From: The NRS community
To: Netherrealm Studios/Warner Bros. Games
An open letter concerning Mortal Kombat X netplay
Dear Netherrealm Studios and Warner Bros. Games employees!
First and foremost, thank you for taking the time to consider our letter and request for better netplay/netcode in Mortal Kombat X. We are faithful gamers who specifically prefer to play NRS games. That said, we appreciate all the work that NRS has done with Mortal Kombat (2011) and Injustice, including the step back to 2D in MK9, the great training mode in injustice and the support of the tournament scene for MKX, as well as balance fixes throughout these games. These things have been achieved mostly in cooperation with the community, so we hope our collected feedback on the netplay will also help to solve this matter. We hope you will recognize and understand our frustration with the current state of the online experience, which is widely considered to not reach the quality of other current or older fighting games.
- Online issues:
- Connecting and matchmaking: Some people can’t connect to online at all, some only on rare occasions. The overall experience has a feeling of 5 frames of lag at least. The quality varies for users without any relation to their connection speed. Some people claim to have a worse online experience than in MK9 or injustice.
- Gameplay: Anything that requires strict timing or quick reacting often happens to not work consistently or at all. This includes: Counterpokes; block on reaction; block of quick overhead/low sequences; block of multiple quick pokes; combo links; punishing blocked attacks; frametraps; footsies; wakeup attacks; throw techs; anti-air-attacks; jump-in punches; reversals. Also Inputs can be “eaten up” by lag. For example: Ducking, then back 2 comes out as down 2; a string cancel like 33 ~ down forward 4 comes out as 3 forward 4. All of these things are an essential part of the gameplay and are massively hindered by the delay.
- Follow-up issues:
- Many players already have dropped the game because of the frustrating online experience. Aside from limiting the fun, they don’t see the laggy environment as proper training ground for offline events. This discourages especially people with no offline scene close by to attend bigger offline events at all. For many the netplay is also not consistent enough to become competitive online.
- The credibility of the ESL events suffers from the above point, for players as well as viewers.
- People opted not to buy the DLC because of their poor online experience
- The online Faction mode has been advertised as big draw for MKX but the online gameplay doesn't make it worthwhile to participate
- NRS’ image is suffering from the whole issue. People are unsatisfied that there is no communication about the problem or even admittance of it. Some are under the impression that NRS/WB do not invest enough resources into delivering the best possible experience for their paying customers.
- Examples of good online experiences:
- The community has put together a list of other (fighting) games, which provide a better online experiance than MKX. We hope that NRS will use this list of games as a benchmark.
- Killer Instinct is usually considered the best online experience nowadays, making the game feel like offline for connections all around the world.
- Other examples of games with good netplay are: Skullgirls, Soul Calibur V, Tekken Tag Tournament 2, Virtua Fighter 5 FS, Blazblue and Ultra Street Fighter 4. Two non-fighting games that have particularly good netcode are Driveclub and Titanfall. All of these are widely considered ahead of Mortal Kombat X, even though they are older and some of them had a lower budget.
- Ideas for improvement:
- It is the majority opinion throughout the community, that rollback netcode delivers better netplay than input delay due to the immediate reaction to your inputs on your screen. The possible choppyness of the picture can be avoided by a self-adjustable number of delay frames. People report they have the best results playing on rollback with 2-4 frames of delay setting.
- We know that changing network code after launch is a difficult task however other games have proven that it is not impossible and that it is much appreciated by the player base which can play an important part in this process. If we take DICE for example they have acknowledged netplay issues in Battlefield 4 and are working on new solutions right now. They do constant testing together with the community to improve their game including the online experience and server performance.
- To improve the current experience without touching the netcode, the game could show ping and WIFI-connections
- The next NRS game should have an online beta
The NRS community hopes that you hear our collective voice about the netplay issue and respond to us as soon as possible. The current state harms both NRS and the players, the online as well as the offline community. We are looking forward to improvement, so we can enjoy our favourite games just as well online and strengthen the competitive NRS scene.
Regards, the NRS community
