I don't want to mess with the speed of the game much to be honest... Some people like it this speed and some don't. But the ones that are here now are generally the ones that like it, so changing it to suit the people who didn't like it and left seems like a pretty bad idea.   And I fully agree with what people have said about increasing the userbase and getting more interaction between users, being the preferred option to keep people interested.  The game itself has virtually no social media presence, so we would like to step that up, to try and get some new blood in.  We're going to revamp the referral system so you can refer people to any page on the site (not just the homepage), then we're going to let a few people run the official socials with their referral URLs, so they should be getting paid a decent amount of money if we can build up a nice social media presence.  We can have multiple people doing that, and they'll just put their own referral URL and initials in their post, so we can see who posted what. 

I'm 53 and started playing 2 years ago, though I've played video games since the late 1970's.

It has been the fundamental change that the game has required since 2012/13, when everyones original crop of fighters decayed. You look at the userbase decrease from that time period and it was literally the thought of having to create new fighters. There were so many guys who all up and left after one crop of fighters. Some others were lucky that when a manager left for one reason or another that they inherited a new crop which kept them an extra year or two.  Mike changed the speed of the game once before from 13 weeks to 12 weeks which had no adverse reaction to the core players. During that time there was a vote on training speed increases which 90% of the game thought it was required. Mentors summary that ' increasing game speed does not really do anything, other than make all the history obsolete.' is absolutely wild. It was done before and the games history was not made obsolete. When I came back I created my guys and basically logged on once a week to change the training for a full year before they were somewhat ready to fight competitively.  I don't think anyone is advocating for an arcade version of tycoon where it is just plug and play. However fighting at the early levels is just not fun what so ever. It is literally all about the first couple of moves in a fight and it is over - the grappler vs striker is back in the 1990's.  I know from talking with Rush how much of an absolute clusterfuck changing the learning speeds would be (the fact that every single fighter on the database would have to be changed one by one). However, without the learning speed change I honestly don't see many of the old timers coming back and after the game existing for 15+ years I think anyone that wanted to find this type of game has already found it by now. 

One of us may be misunderstanding the other, and it could be me. I think we're saying the same things - 25 yr old builds typically smash a new 18 yr old build in a lvl 1 QFC fight. Sure, there are times the younger fighter wins, but it's typically because the manager of the 25 yr old build is new to the game themselves and the 18 yr old is managers by a more long-timer. QFC thresholds could use some tweaking for sure, but I don't see a downside to increasing the skill points offered at creation. I agree with Daudy's take 100%.

In all fairness the QFC bit you’ve wrote is bollocks. I can beat any 18 year old creation testing in QFC with a 25 year old build. The reason they’re getting slaughtered is because they don’t know where to allocate their points, make illogical builds, or spread their points too thin to make all-round fighters that just turn out incompetent at both striking and ground game.