“Join the White Lotus” they said. “Align yourself with the godlike defenders of Earthrealm.” So I did, and everybody else decided to be an ice ninja instead. Mortal Kombat X‘s Faction War feature makes me sad.
My initial excitement over joining one of five factions and battling it out online and off against the competition has declined each day since Mortal Kombat X‘s release. The standings just aren’t fluctuating, and it’s become clear to me that no matter how many challenges I complete, the Lin Kuei will always come out on top due to superior numbers.
The Faction War system works like this: players choose one of five factions. Everything they do in the game, offline or online, contributes points to their chosen faction. At the end of the week, points are tallied and the winning faction is crowned. And that winner is going to be the Lin Kuei, Sub-Zero’s clan. There’s no two ways about it.
Just look at the clan representatives in the screenshot above — it’s like they’re lined up from most interesting to least. Humans in military garb? Bah. Why bother, when you can be an elder god, or a dark wizard or a dick with a cyborg eye?
It’s a popularity contest, and the only way another faction could come close to the Lin Kuei would be if they swapped out Scorpion for their current rep.
I’ll be monitoring the ongoing war on a weekly basis, and should things change I will be the first overjoyed White Lotus member to let you know.
Comments
27 responses to “We’re Losing Mortal Kombat X’s Faction War To The Ice Ninja”
“or a dick with a cyborg eye”
Who wouldn’t want to be a cybernetic penis
What’s this “we” stuff?
My faction happens to be winning 🙂
I wouldn’t worry too much about losing though, because it resets every week.
Yeah, but even after it resets your faction will be in the lead, unless the population changes significantly.
Once people max out their level on Lin Keui, expect drastic shifts in numbers as people go to max out their faction levels with every faction, there’s even an achievement for it
The thing is that the game features achievements tied to taking part in and fully leveling each faction. I don’t know if this will be enough to knock the Lin Kuei from the top spot in future, but it should at least have some effect.
Seeing as two achievements involve playing as each of the five factions, and reaching Rank 50 with each of the five factions, I don’t think there’s much to worry about.
All hail the Lin Kuei!!!!!
Devs still haven’t learned to randomly assign players to groups so that an even distribution is achieved. There’s no point to a points based faction system when everyone will just pick the “cool” group.
Or weight the scores based on population. If Faction A has double the pop of Faction B, then Faction A only earns points at half the rate of Faction B.
Simple.
They just need to make the points an average. So just average the points earned over active players for the week and make that the way it is scored.
LOL… welcome to the world of factional MMORPG PVP =P
Where at the end of the day it’s not your skills or challenges.. it’s how popular your clan/name gets =P
I think a better solution would be that each Clan has a certain group of fighters that can only be played by that Clan, so for example the Lin Kuei clan members can only choose fighters such as Sub Zero, Scorpion, Kenshi, Jin Kung (basically the Ninjas), White Lotus would be Raiden, Liu Kang, Kitana.
Do the same for the Brotherhood, Black Dragon and SF and include one or two cross overs between each so Scorpion could also be selected by Brotherhood clan members, Takeshi could be both SF and White Lotus.
It would require ignoring the storyline alignments to some degree but it could be worked out and make people think a bit more about their Clan selection because their chosen fighter might only be available in the Brotherhood and Black Dragon clans
Another option would be to do away with clan selection, and instead, using the above formula, whichever fighter you choose and win with, that fighters associated clan gets the points
I chose the Brotherhood of Shadow and I regret that now.
I see your point, but the idea of being able to play as whomever you want was to avoid restricting the way people play. Obviously there needs to be something done in order to make the Faction Wars fairer, but I don’t think restricting what characters people can play as is the way to do it.
Maybe they could just give double points when actually playing as members of the chosen faction.
Wouldn’t that just lead to the more popular characters (like Scorpion and Sub-Zero) determining which faction wins? The current system is obviously flawed, but giving double points for characters tied to a particular faction won’t really fix it.
Sorry, I meant being in the faction AND choosing a character from that faction. Giving an incentive to play as characters from your chosen faction, as opposed to restricting access to other characters.
Although as I said below, that wouldn’t really work, as a lot of characters don’t fit in those five factions.
Surely scaling contributions based on the number of players in a faction is the best way to go. Although without seeing behind the scenes numbers, it’s possible this is already going on, and the Lin Kuei members are just going crazy earning war points.
I’m actually in the Lin Kuei faction (I couldn’t go past Sub-Zero’s home team), but I was hoping that the stuff that was happening earlier with the War Tower would balance out the faction percentages for this week. It really doesn’t seem to have had a positive effect though (in fact, Lin Kuei is doing even better this week, likely because the people in other factions last week jumped over).
Why do you regret your decision? Does winning or losing the faction war actually have any effect (besides unlocking the last faction kill)?
The problem with placing specific characters into these five groups is that most of the characters don’t fit. The only Black Dragon member in the game is Kano. Raiden is the only White Lotus. Brotherhood of Shadow probably has the most, due to all the revenant characters.
And what about Kotal Kahn? D’Vorah? Ferra/Torr? Where do they fit?
Perhaps the points you score for your faction should be multiplied by the reciprocal of the number of members of your faction. If you’re a part of the smallest faction you make points much faster to compensate for your smaller numbers.
Perhaps flooring the number to the nearest 1000 or so would still keep a tiny advantage to those in larger factions, but not enough to make a big deal.
Eg, X has 10,000 people, Y has 1,000 people. If someone from X earns 1,000 points they only get 0.1 points for their team. But the same person from Y would get 1 point.
I could be wrong, but before the game was released I thought I heard that a similar system to this would be implemented in the final product. Is this not the case?
I chose Lin Kuei mainly for nostalgia’s sake since Subby’s been my man since the first game (that and that fact that it’s clearly the coolest faction, guys, come on) but I’ll jump ship once I max out my rank, as I imagine many others will.
I couldn’t comment on that as I haven’t paid the most attention to this game’s release. To me it makes enough sense that surely the developers at least thought about it.
Coolest faction? 😉
Isn’t the Lin Kuei the first option to select? Wouldn’t people who don’t give a damn just select the first option to get it out of the way?
When I went to join a faction the option was defaulted to Black Dragon. I made the decision to be Lin Kuei the minute I found out there was a Faction system (Sub Zero’s been my favorite character since day 1, the choice was clear for me) so while this was a cool idea, it is, unfortunately, becoming a glorified popularity contest.
I picked Special Forces because they looked like they’d have the most fun on a day to day basis
I’ll be switching my faction weekly just to mix things up a bit. My mates n I are doing this or just switching when each faction is lvl maxed. Some of us are subzero fanboys, some are just going left to right. It will mix up in time i reckon.
Im sure there’s a reddit post telling everyone what faction to join each week to boost your faction points or whatever.
As an australian I do not have access to factions or online features
um, I’m from Melbourne, and I have access to everything.
Sooooo …. I don’t know what’s going on with your system. Maybe put the disc in…
😉
Should be based off of percentage of players and average score so a faction of 100 people that get top score beats a factions of 10,000 people who score averagely.
Hi, i have question
I play mortal kombat x on ipad, i did this faction war and they write can get powerful equipments,
I ask that didnt gift to anyone? Or they gave to whom?