FIGHT ON! KI Documentary

Absolutely loved this documentary! KI had a great story to tell and I think it was done justice here, without a doubt. It was also nice getting so many perspectives along the way, but mainly it was just wonderful seeing the reaction people had to the franchise’s return and what people ultimately thought of it by the end.

Of course, you can’t mention the end without mentioning the toxicity and what Keits essentially learned along the way with regards to community interaction. I still consider that to be an absolute black mark on the community; people that honestly felt harassing developers was acceptable so long as they got their point across or simply ranted at them because they weren’t making things the way they would’ve done it.

Part of me will never forgive some of those people, because to me, they really ruined a good thing for all of the community. It was awesome to have actual developers come in and explain things and answer questions or tell you that they were working on fixing an issue, or simply ding Q&As.

As someone that’s been a fan of Mortal Kombat since the beginning, I’ve always felt that there’s been somewhat of a wall between the players and the developers and in many ways, I think they’re right to do that. Ed Boon can’t post about anything without getting yelled at for characters or any number of things people want, or don’t like, or whatever.

Here, we had actual developers wanting our feedback, wanting to talk to us and hear our ideas and answer our questions, and it feels like some in this community squandered that opportunity because they couldn’t stop being rude or toxic or invading the space of developers.

As for the downer at the end; the impression given that there’s no KI planned or in development right now, I have to admit that I’m at somewhat of a loss as to what MS is doing with their IPs.

Phil Spencer already mentioned that sequels for Crimson Skies and MechAssault, two of his favorite IPs are not in development. We already know that they’re making a Fable game and almost assuredly a Perfect Dark game and a Forza game. But they have so many solid IPs; stuff that did well, or at the very least scored well on the original Xbox, Xbox 360 and Xbox One. Killer Instinct scored well out of the gate and only got better as it went along. Why would they not want another game in this series to help build out their portfolio? The last one couldn’t have been THAT expensive and I’d have to think it did relatively well financially.

I dunno. I’m holding off judgment until I see their July showcase. I’ve always preferred Xbox to Playstation in terms of their controller and UI, and I also dig Game Pass and their backward compatibility, but there are new exclusives that I want on PS5 and that kinda beats everything else. Hopefully MS can answer the bell.

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It’s really vexing. But this problem is so old, and so universal we have multiple platitudes covering it. “A few bad apples…” etc. I think one interesting outcome is that - although these forums had their share of rancorous debate, as a moderated forum there were checks on some of the more abusive practices that you saw elsewhere (Facebook, Twitter, and real life). I think this suggests, at least to me, that this kind of interaction between communities and developers is possible but it needs to be in a more controlled environment. Not on social media or in the hallways of fighting game tournaments.

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One thing social media has taught me, is that people really can’t govern themselves independently in uncontrolled and unregulated environments.

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Since watching the documentary ive been back playing KI for 2 weeks now every single day and im back in love again. I have an account on xbox wich i play on pc but i also bought the full version on steam and after playing mk11 im honestly more of a fan of this genre because all the characters are so unique and hype and its alot more technical. Still got a long way to learn all the characters from season 2 and 3 but i dont mind at all.

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Glad you’re enjoying the game once more. Welcome back :slight_smile:

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Hey man,

Glad to see you posting on the official boards!

It’s a quieter, but excellent community here.

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For sure. I’d also include tourney streams as well. I believe I read a few years back that this was a major issue at one point; Keits getting harassed by players while he was in the stream. I kinda recall that being the sort of genesis of Keits taking a more Harada-like “don’t ask me for ■■■■” kind of approach and basically shutting down any KI talk on his twitter.

Again, that’s just kinda sad to me. Some players seemed unable to get the hint at the very least and cool off, some perhaps believing that they were different than other players, had a different kind of relationship with him, or simply didn’t see what they were doing as toxic or negative or wrong in any way.

To me, there was a lot of immaturity and lack of respect. Perhaps people thought of him as one of their own, so they felt free to harass him and bother him and pick at him and make him justify everything or argue with him until he saw it their way because it’s just a conversation or whatever, but I can’t imagine being in his shoes at that time and absorbing a constant stream of rarely constructive criticism any time you tried interacting with the community. I’d want to shut that proverbial window to keep all the noise out too.

I agree with you about this site, Andy. I think for the most part, this site has always been rather positive, and tended to be more constructive when laying out certain issues. Not always, of course, and there were those bad apples, without a doubt. But to me it seemed relatively rare that Keits or James or Adam would come on here and talk about stuff or answer questions and be met with hostility. Usually most people were just thankful to hear from them on something they had a question or opinion on.

So yeah, I think the controlled environment is probably key. Facebook’s group was toxic as hell and twitch chats are always a cesspool of mental diarrhea. As much as I’d love for the devs to be able to get out there and talk about their game anywhere and everywhere, I’d hope that the lesson learned from their perspective wouldn’t be “I can’t talk to these people at all, there has to be a wall between us” and maybe more something along the lines of “there are certain places I shouldn’t go because those people act like trash, but there are some places that are constructive.”

That said, I wouldn’t in a million years fault any of them for not making the distinction. An overwhelming abundance of negative noise from all different directions isn’t going to make you want to run in the direction where the noise is the least negative, but can still be slightly negative at times. You’re just going to want the noise to stop in general.

Agreed. Granted, I think people were bothering him about stuff at in-person tournaments as well, but I’d have to think it was exponentially worse on Facebook, Twitter and Twitch. Some people feel a lot more emboldened when there’s distance and not in-person contact, and if you add anonymity to that as well, the boldness increases dramatically.

I could be wrong, but I also think critical thinking skills tend to diminish. Keits mentioned in the documentary that people were only looking at decisions made in a vacuum, where the devs had several other aspects they had to consider. I think it was a lot easier for some people to grab their torches and pitchforks and join the online mob if some pro level players were complaining about something or even if it was just regular players that were part of the community; the whole echochamber vibe. Negativity begetting negativity. People foregoing the idea of considering why something was done in favor of simply complaining nonstop that something was done and trying to bully the devs in to making the game the way they wanted it, because they’re the customer or whatever.

So yeah, the textual streams, the news posts from Adam, the Q&A’s, I think all of that stuff worked really well here, at least. But in places where people feel no compulsion to govern what they say, it might be best for devs to avoid those situations, sadly, or at least take time away from them if the noise gets too loud. Maybe the devs learned some lessons, maybe some of the pros and their fans that kept harassing them learned lessons as well. I kinda doubt the latter part, but who knows.

I just hope that if they do make another game, which seems relatively unlikely for a long time, the devs will try a solid level of interaction and give in take and that fans can be a bit more constructive and perhaps more concerted in an effort to combat the more negative and toxic people who don’t seem to realize that devs can be driven away by their constant raging.

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Yeah, I hope they don’t get discouraged about community interaction. The folks at MS always seemed to have thick skin, but I have a hard time coming up with a rationale for continued, deep community engagement other than “I really like hearing what’s happening and what they are thinking for the game.”

I think one of the challenges continues to be that people suffer very little in terms of consequences for abhorrent behavior on the internet. So they are free to act in a way they would never dream of acting in a real room. In the case of the FGC, (which looks like more of a toxic waste dump every minute on Twitter), you combine those with a community that tends to collect socially dysfunctional people who devote a lot of their ego to the “scene,” and it just amplifies this issue. It’s not unique in this way, but it’s certainly true as well. I think Keits took more abuse than other developers because he was a fixture in the FGC and people felt they could approach him. They also didn’t have any humility and there was a lot of “he’s not a better player than me, so what makes him think he knows better than me?” Without accounting for the fact that the dudes job was to sit and think about fighting game balance for 8+ hours a day. He has a somewhat abrasive personal communications style (not to blame the victim) but I think that didn’t help. But I think the biggest disappointment to me is how completely the high level player community failed to recognize the problem and police themselves. Even the examples of players who weren’t raising a fuss (I won’t name names) you got the impression that they were being quiet about it but secretly cheering on the troublemakers. What I never saw was one or more top players saying “Hold on a minute here guys and gals. We are destroying what we love and we need to stop.” I have been FGC “adjacent” for a long time and the way this played out certainly didn’t encourage me to start participating in the “scene.”

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Is this server dead?

No. It’s not particularly high traffic these days either though.

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