 Once again, we have reached the end of a season and the beginning of a new one. And once again, the requests for information are coming in, like When, How, What and so on.
So here we go! When?? On Thursday morning, the game will be taken off line. The entire system goes into "season-change"mode, backups are taken (3 backups at different stages during the season-change, just to be on the safe side), team are moved into their rightful divisions if they have promoted or relegated etc etc. Then I have to add a division to the Swedish and Norwegian league, that are both currently FULL. I also have a number of updates (read details below) to upload. This time, I also have some hardware-upgrades to deal with. We are replacing a switch to improve our network performance, and we have to install a new CPU in one of the servers. When all that has been completed successfully, I then run a different program that sets up the new season, with fixtures, generate youth-players and so on. I estimate the game to be down for roughly 9-12 hours, depending on potential problems along the way. The game will at least be back up by Friday morning, and ready for the cups this weekend, and the pre-season training camp this Sunday. Then the new season begins on Monday morning with training at 09:00 and the first league round at 15:00. A complete schedule will be posted in my blog, as always! The new stuff As I have written in the forums, this has not been the best of seasons for ManagerLeague. Twice I have had to upload fixes to the live game, and some problems have surfaced. More than anything, this is due to me being overworked, and not putting enough emphasis on testing and Quality Assurance. But we have leanrt from the experience, and will try our best not to repeat it. We do see a growing challenge in managing this growing community and game, when there is just 1 person doing all of the technical stuff, but hopefully we can afford to take on another pair of hands soon. We are working on it 
So, over the past 4 weeks, what have we done? We certainly do not want ManagerLeague to be known as a "buggy" product, so we have spent the entire season fixing and improving things. Here is the full list. Game tweaks - Playing with 10 players after a red card or injury (and not having subs left) now makes the team suffer all intended penalties. - It is now more important to let experienced players take Penalties. (Age and experience counts) - Fortune-tax has been increased from 0,5 to 1,0 % - League-based sponsors are now supported (Some things we have to add into the game just because of what our partners demand )
Game fixes - Changing team-name while having active bids on players will now update the bids to show the new team-name - Fixed the Message-button on the contact list so it now picks the right receiver, and not yourself - Fixed javascript bug with the floating "tooltips" that would occur if the tip-function was called before the page was 100% done with loading. - Fixed bugged transfers. - Fixed the Sack-button on the player-info popup for names containing a ' - Fixed up a lot of old code in regards to countries, languages and updated the leagues-setup. - Fixed a bug in custom cups: You can no longer join a league-specific cup unless you are in the right league (They were hidden, but you could still join them) - Fixed a bug that prevented the Indonesian language to work properly. - Fixed bug with message received after accepting open friendly Game updates / Speedups - Updated languages to new versions - Optimsed training to run faster - Optimised the transfer-history page Portal fixes and updates - Optimized News, Blogs, Articles and Competitions sections on the portal - Fixed better logging of logins (problems were found with the first-time login after registration) - Fixed problem with referral-links if they contained more parameters than the ref-id - You can now use a space in your nickname when registering, it is no longer replaced with a "_" - Fixed tooltip-bug on the portal (Tooltips could fail to go away) - Reduced number of javascript required to load for all portal-pages - Increased the height of the typing-window when typing a new blog-entry Mobile fixes (for our mobile version at mob.managerleague.com) - Fixed some issues on the mobile offers-page (like still using a 16 hour limit etc) - Fixed some problems on the mobile messages-page (language-issues + error when using the REPLY-button - Fixed the mobile front-page to use to new (and correct) language-settings - Fixed various translations in the mobile interface - Tried fixing foreign characters in the mobile version, but many mobile phones will still have problems with them. Not much I can do about that. In addition to this, there have been a number of admin-fixes to allow us to find and deal with support, cheaters and other issues more efficiently. I would also like to thank the players who have helped us locate problems in the development-version; Your help has been very valuable to us! Also a big THANKS to our translators who have put in a great effort to update languages lately. Looking to the future With an increasing workload on my hands, I am slightly worried about when I will actually get the chance to implement things like Champions League and the Cup Winners Cup. I hope that we will not be haunted by any *problems* next season so I can actually spend some time developing and not just fixing things and handling support and cheaters. I am in this because I like to make games, and at the moment I feel like I haven't been making games for some time  As I said, we might be able to take on another pair of hands in not too long, and that will help a lot, no doubt.
There are a number of things we need to get done here, and to mention just a few, I can quickly list: - A new portal - A proper tutorial - A translated manual - Champions League - Cup Winners Cup - A better transfer-system I also want a major upgrade of the simulator and some way of actually watching the games being played, yet this is too big a task to even begin with while I am the only developer. Whatever happens we will be loaded with work for a long time, that much is evident. Now I hope for a problem-free season, and a lot of pleased customers. Good luck in the next season. Christian "Spinner" Lassem ManagerLeague Headquarters |
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..........keep up your excellent work spinner!!
An unhappy, stressed Spinner is no good to us. Hopefully you can get the helping hand to offload the extraneous things to 
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