Netcode Bad, Game Dying

The other day I happened to overhear a conversation between some of my coworkers. One man walked away from the other, and I could’ve sworn he said, “… or MKX.”

“Do you play MKX?” I asked.

Turns out he did. Awesome. I exchanged gamer tags with him so that we could find each other on the PlayStation network. A few days later when I logged in, we were friends. But he wasn’t playing MKX. He was playing Street Fighter.

When I asked him why, he said it had to do with the terrible netcode. He complained about how impossible it was to do combos. At first I thought he didn’t know what he was talking about. But the more his words rang around in my mind, and the more I played MKX with those words in mind, the more I realized that he was right.

Kotal Kahn, my main character, actually has some pretty easy combos to execute, all things considered. Compared to some other characters combos, his are downright easy. B122DB2. It’s doing a combo move with a special move at the end of it.

Whenever I go into the practice mode and try out his combos, I can do them amazingly easily. I can land them every time. It’s trivial. But landing them in a match, that’s another matter entirely. For every bit of confidence I gain doing his combos in training, I am unsure in actual net play.

Then I think of some Tweet I read about how the netcode for Street Fighter V is better than MKX. And then it makes sense to me why MKX is doing so bad on Twitch.

I mean, I had been scared that StarCraft was losing viewers, but MKX makes StarCraft look like it’s doing great.

I have bittersweet feelings about all of this. Because I really love Sonic Fox. I think me really makes the sport, and I love to watch him fight in tournaments. But there doesn’t seem to be much in the game department to support a thriving community. I guess what I’m trying to type here is that, there won’t be much more of Maul’s MKX blog. The game support just isn’t there. But I want Sonic Fox and Dab to know that I’ll be watching them, and cheering for them in many tournaments to come.