Should MMA Tycoon Shorten Its In-Game Year?

Editorial by Cardiff Wanderer

The greatest dilemma facing any game is balancing the need to bring in new members with the desire to keep the current users happy.

In MMA Tycoon terms, the biggest battle is appeasing long term users who have built their fighters over many years with the need to limit their power so new players are not put off by the seemingly insurmountable competition that greets them when they enter the game.

Many solutions have been proposed, discussed and implemented to solve this issue. The most famous of these is the ticker program which degrades a fighters attributes if they are not trained for a period of time.

Unfortunately, none of these plans have satisfactorily fulfilled all the criteria for balancing the game in one broard sweep.

One potential way to introduce fluidity into the game which would allow new managers a path to the top, while giving veterans their deserved advantage and going back to the core focus of the game would be to speed MMA Tycoon's internal clock.

Currently Tycoon works of a 3 month year which means a fighter will be with a manager (if they start at 18 and retire at 38) for 5 real world years. In that time a fighters prime is approximately 18 months (of real time) which is one of the main sources of stagnancy within the top levels of competition.  

If the game speed was doubled, then these fighters would only have a limited time in their prime which might encourage people to take more fights to exploit that window. Marquee match-ups would be a more regular occurrence and storied moments would add to the games lore.

Both new and old members could find advantages with the system. New players could see the lifecycle of fighters, giving them hope that they could have a top fighter without having to dedicate years to the game. While the veteran players would still have the advantage of wealth and experience to get the best out of fighters.

Those who like to build up a project fighter would see the process take a year rather than two while those who like to fight regularly would know that a time limit on a fighters career would limit the colossal stats that some managers have achieved.

Managing an org would be a very different prospect as well. Managers would be clamouring for fights once their new warriors had hit their prime. Fitting everyone into the schedule would be far more intense; much like it was in the earlier days of the game.

This could even reinvigorate the clothing, pharmaceutical and gym market as more fighters would be fighting to gain resources and clothes and supplements would run out twice as past to adjust to the games new speed.

Of course this would make MMA Tycoon a very different game. The sedate pace the game flows at would be modified to a brisk canter so those who enjoy the careful nature of the game could well be put off and walk away.

The new players attracted to the game may be very different as well. Some new recruits may spend  one fighter lifecycle with the game and then disappear while others would look for more intensity to go along with the strategy elements. These players would be different from those who tend to exist within the chambers of Tycoon land.

Then the practicalities of making such a huge direction change must be considered. In fact it may not be possible for the game to make a colossal alteration to the games premise and that is without considering the time such a move would take.  

MMA Tycoon could never return to what it is now, and that is a very high price to pay. The question would be whether such a move would be worth it? 

These are the views of CardiffWanderer and these have no affiliations with MMA Tycoon itself. Find Cardiff on Twitter @CardiffWanderer.  

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