Is this game dying?

[Julian]

Just follow the model an online tennis management game (rocking rackets) uses, and that is to have multiple game worlds that vary in game speed. E.g. world 1 is the normal pace, 1 game day=1 actual day, world 2 fast paced, 4 hours irl = 1 game day, and so on. It will most likely segregate the current player-base but will also welcome returning and newer ones due to the variety of game speeds. This will allow the original world to be untouched, and basically create newer, faster-paced ones with new history etc.

[jjsquirrel]

Yes changing the learning speed would have a number of secondary effects throughout the game. Some that could be be hard to see in advance. But if this really is the holy grail that will bring the inactive managers back I suppose it has to be done. As long as there is an active developer around to fix & balance things it might work out.. but there are some big if:s in here. And if the key assumption turns out to be wrong or the whole thing is poorly executed it may instead kill the game.

Segregating in different worlds is an interesting thought but comes with some practical concerns. Island still has a lot of connections to the main world, like sharing rankings and using the same database table for fighters so creating in one world would advance the all-important id in both. Seems like a good deal of development would have to go into just sorting the infrastructure.

Another option would be to spin up a whole new tycoon instance, but that would have to go on a separate server/domain name -> again some effort & investment for Mike but maybe not as much. And we would have to deal with having separate manager accounts for the two tycoon versions.. and separate VIP day counters.

[jjsquirrel]

Problem: It takes too long to get to open id.

Simple solution: Allow fighter creation with enough skill points that they can go directly into open id. Have some minimum age for this (so they don't unfairly get a longer career), maybe a VIP cost or whatever. We can just say they came from another fighting sport like kickboxing or something. Maybe you cannot allocate every point exactly, but some will be sprinkled randomly across skills to simulate how you cannot get a perfectly minmaxed fighter through regular training.

[CelticStryder]

12 hours ago, Mentor said:

It also means you have to also alter other things in the game such as injuries, cuts, how regularly orgs can hold events (as fighters will need to compete more regularly). Not to mention any such changes will totally destroy all legacies and historical records, as basically it means the rules have also been changed.

Don't mean to take your entire post out of context but the part I quote above confuses me. I dont understand how cuts/injuries and how often orgs can hold events need to change as well or how it ruins historical records and legacies? If you were to speed up the game itself so lets say 36 days IRL equals 1 year in game then essentially you are getting 10 years in game for every 1 IRL (opposed to 4 right now). That shouldn't effect the age at which fighters hit Open ID or when they start to depop because their aging speed would also increase. In terms of cuts/injuries 16 days would equal 5+ months so the only thing I see here is fighters with a good cuts/injury hidden being rewarded. Most fighters likely still get in at least 2-3 fights per in game year which if they fight from 18-35 that equals somewhere between 35-50 fights. Also not sure what the concern is surrounding how regularily orgs can hold cards because you can book cards every single day..... unless you war talking about the penalty the game applies for holding more than two cards in a seven day period. If thats the case then just remove that penalty.

I am just giving my opinion that the game struggles to grow and retain players because its too slow. Most new players end up leaving because the game moves too slowly that they dont stick around long enough to really learn what they are doing. The ones that you mention have been around for a long time ultimately get bored and either leave for extended periods of time before coming back or they just get bored and leave altogether. Not saying any of these more elaborate suggestions on how to fix the game are bad ideas and dont mean to disresepct anyones ideas...... but lets be honest here...... The game still has VIP features dedicated to stats from 2010 and many pages that havent been updated since that time either..... its 2023!!!!! So what do we think the odds are that Mike or anyone else is going to completely rehaul the Island system when we cant even get a simple page either updated or removed in 13 years?

[ArtieBanks]

7 hours ago, jjsquirrel said:

Yes changing the learning speed would have a number of secondary effects throughout the game. Some that could be be hard to see in advance. But if this really is the holy grail that will bring the inactive managers back I suppose it has to be done. As long as there is an active developer around to fix & balance things it might work out.. but there are some big if:s in here. And if the key assumption turns out to be wrong or the whole thing is poorly executed it may instead kill the game.

Segregating in different worlds is an interesting thought but comes with some practical concerns. Island still has a lot of connections to the main world, like sharing rankings and using the same database table for fighters so creating in one world would advance the all-important id in both. Seems like a good deal of development would have to go into just sorting the infrastructure.

Another option would be to spin up a whole new tycoon instance, but that would have to go on a separate server/domain name -> again some effort & investment for Mike but maybe not as much. And we would have to deal with having separate manager accounts for the two tycoon versions.. and separate VIP day counters.

 

There were two active developers who were really keen back in March/April. The first thing we brought up was speeding up learning. I wasn't too fussed at speeding up the actual game - in actual fact i'd be against it. This game can take you 5 minutes per week or 1 hour per day which is a lot of the charm and allows for a varied userbase with people who have little to no time on their hands to those who have a lot of time on their hands. 

The biggest issues were as following. The game was held together with sticky tape basically. Everytime one of the devs improved or fixed something that it broke something else and these were just minor tweaks.

The learning speed could only affect new creations and not current ones based on the fact that it is a database and you would have to go through each fighter individually to bump up their learning speed or something to that effect. They planned to try it at 400k but as I continue that just wasn't going to happen. 

The other idea was thrown out like some people in here of basically another server to allow this one to run its course and people to play on an 'Island' until this part had run its course and it could be merged back together again. The biggest issue was it could erase the history of the game basically but it was an idea that was put forward at the time. 

The biggest issue was that a few players in the game were actively exploiting bugs in the game - this wasn't just a money glitch either although that was part of it. The dev team basically had to run around securing different parts of the game to try and stop it. There were times they managed to patch up one thing and by the time they fixed that there was another bug being abused - this carried on for months and was basically their job trying to fix it rather than trying to improve the game. Both of the devs then went on holiday and to my knowledge haven't done anything since returning in October. Mike as far as we are aware doesn't have the time, energy or desire to really do anything with the game - those two devs in my view were the last lifeline the game had to actually get proper improvements. 

[jjsquirrel]

45 minutes ago, ArtieBanks said:

 

The learning speed could only affect new creations and not current ones based on the fact that it is a database and you would have to go through each fighter individually

Hmm, something like: update fighters set learningspeed = learningspeed*1.1;

would give a 10% increase across the board for all fighters. If you want a nonlinear dropoff based on fighter age instead you write in whatever the formula is in the query. Easy for me to say of course having never seen the db or game code.. but I'm willing to bet I could do it if you gave me access

But your last sentence kind of nails it down. If the owner for whatever reason has no time or even worse desire to run the game it will eventually die. I got my hope up as I saw some development happening, came back to join 400K. The biggest opportunity ever maybe to bring old managers back and breathe some life into things again with a big id turn and development plans. But nothing, not even starting Island season as promised.

The level of mismanagement here could have killed big budget AAA games but this old thing lives on like a garden weed refusing to die despite the abuse it gets. The game nailed a couple of things perfectly, like the fight engine. That and the community kept it alive for years. But the lack of communication, the feeling that there is no one at the helm, that is simply demoralizing.

[ArtieBanks]

59 minutes ago, jjsquirrel said:

Hmm, something like: update fighters set learningspeed = learningspeed*1.1;

would give a 10% increase across the board for all fighters. If you want a nonlinear dropoff based on fighter age instead you write in whatever the formula is in the query. Easy for me to say of course having never seen the db or game code.. but I'm willing to bet I could do it if you gave me access

But your last sentence kind of nails it down. If the owner for whatever reason has no time or even worse desire to run the game it will eventually die. I got my hope up as I saw some development happening, came back to join 400K. The biggest opportunity ever maybe to bring old managers back and breathe some life into things again with a big id turn and development plans. But nothing, not even starting Island season as promised.

The level of mismanagement here could have killed big budget AAA games but this old thing lives on like a garden weed refusing to die despite the abuse it gets. The game nailed a couple of things perfectly, like the fight engine. That and the community kept it alive for years. But the lack of communication, the feeling that there is no one at the helm, that is simply demoralizing.

The last I heard regarding the Island was months ago from one of the devs who said Mike wanted all the glitches out before releasing it. As far as I know that was just before September when one of the devs went on holiday. They were planning to put out a patch when the other went on holiday so that got put on hold and since then nothing has came out.

Regarding the learning speed - I thought it would be simple also but was told it wasn't and i'll take his word for it. 

[jjsquirrel]

I only heard some vague rumour about a money glitch, had no idea there were several floating around. And no news about any issues being patched. If you announce a planned change then don't do it, at least say it is postponed or cancelled or whatever. Like when are we getting the physicals cap? 🙄

But if there is work going on in silence, sure I'll take that over no work at all.

[Zello]

It's fucking dead if they don't add MIami

[Mentor]

15 hours ago, CelticStryder said:

Don't mean to take your entire post out of context but the part I quote above confuses me. I dont understand how cuts/injuries and how often orgs can hold events need to change as well or how it ruins historical records and legacies?

If lets say you have an org, running 1 event per week and fighters progress faster, it means they also degrade faster. If a fighter has the same injuries and cuts as now, it means that if a fighter is out for 3 weeks, it will play a much bigger role in that fighter's career. Recovery times will also need to be speed up, because if they recover at the same pace (after fights), it means that they will degrade much more significantly when they do not train. 

Going back to the 1 event per week scenario, that will be insufficient, because fighters need more regular fights under the new rules. If not, fighters will have much fewer fights during their career. 

I guess the easiest solution, is to simply speed up training during the first few years until a certain age, then have it the same as it is now, it will also play a big difference. Maybe if peak age is early 20s instead of mid 20s, it will be massive, it will make 16y olds more interesting, as they can peak in 4-5 in game years. I 100% agree that developing a fighter takes way too much time, but i think we should avoid changing too many other things.

 

[jjsquirrel]

22 minutes ago, Mentor said:

If lets say you have an org, running 1 event per week and fighters progress faster, it means they also degrade faster.

 

Really? I thought it was based on number of training sessions rather than amount of skill gained.

In any case, if overall skill gain rate is increased fast learners will be even more important as they will have more of a relative advantage. This will make things harder for new managers who often come late to id orgs and may not check learning speed.

[ArtieBanks]

15 hours ago, jjsquirrel said:

I only heard some vague rumour about a money glitch, had no idea there were several floating around. And no news about any issues being patched. If you announce a planned change then don't do it, at least say it is postponed or cancelled or whatever. Like when are we getting the physicals cap? 🙄

But if there is work going on in silence, sure I'll take that over no work at all.

 

Those issues were all patched behind the scenes - all of the glitches were something you didn't luck into they were sought out and abused. There were a bunch of small quality of life changes made that were updated in the discord chat iirc but nothing major that changes the game in anyway. 

 

As far as I am aware there are no new changes in the works since at least one of the dev's hasn't been in touch with Mike since he got back his holiday - maybe the other one is still working on something? I dunno. 

[Mentor]

18 hours ago, jjsquirrel said:

Really? I thought it was based on number of training sessions rather than amount of skill gained.

In any case, if overall skill gain rate is increased fast learners will be even more important as they will have more of a relative advantage. This will make things harder for new managers who often come late to id orgs and may not check learning speed.

What i mean is, if you are increasing skills faster and degrading faster, it means your career in real life days is also shorter. That means, to get 30,40,50 fights, you need to be having more regular fights as well. This means the org you are competing in, needs to run more events every month. More events = depreciating returns for the org, which also means they wont be able to pay the same contracts, without going bankrupt. 

My point is, simply speeding up the progression and regression has a LOT of questions attached to it, you cannot simply do that without brining to the table so many other factors.

[Mentor]

I am not sure if both devs are out, but it does seem that there is much less movement recently. There is at least one massive money printing glitch in the game, it is pretty serious to be honest, in fact it is so serious, that the people doing it, have kind of broken the game if their money printing is not removed totally. My prediction is that they have generated in 9-10 months more money than PPV level orgs (like GAMMA) have generated in 15 years, so yeah, clearing that out is absolutely a priority. 

[ArtieBanks]

11 hours ago, Mentor said:

I am not sure if both devs are out, but it does seem that there is much less movement recently. There is at least one massive money printing glitch in the game, it is pretty serious to be honest, in fact it is so serious, that the people doing it, have kind of broken the game if their money printing is not removed totally. My prediction is that they have generated in 9-10 months more money than PPV level orgs (like GAMMA) have generated in 15 years, so yeah, clearing that out is absolutely a priority. 

 

The econ in this game was broken before I left the first time. I was begging Mike at one point to change it because it was busted as hell. The time before when he tried to fix it with the changes to papering the arena was broken within a couple of days which leaves us with the current state of the game. Actual orgs could do the exact same thing if people didn't care about winning or losing - the principles behind the grappling orgs are the same as the old EPL tournament format. James Bomb who won it ended up with close to 700 hype/pop over the course of 14 weeks which would have carried the org to the same profits as the grappling orgs. The problem isn't the grappling orgs but the problem is the PPV forumla needs to be reworked and money needs to be drained from the game. That has been said for 10 years now. This isn't to mention that actual money glitches have been around for years dating back to the start of the game. At this point through the work of the devs they managed to patch up all of them that are known. 

 

As far as the money made from the grappling org? I can tell you that it doesn't come anywhere close to the money that was glitched - which was in the billions. Chuck got crucified for it but he was the one that got caught. There were quite a few more than him that done it and pretty much got away with it without any punishment other than the cash getting drained from their accounts. That was just the money glitches - there were others relating to abuse of the fight engine which pretty much ruined the integrity of the game for most of the past year. 

 

 

[Rei]

7 hours ago, ArtieBanks said:

 

The econ in this game was broken before I left the first time. I was begging Mike at one point to change it because it was busted as hell. The time before when he tried to fix it with the changes to papering the arena was broken within a couple of days which leaves us with the current state of the game. Actual orgs could do the exact same thing if people didn't care about winning or losing - the principles behind the grappling orgs are the same as the old EPL tournament format. James Bomb who won it ended up with close to 700 hype/pop over the course of 14 weeks which would have carried the org to the same profits as the grappling orgs. The problem isn't the grappling orgs but the problem is the PPV forumla needs to be reworked and money needs to be drained from the game. That has been said for 10 years now. This isn't to mention that actual money glitches have been around for years dating back to the start of the game. At this point through the work of the devs they managed to patch up all of them that are known. 

 

As far as the money made from the grappling org? I can tell you that it doesn't come anywhere close to the money that was glitched - which was in the billions. Chuck got crucified for it but he was the one that got caught. There were quite a few more than him that done it and pretty much got away with it without any punishment other than the cash getting drained from their accounts. That was just the money glitches - there were others relating to abuse of the fight engine which pretty much ruined the integrity of the game for most of the past year. 

 

 

 

billions? 😭 

 

abusing the fight engine? 😭

 

I never knew about these things!

[libertarian4321]

The only thing dying here are my 76-year old fighters- still active and still kicking ass collecting a QFC pay check!

[jjsquirrel]

Game is not dying, but will soon need to have some dying coded in.. or at least forced retirement before we get to that point.

[Daudy]

16 hours ago, libertarian4321 said:

The only thing dying here are my 76-year old fighters- still active and still kicking ass collecting a QFC pay check!

Hey now, there was that one time recently Frito not only won, but then got a contract to fight in a real org for a change!

Watch out world, he's only peaking now.

[Mentor]

On 12/7/2023 at 8:47 AM, libertarian4321 said:

The only thing dying here are my 76-year old fighters- still active and still kicking ass collecting a QFC pay check!

Interesting point, i think there is no code which says a fighter is dead. Most likely your 76y old will keep on fighting as long as you want. Will be interesting to see a 100y old fighter compete in the near future.

[HareRumpler]

On 12/6/2023 at 10:44 AM, ArtieBanks said:

 

There were quite a few more than him that done it and pretty much got away with it without any punishment other than the cash getting drained from their accounts. 

 

 

Yeah, but the issue was, and appears to still be...that while $ may have been taken from their accounts, there is a high suspicion (confirmed to me by at least one person) that much more is still stashed away on planes, businesses, alts, etc. that is still able to be tapped into and keeps the game unbalanced and unfair for anybody who isn't taking advantage of that.  And, not sure, but I suspect there's still at least one glitch around that's being used for funding on top of the "reserves" that have been tucked away.

[Gator001]

On 12/7/2023 at 5:58 AM, Rei said:

 

billions? 😭 

 

abusing the fight engine? 😭

 

I never knew about these things!

yeah it would be nice to know the exact details of these glitches. Not to abuse them but to be aware who has been taking the piss

[Rei]

6 hours ago, Gator001 said:

yeah it would be nice to know the exact details of these glitches. Not to abuse them but to be aware who has been taking the piss

I'd like to know so I can charge them more for graphics 

[HareRumpler]

9 hours ago, Gator001 said:

yeah it would be nice to know the exact details of these glitches. Not to abuse them but to be aware who has been taking the piss

My guess would be that the only reason the people doing it haven't been outed publicly and there's been no transparency around the impact on the game is that if those actions were taken, the entire game would come crumbling down.  Unfortunately, I think most of the major players wrt orgs and all have either been directly involved or benefitted from it indirectly. So, if actions were taken against them to ban like has happened with others in the past, the game would cease to function, not to mention that the majority of the user base would probably jump ship.  It's a BIG part of the reason I unloaded SPPS originally and finding out that there was so much more than even I suspected and that it went on for so much longer than I was originally led to believe has me seriously considering whether I should be bothering again as well.  I'm starting to get to the point where I believe I should walk away from this dumpster fire out of principle alone.

[jjsquirrel]

This thread is taking all sorts of interesting turns. If this money-glitch thing is on a level that it would potentially bring down the whole game (which has so far survived a non-working economy from around day 2 I hear), then it cannot be too much to ask the Tycoon FBI to also check "secret" stashes like company accounts and jets.

But the whole game practically being run by a couple of bigshot oligarch org owners having Mike too scared to act against them.. isn't that in a way the most tycoony thing that could possibly happen in a tycoon style game? Maybe we should just declare them the season 1 winners, reset everyones accounts and start over with the quicker learning speed? 🤑