Everyone in the fighting game community is excited about this week’s recent Mortal Kombat 11. But, according to a thread on Reddit, this installment of guts and blood isn’t all tea and sunsets when it comes to microtransactions.
Reddit user AccomplishedPoet8 calculated exactly how much money and/or effort it would take to get every skin in the game and it’s not a pretty sight. Due to the significant amount of customization and unlocks, he figured out that it would take $6440.00 to unlock every skin or well over 3000 hours of playtime. That’s no small feat!
He starts by explaining that this isn’t from the get-go, either. This would involve the initial work to “finish the campaign, do every character tutorial and complete the basic towers.” No other grinding is needed for this math to work out. But, as every public school student is familiar with, he shows his work to go along with it to show he’s not making up figured and makes basic assumptions based around the RNG of the game.
The poster then continued on by explaining that a single skin costs 500 Time Crystals, which comes to about $5.00. As they accumulate pretty slowly, he’s left them out of his math.
“Skins appear in the store on a rotational basis,” AccomplishedPoet8 explains in bullet points, “where a set of five skins are made available for a limited period of time (usually 6 to 8 hours), then they are gone and you have to grind the towers to earn them. This adds to the urgency to quickly spend money on that skin you always wanted. For our calculations to be valid, we will assume you never see a duplicate skin in the store and you check the store every 6 hours or so.”
Since there are twenty-three fighters in the game currently and each character has sixty skins, he did the math accordingly. Taking out four skins per fighter due to them being unlocked via tutorial leaves us with a whopping 1,288 skins left to unlock. He notes that this is including the “patch which the devs promised would solve the progression issues.” At five bucks a pop, the math comes to his grand total of $6440 and that it doesn’t even include “fatalities, brutalities, gear or single use consumables.”
He figured out the math for how long it would take to manually get everything via grinding by actually playing the game and timing himself. After four hours of play, he had earned 760 Time Crystals, meaning he would need 3390 hours total into the game to get it all. O put that into perspective, that is over 141 days straight with no sleep, grinding on MK11.
He finally notes that in Mortal Kombat X, players could unlock all skins, fatalities, brutalities, and DLC for a total of $40.
It’s interesting to see how the costs adds up, though NetherRealm did make a few recent changes to the game’s economy with more on the way. But, $6000 worth of content after a $60 game might be a little steep for most players.
Neatherrealm has stated yesterday that they will come up with a solution for this. “We have seen that there are some players that are struggling with progression, the Towers of Time, and with the Krypt,” Tyler Lansdown, community manager at NetherRealm, stated during yesterday’s Kombat Kast. “So we do have a fix rolling out ASAP to address our players who are having those problems to address balance and to address the rewards you get from playing.” But, in the meantime, the grind problem remains for now.
Published: Apr 24, 2019 07:36 pm