Currently as I understand it players are receiving a -3 point penalty on player skills when playing an away game. What I don’t understand is why would a players skills diminish when playing an away game, his skills would remain the same whether at home or away. The difference between a home game and an away game would be player mentality. A player at home would be more offensive in nature, while away the player may play more defensively.

eg.
Home games: MC0 would equal MC+1, MC-1 would equal MC0, MC+1 would equal AC-1
Away games: MC0 would equal MC-1, MC-1 would equal DC+1, MC+1 would equal MC0

P.S. I didn’t know if I should post this here or in game suggestions.

there are factors like travel disorder, fatigue etc which come into play plus you already mentioned the mentality thing. then the lack of home crowd supporting them, they might just be short of their 100% could be another reason…
combining all those could be substantial, but i cannot say how we reached the figure 3.

check this link too
http://www.rubysoccer.com/forums/1/topics/1103
i like philip leiback’s suggestion of using certain percentage rather than a fixed 3. and may be less or no reduction at all for experienced players and more reduction for younger players.

Travel fatigue/weariness would only really be a factor with long distance travel to get to games. This though is generally overcome by teams in real life by travelling in advance of the game to allow for player rest, recovery and acclimatising, instead of travelling to the venue just before the game on game day.

The home crowd support thing is why I eluded to having player mentality changes. Home crowds would improve mentality, while being away would decrease mentality.

In the end I was trying to put forward a simplified approach to solve the issue, as complexity gives rise to more areas where things could go wrong.

as far that i know you don’t lose 3 points, but the home playing team gains 3.

it wasn’t announced, but gabriel sort of said that in this thread.
http://www.rubysoccer.com/forums/2/topics/257?page=4

check the first comment in fourth page.

Yeah, this small change was announced only on twitter (which has now the official latest news source in the login page as well).
Regarding the -3 penalty, it is only a simplification of the mentality / travel disorder implications. In the future we’ll probably have more complex calculations that should influence players performance during the match.