Hattrick Hope on the Horizon!

[Poli]

Hattrick announces

07/06/2007 Club owners threatens to cancel next season The Club Owners Federation (COF) may take drastic action if the Hattrick Football Association (HFA) and the Player Union does not respond to their demands.
- Many clubs are losing money today and the situation is getting worse. We can´t accept this anymore, the chairman of the COF said today.
According to the COF, the current salary deal with the Player Union is too generous and should be renegotiated. They also point their finger at the HFA on the need to increase ticket and sponsor income.
- We have raised these issues many times, but the HFA and the Union haven’t listened to us. This time we will not back down so easily, the chairman continued.

The HFA released a written statement, confirming negotiations will start this weekend.
“A solution can be found, but we must not lose the long term perspective. Money is one thing, but we also need to motivate all smart managers to continue doing what they are doing right.”


07/05/2007 New start date for individual birthdays The new way to measure age will start Monday July 16th instead of the 11th. This move is because we don't want to interfere with the current U20 WC, which will end on Sunday the 15th.


07/05/2007 Individual player birthdays Up until now all players have shared the same birthday. But just recently experts have found out a more correct way to measure players' age, which been proven with success for players in the youth team. Starting Wednesday July 11th this new way to measure age will also be used for senior players, meaning their exact age in both years and days will be shown.

According to the experts the mass birthday celebration is utterly wrong as all players do not share the same birthday. Players are a certain age and anything between 0 and 111 days as a Hattrick year is 112 days long. In practise this means that a player which normally would turn 23 years next season in fact is somewhere between 22 years, 57 days and 23 years, 56 days on Wednesday.
So, some of your players are really younger than they look and some are older. Experts claim either way is just as likely, which by coincidence also makes this new way to measure age fair for all users.

[terpkristin]

Eeenteresting
I know they've said they know the economy is broken, I hope it's not another patch job..

/tk

[Tellistto]

Eeenteresting
I know they've said they know the economy is broken, I hope it's not another patch job..

/tk


Must admit that it looks like a bandaid is being used where surgery is required.

Only time will tell, I guess.

Tell

[Brillig]

I guess they finally realized all the old-time managers were quitting...

[Poli]

Agreed.

[finkenst]

well, they got a lot of excess money out of the game, i suppose...

but my initial reaction was: wtf does this mean?


followed by "what kind of half-assed job are they doing this time?"

[sterlingice]

To be fair, I've been saying this change is coming for a season now and it *should* be substantial. That said, we'll see how substantial it is. This could be anything from completely revamping the wage and income structure to saying "wages will decrease by 3% and income from sponsors increase by 5%"

I sense it will be something to the effect of decreasing the exponentiality (no, I don't think that's a word) of the wage curve so that ETs and maybe a level or two above are affordable again so that people don't just have to stop at titanics to remain economically viable. This should cause higher end players to get a bump in value. So rather than having the price curve increase until titanic and then decrease, it will increase until the new equilibrium point.

The bigger change will be to how they change income. Again, if it's something like "5% increase to all income" then it's a band aid and won't do a whole lot. It will induce some inflation into the economy, more than people realize, but not enough to reinflate prices more than a few hundred thousand bucks. Frankly, I think this is the likely scenario.

A more radical and better solution will be a big revamp of supporter calculation and caps as well as making fans actually smarter instead of making bogus "smart fans". I think we're a ways off from that. And the bigger danger is that they will do the above two changes and it will cause some significant temporary ripples but then only small substantial long term gains however they will see these couple of changes and wait to see how it plays out before implementing real change.

SI

[Mr. Wednesday]

Anything that just amounts to tweaking the coefficients on the formulas isn't going to really change anything. The thing that I think a lot of people don't grasp is, it will ultimately always be supremely difficult to get to (and stick at) the highest levels of the game without running a deficit, and the point of the wages has always been to provide a practical limit on the amount of skill that individual players can attain.

The only thing that's really, unequivocally broken is the supporter and crowd figures. They need to have a consistent model for how they trend from lower to higher divisions and from unsuccessful to successful teams.

[Brillig]

Here's the economy

7/13/2007 New League Treaty Signed
A new league treaty, designed to strengthen the position of club owners in relation to players and sponsors, was presented today. Under the treaty an extra sponsorship grant of €10000 per team will be paid out each week. The player union have agreed to lower all salaries by €250 per week, and ticket prices will be increased by around 20 per cent. Even financial policy is affected,: Clubs will retain half the current interest on savings (a reversal of the previous decision) and get a one third reduction on the interest rate on loans. Finally, the package includes a 25 per cent discount per new seat built in arenas. Clubs that have made expansions in the last calendar year will also receive a €25000 refund. In two detailed editorials, published Saturday and Monday, this treaty and the long term plan for the Hattrick economy will be discussed.


and the editorial

Hattrick Economy: Review and Actions


7/13/2007

Over the last few months we have spent a lot of time analyzing the Hattrick game world and how it is developing, especially in terms of economy and player development. It has been apparent to many that something has not been healthy – especially looking at the increasingly collapsing transfer market – and there have been many theories about the cause of the problems, and of potential solutions to them.

We have listened closely to these discussions in the forums, and have tested them against the facts and statistics that we have on hand. We have also taken the help of two independent studies, one carried out by two national economists at the University of Stockholm, applying a strictly scientific perspective on the development of the Hattrick economy, and another by an experienced Hattrick user that has approached the same data, but also from a game experience point of view.

The conclusions of the two surveys were very similar when it came to describing the problems Hattrick faces.

To summarize, the long-term balance between team costs and team income has been broken, causing more and more money to leak out of Hattrick. One important factor here are salaries, attached as they are to a pool of players that are increasingly big, highly trained, and, therefore, expensive to maintain.
In the short term, we need to reverse the trend in the game that empties the overall economy of money, thereby stalling the transfer market as well as forcing many teams into bankruptcy.

Just as urgently, we need to start a long-term change towards giving Hattrick a more stable economy and player market, changes that will reduce or remove the need for us to make further direct interventions in the game economy. Some of these changes are already underway, or have influenced game design decisions in the past year.

Among our aims are controlling player creation and player retirement, reducing overall training (without making the game less fun and interesting), improving the game engine for multi-skilled players, restoring the idea of the best players also being the most valuable ones in the market, making sure Hattrick remains a game that holds interest for the casual gamer as well as for the hardcore.

Things we see today that we think can be fixed by moving in this direction are, for example, the broken transfer market, the low motivation for long-term training schemes, and the existence of farm teams and kamikaze teams.

There is much to do to, but it can be done and we think a lot of positive things will grow naturally from addressing the root causes, which are all connected to the input and output of the key resources in Hattrick: money and players.

It has often been said, also by the HT-team, that Hattrick is an economy that can and should regulate itself: If salaries are too high, users will adapt. This is true to a large degree, and it is certainly enough for the individual teams to decide their own fate. But it is not enough to reverse a failing global economy, possibly because at the end of the day Hattrick is more than an economic simulator, it is above everything a game, and it is our duty to update the parameters of the game to make sure it is both playable and challenging.

Short term issue: Money supply

Simply put, the current recession in Hattrick is due to the fact that costs have kept rising steadily for many seasons, while income has stayed put. The increase in costs is mostly due to higher salaries, as more and more players are added to the system and then are trained higher and higher.

The average team loses money and cannot compensate their losses through training and selling as in the past. Since the average team is losing money, money leaks from the global economy in Hattrick. In fact, we have seen similar patterns for many years but the global economy has then been fed by a very high growth of new users that bring fresh money into the game. As the growth rate has slowed down, there is less new money and also a lower demand for low skill players. That is perfectly OK, but it does mean we will need to adjust the money supply in Hattrick in other ways to keep the game healthy.

To improve the money supply in the short term, sponsorship money for all teams will be increased by €10 000 a week. We have previously announced that the interest rate on savings will be removed altogether, but in the light of our analysis this seems counter-productive, and we will keep a small interest on savings at half of the current rate. We will also lower the interest on borrowed money by one third.

On top of this, the price of constructing new arena seats will decrease by 25 percent. This will enable newer teams to expand their incomes quicker, as they get more fans. To compensate teams that have recently expanded their arenas under the old rules, a one-time grant of €25000 will be given to any team that have expanded their arena in the past calendar year.

All players in Hattrick has accepted a reduction of their salaries by €250 a week, and in a new agreement with the Player Union, the annual salary payments has been rearranged to make the last week of the season payment free for the Clubs. In addition to this, ticket prices have been increased by around 20 per cent.

We have tried to make this stimulation package as considerate as possible and to make it affect teams in a fair way. We absolutely realize that merely adding money to the system will not solve the long term problems Hattrick has, but it WILL help stimulate the economy while our other measures take effect. And this is needed.

2. Mid-term issue: Transfer market

The transfer market is the most visible facet of the economic problems in Hattrick, simply because it is the only way Hattrick teams have to interact financially with each other. In this regard, the transfer fills a very important role as it allows teams to specialize their training, build teams more imaginatively, and so on.

We believe there are a number of reasons for the low prices on the transfer today: the oversupply of high-skilled players, the lack of money in the system, fewer new teams that create demand for players and low motivation to retire older players, as well as the fact that the very high salaries for one-dimensional players disrupt the value model on the transfer, making the best players very cheap to buy, but impossibly expensive to employ.

These odd valuations make it harder to plan training, which is a key ingredient in Hattrick. Other negative effects include the possibility of short term strategies that are no fun, unrealistic and sometimes destructive: divine tricks, kamikaze teams, and so on.

However, we also know that while these ultra-expensive players are very visible and irritating on the market today, very few players are actually being trained to these levels any more – most users do take the extreme wages in account and stop training in time. The exceptions are the ones being trained for the national teams, and with changes in the match engine the recruitment focus of the national teams would likely change over time.

What is worrying, though, is a similar effect of ceased training is also starting to happen at levels where the wages are not extreme – the skill levels at which training becomes unprofitable is steadily creeping down, which means that if we were not to take action, we could face a situation in a few seasons time when NO training is profitable any longer. This trend is more fundamental and is connected to the overall economy, training and player supply.
We recognize it is important to reduce these transfer valuation effects, but we do not want to achieve that overnight, it is something that we hope to see grow gradually. The important thing now is to break the negative spiral.

The key method to restoring the pricing of the best players will be through the match engine, making secondary skills more valuable than they are today.
(We will present the changes, and make it possible for managers to test the tweaked match engine in friendly games before it is actually implemented in league and Cup play.)

We will also introduce a skill level factor in the skill drop formula, making it harder to maintain extreme skill levels – this will be especially noticeable at the levels above divine. We are also considering further changes that would discourage national team coaches from selecting one-dimensional players with one extremely high skill, gearing the focus of national teams towards the multi-skilled player. The end effect we are after is that highly skilled players, no matter what they look like, are likely to become more sought-after on the transfer market. But the best players, and the players to command the highest prices on the market, and that are likely candidates for national teams, are players with multiple skills.

This season we will also introduce a few new concepts that we think will move Hattrick in the right direction for the long term; a new system for stamina and also changes to how players develop over time. These changes will be presented in our next editorial, scheduled to be published on Monday. There we will also indicate some ideas we have for the next several seasons.



HT-Johan

[sterlingice]

First off, looks like we got the band aid approach and it's because of the following line:

The key method to restoring the pricing of the best players will be through the match engine, making secondary skills more valuable than they are today.
(We will present the changes, and make it possible for managers to test the tweaked match engine in friendly games before it is actually implemented in league and Cup play.)

No, that's just patently wrong. They've been trying this for nearly 10 seasons now and it's done next to nothing. Unless they completely revamp how things are done (watch older players quit in droves if they do some crazy stuff), it's just going to be that proverbial band aid on the match engine that has never worked.

SI

[sterlingice]

Let's see how close I was...

To be fair, I've been saying this change is coming for a season now and it *should* be substantial. That said, we'll see how substantial it is. This could be anything from completely revamping the wage and income structure to saying "wages will decrease by 3% and income from sponsors increase by 5%"

Looks like those two conservative guesses were almost dead on.

I sense it will be something to the effect of decreasing the exponentiality (no, I don't think that's a word) of the wage curve so that ETs and maybe a level or two above are affordable again so that people don't just have to stop at titanics to remain economically viable. This should cause higher end players to get a bump in value. So rather than having the price curve increase until titanic and then decrease, it will increase until the new equilibrium point.

Nope, just more nonsense about how multiple skills are useful now.


The bigger change will be to how they change income. Again, if it's something like "5% increase to all income" then it's a band aid and won't do a whole lot. It will induce some inflation into the economy, more than people realize, but not enough to reinflate prices more than a few hundred thousand bucks. Frankly, I think this is the likely scenario.

Bingo, unfortunately. The big bomb I didn't predict was the 25% extra inflation on fans- good but doesn't address the big picture.

A more radical and better solution will be a big revamp of supporter calculation and caps as well as making fans actually smarter instead of making bogus "smart fans". I think we're a ways off from that. And the bigger danger is that they will do the above two changes and it will cause some significant temporary ripples but then only small substantial long term gains however they will see these couple of changes and wait to see how it plays out before implementing real change.

Why make more substantial changes to the fans, the root of the problem, when you can just make stupid fans pay more money to hit the stadium. That way, we can give people even more incentive to stay down so they have a more stable economy and can make even more money and deeper cup runs rather than trying to promote to where they belong.

SI

[finkenst]

Why make more substantial changes to the fans, the root of the problem, when you can just make stupid fans pay more money to hit the stadium. That way, we can give people even more incentive to stay down so they have a more stable economy and can make even more money and deeper cup runs rather than trying to promote to where they belong.


As i told tellistto on thursday or friday:

So, we know the fans are messed up and we don't know really how to fix it so we're going to increase ticket prices to blur the issue.

[sterlingice]

As i told tellistto on thursday or friday:

So, we know the fans are messed up and we don't know really how to fix it so we're going to increase ticket prices to blur the issue.

Exactly as I said in my last paragraph. They want to just try this, watch how it muddies the water for the next few seasons and then worry about fixing whatever messes they've made.

SI

[Brillig]

Edit to add: When they say "next season", they mean "right-freakin-now"

Phase II

Stamina and Player Development News


7/16/2007

The editorial from a few days ago is continued, with a look into the changes of the coming season and also on what long term challenges (and opportunities!) we see for the development of Hattrick.

In Hattrick, there are two key resources that define how well teams will succeed: Players and money. The two are tightly connected to everything in the game and it could well be said that the real problem in the Hattrick economy is not actually the lack of income, but rather the fact that there are too many highly trained, expensive, players available in the game.
There is little cost attached to recruiting and training players in Hattrick, so we do a lot of it. Also, when a user leaves Hattrick many of the players he trained over the years are left in the system, slowly increasing the average skill levels faster than they can be "consumed".

Training is not bad in itself, it´s an important part of the game and something we do not want to destroy. But, over time, we do need to bring down the total pool of skilled players, increase the demand for them, or even increase the training time to produce a great player. We might also consider new ways to remove players from the system with in-game mechanics, as a way to reduce the player pool. Controlling player supply will be a natural part of our game design going forward.

As we have also indicated in an editorial a few months back, we are making changes to the stamina system in Hattrick. Stamina will get a more central role in the game, both on the field but also for the development of a player over time. Connected to this are several changes to the salary formula and to player skill drops.

• Stamina will become important for all player positions (This will be implemented next season)

• Stamina will be trained every week, as a percentage of the total training of the team. Stamina training efficiency will drop at higher intensity levels – it´s better to train a little every week than a lot now and then. Older players will need more training every week to maintain a certain stamina level. Managers will have to find the appropriate stamina training quota for their particular squad and ambitions. (The new stamina training will be implemented this season, to reduce any negative impact on teams all players will be sent to an extra boot camp before next season to get their fitness up).

• Age will become a much smaller factor for skill drops, although like today skill drops will not start until players are in their late twenties. Older players will be able to keep reasonable skills for many years, but will have problems keeping their stamina. Skill drops will be more predictable, less random, than they are today. (This will be implemented next season.)

• Skill level will become a factor in skill drops, making it more difficult to maintain very high levels of skills without further training – especially noticeable above divine skill level. (This will be implemented next season.)

• The “age discount” for older players will be reduced, but slowly. Older players will, compared with younger players, have higher salaries than today. (This will be implemented next season.)

• Having a reasonable stamina will be necessary for a player to be able to absorb other kinds of training. Players with very low stamina will not benefit very much from traditional skill training. (Implemented next season.)

• We will reduce or remove the possibility for stamina and set pieces trainers to train a whole squad of players, even those that get no time on the pitch. In line with the general upgrade of secondary importance and stamina, set pieces may on the other hand become a more valuable skill to have. (Implemented next season.)

• Injury recovery times will decrease a little from today's levels, and become less dependent on age. Injuries will however be affected by current stamina on the pitch. A tired player runs a slightly higher risk of injuring himself. (Implemented by next season.)

• Stamina drops will now be calculated at the time of training, not as today in a separate Monday batch. The training effect will be the result of training and loss. (Implemented immediately.)

Why do we make these changes?
For several reasons, naturally! The current stamina system lacks in both realism and as game experience, and with substitutions coming into the game we wanted to make stamina count for all positions, otherwise substitutions would become a midfielder-only affair. Stamina also offered us a way to decrease skill training slightly while at the same time giving us a more realistic and strategically interesting way to plan the development and configuration of your squad. Today, older players become very cheap to employ and many teams have very old squads. We need some incentives for player to be retired, or at least for older players to stop being starters, maybe serving a few extra seasons as substitutes instead (where they will do much better than today, as their main skills will be higher but their lower stamina may not let them play for too long).

That´s the changes for the upcoming season, many of which will take effect one full season from now. The most important change apart from stamina and player development will be the changes to the match engine, to promote multi-skilled players. We will present these changes in detail during the coming season.

On our list to review are also the supporter formulas, that is, how supporters in Hattrick react to the success or failures of your team. Here is room for improvement, supporters should have a longer memory and maybe it should also be possible for you as a manager to interact more directly with your fans. In connection with supporters, we may take a look at promotion and demotion effects in the game as well.
We mention this because we will try to be more open about what we are working on, not only to give a heads up what could happen in the game in the coming seasons, but also to get your input and ideas on it all.

Finally, we are aware that this is a lot of news to take in, but we think that over time these changes will make sense and not make Hattrick a more complex game. We want it to be easy to use Hattrick, but at the same time keep it a game that is deep on interaction and strategy.

[finketr]

Exactly as I said in my last paragraph. They want to just try this, watch how it muddies the water for the next few seasons and then worry about fixing whatever messes they've made.

SI

my exact quote on friday:
[16:07] AIMID: so, they're saying, the crowd algorithm is still f'ed, but to mitigate, here's 20% more money
[16:07] AIMID: for those who do show up

[vex]

I want a reset!!! It always worked in Omerta, we just have to complain enough. Who's with me!!! :)

[Qwikshot]

I want a reset!!! It always worked in Omerta, we just have to complain enough. Who's with me!!! :)

Not me, I got 8 million in my pocket.

[JAG]

*Hires detectives*

[vex]

Best transfer that, JAG has his best on it.

[Poli]

That's funny.

[Maltby]

heh

[JAG]

I set my stamina % at 10, and hoo boy those older players did not like that one bit...

[Poli]

15 here, and my three oldest guys dropped it like it was hot.

[sterlingice]

I had quite a few drops, even at 20%. But I noticed most were on guys who bumped up to formidable last week on their "boot camp".

SI