Loan renewals are available! When the loan contract is reaching its end (12 turns before) both managers will receive a message and will have the opportunity to propose a loan renewal. If the other manager agrees the loan will be extended for the minimum period requested in the original loan clause. For example, if the manager requested a loan from 36-108 turns, the loan will be renewed for 36 turns. Wage and other conditions will remain the same. The loan can be renewed as many times as the managers want. It’s not possible to renew loans with CPU managed teams.
Important: if you have a loan ending in 12 or less turns from you will not receive any message alerts, but you’ll still be able to renew the loan going to the player info page and clicking the new loan renewal option in the bottom left area.

First improvement from the match engine enhancements package: zone based passing frequency. Your team will still use the passing frequency strategy you define, but your defenders will pass the ball a little more frequently while your attackers will pass a little less frequently.

Second improvement on the match engine: passing logic. Players used to pass the ball to the most distant teammate within the range specified in the passing strategy (short, medium or long), now they pass to any player within the range.

Enhanced player movement during match. Instead of running in a fixed line from goal to goal players now have more freedom, making their moves more realistic. They’re still lacking a marking sense, but that will be improved in the future.

Wage cap is now at a more reasonable level. Besides getting a more realistic value allowed by the Board we will prevent mistakes like extra zero’s in the wage value or misunderstandings between transfer price and player wage.

Minor adjustments on wage cap formula so that the club’s financial situation is now the most important factor.

Player rating system (the score they get in a match report) has been changed. The quality of the opponent is now taken in consideration. In other words, your players are expected to play well against weaker teams, so their score might not be that high if they don’t play very well, even if you still get the victory. The opposite is also true, playing against stronger teams your players will have to give their best and that may not be enough, sometimes they will get good ratings (they did well for their capacity) but that wasn’t enough to get a victory.

Improved player running and distance calculation on match engine. Real distance (diagonal) is now used instead of horizontal distance plus vertical distance. This will affect the distance a player can run and the distance calculation for shots, passes, etc.

Swap position feature (changine MA to AM, DM to MD and so on) is available for managers with players loaned in. The manager who loaned the player out won’t have access to this feature on the loaned player until he comes back.

Control skill is now used when a player receives a pass. They may not completely control the ball (it may bounce on them) if their ability on this skill is low.

Starting next season on both dimensions managers will receive a bonus or penalty on their performance rating depending on their competition results compared to the Board expectations. You were expected to fight against relegation but was middle in table? Extra rating points for you! Were you eliminated from the national cup sooner than expected? Too bad, your rating will drop a little bit.
The amount of rating points earned or lost will depend on the quality of your opponents. In a well balanced league, failing or being above your expectations may not affect your rating that much, but if a top team fail or a clearly inferior team performs really well, that will make a big difference.

On loan renewal the loan wage is recalculated based on the agreed loan percentage. For example, suppose the player wage was 5,000 and you agreed to pay 50% of his wage, so the loan wage is 2,500. If the player wage becomes 10,000 during the loan period, you’ll still pay 2,500 as the loan wage, but if the loan is renewed, you’ll start paying 5,000 (50% of the new wage).

Partial tackles enhancement
When your player tackled an opponent he would either take the ball or fail, now there is a third option, a partial successful tackle. If a partial tackle happens your player won’t take control over the ball, he will kick it away from the opponent instead. In that case, he, the opponent or both may lose some time to recover from the tackle.
Please provide any feedback you have in the Improvements Discussion topic so we can adjust this new enhancement if needed.
p.s.: a partial tackle still counts as a successful tackle

Bug fixed: fouls statistics were being counted twice! So when you look to any match report prior to this announcement you have to divide the number of fouls by 2 in order to get the number of fouls that actually happened.
Thanks to Gustavo Nery for finding this bug :)

Match engine enhancement: keepers lose stamina on hard defenses.
As your keeper perform hard defenses, he will increasingly lose his match stamina and will be easier to beat. After conceiving a goal his match stamina will be recovered. It is important to notice that lots of shots don’t guarantee the opponent keeper is losing his match stamina, if your shots are poor or the if keeper is very good and is not having a hard time defending your shots he won’t be affected.

Bug fixed: penalty shootout was not being stored on match report. It worked in the past but was bugged for a while. It should work for the next penalty shootout decisions.

Match engine enhancement: when nobody has the ball only closer players or the closest player in your squad will try to get it. No more swarm behavior (everybody run towards the ball).

It has been reported a while back that the wrong player was taking free kicks or penalty kicks sometimes. Today I’ve just figured it out. Whenever your formation was incomplete at the match start and the system was responsible to complete it, the free kick, penalty kick and corner kick players were ignored, as if nobody had been selected.
This is fixed!

New basic strategy: passing priority.
With this strategy you can influence the field zone where your players will focus their passes. It can be set to center, mixed or along sides. The last one means most of the times your players will pass the ball to a teammate next to the field sides while the first option is the opposite.
IMPORTANT: you can already set the strategy in your formations, but it won’t be applied until FastTicker season end in 2 days. Until then everybody will be using the “mixed” option no matter which one is really selected.

Thanks to Nicky Broos, one of our users, the coutry list page got a new look. Check it out!

When a loan was renewed the smallest asked period was used as the new loan period. For example, if I asked 36-144 turns the renewal period would be 36 turns, even if the other manager had originally loaned him for 108 turns. This will remain the same for existing loans, but for new ones the exact period will be used for renewal.

Country points obtained on CL or Libertadores are doubled. In other words, a victory or draw on these competitions are now worth twice as much country points as the same result on UEFA Cup or Copa Sudamericana.

Today’s most important improvement: goalkeeper injury.
That’s right. There is a 1 in 400 chance of a goalkeeper injury during a match. If you have only one quality keeper it’s better start thinking about buying another one.
p.s.: the current injury names used are the same for keepers and regular players, so they may not make sense. Please ignore it, after all, the important information is how many turns the player will be injured ;)

Increased the number of different formations allowed from 5 to 7.

Match engine enhancement: improved players tackling decision. At most 2 closest players will try to tackle an opponent at the same time. We expect this to reduce the “swarm” behavior.

Bankruptcy rules changes: when you finances go below zero and all your departments are on level 0 a random player will be “sold” and leave the game in order to quit your debits. Previously the transfer listed players had priority on this rule. This change was made so that managers can’t abuse the rule by transfer listing the players they want to be gone when reaching negative balance.

Manager and team ranking points are now earned based on opponent quality. In other words, beating a strong oppoent is worth more points than beating weak one. As a result the best ranked teams/managers will probably lose some points even on victories until the new scores are normalized.

Match strategies are not applied partially anymore. If you configure a position change and a substitution in the same strategy, the position change is not performed if the substitution can’t be made (when the player is not available).

Enhance distance to goal calculation on match simulation. Instead of measuring the distance to the center of the goal we now measure the distance to the closest point of the goal, considering its whole size. It should make LC/RC attackers shoot a little bit more.

New individual tactics: corner tactics.
With this new enhancement you can choose which players should move forward or hold position for a corner kick, and move back or hold position for an opponent corner kick. The option “play position” represents the current behaviour, that is, depending on the player positon he is more or less likely to move forward or back on corners (defenders are more likely to move back on opponent corners and attackers more likely to move forward on offensive corners).
IMPORTANT: these changes won’t affect the match simulation for the next 24 hours so that more people have the chance to configure the tactics.