Progress update on bringing back club money (this has been developed but is not in the game yet):
-Calculation of initial money balance determined
-Unfinished contract, loan and transfer proposals to be cancelled on club money return, offers need to be made again
-Transfer lock on season start will not be required any more

Yet to be adjusted:
-Re-adjust transfer budget and wage limit on club money return
-Ensure budget never exceeds money balance during the season
-Sanity check

Only testing left before bringing back club money. Fingers crossed no errors happen so I can finally apply this to the game :-)

Most of the testing is done, I just want to make sure transfers are still working fine and have a final look into the screens I’ve changed. My goal is to have it all done this week so we can fix this aspect of the game and move on to new and exciting features.

I’m happy to announce I’m done with the testing and changes. As I clearly don’t have time to thoroughly test it an error or two might still occur. I’ll also rely on managers feedback with regards to how their team economy is going, if the balance seems to be uncontrollably going down for example or if everyone start to get rich quickly. Initial testing suggests this won’t happen, but we’ll see.

Player values and wages will be adjusted once the changes go in. I’m pretty sure future adjustments will occur once we start playing with this for a few seasons, but hopefully they are good enough for now. This will have no practical effect other than adapting to the new reality.

I’ll wait until tomorrow to put the changes in and I’ll announce it here, but I’m pretty sure you will notice once you enter a dimension and have a look at your team info or players screens. The only reason for not putting them in now is because it’s night time here and we won’t be around for much longer to fix any errors. Not that I’m expecting any ;-)

Cheers

Club money is back! Please leave any feedback on this topic

Just upgraded all of our software infrastructure. This shouldn’t make much difference to you users, but please let us know if you experience any problems.

Working on some important software upgrades before we can move forward in terms of features. Lots of new things planned but most importantly we are trying to bring some structure and organization to the way we introduce new things in RubySoccer. Stay tuned!

To those using google to login into rubysoccer: this is not working at the moment. Google has phased out the API we used to do this. I have already implemented the replacement, but need time before applying it to the server. Meanwhile, use the “I forgot my password” link to create a password for you, and you will be able to login using your email.

This is definitely the biggest pack of changes in years. Though we did our best to test everything, bugs are expected. So please be patient and report.
- Upgrade of the framework and libraries rubysoccer uses to their latest versions
- Due to the upgrades to the most recent and powerful javascript libraries, we won’t support Internet Explorer versions < 9 any longer (please use a decent internet browser)
- Added link to monitored topics to forum
- Added link to my posts to the forum
- Upgraded facebook/google auth functionality to their latest (google for instance deprecated the support for our prev approach by the end of april/2015)
- Upgraded bugzilla to its latest version
- Fixed all bugs that were preventing our Admin area from working (this is for our GMs). Still need to discuss some of the new aproaches that we will use to detect cheating
- Latest Portuguese Translations

Most issues caused by the last update have been resolved. Tick times have moved a bit and we are still resolving related issues, so the time displayed until the next tick may not be accurate 100% of the time and ticks may occasionally run out of schedule while we resolve this. Thanks for your patience ;-)

Last 3 ticks have run ok and the times displayed until next tick are behaving correctly. All reported issues seem to be fixed now. Thanks everyone for pointing out the errors, enjoy!

The automatic scheduling of friendlies on season start option has been disabled. Players will now improve even without playing, to simulate improvements from training. In summary a non injured player with stamina 100 will improve during a turn as if he had played a friendly on that turn.

Having friendlies during the whole season was not realistic at all, but a necessity due to the way player improvement worked so far. Hopefully now managers can focus on official matches and play friendlies only when they feel like it to play against a friend or to test some specific tactics.

Cheers

Please start using rubysoccer.com (without the www) to access the game. There are still some things to be done to fully transition to that url everywhere, but we’d like to have a single and shorter way of getting to the website to simplify things. Right now if you try the www version, you’ll be automatically redirected to the non-www version.

An additional clarification with regards to the transfer budget during the season. There is a limit to how big it can be in relation to the total money balance, if you start to lose money for instance you may see the transfer budget reduced, even if you don’t buy any players. This limit is higher than what you would get with a level 10 investment on transfer budget, so you still have room to increasing the budget above the original value by selling players, even if you raise the investment level to 10 on season start. This represents an additional step by the board to protect the club finances.

When reading our logs, I’ve noticed some of you were having issues seeing our manager achievement pages and creating press releases. Those 2 things should work now.

In order to attract and retain new users we need to make sure they don’t get lost in the game and have something to learn how to play RubySoccer. Our help wiki is pretty out of date, incomplete and not context sensitive, that’s why we are investing some time on an in-game help system that displays help content based on the screen you are currently in. The system itself is almost ready but we’ll need help producing and translating the content.

I know this is not a big deal for existing users as they pretty much know what is needed to play RubySoccer, but they will also benefit from this system when new features are launched as they will just be able to read the updated help pages instead of relying in getting all the info from the developers in the forums.

The new in-game help functionality is ready but still needs content. Now if you click on the Help link in the top right corner menu an in-game window will open with help information about the screen you are currently in. When the help page for a screen does not exist yet you will see a link for the existing wiki where the old help still resides (unfortunately not up-to-date). Give it a try and let us know what you think. For some actual content you can check the Team Info, Finance, Team Titles, Team Matches, Invitations and Negotiations screens.

Cheers

We have relaxed the rules for managing national teams. Now you can apply for a national team immediately after resigning or being fired from another one. The only remaining restrictions are that you cannot apply to a national team if you are already managing one and you cannot apply for a national team that you have managed in the last 144 turns.

During this week our focus was on better game experience (still in progress) and some small tweaks for the game, such as additional help content (thanks Dimitri), updated dimension description (they were so out-of-date it’s not funny) and in-game message links without the www in the beginning. We still need to update our various non-english translated contents and at the same time pick another relevant feature/change to introduce. My thinking at the moment is in changing the investments behaviour so that teams can use money to buy investment points…some of our managers are getting rich too quickly!

Fixed transfer budget calculations and adjustments for when open transfer proposals exist.

The Wage Limit investment area has been removed. The calculation behind it was serving no real purpose so now the only wage limitation left while negotiating with a specific player is based on the player quality and your current money balance. For now we will have only 6 investment areas, but we plan to add new ones in the future.

Currently working on allowing the use of money to buy investment points (previously called board points) on season start. In order for this to make sense we’ll reduce the overall amount of investment points distributed, meaning that you won’t be able to get to level 10 in all areas without spending some money, even if you win all competitions. This will be the first counter measure we are going to try against inflation, let’s see how it goes.

RubySoccer now has a Mobile website!

This is a beta/preliminary version, so it is rough around the edges and it doesn’t have all of the functionality we would like it to have, but we’ve decided to release it to you guys anyway so we start getting some feedback and suggestions. Please use our forums to talk to us about it!

Next season you will be able to buy additional investment points using the club money. Each point will cost 1,000,000 to start with, we’ll adjust the value later if needed. You are not allowed to sell points or undo the purchase, so think carefully before buying!

Cheers

Star rating is now being calculated for the players in three slightly different ways. We’ll let these calculations run for some turns, analyse the results and pick the most appropriate one. No stars will be given for your players during this “trial” period, but once the trial is over we’ll do another announcement here and the new feature will be applied for real.

We have a pretty good idea on which of the three formulas being tested will be used for star rating calculation. The rest of the feature design is ready and we’ll implement it over the next few days. Keep your eyes in our channels for some hints of how it is going to work!

The star icons to go alongside the player names are ready to go! The goal is to have them applied on next season’s start. We’ll post a screenshot in the next few days.

For those who don’t follow us on Twitter, click here to see how the team players screen will look like.

The logic for the star player system is almost completely implemented, except for a couple of screens and the performance boost during matches. I’m having some last minute doubts about how to do this one but luckily it will be easy to change if I get it wrong the first time.

Stars will rise next season! Even though there are minor tweaks to be done I consider this feature ready even if I don’t complete said tweaks before the season tick. We’ll announce the next major feature being worked on in the next few days.

Cheers!