You will not receive messages about bad morale players anymore, only when the morale becomes critical or goes out of critical. We’ve realized these message only clutter manager’s inboxes and are not very useful as the manager can easily check morale status from the formation screen when deciding which players to use.

When modifying a scout search there was a bug that prevented you from blanking out the value of a field. This has been fixed.

Cheers

Coaching screen now has a column indicating the report “age”. This should help you in analyzing your existing reports and deciding which ones to request again.

Starting next season you will be able to configure player tactics in your formations. That means you can give your players specific orders with regards to Passing Style, Passing Distance, Passing Priority, Shooting Distance and Tackle Intensity, or let them use the corresponding team orders that are already available today. This should bring an extra level of control to managers and improve the tactical aspect of the game.

A few improvements in one go!

1) Individual player tactics are now available. You can override your team instructions regarding tackling, passing and shooting for each player in your formation using the new Player Tactics tab from your Formation screen.

2) Contract renewals have been changed so that the new contract values are applied on the spot. You are also able to re-negotiate the player contract earlier than before. This is in preparation for the feature where teams will be able to make offers to your non listed players to persuade them to request a transfer from you. By offering a renewal with a better salary earlier on you are more likely to convince the player to stay in your squad.

3) When asking for a salary value players will take into account the salary paid to his teammates, if they earn more than average he may ask for more than average. Your negotiations department will take this into account when suggesting the salary you should offer.

4) You are already allowed to make transfer offers to non listed players, but for now the target player will not be affected by your offer and it will be entirely up to the manager to decide whether to transfer list him or not. That means CPU teams will just ignore such offers. Of course all this will change when this feature is fully implemented and these offers will have impacts on the target players and also negatively affect the players from the buyer team, this is just an early release of partial functionality.

I’ve fixed a reported bug where managers were unable to transfer list a player that had renewed contract in the last 72 turns instead of the usual check of hired by the team in the last 72 turns.

In addition to that I’ve released a few more things related to non-transfer listed offers and player status, but they are just informational and are not active yet. There is a new Status tab from your players’ screen that will show you how happy he is with different aspects that matter to him. Once fully implemented this will be used to determine how easily he can be tempted by transfer offers (assuming such offers would potentially increase his status values) and decide to leave the club by requesting transfer and not accepting contract renewals.

Small improvements pack:
- added ‘Hire Date’ column to players contracts screen; the ‘Contract Begin’ column now represents the last contract renewal date
- when modifying a scout search do not receive an alert about losing progress if current progress is zero
- player value is now periodically recalculated for CPU managed teams as well as human managed teams

I’ve realised players were now asking for exaggerated salary increases by considering teammates salaries. Even though they will continue to look for his teammates when asking for a new salary they will be less aggressive on their demands now. Also, the maximum wage allowed by the board now takes into account this smarter way players are asking for wages so you don’t end up losing players unnecessarily.

Another phase of the player status and non-listed offers feature has just been deployed! Every player’s overall status has been reset to 50% but they will be slowly updated as changes happen and offers are made. All players will now have their match participation status updated, including youths, retiring, goalkeepers and cpu-managed players.

The morale concept has been replaced by the status concept and the tab where you used to see your players morale now display statuses. Having low match participation will no longer impact match performance or influence other players morale and will no longer be the sole criteria for a player deciding not to renew contract.

When a player receives interesting transfer offers and he is not transfer listed, his overall status will decrease. When you make transfer offers to non listed players your players’ overall status may also decrease. Once the player status reaches 0 he will request to be transfer listed and will not accept contract renewal proposals. This may be too conservative but it’s better to start this way and evaluate what happens.

Transfer offers to non listed players cannot be made if the player has renewed the contract in the last 72 turns and all non listed offers are dropped once the player contract is renewed. We are yet to do some changes so that the wage asked by players on renewal is affected by the offers against him and also by offers being done by his own team.

CPU teams do not participate in this yet, meaning they will not yet react to unsolicited offers and will still be able to renew contracts when overall status is 0. That will change in the next update.

As usual, all feedback is welcome.
Cheers

Additional improvements:
-Hide detailed status list from outside managers
-Make visible the overall status text (Critical, Bad, Neutral or Good) in the player info screen for outside managers
-Players may ask for higher wages when affected by unsolicited proposals for them or by your own unsolicited proposals to outside players if such proposals are of interest to the respective players
-CPU managed players whose status become critical (0%) will be automatically transfer listed
-Renewal proposals will be cancelled if player status becomes critical

Latest changes:
-Impact of your own unsolicited transfer offers on your squad is greater if you have more players
-Wage status recalculated immediately on wage change
-Youth players overall status can never reach 0

Fixed a bug where CPU teams were transfer listing youth players.

New improvements deployed:
-When players from CPU teams receive unsolicited transfer offers the team may decide to renew his contract in order to drop the offers, if the player is considered valuable to the team
-Retiring players will never have their overall status reduced to 0%

Improvements to player status:
-Any transfer proposal, even for listed players, may impact the overall status of the player in question and of your own players
-Clicking on the player name in the team players status screen takes you to the player status screen instead of player info
-Player status screen now tells you the current impact of proposals to that player’s overall status (if greater than 0%)

Improvements to transfers/loans/free players screen:
-When entering the page it will by default load the transfer listed players
-It is not possible to sort by age
-Bug fix related to sorting

Miscellaneous:
-Every turn all countries without any human managed clubs will be deactivated and one of them will be randomly made active. In other words, there will always be exactly one active country without managers.

Star players that provide hiring bonus now increase the impact of your transfer proposals. Similarly, they also help reduce the impact of transfer proposals your players receive. In addition to that I’ve fixed the recalculation of the player overall status after a transfer, now it happens immediately.

Cheers

CPU teams will now start making offers to non-transfer listed players. This concludes the cycle of changes related to this feature, we’ll know evaluate how things go and adjust later on if necessary. You can expect a poll soon asking about the next big thing you’d like to see in RubySoccer.

Cheers

Match Replays have been re-written to use javascript and html5. This is a first draft version of this screen. It has literally been written in a few hours just to replace the java applet, which was not working. The next step is to make it nicer and responsive (so it works on mobile phones).

edit: just added a slider to the screen. I think it will make it easier for you guys to use it.

Just spent some time improving the Match Replays. It should be easier to see what is happening, and also to control the speed of the replay.

The Evolution Stage coach report has been improved to give an estimate of the player’s main skill when he’s fully developed. This estimate will be in the form of a range and will become more accurate as the player gets closer to his full potential. After generating a successful Evolution Stage report you need to wait 36 turns before requesting a new one for the same player. All existing reports of this type have been marked as a failure so managers can immediately request them to get the new version of the result, if desired.

New match rating calculation is in place for goalkeepers only, all other positions remain unchanged for now. I’ll update and release new rating calculations position by position (G, D, M and A) so we can start evaluating the changes early on.

New match rating calculation for defenders are in! I have a feeling they are a bit in the low side, but at least they are relatively easy to adjust if needed. The most important factors in the new calculation are tackle efficiency and minimum tackle attempts based on what happened during the match. We also adjust the rating accordingly if the player wasn’t in the field for the whole 90 minutes and give the usual bonus and penalties for fouls, cards, assists and goals.

All match rating calculations have been revised, including the ones previously in place for GKs and defenders. Hopefully the new numbers are more realistic and result in a higher number of “average” ratings instead of too many highs and lows. Just to reiterate, the match simulation and corresponding player performance has not changed at all, just the final calculation of ratings.

We should not have teams from the same country drawn into the same international cup group anymore, unless of course the number of teams from a country exceeds the number of groups (which never happens in the current settings). In order to do this we had to compromise on the strength split logic, meaning we may have a particular groups composed with relatively stronger teams than others. Let’s see how it plays out the next time the groups are created.

Cheers

Bug fixes:
- when youth players were release any coach report that was in progress continued to be progressed until completion even though the old manager had no access to it
- adjusted the screen to replace a player in the national squad to the new game layout, hopefully the last screen we’ve missed.

The transfer budget change from investment points to money/expenses based will happen almost fully automatically on transition from turn 12 to 13 next season in both dimensions. I’ll only have to do a manual server restart each time and that’s it. For now the only apparent change is the Investments screen missing the two areas to be removed and the transfer budget value displayed on your team’s main screen, it is now showing the budget minus any open offers you have.

Cheers

The titles screen for managers and teams now contain flags indicating the country each particular competition belongs to or no flag when it is an international competition. This is a small but nice addition that had no reason not to be there since the beginning!

Have you checked our game manual lately? We’ve been slowly adding content to that in order to make it easier for new players to learn the game. Experienced players might find something useful there as well, who knows? The manual can be found under the “?” menu on the top right (if you’re not using mobile) or at the bottom of your sandwich menu (if you’re using mobile).

Cheers

Are any of your players part of the Team of the Round? In the league screen there is now a tab for the Team of the Round, which is a selection of the players with the best performance in the last league round. We have a few improvements to do on this yet (link to player information, send messages to managers and add this to player statistics) but we decided to release it earlier for fun.

p.s.: MediumTicker will only show content on the new tab after the next league round

Small improvements:
- Country ranking preview for next season is now sorted by points automatically
- Added sorting to scout reports screen

In the player info screen you now have a tab for Awards. For now the only award possible is “Team of the Round”. Awards are sorted by season in descending order and when a player received multiple awards of a particular award you will see a multiplier in front of the award name, e.g. “2 x Team of the Round – Premiership”.

Sorting has been changed in the player list screen so that it now sorts in descending order on first click for player skills. The remaining columns will still sort ascending first.

You can request all coach reports for a player at once with the new Request All Reports button in the player coach reports screen. There were also some enhancements in the order player evolution steps are generated in preparation to the player traits feature that is coming. Stay tuned!