Nearly two weeks ago, I wrote about 10 changes coming this season-change (Thursday).
Since then, it has been made clear that there are even more changes going that might cause a question or two to be asked, so I figured a little information wouldn't hurt. I will start listing these as items 11 and onwards, since the first 10 can be found in the previous blog-entry!
11: Automatic help-popups for new players
This is not something that will affect experienced players, but it is simply a feature that opens up the help-popup on every page on a users first visit to a page. WHile open, it will also pulsate the help-icon to show how it can be opened again, in case someone didn't understand what it was. This has been done after some feedback involving users being sent to the old manual which can hold inaccurate information. From now on, we will provide the help needed in these help-popups, and .....
12: A new ingame tutorial has been made
We have received feedback on a few different problems with the current "user manual". It has also been called "User Misguide" and "Huh? Manuel?"
Furthermore, we see that most new users don't make it to the manual, and if they do, they see a lot of text and can't really be bothered to read it...After all, they are here to play a game, not to read a damn book! I have to admit, I would not have read that manual myself now, as it is bloated and very inefficient to read if you just want to get started. Also, the so called "getting-started-article" we have is..uhm...Like 4 years old.....And when you read it, and look at the screenshots, well, it sure doesn't look like ManagerLeague! So...We whirled our magic wand in the air a couple of times, and came up with a very simple, short, and concentrated step-by-step introduction to ManagerLeague, which is updated, translatable (the translators are already working on it), and inside the game. It will be in the help-menu, and for new users it will have a rather visible link in the middle of the General-page, where it will rest naturally with the unfinished basic achievements (see previous article).
We belive this should conclude our effort towards making ManagerLeague easier to get into, and if this works as it should, we will make more of these tutorials later, as the framework is already there.
13: Training-camps have been modified quite a bit
This point is strongly connected to the next point, which is about Morale, but we shall start with the camps.
First of all, we had a rather embarresing crash of the camp-simulator last week, for the first time in our history. And due to a fault in the system, some where able to order an EXTRA camp, and so get two camps in stead of one. This has been prevented for the future, so it will not happen again.
Second of all, the logic has been altered quite a bit. We have known for some time that the Team-stats have been a bit "broken", and it is far to easy to get an average around 90 in all team-stats. It was never meant to be like that, as the intention was to create differences between teams, by not an average so high, so you had to chose which areas your team would be strong in. So, to achieve this, we have changed the training-camps a bit. They will now yield less stats for the team. In return though, they will yield more stats for players! And, if there is any doubt, allow me to answer this question that I received in my inbox the other day:
Yes, a higher intensity during a training-camp, the more you will gain in BOTH team- and player-stats.
The biggest change, is how the morale is affected by the Location of the camp. It has been ridicolously high for a long time, so you could easily jump from 50 to 75 before the seaosn had actually started! This also meant that not many teams had to spend any training-slots on their morale to grow or maintain it, as it was already through the roof before camp #2 set in.
This will no longer be the case.
The new max morale-gain from the location is now 8 (Exotic). You can get lucky and get one of the random gains added to morale, and in extreme cases maybe even 2, but that is it. If you wish to take the cheaper route and book camps Abroad, the gain is 4 in stead of 8. If you stay at home, there is no gain. Of course, like before, the higher your morale is, the less you will gain. As soon as you reach a morale of 75, your max gain from the location of camps is half of the above mentioned values.
There is one last thing I should mention here, and that is: This is not the end of our re-focus on team-stats and team-development. We shall take one step at the time, but I do belive we can expect at least one new team-stat in 2-3 months from now, just so you know.
14: Morale
As if not changing the camps was enough, we have spent some time in the simulator and discovered some rather terrible code from way back in time. Some of the issues we have found have caused very unfair morale-changes, specially in cup-games and champion-league games. Also to some extent, in league-games. We have thus degiend a brand new system for how morale is changed by the result of a match.
The old system, which comes from a time when we had only one league, no Champions League and dinosaurs roamed the lands, was based on two things, and two things only: Division and Position. The better the division, or the position if the both teams were in the same division), the bigger the favorite, and the smaller the potential gains if you win. And that is pretty stupid for many reasons, but there is little point going into them in more details now.
The new system is somewhat more sensible. It allows for more fun with player-cups, it consideres all match-types differently, it does not care about your division or position, but it cares very much for the Quality of the players who actually play the match!
Allow me to explain:
After the match has been played, and the result is ready, the simulator knows exactly who has played. From this, it decides if one of the teams is a favorite, or if we have two equal teams. Then there is a modification if the win is by more than 3 goals, but that is not all that important. Whatever one team gains in moral, the other one loses. If two teams regarded as equal draw, no teams gain or lose morale.
The morale-change is of course affected by how important the match is. The old model didn't know the difference between the league-cup finals and a match in a player-cup, and this has been improved. Friendlies will still not affect morale (yes, we discussed it). Player-cups will only have a tiny effect on morale, while games in the Champions League will have the greatest effect. What is really cool about using the Quality of the players who actually play the match, is that you can play with a young and inexperienced team in a player-cup and risk losing less morale than before. Unless you meet a similar young and inexperieced opponent, of course. So, if your team plays better than expected, in relation to their quality, you will gain more morale. If you team plays rubbish, you will lose more morale.
All in all, we should all expect to have a much lower morale in average from this point on. Today, after landing at position #10 in my league, I still have a morale of 85...Which is a bit daft. I know some users will not like this change, as it will seem to "make their team less good", but keep in mind this is much more fair than it was, and the lower average on morale will be fealt by everyone.
15: Uruguay
Uruguay has been implemented as a nation, with its own name-database.
16: Slow ML-Mail as a result of a lot of sent messages?
To avoid a SLOOOW ML-Mail, your outbox will simply no longer show (or load) Mass-messages (those sent out to multiple friends and those sent out to participants of a cup). We had failed to realize how much the new cup-message-system would be used, and this has caused severe problems for those arranging large cups sending messages to the teams in the cup. This should avoid the horribly slow ML-Mail for you.
17: SMS-payments for some regions
We have been able to hook up more countries with a better SMS-payment-system. This time it was Bosnia and Herzegovina, Belarus, Slovenia and Slovakia who have been moved over to the new service-provider, which works a whole lot better than the old one we used for those countries. I also belive this will give you a better deal than you had with the previous provider, so cheaper credits through SMS for you!
Summary
The next season will thus bring far more improvements that I thought it would. Now and then, things suddenly fall into place, and even though we had that training-camp-crash, things have been running pretty smooth lately. This has allowed us to focus on improvements, and trying to nail down a few things that have annoyed us for a while. There is a sweet mix of new stuff, improved stuff and balance-tweaks this time around, and some of these things had to be sorted out to give us time and freedom to focus on other things to come. It has been very healthy for us to review the code involved with player-generation, training-camps and morale, as these parts of the code have been left alone for quite some time. The work we have done here, will benefit us in future improvements as well, specially when it comes to the simulator. The new player-search should get rid of most of the performance-issues we have seen (or so we think!) and the Achievements will be quite fun for everyone, trust me :) Getting the team-stats under a bit more control, opens up a more tactical approach, where you have to decide which areas you wish to develop your team in, which is a good thing! It makes teams more different, and it opens up different training-tactics. The morale also needed a serious fix, and we are excited to see the results. We have to admit that some of these changes might have to be re-tuned in the coming months, as we know our testing environment does a poor job at emulating the real game in some cases. The same is true for the player-search, and we will monitor the length of the queue and take action if it turns out to be terrible.
Trying to make new users stick to ManagerLeague has been a goal with a high priority for a long time, and we now think we have the right tools for the job. If we are right, we will see a steady growth of teams in here over the next year. If not, well, then we were wrong.
I wish you all the best for the coming season, as do Coach Mac and Chairman.
Yours informationally
- Spinner
