Ahhh, the online fighting game experience. I've been on both sides of the coin. When I started playing MK9, I was a bum. I mean, I was one of those guys that was trying to beat people with just uppercuts and special moves, and actually managing to win sometimes -- but if I played anyone who knew what they were doing, I was shark bait.
I would lose long stretches of matches at a time, and it took me about 1000 games and finally finding out about fundamentals for me to start to improve a lot. But there was one problem:
When I started to get better, I started to beat a lot of people and finally collect wins. But because my W/L ratio was so low at that point, no one really good wanted to play me. I would challenge guys in rooms or come across people in player match, and they'd decline because they thought I sucked. Bummer.
Over time I kept playing player match and started to accumulate the wins where I could. Eventually, better players would play me and I had some great sets. But then the reverse started to happen; once I had a decent amount of experience and a better ratio, better online players started refusing to play me.
Fast forward to Injustice on PSN, where I'm consistently better than most people I come across, but still looking to improve a lot. Beating someone or losing to someone in one ranked match offers me absolutely nothing. I'd rather play someone and lose 20 games where I learn something, than win 1 game against someone that had no time to adjust to what I was doing. So player match + friends list matches is all I've been doing when I have time to play, and it's been a blast.
But still on XBL, where I usually only sign on to play Private Match against guys who are way better than me, I get turned down on challenges because of ratio and low match count. Or after winning a match I get hatemail for "sandbagging" or having a "duplicate account".
It's an imperfect system and you try to make the best you can out of it.
