If you miss the flags in the team players screen you can go to your settings and check the new option to have them displayed by default so you don’t have to click the hide/show flags option every time. Regarding the star players feature I forgot to mention in the announcements here that every player has a natural star factor that may slightly increase or decrease his chances of becoming a star. At the moment this natural star factor will very rarely be fundamental to the player’s star fate, but it will help bring them up or down a little bit.

What’s next, I wonder? Could Gabriel be finally working on the player morale system? I bet he wouldn’t even tell if he was!

I plan to make a couple adjustments to the way stars are awarded to players. The first one is to make existing star players lose at most one star level in between seasons. So if you have a 3 bronze stars player in your squad this season even if he has a bad season he will be at least a 2 bronze stars player next season. I believe this makes sense as stars shouldn’t be completely forgotten from one season to next. The second change is have the number of stars playing in a country be directly related to the ranking position of that country. At the moment the country ranking has no direct influence in the likelihood of a player becoming a star, but if a country is better ranked it means it has stronger and “more famous” leagues and should have a higher number of stars.

The negotiation functionality has made its way to our RubySoccer mobile website, and our hardware & software infrastructure has gone through upgrades. According to our service provider this should increase the website’s performance (any feedback is welcome).

You can now see player stars in the scout search results. In addition to that I’ve finished the changes mentioned before were star players will lose, at most, one star level per season and the country ranking will determine the number of star players for the teams of a given country.

We decided to initially implement player morale related to match participation only. In other words, players that don’t play enough official matches will have bad morale and may eventually decide that it’s best to leave the club. We’ll give all the details when it’s released.

In addition to that I’m working on enhanced player negotiation behavior. That generally means that during a contract negotiation players may decide to stop negotiating if there are too many counter offers or if your initial offer is too low (you may hurt their feelings) and may even accept some counter offers that are close enough to what they expected (no more asking for 13010 when you already offered 13000!). We’ll have several different negotiation profiles meaning you’ll experience different negotiation behaviors when negotiating contracts. The main point to take here is that, once this is included in the game, you need to be more careful with your initial contract offer or you may end up with a player that DOES NOT WANT TO RENEW HIS CONTRACT!

The new player negotiation model is in place. Next time you make an offer to one of your players be mindful he might not like it and just quit negotiations with you. We have several different player negotiation profiles in place, meaning different players may behave different when negotiation with you. Basically they will be more or less tolerant in terms of how much less from their expected wage they will accept, how low your offer can be and how many counter offers they will accept before getting annoyed and stopping negotiating with you.

Mass messages have been sent in-game as well as a reminder so that everyone is aware. If a player does not want to negotiate with you it means you will have to sell him or let him go (if he is yours) or forget about hiring him for some time (probably long enough for him to go to another team).

Cheers

While we work on new functionalities, we have also decided to dedicate some effort to fixing some of the bugs we believe have been plaguing the game and annoying some people. We are also counting on you guys to report bugs! If you don’t report, they might take much longer to be fixed.

Bugs fixed today:

- User signup failing (without the user knowing why) when chosen login was too long
- Statistics: Name and Team fields auto completion (its working again)
- Press releases: now the user is informed why its creation failed (if it failed)
- Newspaper article suggestions: this hasn’t been working for a while. It now is. We know the newspaper needs a lot of work, and it is on our list. Right now its not a top priority, but it will be done guys
- Mobile match report not working in certain situations

Our host will go under maintenance this Thursday, September 10, at 3:30AM UTC (roughly 64 hours from now). They expect the downtime to be no more than 30 minutes but in the worst case it should take 1 hour. Fortunately for us the maintenance window does not include any tick times and will happen during the afternoon in our time zone so we will be able to do a sanity check once RubySoccer is back to make sure the tick schedule is alright.

Cheers

I’m happy to announce that the player morale feature is well under way! The initial profiles and calculations to determine the player morale based on match participation are all ready. Next steps are apply morale effects on match performance and player transfer as well as send messages to managers alerting of unhappy players. Similar to what I did with player stars, I’ll create a new topic in the forums later on explaining the morale system in more details.

Cheers

The trial period for the player morale system has just started! Please take some time to read the overview of this feature on this topic and also what is going to be different during the trial period. We already have some good suggestions to make the system more realistic in the future and these are all noted, but what is posted there is pretty much how the system is going to work to begin with, except of course for any adjustments that prove to be necessary after the trial period.

How long this trial will last will depend on the feedback we receive, we just want to make sure everyone is comfortable with it and has experienced all the different situations they can face due to player morale. If you just ignore morale for now because you won’t actually lose players you may lose the chance to learn how to better manage it when the trial ends. It will also help us understand how easy/hard it is in practice to keep everyone’s morale out of critical, to bring a player with critical morale back to neutral, to have your main players always with good morale, etc.

Cheers

The parameters for morale calculation have been relaxed a bit and morale has been reset for all players. It was clear from the discussions in the forums and from personal experience that players were being too demanding. I have not yet done any of the suggested enhancements to the system apart from changing existing parameters, let’s see how this works out first and move on from there. Oh, and this is still a trial so you won’t lose your players due to morale just yet.

A new investment area has been added: Negotiations. This area of the club will provide you advice on how much to offer a player you are negotiating with. The highest the level more accurate the suggestion. All clubs have the maximum level on this area to start with so they can experience the full benefits of it. Next season you will be able to decide how much to invest in this area as you do for all others. Hopefully this will mitigate some of the negative impacts of the enhance player negotiations.

You will see the suggested wage when offering a contract to a player and the wage field will come pre-populated with the suggestion (except when you are looking at an existing negotiation, in which case it will come populated either with your own offer or with the player’s counter offer as usual). I am yet to add the suggested wage to the mobile version of the contract offer screen.

Small improvements to the players morale screen:
-fixed sorting
-included morale rating column

Morale has been reset and the third and (hopefully) final phase of the morale trial has begun! Stamina and relative player skill will be taken into consideration when players don’t play a match and give a small increase to the rating instead of zero contribution. This shouldn’t make much difference for older players but will definitely help managing younger players morale, even though they will still have to play every now and then.

If this proves to be the last trial what I’ll do once it is over is reset the morale once again, reduce the transfer multiplier for critical morale players to what we originally intended (the price you see now divided by 10), change the contract renewal process so critical morale players will not accept renewal offers and finally increase the maximum numbers of players in a team to 40. This last one has been requested for a while, not so sure managers will be so eager to have that many players now that morale is in place ;-)

Cheers

We now have a revised way to calculate the player overall quality and the team overall quality. Every season the formula for player quality will get updated based on what real managers consider a good player. The result will be a better relative estimated value and wage calculation and improved CPU buy/sell behaviour. The team quality calculation will benefit from this revised player quality calculation, but it has also been improved in itself in order to assist the board expectations calculations and manager performance evaluation. There is an additional task in our short term plans to further improve the way manager performance and expectations are managed, but the changes included today are an important step in that direction.

Morale effects are now for real! The trial is over and morale has been reset for all players. Here is what changed since the last reset:

- Critical morale players will not renew contract
- Critical morale players will be transfer listed by a price that is between 7 and 10 times their estimated values
- Maximum number of players in a team has been increased from 30 to 40
- It is a bit easier to go out of critical morale now, you only have to take the player back to what would be a Neutral level for him instead of Good as it was previously

Cheers

Injuries are now a bit more likely during matches and the average length of injuries has been increased. It was too easy to manage injuries and most managers didn’t even bother having a high level in physiotherapy, hopefully this will raise the importance of this area. In the future we are going to introduce training injuries, meaning players may get injured even without playing a match.

In addition to that we have also decreased the amount of time the board may override your decision to sell a player or let him go for free from 3 to 1 season after joining the club.

We have a big change coming, but that will take a little longer to be ready. In the meantime we are improving the way the team quality is perceived to be competition specific. This will affect the board expectations, manager performance rating changes and team/manager ranking points. The goal is to have more realistic goals and match results effects. The new system will try to learn from the team’s previous participations in each competition and balance that with the current squad quality to provide a better result.

Team quality calculation will change next season. In the current system the team quality is solely based on the quality of the players in the team and that is then used to determine board expectations, manager performance increase/decrease and a few other things. If we look at the results versus expectations it is clear the existing method is not good enough in a lot of cases. That’s why starting next season the team quality will be competition based and include the previous season’s performance in each competition in addition to the quality of players. This should provide more realistic expectations and manager performance ratings.

CPU teams will stop loaning players too close to season end and will not start loaning again until after investments are updated for the new season. This will ensure they don’t loan players during a period where they will not use them and also ensure they don’t loan players just to have them returned because of reduced coaching level.

The points calculation for the team and manager rankings has just been improved. Now we store the history of matches instead of just a count and the number of points, that means we can discard the oldest entry and include the new one instead of just discarding an average based on the current points as we did before.

Another important change is that unemployed managers will have their match counter reduced as well as their points and instead of losing one point per turn they will lose one entry in their match history. The old system caused a disadvantage for someone that decide to return to the game because it took longer to earn points when compared to a fresh new manager. Not anymore!

We have slightly changed the generation of multi-position players (DM, MA, DA, etc) so that their two main skills have a higher chance of having a big gap between them, even though they will still be closer in most cases.

To those who love our current look & feel: you better take some screenshots. It is all going to change, and very soon.

We have a brand new look & feel, along a number of other changes – too many for me to mention. This is the very first iteration of our new look & feel, so THERE WILL BE BUGS. We also had major upgrades and changes in our infrastructure, so this cause issues with ticks & etc. Please report the bugs as you find them, and be patient. We also would love to receive suggestions and feedback! Enjoy!

Looks like we might be going through some problems with our server hardware, so the website might have some hiccups. I’ve raised a ticket with our provider, lets see how it goes.

Colors have been added to the Formation screen to indicate the morale status for each player. The morale status itself has also been added to the tooltip where you can see the skills for the player on the same screen. This should help in managing players with bad or critical morale.

Training has just become more dangerous! Players can now get injured during training so your physio department will soon start receiving more visits.

Our different game theme colours are back! As before, you can change them in your manager settings. Question for you: should the user preference be stored and used on the front page as well? Also, the mail screen should now look better, the navbar menu should never span over more than one line, we have new icons for some menu options and the managers online dialog now also tells you when a specific manager last browsed rubysoccer (so if the manager hasn’t been browsing in a while, it means he/she is probably not even available anymore).

Portuguese (Portugal) managers might be experiencing a site error right at the front page. That problem should be gone now, but you have to clear your cookies . Let me know if you have any questions.

We have a new manager setting to display an average skill column in the player list screen. This column is informaitonal only and is not used to determine the player quality anywhere in the game. The average uses all skills but tackle and shooting for goalkeeper and all skills but keeping for other players, it is a rounded simple average (sum of values divided by number of values).