I have been playing offline, shoulder to shoulder MK since I was 13 years old and MK1 had just been released. It was a much more enjoyable time. None of this "online rage quitting/shit talking/general BS" that goes on nowadays....but....I live in Wichita, Kansas and always have. The offline community here is D-E-A-D. Online is my only option. Back when MK was big in the arcade, I would play random people, kick their ass, and they'd leave after one match. I understand because they don't want to keep losing money, but that really sucked for me because it made me spend a majority of my play time fighting the AI. That sucked. Very rarely would I ever encounter anyone of any caliber. They never stuck around either.
So flash forward 20 years and when I started going online to play MK, I got the ever-loving shit kicked out of me because I spent 20 years playing the AI and couldn't hold my own against real people. That's what living in a place like Wichita will do for you. There is absolutely no offline people around here so my skill dwindled terribly over the years to a point where I wasn't really any good anymore and I began to lose interest in even trying to get better against real people.