Veranderingen in het spel!

[Lamme Lennie]

First update to the Match Engine (Friendly games only)


We have been working very hard on the last couple of weeks/months in order to provide you with some extra data so that you can understand better the performance of both your player and your team during matches. Right from the beginning it was clear for us that neither the current rating system nor the current Match Comments were enough. So based on the inputs we got from the community we're going to release two new components of the Match Reports: the "Player Statistics" (new option on the info box at the right - all games prior to these changes will not have any player stats available though) and a zonal Ball Possession stat (in the existing Match Statistics option). Both should be pretty self-explanatory!

Along with this ME update we're also releasing a new individual order (IO). There was some confusion about the existing "Dribble with the ball" IO; this order actually means "Run with ball" and not "Make dribbles (tricks) more often" as some people think. Therefore we have replaced the meaning of the current IO's (both "Dribble..." and "Avoid Dribbling..") and inserted the "Avoid making dribbles/tricks". If you select this IO your player will avoid making dribbles. This will be specially useful for defenders so that they can avoid making stupid mistakes in the defense, particularly if their dribbling abilities are not so high.

Another thing that comes along with this update is a completely revised match rating system. All match ratings should now reflect more accurately what has really happened during the match. Also some nasty bugs that you guys have been reporting (thanks!) were found and corrected. And remember.. this is not a finished product so keep giving us your suggestions on this specific part of the ME.

There were also some minor bug fixes and some really needed tweaks. Here's a short list of those tweaks:
- Forwards should now be more smart when they're running clear to the goal;
- Long-range shots were improved, as well as the related Individual Order;
- The goalkeeper positioning was slightly tweaked in order to reflect reality;
- Wingers weren't missing that many crosses (the crossing skill wasn't having the desired effect on crosses).

I guess that's all for now. Now you should be wondering why we haven't talked about the "(friendly games only)" part. Yes, that's how you've read it: this revised version will be released only for Friendly matches for now. We're hoping that everything goes according to our plans and no significant problems arise. If this is the case, the new version of the ME will be applied in next weekend's league games and from that moment on will be used in all matches. So basically:
- revised (new) version will be used for Today & tomorrow's friendly games;
- current (old) version will be used for Today & tomorrow's cup games;
- if the new version runs without any significant issues we'll apply it for next weekend's league games and for the all the upcoming cup games as well.

Sorry for not having warned you guys a little bit before-hand but we really wanted to have this ready for the mid-week friendlies and have basically been working on it non-stop for the last few weeks. Besides these aren't any significant changes.. instead there are a lot of significant improvements

Hope you guys enjoy our work. Please let us know about your opinions on the new ME (bad or good hehe) in the forums!

Eindelijk! Ben benieuwd.

[Forever]

De admins van footstar posten regelmatig wat op het global forum. Deze post is wel van belang.

Wow loads of activity during the weekend.
I haven't had the time to read all the comments, something that hopefully I'll be able to do very soon. Some reactions though

1. Gk ratings aren't directly affect by goals. You guys can call it unrealistic: I'd answer: maybe, but that's how things will remain for now. At the moment goals are 100% merit from the player that shots, so why penalize GK when they just allowed the goal because they haven't skill enough? By using this line of thought, then all players with low skills would have ratings like 0,1,2 etc. Rating will reflect the individual performance of a player and will never be affected by the result of game. In this kind of the game it does make in sense at all.

2. Lots of goals: yes, there seems to be more goals now. This is due to the fact that players in a goal position are more smart now: they just don't go against the GKs like before. Therefore forwards with better shooting & technique will be rewarded more often against low skills GKs. Besides if teams are unbalanced goals should appear naturally. Balanced teams will have balanced matches/results. This is common sense I guess.
Now I have been noticing that these unbalanced results happen mostly when defenders try to dribble on the defense. There's now an individual order to avoid this.. if you guys don't want to have your teams to suffer crazy goals, just tell your defenders to do not dribble (if they have low dribbling skill).

3. More goal than passes: this will only happen in very unbalanced matches. Anyway matches here in FS only represents like a quarter of what a normal match would have. In a normal match (a full simulation of a 90' match >> like in FM for example) a midfielder or a defender can make around 50 passes at most. Here you'll see 20 at max (in a balanced match). Something we need to improve but we have to make some optimizations in the ME first (more plays, more resources, more time to simulate matches).

[Lamme Lennie]

Important upcoming changes to contracts


On the February 3rd's morning we're going to release a set of changes to how contracts work here in Footstar. These changes will hopefully reduce the number of possible "exploits" in the game, at least in what the financial status of the players are concerned.
The list of changes is as follows:

Contract changes

- Signing fees
Signing fees will be completely removed from the game.
Despite being a realistic feature, signing fees were an easy way to give an unfair advantage to some players. Since the economical balance of the game could be at stake, we've decided on the easier option to solve this: remove the feature. This way players will have to build up their funds by signing good contracts instead, so we believe in the long-term it will lead to more fairness in the game (and also to a better understanding of it and a better way for managers to control their expenses).

- Wage restrictions
Some wage restrictions will be introduced to prevent unrealistic sudden changes in players' wages. Consider this as a set of "board rules" in which your club's directing board won't allow you to run the club's finances on a crazy manner. The complete list of changes follows:
On signing:
- The highest allowed wage will be 1000% of the lowest player wage on the club. This will hopefully lead, in our opinion and to some extent, to more balanced wages. Example: if your lowest-paid player receives 500€ per week, you will only be allowed to pay a newly signed player 5000€. The lowest wage on your club will be the lowest wage you pay a human-controlled player; bot players will not be taken into account (as you cannot obviously control their wages).
On renewals:
- Same rule as before applies to all renewals, except if a player already receives more than the 1000% cap. If he does, he'll be allowed to renew for his current wage but no more than that. Example: if a player receives 10000€ per week and the 1000% cap sets the maximum at 5000€, the maximum wage you can offer the player will be 10000€.
- The maximum allowed wage increase will be set at 100% of the player's current wage. Example: if a player has a 500€ wage, on renewal you'll only be allowed to pay him 1000€ tops (double his current wage).
- The maximum allowed wage decrease will be set at 50% of the player's current wage. Example: if a player gets 1500€ per week, the maximum decrease will be 750€ (half his current wage).
- You will only be allowed to offer a game bonus of a total of 50% the maximum allowed wage (example: maximum wage 1000€, game bonus 500€).
- You will only be allowed to offer bonuses (except the game bonus, described above) of a total of 25% of the maximum allowed wage (example: maximum wage is 1000€, you will be able to offer a maximum goal bonus of 250€, assist bonus 250€, etc., not cumulative).
- You only be only allowed to renew a player's contract every 2 weeks. Old rule (in the meanwhile removed) was a full season, and it proved highly "unrealistic". Though, it's a necessary measure to get the rule back. We think the 2 week period is a good choice for the restriction and will allow some "freedom of movement" to managers.

Signing restrictions/Club control restrictions
With the contract changes we will also release a couple other restrictions concerning managers changing clubs (or getting fired due to FS Fan expiration) or players changing clubs/managers:
- You won't be able to take control of the same club you left for at least 6 months. Example: your FS Fan period expires and your club turns bot a week after that. If you decide to renew your FS Fan after that week period, you won't be able to take control of your old club, having to opt for another one instead.
- Players won't be able to sign for the same club and/or manager for a period of at least 3 months. This includes bot clubs from the date when the changes take effect on. Examples: - a player leaves a bot and immediately tries to sign for it again: he won't be allowed to do that; - a player plays for a club managed by manager X. Manager X in the meanwhile is fired (for some reason) and takes control of another club in the following weeks. The player won't be able to sign for his old manager's club for 3 months after the manager first left.

Conclusion
These rules will come into effect after some possible exploits were "found". Some other exploits may still be possible (although a lot less effective with the new rules), but, as you can imagine, some are very complex so we're relying on your help to find them in the future so we can cover all possible fronts.

Reason for the Feb 3rd "deadline": since this is a economical update day, we have set it as a deadline so managers can in the upcoming days make the necessary changes and plan ahead the future of their club's economy. Even though, sorry for the seemingly short-notice. As we always say, the game is yet in its very beginning (although 3 months old already) and prone to relevant changes. Hopefully these changes will balance things out some more and other radical changes won't be necessary in the future.

This being said, happy planning and, as always, let us know what you think by starting up a discussion thread in our forums with constructive suggestions. And thanks for reading this far!

[Lamme Lennie]

Next season changes: Personal Trainers / New language: Norwegian


Training is indeed the core of this game. It generates a lot of interest in the forums (trying to crack our formulas seems to be giving well-known users some good headaches) and obviously the main attraction of the game is indeed getting your player to advance in his career and the only good way to do that is to become a high-skilled player.

In the past couple months we have noticed a bad tendency in Footstar, contrary to our early plans and expectations: most users rely on the efficiency of their "personal trainers" to give them training boosts so they can indeed gain a small advantage over other users (that can be noticeable maybe not in short-term, but surely in the long-term).

Our early plans focused mainly on getting players to sign for teams with good training plans, not teams that would go as far as making unrealistic deals so their players could easily buy a high-level personal trainer. In order to revert to our early plans and make the game evolve around them, we're going to introduce a change concerning the "personal trainers" way of working that can hopefully take some load of the big interest generated around them:

- Personal trainers, from next season on, will only take effect when a player is not training the same as his team is.

That is, whenever a player is training the same as his team, he will always train at 100%, regardless of his personal trainer level. Whenever he's not training the same as his team, his personal trainer will have the same effect as today. Also, players on bot teams will see the effects of their personal trainers unchanged - it will remain as it is now.

A major change to some, since so many have gone into such depths to get their players a (what some considered unfair) advantage, it is nevertheless a necessary change. This, we believe, along with the recently announced and near coming contract changes (read the announcement below) will turn this game somewhat less prone to have users making obscure deals and/or cheating the system in order to gain long-term advantages over other users.
Also, it will lead hopefully to users being more interested in signing to highly-organized and training-efficient teams instead of going to deorganized and/or soon-to-be bankrupt teams just in order to gain advantages - that we agree, were indeed important if things remained unchanged.
To those thinking: "but I've gone so far to get my high-level PT, will it become useless now?"; well, heavens no. But it will serve the purpose we thought first of when implementing it: it will help you reduce the disadvantage you have if you're training in a training-deficient team. Also, you won't lose your PT, it will just give you less of an advantage. And also, try to think of others instead of only yourself: do you want to end up playing this game alone? Because if others think your advantage is very unfair, they will surely leave.
So in conclusion: we believe the PT is a useful and fun feature but it was going in all the wrong directions. This will hopefully set it in its correct tracks again.

We'd also love to let you all know that a new language pack was just added to the website. So, due to the hard work from the following team: Erik Hoff (Player), Stale Solberg (Player), Hans Bjornebye (Player), Nils Sandvik (Player), Are Horn (Player) and Christer Numme (Player) we can today add Norwegian as an official language in FootStar! Thanks for all your work guys, it was a really great effort!

To change to another language, go to User >> Preferences and change in the drop down menu for languages.

If you want to have your own language available in FootStar just contact us at <!-- e --><a href="mailto:languages@footstar.org">languages@footstar.org</a><!-- e -->

[Mukkus]

Prima verandering! Ik zet hem in het noors!

[Lamme Lennie]

Next Season Changes: Part 2

Due to the upcoming rule changes to the Personal Trainers and thanks to the input of many users in the forums we were able to find yet another loophole; that loophole can hopefully be fixed by a new little set of changes that will hopefully set the balance between PTs, Bot Teams, Money and Training straight.

Things would be kept pretty much balanced in what concerns field players, but with the announced changes, goalkeepers would obviously have something to gain with moving to a bot team - 90% training all the time, PT bonus, etc.. Due to this little "unrealistic" feature we've decided to do something to once again close the gap between bot and team training.
In order to do this, from next season on the following changes to the system will take place:

- If you have a Personal Trainer with a level higher than 2 in a bot team, the game will assume you have a PT level 2. This is to prevent "money-collecting" in teams in order to buy a PT 6 and reap the profits of always training what you want and still getting the PT bonus on a bot team.
- The bot training percentage will be also changed. Right now players train at 90% on bots. Next season it will work like this:
> GK skills will be trained at 80% on bot teams.
> Other skills will be trained at 85%.

These changes will have a minor impact on most player's training (except for GKs, where the balance had been lost with the previously announced changes - our bad) and, as we said, will hopefully lead to a balanced training system again.

We also believe it is important to set some definitive rules regarding PTs and the lack of money to pay their wages. So, starting next season:
- In case you don't have the money to pay the PT's wages, he will become inactive for the entire following week (from Friday to the following Friday).
After that, this will happen:
- If, at the next economical update, you have the money to pay your PT's wages, he will become active again. But;
- If, at the next economical update, you still don't have the necessary money to pay the PT, he will be downgraded by a level and stay inactive.
The loop is then restarted; it will only stop when you a) have a PT of a level you can afford; or b) you downgrade your PT manually (highly recommended, since you'll get at least some money back - the system automatic downgrade won't give you any money). Note though that even if you downgrade your PT in a week it was set inactive, it won't make it active for that week; only in the next economical update he'll be set active again (if you can afford it then).

We apologize for the big amount of changes announced in such a little period of time but as you can imagine and some have already found out, the training system is a very complex thing to keep balanced, especially with a human component highly involved (unlike in other games, here players have free will and it's sometimes difficult to follow the behavioral trends or the complicated loopholes they find in order to succeed). As such, your opinions and suggestions in the forums are very important so we can find out what's necessary to keep the game running smoothly and provide a fairly good game experience to everyone. We thank you for that - you guys have been of tremendous help till now, so please keep it like that with the constructive discussions - and sometimes even the crazy theories!