trying to play ranked in this game is so dumb. booted it up, here’s how it went: joined a lobby with 0 other players; left, joined a lobby where all the stations were bugged for me; left, joined a new lobby, played a nago who ranked up after the game so I couldn’t rematch him; bugged lobby; new lobby, played a cS cS cS cS sol who quit after one match; matched against a ram and had the connection drop before the match. ok then, back to parks it is.
edit: update: went to parks, every station and every lobby bugged, unable to get a match. it’s wild to me that you can pay $60 for a game, like the game a lot, everyone likes the game a lot, but you boot it up and literally quit the game without getting to play it because of how broken it is.
Yeah the ranked play is a fucking joke. Even without the server issues it’s terribly designed. You have a system that shows your opponent’s name, their level, and their character in advance. So it’s very easy to cherry pick opponents, especially since you can only fight people stuck in the same auto-assigned lobby and there’s no incentive to rotate. There’s also no pre-match ping indicator, which wouldn’t be an issue if I didn’t run into so many people from South America and Japan in US East. There’s a floor above floor 10 that requires you to win your first 5/6 matches for permanent ascension, but many people are so afraid of losing that they’ll prowl the lobby in search of favorable matchups and refuse to rematch if they lose. Also if you ascend to Celestial you can’t rank down but you can drop down to the 10th floor and bully weaker opponents, which isn’t possible with any other rank, and that seems like a big issue, to me. Really think if you’re that good you maybe shouldn’t be able to drop down and gatekeep. Especially since there seems to be a large skill gap between each floor but the largest one is def between 10 & Celestial. I’ve ranked down multiple times cuz I had dudes with gold wanted posters and 85% winrates repeatedly rolling up to my kiosk and I’m down for any kind of fight that isn’t laggy but…that seems really bad. I think that kinda defeats the point of this whole system. I think everything except the in-fight netcode sucks shit. Which I’m sure we all agree on but it bears repeating.
Like, ranked is always meaningless and bad for the soul but this is a whole other level of dumb. And I probably wouldn’t mind at all if the servers fucking worked, if I could easily hop around and find fresh people to fight, but they’re still a mess 2 weeks in and that’s just embarrassing. That’s the sorta thing that damages a game long term.
This was actually US West cuz US East wasn’t working but they still wanted to rematch after a fight spent in rollback hell so they’re a real deal sickie, hats off to them
I started enjoying an 8f rollback match once I realized that it was also an opportunity to play in slo-mo. It’s more tactical and you can’t be bamboozled by fast characters anymore
I’m gradually rotating through every character playing about 20-30 matches to get a feel for each, and I vibed with Potemkin a lot but last week but today I’m really feeling I-No. It’s just like geist bitterly complained about, everything I-No has counters everything they have
I’m sorry geist but I might be joining the rock-witch fanbase
Japan voted for Order Sol but no region anywhere voted for Robo-Ky smh
I realized today I miss Robo-Ky. I loved its palette swap Mortal Kombat energy and how it kept electrocuting itself. And a better counterpoint to Ky’s self-seriousness than equally serious Sol is a robot parody
back to 10f, actually connected to human players in ranked mode without glitching out. idk if I can keep 10, I feel pretty much like a floor 9 player. it is my place.
EDIT: I finally figure out how to set your preferred music, so I’m pretty sure I’m going to hit celestial now that I’m hammering buttons to WRITHE IN PAIN. get fucked, world.
Some opponents started doing big anime air combos with a dramatic 3d starting animation to me, and I could find no such move in their character’s command list. I started wondering if this game has mystery secret moves, but apparently what it is is that any character can do this by holding down Dust? Who knew.
(I did go through half the tutorial missions and didn’t spot this, maybe I skipped a dust tutorial because I thought I understood it already)
One move that feels like in a past game it was an actual secret (or glitch) move though is Slide Potemkin Buster in the level 5 tutorials. I could only execute it 10% of the time even in a tutorial environment with no stress, it seems like a speedrunner difficulty trick with a tight timing window. It’s such a ridiculous move I’m pretty sure if I mapped it to an automated one-button combo using some software I would instantly go up 2 ranks purely by abusing it, but I’ll refrain
yeah that’s called karaing, and pot can actually kara any of his special moves, to varying degrees of usefulness. Kara pot buster is 3 frames slower than the regular version, but you can get a lot of milage out of it. the most straight forward use is to combo it after a garuda hit. one hilarious gimmick use is to open a round with it, as a Kara pot buster will actually hit in that scenario if the opponent blocks at round start for some reason. guaranteed instant tilt
My favorite moments in this game is when you have a full bar of tension and all you need is to find a way to safely cash it in for a tiny amount of damage
