Match Report messages now include the goal scorers. Thanks Rui Reis for the suggestion! In addition to that we’ve also added some column titles to the team matches screen. Not that you guys didn’t know what each column was, but it’s always nice to have things clearly labeled, especially for new players.

The team players statistics page now shows data for players that haven’t played any matches in the season. Of course their numbers will all be 0, but this will give you the whole picture of your squad and make it easier to identify those players you’re not using yet.

Club rotation is live! That means no more club renaming to keep up with real life top division clubs, we’ll let them join RubySoccer as bottom division clubs are relegated out of the game. Don’t worry, they can always come back by being “promoted” back to the bottom division in future seasons.

At the same time I’ve done additional changes to ensure all leagues have exactly 20 clubs. That means relegated clubs from the bottom division in Paraguay, England, Italy and Spain will NOT be replaced by new clubs next season, effectively reducing the total number of clubs in them to the standard 20. When the next season then ends, clubs relegated from those divisions will be replaced by “promoted” clubs as usual.

In addition to the countries mentioned above, only Brazil will initially have “inactive” teams that will take part in the rotation system, but in time we’ll make sure all countries have their own inactive clubs pool. Please notice that managers that are relegated from the bottom division in their country leagues will be fired for bad performance. Check out our game manual entries for Inactive Teams and Inactive Players for additional info.

Cheers

Updated Portuguese league names and included 5 new inactive clubs: Cova da Piedade, Fafe, Famalicão, Tondela and Viseu. These are now available to be promoted to the bottom division by replacing one of the 3 relegated clubs by the end of the current season. We probably need to add a screen where such inactive clubs are displayed…

A new tab has been added to the Coaching screen to provide a “player” view of your team’s coach reports. This screen lists all your players in different rows and each report type as a column, with a shorter version of the result text displayed, where available. This is another suggestion from the forums that made it into the game (thanks Alexander)!

The rules for re-hiring players to your club will change. Previously the rule simply stated that you could not hire a player whose immediate previous club was yours, but now the rule is that you have to wait for one and a half seasons (216 turns) before hiring a player that used to be owned by your club. In general this should be a more sensible and relaxed rule than the previous one.

If someone sends you a link to a player or team (and you’re not logged in), you will now go straight to it – instead of having to enter the right dimension first.

Many (if not all) of the bugs introduced by our latest technology upgrade from Friday have now been fixed. The latest one was the help dialogs, which are now working again. Please let us know if something is still not behaving correctly.

In a more interesting note, 16 new Italian clubs have been added to the game as inactive clubs. They will be joined by the two relegated ones in the current season and three of them will be promoted into Serie B two seasons from now. At the moment they are picked randomly, but I plan to add a mechanism for managers to have a say in which clubs should be promoted.

CPU teams will not loan players paying astronomical wages anymore. We have just introduced a factor to cap (that depends on player skills and stars) how much is an acceptable wage for them to pay. Just to be clear, they will still loan those high earners, but only if the wage percentage allowed by the loan clauses is within this new factor calculation.

This is the first step in improving how players and CPU teams handle negotiations. The main goal with this is provide some awareness to CPU teams so they don’t spend all their money in stupid loans. Managers offering high wages from now on should make sure they have the means to pay for them, as CPU teams are not going to help them with this anymore.

The league screen navigation has changed as announced on Facebook. Instead of navigating through leagues using the links in the top right you will now see a selection box on the right hand side to switch between the country’s leagues.

We have also added an Inactive Teams link to the country pages so that you can view all the teams that are available to be promoted to the bottom division of the country at the end of the season. In the future we may add an option there for managers to vote on which team they’d like to see promoted from the inactive teams pool.

Fixed the player statistics page to again show the season aggregate. Thanks Roy for reporting the issue.

When looking at the league screen for the current season, before the first match has been played, teams will appear in the same position they’ve finished in the previous season.

You can now vote on which inactive team you would like to see promoted into the game. Just go into the Inactive Teams page of any country and make your choice! You can have one vote per country every season and if your chosen teams do not make the cut any votes they have received are accumulated for the following season until they are promoted.

New Spanish teams are now available in the Inactive Teams page in FastTicker. They will be available in MediumTicker next season as the Segunda Division size needs to be reduced from 22 to 20 first before new teams can join Spain there. Don’t forget you can vote on which inactive teams you’d like to see promoted into the game in each country where they are available.

We have a new Competition Statistics page that can be accessed from the link below the Top Scorers table in any competition screen. For now we show the top 10 players with more goals, assists and higher average rating but in the future we’ll add more information to this screen.

The competition prizes have been adjusted taking into account the latest poll. Here are the old and new amounts for the champions (league and national cup are adjusted based on country ranking):

League: 12.2M (used to be 15M)
National Cup: 6.2M (used to be 6M)
Champions League and Libertadores: 8.35M (used to be 6M)
Europa League and Copa Sudameriacana: 4.175M (used to be 3M)
Club World Cup: 3.25M (used to be 3M)

New enhancements to Coaching screen, Player View tab:
- Player View tab is now the default instead of Report View
- Evolution Stage and Next Step reports now show how long ago they’ve been generated
- You can request new reports from there without having to go to the player details

National Squad managers won’t be fired for bad performance after being eliminated from a competition if they have joined the team less than 36 turns before. This should avoid situations where a manager joins the national squad in the middle of a competition and is fired after one or two matches, without having the time to get to know the squad and experiment on tactics.

Fourteen new Paraguayan clubs have been added to the inactive teams list in both dimensions. MediumTicker and FastTicker are now aligned in terms of number of active and inactive clubs, all leagues have 20 clubs in them with 3 relegation/promotion spots (for countries with more than 1 league). Don’t forget you can vote for the club you’d like to see promoted into the bottom division in each country.

Scout search progress is now negatively impacted by the number of players in your hotlist that were not found by your scouts (or whose scout report has been deleted or expired). In the scouting page you will see a warning message if your searches are being impacted. The message will tell you the number of “non-scouted” players in your hotlist and the current impact they’re having in the searches. This new feature represents the extra work load on your scouts for having to keep track of your hotlisted players.

As a result of the last announced change it was clear we needed a better way to manage the players hotlist (thanks Leigh for bringing it up). The player hotlist dialog now has an option to remove the player from the hotlist and also displays “(non-scouted)” beside players that do not have a scout report from you and therefore are negatively impacting your scout searches. This can only be done from the “All” tab (not from G, D, M or A) but hopefully is enough to facilitate hotlist management for now.

Again, this was done as a quick fix to complement the previous change, we can definitely build on top of that or improve the hotlist management as a whole in the future.

When creating or changing a match strategy you can now select the competition type it is applicable to. The available options are: any, league, national cup, international or not international. This applies only to club formation strategies, not to national squad formation strategies.

Player hotlist dialog enhanced so that the “non-scouted” information is displayed and players can be removed from position specific tabs, not only from the “All” tab.

We have just introduced the concept of negotiation priority for players. Each player will have a priority and take that into account when evaluating transfer offers. This replaces and enhances the broken “first team chance” they used to consider along with the wage (which is still a factor).

You can find more details in the game manual, player contract section. In summary there are two main differences. The first one is that when your team looks bad in terms of the player’s priority he may reject a transfer offer or, in case of renewal, ask for a higher wage (a message will be displayed when that’s the case and the suggested wage for renewal takes that into account). The second one is that a transfer offer may become a priority offer if the team is very well placed in terms of player priority. During offer comparison the player looks at priority offers first before even considering others, so a “normal” acceptable wage priority offer on its own will beat any wage in other offers.

Your Negotiations investment area has just become more important as the player priority may be revealed in the contract offer screen depending on your negotiations level. When you reveal a player’s priority you can also see which transfer offers are priority offers in the current negotiations section of the player info screen.

If this works well we will enchance the player status logic to consider the player negotiation priority when evaliating non-listed offers, but that’s a separate future discussion to be had.

Four new inactive clubs have been added to Argentina. As a result, the second division (properly renamed to Primera B Nacional) now has three relegation spots. Don’t forget you can see and vote for your favourite inactive clubs in EACH country by going to the Inactive Teams tab in the Country screen.

You can now use rubies to immediately complete coach reports: 2 rubies if the report progress is less than 50%, 1 ruby otherwise. As said before we don’t want RubySoccer to become pay-to-win. While early completion of coach reports provide you quicker insight on your players we do not deem it to be fundamental and decisive enough so that those not paying for it are unable to compete against those that are paying.

Scout searches can now also be completed using rubies. Bear in mind that there is no guarantee a player will be found, it all still depends on your search criteria. Similar to coach reports, the lower the progress of your scout search the higher the price: 3 rubies if current progress is between 0% and 33%, 2 rubies between 34% and 66% and 1 ruby if higher than 66%.

You now have an option to choose whether or not a scout search should become inactive when no players are found on completion. The default behaviour is to make them inactive and therefore all existing searches have been marked as such. If you want them to continue running in this situation just uncheck the box that says “Inactivate if no player found?” when creating new ones or editing existing ones.

Thanks Alexander for the suggestion.

Newly generated goalkeepers will have 30% more training evolution steps on average than existing goalkeepers. We didn’t change the overall number of times a player can improve so that means that GKs will have less steps requiring them to play matches as a result. As things current stand it is difficult in many occasions to fully develop a GK without compromising some of your official matches, this change is hopefully assist in addressing that in a few seasons.

You can now postpone the retirement of your players using rubies by clicking the new icon beside the retirement icon in the player info screen. The cost increases the closer the player is to 40 years old: 1 ruby if he’s 36, 2 rubies if he’s 37, 3 rubies if he’s 38 and 4 rubies if he is 39. You cannot postpone the retirement when he is 40 years old.

When you postpone the retirement you are guaranteed the player will not retire at the end of the current season. During the next season tick, normal rules will apply in determining whether the player will announce his retirement again, if you’re lucky he may not do it. As usual the chances of announcing retirement are higher the closest the player is to 40 years old.