Improved decision making for CPU teams when buying / selling players or hiring youths. They now have a better guess on the player potential instead of just considering their immediate needs. Loaning players not included yet.

Cheers.

We’ve taken the first step in reducing the board interference on loyal managers’ decisions. You are now able to fire any player, even the ones the board consider important, if you’ve been on the same team for at least 3 seasons. This number can be adjusted in the future, if it makes sense to do so.

Cheers.

Have you noticed the new link called “Form” in the league table screen? That’s the link to the new form table! There you can compare the recent league performance (last 6 matches) of all the teams in the league. Enjoy!

Cheers.

The position column in the form table now represents the team’s current position in the league.

Anti-cheat: managers cannot apply for teams which have bought or sold players to their current team in the last 144 turns.

Some managers playing in MediumTicker may have noticed the international competitions had to be re-generated a couple times. Our apologies for any inconvenience caused, it happened due to some wrong configuration in the new countries. We hope you enjoy them by the way ;-)

CPU buying behavior is still being worked on but it should already be possible to notice some small improvements in the market. A couple bugs were also fixed on this logic, they pretty much made the CPU teams make some dumb decisions regarding defenders and old players. Give it some time and let us know what you think!

Cheers

Revised CPU buying behavior to reduce the allowed amount of money to spend on a given player. This is to reduce the number of teams bidding for players with unrealistic transfer prices. All feedback is really appreciated and can be provided on this topic: http://www.rubysoccer.com/forums/1/topics/2160

Cheers

CPU teams are now capable of loaning players from other teams. They won’t loan their own players out or bother with renewals, but it’s a start :-)

Cheers

Proportional performance bonus / penalty for final league position now in place. In other words, if you join a team after the league has started the performance bonus / penalty given to you when the league ends will be reduced to match the amount of time you were in charge of the team during the competition. For example, if you join a team exactly in the middle of the season and at the end your final position was bad enough to give you a 4% performance penalty, now you’ll lose only 2%.

Cheers

Proportional performance bonus / penalty for cup elimination rounds are now in place as well. This is only applicable if you joined a team after the first leg of an elimination cup round has been played and gets a penalty (for being eliminated sooner than expected) or bonus (for qualifying further than expected) after the second leg.

Cheers

- Improved the alignment of screens that show player lists
- Renamed section “Stadium” to “Investments” – i will add more things there
- Removed twitter authentication. It was not working
- Fixed the newspaper (and this is now on my queue of things to improve)
- Numerous other things which u can’t see, but will help us improving/measuring the youth evolution system
- Ruby upgrade to 1.9.3. Gems upgrade to their latest compatible versions (you can’t see this one too). Both are intended as a preparation to a fuure move to Rails 3.2 (we are currently on Rails 3.0.9)
- New functionalities will be marked with a special “New” icon – which will automatically go away 2 months after the functionality was added (see example on the manager info page: “Ranks and Achievements”)

Mostly, this is to show you guys that I am back to active development.

We are currently testing a solution to stop the spam in the forums. Please let us know via in-game messages if you are unable to create topics or posts.

Cheers

Lots of teams have money to spare…players might as well get their cut! Don’t be surprised if players start to ask for more money when you negotiate contracts, it’s only fair they get a raise due to inflation. I know, this will not fix the economy and we won’t forget other related issues ;-)

Cheers

Reverted last change on players wages, we’ll now focus on applying fundamental changes to the economy model at once rather than trying to remedy the current unbalance beforehand using such measures. We have a suggestions topic open in the forums if you wish to have your say: http://www.rubysoccer.com/forums/3/topics/2226

Cheers

The new economy system is finally ready! There have been some structural changes done with the latest update. Their main goal is to make it easier for us to handle the money balancing issues in the game so we can focus on more important aspects of football management. As with any fundamental changes such as this one I expect some managers will complain and it will take some time to adapt, but hopefully it will prove to be for the best in the long run.

Let me try to summarize what has been done:
- revised estimated player value formula (fixed, not based on existing transfers anymore)
- revised player wages formula
- concepts removed: team money balance, team economic situation, stadium capacity
- concepts introduced: board points, transfer budget, total wage limit, transfer to budget percentage, investment areas (coaching, physio, scouting, stadium, transfer budget, wage limit and transfer to budget percentage)

Investments cycle
On turn 1 all teams will receive a number of board points based on their performance in the past season and the country ranking. These board points can be spent in the 7 available investment areas. To upgrade an area to level X you need to pay X board points. You can downgrade any area and receive back the corresponding number of board points to allocate somewhere else. Managers have until turn 12 to tweak the club investments for the current season. On turn 13 any board points not spent will be automatically allocated and the levels of investment will be locked until the following season. Also, the new season’s transfer budget will be established and the new wage limit will be in place.

Transfer budget
The transfer budget is the amount of money you have to buy new players. When this value is renewed on turn 13 any money left in the previous season budget is disregarded. When you sell a player a % of the transfer amount is added to your transfer budget. The exact value depends on the level of investment on this area.

Wage limit
You are not able to hire more players or even give your player raises that would cause your total wages to go beyond your wage limit. Nevertheless, there are some cases where this can happen, and if it does the difference between the wage limit and your player wages will be deducted from your transfer budget every 3 turns.

My intention is to add more in-game help for the new economy if needed and also create a page in our wiki with more details about all changes. For now, please use the Improvements Discussion (http://www.rubysoccer.com/forums/5/topics/330) and Economy (http://www.rubysoccer.com/forums/3/topics/2226) topics to post your thoughts (either positive or negative) and questions. Please, be nice :-)

Cheers

The maximum transfer price for a player has been raised from 3 to 4 times his estimated value. There are divided opinions about this change so this is an experiment made possible by the new economy model with the ultimate goal of removing the limit altogether (and maybe the estimated value as well, but let’s not go there yet). Let’s see how it goes.

Cheers

Added a warning message when a reasonably high wage is offered to a player. This is to make sure managers double check their wage offers to make sure it was not a mistake, such as an extra 0 at the end of the value.

Cheers

Just found and fixed a bug in the amount of board points awarded from the team’s performance in international cups. The incorrect amount and the newly fixed amount are not that different so you’ll probably not even notice it. Unless of course you have a spreadsheet full of formulas and have already figured out how we calculate them ;-)

Cheers

Worried about losing all that money you have on your transfer budget when the new season comes? Worry no more! During the season tick ALL the money remaining on your transfer budget will be converted into board points to be spent on your investment areas for the new season. That means there will be no transfers between turns 144 and 12, any pending transfer proposals on turn 144 will be withdrawn.

We won’t disclose how the conversion works (and it may have to adjust the formula over time), the only thing I’ll tell you is that the “bigger” your club more costly the conversion will be. In other words, if a big club and a small club had 100M left on their budgets the small club will get more points from it, as it was probably harder for it to have all that money left in the first place.

Cheers

Removed maximum transfer price restrictions. With the new economy model and the renewal of your transfer budget every season it doesn’t make sense anymore to have such limit.

Cheers

Estimated value for players has been removed. It’s like they say, the value of something is the amount of money somebody is willing to pay for it. Or something like that, you’ve got the idea :-P

Put back estimated value for players until the new scouting reports functionality is ready.

Cheers

RubySoccer’s Infrastructure & Framework (including JavaScript) have both been upgraded/updated to the latest versions available. This is not a small update, it required a lot of changes and adjustments to several areas. Some bugs may be introduced as a result of this, while many others were fixed. Please report any issues you find, we will ensure those are fixed asap! Some of the highlights:

1. Mobile devices can now drag and drop players on the field. This should be great specially for those who use an iPad or similar to login
2. Team/Manager/Player history pagination work better – there were some bugs with that functionality
3. Sortable lists work better (job applications)
4. With the new infrastructure/framework, stability & security should be superior (we get all of those fixes in the new versions) and we might also see some performance improvements
5. A new tick progress bar has been implemented

Make sure you send us your feedback on this new update!

Scout Reports

The new scout reports feature is finally out! All scouting functionality has been moved to a Scouting screen, the link can be found below the Club header in the top menu bar. The Search screen now contains only the basic search functionality, used to find players, managers and teams by name, nothing else.

Your club scouting department can now be used to either perform a player search (original functionality) or scout a particular player. Once you do one thing or the other you need to wait the usual amount of turns before you can use your scouts again. When you scout a player a report is immediately generated showing the potential value for each of the player’s skills. The accuracy of these potential values depends on your scouting level and the player age.

In order to request a report you need to go to the player’s info screen, where you will see a new tab on the right hand side called Scout Report. On this tab you will find any existing report (if the team has previously requested a report for that player) or a message saying there is no report. You are then able to request one.

A scout report lasts for 3 seasons and is attached to the team, not the manager, since it can only be generated due to the team’s scouting department. If a player already has a scout report you need to wait at least 1 season (144 turns) before requesting a scout report for him again. Scout reports for individual players are located on the new tab for each player, but you can also find a list of all the team’s reports in the new scouting screen.

Enjoy!

Scout reports inaccuracy has been limited to reduce the number of results that are off the correct number by an unreasonable amount. A follow-up improvement is to relate new reports to previous ones, making them more accurate. Before going down that path though we’ve decided to test how this smaller change will affect the outcomes.

Cheers

Player morale is slowly being rolled out. For now the morale is not being displayed anywhere but is being stored and updated behind the scenes based only on how much a player is taking part on official matches. We will increasingly add more factors that will influence morale and when we have a solid foundation we’ll reset the numbers, make them visible and explain how they will affect player behaviours.

Cheers

Progress update on bringing back club money (this has been developed but is not in the game yet):
-Club money with updated finance screen and financial periods
-Old money checks when buying/loaning players
-Stadium size and maintenance based on stadium investment level
-Match attendance and ticket income put back

Yet to be adjusted:
-Amounts for ticket income, sponsorship and merchandise
-Determine how to calculate transfer budget and wage limit within the constraints of club money balance
-Determine how to define club money balance when changes are complete

RubySoccer’s host will go under maintenance within one hour. It will be out for up to 2 hours during that maintenance, hopefully everything will be back to normal after it.

Cheers

Progress update on bringing back club money (this has been developed but is not in the game yet):
-Adjusted amounts for ticket income, sponsorship and merchandise
-Calculation of transfer budget and wage limit within the constraints of club money balance

Yet to be adjusted:
-Determine how to define club money balance when changes are complete
-Sanity check