I like fighting games a lot, but I am terrible at them. This is also the first Mortal Kombat game I've ever put any real time into, so I'm still not super with it, so to speak. Given that this is on the popular end of fighting games, I imagine that there are a fair number of relatively casual players like myself who are playing online. And yet, every time I'm stupid enough to ever try playing someone, I'm put up against someone who has an online record of like 150/15 or something idiotic and I have no chance at winning or having fun. I think it might match by player level, but since all my XP was gained through story mode and fucking around it's completely irrelevant to how I will perform against human players.

All it does is ensure that I never want to play this game online, which is pretty sad because I could see myself getting into it otherwise. Meh.

You should always learn a character to a decent competitive level before jumping online, if you can't hit consistent 20 - 30% combos you're not going to win very many matches online.

Also no one gets good at anything without practice and fighting games take a lot of it, youtube is your best friend for learning combos. I know this doesn't help your match making issues but it will help you continue playing, and the more you play the more matches you'll end up winning.

Also you can go into lobbies I believe and challenge people through the chat lobby after seeing their records. Maybe playing some people in there will get you trained up for ranked and king of the hill.

The matchmaking (providing it's actually working) definitely seems to match up people who really shouldn't be playing each other quite often. I once had a 10+ streak where every single opponent I was getting matched up with showed my win odds at sub 8%.

But again I still prefer that over my usual matchmaking experience of having to wait 3+ minutes to get a single fight going. And that's just in the most popular modes as well (1v1 ranked and unranked). I have literally NEVER gotten an online match in ANY OTHER MODE.

The matchmaking does seem to be a bit off. The limited pool of people online at a time is probably a factor in that, but I should suspect that there should be many more players online due to the popularity of this game. Is this thing still locked by region?

Yeah, matchmaking is bad. My record is 70/20, and I either get matches against people with a record of 100+/15 or people with records of like, say, 2/45 or no record at all. The one thing I can say is that at least it is much quicker to get into a ranked 1v1 on PS4 now than it was when the game launched (now it's like 30 seconds, before it was like 2 minutes)

I haven't had a great experience online either. But to be fair, I'm not taking it very serious in the first place. I just wanted to see how I'd do with no real goal of getting great. I wasn't really getting stomped so much as I was getting cheesed by spam attacks. I lost interest quick.

You are better off going through the rooms and try to handpick lobbies with less skilled players. Though the absolute best you can do is learn the game together with a friend. As far as online goes, you need to expect to lose constantly until you have learned a looooot of stuff. Getting decent or good at one of these games is a commitment of time. You gotta research, practice and just play, play, play.

Fortunately, the game is pretty forgiving in a strictly casual mashy scenario. In that case just search for other players who just wanna have fun or whatever. Ranked is definitely not the way to go in that case.

Matchmaking got fixed in the patch, have at it.