Well after over 1,000 matches, I encountered my first disconnect while playing in the arcade! The match totally froze for a few seconds and then it took me back to CPU match while trying to find the next opponent. Thankfully it didn't count as a loss for me.

(I guess it was some network error, it's not really possible for a player to pull the plug on the network the arcade cabinet is using)

I guess you found another cab after your Round One got rid of theirs. Very nice!

Love to hear that this game is being played in arcades still. You don't need a row of cabs to support multiple players anymore which is pretty crazy to me! Just one ALL.net cab and you're playing with hundreds and thousands of other players across the country. Makes me wonder why this isn't in the United States, maybe the player population just wouldn't be high enough and the distances too great.

Connection quality is the main indicator for getting matches, so are you still frequently finding matches now at your skill level?

From my experience of playing NESiCAxLive 2 arcade games online in American Round 1 locations, I guess people just aren't interested. Granted, those games I've played online were BlazBlue Central Fiction, BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle, and The King of Fighters XIV Arcade Ver., games that aren't super popular even on consoles compared to the heavy hitters like SF and Tekken, but Street Fighter (both SFV Type Arcade and now SF6 Type Arcade) seems decently popular if you play them at around noon or evening time on a weekend. You'll actually get games with people and there is a skill range, though most people are kinda low level. Tekken 7 was really popular at my Round 1 before they got rid of it, so I imagine online arcade 3D fighting games like VFes or a hypothetical arcade version of Tekken 8 with online play can draw people in the way SF6's arcade version does.

The amount of locations is also quite low too... generally more people would be playing if there were more machines out in the wild, no?

American arcade mindset is mostly just local play too. For pretty much 95% of arcadegoers today there's no real concept of an online arcade game. There's a couple machines trying to do it but they are very expensive racing games. Maybe the new Mario Kart has it?