Site Redesign Competition

[Face Kicker]

1 mma news feeds current and up to date (the site could post its own rss feed)

2 mma links to events where people can watch.(a very good friend of mine runs such a site and i suspect wouldnt mind posting links)

3 possible torrents for download of mma events (again very easy to put together with existing torrent sites)

4 a better ingame communication system ,people would stay online longer if there was a chat client NOT a shoutbox where people can add friends etc

5 tickers!!! introduction of tickers took our membership from 10,000 to under 7,000 people just thought na to much work , people like to win plain and simple , they like to come online ,set training and check in a few times per week ,at the momment its a bit like owning a farm where things become chores not tasks and have to be done every day , for the fanatic its great ,but for the average player its a turn off.

 

1- there's a feed in the forums, and people already complain about spoilers. i think it's best to ensure the main site is spoiler free, so that nobody has to actively avoid it for that reason. perhaps if there were an option to disable the feed, but otherwise i think it's a bad idea.

2- links to what? prelims on facebook and illegal streams? i see no point in that, as no good would come of it.

3- oh you mean copyright infringement? yeah probably not a good idea.

4- ingame chat would be great.

5- how would you propose to deal with skill decline as fighters age, and how to avoid quad elite fighters with all elite physicals and 6 to 8 elite secondaries (and those skills are not an exaggeration)?

[Guest]

1- there's a feed in the forums, and people already complain about spoilers. i think it's best to ensure the main site is spoiler free, so that nobody has to actively avoid it for that reason. perhaps if there were an option to disable the feed, but otherwise i think it's a bad idea.

2- links to what? prelims on facebook and illegal streams? i see no point in that, as no good would come of it.

3- oh you mean copyright infringement? yeah probably not a good idea.

4- ingame chat would be great.

5- how would you propose to deal with skill decline as fighters age, and how to avoid quad elite fighters with all elite physicals and 6 to 8 elite secondaries (and those skills are not an exaggeration)?

 

 

Agree with all of this. On #5 i think Tickers need to go. I am keep putting my once a week maintanence off an i think once i get behind the tickers will be what forces me from the game. I would rather have training speed slowed down rather than tickers where you lose what you already built. The tickers were realistic but not worth all the problems. People cant leave the game for aeven a little while. You cant give a fighter a break you cant train every skill, you cant improve anything for a specific fight. Released fighters are hurt, inactive managers have no reason to come back. All of this when there is other options. I personally would go with a hidden "prime" age where the fighter starts to slow down in learning and it keeps getting slower and slower until you are stuck at that skill until you retire or reach a forced retirement. I would also make all learnign speeds about the same or a speed that fluxuates from session to session. This would prevent testing and make people run with the fighter they created and you dont know where that training wall is until you hit it. Might be 25, 28, or 33. Lets turn this back into a fighter management game rather than who is best at hacking and using loop holes and getting faster fighters than everyone else.

[haystax]

WARNING .... A LONG POST IS COMING!!!!

 

 

I think we can keep the heart and soul of the text based game in place while stepping it up visually and creatively on the web design.

 

What I meant when i said I agreed with soul was this .... the current site looks like it is from the AOL era of web design. There is zero that is I find kind to the eye about it. And that is not something that new side borders, a lighter color palette and a new logo is going to resolve. I am going to discuss in depth what I see as flaws in the design/layout of the site as it is right now. And some ways to fix them, while not corrupting the soul of the game.

 

Index page - The first page a new player comes upon when finding the site. Has a 2"x3" blurb about what the game is, all text. A menu with links to find out more about the game, contact info, registration links, etc. Then below that it just space taken up by information that ONLY people in the game care about. The only quality piece of the entire lower half of the page is the fact that you can click on the fighter/manager links to see a sample of those type pages. Like I have said a couple times now ... this page, alone, almost made me not sign up for the game back when I did. It is so much text based info, and only a very small fraction of it matters to the guy that has just stumbled onto the URL. Throw onto that the tired color scheme and logo work, and I can see how it might be a severe bottleneck to getting new managers to take the bait.

 

While here, I want to bring up the "aboutus.php" page. This is the page that goes into detail about the game to a new manager. It is still a lot of text, but is much closer to what I would want to see on the main index page. A blocked blurb about managing fighters/fighter creation ... a blocked blurb about creating/running companies ... a blocked blurb about alliances ... a blocked blurb for the actual fight engine itself. By blocked blurb, I am talking about a small screenshot type image of a sample of each of these and no more than 5 bullet points about each one. You can fill the misused space at the bottom of the index page with these 4 blurbs and completely eliminate one whole page from your database.

 

That cuts the "What is MMA Tycoon?" from the menu and then the other links get cleaned up ...

- affiliate information moves to the contact page which is linked twice on the main page now (menu and footer), cut it from the menu all together.

- "forgot details" and "resend activation email" morph into links under the actual LOGIN and CLEAR buttons like they are on most sites.

- rework that now unused space that was the menu and make it look attractive, with a clear register button.

 

 

Spoiler page - After signing up, this is where you land. What do you see when you get there? An even larger menu, now a mismash of text and sometimes nondescript buttons .... and a HUGE wall of text. It takes me 40 single clicks on the down arrow on the scroll bar to see the whole thing ... not counting the fight 20 fights area at the bottom. That's on a 19" monitor running at 1440x900. Not a great resolution, but still, that's ridiculous. We currently show the last 10ish News updates before archiving and 20ish game updates before cutting them off and archiving. Do we really need this many showing at all times? Do I have a major need if I have played in the ohhhh, last two months to see what was changed in February this year? We could truncate those down to FIVE news and FIVE game updates and have the archive links right there as they are. That cuts that page length in half. To even further streamline that area, setting those news updates as bold headlines that expand into the full update crushes the space even tighter and makes it that much better. I know some wont like that because they will miss things. So leave the latest news update as is, and minimize the older four updates before the archive cutoff.

 

 

Profile page - The meat to the site. Again, the issue with the menu is there, it's across the board. I personally feel there is more info than needed on the page. For a user like myself, the blog block is unused space. Could the guestbook and blog areas be better housed elsewhere ... behind a link or something. Is that information important enough to take up that much real estate when a certain % of the community never bothers with it? I have never posted a blog entry and have read very few, easily counted on one hand, blogs from others. As for the guestbook, maybe a little harder to justify its removal as many people use it quite a bit, but I do not understand it's use at all to be honest. With most things on the site, I don't think we need the last 20 fights listed, and think that 10 is enough.

 

 

This is really getting long and I am partially losing my vision here. Basically, I want to see less information thrown at me only as text. I need more visual stimulation outside of text. I want to be at least be able to do away with complete sections that I have NO interest in seeing. I like the idea of a horizontal menu with drop downs of some variety over the vertical one we have now. That frees up the horizontal space completely to be used more creatively. I do not want to turn this game into a console game. I like what the game is at it's core, I've just never enjoyed the wrapper it is presented in and in fact have grown to really dislike it.

[haystax]

Here, maybe this will explain my vision a little better. I'm not saying just like this, but I have always enjoyed how this game has worked their site. This is only the index page for it, as I don't think the rest of the site transfers as well. But we have to agree and start somewhere. It is simple and effective at explaining what the site is about. It has enough visual pop to catch your (at least my) eye and shows what it waiting when I sign up ... all at a glance. There is no reason we couldn't follow a trend like this as a basic idea for a building block.

 

http://img191.imageshack.us/img191/263/glbexample.jpg

[Guest]

i agree with the above post

but @mike your giving the game away for free yes? and membership is declining yes? so you have a problem yes?

until mike sees this for himself we are flogging a dead horse put it simple its not working in its current format , numbers dont lie

what we lost 4,000 members over the last two years? so where will we be in the next two years?

@mike this may be your baby but at the end of the day its a product and products need to be sold in thier best possible format and currently its not being done justice

i dont really care as i am not making any money from it , but i know how much servers cost per month i have rented a few in my time.

to be totaly honest you would be better off trying to sell the game to a reputed game company and take a percentage , they would then bring thier own designers in and overhaul everything

and i bet it would be a console type design , membership would go up , compertition would get steeper ,and the game would progress.

 

as answer to the utterly stupid remarks about are feeds or torrents breaking the law???

simply put NO! as long as there is no content on this site , anyone can post links to any site they wish , this is 2012 ffs

I dont know where the actual server for this game is , but most are in holand or scandanavian countries , rest assured if this game server is bassed in either it can stream porn 24 hours a day and not get done

 

edit

i formed the alliance GTI what a lot of people dont know is GTI= grabthe.info, google it you will get something along the lines of probably the best mma torrent download site on the internet.

i have been staff there for over seven years and it holds everything possible you can think of about mma ,we have only once got an email of warning and that was from activision asking us to take down our torrent links to thier products ,which we did , that was three years ago , torrent sites dont break any laws as they only provide links , not actual content

[minark]

i agree with the above post

but @mike your giving the game away for free yes? and membership is declining yes? so you have a problem yes?

until mike sees this for himself we are flogging a dead horse put it simple its not working in its current format , numbers dont lie

what we lost 4,000 members over the last two years? so where will we be in the next two years?

@mike this may be your baby but at the end of the day its a product and products need to be sold in thier best possible format and currently its not being done justice

i dont really care as i am not making any money from it , but i know how much servers cost per month i have rented a few in my time.

to be totaly honest you would be better off trying to sell the game to a reputed game company and take a percentage , they would then bring thier own designers in and overhaul everything

and i bet it would be a console type design , membership would go up , compertition would get steeper ,and the game would progress.

 

as answer to the utterly stupid remarks about are feeds or torrents breaking the law???

simply put NO! as long as there is no content on this site , anyone can post links to any site they wish , this is 2012 ffs

I dont know where the actual server for this game is , but most are in holand or scandanavian countries , rest assured if this game server is bassed in either it can stream porn 24 hours a day and not get done

 

edit

i formed the alliance GTI what a lot of people dont know is GTI= grabthe.info, google it you will get something along the lines of probably the best mma torrent download site on the internet.

i have been staff there for over seven years and it holds everything possible you can think of about mma ,we have only once got an email of warning and that was from activision asking us to take down our torrent links to thier products ,which we did , that was three years ago , torrent sites dont break any laws as they only provide links , not actual content

 

Those same designers would also make it so you could spend RL money on boosts and we'd turn into any other farm town or stupid game that thousands of people play and spend money on here and there and in the long run the people who spend the most would do the best and the people who didn't spend money would sit at the bottom and rot.

 

Now that that's out of the way, just stop. Console is not the way to go. We're not on a console. Is that so hard to understand. If you remember correctly we lost about 3k people when tickers came into place. GAME CHANGES LOST MEMBERS, not site design. GET OVER IT PEOPLE. Everyone who thinks the layout being browser based is the reason this game hasn't thrived needs a reality check. All of these games we're comparing this against have HUGE advertisement bases. Many advertise on actual sport sites and many are downloadable and advertised constantly on Facebook. The facts are that MMATycoon doesn't have an iphone or andriod app, it doesn't have a facebook app or add-on or whatever. It's just not advertised like these games you people keep trying to compare it to. If MMATycoon was advertised on TUF commercials or if it had it's own add on all the MMA websites, numbers would be thriving.

 

In conclusion, console is the wrong way to go. You people need to be reasonable and realize that the reason for growth and decline on this game is hardly because of the layout. While that may swing it a bit(as in a couple 100 people whichever way) to say that's the difference between 6,000 and 20,000 members is beyond ignorant.

 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

EDIT - And as far as SLVRBCK's idea goes, I do really like a lot of those ideas. That cleaned up version that still keeps the browser base look appears to be a clean and easy to follow look. I've never been on that site, but just looking at that home page makes me want to sign up. Lol

[Guest]

How many times does Mike have to say he isnt interested it your guys approach? I know your trying to help but its bordering on being rude. He knows his situation and the games better than anyone. A new model isnt going to change anything. The only way to grow the game is advertisement. Mike isnt in a position to do that right now. So he needs to keep it simple and keep people playing for long periods of time. That means game play improvements and some design and color changes to change things up a little. Other idea might be better they might not. But at this point they wouldnt add anythign to be worth the time and effort it takes and the concerns that mike mentioned. Just not worth it. Maybe after the game is bigger when he is in position to advertise. But if this is as big as the game will ever be or the game is short lived. There is no point in a complete overhaul.

[Nemesis84]

People say the site is down 4000 memebers etc but I seem to remember the number plumiting when all the multi's were deleted in the big purge so in reality there was never 10,000 people playing. There was, give or take, around 7000-8000 people and a load of multi accounts from within that number and there is now just under 7000 so the loss of actual players is not as big as sone like to claim.

 

Mike has said what he wants and said what he doesn't by responding to the idea's given, as Brainsmasher said just going on and on with the same thing when Mike has already said its not going to happen is just a waste of time. If you think the game should be done in a certain way then build your own game that way and you can laugh at Mike and all us who stick with this game if it does die but at the end of the day its Mike's game and while some of us may pay real money to play it that doesn't mean we have any rights over it and if people don't like that or think its going to die due to how Mike wants to run it then don't buy VIP or extra fighter slots and protect your money, but don't expect him to to bow to users pressure when its him who keeps the site running regarless of the income it generates or lack there of.

[Guest]

as answer to the utterly stupid remarks about are feeds or torrents breaking the law???

simply put NO! as long as there is no content on this site , anyone can post links to any site they wish , this is 2012 ffs

 

Apologies in advance for going off-topic, but I'm curious about this comment. I'm no expert, but I would have thought that a site that charges money for VIP membership, and then provides torrents and streams of copyrighted works would be extremely illegal. Why isn't it?

[toejam98]

LOL, it may not be illegal but sites arn't going to advertise or be associated with a site posting links to torrents and streams. So say good bye UFC feed, goodbye MMA Playground, goodbye .... etc

 

im pretty sure it is illegal tho, if you remember channelsurfing.net was shut down, all they did was link.

[Guest]

Apologies in advance for going off-topic, but I'm curious about this comment. I'm no expert, but I would have thought that a site that charges money for VIP membership, and then provides torrents and streams of copyrighted works would be extremely illegal. Why isn't it?

no apologies needed , no you are not breaking the law by providing links to illigal content for use of a better word , the reason is as long as the content is not stored on your server you are not breaking the law.

mmatcoon could infact provide links to streams,downloads,of as much mma content as it wants , its simply providing a signpost,BUT if this was a big site with 20,000 plus members and everyone clicked on links , the site devs would have to use a proxy link manager what are free and totaly legal again , these simply hide the address from where the click came from , so for instance if mma.com suddenly had a huge amount of hits and they decided to check where those hits came from , they wouldnt be shown as comming from mma tycoon. so to sum up you can signpost what you want to ,and your not breaking the law , these are facts btw

 

edit: to take this further i have for some years mow created my own toolbars which sit in chrome,firefox and IE these are browser add ons ,and provide links to anything i think people just wouldnt stumble across , i did create one for mma tycoon last year , and it bypassed all the menus on the front page of the game , i just put all the options in dropdown menus on the toolbar , i also provided links to live streams ,and mma downloads , this toolbar is now defunked . the purpose for me getting into toolbar creation in the first place was because people in work would ask me to get a copy of a film or a game or something , so i thought it be easier to get them to do a 10 second toolbar instal that would provide them with everything they needed ,at the moment i have three of my own toolbars still active.

the mma tycoon one i did provided the user with quick access to all pages in the game just by scrolling over and a menu dropped down ,very easy to use.

 

edit by Mike - don't post links to torrents please, whether you think it's legal or not.

[Guest]

no apologies needed , no you are not breaking the law by providing links to illigal content for use of a better word , the reason is as long as the content is not stored on your server you are not breaking the law.

mmatcoon could infact provide links to streams,downloads,of as much mma content as it wants , its simply providing a signpost,BUT if this was a big site with 20,000 plus members and everyone clicked on links , the site devs would have to use a proxy link manager what are free and totaly legal again , these simply hide the address from where the click came from , so for instance if mma.com suddenly had a huge amount of hits and they decided to check where those hits came from , they wouldnt be shown as comming from mma tycoon. so to sum up you can signpost what you want to ,and your not breaking the law , these are facts btw

 

edit: to take this further i have for some years mow created my own toolbars which sit in chrome,firefox and IE these are browser add ons ,and provide links to anything i think people just wouldnt stumble across , i did create one for mma tycoon last year , and it bypassed all the menus on the front page of the game , i just put all the options in dropdown menus on the toolbar , i also provided links to live streams ,and mma downloads , this toolbar is now defunked . the purpose for me getting into toolbar creation in the first place was because people in work would ask me to get a copy of a film or a game or something , so i thought it be easier to get them to do a 10 second toolbar instal that would provide them with everything they needed ,at the moment i have three of my own toolbars still active.

the mma tycoon one i did provided the user with quick access to all pages in the game just by scrolling over and a menu dropped down ,very easy to use.

 

edit by Mike - don't post links to torrents please, whether you think it's legal or not.

 

Ahem - Tell that to Isohunt, BTJunkie, Pirate Bay, Mininova, Torrentspy, etc. It's illegal dude, it's "assisting in making copyright content available" (See Piratebay ruling). Many of these people have been sued and/or investigated by the FBI, have been found guilty, and have had their servers seized and shut down. I don't think MMATycoon could survive or afford the legal backlash on 10 dollar VIP buys. For example, torrentspy was ordered by the US Courts to pay 110 million dollars in damages to the MPAA.

[Guest]

Agree with all of this. On #5 i think Tickers need to go. I am keep putting my once a week maintanence off an i think once i get behind the tickers will be what forces me from the game. I would rather have training speed slowed down rather than tickers where you lose what you already built. The tickers were realistic but not worth all the problems. People cant leave the game for aeven a little while. You cant give a fighter a break you cant train every skill, you cant improve anything for a specific fight. Released fighters are hurt, inactive managers have no reason to come back. All of this when there is other options. I personally would go with a hidden "prime" age where the fighter starts to slow down in learning and it keeps getting slower and slower until you are stuck at that skill until you retire or reach a forced retirement. I would also make all learnign speeds about the same or a speed that fluxuates from session to session. This would prevent testing and make people run with the fighter they created and you dont know where that training wall is until you hit it. Might be 25, 28, or 33. Lets turn this back into a fighter management game rather than who is best at hacking and using loop holes and getting faster fighters than everyone else.

yep. i think this sums it all up just about perfectly

[Guest]

no apologies needed , no you are not breaking the law by providing links to illigal content for use of a better word , the reason is as long as the content is not stored on your server you are not breaking the law.

mmatcoon could infact provide links to streams,downloads,of as much mma content as it wants , its simply providing a signpost,BUT if this was a big site with 20,000 plus members and everyone clicked on links , the site devs would have to use a proxy link manager what are free and totaly legal again , these simply hide the address from where the click came from , so for instance if mma.com suddenly had a huge amount of hits and they decided to check where those hits came from , they wouldnt be shown as comming from mma tycoon. so to sum up you can signpost what you want to ,and your not breaking the law , these are facts btw

 

edit: to take this further i have for some years mow created my own toolbars which sit in chrome,firefox and IE these are browser add ons ,and provide links to anything i think people just wouldnt stumble across , i did create one for mma tycoon last year , and it bypassed all the menus on the front page of the game , i just put all the options in dropdown menus on the toolbar , i also provided links to live streams ,and mma downloads , this toolbar is now defunked . the purpose for me getting into toolbar creation in the first place was because people in work would ask me to get a copy of a film or a game or something , so i thought it be easier to get them to do a 10 second toolbar instal that would provide them with everything they needed ,at the moment i have three of my own toolbars still active.

the mma tycoon one i did provided the user with quick access to all pages in the game just by scrolling over and a menu dropped down ,very easy to use.

 

edit by Mike - don't post links to torrents please, whether you think it's legal or not.

 

mike there were no links there only a copy pasted link list ? nobody could possibly download anything from the content i posted as its an invite only site in the first place , i was pointing out to other members what is available each week , i didnt say how they could get the content

[Guest]

Ahem - Tell that to Isohunt, BTJunkie, Pirate Bay, Mininova, Torrentspy, etc. It's illegal dude, it's "assisting in making copyright content available" (See Piratebay ruling). Many of these people have been sued and/or investigated by the FBI, have been found guilty, and have had their servers seized and shut down. I don't think MMATycoon could survive or afford the legal backlash on 10 dollar VIP buys. For example, torrentspy was ordered by the US Courts to pay 110 million dollars in damages to the MPAA.

i did state earlier in the thread it all depends where the server is ??? and DID SAY if the server is in a scandinavian country or in holland you will not get prosecuted as thier laws are diffrent to the USA

i understand your concern and thank you for pointing this out , but in reality who ever downloads from any of the sites you mention above??? you would have to be a complete idiot to do so as they are public trackers.

 

anyone downloading from public trackers are just asking for it , not so much a fine as it would be to much work , you download from public trackers and you are sticking your dick into a wasps nest ,anyone can embed anything in a file for public download its far to easy and is pretty common practice for someone to stick a trojan in a download ,also since the rush of android apps on the torrent scene there are a lot of phones getting hacked. the public trackers are to be avoided at all costs.

on the other hand you have private trackers and if established and have a good name these are safe.

in reply to torrentspy getting caught ? serves his own right he listed the tracker in his own name , used his own email address , and paid for the server with his own bank account???? wtf lol he also used advertising for soft porn sites to fund his costs , nothing like waving a red flag and saying come and get me.

the 110 million dollars by the way ? do you know how much has been paid ? $0.00

the FBI can fine who the hell they like , the problem is they can only demand in america the rest of the world just laugh at them ,the end story of torrentspy is it got shutdown on monday and reopened under a diffrent name on thursday sort of thing , american law doesnt count for nothing outside of the USA

[Guest]

Well, your pretty much wrong. If it effects US business and trade, they can request extradition (see Kim Dotcom). The Piratebay was located in Sweden, a Scandinavian country, and the owners are going to prison, and were fined a few million dollars. Bithumen the largest Hungarian tracker had it's servers seized. A quote from the report:

 

"It should be mentioned that it was the pressure from the United States that made Hungarian authorities to carry at least 2 notable raids against online piracy – in 2007 and 2009."

 

We're really getting off topic though, it doesn't matter if you would "Have to be totally stupid" to download from a public tracker. Public or private, it's still illegal, across the world.

[Guest]

Are you guys making this in Css or photoshop

[Guest]

All that is needed for the time being is a visual - so just Photoshop

[Guest]

ok

[Guest]

 

http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/4796/collaborationattempt3.jpg

 

I really like this, nice and clean.

[byrk]

main thing with Warbringers layout is, that by the most part its mostly just... switching red streaks into black ones. The main window changes so little, its almost no change.

The gray layout on the other hand is very fresh and "up to date", thought it needs some work too.

[Guest]

Ok so I was messing around with the idea of a new logo and came up with this using what Mike has said about liking the green in his AV etc...

 

http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/4716/logoajf.jpg

 

And this is how it looks in a very rough page header that I made as an example using the current front page

 

http://img534.imageshack.us/img534/843/hometbf.jpg

 

Obviously that can be improved on greatly but thought I would throw it out there as a first go.

 

please no !

[Guest]

and why we need different design? i cant even get threw all these new updates if it will be in different design i will have to take a month off to get back have this game works.

[Guest]

Well, I must have missed the part about the tradional website haha, as I went a bit from that, BUT perhaps this could still work? This is my first draft of my design anyways so here we go!

 

http://i1238.photobucket.com/albums/ff495/UntouchGFX/MMATSite3Spoilerpage.png

http://i1238.photobucket.com/albums/ff495/UntouchGFX/MMATSite3Spoilerpage.png

 

^The page is on the profile page with all the little details there.

I used the old buttons and such which will get replaced. There are some additional effects going over it to make it all work together a bit more.

Also, the size of the spoiler page, and other pages are not looking optimal, but its just to give you an idea of where it would go.

 

With me just reading abuot the traditional website, I probably need to go in and make another design instead.

 

Feedback is more than welcome though!!!!

 

why wee need so big spoiler page? you read it 1 time and its it not like you have to look at it all the time and the most important stats are so small come on.

[Guest]

http://img256.imageshack.us/img256/845/tycoonlogo.jpg

 

That looks a lot better imo!

 

this looks like in 3 grade