Hattrick News

Going 2.0, let’s evaluate the new design

spinsis — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 17:32:56 +0000

Most of us have been following the discussion regarding the pros and cons with the new design. While there have been a lot of positive feedback since the first few screenshots, the community has also raised some fairly good questions about the impact of the new design. There are “a good few” nei-sayers that aren’t too happy about the change, but as normal when Hattrick pushes something new, this is always an obstacle that they face.

The biggest and best change for Hattrick will of course be the removal of frames which enables a lot more flexibility when it comes to implementing new elements on the site. This was also addressed in the first editorial from HT-Tjecken back in August. Tjecken initially highlighted the problem as: “One can say that this technique [frames] was as common back in 2000 as it is rare today. The big problem with frames is that it makes it hard to bookmark or link to a particular page. If you open the page in a new tab (or a new browser window), all the navigation in the menus as well as the ticker disappears. Moreover, frames also make it harder for search engines to find info.”

A few people felt the last line was disturbing. However I’m not one of them; of course it’s not only about user friendliness, it’s also about SEO-optimizing the site and (if possible) increasing visibility and making it easier for users to locate pages through normal search engines (e.g. help pages). Having said this, I’m sure that Hattrick has focused extremely much on user friendliness and moving into a ‘new’ web era. Another comment that was written in the first screenshot of the new economy page was that the new design enables a raise in font size, which will have a huge impact on users browsing through mobile devices, especially since the removal of frames will adjust the design to fit not only bigger screens but also mobile devices. As I’m personally a big fan of browsing Hattrick on my mobile, I’ll have to say that I’m all in favour of the new design just for this reason. And from a business perspective it is certainly a good move as more users get on web-friendly devices.

Let’s deep dive into the new design and take a closer look at the screenshots and comments that was originally released. I know that there are people using Stage, but not the critical mass just yet.

The Economy / Your Club’s Finances (Finances becomes Economy tab)

At first glance there doesn’t seem to be a lot of change here. One thing that people have commented on is the right side image that shows your sponsors mood, rather then showing their mood in text beneath the club’s funds. Tjecken also commented on all of this (icons and images) being more integrated as well as everything being part of one streamlined collection, rather than bits and pieces from different sources and people. The big thing is however the left side and top navigation. Hattrick will become much more easily navigated with a top navigation which will expand down the left side depending on your choice of tab. What we’re seeing here is “My Club” and one can only assume that the forum would expand over the full page if this is chosen. Big and great change indeed. What I really miss though is a function that is a part of FoxTrick, to be able to see results over a two weeks period. This is really good as one doesn’t have to calculate and compare the results over “this week” and “last week” - since these two are crucial measures because of home or away fixture.

Staff (Becomes its own tab under My Club)

Kudos to Hattrick for more than looking at FoxTrick on this one. They saw something they thought would be beneficial to the users - and implemented it. For those of you who haven’t used FoxTrick, this script would on this page show you the cost of each of your different specialists, as well as the total cost. Something which will quite obvious be implemented in the new release. Overall this page is very clean and I like the fact that “Latest event” will be moved from this page. Hopefully this will be given more visibility, maybe on the same page as the Press Announcements, Overview perhaps?

Player Overview (Non-Supporter)

Player Overview (Supporter)

Let’s look at the player overview both from a non-supporter and supporter perspective. This is obviously very interesting as it compares the two and shows what will be ’special features’ only available to supporters. First of all I have to say that I love the fact that Statistics has been given greater importance in the new design. One can only imagine what will happen when Alltid is fully integrated with Hattrick, but hopefully we’ll see way more statistics even on an individual player level - and both for non-supporters and supporters. In general there aren’t that much news a part from the new option to show the skills in bars (numbers) rather than the old descriptional text. As we’ve been shown this in the supporter version, I really hope this isn’t just enabled for supporters as it is more likely to be a good function and opportunity for newbies rather than people who have played the game for seasons. I also have to agree with DogNatural (Hattrick 24/7), that the caption of “Only available for supporters” in the non-supporters version for “Match History” and “Training Details” is more likely to cause upset non-supporters than more paying customers. It would be better explaining what benefits Supporters have in general in the Shop and Help rather than showing, but blocking certain function on the site. It’s like today on the site when you as a non-supporter are prompted with “This feature is only available to supporters” rather than just removing this from the non-supporter version. Having said this, I can still understand why they’d like to have this present from a business perspective.

The most important improvement for me here is the neat overview on individual pages. Most of what’s available under each section can be clearly seen as a user and you wouldn’t have to click around like a maniac just to see e.g. previous ratings. Functionality-wise on the player page I also really enjoy the possibility to jump easily between players, not having to press ‘back’ 11 times (or open up 11 different tabs) just to compare players and see your starting eleven. This of course depends on the way you pick your team and how you interact on the site - but for most of us - this certainly improves ease of use and overview.

Overall I’m very enthusiastic about the simplicity and clean layout. As mentioned quite a few times in them text I also really enjoy the ease of use and functionality. I’m also thrilled about the future development as Tjecken commented that with the new design - improvements and new functions could be pushed and made available much faster - at least from a layout perspective. What this generally means for me is that a lot of the ‘boxes’ we see as users are widgets which can be coded to hold whatever information Hattrick or the community would like. Positive.

Other external sources about the new design:

My players never raise their experience, what’s the deal?

spinsis — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 22:35:25 +0000

Experience in Hattrick exists just like in real football, players gain experience through different types of matches and could to some extent weigh up what they’re lacking in main skill with a high level of experience. Something that often is widely discussed in the conferences is how the rise in experience work, how much experience points (explained further below) is actually needed to have your player pop one level in experience? Also, how much experience does a player gain from certain types of matches? What are the negative effects of inexperienced players?

So first we’ll address the downsides of having inexperienced players. Inexperienced players are just as in real football more likely to make mistakes (inexperience special event) - meaning he’ll get a bit shaky and mistime a few tackles, hence, he’s more likely to get booked more often. Of course, inexperienced players are also more unlikely to score on a penalty if your game goes to penalties in for example a cup game. The effect of experience has also been proved in the past to be non-linear which is worth a mention. Experience is of course also more important to the team captain than to the rest of the team, there’s been a couple of theories regarding this, the most spoken of is that the team captain’s experience is counted twice.

As mentioned the entire model around experience is based upon experience points (referred to below as XP). There hasn’t been many studies done to find out exactly how much experience points a player needs to pop one level in experience, but the common agreement is that it is somewhere between 25 and 35. After every game each player has about a 33% possibility of raising their experience, this is only, and solely a chance factor. How much each player would yield in experience (from chance) depends on what type of game he has actually played, this is calculated from the following numbers:

A player will receive:

0.3 XP from a national friendly
0.6 XP from a national friendly with cuprules
0.6 XP from an international friendly
1.2 XP from an international friendly with cuprules
3.0 XP from a league game
6.0 XP from a cup or a qualification game

Some of you might think that these numbers are double of what you’ve seen before, as this is the general confusion, I’ll address this right away. In addition to the possibility of receiving the ‘chance-XP’, ALL players that have received a yellow/red card, got injured, or have scored during a match will also receive experience points as per the following numbers:

0.1 XP from a national friendly
0.2 XP from a national friendly with cuprules
0.2 XP from an international friendly
0.4 XP from an international friendly with cuprules
1.0 XP from a league game
2.0 XP from a cup or a qualification game

This of course means that as set piece takers and forwards often score more goals, they’ve got a tendency to rise in experience quicker than other players. This also works the other way around; as keepers never get a yellow or red card nor score a goal (unless set piece taker) - keepers will not rise as fast in experience as other players. It’s also worth noticing that a player that scores a hattrick doesn’t receive more XP because of this, nor does a player that scores and get booked in the same match receive more XP.

If you’re already thinking about what this means for your players; it basically means that your average player will pop in experience after about one and a half season if he plays only in the league every week. So, what if your player is in the national team? Well, to say the least this will speed things rapidly. No one really knows how much a national team friendly yields in experience points, but it’s suggested that it might be around 4. However, if he happens to get into the starting eleven for the national team while they play a tournament game, every player will receive 10 XP (!).

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Stamina Study: What % is needed to retain stamina?

spinsis — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 15:02:23 +0000

There have been numerous threads the past months regarding the stamina, and above all questions about what percentage that is needed to retain excellent stamina on your players. We can now publish a quite substantial study that has been done by Roquevarela with data added and adjusted by Zeverlap. Full credit to these two managers for making these numbers available to the general community!

The original study that was made by Roquevarela, and which is the main base for these findings and hence this post, can be found in thread 11112037.29. Furthermore, please note that formidable stamina has not been included in this post, mainly due to the findings on this level not being adequate to draw conclusions, especially since everything above excellent can be considered a bonus - and to some degree random.

8 = excellent, 7 = solid, 6 = passable, 5 = inadequate, 4 = weak

Also, as pointed out by Zeverlap, as the ages of players are given in years only, the same levels of stamina for different percentage of stamina training might exist. This is because the highest level of what players hold for that age is the number listed. This means that if a player goes down from solid to passable at the age of 31, the player would actually go down at the age of 30, as some players will drop at 30,15 (30 years and 15 days) while others might experience a drop at 30,80.

So where do I look and what is important with this table? As most managers know by now, having lower stamina in midfield, lower here referring to lower than solid - will cause a severe and very penalizing drop in performance. Of course, this is mainly important for your inner midfielders as they are the ones looking to boost midfield rating, if your midfielders get tired quick, your midfield rating is likely to drop as players cannot use their entire playmaking skill for 90 minutes - which might be the explanation of why your possession is different between the first- and second half.

Example: So if you wanted to boost training for your youths, while still retaining excellent stamina on your 27 year old inner midfielders, you’d look in the table for year 27, number 8 (as in excellent) and come to the conclusion that you’ll most likely need a stamina level above 20% (22% to be exact according to the table). Of course, if you were only looking to retain your midfielders at solid stamina, you’d see that you could lower your level of stamina training significantly.

Please note that as with all studies, these type of data is collected from the general community and with inputs from a lot of people - which might cause discrepencies. I’d still encourage managers to draw their own conclusions from their own studies. Having said this, I’m more than confident that this table can provide you with a solid base and future reference.

If you’ve made your own study and don’t agree at all with some of the numbers, please post a comment!

Random or rounded stamina drops?

17 year old youth pulls for €3-4-5-6m, why?

spinsis — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 22:24:55 +0000

In the past, before the days on players were actually counted, we always saw a significant increase in transfer prices on 17 year old players. This was often referred to as ’sick’ or met with general criticism throughout the community. Since then we’ve had some developments in the game. Players are now ageing in days, meaning that the ’sick’ prices today often comes from 17.0-5 (the 0-5 symbolizing the number of days the player is. E.g. 17.1 is a player that is 17 years and 1 day old) old youth pulls.

In the beginning of this revolutionizing introduction of the days, which not only would have an effect on the transfer market but also training and other factors, the community reacted with a surprisingly (to yours truly at least) positive reaction. It seemed to everyones best knowledge, that this would reduce the sometimes ridiculously high prices for a fresh youth pull. It’s also important to keep in mind that although high prices affect more or less all of the really young players, and always has - this especially goes for solid or excellent youth pulls which are multi-skilled, e.g. a 17.1 excellent playmaker/solid passing type of youth.

To many new managers in Hattrick today, the prices on 17 year old players is somewhat a mystery. Sometimes one might have a bid for a couple of hundered thousands, while others are well above the three million euro line. This is as I mentioned due to the number of days the player in question is. Not only are managers hoping to get a future star for their team, but the younger the player, the higher the skill (and multi-skill) equals higher chances of opening the eyes of the U20 National Team coach as well as the prospect of multi-skill training. As a younger player equals faster training, this means that the possibility of training the player in a number of skills before he’s ‘obsolete’ in the training ground is dramatically increased.

In the past managers that bought these super-youths often argued their case with comments such as “I’ll get the money back when he’s multi-skilled and still young” or “I’ll get the money back with interest when he’s high in one skill and still trainable in another!”, but unfortunately these types of explanations became somewhat shredded when the transfer comparison tool within the game was introduced. Why? you might ask yourself at this point; well, it’s as simple as: when there is no data available, we can’t make rational decisions. Even more simplified, this means that if we’re not sure of what the value of the player is, or if we can’t launch into a full scale investigation or justify the price, we’re more likely not to buy the player.

However, there are of course exceptions. My strategy in buying players nowadays includes a more team than economic approach. It might be due to the fact that I have money to back my decisions, but I’d like to take the “he’s perfect for my team” approach, and then see where the pricetag will land. Plus, managers that have the money to spend, the long-term view of training and backing from scouts of the specific National Team - are of course more likely to spend on super-youths.

So where was I going. After studying the influence from the introduction of days on super-youth prices I have very little data. None which would be representable or even remotely interesting to this discussion, however, common sense tells me a couple of things:

The distribution between money and where it’s spent within the game have radically changed. In the past managers would spend in the beginning of each season; buying new, young, freshly drawn 17 year old youth prospects for overprices to train. The money to do so would come from selling players at the end of each season. Supply and demand have never been easier explained: the supply of players at the end of each season would explode, causing a drop in transfer prices from week 14 and onwards while the complete opposite (high demand and low supply) would occur during weeks 0-2 of a season. Of course, with players ageing at the same time, this was the most logical thing to do, sell before the age, and buy when the player is as young as possible. Makes sense.

Today, the distribution is spread out throughout the whole season. A super-youth can be pulled any day and any week of a season, which of course means that managers have to be on their toes and lookout 24/7.

Prices on 17.0-1 is still utterly ’sick’. With more money in the game in general to fight the previous recession, it’s probably even worse than before.

As I’ve lost the point I was trying to make a long time ago (sorry about that), I’m hoping that this at least will help the people wondering about the super-youth overprices. My apologies also for the term “super-youth(s)”, this is a direct translation of the word “superjunis” used by all of the Swedish managers for these type of players.

Do you think it makes sense to pay above three million euros for a 17 year old? Why? Or perhaps why not?

Election Turnout: A Measure of Community Spirit?

DogNatural — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 16:19:15 +0000

One of the most common things we read on the conferences in the days after an election is “how come we had such a terrible turnout?”. This is often followed by comparisons to other countries before swiftly moving onto complaints that “our community must be rubbish”. However, these claims and complaints are often made without seeing the wider picture of Hattrick election turnouts. Lets take a closer look.

If a high turnout is generally regarded as in indicator of a healthy, vibrant community then the obvious question to ask is “which countries have the highest turnouts?” In turn they must surely be the most rocking communities…

Notice anything? Yep, these countries have some of the smallest user bases in all of Hattrick. You could argue that these smaller nations have a better community spirit than some of their larger counterparts, but that would probably be unfair on the HT behemoth nations.

It is important to see the major influence that the size of a population has on turnout. Some people don’t realise this, but a general rule of thumb is that smaller countries usually have higher turnouts than larger countries.

As you can see there is a definite ‘gear change’ between the smaller countries with large turnout percentages and the larger nations with smaller turnout percentages.

Here is an excerpt of the same chart but only showing nations with less than 1000 active users:

At least on this chart we can clearly see the data points!

You will notice there is a wide range of turnouts for the smallest countries, so although we saw from Table 1 the highest turnouts are invariably from some of the smallest countries, the opposite is not always true, i.e. just because a country has less than 50 active users does not mean it will have a high turnout.

Angola of course clearly stands out high above the others with the highest turnout in these elections at 77.3%. On the other hand Uganda and the Maldives as the newest countries to join the HT party sit on a rather more modest 14.3% (or 1 voter from 7 users!).

It is interesting to note the difference between Angola and Qatar: both have a population of 22 active users; however while Angola set records with 77.3% turnout Qatar could only coax 27.3% of it’s active users to the polling stations.

“Fair enough” you may say, “but Angola and Qatar only have 22 active users – that means Angola only had 11 more voters than Qatar”. Very true - this particular example is perhaps not as clear-cut as it first appears - but don’t think this is confined only to the smallest countries.

Lets take Makedonija and Malaysia as another example. While the 857 users that each has may sound minute compared to giants such as Italia or España who have upwards of 80,000 users, it is worth noting that only 51 of the 124 nations in Hattrick actually have higher populations. That means there are 71 smaller countries than these two - so really they aren’t that small after all!

138 Makedonian users voted in the elections, whereas only 61 of their Malaysian counterparts chose to voice their opinion. For decent sized countries such as these there is a whopping difference between 7.1% and 16.1% turnout!

I don’t know anything about the community in each of these countries but I think it would be fair to assume that Makedonija has a stronger community spirit than Malaysia, probably a more active conference and larger group of core users as well.

So, we have looked at the smallest countries as well as some of the medium sized ones. Now lets turn our attention to some of the largest:

We can see quite clearly that the largest countries follow the same general trends as the smaller nations – i.e. the larger the country the more likely it is to have a lower turnout. However, there is one startlingly obvious anomaly: Italia.

With 82,183 users Italia is the second largest country in HT, yet while the other nations with 40,000 or more users tend to have turnouts of around 2 - 5% Italia had an unbelievable turnout of 9,412 voters – that’s 11.5%!

I am unsure as to why Italia is unique amongst the large countries but, like Makedonija, I am willing to hazard a guess that they probably have a fairly active community and conference. I have heard that they have several successful community building projects ongoing, such as a match day radio show but as I don’t speak a word of Italian I am unable to say for sure that this explains their unusually high turnout.

Unfortunately Italia does seem to be the exception to the rule amongst the larger nations:

Wow! What on earth is going on in Sverige?! The motherland of Hattrick can only convince 2% of its population to vote? That’s the lowest turnout for any of the 124 Hattrick nations!

Maybe it’s apathy? After all, they have “been there, done that, got the t-shirt” in Hattrick by not only giving the world the game but by winning multiple World Cups and even the Masters. Perhaps the poor turnout in other older leagues such as England is also indicative of a growing indifference to the international game?

So we can certainly see that election turnouts are a mixed bag, but there is one thing we can say for certain: the grand old teams of Hattrick surely don’t like leading this unsavoury chart.

The question is: how will they turn things around?

Why not leave a comment?

Whether you are happy to be from Italy, Makedonija or Angola or whether you are concerned about your future in Sverige, España or England; please leave a comment with your thoughts on this article. Why do different communities have such varying election turnouts?

Have your say!

One search engine for all major Hattrick resources!

spinsis — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 22:22:25 +0000

Well you asked for it! A lot of times when I myself have been looking to find a specific answer I had to go to many different resources and combine this with asking many questions in the conferences. This was one of the original reason for the creation of HT-FAQ.

However, since then a lot of new features and rules within Hattrick has changed. There are a lot of player guides as well as online resources and tools out there which are constantly evolving and updated.

Today we’ve taken one step towards solving the issue of looking through your 1000 Hattrick bookmarks, we’ve created a search engine right here on Hattrick News which besides Hattrick News itself also searches within: The Official Hattrick Wiki, HattriX-files, IntroHT, and Hottrick.

We have great hopes for adding additional resources as soon as we test this out a bit. Having said that, it seems to work perfectly fine at the moment. The search is driven by Google which essentially makes it a boolean search, meaning you can use +, -, * as boleans in the same way you use them with your normal Google searches.

Try it out! If you haven’t noticed, it’s located top right on every page of Hattrick News.

(Please note that if you can’t find a specific page or ‘answer’, it is most likely due to this page not being in the Google index, this is something we cannot fix, but is up to each respective website owner to take care of)

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Thoughts and FAQ on Conditional Substitutions

spinsis — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 13:24:01 +0000

Let me start off by saying that this article is a further build to the Hattrick Announcement to allow conditional substitutions for the youth team. If you haven’t read that Hattrick is opening up for conditional substitutions in the youth team yet, please read that article/announcement first as you are otherwise most likely not to know what the hell this is about …

Over the last few days since this news was announced, HT-Tjecken has been answering a lot of questions, sort of like a Q&A session in thread 11418829.29 in Global (English). Luckily for us, Hattrick Library founder DogNatural was kind enough to sort all of them out in a thread in the Library. Let me give you a quick run through of the Q&a session and then some general thoughts regarding substitutions (SKIP THE Q&A AND JUMP TO GENERAL COMMENTS AND IDEAS).

—

Q: In YA substitutions it´s the perfect way to know how good are the players in each position, but for example, will the stars showed at the end of the match the real value to compare a player that play 5 min with an other that play 90? (of course first one won´t have the grey part losing due to stamina)

A: Stars always show the average performance for a specific player in a match. So, yes they are comparable. Naturally, the longer a player is on the pitch, the better calculation can be made in general as there are more measurements points.

Please not that if a player has played in two positions during a match, he will only get a star rating for the last position.

Q: One of the conditions is “red card for a defender”. If I play with 3 central defenders, can I add an extra central defender if one of them gets a red card, or will I lose training for that?

A: As long as you don’t play with 4 central defenders at the same time, you’re safe.

Q: Wingers… In the manual you wrote that only the specific repositioned player that uses the winger position in 4-4-2 can be positioned as a winger… how may I know who is that player without using the html version instead of the flash?

A: When you give a repos player a player order in flash, a 4-4-2 grid will be displayed where you get to choose where your repos player’s original position is.

Q: What is the earliest possible time, if everything works like it should, for this to come to the competetive games of the senior team? Season 36 is just about to start, but could it be in action during season 37 all ready?

A: If all goes well I guess it could be ready for season 37.

Q: Will it be possible to see the star rating for the substituted player as well as the sub?

A: Yep.

Q: Can you tell us something please, about which kind of ME is useful at YA?

A: It’s the “old” one, ie stamina doesn’t work the same.

Q: Whoa? So a divine defender playing 85min as a defender and then switching to the forward position gets some 1* star rating because it ignores defending completely? Makes absolutely no sense. Showing the average would be roughly as horrible.

A: I agree that it’s not the perfect solution with only showing the latest position, but it’s the best we can do for now. It does not mean however that we stopped thinking about some other solution to give a better “feedback” to managers.

Q: How about individual orders? If the player just switches the individual order, will we still see only the latter rating or an average?

A: Same as with subs, only the latter rating will be visible.

Q: Will confusion disappear if I am changing formation?

A: Yep.

Q: Suppose I play 3-4-3, one of my forwards gets a red card, and I substitute a defender for a forward when a forward gets a red card. So I’m playing 2-4-3 then, from the point of view of the original line-up it will look like a 2-4-4, will I be safe for confusion?

A: It’s the same thing as your earlier question. As long as you don’t have more than 3 player in the same position at the same time, you’re safe.

Q: But now you talking about, lose training. I think Jetstar means that 244 isnt a normal formation what means, your players can be confused.

A: Perhaps I should read what it really says, yes.

If you change formation to a formation where you don’t have full routine, you risk confusion.

Q: The training effect is not mentioned in the editorial. If i substitute player in training position (let say defender in minute 60), with another player on the same position, what training will get both players? 60/90 for the first one and 30/90 for the second?

A: We got minute based training.

Q: I have not seen anything related to tactic change during the match. Because trying to play “italian style” by adding many defenders is OK, but it would be really adapted to switching to pressing or CA.

Do you envisage to modify that in next version ?

A: That’s an option of course.

Q: What would happen in this situation?

I play 442 normal and set:
1. Minute 60: If I’m loosing, put one defender as extra inner.
2. Minute 60: If I’m winning, put one forward as extra inner.

Now…

Minute 61: My rival score, so 0-1. I put one defender as extra inner, 352. Ok.
Minute 62: I score, so 1-1. My variation is gonna be ok
Minute 63: I score again, 2-1. I put one forward as extra inner, so I playing 361??? Is that possible?

A: That’s exactly what will happen.

Q: If I reorder a defender to “play midfield if a midfield/winger get a red card” and a winger(!) is red carded, then the defender will play winger or inner?

A: You can’t order someone to “play midfield”, so that scenario can’t happen.

Q: So I could start out playing 2-5-3, and say
- minute 20 change to 3-5-2
- minute 25 change to 2-5-3
- minute 55 change to 3-5-2
- minute 60 change to 2-5-3
- minute 75 change to 3-5-2
- minute 80 change to 2-5-3

And I would effectively be playing something like 2.2 - 5 - 2.8 with very little confusion effects? I can see this become popular with AOA teams…

A: You can only do 5 orders, so it’s nothing you can do that much. That said, we are thinking about having some “penalty” for every player order too even though we don’t have right now.

Q: Will you be adding conditional subs for injured players as well?

A: We want to, but I can’t say exactly when. Injuries are a bit more complicated than the other stuff.

Q: Are you talking about friendlies or official matches? I mean, can we hope for substitutions to become available in senior friendlies the coming season and for official matches at the beginning of the next? Or should we just hope for it to be available for friendlies (with or without official matches) in one season’s time?

A: I rather wait with all such predictions until we know a bit more how things turn out.

Q: Will you be adding conditional subs taking into account the possession?

A: I’m not so sure about that, there are both pros and cons with that one. So, perhaps.

Q: Will you be able to recieve formation experience based on the minutes you play the different formations?

Lets say you play first half in a 4-3-3 and second half in a 3-4-3. Will you then get 50% formation experience in both formations?

A: As of now you only get formation experience for the first formation you use. We will however most likely change that so it becomes minute based.

Q: Let us say I start playing with 4-4-2

The ref gives my forward a red card, effectively changing my formation to 4-4-1. This has never caused confusion in the past, and how should I interpret your answer?

1. It will not in the future either because it was the ref who changed it, not my conditional orders”

A: I’ve never seen any formation loss because of red cards during our test phase, hence why I’m quite certain your number 1 is the correct answer. Will see if I can provide a better answer later on.

Q: How about experience? Will the both players (substituted and the one who comes in for him) receive full experience by the same parametres as usual, or is that somehow minute-based too?

A: Minute based.

Q: But what about casual gamers who do not want / cannot spend more time managing their teams?

A: It’s still optional and it’s really hard to say how much impact a tactical change will have. And naturally, sometimes tactical orders could actually fail. But this is an important question for us of course, we want to keep the game as simple as possible though it should contain depth and tactical options for those who want that. I actually think subs aren’t that hard or complicated either, it all depends on how complicated you as a manager want to make it. So, I think it’s Hattrick style over this feature, but we of course have to listen and have a close watch on this in the future.

Q: What about newbies?

A: I guess most people who start to play a football manager game think it’s possible to do substitutions, it’s part of football after all. That said, I definitely agree that it’s a lot to read before you get the hang of the game and it’s naturally also our aim to make it easier to understand the game. But I don’t think this feature makes that situation any worse.

Q: How can we get reliable information from matchratings after the implentation?

A: Something which also involves a risk, and moreover I don’t think anyone can disguise their ratings forever. But we are already thinking about how to make the “match information” better so it’s easier for you to analyze your match and the choices you made. Ie to make you understand the match engine better (and understand that the random factor isn’t that big…). When doing that we will also search for ways to include this type of information.

Q: Suppose I set this order: at minute 80, replace player A with player B with the same position, on any condition. But before minute 80 player B already enters the pitch, replacing player C who gets injured. Of course, I expect that in such a case my order is just not carried out… Is it so, or is there risk that something nasty happens?

A: As one of the players in your substitution order is not available anymore (he’s not a sub anymore), the substitution will not be carried out.

Q: How about players not substituted?
Will the old experience system prevail there, or will they receive the new minute based experience aswell?

Meaning: will substituting a player at 85m be the only way for any player receiving guaranteed “full” experience for a single match?

By the way, does “before extra time” mean at 90m or after full time in league matches? In the latter the substitution will not happen at all.

A: It will work similar to how training works. You can gain 90 min experience per match. If a player plays for 45 minutes, he will receive 45 min experience.

—

These are some of the questions which HT-Tjecken have answered in thread 11418829.29 in Global (English). But as this, as with any conference thread is constantly changing and being updated I’d encourage you to go through the full thread. There are also a lot of double posts, I’m sorry if any of that occurred in this run through.

In general there seem to be a “HOORAY! FINALLY” and a “I DON’T HAVE TIME FOR THIS!” side to this feature. It’s like with any new thing that Hattrick has implemented really, there are always two sides created (two sides of the coin!) and even though I’m sure the Hattrick creators take all comments into consideration, we are VERY unlikely to see that a new feature is being reversed and completely removed from the game. However, if the test with the youth teams should be less successful, we might see that the original road map to roll this out by season 37 for the senior squads is changed.

Personally I’d say I’m somewhere in the middle. It’s great to finally see a really big new function being rolled out, much like the youth teams when they were introduced. And as HT-Tjecken commented in one of his answers to a question, I also think that most new users expect this function to exist when they sign up to start playing. However, there are a couple of dangers to conditional substitutions. As the game become more complex, more and more managers that aren’t real fanatics might lose interest very quickly. This is also a function that more or less move away from the saying that Hattrick “are not different from a manager that plays 1 hour a week compared to someone who plays 20 hours per week”, that is; there’s no different between your level of commitment. Of course, they can argue how much they want that one does not NEED to use this function - that it is completely optional, but - if this proves to be largely successful, which is likely to happen, the two camps are likely to grow even stronger in both directions.

From what we’ve seen so far, there are a vast amount of ideas and comments regarding substitutions from he community. As mentioned before they range from very positive to quite negative. Some of the positive thoughts and ideas that have been collected include:

Older players with lower stamina become more useful
Lower stamina-training share in general could be an option
Multiskilled players are more valuable, as they can fill out two positions
Having many tactical options means you have to have a balanced squad,to be able to exploit them
Some advantage to “tactical” managers over “money-bags”
As counter attack tends to give the counter attack chances early in the game a formation change could become a powerfull tool, play strong attack in the first half of the match and in the second half switch to even stronger defence
You play 4-3-3 CA from start, secure the 3 CAs in the 20 minutes (or first half), and switch to 3-5-2 or 4-5-1 for the rest of the game…
You could play very defensive first half (like 5-4-1) and press and than switch to 3-5-2 or 3-4-3 (with stamina fresh midfielders) in the second half, of cause you run the risk of loosing some chance even in second half, but not that many, so that would be a very viable tactic use
Possibility to check more than 11 players in one game in YA
Able to precisely manage formation experience
Does an opponent tend to leave one WB position weak, but which one varies? Attack one wing in the first half, and in the second take that winger off, bringing in another on the other wing
Having two wingers with reasonable amounts of PM make switching wing attack sides very easy (two orders - one to switch to “towards middle” orders from “offensive”, and vice-versa for the winger on the other flank)
Having two old guys sharing one position and getting one half each looks like a potentially powerful strategy for teams that are training properly, and don’t want to use 25% stamina share

Some of the negative or skeptical thoughts include:

Subs will be pretty advanced tactically compared to the rest of the game. As many managers mess up with set tactics player positioning etc, etc this will be beyond them
The changes basically require a manager to add 2 or so players to his optimal squad
People will overuse subs, as they do with any new toy we get given by the HTs
This lets me hedge my bets against potential cup upsets
Favors rich teams
I don’t see how they could be effectively used for much else than securing a lead
This is a very useful option for skill-trading. The new sport is hitting the next level on the minute

WHAT’S YOUR TAKE/IDEAS/COMMENTS REGARDING CONDITIONAL SUBSTITUTIONS? PLEASE SUBMIT ANY IDEAS OR COMMENTS YOU MIGHT HAVE AS A COMMENT.

[The background information and data for this article was researched through the Hattrick Library (Alliance ID: 71795). Many big thanks to Mod-DogNatural for collecting all of the data in The Library thread 11436454.1]

HT-Tjecken: Conditional substitutions for youth teams

spinsis — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 21:37:40 +0000

Ever wanted to substitute your defender for an extra forward if you’re down late in a game? Or wanted to turn your normally offensive team into a defensive wall if you’re in the lead? With our new substitution feature, now you can!

Today we open up for preconditioned substitutions in the youth academies, as a beta test. Later on, we also hope to make it possible for senior teams too. Read this manual to learn how to use this feature. If you who want to know more about the development process and our motives with this feature, please read on.

As long as I’ve played Hattrick (which I’ve been doing for about 1/3 of my life now) I’ve longed for a possibility to make tactical changes depending on the standings in a match. To be able to close a match “Italian style” if I am in the lead, or go all out offensive if I desperately need a goal. I can remember the times when I’ve been sitting in front of the screen watching my games and saying “Hey referee, I want to make a tactical substitution!”. For me, planning substitutions is a part of being a manager, and I guess most of you can agree in that. It makes the manager experience more realistic and more alive. That’s perhaps even more important than the tactical options substitutions open up for

But even though substitutions has been a much wanted feature and we know it would improve the manager experience a lot, one has to remember that it’s also huge feature to implement. That’s also why it has been put aside for other features during our past, we just haven’t had enough resources and time for a project like this. At times we’ve also thought that the match engine in its current state would not be able to handle it, Hattrick is a simplistic game after all. But there are times when miracles happen, and dreams come true: This time it happened one winter morning in 2007 when Daniel called me up:

- I’ve implemented substitutions now.
- You’ve what?
- Yesterday I got an idea for how to fix subs and I’ve been working on it all afternoon, evening and night since then. I haven’t slept at all. But it’s there now.

To call this a classic Hattrick moment is an understatement. Of course, it was not as it was ready to use – quite far from it. But the basic match engine structure was there, it was possible after all. It would however not have been possible if we hadn’t rewritten the whole match engine for the youth academies. So, one can say this is also a result of the implementation of the youth teams.

If preparing the game engine for substitutions was easier than we thought, it was a lot harder to design a good interface and a good logic for it than we initially thought. And as we weren’t prepared to release anything we didn’t feel was good enough, we rather postponed the release.

Our motives
My personal dreams aside, our basic intention with subs from the start was that you should be able to substitute a tired player for a fresh one. That itself would also open up for new tactics and strategies in the game, like get an edge by having a larger squad for example. But after a while we felt we shouldn’t satisfy ourselves with just that, we wanted to open for more tactical options. So we added the possibility to make an order in advance which would depend on the standings in the game, and also if a player gets a red card.

As in everything we do, we thought a lot about how to add subs without making it too complex. Hattrick is a simplistic game, and we like to keep it that way. When we add new features we want it to add depth to the game, and not complexity. Subs definitely the game depth; it makes the manager experience more alive and the game more interactive. And while it’s impossible to completely avoid some complexity, we still feel this is substitutions Hattrick style.

What about injuries then?
We started to look at adding the possibility to react to injuries too, but unfortunately that turned out to be very complicated in the current match engine. The most problematic part was that we would then also need to design and implement a completely new automatic substitution system. There were also some other things we thought could be nice to have, but we had to stop the feature from growing too big in this initial stage – otherwise it would have taken us forever to release. So, we decided to keep the current injury substitution system and let it be completely automatic as always – for now. This means we consider this the first version of substitutions, and not the final version.

Our hardest part
Hattricks’s match engine is build around 4-4-2, and if you want other formations you reposition players. Moreover, you can’t order your repositioned players, for example your extra inner midfielder, to play offensive or defensive. His individual order is to play “extra midfielder”. In fact, this “extra midfielder” is repositioned from another position on the field. As we now made it possible to change the individual order during the match, you also need to realize that if you order your “extra midfielder” to start playing offensive in the 60th minute – he will not become an offensive “extra midfielder”. He will in fact stop being an “extra midfielder” and start playing offensive in his original position somewhere else on the pitch.

Just swapping a player for another is easy. The only time you really need to think about what you’re doing is if you want to change the player behaviour on a repositioned player. As a result, the hardest part has been to design an interface which could deal with this in a good way. And to be frank, the best solution we found is not the perfect one. But unfortunately the match engine sets some limitations here as it’s constructed around 4-4-2, every other formation is really just a version of 4-4-2 in the match engine’s eyes.

Why a beta test for the youth teams?
When we released the youth academies more than a year ago, we also said we would use it to test new features which may, or may not, later end up in the “real” Hattrick as well. So, it’s actually a rather natural choice to introduce this to the youth teams first. We’ve been testing this feature for quite some time now, but even so we know we may experience some bugs which didn’t show themselves during the test phase. There can be problems with certain web browsers, but also problems which only show themselves with heavy load (a lot of users online at the same time as a lot of matches are being played for example). Moreover, we also would like to know to what you think about the feature before we introduce it for senior teams. After all, this is a major new feature and a big change.

We hope you will enjoy this new feature (I know I will!) and we will gladly listen to your opinions on the forums. As mentioned in the beginning, please read the new manual chapter to understand how everything works. Good luck!

Until the next classic winter morning call…

/HT-Tjecken

Playing Counter Attack (CA)

spinsis — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 13:45:51 +0000

There are several reasons for playing counter attack. In many cases the primary reason for a coach thinking about using counter attack in a big game would include his team’s ability to win the midfield. This is of course due to a number of factors such as skill, form and team spirit. It might be that the opponent is just superior overall, and by trying to reduce the number of chances for the opponent by using an “all out defense” mentality - one counter attack chance might just be enough to get away with a point - or all three if you’re lucky or skillful enough.

The biggest discussion regarding counter attack (apart from the formula to actually calculate how good your tactical rating for CA will be) has always been “what should my midfield rating be in comparison to my opponent for the counter attacking to work optimally?”. There are several different schools for this, some argue that you should try to keep possession as high as you can, while others has gotten good results from just having less than 5% of the possession. There’s probably no real statistical answer to this question, the only thing that has been proven statistically is that the midfield needs to be weaker before calculating the penalties in order for normal counter attacking to actually work at all. What’s your take on this? An important thing to have in mind here is that your midfield rating is automatically cut by another 7% from just choosing to play counter attacks. This might be one of the reasons why it has been so tough to statistically find the optimum.

The calculation for calculating your counter attacking skill level for your team is often referred to as: [(Defending of all defenders) + (2 * Passing of all defenders)} / 10 = Your counter attacking rating.

This means that if you have five solid defenders with inadequate passing, your CA team skill would be:
[(7*5) + (2*5*5)] / 10 = (35 + 50) / 10 = 8.5 or mid level excellent.

There are several tools for calculating this if you do not wish to make your own, one of the most popular being the tool provided by IntroHT in which you simply enter the skill of your defenders defending, passing and form and get an output.

Okay, so now that I know I need to lose the midfield, what would be the optimal formation to use? This is of course very much up to how your opponent plays, but as you’re already “focusing on losing the midfield”, and since the basic concept of counter attacking builds upon outclassing your opponents attacks; you need to be focused on strengthening your defense AND also get good attack ratings. With this and the fact that your opponent has a stronger midfield in mind, we can quickly exclude all formations (more or less) that uses five midfielders as we don’t want to win the midfield. And, as we also need to have really high defense ratings, we really need to focus on four or five defenders.

This leaves us with 4-3-3, 5-3-2, 5-4-1, and the traditional 4-4-2 (5-2-3 has also been seen). In most cases counter attacking teams that always play CA opt for 4-3-3 or 5-3-2 to get a high rating mid forward and on one of the wings using an offensive winger. In other cases, teams trying to surprise their opponent by using CA in the occasional game, might often turn to the classical 4-4-2 as experience on this formation is always maximized.

Whatever way you might go about using this tactic, make sure you know what you’re getting yourself into and how you’re supposed to play it. Playing counter attacking the wrong way might see your team utterly useless in attack and unable to score. Plus, if your defense is not strong enough, this might not even give you a 0-0 point - but instead see you outclassed in many games to come.

Other common sources: Effective counter attacking by Bobymoore, Tactic: Counter-Attacking (CA) by Resak @ IntroHT.

Travelling with Hattrick

spinsis — Tue, 27 May 2008 19:53:03 +0000

We’ve been around the world

The last year I’ve been to quite some places; Sweden, Germany, Kuala Lumpur, Thailand, England, and Australia. I haven’t been to any of these places, visiting a university or any random Internet café without meeting a fellow Hattricker. I’ve met so many people sharing the same interest – mostly Swedish because it’s my nationality, but also Germans, Aussies, and Thais. At the World Cup in Germany I met a guy from Argentina that summed it all up with; “They say it’s just a game, but that’s not the whole truth, is it?” It’s amazing what a game and its’ community can achieve in order to connect human beings from different cultures.

I’ve explained the concepts of AIM and AOW as well as why secondary trained players have lower salary to so many people, from so many countries – in so many different countries it’s unbelievable. It’s not something I do because I have to, or because I want to feel superior, it’s because of the legacy of the community. Helping fellow Hattrickers has and will always be one of the things that many people value the most within the community. It’s about enthusiasm, passion and sharing a common goal of interest.

Besides the Argentinean I met in Germany, one of my brightest glowing memories is when I was browsing Hattrick at an Internet café on Koh Phangan in Thailand. Although this party and “go by your day with doing nothing” – island is mostly occupied by tourists, there was this Thai guy sitting a few computers away from me. If you’ve browsed Hattrick in a fairly public place, you’ll know that when you see the Hattrick frontpage and its’ interface, if only for a short glance, you make it your mission to investigate who is browsing it. The beauty of this little story is this; the guy could speak almost no English, that’s one of the moments that I realized the magnitude and depth of the game. He probably didn’t have to speak English; Hattrick was probably available in his mother tongue language anyway!

I’m currently residing on the Gold Coast in Australia. Since I go to a university were about half of the students are international, my path has crossed many nations and cultures just by walking in the front doors of the library. I’ve seen and heard South Americans, Australians, Scandinavians, and Middle Europeans discussing football in general after a game in the Champions League. You won’t believe how fast the Champions League could relate to the Hattrick Masters and how closely linked football and Hattrick is. This might not be of any surprise to you at first glance, but really – shouldn’t it be the other way around?

If you’ve played the game for more than a couple of months you know when your first crisis is. Your girl, wife, family, or friends have booked this great vacation, it’s going to last two weeks and you’re going to the Mediterranean – fantastic. You pack and get ready to leave when you realize; what about match orders? What about that friendly? What about scouting the next opponent? What about training? What about Jonas, will his injury be gone until next game? I can’t go! This vacation will be a complete disaster for my long-term goals, I might miss training – it could cost me millions, or even worse – we might lose the game on Sunday. You try to explain to the people in your travel group that you can’t go because your Hattrick team; your virtual team might suffer great losses. You are without a doubt met with laughter!@#?%! Unless you’re in the game, you don’t know how this feels.

To steel from a great man; “It is not a concern of any one race. The people of <Hattrick> are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings love and need.” (Robert F. Kennedy context edited).

This is what it’s all about my friends. We’re not very different after all. We all strive for excellence in our Hattrick careers, whether it’s on a personal, team, or community level – we are all the same in our hearts.

I wish you all the best in your HT-careers.

(Please note that this article was written for the Hattrick Anniversary Book. However, as it seems to never hit the shelves, we might as well share this story with you. These are all true stories, even though the author is not ‘currently residing in Australia’ anymore.)

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