Again.
- Balance is all over the place (hence the 45 patches since game launched), " there's viability across the whole roster" is a joke.
- Street Fighter is an even bigger pop culture icon. The simple fact that people bought a PS4 just to play SFV beta makes this clear. And considering a good 50+ out of 80ish people from my PSN friendlist (good matches from SF4/USF4) bought MKX out of curiosity / tired of playing USF4 / just to fill the gap until SFV launches ... I can safely say these guys aren't the only ones in the world.
- Tournaments having a lot of entries / placings being steady / etc is great and all. But that's a VERY little portion of the guys that actually bought the game. MOST will never attend a tourney or will care about SonicFox.
That is a very narrowed vision of the state of MKX, and hardly a good way to judge if the game "is in a good place right now" IMO.
- "Continued support" ? You mean more characters hidden behind a paywall ? Meaning, ultimately, that you need to pay more if you wanna be competitive (need to look into the DLC characters just for Matchup knowledge's sake, and worse, one of these might be top tier and gotta use it at some point to ensure your placing - if a DLC character is a perfect counterpick for some other top tier character for example).
Or maybe you mean more "balance" patches, most of those being a way to cop for the fact that they rushed the game in order to avoid competition (SFV mainly), since a careful beta test or just a few locatests could have showed obvious problems.
Unless you talk about the fact that they plan on fixing their garbage netcode ? Or just apologize about rushing their game, selling massively MKX, and still use the weakest netcode for a fighting game released in 2015 (oh sorry, talked about MKX netcode ...)
I can be happy about being able to watch nice matches from ESL, I can be happy about NRS still balancing the game a few months after release (even though they will definitely stop after they sold all their DLCs, lets be honest here), I can be happy about SonicFox winning majors all day.
But in the end, I still bought a game that is a complete joke as soon as you try and go online. In 2015. Without a word from Ed Boon except "netcode is awesome".
In the end, most of the guys that bought this game have the very same problem.
And considering that most people bought it to play online, and that they WILL stop playing (or already have) unless NRS does something about this, meaning that the MKX community will shrink and shrink every day, I hardly consider MKX being in a good place right now.
Unless you thought the same about MK9 ? (And see how fast everyone stopped playing it)
Pretty sure by Summer 2016, people will have jumped ship, and will be playing SFV if they need a viable way to play a next-gen fighter ... online.
Fell in love with MK in arcades (rotate joystick like a maniac to do Liu Kang fatality !), loved MK ever since, but not gonna be happy about buying yet another "glorified training mode" instead of a fully functional online fighting game.
And that's the part I hate the most (I bought every MK except for a few 3D shitty ones, MK9, Injustice, etc) : I'd like NRS to step up, turn that MASSIVE amount of people that actually bought their game into DIE HARD fans and build a HUGE community around it.
But their goal is just selling Kombat Packs and teasing movie characters ... sad.