I'm all in favor of having tutorials, trials, and even having exlcusive content to be unlocked only through online playing is a great way to incentivise people to play online PvP and get better. I also think having a good lobby system and online ranking can help with that. And that's great.
I also think it's ok though for people to enjoy a game how they want to enjoy it. Some people just want to mess around in a story mode, and then maybe play some trials or practice mode to see if they can learn some cool combos, and have fun unlocking stuff against an ai, with no need to compete against a human.
To be honest, sometimes I'm that person. My favorite part of fighting games is learning how the game works, learning a character, theorizing about their moveset and possible strategies, going into practice mode and seeing if I can learn or get better at their combos. One of my least favorite things to do is actually play other people.
Of course, I’ve never suggested that you shouldn’t be able to enjoy/play the game however you want. Unlockable content is a very powerful incentive, which is why you had people who absolutely hated SP content and the Towers grinding them out just for said unlockable content. Why not have something similar for the online content? Why is it no problem forcing players to grind SP content who don’t want to, but it for some reason IS a problem to force players to grind MP content who may not want to?
Also to put it another way and to reiterate, a lot of players who don’t care about the SP stuff will grind it out to just unlock stuff even if they’re bored to tears. But when there’s all these SP incentives and little to no MP incentives, you’re not going to incentivize SP players to ever really try out MP content let alone grind it. All I want to see is heavy incentives for the MP content just like there is for the SP content. I don’t see that as at all unreasonable.
This is often overlooked by a lot of people deep into these games... in that a HUGE portion of players never play online vs at all. They play arcade, and maybe some vs locally with family.
Which is my point exactly. There’s very very little, if any, incentives to consume MP content. Maybe if there were really good and exclusive MP rewards that incentivized you to play them, you’d see these SP only players actually giving MP a shot.
This is a screen shot from a thread on the SF6 steam fourm called "First ever fighting game, likely to be my last"... and the truth is THIS is the most common user case for the average fighting game player. They get it, they screw about in the minimal SP stuff, usually only arcade and traing mode, go online and get roflstomped, loosing 100% of their games and never play online again.
Which is why I’d love to see in depth tutorial modes for the gameplay overall, and character tutorials. As well as the combo trials. And all of these things having exclusive rewards attached to them. And then of course as I’ve said, having a ton of MP exclusive rewards. This will help
incentivize these players to stick with the MP stuff and not just immediately give up because they can’t automatically beat everyone without actually putting in effort to become better at the game. Want this super sick exclusive gear or alt costume for your character? Then practice the game via all the different training modes available, and then grind matches. Practice is how you get better at anything, fighting games are no different. And offering all the tools you need to accomplish that makes it that much easier. And then on top of all that, you have an additional incentive to want to get better at the game.
This is why MK is so popular. As people on this site can complain about the towers and the grind and all that all day, but it is the exact single player content that makes MK so popular. It is the SP that drives sales. Those towers in MK11 was WHY the game was popular.
I didn’t care that they had the towers, I didn’t like the fact that you not only had to grind them for weeks to months in order to get exclusive character content, but that also, there wasn’t anything anywhere close to a comparable amount of exclusive stuff to unlock via the online modes.
TLDR: I know I keep repeating myself, but I feel it’s an important point. As I’ve said, the majority of players would not have grinded the towers if there weren’t incentives to do so, which is my point. Moving the majority of those exclusive unlockable stuff to the tutorials, combo trials, character tutorials, story mode and online modes would not only be an incentive to do them, you’d actually be leveling up your game in the process of trying to unlock these things. Seems like a no brainer win win to me ¯\
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