Coming change to The General-page (11/12/2009 02:22)

The coming update (just a few days away now, I think), has another thing that many have asked for. It is way overdue, but it is finally here.

I thought I would show it with a screenshot, and explain it, to avoid misunderstandings. I REALLY hope it will not lead to a lot of people "not seeing" that they have coming fixtures though. Here goes:

We are talking about the General-page, the one you normally come to when you log in. And we're talking about the lower left box, containing fixtures and results. HEre is an illustration so there are no mistakes:

Yes, of course you immidiately spotted the yellow text right at the bottom. Fair enough.

What many have complained about, for a long time, is that this box revealed too much of your coming fixtures in regards to the League Cup, Champions League and Playoff-matches. So we have taken some steps to avoid such things.

Lets start with an example of the League Cup and how things will work:

As you can see in the above picture, The Other Spinners have played a League Cup match in round 6. However, he has not yet actually seen the match, and since he hasn't, he no longer has any clue if he won or not, because any potenatial League-Cup fixture is hidden. There are basically two ways you can make the fixture appear:
You can click in the checkbox to the left of the yellow League Cup text, as that will reveal all League Cup matches. Or, you can simply watch the match.

Please note that the fixture will not appear instanty if you watch the match. To do that, you must use the checkbox. But once you have seen the match, the fixture will be visible every time you get to this page.

So, lets assume I don't have time to watch the match right now, and just check the checkbox:

So, as soon as I check the little checkbox, the next league-cup fixture pops up. Very handy :)

And as you can see here, in the above picture, as soon as I have watched the match, the fixture is always automatically displayed, with or without the checkbox checked.

 

I have also implemented this functionality for Champions League, but it is of course a little different. I will explain and show you.
The Gruop-Stage matches are not affected by this, as they are all drawn in advance. So they will always show. However, there is something important about the last one of these group-stage-matches: In order to see the first Knock Out Stage fixture, you must either reveal it with the checkbox, or you must make sure you have watched the LAST group-stage-match. Take a look at this:

As I mentioned, all the group-stage matches are displayed as usual.

As you can see here, in the above picture, I have NOT WATCHED my last Group-Stage match, and so I have no clue if I made it through to the Knock-out stages.

As you can see here, it was revealed by checking the checkbox.

And finally, this is how it looks the next time I logged in after having Watched the match...So, simple, right? This should help with not ruining the excitement a bit!

Also, a similar approach has been taken when it comes to Playoff-matches. Now, I have not made screenshots of this, as they are exactly as the examples above, with these modifications:

- Your first playoff-fixture is hidden unless you have watched the last league-result from round 30. You can of course reveal it by using the checkbox.
- Your next fixtures then depend on wehter you have watched the previous playoff-match. Again, you can use the checkbox to reveal it.

So, as I said, we hope this will go a long way towards increasing the excitement about certain matches here in ML, and I also hope it will cause as little confusion as possible. But I am already preparing for the support-tickets named "Why the heck did I just play a playoff-match? It was not listed in my fixtures!"

I would also like to point out that these changes have been implemented ONLY on the General-page, and not on the page called Fixtures And Results. So,. if ever in doubt, check your fixtures and results page under the Data-menu.

Finally, we have made one more change when it comes to "revealing results", and that has to do with Player-Cups again. We have disabled the message being sent to all team after every game, so your number of Unread Messages will not reveal anything at all. In stead, after the cup has been completed, all participants get a message about the cup being finished, with a link to the cup-details.

So there you have it! From all of us, to all of you, a little pre-xmas-gift. Coming SOON!