Let me set the stage for you.
I’m fighting @SeaDragonX 's ARIA, which as you might know, is really good. At this point of the match, I’ve destroyed Booster Body and he’s taken about 80% of my first life bar, so it’s pretty even. I’m in Instinct and the match is in neutral, meaning I get my club every few seconds.A club appears in my hand, and I press HP to anti-air the jump that I’m expecting. ARIA does jump, however the inexplicable happens.
The button that I pressed has 3 separate hitboxes during its active frames, which you’ll see in the video. The video goes super slo-mo then frame-by-frame so that you can see them in relation to ARIA’s hurtbox (green box). The 2nd hitbox is about 3 pixels away from hitting the front of her hurtbox. The 3rd hitbox is about 0 pixels away from hitting the bottom of her hurtbox, which moves up very slightly between those two frames. As a result, the attack whiffs. Meanwhile, ARIA’s entire character model (!!) goes through the business end of my club completely unscathed.
https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=754EEEBD2CD23C85!13229&authkey=!AH0Tekb8ZJDU17k&ithint=video%2Cmp4
If SeaDragon jumped or pressed MK one frame earlier or later, it would’ve hit. If ARIA didn’t clip her toenails that morning, it would’ve hit. If the Peacemaker had reasonable hitboxes, it would’ve hit.
I’m not even mad; that’s amazing.
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As rare as it is, I have actually seen that happen before. It’s things like this that make me think there’s bad game design involved. Why make it look like it’s going to hit only to magically miss instead? Besides, we all know that ARIA is anything but magic…
First of all, great video.
It seems like they could line up the htiboxes a bit better with the graphics of the move. But they are clearly intending for it to hit close jump ins as well as people on the ground blocking. This is a pretty extreme example.
I noticed a lot of this in the SFV beta too though. Just limbs not being well aligned with the hitboxes (as Ken’s feet whistled through the legs of opponents over and over). It seems like they make the moves look cool, and then adjust the hitboxes for the purpose of gameplay and maybe don’t do enough to reconcile them.
Yeah, that was one of the first things I noticed about SF5 - hitboxes for many normals do not actually extend to cover the (very obvious) physical length of the normal. It made me faintly amused to recall the sheer amount of bloody murder that was cried when Cinder’s (I believe) cr+MK was determined to have a hitbox that ended shy of where his foot is. KI players are apparently not nearly so tolerant of this phenomenon as SF players. 
But yes, that video is amazing. I’ve never seen that before. I feel like I’d have just stared blankly at the screen for the next 4 seconds, completely irrespective of what else was happening on-screen. :-p
Ah the joys of frames and hitboxes. Technically everything worked as intended in this, the club just happens to have one of those hitboxes that doesn’t visually match the attack.
I thought I had found yet another Aganos bug. I don’t think the move is intended for just close jump-ins. It’s probably just easier to place three big boxes for a move that travels downwards that fast. You would probably have to either slow the move down or give it a ridiculous number of active frames to have the hitboxes match the model.
In any case, this is probably a 1% percent chance thing that only happens in this matchup if ARIA presses this button with this timing. I was seriously one pixel away from hitting her.
UPDATE: They “fixed” it! The hitbox on the overhead now coincidentally covers the area of interest in the video. They added about three goofy-as-hell looking boxes to the attack. In classic IG fashion, they didn’t put it in the patch notes.
We did it!
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Good. I had a Sadira AND a Maya player both do this to me some time shortly after you posted about it.