Why is the end of round more important than the first 4 minutes?

[xhaydenx]

Ah you're a dev, but not an MMA judge.

Accounting for a certain percentage of your install base to do a given thing in a given situation and basing your core game loop around that isn't analogous to figuring out if a judge is correctly or incorrectly applying their understanding of the Unified Rules of MMA to judge a contest.

I'm not the person experiencing my game designs either though.

It's the same thing. I can watch what happens in a loop, watch what actions players take, etc. If I've done that enough, I can predict how mechanics are going to combine to create dynamics. From there I can predict how a player will react to that. If I can't predict that, my design is a failure.

The mechanics of a fight are the rules and the scoring criteria. Knowing how all that works, and seeing how it has affected judges over the last 10 years, allows me to predict pretty accurately what a judge is/was thinking when they came to a decision.

 

[Emjay]

Knowing how all that works, and seeing how it has affected judges over the last 10 years, allows me to predict pretty accurately what a judge is/was thinking when they came to a decision.

You're giving yourself too much credit.

Judges aren't some static variable. They're humans who interpret things in ways that you can't always account for, creating dynamics that you didn't foresee. Tuning your design over the course of a 3 year dev cycle, you can convince yourself that your design works. Until a million plus people are playing your game on launch day all at the same time (assuming you work on a AAA title).... which is why patches exist.