I was just reading about the MK X day one patch (already dealing with the mess on PC at the moment) and it's large, for starters.

Beyond that, it is detailed that it lowers the rate at which you earn currency in game. Currency that can also be bought with real money. One example on reddit apparently says a drop, from beating a boss in the tower, went from 2,500 coins earned all the way down to 200. And so, everything takes longer and they try to get people to spend further money on the game.

The update just dodges most reviewers work, where in the past we have seen DLC get games killed in reviews. Forza 5 comes to mind. I hope Giant Bomb could hold their score til we see how this plays out. I haven't yet either, to be fair, but my game is a mess on PC.

This is super shady. It's a shame there are some real shitty things messing up what otherwise seems like a great game.

EDIT: Apparently you can't actually boy coins!

That's some big league bullcrap right there.

I gotta admit, this is the nail in the coffin for me. I'm not buying MKX anytime soon now after strongly considering getting it this week.

Netherrelam really screwed the pooch on this one. MKX's launch has been totally botched.

• Wack Net code
• Pushy In-game DLC Upsells
• Totally busted non-playable PC version
• Shady DLC such as " easy fatalities"
• massive day 1 patches
• obvious Coin doubler-ish rebalancing, turning Krypt Unlockables into a grindfest or a spend fest
• trying to pull a fast one on reviewers by holding this info till post launch

I just hope they can survive this, this is beginning to feel like the second coming of Simcity. People are really turning on them, understandably so. I'm worried the MK brand is going to be permanently damaged by this.

I'd hate to lose Mortal Kombat, because of some extremely poor business decisions and PR bungles.

They probably had it so high just for reviewers to be able to see what the Krypt was all about and see content. Maybe even for testing purposes.

EDIT: Lowering a tower boss' reward from 2500 to 200 is kinda fucked though. 200 doesn't feel like much of a reward.

Jeff mentioned it takes a long time to earn koins in the quick look. I found it to be slow as fuck too. That said the only dlc available relating to the krypt I have seen so far is "unlock everything" for 20 bucks , no koin packs or anything like that. Games been in stores everywhere here since last friday but the dlc only showed up today on psn so maybe theres more to come..

Yeah. Doesn't look like you can actually buy coins, just the ability to unlock everything all at once.

Basically entirely how I feel. MK is really the only fighting game franchise I care about, but this launch has been a huge clusterfuck of poor decisions.

That's a real bummer. This game has burnt a lot of goodwill I had for that series. I was telling myself I'd just wait and buy the Komplete Edition, but now I'm so apathetic about the whole game that I don't even know if I'll notice when that comes out.

That sounds incredibly fucked up, I'll give Netherealm the benefit of the doubt for this and blame WB as it doesn't sound like the type of thing Netherealm would do.

What does currency get you? Just skins and bonus stuff, or is there anything that affects gameplay? Edit: If I have to grind to unlock characters or movesets, that's a bummer. Everything else I don't really care about.

It's all cosmetic stuff and concept art and modifiers for the Test Your Luck mode variant where you choose your modifiers.

@dasuberogre: @elvicerator: It's mostly cosmetic, but it also unlocks brutalities, which unlike fatalities cannot be done without unlocking them first.

This all kinda makes me glad I only cared enough to Gamefly the game.

Still nothing that gives anyone an advantage or disadvantage in the game though. Brutalities are just an extra bit of flair at the end of match.

@dasuberogre: While technically true, they're also basically alternate fatalities, which are a defining feature of Mortal Kombat. I would guess those are something a lot of players will want to unlock.

Yeah, sounds like they amped up the currency rate so reviewers could see more of the game before launch, but it seems like they always intended for it to be a slow grind.

I don't really care? Yeah, Brutalities are the one bummer I guess, but I don't mind if the unlocking of random cosmetic/art stuff is a slow grind in a fighting game. I mean, Smash Bros. Brawl and Smash Bros. 4 both take quite a long time to unlock all of the trophies and alternate soundtracks and whatever, and I don't particularly care.

It's funny, unlike Sim City I think there's a really good game here, but holy crap have they burned people on this. I love the characters and when I can get matches to work the online is a blast and it's for the most part smooth. However, if they think a good strategy is to throttle my leveling and shove ads in my face for a: characters that I don't give a shit about (Jason/Predator) and b: costumes that while cool are NOT worth thirty dollars and c: you're attempt to make the game easier for cash than I have to come to the conclusion that they want to burn their fans. I mean there is no way that someone as deeply ingrained in this industry as Ed Boon couldn't see this backlash coming. We've seen it with how many games now? AC: Unity, Evolve, and Forza 5 to name a few. Such a shame, because as far as the game itself goes it's one of the better fighting games I've ever played. I hope they come to the same conclusion Ubisoft did with Unity and ungate some of this stuff and fix the leveling to show the people who buy their games that they're listening. I'm the first one to defend dlc as something that's optional and if you don't want to play don't pay, but this is just getting silly. (Sorry for the ranting nature of this.)

@slag: I feel the exact same way. The unlock everything DLC and fatality easy mode feel a lot like micro transactions to me, it's all very gross so far...

I'm sure he's already aware, but @jeff should know about this if he doesn't.

Ideally, they would have been in touch with reviewers explaining exactly how a day 1 patch could alter the experience for actual players post release. Maybe that happened, and it would be a little (little) less skeezy. But if not, this goes from some slightly gross up-selling and DLC weirdness, to approaching them trying to defraud gamers by intentionally giving reviewers a better experience.

Shit fucking sucks. I love MK, and NetherRealm. And the game as it is seems pretty great. But this vestigial money grubbing (which I hopefully assume is the WB influence) can take a great experience and make me just want to walk away entirely.

Some of this reaction is hyperbolic.

I don't agree in principle with the game's business model, but bemoaning Netherrealm's imminent demise because they've amped up the in-game grind rate is laughable. Especially for a game that, upselling practices aside, plays better than anything this MK9/Injustice/MKX team has ever put together.

@historyinrust: People aren't saying Netherrealm is dead in here, they are saying they don't like all these practices and are complaining directly about them. Same thing that's gone on in the past with say Forza 5. Hopefully they listen.

@artisanbreads Mortal Kombat Horizon Komplete Edition? I'm down for that. :p

"The update just dodges reviewer's work" Well, shouldn't reviewers do their job?

I said it before and i'll say it again

We need the law to step in and put the kibosh on microtransactions.

The "speak with your money" thing will never work, because if a game doesn't sell the studios get closed down, no one thinks to blame shitty microtransactions.

I was definitely considering getting into MKX this year, but everything I've read about it leading up to release, and this included, just rubs me in such a wrong way. I'm not going to end up buying this thing until it's like 20 bucks, maybe.

Neogaf seems to have debunked this already. You get 2,500 koins the first time, then there's diminishing returns.

Because goverment involvement in videogames is something that totally gonna work out and do a ton of good.

Jesus, it's not like they sold you 5 characters and made you buy the rest ad-hoc. It's not like they withheld a large chunk of the game and are holding your feet to the fire to give them more money to get the rest.

Everything in the Krypt can be unlocked by simply playing the game. The game you paid for. It is bad that they seemingly lowered the koin count to artifically extend it? Yeah. But it's still something you can get by, again, simply playing the game. This is hardly something to get this irate about. It's bad, but not nearly worth this doomsaying that's been going around.

Which, iirc, is exactly what happened in MK9. You got a ton of coins for the first time through but on subsequent ones you got less.

@artisanbreads: The following brought to you by a comment in this thread:

Exactly what I was going to say. Seems like people just wanted another outlet for some latent micro-transaction anger.

That's what I last heard. Which makes sense because it would be utterly pointless for NR or WB to not have the economy tuned to what they want long in advance. Free to play games, for all their design problems, are very naked about their approach and this would have been no different if they decided to do it that way. As it is, it seems to be people reading into way more than is there built on already legitimate concerns over the way the game is selling DLC and such.

Yeah, as long as the update didn't drastically reduce the koins you get from other gameplay, this might have just been correcting an oversight. For instance, if boss fights give you an insane amount of koins compared to everything else, then running them over and over could easily ruin the unlockable system from their standpoint.

Not to say that I'm happy with some of the other crappy things the new MK title has done with unlockables and DLC. There's a lot not to like, but I personally don't feel like this is one of them.

I still don't get why supposed reputable sites write stories based on a Reddit user's friend.

I just got 75,000 koins playing through one test your might tower and one klassic tower. I did get a couple of the kombo and uppercut bonuses. That was enough to unlock a ton of stuff and there are far more interesting unlocks than there were in MK9. Almost everything has been a fatality, brutality, costume with only a few concept art pieces. I also got Kung Lao's hat and threw it at something to make a bridge.

Honestly the only thing I'm not too big on right now is the Easy Fatilties being listed on that start menu that gives you the basic special moves. Just it takes up some space where they could have put a few combos or more special moves (some characters they only show a handful and they leave out some, and I don't mean like they leave out input differences that change distance length, I mean entire special moves).

I've only played a handful of online matches but they rand pretty damn smoothly.