Online community shrinking?

I do not play MK9 online as much because I'm tired of playing the same old characters...Scorpion, Smoke, Noob, Reptile (sometimes), Sub-Zero, Ermac, and Kung Lao. What kills me is people want MORE characters. Why? Very few people deviate away from this list. I understand people have a main(s) character(s), but c'mon.
 
I thought the online community was smaller today, but I did play in the middle of the day, around 11, so I thought it was that. I haven't been on lately, I've been to busy this month. But man, was a little sad to see it so small today. Maybe ill find some tournament to go to just to see how ill do or to get some competition. I'm not that good, but not awful at this game and am always looking to get better.
 
I think it was a combo of a lot of things. Yes, there were some people who were just around because MK was the New Hotness and went on to other games. There were a few people who grew impatient waiting for a patch to fix the online issues and stopped playing.

Not to mention September is back to school time and a lot of folks are back in class. Same reason things are quieter here on the forums and on Facebook.

There's still a decent amount of people playing, but for those who've been around MK for a while this is just part of the normal cycle. A new game comes out, new people come flocking, a few months pass and some stick around but others leave. World keeps turning around.
 
I just went online to play and it was a ghost town, so much so tumbleweeds rolled through on the screen. I got owned like I always do by the awesome spammers and people with mods/cheats. It bores me no one actually "plays" the game. They just wanna increase stats. I hope MKAK gets patched soon. I rather play MK2 than MK9 online.
 
Verstande said:
I blame NRS for hiring Gamespy in the first place.
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The big joke is NRS wanted MK9 to be the alleged gold standard in online play. Suffice it to say that royally screwed that up, but hey, did we really expect anything else but what we got from NRS?
 
DirtyWhore said:
The big joke is NRS wanted MK9 to be the alleged gold standard in online play. Suffice it to say that royally screwed that up, but hey, did we really expect anything else but what we got from NRS?
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The way that Ed Boon and NRS were focusing mainly on hiring "specialists" for online (according to some of the leaked resumès), pre-E3 2010, it sounded like NRS was on the right track, as far as online goes.

So, yeah I was expecting the online to be GREAT, by the way that they were hyping it up.

As soon as I heard Gamespy servers my mind went to "Uh oh" mode.
 
The online is a joke regardless of lag. I swear the servers favor some connections over others. I noticed lagged people will always, always have the advantage and usually win because you aren't allowed to play due to their lag. Call me crazy with a K (thank you JC), but back in the days of Half-Life, UT, etc, if you were lagged, you were screwed. It seems the polar opposite with MK9.
 
People are moving on to different games, I've thought about doing the same. Every time I play I just get pissed, because everyone online just tries to be the biggest a-hole that they can be. Too many characters in the game just have really annoying tactics and MK has the worst gaming community I have ever seen, and I think that's the main reason why MK9 is pretty much dead.

I'm looking at the chat rooms now and there is a whopping total of 59 players across 5 rooms. That's sad.
 
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:hail:

Immortal Reaver said:
Every time I play I just get pissed, because everyone online just tries to be the biggest a-hole that they can be.
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You made my day. Thank you.

I was a Street Fighter-to-MK convert back in the day and given how piss-poor MK is becoming online, I am thinking of moving back to Street Fighter. Unfortunately I can't "connect" with the characters; I find them boring. That is why I love MK. The characters are so individualistic, engaging, have great personalities, and stories.
 
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Immortal Reaver said:
People are moving on to different games, I've thought about doing the same. Every time I play I just get pissed, because everyone online just tries to be the biggest a-hole that they can be. Too many characters in the game just have really annoying tactics and MK has the worst gaming community I have ever seen, and I think that's the main reason why MK9 is pretty much dead.

I'm looking at the chat rooms now and there is a whopping total of 59 players across 5 rooms. That's sad.
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Sad to say but IMO MK VS DC had a better community. There were clans, elites, ect but now with MK9 its like not many people care anymore because of the constant lag and desynch inssues that have plagued the game for so long since its release and has NOT been fixed, and not to forget about spammers. I think people other than the brutally hard core fans just lost hope and went to other games. I know I did.
 
One of my favorite things people do online is when you play them and if they beat you and you challenge them again they make you wait for like 1-2 min before accepting then they press NO as if "Ahahaha F**** you.
 
I hear you man. I've been reduced to that point myself becuase of the online issues and people spamming. Now I basically just make MK videos and tutorials.
 
DirtyWhore said:
I do not play MK9 online as much because I'm tired of playing the same old characters...Scorpion, Smoke, Noob, Reptile (sometimes), Sub-Zero, Ermac, and Kung Lao. What kills me is people want MORE characters. Why? Very few people deviate away from this list. I understand people have a main(s) character(s), but c'mon.
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I'm going to be honest, in my oppinion: When a game has such awesome looking, and cool playing characters like Scorpion, Sub-Zero, Noob Saibot, Reptile, Smoke, Ermac, Cyrax, and Kung Lao its hard for people to use any other character because these cool characters make the others seem almost stupid to use. Then again, when NRS released the demo back in April, Scorpion and Sub-Zero were the highlites of the game so many people just got used to playing with fire and ice, I know I did lol. Again IMO, I have been a Scorpion fan since MK1 and I will say this for the record: there is no cooler looking character than Scorpion. Everything he has, his swords, chain spear, attitude "Get Over Here", hellfire..comon he's the most awesome badass ever to grace the fighting game world lol. Sorry but when I see a character like Nightwolf and Raiden they just look so stupid and crummy lol.
 
They released the DLC content WAY too quickly.

If they released Freddy now, while the community is a lul, it would have revitalised.

DLC should have been staggered. Instead it was force fed to a greedy community, they've had their fill and now they are gone.
 
I played MK for the first time in a few weeks thanks to Madden. Once MW3 comes out the online community for every game will shrink
 
I don't even know why I still play online to be honest. The lag kills it for me, I mean seriourly. I accept every defeat I get, but maining a character that needs perfect timing for his combos is really frustrating. Sorry, I don't find Scorpion cool over Nightwolf (Scorpion looks very corny to me design-wise) so I won't be picking the supposed "super bad-ass" Scorpion in MK9. Opinions are shit.
 
Voncroy said:
I don't even know why I still play online to be honest. The lag kills it for me, I mean seriourly. I accept every defeat I get, but maining a character that needs perfect timing for his combos is really frustrating. Sorry, I don't find Scorpion cool over Nightwolf (Scorpion looks very corny to me design-wise) so I won't be picking the supposed "super bad-ass" Scorpion in MK9. Opinions are shit.
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If opinions are shit then why did you give yours.
 
I think it was the return to 2D that just sapped the feel and look of more reedom while playing. The game surroundings feel somewhat boxed in and to tight, the X-Ray meters eat up visual space at the bottom of the screen and the characters are a bit to small.
 
Re: Online community shrinking? A rant.

/on :soapbox:

MK has always suffered from ineptness and mismanagement. Midway certainly was a huge problem because they were a dying company and milked MK for all that it was worth. Couple that with the MK Dev Team's (now NRS) famously laziness, and the quality of MK after pretty much UMK3 (even that game suffered from horrible character imbalances) declined. When WB picked up MK, I thought that was the best news ever. A real company with a financial war chest behind it could easily revamp MK and make it a respectable franchise again.

MK 2011, when I first saw it in June of 2010, I was stoked! It looked exactly how I always imagined MK should look, the playability seemed tight, and it was a celebration of its roots with the character roster and storyline. April 2011 couldn't come quick enough, but I noticed marketing issues through the year.

The reveal of characters wasn't synchronized or consistent in distribution other than whoever can pay the most for an "exclusive". It was evident, to me anyway, that the focus was to get the most money out of MK and the idea of "service to the fans" was secondary even before the game was released. I would have had rather the roster be revealed in more controlled, even manner rather than via random magazines in Russia, a website in Antarctica, a TV show in Zimbabwe, etc that I had no access to.

Info on the game was spread out thinly over every media outlet possible: Facebook, Twitter, every gaming site known to man, every gaming magazine in the world, and everywhere in between. That is what I thought the "official" MK site would be used for, but that site is useless.

In the videos put out, if it wasn't a specific trailer for a character, 9.5 times out of 10 the video would contain Scorpion and Sub-Zero. It got old...quick. I get it that they are iconic, popular characters, but they are not the only iconic, popular characters. I love all the characters equally (I have one exception and that is listed in another thread) as MK has the most unique, well-drawn, intriguing, and engaging characters, but saturating the marketing over only two is defeating the purpose of the franchise.

The game's final form is absolutely remarkable. As a 20 year fan of the franchise, when I loaded the game up, I was a teenager again; giddy over MK. The character models/personalities, the arenas, the playing mechanics, the violence, everything that encompassed MK was on-par. I loved the return to a 2D plane too as I never liked the 3D plane. I thought, "Welcome back Mortal Kombat."

Then I went online. Need I say more?

Although lag has been rectified for the most part now (it'll always be there some way regardless, that is online play inherently), exploiting lag tactics voraciously, intentional spamming, and the general sh*tty attitudes of people online has broken MK online for me. I think a lot of the latter two points stems from the idea of being a stat-based focused game. People get hung up on their win/loss ratio than actually learning how to play, winning fairly (respectably), and/or losing graciously. Yes, d-bags online will always abound, but the MK kommunity takes it a whole other realm (pun intended).

DLC came out way too soon and way too fast. I expected DLC to come over gradually over a year strating from about two months after the game's release. The DLC was "ok" at best and most of it was free so that was awesome. I like Skarlet, Kenshi is "ok", Rain is boring, and Freddy is gimmicky. Classic fatalities were great (love to see more) and the classic costumes were fun to get even if all were "ninja based".

Between the fun of online play being annihilated thanks to the spammers, crap attitudes of people, and the assumed death of DLC, it's all conspiring to turning most people off of MK and going elsewhere. I had hope of revitalization with MKAK, but again, online play is atrocious and they take their sweet time fixing it like they did with MK 2011.

It pains me to say it, but as much of a fan I am, I too am losing interest in MK from an online standpoint and I get the gut feeling that WB and NRS simply don't "get it" as to why people are becoming disenfranchised in droves or worse, they don't care.
/off :soapbox:
 
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