Does Mortal Kombat X have the lowest average skill level ever in Fighting Games?

Note: This isn’t intended to be inflammatory, it’s purely a matter of science and curiosity. I’m ignoring the launch of Street Fighter 2 for obvious reasons.

As a remarkably slightly above average fighting game player I somehow was in the top 40 of Injustice about a month after launch; and my win rate was about 3.5 wins to 1 loss; or 78%, as was almost everyone else on the list. My secret? Well Injustice’s playerbase wasn’t too hot either; also I played a supposedly low tier character and bodied everyone; and even had backup characters for bad matchups. But in MKX the top 100 is almost exclusively around 95-98%, now you say 78-98’s not that big of a deal man; it’s only 20%! Not so sir, as anyone that plays Freecell knows, if you played 500 games at 78% you would lose 110 matches, if you played 500 games at 98% you would lose only 10; 11 times as many losses. So basically MKX’s playerbase is eleven times worse than Injustice’s; okay 98% probably not fair; let’s stick with 95%, you get 25 losses for those 500 games and that’s still 4.4 times as many losses.

I didn’t play Street Fighter IV at launch so I’m not sure how bad it was there, probably closer to Injustice’s tick. But let’s have some fun and compare with other games. If you look at Guilty Gear Xrd’s top 100 the average win rate is about 55-60% (mine is personally about 40%, which I’m damn proud of), sure there’s a handful of people that farm lower ranked players but for the most part almost everyone that plays that game is super legit; a lot of this has to do with the tiny, though quite devoted, playerbase.

I also played KoF XIII to around a 50% tick, matching up with 60-65% players or thereabouts at the top; though that wasn’t that close to launch. Tekken 6 is yet another game I played recently, inspired by my success on the free to play circuit, and boy did I get completely massacred by those guys. A pretty old game so naturally the only people left playing were pathologically insane monstrosities who took my soul out and ate it. I won 1 game after about 50 matches, good enough for the platinum trophy.

MKX is a fucking huge game and all those people that played MK2 like five centuries ago (myself included) are playing it for whatever strange reason and pretty much all they know how to do is uppercut and hold that block button. Additionally EVERYONE in the FGC is playing this game, and all of them are pretty damn K-Bradlike. So the sheer size of the game has compounded with nostalgia, E-Sports, Twitch, and the power of friendship to create a completely insane, ridiculous top 100 filled with assorted random familiar players from a whole bunch of different games, and all of them have 80-140+ winning streaks going right now.

I’m happy that MKX is so big, but it’s also pretty amusing and I hope you take this in good humor.