Posts that Frenchi Melow is monitoring

Topic: [admin_only] Improvements

Small improvements to the players morale screen:
-fixed sorting
-included morale rating column

Topic: [admin_only] Improvements

A new investment area has been added: Negotiations. This area of the club will provide you advice on how much to offer a player you are negotiating with. The highest the level more accurate the suggestion. All clubs have the maximum level on this area to start with so they can experience the full benefits of it. Next season you will be able to decide how much to invest in this area as you do for all others. Hopefully this will mitigate some of the negative impacts of the enhance player negotiations.

You will see the suggested wage when offering a contract to a player and the wage field will come pre-populated with the suggestion (except when you are looking at an existing negotiation, in which case it will come populated either with your own offer or with the player’s counter offer as usual). I am yet to add the suggested wage to the mobile version of the contract offer screen.

Topic: [admin_only] Improvements

The parameters for morale calculation have been relaxed a bit and morale has been reset for all players. It was clear from the discussions in the forums and from personal experience that players were being too demanding. I have not yet done any of the suggested enhancements to the system apart from changing existing parameters, let’s see how this works out first and move on from there. Oh, and this is still a trial so you won’t lose your players due to morale just yet.

Topic: [admin_only] Improvements

The trial period for the player morale system has just started! Please take some time to read the overview of this feature on this topic and also what is going to be different during the trial period. We already have some good suggestions to make the system more realistic in the future and these are all noted, but what is posted there is pretty much how the system is going to work to begin with, except of course for any adjustments that prove to be necessary after the trial period.

How long this trial will last will depend on the feedback we receive, we just want to make sure everyone is comfortable with it and has experienced all the different situations they can face due to player morale. If you just ignore morale for now because you won’t actually lose players you may lose the chance to learn how to better manage it when the trial ends. It will also help us understand how easy/hard it is in practice to keep everyone’s morale out of critical, to bring a player with critical morale back to neutral, to have your main players always with good morale, etc.

Cheers

Topic: [admin_only] Improvements

I’m happy to announce that the player morale feature is well under way! The initial profiles and calculations to determine the player morale based on match participation are all ready. Next steps are apply morale effects on match performance and player transfer as well as send messages to managers alerting of unhappy players. Similar to what I did with player stars, I’ll create a new topic in the forums later on explaining the morale system in more details.

Cheers

Topic: [admin_only] Improvements

Our host will go under maintenance this Thursday, September 10, at 3:30AM UTC (roughly 64 hours from now). They expect the downtime to be no more than 30 minutes but in the worst case it should take 1 hour. Fortunately for us the maintenance window does not include any tick times and will happen during the afternoon in our time zone so we will be able to do a sanity check once RubySoccer is back to make sure the tick schedule is alright.

Cheers

Topic: [admin_only] Improvements

While we work on new functionalities, we have also decided to dedicate some effort to fixing some of the bugs we believe have been plaguing the game and annoying some people. We are also counting on you guys to report bugs! If you don’t report, they might take much longer to be fixed.

Bugs fixed today:

- User signup failing (without the user knowing why) when chosen login was too long
- Statistics: Name and Team fields auto completion (its working again)
- Press releases: now the user is informed why its creation failed (if it failed)
- Newspaper article suggestions: this hasn’t been working for a while. It now is. We know the newspaper needs a lot of work, and it is on our list. Right now its not a top priority, but it will be done guys
- Mobile match report not working in certain situations

Topic: [admin_only] Improvements

The new player negotiation model is in place. Next time you make an offer to one of your players be mindful he might not like it and just quit negotiations with you. We have several different player negotiation profiles in place, meaning different players may behave different when negotiation with you. Basically they will be more or less tolerant in terms of how much less from their expected wage they will accept, how low your offer can be and how many counter offers they will accept before getting annoyed and stopping negotiating with you.

Mass messages have been sent in-game as well as a reminder so that everyone is aware. If a player does not want to negotiate with you it means you will have to sell him or let him go (if he is yours) or forget about hiring him for some time (probably long enough for him to go to another team).

Cheers

Topic: [admin_only] Improvements

We decided to initially implement player morale related to match participation only. In other words, players that don’t play enough official matches will have bad morale and may eventually decide that it’s best to leave the club. We’ll give all the details when it’s released.

In addition to that I’m working on enhanced player negotiation behavior. That generally means that during a contract negotiation players may decide to stop negotiating if there are too many counter offers or if your initial offer is too low (you may hurt their feelings) and may even accept some counter offers that are close enough to what they expected (no more asking for 13010 when you already offered 13000!). We’ll have several different negotiation profiles meaning you’ll experience different negotiation behaviors when negotiating contracts. The main point to take here is that, once this is included in the game, you need to be more careful with your initial contract offer or you may end up with a player that DOES NOT WANT TO RENEW HIS CONTRACT!

Topic: [admin_only] Improvements

You can now see player stars in the scout search results. In addition to that I’ve finished the changes mentioned before were star players will lose, at most, one star level per season and the country ranking will determine the number of star players for the teams of a given country.

Topic: [admin_only] Improvements

The negotiation functionality has made its way to our RubySoccer mobile website, and our hardware & software infrastructure has gone through upgrades. According to our service provider this should increase the website’s performance (any feedback is welcome).

Topic: [admin_only] Improvements

I plan to make a couple adjustments to the way stars are awarded to players. The first one is to make existing star players lose at most one star level in between seasons. So if you have a 3 bronze stars player in your squad this season even if he has a bad season he will be at least a 2 bronze stars player next season. I believe this makes sense as stars shouldn’t be completely forgotten from one season to next. The second change is have the number of stars playing in a country be directly related to the ranking position of that country. At the moment the country ranking has no direct influence in the likelihood of a player becoming a star, but if a country is better ranked it means it has stronger and “more famous” leagues and should have a higher number of stars.

Topic: [admin_only] Improvements

If you miss the flags in the team players screen you can go to your settings and check the new option to have them displayed by default so you don’t have to click the hide/show flags option every time. Regarding the star players feature I forgot to mention in the announcements here that every player has a natural star factor that may slightly increase or decrease his chances of becoming a star. At the moment this natural star factor will very rarely be fundamental to the player’s star fate, but it will help bring them up or down a little bit.

What’s next, I wonder? Could Gabriel be finally working on the player morale system? I bet he wouldn’t even tell if he was!

Topic: [admin_only] Improvements

Stars will rise next season! Even though there are minor tweaks to be done I consider this feature ready even if I don’t complete said tweaks before the season tick. We’ll announce the next major feature being worked on in the next few days.

Cheers!

Topic: [admin_only] Improvements

The logic for the star player system is almost completely implemented, except for a couple of screens and the performance boost during matches. I’m having some last minute doubts about how to do this one but luckily it will be easy to change if I get it wrong the first time.

Topic: [admin_only] Improvements

For those who don’t follow us on Twitter, click here to see how the team players screen will look like.

Topic: [admin_only] Improvements

The star icons to go alongside the player names are ready to go! The goal is to have them applied on next season’s start. We’ll post a screenshot in the next few days.

Topic: [admin_only] Improvements

We have a pretty good idea on which of the three formulas being tested will be used for star rating calculation. The rest of the feature design is ready and we’ll implement it over the next few days. Keep your eyes in our channels for some hints of how it is going to work!

Topic: [admin_only] Improvements

Star rating is now being calculated for the players in three slightly different ways. We’ll let these calculations run for some turns, analyse the results and pick the most appropriate one. No stars will be given for your players during this “trial” period, but once the trial is over we’ll do another announcement here and the new feature will be applied for real.

Topic: [admin_only] Improvements

Next season you will be able to buy additional investment points using the club money. Each point will cost 1,000,000 to start with, we’ll adjust the value later if needed. You are not allowed to sell points or undo the purchase, so think carefully before buying!

Cheers

Topic: [admin_only] Improvements

RubySoccer now has a Mobile website!

This is a beta/preliminary version, so it is rough around the edges and it doesn’t have all of the functionality we would like it to have, but we’ve decided to release it to you guys anyway so we start getting some feedback and suggestions. Please use our forums to talk to us about it!

Topic: [admin_only] Improvements

Currently working on allowing the use of money to buy investment points (previously called board points) on season start. In order for this to make sense we’ll reduce the overall amount of investment points distributed, meaning that you won’t be able to get to level 10 in all areas without spending some money, even if you win all competitions. This will be the first counter measure we are going to try against inflation, let’s see how it goes.

Topic: [admin_only] Improvements

The Wage Limit investment area has been removed. The calculation behind it was serving no real purpose so now the only wage limitation left while negotiating with a specific player is based on the player quality and your current money balance. For now we will have only 6 investment areas, but we plan to add new ones in the future.

Topic: [admin_only] Improvements

Fixed transfer budget calculations and adjustments for when open transfer proposals exist.

Topic: [admin_only] Improvements

During this week our focus was on better game experience (still in progress) and some small tweaks for the game, such as additional help content (thanks Dimitri), updated dimension description (they were so out-of-date it’s not funny) and in-game message links without the www in the beginning. We still need to update our various non-english translated contents and at the same time pick another relevant feature/change to introduce. My thinking at the moment is in changing the investments behaviour so that teams can use money to buy investment points…some of our managers are getting rich too quickly!

Topic: [admin_only] Improvements

We have relaxed the rules for managing national teams. Now you can apply for a national team immediately after resigning or being fired from another one. The only remaining restrictions are that you cannot apply to a national team if you are already managing one and you cannot apply for a national team that you have managed in the last 144 turns.

Topic: [admin_only] Improvements

The new in-game help functionality is ready but still needs content. Now if you click on the Help link in the top right corner menu an in-game window will open with help information about the screen you are currently in. When the help page for a screen does not exist yet you will see a link for the existing wiki where the old help still resides (unfortunately not up-to-date). Give it a try and let us know what you think. For some actual content you can check the Team Info, Finance, Team Titles, Team Matches, Invitations and Negotiations screens.

Cheers

Topic: [admin_only] Improvements

In order to attract and retain new users we need to make sure they don’t get lost in the game and have something to learn how to play RubySoccer. Our help wiki is pretty out of date, incomplete and not context sensitive, that’s why we are investing some time on an in-game help system that displays help content based on the screen you are currently in. The system itself is almost ready but we’ll need help producing and translating the content.

I know this is not a big deal for existing users as they pretty much know what is needed to play RubySoccer, but they will also benefit from this system when new features are launched as they will just be able to read the updated help pages instead of relying in getting all the info from the developers in the forums.

Topic: [admin_only] Improvements

When reading our logs, I’ve noticed some of you were having issues seeing our manager achievement pages and creating press releases. Those 2 things should work now.

Topic: [admin_only] Improvements

An additional clarification with regards to the transfer budget during the season. There is a limit to how big it can be in relation to the total money balance, if you start to lose money for instance you may see the transfer budget reduced, even if you don’t buy any players. This limit is higher than what you would get with a level 10 investment on transfer budget, so you still have room to increasing the budget above the original value by selling players, even if you raise the investment level to 10 on season start. This represents an additional step by the board to protect the club finances.