Booking an event

This step for step guide will help you book your first MMA event in the game.

Introduction

For this tutorial I played the XCC company using the Mittens Blurcat persona: this is one of the easiest companies to play given there’s only 3 weight classes (the easiest being WEFF with two): Lightweight, Featherweight and a Women’s weight class. Our role is to grow and reach a bigger audience by building stars. After a while, you’ll notice the big American company GAMMA (the fictional UFC) will try and steal your top Lightweight talent away. But let’s not worry about that for now.

Buttons you'll need to press will be in bold
Dropboxes to click will be underlined

Scheduling

We start off the game on the blurcat(dot)com news website (recognize the reference?). In the Match Making screen, accessible from Your Office, we’re first going to Add an Event. Name it “XCC” and schedule it two week from now (Saturday wk3 January). In the future, we’re going to schedule our events two months ahead to give fighters enough time for their training camps.

The Main Event

Now we’re Adding Matches to the card. There’s two columns representing the fighters in the blue and red corner. We can change the weight class at the top left of the screen: let’s click it and change it to No Division. To determine a popular main event for our show, we need a popular fighter. Use one of the Search buttons and set Min. Name Value to Mid Level Regional and Close the popup screen. These are the fighters people want to see. You’ll see that most of them fight in the Featherweight division. Now click the Rankings button below the selected fighter’s information and hover over the top ranked “Philip Ziskie”. You’ll find out he’s ranked #2 in the world. Nunes is the top contender and ranked #7 worldwide. Sounds like a match. Close the screen. Now let’s check out Titles to see who the current champions are. As expected, Ziskie holds the gold. You can click the other two champions’ picture and press press Name Value to find out they aren’t as popular as Ziskie, who is a relatively huge name for us.
We’ll decide to let Ziskie defend his title against Nunes. Let’s put the title on the line first in the upper screen dropbox. Select both of the fighters in the left and right column respectively and click Fan Feedback. Apparently fans think this is a worthy main event. Now let’s Add it to the card. Rename event to “XCC: Ziskie vs Nunes” and click Rename.

Co-Main Event

Press Add Match once again. Now let’s Search for someone with a Pro Record that is Undefeated and set Min. Name Value to Low Level Regional. Co-main event winners will carry the event as well and will get a slightly higher popularity bonus from winning their fight. Let’s build up a big future title contender here. In the Lightweight division we see Elvis Milissis sporting a 3-0 record. Let’s have him fight Kenny Magilton, who’s “coming off a victory” (if he doesn’t show up on the right, reset the search filter). Press Compare to see how well they match up. It seems to be a classic striker vs grappler matchup, with Milissis’ wrestling matching up to that of Magilton’s. He should win if he avoids being taken down, though lack of experience might doom him. Magilton is ranked #4 in the company. If he wins, we have a top contender on a winning streak to challenge the champion. If he loses, we have an undefeated young talent coming off a big win. Either way: we win. Make sure to Reset the Search filter afterwards.

Filling the card

Now let’s add a Women’s match by selecting the division from the Weight Classes. April Watson’s profile hints at her being a “potential major star”. This might be someone we should promote, maybe our 'Gina Carano' of sorts. Click View Profile and Scout her and you’ll see her striking stats are strong. Her ground skills are (very) weak so let’s match her up with another striker so she won’t get taken down. Scout several other candidates with similar records. You’ll find Simone King is only Average in striking, and just as weak on the ground. There’s a fair chance she’ll lose to Watson. The Fan Feedback is good: this might even be a co-main event! To spice things up, let’s decide to Hype the match by setting the slider to Large (fighter #1). If she wins, she’ll become even more popular. If she loses, some fans will lose interest in her. Let’s Add the match-up to the card.


That’s three matches we booked already. Fill the event with other matches however you like. Try to have at least six fights. More is better but will cost you more on wages. The arrows at the right of the screen allow you to set the order. Moving the lowest fight down will make it a Preliminary bout, but you don’t have to use that yet.

Showtime

That’s it. Your screen should now look like this.



Now Advance to the event and go grab some popcorn. Meanwhile, enjoy watching the gameworld unfold (you can use Fast Advance in the Options to speed things up for this tutorial).

Once you get to fight night the commentators will provide a pre-show analysis, and the fights will begin.

The Aftermath

In my game, Watson beat King as we thought she would. Milissis did well to stop Magilton’s five takedown attempts and proceeded to knock him out. Finally, ‘Kid’ Ziskie defended his title as expected by TKO’ing Nunes. And just like in real life, the women tend to steal the show sometimes.


We got a ‘Decent’ critical rating, which means fans appreciated the quality of the matches (so it was considered relatively exciting to watch), and we got a ‘great’ commercial rating, which means fans appreciated the quality of our card (the main event was attractive on paper).

This event went well for us – the booker – but know that you’ll have to deal with lots of upsets during the course of the game. Unexpected challengers will rise and supposed undefeated champions will fall. That’s the fun of the game. Enjoy playing your part in the exciting World of MMA.

[Marginal0]

Yes, but you need to have contenders for your next matches. The more fights you host, the more contenders you end up with. Also, in the 4th game, which I'm playing nowadays, you get penalties if you have less than 8 matches.

Those two matchups are indeed potentially exciting and are great choices for your first year.

Thanks for reading and have fun playing.

[michael]

Why at least 6 fights? I started out a game and always put 4 on the card, seems to be ok.

I got to Fights rated excellent on my Third show. Maybe you can use them for futher tutorials.

Philip Ziskie vs Sammy Gaffigan
Janinha vs Olivia Sweet

As i only had four fights this was enough to, have this show be the Criticaly higest rated show in the past Decade. Than again i am only half a year into the game.