CPU teams will ask for higher values when transfer listing a player whose status became critical. This is the first of a series of initiatives that we know need to be done to make CPU teams a bit less dumb. We still want them to “help” managed teams a little bit, but their lack of planning is not good for the health of the game overall.

Values entered into transfer price and wage fields are now properly formatted as you type. For example, if you type 12000000 you will actually see 12,000,000 on the screen. This should help avoid mistakes of entering one less or one extra 0.

During the season tick the RubySoccer Football Federation will elect the World Team of the Season, picking the 11 best players from all over the world. The best player among those 11 will also be given a special Player of the Season award. The election criteria is a mix of player match performance and the one used to give stars to players, mostly relying on consistent good match performances.

The World Team of the Season will be displayed in the Hall of Fame screen (accessible from the Dimension menu) in a new tab called Players.

The forced transfer feature is finally complete! I recommend you read the corresponding section of our game manual to familiarise yourself with it. The bottom line is there is no player status anymore and in order to buy a player that is not transfer listed you need to pay a lot of money to the team and be ahead in relation to the player priority. You can only attempt such transfer once every 6 turns, you can find out how many turns you have to wait in your profile page (easily accessible by clicking in your name, for example, from the team info page).

When renewing the contract of a player that is unhappy in terms of his priority there is now a cap on how much more money he is going to ask for. The old logic was always doubling the value on every renewal, which is not really what we intended originally.

CPU teams have now learned to use different formations and tactics instead of the predictable ones they’ve been using so far. They’re still dumb in terms of picking the players suitable for a given position in the field (e.g. they may pick an L player to play on RC), but this is definitely an improvement to some of the bizarre formations I’ve seen them using in their matches.

I’ve adjusted the player generation code so that lower ranked countries have better chances of getting decent players. Currently the chances are very low, they should at least be more likely to generate players with good primary skills and bad secondary ones or vice-versa. Why not even an overall decent player every now and then?

After gathering some feedback on forced transfers I have updated the amount of money required to be dependent on the player skills and potential when compared to his teammates. Instead of a fixed amount of at least 3x the team money balance this will now vary from 1x to 3×. I expect it will be close to 2x or slightly over it in most cases, unless you’re trying to snatch the top players of a team.

An upgrade has been applied to RubySoccer. This shouldn’t change any functionality, but behind the scenes the changes were extensive. If you see any issues, please report them to us.

Our match replay controls were not displaying, and our table sorting pictures (arrows) were not appearing. These bugs have now been fixed.

A significant change was applied to our infrastructure. Please let us know if you see any issues. We’ve noticed performance is a little better, do you guys agree? Voice your opinion!

CPU teams will update their investments following a new logic and schedule. The aim here is to have investment levels more aligned to the team’s financial situation and avoid money waste with upgrades/downgrades.

After recent changes to increase the number of players kept by CPU teams we’ve noticed the logic used to decide which players they loan needed to be changed to ensure such players got match time and were not loaned just to sit on the bench. This has now been done and their loaning behaviour should be back to normal once the league starts.

Despite what the game manual says, there was a bug where some players reached their full potential without developing any traits. This has now been fixed and all players generated from now should have developed one positive and one negative trait by the time they reach their full potential. Some of the current players will still have the issue and will reach their potential with 0 or 1 trait instead.

Forced Transfer have just become a bit easier. A player will no longer reject the offer if your team is worse than his current team with regards to his priority, he will only do it if you are below the rejection point (meaning he would reject even if he was transfer listed). That means in the majority of case what you really need to work out is how much to offer as transfer price, and of course continuing to offer an acceptable wage to the player that is higher than his current wage.

CPU buying decision was improved slightly. The change aims to avoid the common scenario where a CPU team buys a player that has just slightly better potential than the one in their squads they consider the worst suitable for a given position, and then decide to sell the bought player not long after.

Version 0.01 EARLY BETA of player heatmaps is available. You can access them from the match replay section.

CPU teams will now start fielding players that need to “play official matches” to improve. They’re not yet handling other more complex requirements such as play abroad or play international competitions, but this change should help improve the overall player quality in the game.

Players now have a “class” attribute that is a snapshot of his current skills and star status. This is not yet used to determine any in-game behaviour or logic, but it will be used soon. Please check our corresponding game manual page for more information.

Cheers

Teams now also have a class attribute! This is based on their key players skills and is also relative to other teams in the dimension (except national squads). The team class can be seen in the team info screen, managers at risk and dimension’s free teams list from the Job Centre. We plan to add this into a couple more places such as ranking screens.

As with the player class, the team class is informational only at this point.

We have added league classes. It can be seen in the league table screen, on the left hand side of the title panel beside the league name, where the season number corresponding to the league stats being displayed used to be (now moved to the right hand side). The team class is now also displayed in the ranking pages.

Another small addition done at the same time is displaying multiple goal icons beside the player name in the match report, when they’ve scored multiple goals. If they’ve scored more than 3 goals during the match we should the goal icon followed by “x” and the number of goals.

You can now give numbers to your players using the “Numbers” tab in your team players screens. These number will then be displayed in match reports alongside the player names. This is an optional feature and you can leave players without numbers if you wish (or even remove numbers from currently numbered players).

At the moment the interface used to set the numbers is as simple as possible and there is a single validation that you’re not giving the same number to more than one player. If you do that an error message appears and you have to re-do any changes you had previously done.

Cheers

The number of votes for inactive teams is now being displayed in the “Inactive Teams” tab from the country screen. At the same time we’re putting in a fix to ensure those votes are really taken into account when promoting clubs into bottom divisions, it seems so far they were not!

The player traits related to playing better/worse against weaker/stronger teams are now based on team classes. The corresponding trait descriptions have been updated to better explain this change. For example, if you manage an A team and is playing against a B team, your players will have the traits “plays better/worse against teams with a class worse than yours” activated whereas your opponent’s players with the traits “player better/worse against teams with a class better than yours” will have it activated. When both teams have the same class these traits will not come into play.

Player limit information is being introduced in “The Board” screen. Nothing is being enforced yet, so have a look at the limits for your team and see if they make sense. These numbers are based on your team’s class and league class and are supposed to limit the number of players you can buy for a given class, but you can still grow players from lower to higher classes to go beyond the limits.

Points give for team and manager rankings now take into account the opponent class. That means a victory against an ‘A’ team is worth more points than a victory against a ‘B’ team, for example.

Don’t be surprised if you see your players’ estimated value radically changing, it is all part of the modifications done to the way we calculate it. It now takes into account the player class, age and the amount of money available to the teams in the dimension. As you can imagine the same player may have different values in FastTicker and MediumTicker.

Another key change is the amount of money CPU teams are willing to pay on player transfers. We’ve noticed a considerable increase in that value and therefore made some adjustments. They will continue taking into account the player estimated value but will now also factor in the player’s class and the buyer team’s class.

Coming soon: improvements to forced transfers that will change the amount of money needed and also include a suggested value for the offer.

A new forced transfer formula is in place. In summary, it does not depend on the target player’s team money balance anymore, but on the player estimated value and his team’s and league’s classes. From our manual:

“The team’s board will evaluate your offer in comparison to the player’s base value. The base value is not displayed anywhere and is the key factor in the estimated value calculation, therefore the estimated value is usually a good indication of the player’s base value. Your offer will have to be between 2x and 12x the player’s base value, depending on the grade of the target player’s team and league. That means it is easier to force the transfer of players from small clubs and/or leagues. If the player’s team has a manager, the amount required to force a transfer is doubled.”

New formulas are now in place for ALL club revenues. The main goal is to try and balance the game economy and add a more challenging scenario when managing small clubs. These are the changes:

1) Sponsorship is calculated based on the league class with a small influence of the team quality
2) Merchandise is calculated based on the team class with a small influence of the league quality
3) Match attendance is calculated based on home team class, visitor team class and competition type. For league matches the league class is used, for national cup the team with the highest league class is used, for international competitions we have an almost guaranteed attendance of 40,000 (EL and Sudamericana) or 50,000 (CL and Libertadores).
4) Stadium investment has been replaced by Headquarters. Its role is the same as the Stadium when it comes to limiting how high the level of the other investments can be, but it does not determine stadium size anymore, all clubs have a 100,000 capacity stadium (at least for now).

The thinking is that the revenue from Sponsorship and Merchandise can be used to pay for your main players wages (roughly your 22 best players), the revenue from competition prizes can be used to pay for investments and the revenue from tickets sold can be used to pay additional wages or for buying players.

Hopefully this is the last big change to the economy and we can now focus on a few important improvements to player evolution and potential prediction!

CPU teams have a completely revamped logic to decide which players to sell and which players to buy. They now view players in one of 3 categories: main squad, reserves and future. For selling they will get rid of reserves that they believe will not become main players, mainly due to age, as well as extra future players they may have. For buying each team will have a different priority based on their class, deciding whether to hire main players, future players or loan players.

A key change is that a CPU team will not bid for a player if another CPU team is already bidding. This should increase the number of different player negotiations happening simultaneously. Nothing changed with regards to the values they pay for players.