When you apply for a team that has been free for 36 turns or more you will immediately join that team instead of having to wait for your application to be processed during the tick.

Some small improvements/fixes:
- first division league champions will now receive a “Champions” message from The Board
- morale color for “Bad” changed to orange and for “Neutral” changed to black
- message icon now display the number of unread messages you have instead of total read and unread
- transfer list player screen adjusted to new look and feel

Our previous mobile layout has been disabled, as our new site should already be mostly compatible with mobile devices. A new login area has been created for mobile devices, so no scrolling on the collapsed menu to get to the login section is required. By the way, the facebook / google login buttons are the first to come up in collapsed menus (for mobile devices).

I have re-generated the board expectations on FastTicker because it wasn’t aligning with the number your team was going to be measured against, so it was not real. Something went wrong in the calculation during the season tick, I’m still investigating. I’ll probably have to do the same, if I can, with the national cups and international cups expectations, assuming they are also wrong.

Update: expectations for national and international cups have been re-generated as well

Bug fixes:
-Manager info page properly displaying club name / national squad name for managers who manage both
-Ranking link beside manager name on team info page now takes you to the right ranking page
-Manager ranking filter by country do not display the national squad manager in the list anymore
-Several admin screens adjusted to new look and feel

Our portuguese (brazil) translations have been updated. Still have to update some help screens, but the game itself has been fully translated

The morale system will be improved soon to give back some more control and decision power to the managers. Critical morale players will not be automatically transfer listed, they will instead negatively affect the morale of other players as time goes by. It will be up to managers to decide whether to transfer list them, try to recover their morale or ignore them. Bear in mind they will still refuse to renew their contracts, so if you don’t want to lose them you need to get them out of critical in time.

And by soon I meant now! The morale changes are now in place, you can remove your critical players from the transfer list but don’t forget they will start to negatively impact everyone else’s morale, so you’d better give them some match time or get rid of them.

I want you guys to start communicating more, so I’ve spent some time to make the forum more usable on a mobile device. There’s still some things that need to be done but the current changes should already make the experience much better.

The board expectations logic has been fixed so that the calculated number your team is measured against aligns with the expectation the board tells you. During the last season tick I had to re-generate expectations to manually fix it, next season tick will have it calculated correctly without need for manual intervention.

Managers will now receive messages when a player is injured during a match.

The scout search results screen will now display only the player last name instead of the full name. This change aims to better accommodate player names on the screen, for most players. We may still have to do some further adjustments but the screen looks a bit better now than it was before.

Loan list screen has been modified to conform with the new user interface design. It’s funny how we keep finding some screens that were not converted. If you see some screen that looks odd (gray background instead of white for example), please report!

The messages screen has been modified to display the current message on top for mobile devices. On the desktop version messages continue to be displayed on the right hand side. Please let us know if this works better for mobile devices.

Cheers

CPU teams will now take in consideration player stamina when deciding the line-up for a match. As I’ve said before we don’t want to make CPU teams too smart but this is a basic feature that they should already be doing. Let’s see if they will now pose more of a challenge, especially the ones in international competitions where stamina management can become an issue.

In the past week the focus has been on re-designing the player evolution model. We’ll still have evolution steps as we have today but each step will be tied to a requirement (training, playing official matches, playing first division matches, etc). Your coaching role will change, instead of determining how often players improve it will be used to give you insights about how to continue improving a player or how good a player will become for example.

Stay tuned for more updates!

In the past few days some users reported strange player rating in international cup matches. After some investigation I’ve found out it was related to the team expectation generation for international cups. The issue has now been rectified for the current season and shouldn’t happen in future seasons either.

Cheers

New player evolution model development update: the foundation of the new model is ready, meaning all the logic to determine the player evolution profiles, evolution steps and player progression is tested and working. Before releasing that though we need to finalise the changes to coaching and scouting, not to mention CPU negotiation behavior. Without this additional changes these other aspects of the game will be “broken”.

From now on, you will be able to know how long each team spent on each area of the field (defense, attack or midfield) – when in possession. The information is on the match report. Old matches will show 0% everywhere, as these calculations were just added. Merry Christmas!

We’re a bit late but RubySoccer’s Christmas gift to you is the new player evolution model. We’re still working on finishing touches related to CPU behaviour and proper game help about the new system but as the mechanics are all ready to go so I’ve decided to release it earlier. As usual, your feedback is important to fine tune the system and make it work better for everyone.

Here is a summary of the changes:

• Players will improve at different speeds throughout the ages and there are a number of different profiles, such as quicker improvement when younger, quicker improvement when older, normal curve, etc.
• Players will have their full potential available at different ages: that can happen as early as 23 or as late as 30. The potential being available doesn’t mean the skills have reached their maximum, it just means the maximum is up for grabs with the proper actions.
• Players still only improve by “training” or playing official matches, but now there is a limit to how many times an improvement of a specific type can happen. In addition to that, sometimes the player will need to play official matches of a specific type or for a foreign country for example in order to improve.
• Coaching does not play a role anymore on how quickly a player improves, it is now used for requesting coach reports. These reports can tell you more about all aspects listed above related to a player’s evolution. Be mindful that there is only so much your coaching team can do every turn, so requesting too many reports may not be very effective (unless you’re in no hurry to get the results, in which case it’s a good thing).
• Scout reports still work the same except that you cannot request scout reports for your own players, only for outsiders. Similarly, coach reports only work for your own players.
• Loan requirements have been changed to suite the new model. You cannot request for a specific coaching level (as that doesn’t make sense anymore), but you can now request for the loaning team to be qualified for an international competition or for the loaning team to be from a higher ranked country for example.

Hopefully that’s enough information to start with. Please write in the forums or in our Facebook page if you have any questions about in the new system so we can make sure the answers go out to everyone and also make sure the system is working as intended.

Enjoy!

We will reduce the player skills of existing players to speed up the effect of the two main changes done to the player generation process: reduced likelihood of great players for lower ranked countries and new evolution model. Without this skills reduction it will take too many seasons for these changes to have a real impact and there is no real negative effect in doing them as everybody is going to be affected the same and whoever has the best players today will continue to have the best players after the change.

The reduction will be of 5 points in all skills for players 21 years old and over on FastTicker and 19 years old and over in MediumTicker. You can expect this to happen some time in the next 48 hours.

Players now have a new attribute called “pressure handling” that can be seen in the player info screen. This will be used instead of stadium level to determine the penalty the player will receive when playing away matches. For now this attribute cannot be improved and in all existing players it has been set to “Poor”, whereas newly generated players can also have it as “Reasonable” or “Good”.

I have just started adding more player statistics to the game and the first two additions are goal assists and effective tackles average per match. You can find the assists information in the match report and in the player and team players statistics screens. Effective tackles average per match can be found in the player and team players statistics screens.

Bear in mind that existing statistics have not been updated and this data will start being collected from now on. That means your averages for the current season may be inaccurate if your team is in the middle of a competition at the moment and that for old seasons and existing match reports these new values will show as zero.

I have just reduced player skills as previously announced. Scout reports for those players were also updated to reflect their new current skills.

Cheers

You may have noticed that RubySoccer has been inaccessible during some periods in the last few days. That’s due to an incident with out host that is still being resolved. The situation seems to have improved but they haven’t confirmed the issue is fully addressed just yet, all we can do is wait at this point and hope they do it as soon as possible.

When things like this happen you can always use our Facebook page to look for updates, report problems or simply post your questions and comments.

Additional player statistics added: fouls, successful passes (%), shots on target (%), goals scored (or conceded) on free kicks, penalty kicks and headers. Statistics screens are likely to change to better accomodate all this extra information. All these new stats will have 0 values for now and will start to be populated as matches happen.

Other minor enhancements:

• new youth players were getting skills improvement straight away, that will now stop
• coach reports results have been improved to be more useful for the Next Steps and Full Potential reports, later on I’ll update existing reports to reflect that
• when players go out of critical morale their morale is not “reset” anymore, they just go back to neutral and don’t lose the recent match participation history

New managers that join RubySoccer from now on will be able to get up to three formation suggestions to help them in learning the game basics. Figuring out that real life formations may not work so well in RubySoccer can be tough on newbies so this feature aims to make the transition easier. Of course they will still have to figure out tactics, strategies and how to best use their players, all the system will do is suggest the positioning of players in the field without actually assigning players to the positions.

We have just introduced the concept of inactive countries. Such countries function as normal except that you cannot manage a club in them, you can only manage their national squad. The goal with this is to group managers together in the same countries to increase the level of interaction between them.

As more managers join active countries we have some logic in place to activate additional countries. Similarly, if a country becomes empty and the other non-empty countries don’t have enough managers then the empty country will become inactive. We can always consider manually activating countries if people have a good reason to ask for it, otherwise we’ll stick to this new model.

Cheers

Coaching influence on player evolution is back, but not exactly the way it was before. Each evolution step will have a recommended coach level attached to it, your Next Step report will tell you what that level is (existing reports will have to be re-generated). If your coach level is below that recommendation, it will take longer for the player to complete that step and improve.

The new scout search model is in place. In the scouting screen you can define your search criteria, these searches will be progressed during the tick and, once 100% is reached, you’ll get a message from your scouts with a player recommendation or advising that no more players have been found. The in-game help has some more details if you’re interested.

Cheers