Coming soon, with Mike Tycoon

Editorial by Mike Tycoon

I thought I’d run through a few things that are in the pipeline. If you keep an eye on the Twitter or Facebook feeds, or stay active in the forums then you might know a lot of the plans but I’ll summarise a few things here and maybe throw out a few new ideas.

K1 option

There are lots of K1 orgs in the game anyway, so I thought it made sense to formalize it and separate it from the MMA rankings. I know people were a bit concerned that it would become “K1 Tycoon” and not “MMA Tycoon” but I see it as the opposite. Right now you could create a standup only org and you’re ranked in the same group as the MMA orgs, diluting the main rankings. So instead, let’s have separate hype/rankings, proper 10 point must scoring with knockdowns and a standing 8 count and really make the most of it. I think it will be genuinely exciting to have that sort of new game feel to the emerging rankings.

On the negative side, there’s a helluva lot of commentary that needs writing, so I’d appreciate your help with some contributions in the forum thread, here.  Whether we also do boxing only and ground fighting only games I’m not sure, as I think they might be a little lightweight. I’m not ruling it out though if people want to see it.

By the way, when I call it a K1 option it will not be exact K1 rules, it will basically be standup and clinch fighting with no time limits in the clinch and no takedowns. We can’t call it K1 either, because that’s a trademark, so we’ll call it “Kickboxing Rankings” unless anyone has any smart idea for a name.

Tickers

I’m thinking about maybe changing the balance of tickers so that they’re more focussed on age and less on recent training. I gave in to the intense pressure early doors, to slow down the decline. That made the whole concept pretty redundant if nobody ever declines, so we might as well make it easier to maintain up to a certain point (age), then have the age really kick in and make decline more inevitable than the general slog that some people seem to find it.

Game Speed

I’m quite keen to knock a couple of weeks off the game year. It would still be several real life years for a fighter to go through his career but it would still help move things along a bit in terms of fighter evolution.

Website redesign

After seeing the absolutely hideous new BBC Website design completely fail to cater to the users’ needs, it did make me feel a bit better about any minor usability issues we have on here. It did also make me want to make the site look a bit nicer. I’m sure we can improve the homepage to display more content but man…. We have HUNDREDS of pages, so it would be a pretty epic job to change it all. So this is one for the backburner but it’s something I’m considering long term. Shorter term maybe we’ll have a change of background image as I think the faces collage is too dark.

Tycoon Times – Payments for Articles

We’re also planning on paying for articles that are published in the Tycoon Times. Something around the $3k mark maybe. Feel free to suggest a price that would be attractive in the discussion box (bottom left). I might also remove the $5 for buying the Tycoon Times so that it’s just free. Who cares about $5 anyway?!

Sponsorships

Even though hype now means something for clothing and nutrition companies, I’ve only had one sponsorship. I think getting sponsorships going again is a key aspect for keeping new users interested in the game, so any ideas are welcome. I’m not just doing computer generated sales based on hype so forget that one… perhaps people don’t realise how much difference the hype makes when it comes to merchandise sales at events??

Either way, I want to implement some trophies for total sponsorship dollars, total number of fighters sponsored at a time, peak hype reached… stuff like that, for companies to aim for.

I also plan on adding banners for clothing and nutrition companies, much like for gyms (that currently show up on the gym search page). I’m thinking that maybe we could show these banners on the spoiler page at the top, with higher hyped companies displaying more often.

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