The combo system in MK1 is extremely fluid. Even an old muggle like myself was able to do awesome meterless combos and hit confirms into crazy stuff... and this is only the beginning. Once we have all the other moves available (kameos) there will be a really astounding amount of combo potential and more importantly fluidity.
I see a lot of people asking for movement speed increases of some kind. Something I personally think is not needed at all, but still lets just say they do chaneg this.
Any movement increases will make all those combos that are currently doing 30-40+ suddenly be able to link into even larger combos. I mean think about all those combos that just aren't quit linking.. and then you go.. man I wish the dash was faster or w/e... but what I think people are not thinking about is that this will mean the combo abilities will be so insane, and so over powered that there will be no way it can be balanced or even fun beyond one touch death.
I have a feeling the movement speed is actually by design to LIMIT the player from busting out 88% combos that carry from corner to corner, and I worry that the pressure to make the game "faster" will actually make the game a broken mess.
This is certainly within the realm of possibility. On the other hand, there were lots of dropped combos in all the footage that I witnessed that could have been prevented with some tweaks to the movement, dashes in particular.
I do think your concern about increased movement leading to excessive access to larger combos and all other haberdashery is quite valid, but I can't help but recall that the MK11 beta had the exact same issue where movement was more limited than the final game ended up being and it was all the better for it. If anything, certain characters like Baraka, Frost and Noob could have used additional movement buffs.
This is a delicate scenario because with 3 days of gameplay without a Practice mode, people found TOD combos - buffing the movement could indeed make those combos easier to perform. However, buffing the movement would not only make it easier for defenders to make people whiff, but also help alleviate a near-universal criticism of the game along with cutting down on excessively long animations in throws, strings and special moves.
Perhaps this issue is best addressed in stages: perhaps NRS's first move should be to shorten animations and move cooldowns without changing any dash properties and let players rock with that for a month and some change. If that's not enough, then they can increase the length of dashes. And then if that's not enough, then they allow us to cancel into block from our dashes so that we can dash-block again but shorten the distance of dashes back to Stress Test distance.
The movement does need to be handled delicately, but it does appear as though it needs to be handled. Leaving the movement as it would appear to be a big blemish on what is otherwise a fantastic game.
