Lenin

A couple days ago, I fought this Scorpion player whose ass I handed back to him with CySubz > reg. Subz > Kung Lao > Johnny Cage > Raiden, he stayed in taking beatings all the way through until the sixth match when I picked Ermac, he raqequit out the middle of round one and sent me the message "ermac=cheap". Scrubs are scrubby. Their brains just don't work. But they make me smile so I keep playing. EDIT: Skarlet is dated for the 21st, Rain confirmed. Fourth character teased. That's also the date for the Cyrax/Sektor klassic kostumes apparently. I assume this means 360 will finally get the patch then or sometime before.

You'll rape faces. Avoid the ice clone.

MK is all flow charts in every aspect. Nightwolf's is the funniest. Shoulder. Did it work? Yes. Shoulder. Did it work? No. Did you get punished? No. Shoulder. Did it work? Yes. Shoulder. Did it work? No. Were you punished this time? Yes. Wake-up shoulder. Did it work? How could it not? Do two hatchets and juggle them with a shoulder. Do another shoulder. Are they running away and crouching without block? Enhanced lightning, juggle with shoulder. Are they not running away and crouching with block? LOL SHOULDER. Repeat. Nightwolf.

I'd really rather not have to do some WoW style grinding in my AC games. I'd also rather not have to wait for the mexicans to show up with the rifle I want.

Word is that Paulo Garcia, a member of the NRS development team says after the patch is released, the hotfix that follows to get rid of Kung Lao's infinite/hat loop/something and Kano's upball shenanz, whatever will also have changes to Quan Chi. After what the patch did to him (apparently after Sky Drop there is virtually no hit stun whatsoever, you get no mix-up off of it. High risk, no reward, just like basically all his other specials), I expect some kind of buff. But it wouldn't surprise me if they nerfed him more, I mean, you can still do Skeletal Boost before a fatality. SO FUCKING OP DUDE. Curious about this. Anyone here who plays online, what characters do you end up fighting the most? I'm getting so sick of Scorpions. I fight that fucker in at least 12 out of 10 matches.

Since we're pulling parts out of the dirt rather than corporations selling them and this is an MMO... is that possibly how parts are going to be unlocked? Playing Archaeology Core with your friends in the downtime between territory conflicts? Because that'd be pretty gay.

AK47 is the most accurate assault rifle. FAMAS is the best assault rifle. I think Raor was saying FAMAS is the ACR because it's the best, but I hope not because then it'd make less sense.

CoD will never be as good as it was in CoD4 because CoD4 was a fluke and developers will forever scratch their heads trying to figure out what the fuck they did right as they continue to belt out progressively worse games on an annual basis.

Charter Communication's "Max" package, IIRC. I'm totally blanking on my bill... I don't think it's higher than $50/monthly, though. You should talk to your ISP and see if they offer a service plan that's been designed for HD streaming and/or gaming. Somewhere in the way of 20+MB/s download speed is where you need to be for a smooth gaming experience online at this point in time. Anything above 25MB/s should feel like similar to offline play as long as you're connecting to a server and not a peer. If you play a lot of P2P games, you should get something that stresses upload speed as well, it'll help counterbalance the shitty internets of other players, and pull host more consistently if your game operates on that. I recommend getting your net from a cable company too. ISPs such as Verizon and the like tend to gargle balls in comparison for some reason. My ISP is good, aside from that time my payment was late and they turned off my internet and their customer service department didn't understand why that situation should stop them from asking me "would you like to pay your bill online?" That was fail, but other than that they're solid. Their service plans don't really feature particularly good upload speeds, though. Comcast is pretty good too from what I hear. EDIT: (missed this post somehow...) That ping is really good. The lower it is the better you connect to whatever server you're bouncing off. You've gotta be REALLY close to that server for 20 ms ping. You gotta shitcan that standard DSL line if you want a better experience from your games.

...wow dude. How was that even possible?

The whispers on the street say they rushed it out in an effort to provide fellatio to the PS3 community and it looks like somebody forgot that you can't orphan the balls. Somebody had to be the guinea pig, I suppose. I still don't understand why I rarely ever experience lag in this game. There's a little latency, but I don't lose frames or inputs unless my opponent is across an ocean or just has a connection from 1999. Also, you know Ice Clone is on a timer kinda like Cyrax's net right? If you bust it out too close to your opponent and it doesn't come out, you have to wait before you can try it again. I think the same thing applies if you get hit while it's out. That's a possible explanation, but probably not it. If your netcode is that bad I seriously weep for you. Maybe my internet connection is secretly gdlk. EDIT: http://www.speedtest.net/result/1337549190.png If it's no lie that I'm above 82% of the US, that's kinda gdlk. I think my DL should actually be about 5 megs faster, though... just on what I pay for. My cross-country connection is ASS though: http://www.speedtest.net/result/1337552503.png But still supposedly better than 64%? What the fuck?

It's 5:30 AM and I'm only just now realizing that Sonya is fucking amazing. That's embarrassing. Her b2,1,f2 string is obnoxious for me since I'm not really used to having to hit confirm in my strings with this game. But I should have the hang of her pretty soon. She plays like fragments of Sindel and Smoke. Already figured out two anywhere-on-the-screen 30%+ combos after... ten minutes? So yeah, definitely feels like Smoke... Need to play around some in the corner with her. This is fun shit. EDIT: Apparently the patch is causing all kinds of trouble for PS3 users. Infinite restarting, inability to rematch players online, broken and desyncing KOTH, hearing rumors of people having their drives wiped or something. Microshaft can keep it for approval for as long as it takes as far as I'm concerned.

Dude, Ed Boon has always been a pretty awesome human being in general. He's like Ono from Capcom if he were worth the oxygen that keeps him alive. EDIT: AFAIK right now, the patch did some things not in the notes... apparently Ermac lost 2,2,Lift as a cancel and now it's a link. Which doesn't bother me too much even as a guy who really enjoys playing him some Ermac. I'm interested to see more surprises...

So wait, quads... snipers... Huh? Lots of TL;DR going on here. Are there handheld sniper rifles in this game or is it all cannons and solely the domain of the quad? I think I caught a whiff in here about sniper shit being quad exclusive, might have misread. Clarification would be great. No RJ snipers = Sad Lenin.

Tom Brady isn't an NRS employee, so unless/until he's confirmed to be doing play testing of some sort for the DLC characters, I'll take what he says about them with a grain of salt. But still all the while acknowledging he usually is pretty reliable. Fujin does have the soundclip, which could be in there for a few reasons. One being that he'll be in the game at some point, the other being maybe he was going to be in the game, but they opted out and just didn't clean up very well. The soundbyte was brought up to Boon over Twitter and his response was "come back in a year and tell me Fujin is in this game". Then somebody got cheeky with him and said "I hope Fujin gets a good fatality in MK9" and Boon's response was "Fujin is not in MK9." Now when somebody tweeted at him "Can you give Tanya a good fatality in this game, please?" his answer was "Did you find Tanya already? Damn u r good". So there's that. Then at some point somebody tweeted something about wanting Rain in the game and Boon's reply was "You make a convincing argument!" In other tweets he proceeded to basically deconfirm: Havik, Mavado, Mokap, Kira and Li-Mei. And I don't see any reason to think Frost will be in the game either (aside from her being in the background of a stage or two fighting Kenshi, I think... but who gives a fuck?), but I want her A LOT more than I want Tanya. So I'll still campaign for her until she's confirmed beyond all doubt to not be up for DLC. I'm pretty down with Rain being in though so long as he has the control sphere, my favorite move in basically any fighting game. Prince references FTW too. As far as Cyber Smoke goes, if you don't get him as a separate character, you can probably bet you'll at least get it as an alternate costume. EDIT: Don't know about Monday for the patch. The original June 7th date was just a community assumption because of the DLC costume pack; it was never intended for release then despite popular belief. Writing code takes time and it might not be ready then. "This month" is the best answer, but all NRS really said was "after CEO", which could mean Monday. Also could mean July 1st. It's iffy. Monday would be beastly though. I just want Skarlet so bad.

Well, here's what the patch is going to do: 1. KL spin will ahve 6 more recovery frames on block 2. KL hat loop removed 3. kabal block infinite removed 4. sonya block infinite removed 5. various bugs fixed 6. wake up moves punishing certain characters after a ground breaker removed 7. stryker xray punsihed on hit fixed 8. advantage on cyrax command throw lessoned 9. cyrax command throw break changed from 2 frame windown to 10 frame window 11. sindel able to scream after 21 now and able t juggle with b3~scream 12. smoke bomb otg removed 13. cyber sub bomb has a smaller buffer window 14. jax ex dash punch goes farther and has armor. 15. jax has a gp fake 16. quan chi sky drop adv lessoned 17. quan chi reset after trance removed 18. quan chi skeletal boost after trance trade removed 19. quan chi can now move after trance 20. raiden no longer has adv after b312 and 334 are blocked. he is now at -1 Tweaks coming a few hours after the patch: 1. sonya cannot link military stance after d4 2. sonya dive kick inf removed 3. kabal cannot link dash after d4 4. KL infinite removed 5. kano up ball is now more disadv on block 6. more various bugs fixed Point taken. I forget how undertested this game was. We're still in the anti-bullshit phase. I still really disapprove of NRS's treatment of Quan-Chi. Anyone can argue all day over how bad he truly is, but he was 100% not competitive before. People say the only reason everyone thinks he sucks is because no one (by which they mean Tom Brady) has told the dipshits how to use him, but even Tom Brady has said before that he's horrid and the patch is just going to make it worse. He called CySubz v. Quan Chi post-patch as an 8-2 matchup out of Quan's favor, so I guess if he's right, there's at least a small silver lining for me in that if someone is brave enough to take Quan, I'm basically guaranteed that win even more so than I was before. His uppercut, sweep and fireball are all super awesome though so there is that at least. Again, according to Tom Brady, almighty MK dictionary, this will be the last patch for a while. Which makes sense, this removes most bullshit so everything can get hashed out at a competitive level finally rather than just watching people exploit their way through the tourney brackets. And speaking of tournaments, CEO started today which means this patch and Skarlet are supposedly right around the corner. That and the fact this patch is encouraging me to basically double the amount of time I spend playing Sindel and I'm hype to finally have at least one female character in this game I can enjoy playing. Skarlet will be worth the buy just to learn her shenanigans to fight against her properly. You seen that E3 gameplay? Bloodbitch is like a bottomless toolbox. Hope it plays out that way.

I used to hate fighting Johnny Cage more than anyone until there was a random ass influx of Raiden players about a week ago. I rarely ever agree with the concept of nerfing anything in a fighting game but I really wish bad things would happen to the Raiden coding. The game's rules just don't apply to him. If there's ONE character that isn't justified in having a safe teleport, it's Raiden. You need to react before it even happens and have a fast uppercut to do anything about it. The loss of frame advantage of his combo strings might mean it'll be a little less easy for him to run all over the rest of the cast. But he'll only be at -1. You will STILL have to sit there. Trying to jump away or poke out of that will just end in you getting superman'd. That's really all it is, another situation in which you can connect a 2-frame start-up ultra-priority move that carries your opponent to the corner. It's awful. And for all your effort Raiden can't be pressured, anything vaguely unsafe eats superman. Can't zone him, teleport is awesome. Can't do oki, ex-superman is retarded. Raiden is all bullshit. It seems like you get the bulk of your damage in that fight just punishing the supermans you can bait. And it's a hard move to bait, if you blink, you won't block it in time. The fact that he can throw it out at midrange safely against a good portion of the cast is bullshit too. Raiden is like the full-character version of Cyrax's command-grab. You can read a Raiden player like a book with no words and still not get anything to show for it. I get that NRS is trying, but some of the shit they're nerfing only makes sense until you stack it up against everything they've decided to leave alone. They should totally nerf Raiden's wake-up. The fact he is so goddamn AMAZING at pressure... punishment... rushing... doing high damage combos... everything, he shouldn't have a fucking "get off me move" since at that point I've earned the right to at least TRY and get something out of the fact I managed to score a knock down on him and his stupid fucking hat.

They're just nerfing Quan Chi to settle the bet they can make him worse than Dan. Cyrax's command grab will be fine, what's going on now, according to Tom Brady is "you're probably not going to ever land it off of a net against somebody with a connected brainstem. You'll have to learn how to land it as a mixup. Some people will miss the break, some won't. And the bomb trap is going to turn in a mixup opportunity rather than be guaranteed meterless damage. The whole thing is going to tear him out of S tier and drop him into the slums of... A/A- tier. People are just going to have to spend some meter and live with all those beefy damage reset combos." Something like that. The only REAL problem with Cyrax was that the command grab was a two frame break. That's fucking hard, and even if you KNOW it's coming the odds are hugely out of your favor to break it which is bullshit. 10 frames of tech is unreasonably long though. I can literally scratch my nuts and react to that.

Doesn't change the fact I haven't experienced any real problems since the hotfix. Post-hotfix they actually improved for me. Lag is still and issue and this game's netcode is shitty for me just because two games out of ten getting lag spiked is unacceptable, but outside of that it feels only slightly worse than SSFIV's netcode.

Hasn't come out yet. It main effects on gameplay are supposedly making Kung Lao's spin more easily punishable, making Cyrax kinda have to work for bomb trap, the removal of Smoke's OTG shenanigans, making Kano's upball less safe because only Johnny Cage gets to have a safe and reliable anti-air... there was some other stuff too but it's not coming to me and I can't be bothered to hit Google right now. It's apparently going to improve online play too. I honestly don't care about this because I'm a pessimistic fuck. Also because ever since they released the hotfix back in wheneveritwas, I haven't experienced any atrocious lag, despite the fact that first hotfix did nothing to fix netplay. I'd say at this point I get maybe two in ten games where there's noticeable lag and those are usually just spikes that work themselves out. As opposed to where it was before when it was like 80% of matches being totally unplayable from the lag and the remaining 20% just ending in desyncs.

The better question to ask of the Raiden episode is 'why did nobody at least think anything of the fact this dude is leaking blue goo from every orifice?'

Found something not serious with Sub-Zero. The 2,2,2 string + the corner. Basically, if you knock someone down in the corner and they won't get up, the third hit will OTG and reset their knockdown. If they do get up, 90% chance they won't block high. I call it the retard trap because it always and only works on retards. The game is to see how many times you can do it before it stops working. I wouldn't post this but I just did it too like five people in a row online, with enough success it actually pissed me off. They can probably still taste my salty Irish nuts in the back of their throats.

I just TL;DR'd the shit out of you. Here's your chance to do it to me: I do sorta the same thing with the characters online. Usually start with Ermac/Sindel/Nightwolf just to gauge where they are, if they suck, I use whoever the fuck I feel like, if they're good or actually trying, I break out one of the Sub-Zeros, or Noob. And rushdown Noob? Define that for me. I don't see the appeal to rusher Noob based on what I think of when I read "rushdown"... Then again, watching my opponent twist like a worm trying to get through the shadow army and my virtually unfuckupable AA game is why I enjoy Noob. The only time I bother actually moving forward is when the zoning has done it's work and I can get you in the corner to spend some meter doing b+1,2,1,4>enhanced up-shadow, 2,1,2>(enhanced) disabler or 2,1,2>en. up-shadow, 2,1,2>en. up-shadow, 2,1>en. up-shadow, 2,1>shadow tackle. Noob reminds me a lot of my old Venom shenanigans in Guilty Gear, immaculate zoning into some horrible things happening to you in the corner. But probably the best way to play Noob is at about 1/4th the screens distance, as few pixels outside of where your opponent can punish a blocked shadow, which is more aggression than people will usually engage in while playing him, but not necessarily rushing. His normals and strings are lethargic in comparison to most other characters and lack priority, he's also missing any substantial combos and juggles outside of the corner. His only weakness there is how much meter you need to spend to be effective, which is a big reason you should lame it out and just throw shadows for a little while. The first round is usually tedious, but you can end round two fucking FAST if you make even one good read and didn't have to blow a breaker to get through round one. Spacing out around a quarter screen distance trying to force a fuck up so you can connect 2,1,2>shadow tackle or 2,1,2>teleport or b+1,2,1,4>teleport or whatever string>special combination you want to inch them towards the corner and it's hard to go too far wrong. Also, you can 2,1>disabler and watch them panic. People are so funny when they know their block button doesn't work. I haven't tried it because I hoard the shit out of my meter, but I'd assume you can 2,1>enhanced disabler too, which is awesome if it works since the enhanced disabler rapes their block button AND inverts their directional inputs. Shang Tsung is fucking legit by the way. But you're wielding an obnoxiously sharp double-edged sword in using him. It's the tits that he can drop 40%+ damage off your life for 1 bar, but you're going to be eating a lot of damage if you fuck up your already hard to use zoning because you either won't have breaker or you won't want to use it because then you'll have basically no combos since he needs enhanced ground skull for all his damage... ...which is why you have Soul Steal. You don't need it to win, not by a long shot. But it's a 10-30% damage boost which is amazing no matter what but it's recockulous should you Wondertwin your way into the skin of a character like Johnny Cage or Cyrax. So it actually does help you that you're working on a lot of other characters, since to play an optimized Shang Tsung you should be able to consistently pull off at least one or two combos with every character, as well as knowing some of their set-ups. I'd bet money that Shang Tsung is probably the best character in this game, just on the basis that he is every character, but 10-30% stronger. And when he's not doing that there's an infinite wall of fireballs. And he has that clown fatality. If I had something in my personality that resembled the will to ever actually try, thus allowing me to play this game competitively, I would focus all my efforts on learning Shang. If that tells you anything. On another note, the balance patch that was supposed to be out the 7th got delayed. Somebody (Tom Brady?) said that it was because Microsoft and Sony are taking their sweet time approving the patch itself. But I'm going to tell myself it's because NRS read the internet backlash to the Quan Chi nerfs and decided to take that atrocity back to the lab. I played around with that guy a while ago and did some good work, but goddamn the man is shittier than 2-girls-1-cup if it were shot in a port-a-potty behind a taco stand on the Jersey shore. Rune trap was the only way I found to deal any real damage. Skeletal Boost is hardcore worthless. Regular rune is slightly less worthless. Steering the Sky Drop is a fun gimmick, but it's just a gimmick. His fireball and trance are pretty fucking good though. You can throw SO many of those fireballs SO fast and just chip away until your opponent decides to go into a crouch without blocking to avoid it only to get smacked by Trance from a retarded distance. Back when I was playing him I thought "boy, this worthless motherfucker would be way less of a worthless motherfucker if I could get a Skeletal Boost off of a Trance", then I read in the patch-notes NRS released that post-patch he'll be able to move immediately after landing a Trance and I thought "fuck yeah", then the next line was "Quan-Chi Skeletal Boost after Trance removed" and was all like D'AW! because FFS. Then I read that he was losing some of his advantage after a Sky Drop. Again: FFS. Right now he's one of the worst characters in the game. After this patch he'll be as useful as a fetus in a Thai whorehouse. The only good thing about him will be his sweep, which is right up there with Smoke and Kabal's in terms of awesomeness, and his fireball, which makes Ryu's hadouken look like shit. I'll concede that Quan-Chi is probably a tough little bastard to balance, though. It'd be easy for him to be pretty OP with not a whole lot of work, but I'd rather have a game with another OP character than an absolutely useless one. I'd like to see Skeletal Boost not be random. Have d,b4 be health boost and d,f4 be damage boost, and let him connect that off a Trance into a mixup. And/or have his Runes launch for a juggle or something. The guy is going to have nothing but mixups into no damage and that's bullshit.

Because then you'd have pretty much no games to play.

You're not going to be able to get away from people forever. Given the rampant idiocy of players online I'll bet 75% of your opponents will genbust just trying to avoid you once.