2013 - Coming Soon

Editorial by Mike Tycoon

First of all, hope you all had a great Christmas and New Year. I wanted to post an article about the year gone and the year upcoming, to give people a feeling of where we are headed.

2012 was a really tough year in real life with lots of time consuming problems to sort out and unfortunately that had a negative effect on the game, as I wasn’t able to spend as much time on it as I wanted/needed to. 2013 however, sees life a fair bit more settled and as a result, I hope to really get stuck in with a lot of improvements. The game has always been and will continue to be my full time job.

First off will be the new training system, combined with some improvements to the fight engine. If we can get through January without any dramas, I hope to have this done by March. I would say earlier but it’s better to be cautious on the date because this is a massive job. The new system will be less time intensive for managers in terms of setting training and will mean a wider variety of fighters.

We are adding two new secondary skills, to balance out the standing and ground game and to make the ground game a little more varied, without the need to add any more ground sliders. These two new skills are transitions and escapes. Escapes will be used when trying to stand up. Transitions is for changing position on the ground, sweeps etc.

When it’s ready, you’ll reallocate some of your points from your existing skills, into these two new skill values, so you’re not all starting from 0 in these skills. We’ll explain that more at the time.

We’ll also be adding a new slider for “Counter Strike vs Counter Grapple” to the standup aspect of the game. This will mean that you can offensively strike but counter takedown and will mean more strategic options, especially for ground and clinch fighters; bringing it much more in line with real life tactics.

Going back to training, we are bringing in a new hidden called “Potential”. This potential is a random hidden set anwhere from 78-82%. This is effectively a ceiling which your fighter won’t learn beyond because his little mind can no longer take in any more information. You can continue to train but any points you gain in whatever you train, will come off your other skills, mostly the ones you trained longest ago. This again will mean we have more varied fighters within the game, which will make fighting more interesting and stop all the top fighters basically looking immortal and exactly the same.  If you don’t train anything for a while, you’ll eventually start to lose skills but not as quickly as under the current system.

All in all the hope is that it will make training less taxing and annoying for those who don’t like tickers, whilst also making the fighting aspect of the game (the point of the game after all), more fun and varied.

Once that’s done, there are a number of quick to medium things we’ll be doing to both address some issues with the game economy as well as just add more fun things to do.

-          We will be looking into the arenas issue, to address the inherent unfairness of the large LA arena. We’ll decrease the capacity of the LA super arena and add a decent sized arena in Europe. We’ll also have a look at the event rating calculations to see if that can be improved and retrospectively change existing event ratings if we need to do that for fairness / to have accurate historic records, going forwards.

-          We’ll have another discussion about the fight engine in general around March time. I’m hearing that it’s performing pretty well as of now, with people’s main gripe being energy recovery once you get gassed / winded. We’ll get that looked at and I will also be changing the way leg kicks affect a fight. At the moment it’s pretty much the same as a body kick but less powerful, whereby both damage your fighter’s in game energy levels. Instead, we’ll make leg kicks effectively affect speed, whilst body kicks affect energy, if people agree with that assessment. If not, we’ll discuss that at the time.

-          Fun-wise, I’m also going to add a submission grappling tournament, along the lines of the ADCC in real life. We will have regional qualifiers and different belt divisions (so a division for each belt colour), followed by a global final. We will run this maybe 2-4 times a year with all the relevant trophies. I’ll look to start programming this in the 2nd quarter of the year.

-          We’ll make some changes to the way Free Agents are handed out, so they don’t just go to the highest ranked manager. That will still play a big part but will become one of a few criteria (of which we’ll have a discussion at the time).

-          Cornermen – I’d like to get this implemented, as it’s been promised for a while. Unfortunately lots of other things came up and it kind of got lost in the mire but it is still high up on the to-do list.

-          Separate rankings for QFC fighters / orgs. With QFC orgs increasing in popularity, I’d like to separate their rankings both to make the main rankings pure and also to give a bit more interest to the QFC orgs. This will be both org and fighter rankings.

That lot should keep us busy for a good half a year at least and along the way I’m sure we’ll add plenty of other little bits and pieces too.

If you have any ideas that you would like to see implemented, please suggest it in the improvements section of the forum. Also, if you’re a programmer and would like to contribute to the site, please make yourself know to me via PM, with what you’d be willing to do. If there are any little projects, we might be able to match up ideas and programmers and get more stuff done.

Thanks for your continued support of the site and I look forward to a great 2013!

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