You can now pay 5 rubies to re-draw a positive or negative player trait or 15 rubies to remove a negative trait altogether.

The player average skill is now displayed in the national player replacement screen, for those who choose to have this column displayed. As a reminder, this column has no direct impact in player value or match performance, it is just a straight calculation of the corresponding skills average.

All forced transfer attempts (failed or successful) will now be stored for future referece. You can see a history of your forced transfer attempts in your manager profile page. For a specific player you attempt to force the transfer from now on, you can also see the history in the bottom right of the player info page.

The newspaper now has a section called “Managers” where you can see the manager movements in the last 144 turns.

When you duplicate a formation, all formation strategies are duplicated as well into the new formation.

When you leave a team you won’t lose your existing scout reports anymore, they will be carried across and accessible from your new team. They still expire after a few seasons as usual, nothing changed about that.

We wish everyone happy holidays, no matter what you celebrate, what you believe in and where you are! That in 2023 we can continue to have fun and improve the game together.

I didn’t have time to finish the new pyramid league structure to be used in TestTicker but it is well underway and should be ready some time in January. More details in the new year.

Thanks for playing

We have just introduced some adjustments to try and manage CPU team money balance. The intention is to avoid teams that are too rich or too poor for their respective classes. We’ll continue to keep an eye on it and how it affects overall economy health and player value, especially on FastTicker.

The work on the new “Pyramid” game mode continues! We are currently in the process of testing out a full season in the new game mode as well as making sure all screens work. No need to rush to check it out just yet, the change is not live.

Some of the cool features in the new game mode:
- all teams from different countries to be part of the same league structure and join the same cup competition
- managers can only join teams in the second division leagues
- planning a way to make sure managers don’t stay at the top for too long and are eventually sacked to start over…not sure yet on the best way to do this

A new game mode is live on TestTicker! The dimension has been reset and it contains 3 leagues of 24 teams each, distributed in a pyramid (one top division and two lower divisions). Managers are only allowed to apply for teams in one of the two lower divisions.

In this new game mode teams from all over the world compete together in this single league structure, as well as in a global cup (knockout format). There are no international competitions (in the traditional sense, as all competitions are international) and not national squads (for simplicity). You have approximately a day and a half to explore and apply to the teams you like before the first tick, after that TestTicker will be back to its usual schedule.

The team ranking screen now has two tabs at the top: points and strength. The points tab is the one that opens by default and the one everyone is already familiar with, it shows the teams ranked by their performance points. The new strength tab ranks teams by their calculated estimated strength, which at the moment happens at season start only, so this rank remains static throughout the season.

In the Contracts tab of your team players screen you can now see how many teams are interested in each of your players. This information was previously only available in the player info screen, contract section.

After the season tick in each dimension, the player value calculation formula for the respective dimension will be slightly adjusted. The basis of the formula is still the same, influenced by the amount of money available in the dimension, however the adjustment will bring down player values overall, especially for younger players still under development.

Austria has been added to TestTicker, which means 22 new inactive teams that can be voted to join the bottom leagues in future seasons. There is still work to be done in order to be able to include it in the other dimensions, I’ll work on that later.

The Hall of Fame page has a new tab that shows all the Star Players of the world. At the moment it is a simple screen where players are sorted by number of stars and grouped in pages of 100 records.

Match commentary now includes entries for “header disputes”. Without this managers were completely unaware of how often the header attribute was used during a match, except when header goals were scored. Hopefully this gives you additional insight on what’s going on during the match.

We now allow 5 substitutions in official matches, in line with most real-life official competition rules.

When transfer listing a player you can now add notes that will be visible to other managers. Maybe you want to tell them the player potential or the reason for selling…anything you can fit in 50 characters. These notes are visible for other managers in the player info page as well as in the transfer list page. In the case of the transfer list page, there will be an icon beside the transfer price indicating there are some notes for that player. You can read the notes by hovering over the icon or going into the player info page.

There is now a limit in place of 3 transfer offers you can have at any given time. The intention is to give more managers the chance of hiring good players, especially during the end of season period when soon to be inactive teams sell all their players. We may tweak that further if needed, but for now it is as simple as that.

A few updates on player negotiations:
- player priorities of existing and new players have been revised and limited only to the following: low country ranking, low manager ranking, low team ranking, small squad
- about 7.5% of existing players have no priority at all, but new players will always have one of the above
- player priority influence on the odds of choosing a particular team has been doubled
- the influence on the number of seasons offered on the odds of choosing a particular team has been reduced by 40%

The intent as always is to try and help the underdogs grow faster, without necessarily being unfair to established teams.

From now on match reports should correctly show the player zone (D, M, A) when a player enters the field in a zone other than the zone of the player he is replacing.

GK specific statistics for saves, deflections and clean sheets will start to be collected from now on. The display of them in the various game screens is still work in progress, but future matches will have these numbers in the player statistics tab. You will also see them in the GKs player info page and statistics page (not clean sheets yet). Soon the team players statistics page will also contain the GK specific numbers, just working out the best way to organise them there.

When using rubies to shuffle player traits we now ensure you pass through all different traits before any of them repeats. For example, if your player “plays worse against same class teams” and you keep shuffling the trait, you will get all other traits before you see “plays worse against same class teams again”. Notice that does not apply to the actual trait value (+1, +2, +3, -1, -2, -3), that is still completely random as follows: 50% chance for +-1, 33% chance for +-2 and 17% chance for +-3.

There is a new option in manager settings to receive messages when one of your player’s class changes. It is disabled by default, which is the current behaviour.

New option added to the manager settings, where one can choose whether to see classes in the list countries page. As countries themselves don’t have classes, what we display there are the classes of the corresponding top divisions.

The messages table now has a search box at the top that allows filtering the messages displayed. At this stage it is very basic, so when you click a message to read it you will lose any text previously entered in the search.

CPU teams may now decide to sell some good/promising players every now and then. I don’t expect this to be anything major, but hopefully it adds some much-needed movement to the player market.

I have been considering if the same should apply to human managed teams, have some players request transfer and refuse renewal proposals in some very specific conditions. I know, losing players is never a popular idea, but that happens in real life. It definitely won’t be as drastic as we had in the past when we tried to have player morale in the game, I’ll do some thorough analysis before extending this concept to human-managed players.

The star players hall of fame page now includes in-page sorting and searching. This works only within the current page you’re viewing; it is not a global sorting and searching capability (maybe to come later). We have also included icons to indicate if a player is transfer/loan listed or retiring.

Player statistics recording has improved, and newly recorded data will include the team and manager information. This will allow us to provide better visibility of team and manager specific player statistics going forward.

The only visible change for now will be in the player’s statistics page, where you will see the team’s name under the competition name. Unfortunately, previously recorded data will not have the team information and will still only display the competition name.

Players will no longer lose stamina when playing friendly matches.