in the core game, and it's awesome, so I think as a newbie, if you are willing to invest 1-2 hours into learning the very basics, watching videos, reading guides, practicing inputs it becomes a very fun game, very fast.