Mortal Kombat 11
Is Kombat League Worth It?
Hello all, and welcome back to my blog.
Hope you all had a good easter weekend, despite the stay at home restictions following the Covid 19 outbreak.
On the blog today, I bring you another Mortal Kombat post, this time focussing on Kombat League and asking the question is it really worth it?
What is Kombat League? for the people who don't know or have never played Mortal Kombat 11, Kombat League is a competitive online contest where players from all over the world compete to climb the ranks of Mortal Kombat and earn exclusive rewards by building upa certain amount of kombat points, the more points you earn the higher your score will become up until you have enough points to 'rank up'. You can also earn rewards by completing a series of tasks within kombat league matches for example 'perfrom 25 throws' or 'perform 15 uppercuts' or something like that.
Kombat League seasons have their own themes such as 'The season of chaos' or 'The season or scorcery' or 'The season of conquest' whatever the season's theme there are four skins you can win for characters in the game and depending what rank you are at the end of the season will determin what rewards you earn.
The Ranks
For instance, Noob Saibot is Apprentice and above, Frost is Champion and above, and Cassie Cage is Demi God and above. To get Sub Zero you need to complete all the kombat league tasks and ensure you've ticked all the boxes, kombat league tasks are not that hard to complete, and neither are the first three levels. It's only when you get to champion and above that things start to get a little tricky and more competitve.
The overall idea is that the computer pairs you up with a player of similar skill to you, but that hardly ever turns out to be the case as the randomiser has a habit of pairing you with players of higher and lower rank than you and calculating a percentage of your chances of winning the match.
To win a match against an oppenet you must win two matches, a best of three matches at most. Wins earn you points, where as losing can have points taken off you.
Here's the problem with Kombat League. To most players Kombat League isn't fun, according to the players.
According to recent poll put out on Twitter asking Mortal Kombat 11 players if kombat league didn't have any rewards would you still play it? the vast majority said No. 85 per cent in fact, that's a landslide majority and an overwhelming response. They wouldn't even touch kombat league if it didn't have rewards. The same question was asked on YouTube as well and 83 per cent of the overall feedback was people didn't want to play kombat league if it didn't have rewards.
Now this could mean certain number of things, it could mean that certain players just prefer custom variations or that people just prefer playing offline, but these poll results do highlight an important issue with Mortal Kombat 11 and that is; kombat league isn't fun.
At the very least, it's frustraiting enough that people don't want to play unless there are some insentives involved. So how can kombat league be improved? So let's start off my talking about the wifi/internet connection debate.
Realistically the match is always almost going to be more enjoyable if both people have a LAN connection because even if your wifi connection is good its always going to dip in quality every now and again. I have had my fair share of landing into laggy matches or the connection cuts out unexplainably. It can be extremely irratating. So allow a preference setting for LAN/Wifi Matches - or possibly the option to only play with LAN players. So that way if a player then knows if they're losing it's them and not the laggy match.
And then of course, if you are playing on wifi you can get paired up with other wifi players or LAN players as well. I don't really have a preference I just want the match to be good. Something that would also make a nice requirement to fixing this problem is having a minimum amount of bars before playing online. 3 - 5 bars. Other games like Tekkan 7 have this, and I think Street Fighter 5 has this as well. So this is idea one for how to improve kombat league.
Idea number two would be to reduce or remove the penalty for losing to someone who is a lower rank than you. Because that just adds a lot of stress to the game and the player is thinking about the amount of points they are going to lose rather than concentraiting on what they need to be focussing on which is the match. And the outcome isn't good if they lose. It is something that does piss players off and means they then have to work towards getting those points back by playing more matches with no gaurentee you will get points back, you could get on to a losing streak which will then cause you to get so fed up you don't want to play anymore.
I sympathise with how frustraiting that can be, and say if come across a highly experienced player who is really good and on a completly different level to you but isn't online all of the time so their rank is abit lower than yours and they beat you which causes to lose points. It's horrible for both players. The loser get upset because they lost points and the winner will feel bad having taken points off you. My suggestion for providing a solution to thsi would be to have the penalty for losing to someone lower ranked to removed or the much prefered option would be to remove the penality completly. Especially when you as the player don't have the option to decline playing someone who is lower ranked than you, and Mortal Kombat 11 is very popular so there are tones of players who are the same rank and on the same level as you.
Going back to what I said about the wifi setting, it would be fantastic is the player could have the choice if there was a setting that would enable the player to choose which ranks you can fight - lower, higher or on the same level as you. Although that could cause a delay or longer waiting period between opponents. So overall the best way to resolve this perticular issue is to remove the penalty of losing points if you lose to someone whose lower ranked than you. Unfortuntly a harsh reality to bare in mind is skill does not actually corolate to the rank in the actual game. Some could be an Apprentice but have the skill of Demi God or God level.
It seems really cruel to be penalised for losing to another player who is more skilled at playing the game than you are. Having said that I do think that gaining points for winning a match against a player at a higher rank to you is a great feature, providing you don't punish the player whose above you. Don't forget skill does not corolate when playing kombat league. They're probably a higher rank because they've played more matches than you so beating them and getting highly rewarded for it makes sense.
It would also encourage players to keep playing the game and playing for longer without getting burned out. Losing to someone who is lower ranked than you or getting on a losing streak will just make the player so frustarited and fed up they'll just want to stop playing. As a game developer the main question you should be asking yourself is 'How do I keep them playing?' So I believe removing penalties and keeping rewards for beating someone higher than you is a good idea, and if you want to go the extra mile you can give the player the option to choose who do they fight. Anyone - regardless of whether they're above you or below you, players who are just your rank and above, or players who are just your rank. This would be a really cool feature to add.
These changes will also most likly improve how the player plays the game as well. Say for example if you're playing a match and a 'rank up' was at stake where you could progress from Warrior rank to Champion, players are going to highly likly zone out.
They're tactics will be very spammy, they really don't want to lose. In fact, they're desire to win is so strong that they will play as cheap or spammy as possible just to get the win. They'll likly throw projectiles at you or spam you with the same moves and kombos. They won't care how they win, they'll care that did win.
So if the penalty was removed and rewards stayed that wouldn't happen so much. Overall, you'd have better and more happy players.So that's change number two and my reasoning behind it.
Change number three, for me would be to add more than one daily goal for players. Give them reasons to keep playing each day.
I understand daily goals are there to plant the insentive for the player to keep playing, as it looks good for Netherrealm studios and their investors, they want to keep you playing and keep you online.
So with that in mind, I would say have two or three daily goals each day, have the one the goals remain as play five sets a day, but make the other two a bit more challenging. For example a goal could be win three matches in a row, or win five matches in a row. Or better still give them goals and objectives to keep playing, so currently the only goal is to play five sets a day. But what if there was a goal that said play ten sets a day, that keep the players playing as they would want to achieve both goals instead of just the one.
For me, I play five sets a day win or lose and then I leave, I stop playing. So by having multiple daily goals I would want to keep playing. It's a win win for both Netherrealm and the players playing which is a good thing. As a player and fan of Mortal Kombat I would want more reasons to keep playing the game other than play just five sets. I play my five sets and then I'm done.
So those are a couple of suggestions for the way in which Kombat League could be improved.
There were two other ideas suggested by two other people in how Kombat League which even these arn't my own I still wanted to mention them.
The first suggestion was to remove the penalties for not playing the game for more than three consecutive days or at least move it to the top three ranks - Demi God, God, and Elder God. The idea behind this is players who have managed to achieve Demi God or above are the ones who take the game more seriously and therefore are more likly to play every single day.
Given that Mortal Kombat is a game rated 18+ means that the people who play the game are adults who have jobs or other things going on in their lives besides playing a fighting game on their console. They can't play every singled day or every three days.
Having said this I don't think this change is one that's likely to happen as it's there as an insentive for players to keep playing. So although I understand why many people would to see this change, it isn't something that likely to happen in the foreseable future.
And the other thing which was suggested which was a popular ideas was to remove the ability to do fatalities in kombat league, as it allows players to immediatly move on to the next fight. As great as fatalities are they do delay the game itself. Players are more interested in moving on to playing the next match but instead they're stuck waiting for that to happen. I know that some people may not agree with this change, myself included but even in world championship tournaments they recommend players NOT to fatalties because it delays the tournament. Fatalties can be a bit of a dick thing to do as well delay things for the other player who just wants to move on to the next match. So I don't believe this change would be a bad idea but also don't think it's a necessaity. If this did happen, I would say keep Brutalties as they're still flashy and fun.
So is Kombat League worth it? At the moment its not to a lot of players as things can go south very quickly and you do come across a lot of spammy Scorpion, Sub Zero, and Liu Kang players who just do the same thing over and over.
I love the rewards, the love the idea, and it can be fun in places and really rewarding, however make a couple of necessary tweaks and kombat league could be so much better and worth while for everybody.
