I've been mostly sticking to ai matches due to online issues, but I've just about had enough of the ai. On the normal difficulty, the game is way too easy, the AI falls for the same combos over and over again, and they never seem to block on wakeup.

Once you jump up to the hard difficulty though, the AI doesn't get any smarter, it just outright reads all your controller inputs. This is especially bad if you get caught in a corner, since unless the character you're up against has fairly slow moves, and you have very fast ones, it will just keep you trapped there until you armour your way out. They know exactly when you get up off the ground, and what state you are in when you do. It really makes me wish wakeup attacks had some invincibility like they used to.

I haven't tried the Very Hard Difficulty yet, but I'm finding this more annoyingly difficult than MK9 ever was. There it didn't feel like the AI could see into the future. Sure, have your ai do huge superhuman combos, but outright reading controller inputs is just annoying when the AI is too easy otherwise.

MK AI has always been a pain in the ass or easily exploitable. I remember getting stuck at the end of MK 2 and 3 for hours.

Luckily, if they can't get that right then at least they're doing all sorts of other cool single-player stuff.

MK/Injustice AI has always been super cheap/cheaty, that's just how it's designed. You can still beat it but it's more about figuring out what inputs fuck up the AI instead of fighting well or whatever (in MK9 it was just crossup jumps over and over). Most fighting game comps aren't very good, an exception is KoF XIII.

Heh, I'm glad I'm not very good at fighting games, because it means that medium difficulty is just about right for me. I do wish there was a middle ground between medium and hard, though. Something on par with MK9 on hard, which was perfect.

One weird thing I noticed: It doesn't seem like the fights ramp up in difficulty as you progress through the ladder. It's like the first fight is equal to the eighth.

It's like a tradition at this point for Mortal Kombat games to have shitty, input-reading AI.

Beating the AI on hard/very hard more or less comes down to exploiting their wake up tendencies, abusing armor on EX moves, and generally just blocking all the horseshit you can until you have a window to fight. It's typically a bad decision to try to mount proactive offense, and way smarter to just punish, punish, punish.

Try going up against someone like Liu Kang with Erron Black on hard. Nearly broke the damn controller.

That is so true, the AI sucks.

Hard is doable if you know your character well. Medium I think is slightly easy but I got a couple of close calls with characters i didn't know. That being said I agree and think there should be a difficulty level between medium and hard.

I'm actually going to voice an unpopular opinion: I really loved the jump between Medium and Hard.

Medium was a good place to start. I consistently beat the AI with any character I played, but they offered enough of a challenge that I felt like I was really learning the characters and applying those lessons. I finally started finding some characters I wanted to main, and Medium became WAYYY too easy. So I bumped up to Hard.

Whoa boy. That was some Souls-level rage. Everything felt cheap. The AI would read my telegraphs way too well, I'd get stuck in corners, and I was struggling to knock down enough of their health. And even my best kombos were only taking away 18-20% of their health.

But I took myself to the Practice Room, and taught myself some longer/better kombos. I mixed up some overhead and low attacks. I also realized that, unlike MK9, you didn't get invulnerability frames upon wake-up. Now with my main, I'm consistently winning against Hard -- and I'm feeling GOOD about it. Again like the Souls games, I felt a really deep sense of personal "leveling up." It was a really rewarding feeling to climb that plateau.

I haven't tried Very Hard yet, but I'm excited to get there soon. Maybe the AI DOES get to some inhuman levels of bullshit, but from what I've seen so far I'm actually really happy with the AI progression.

I spent some time in the Endless Tower and I think the harder difficulties are actually a lot more fair than Injustice or MK9; sure inputs are being read occasionally but not in like an automatic "I win" context for the opponent. Kung Jin does body me at the end but he bodies me like an actually good player would and not just like a cheap computer. A lot of the matches felt really competitive and interesting, which is ultimately what I want out of a Fighting Game Comp (though broken ass SnK boss fights certainly have their charm, here's to you Mr. Invasion Boss Fight designer guy).

I find that the more you think the harder it is. I literally stopped trying after getting bodied by jax and stood still and upper cutted or swept and the ai just falls apart. It doesn't work all the time but it's something. Also I stood still on hard and had a stare off with the ai for 10 seconds. Less is definitely more for mkx ladder. Love the game and the franchise netherrealm but seriously the ai sucks. Oh and screw corrupted shinnokand his dick lasers.

That's kind of the inherent problem of fighting game AI. It basically always tends to be terrible and the problem is that there's no great incentive for it to be any good. Anybody that's going to play the game seriously is going to want to only play against other people (not that that's always an option, unfortunately), so it doesn't make a great deal of sense to spend a heap of time making it good. That doesn't excuse reading inputs and doing a massive punish on the first frame you press a button, but it's the reason why the MK9 AI can be safejumped and punished on wake-up basically every single time you knock them down. Jump kick, block, combo into knockdown - the deadliest vortex of all :O

The issue is that you either win by exploiting the faults in the AI, which surely must reinforce a tonnnnn of bad habits, or you win because the AI rolled a number that told it not to block etc. Neither of those are remotely gratifying. That's the drawback to NRS doing cool things with their story and why I don't really mind that much when other fighting games just have the same old tired arcade mode - if you engage in any of that stuff, you have to fight the AI. I guess exploiting AI can at least teach you some pattern recognition stuff that might be handy...

EDIT: OHNOOLDTHREAD

EDIT 2: Electric Boogaloo: Just watched @fredchuckdave's second ladder video and the AI actually looks quite decent in that, looks like it behaves in a way not dissimilar to high level play and can be beaten by more or less playing the game how you would against a good human opponent. Sure, things like mixups only land on AI because it lets them etc, but it looks pretty good.

Hate the A.I. difficulty? Me? Nooooo way!

It's a fighting game and fighting games always have intense difficulty spikes. Sometimes it can be a joke and sometimes, well, sometimes that happens.

Almost all fighting games are like this. I remember my buddy throwing his controller around trying to beat seth on hard in SF4.