Hi everyone! We have a new update for you this month!!! We have released a podcast to accompany this forum post. This post summarises the changes. The podcast discusses many of the important points in more detail. It is recommended to familiarise yourself with the forum post before listening to the podcast so that it’s clear what we are discussing. https://www.buzzsprout.com/1035580/9985294 [h1]Overall Aims of the New Update[/h1] The new update aims to: [list] [*]Allow everyone to play all of their own official matches each month [*]Allow everyone to play their official matches at times that suit them [*]Have a LOT more official matches that are PvP with both users online[/list] [h1]New Competition Structures[/h1] [list] [*]All existing club competitions (both leagues and cups) have been removed from the game [*]There are still divisions, each team will start in the division that they were previously in pending promotion/relegation results from the January season [*]Each season is now split into 4 separate parts (approximately each a week in duration, varies depending on the number of days each month). Each of these 4 splits contains a ‘weekly’ league (Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer Leagues) [*]All teams in the same division are ranked in the same league tables against one another (i.e. no longer 16 teams per league, but 1 league per division that can potentially contain 100’s of teams) [*]There are no longer any fixtures in the game (where you are required to play specific opponents by a specific date) [*]Each of these leagues has 12 league matches that need to be played during the split duration. They cannot be played before it, and if you miss any during it, you cannot play them afterwards [*]You can play these 12 league matches at any time before the deadline for the split, 12 in a single day, 1-2 each day, or any other way you want [*]There is also an ‘Overall’ league for each Division which is an aggregated sum of the 4 ‘weekly’ leagues, in order to give an overall champion. This is also used to determine promotion and relegation between divisions at the end of the season [*]Promotion & Relegation decided by points gained/targets from this ‘Overall’ league table with the aggregated results for the whole month [*]Any matches that are not played count as a NR (non-result) [*]You gain 3 points for a win, 2 points for a draw, 1 point for a loss, and 0 points for a NR[/list] [h1]How to Play Official League Matches[/h1] [list] [*]On the home screen you select ‘League’ match type for Senior or Youth then click ‘Find Match’ [*]You will be paired against 12 unique opponents in each ‘weekly’ league [*]If no valid human opponents are available to be paired against when you want a match, you’ll eventually be paired to play against a bot team [*]Matchmaking logic tracks who everyone has played against during the month, and factors in opponent difficulty to who it pairs you against, to ensure that everyone receives approximately the same difficulty of opponents over the course of each season [*]There is still a ‘home’ team, but no longer is there any home advantage. Teams are not guaranteed to play the same number of home/away matches each season (and the ‘Support’ Manager Skill has been changed accordingly). We didn’t discuss this during the podcast but the main reason is to avoid having teams needing to play the same number of home/away matches as a matchmaking constraint, in turn making it harder to find matches against other online teams who are requesting. Secondly, it’s to keep the ‘mano a mano’ nature of each individual match:- giving one team a home advantage goes against this [*]Because inactive teams are effectively 'eliminated' from matchmaking, matches are now going to be much harder on average. In fact it will be the case on average, active users will win matches just as often as they lose them. So be prepared for some tough gameplay![/list] [h1]Youth Leagues[/h1] [list] [*]Youth Leagues work the same as senior leagues except they have 8 matches each split rather than 12 [*]Youth teams are now promoted/relegated independently from the Senior teams based on how well they do in the Overall Youth League each season[/list] [h1]Division 5 (the bottom division)[/h1] [list] [*]Division 5 works a bit differently to the rest of the divisions. In Division 5, in order to control the difficulty of the game for new users and allow them some time to construct their squad without being destroyed in matches, there is a set list of 12 bot teams that are played in each weekly league. [*]In order to play League matches against other users, promotion to Division 4 is required[/list] [h1]Promotion/Relegation Points Targets[/h1] [table] [tr] [th][/th] [th]Senior[/th] [th]Youth[/th] [/tr] [tr] [td]Points Required to Achieve Promotion[/td] [td]115 (eg 26W, 15D, 7L)[/td] [td]75 (eg 17W, 9D, 6L)[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Points Required to Avoid Relegation[/td] [td]75 (eg 9W, 9D, 30L)[/td] [td]50 (eg 6W, 6D, 20L)[/td] [/tr] [/table] Note: these are the points targets for the February season. We will keep track of the overall difficulty in getting promoted/avoiding relegation in the various divisions and these points targets may be adjusted in future months to ensure these objectives are of the intended difficulty to achieve. [h1]Manager Skills Points Changes[/h1] [list] [*]There will be changes to how they are awarded at the end of each season and these changes will be announced during February[/list] [h1]National Teams[/h1] [list] [*]How the National Teams feature is implemented in the game is going to be reworked [*]For now the Nationals Teams and World Cup competition still exists (with fixtures) but the teams cannot be purchased/managed by users[/list] [h1]Friendly Matches[/h1] [list] [*]These will function as they do presently. However, if a user has been searching unsuccessfully for a friendly against an online opponent they will eventually be matched against a bot team to ensure they can play a match[/list] [h1]What About Other Features?[/h1] Our top priority is to lock down the core game design. As soon as we’ve done that we’ll flesh out a lot of the features and polish for the game. We’re hoping that this change gets us there. We’ve responded to valid criticism about the playing of official matches as fast as we could to resolve the issues. Some of the polish associated with this change isn’t done yet in the UI and we’ll hopefully be able to enhance this in the early part of February. Also, just to note that there is currently nothing to spend tokens on in the game. Although this obviously is not an ideal situation, we wanted to get in this update and address the matchmaking issues as the top priority and decided that the update shouldn’t be delayed for this reason. We will be introducing ways to use tokens again in subsequent updates.