International cup matches now give additional ranking points in comparison to national league or cup matches. These bonus points are higher depending on the importance of the competition, i.e. Europa League and Copa Sudamericana give you a smaller bonus than Champions League and Libertadores, which give you a smaller bonus than the Club World Cup. We probably need to have a complete manual page to demystify how the ranking points are calculated!

I’ve finally tracked down the bug where CPU teams where loaning players that they didn’t really need, and therefore were not using them in matches. If you have a player loaned to a CPU team and you see he is not being used you should call him back and loan list him again. Next time he gets a loan offer he will be much more likely to be used by the team who gets him, now that the problem is fixed.

The auto-generated in-game newspaper is now reborn with news about player movements (transfers, starting career, leaving club). The World News tab will show relevant player movements in the last 3 turns (or last 3 turns where at least one player moved). There is also a complete separate section now for Managers at Risk instead of displaying them at the bottom of the User Articles page.

The age in which players start losing skills will now vary between 31 and 34 depending on the age they reach their potential. Those reaching potential while still young will start losing skills at 31 and those reaching potential in the 30s will start losing skills at 34, with the other two profile types in between. It is important to notice that all existing players that are 31 and over OR that are already fully developed will still keep the current behaviour of starting to lose skills at 31, all the others will follow this new rule.

Players will now improve a higher number of attributes in a single improvement when younger and a lower number when older. Previously all player improvements gave them a random number of points between 1 and 6 (1 and 5 for goalkeepers), but now the earlier improvements are guaranteed to give them more (between 4 and 6 and then 3 and 5) and the later improvements will give them less (between 2 and 4 and finally between 1 and 3). The average number of points a player receives after all his improvements remain unchanged. This change is effective immediately for existing players as well, in proportion to the number of improvements left in his career.

The main goal of this change is to have better players than can be used as first team at a younger age, instead of relying solely on old players. This could also bring a new dynamic to the transfer market as managers may be willing to sell “not so old” players knowing they will have to wait less time to renew the squad.

You may have noticed some CPU teams have more than the limit of 40 players in their squads. This was due to a bug that has now been fixed, CPU teams will respect the same limit of players human managed teams have, even if it changes in the future. Of course that any teams currently above the limit will remain so until they sell their exceeding players, but they won’t be able to hire/loan additional players in the meantime.

You may want to keep an eye on free transfer list in countries that have inactive teams. From now on, inactive players will be gradually released to the free transfer of their team’s country throughout the season. That means inactive teams will always get a fresh batch of players when re-joining the game as well as having their money balance reset.

Two minor improvements: transfer prices and wages now have proper formatting when displayed in the team and player history ($n,nnn,nnn); negotiation failed messages now include the wage accepted by the player.

Cheers

You may not even have noticed, but since the introduction of the player shirts in the match report screen we were not displaying the * beside the man of the match player’s name. This is now fixed.

The logic associated to penalty kick taking and saving has been simplified in order to better align with reality. We’ve noticed there were too many misses and saves during penalty kick, with the new logic in place should increase the number of goals scored in these situations. In addition to that the goalkeeper trait for “good at penalty kicks” and “bad at penalty kicks” will have a slightly higher impact.

The merchandise bonus star type will be retired, meaning no new players will get it. We found out that it is the star type with less impact, partially due to the fact that some of its benefits are reduced due to the higher wage demanded by star players. As a replacement we have a much more exciting star type: improved youth players.

The new star type will have two main effects: improve the base skills used when generating new youth players (up to what is used in a top ranked country) and immediately increase player skills one or more times as soon as he joins the club. The first effect means that lower ranked countries with such star players would be able to generate better quality youths as if they were better ranked, whereas the second effect means it will be possible to generate players that have already skipped a few steps on their evolution, potentially even reducing the age they will reach their potential. All these details can be found in the game manual page for star players.

You must have realised you cannot see any matches if you navigate to older seasons in your team matches screen or even national/international cups screens. We have existing history for all matches but unfortunately they were missing some key information about the competition they belong to and in which turn they took place. These things will be included in the match history from now on so we can use that history to display older matches in the aforementioned screens.

For now, if you navigate to older seasons in your team matches screen you should be able to see the list of matches that took place in those seasons, but you won’t have information about the turn and competition. In 2-3 seasons time when you navigate back to the current season that information should be there.

The game newspaper now has a section with the latest press releases written by the dimension managers.

Scout searches can now be configured to look only for multi-position (MA, DM, DA, etc) and/or multi-side (LC, RC, LR) players. If you do not check this option the search will work as before, looking for all types. For example, if you search for D with multi-position checked the search will only find DM, DA, MD or AD; without mutli-position checked it will also find D players.

Cheers

Team classes can now be seen in the league table and team matches screen. We can easily add that info to more screens in the future, if it proves to be useful.

In some cases when player classes changed we noticed the estimated value was taking to long to catch up with the new class value range. That sometimes caused confusion and made it harder to make accurate forced transfer offers. We have now changed the logic so that the estimated value immediately catches up to a more reasonable value aligned to the new player class.

Updated player evolution profiles so that:

• no new players will be generated with “reaches potential on his 30s”
• introduced new “reaches potential very young”
• adjusted age for “reaches potential while still young”
• adjusted number of available improvements per season to be smoother and always have a minimum of 2
• removed the scenario where a player had no improvements available in a given season even before reaching potential
• reduced some differences in number of improvements for different profiles
• players can start losing skills at 30, 31, 32 or 33 depending on profile (the older he is capable of reaching the potential the older he will start losing skills)

The main goal here is to improve the number of world class younger players, currently players over 30 dominate the top player lists all over the world. This should also make it faster to renew your squad when the time comes. These changes are effective for newly generated players only, existing players will retain their current profiles.

When you are trying to hire players from the market you will not get the “not interested” messages anymore, they will always listen to your offer first. Similarly we have removed the exclusive negotiation (priority indicator) when one or some teams had exclusive offer evaluation by some players and could sometimes win disputes with very low salaries.

Both these things were based on the player negotiation priority profile, which is still in place and will have a weight in the player decision, but now we have removed the two extremes where the player either completely ignores a team/manager or gives him exclusivity.

RubySoccer is now named Goal FC (Goal Football Club). We have a new website, the technology stack received a massive upgrade, the whole site is now encrypted, etc.
This is an important move for the game’s future, but bear with us while we complete the re-branding (there’s still lots of references to the old name and logo across the whole site!).

As always, enjoy!

After the last league match, the following will happen to a team which has been relegated from the bottom league of a country:

• Any friendlies scheduled for the remainder of the season will get cancelled
• The manager will be fired
• The team will not accept any job applications
• All players will be transfer listed with a waiting period of 6 turns for the transfer to be concluded

The last item is the real change here. Currently the players from inactive teams are released for free throughout the season, which became an easy source of money for the already richer teams. By selling the players instead of making them available for free we reduce this advantage. Any players not sold before the season tick will still be released for free at some point in the following season.

Your coach reports for potential and next step will now be more specific when your player has already reached his potential. There is no pointing in hiding this information or making it subjective.

Please like our new Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/goalfcteam

- Our new logo is on the frontpage;
- Heatmaps are now more useful. I still plan to do a bit more to them;
- Managers online are ordered by last activity (not sure why we didn’t do this before).

Countries which have inactive teams end up having extra players in comparison to the other countries, as a new batch of players joins the game every time teams become active again. In order to balance that roughly 50% of the players generated for re-activated teams will be from countries other than the team’s country.

Newly generated goalkeepers will not have evolution steps that require being man of the match or playing for the national squad. Both of these step types are too hard to be accomplished by most GKs, hence the decision to keep them only for field players.

We have added a new player trait to give bonus/penalty when playing against same class teams. Any player yet to develop a trait can acquire this new one, not only the ones generated after the change.

You can now see the exact value for bonuses and penalties from player traits when looking at your own players, loaned players currently in your club and players for which you have a scout report. The information is visible between parenthesis beside the trait text both in the player info screen as well as the team players traits screen. The values apply to all player skills in the matches where the traits are activated.

CPU teams were not bidding for some star players because they were not taking the stars into account while evaluating the player’s wage and were considering it to be too high. This has now been fixed, so hopefully your star players will start getting the usual offers.

In addition to that I have fixed some grammar mistakes throughout. Please feel free to contact me in-game if you spot additional things to be fixed in that area.

We have just introduced player notes, which are nothing more than some free text you can write about your players to act as a reminder of something you consider relevant or important about them. In order to simplify the launch of the feature for now you are only allowed to write one short note (255 characters) for each of your own players and they will only be visible to you. Later on we plan to extend this by adding public notes and/or maybe allowing you to write private notes about players you don’t own.

In the formation screen you can now see the next match information at the top, including which formation is currently assigned to it. Hopefully this can act as a reminder of what is your next match and whether the formation you are editing is the one assigned to that match.

There is also a brand new League Ranking screen where you can see the game’s calculated strength for each league, corresponding class and number of managers in it. Using the filter at the top you are able to see this info for top divisions only if you’d like.