Becoming Elite is too Easy. We need more Caps

[J0J0]

Suggestion: Stat Caps

Suggestion Description:  As it stands, I could create a fighter right now & training him up to elite within a year (RL), without him ever having fought anyone.

I think becoming elite should rely not only on the quality of training you receive but also the quality of opponents you face.

 

The experience you gain from the quality of opponents you've faced should allow you to reach the higher skill levels.

Experience will be based off rank. The higher the quality of opponent you face, the more your fighter "learns" and the more experience he gets which he can use in future fights. Intelligence level will also play a part because there will always be fighters that no matter how many times they get submitted by a RNC (Frank Trigg), they just will never get it.

Ex: If you win by KO in rd. 1 against a higher ranked guy, your experience meter goes up a certain amount. Win by close decision, it goes up a certain amount etc. Lose brutally and it goes down.

How much it goes up/down depends on quality of opponent (QO) & How you win/lose (KO, Sub, Dec. N/C, Doc. Stoppage).

This would work similar to Hype/Popularity system. It would be an easy way to know what level of fighter you're fighting because the scout doesn't always tell the whole story.

There are guys that are 20-0 who've fought no one. The experience meter would show that. This would also help matchmakers in setting up fights.

As far as training goes, there should be a few different caps. on stats.

Beginners Cap: Useless (1) - Respectable (7)

Intermediate Cap: Proficient (8) - Wonderful (12)

Expert Cap: Exceptional (13) - Elite (15)

In order to unlock the next level of stats, you need to defeat someone at that next level. Until that happens, your primaries cannot go passed the maxed cap for that level no matter how much you train. This does multiple things:

- Fighters will for the most part fight guys at their level until they're ready for the next level.

- Fighters can only move up if they've actually proven themselves against higher level opponents.

- This will prevent 0-0-0 Elite fighters.

- Helps matchmakers with setting up fights.

- Creates a more realistic scenario. (IRL, there a fighters that never become elite no matter how long they've been in the game or how much they train.)

- Involves more strategy when it comes to signing to certain organizations & training at certain gyms because those decisions affect how well your fighter performs and how far he goes.

Now, I realize this would most likely require a whole new system revamp because this would change training & how stats and skills are improved. Also, I understand that there may be some push back but I believe this would create a whole new level of gameplay & strategy for managers.

[Daudy]

For what it's worth, there already is some form of hidden 'experience' factor that apparently works pretty similarly to the intelligence hidden. Obviously one you can gain and the other you can't, and it's debatable what they actually do, but it's likely to do with whatever actually happens in fights themselves rather than anything training wise. Additionally, there are variable total skill point softcaps in place for fighters, but most majorly, learning speed variability that can actually severely limit a fighter's ability to fill out their skills and reach elite.

Just like IRL, there actually are plenty of tycoon fighters who will never be elite no matter how long they train... it's just that as min-max managers who want to do well in the game and not wait even longer for training, we've sacked them all already and probably paid VIP or waited extra time to do so. The current system in place is also why even the fastest learners who have been trained perfectly will never have elite skills in every single secondary (also understanding that elite is anything from 140-150 points in said skill).

 

As for your general suggestion, I know there are some *cough* Alfred *cough* who have always thought the game should have been steered towards something similar to what you envision where you can't really build perfectly rounded guys easily, so some people might like the idea.

The only issue I have with it is how you're judging quality of opponent to advance along your experience chart. Hype/rank is not really a very good metric to determine how good an opponent is. They may have been farming hype in a lower tier ID org, or maybe they're part of Highlander. Those Highlander guys can get some massive hype, but the reason they stay in highlander is because they are no match for most 18yo creations of similar IDs. Nothing against those guys, I love the concept, it's just to point out that hype doesn't always really have correlation with how good an opponent is - which is why some people get grumpy if you match them against someone with similar skills with too low hype (it's all risk against what could be a pretty skilled guy for no reward).

A better way of measuring opponent quality would be maybe their skill point total. Still flawed, but probably a better indicator of where they're at in skills relative to your fighter. A potential pitfall with this is that if it's an experience bar that you can see (which it has to be, because otherwise how do you know what skill cap you can get up to), then eventually people will be able to use that to reverse engineer and figure out the skill point totals of recent opponents (including information on how much certain older guys are declining even).

Also, you'd have to think about whether this applies to primary skills and/or secondary skills. Primaries don't really necessarily correlate with what level your secondaries are at. Plenty of fighters are oversparred and have beefed up primaries with no secondaries, and also the flip side where there's plenty of fighters with elite secondaries in all the parts they want without (yet) being elite in primaries. Additionally, if it is for primaries, how does that look for the BJJ primary? I guess it probably works out, but some of the proposed caps straddle belt colours.

 

EDIT: I've also just thought that this somewhat potentially exacerbates the gulf between the haves and have nots. I have a massive roster, including some very hyped guys across different stages of their development, and my own org. Assuming I want to totally slow cook prospects until they're maxed (I don't, that's never really been me), I have the means to bypass any sort of experience gate. That doesn't apply to everyone else, and definitely not a newer player.

They now no longer have any option to cook if they were inclined and will have to fight more often with no real control over how much experience their next opponent will give them, which then leads to even more missed training sessions during their fighter's early development. Additionally, by the time they get that experience to get to the next cap, their prospect may already be a bit older than they'd like with diminishing training speed. By the time they reach the experience cap to get elite skills, they could already be too old and slow in learning to ever reach those levels (especially given it requires exponentially more the higher you go in each skill).

If you then stop people organising fights against themselves to prevent the established players getting away with this, a lot of them will then have an established network of pretty good Tycoon friends that can help instead and now you've also basically made genuine initial prospect testing way more annoying for the entire playerbase.

Ultimately it's a game and people will find a way to do things as optimally as they can. We should try and avoid situations where what is truly out and out optimal is only accessible by a limited number of players. I realise things like this already exist like private gyms (which people pay for), but at least with that there are things people who don't have access to that can do to somewhat be on equal footing in the long run (ironically slow cooking your prospect to maximise training, even if it's in public gyms, at their earlier ages is one of these things).

All that said though, I would be in favour of the existing 'experience' hidden being more apparently meaningful in some way (even if it's just fight engine related).

[J0J0]

6 minutes ago, Daudy said:

For what it's worth, there already is some form of hidden 'experience' factor that apparently works pretty similarly to the intelligence hidden. Obviously one you can gain and the other you can't, and it's debatable what they actually do, but it's likely to do with whatever actually happens in fights themselves rather than anything training wise. Additionally, there are variable total skill point softcaps in place for fighters, but most majorly, learning speed variability that can actually severely limit a fighter's ability to fill out their skills and reach elite.

ahh, I was not aware of that. As far as the learning speed thing, just like IRL, some people pick up skills quickly, others don't. Sign to the right orgs, fight the right guys & train right (slow or fast learner) & you will eventually get there.

16 minutes ago, Daudy said:

The only issue I have with it is how you're judging quality of opponent to advance along your experience chart. Hype/rank is not really a very good metric to determine how good an opponent is. They may have been farming hype in a lower tier ID org, or maybe they're part of Highlander. Those Highlander guys can get some massive hype, but the reason they stay in highlander is because they are no match for most 18yo creations of similar IDs. Nothing against those guys, I love the concept, it's just to point out that hype doesn't always really have correlation with how good an opponent is - which is why some people get grumpy if you match them against someone with similar skills with too low hype (it's all risk against what could be a pretty skilled guy for no reward).

That's why there's the class system (Beginner, Int. Expert). You can only fight the guys in your class until you're at a point where you HAVE to fight up. If you lose that fight, then you stay where you are. It's like being the big fish in a small pond, but not being strong enough to swim in the ocean. So the Highlander guys would never make progress under this system.

As I said, this would require a factory reset on the current system if it were to be implemented.

38 minutes ago, Daudy said:

A better way of measuring opponent quality would be maybe their skill point total. Still flawed, but probably a better indicator of where they're at in skills relative to your fighter. A potential pitfall with this is that if it's an experience bar that you can see (which it has to be, because otherwise how do you know what skill cap you can get up to), then eventually people will be able to use that to reverse engineer and figure out the skill point totals of recent opponents (including information on how much certain older guys are declining even).

With this system everyone is around the same skill level, until they're ready to move up. I wrote that experience goes down after a loss which is my fault. Win/lose your fighter gets experience. The experience meter is an indicator of the level of opponents he has faced, not necessarily how good they are. So you can fight a guy who has a ton of experience but still sucks. Experience is more of an intelligence factor rather than skills/ability. What they know may not always help them depending on the situation they're in or who they're fighting. 

54 minutes ago, Daudy said:

Also, you'd have to think about whether this applies to primary skills and/or secondary skills. Primaries don't really necessarily correlate with what level your secondaries are at. Plenty of fighters are oversparred and have beefed up primaries with no secondaries, and also the flip side where there's plenty of fighters with elite secondaries in all the parts they want without (yet) being elite in primaries. Additionally, if it is for primaries, how does that look for the BJJ primary? I guess it probably works out, but some of the proposed caps straddle belt colours.

This would apply to secondary's. Primaries will go up but only to the max of that level until you start beating the guys at the next level. At that point your fighter graduates to the next level and starts competing with those fighters. The fighters with beefed up primaries will get exposed at the next levels. So it would be wise to create your fighter the right way or else you'll eventually get smashed.

But regardless of what you do or how you train, the ones who become elite will have truly earned it, not from just training non-stop to 15 with 0 fights, but by beating the guys at their respected levels.

[RegularJohn]

I'll take a closer look at the discussion above but perhaps in the same vein, it should be harder - if not impossible - to become Elite across the board.

for example if you are Elite++ in Conditioning it should be nearly impossible to become Elite++ in Strength; or if you are Elite in Boxing then your stance, head movement and footwork should make it nearly impossible to become Elite in Muay Thai.

[jjsquirrel]

6 hours ago, RegularJohn said:

I'll take a closer look at the discussion above but perhaps in the same vein, it should be harder - if not impossible - to become Elite across the board.

for example if you are Elite++ in Conditioning it should be nearly impossible to become Elite++ in Strength; or if you are Elite in Boxing then your stance, head movement and footwork should make it nearly impossible to become Elite in Muay Thai.

Already accepted: