When I first heard about this I didn't believe it was real but yes, it is real. People get all decked out in full armor and use medieval weapons and shields and go after one another in 3, 2-minute rounds. The blades are not sharpened but the rest of the gear is real.
It sounds like it could be a really fun and nerdy time for D&D fans. I know I was excited for some sort of gladiator style event but that anticipation just made it that much more disappointing.
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There aren't really any rules in this "sport" other than the fact that ground time is limited to 15 seconds, which is nice because otherwise it would probably just end up being what UFC has become... a bunch of people on the ground just doing nothing.
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There's axes, there's maces, there's swords, there's injuries, there's blood but it is plagued with mostly being a standing contest where they whack at one another's shields and eventually win on points.
As one sports columnist wrote "Armored MMA has me convinced the number 1 cause of death in medieval times was exhaustion and boredom"
That's really what this is. It is not exciting because we have to imagine that when people actually were fighting like this the fight was over once the other person was dead. Since we obviously can't be killing people in the octagon for views, the fights just go on in a rather laborious and extremely boring fashion. They somehow managed to make MMA more boring by introducing weapons to it.
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I kind of suffered through one entire event and found that one of the most common moves that is used for victory is leg kicks. Leg kicks? Really?
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I think movies have maybe given us the wrong impression about what these sorts of conflicts were actually like but in my opinion, this will not ever become something mainstream. It can't possibly. At the moment it remains some sort of side show that they struggle to even get enough people to attend to fill up the rows for the sake of the TV audience believing that this is actually popular.
If you can manage to make it through all 6 minutes of that I would be surprised.
I guess this would be reasonably entertaining if you had nothing to do that night. It kind of depends on how much they charge for beer at these events.
Not that long ago the MMA world thought it would be a good idea to have ice hockey fights and that lasted all of two events before people tuned out. This? Well I would be surprised if this ever gains any traction at all. After watching just a single event I can honestly way I would rather watch just about any other sport rather than this.
Looking at their YouTube channel it shows that AMMA (the name of the company) has 136,000 subscribers and I guess that is pretty good. Based on the comments there does seem to be some interest in it but comments are not necessarily organic and could just be accounts owned by the company themselves. To me, I don't see how anyone can really find this entertaining. It certainly can't pay very much to the people that are participating in it because there just aren't enough people in attendance for it to be economically viable.
Imagine moving all your armor across the country or even to another country only to win and get awarded a couple hundred dollars. lol.
I guess if there is one takeaway from this it would be that we can make a sport out of almost anything these days.