Virtual Manager in 2014

Both Virtual Manager developers are now back from Christmas break, which was sorely needed. We were both exhausted after the big race to finish the development and deployment of Virtual Manager's biggest update in almost 7 years on old servers, that fought us all the way.

But now we are back and we hope that everyone had a good Christmas and is well into the new year.

We have big plans for the game in 2014, and there's plenty of work to be done. In the immediate future, we'll be focussing on these 4 areas:

Bug Fixes

Over the holidays, lots of bug reports have ticked in, and our main task this week is to get a handle on those.

For example, some of our new code didn't take kindly to the new year, causing faulty season numbers for certain types of data such as player history and trophies. We have found and corrected the error, and already cleaned up all the corrupted data.

Additionally, there are still some minor bugs in the new match simulator that must be addressed - in terms of code complexity, these problems are fortunately minor when you consider just how enormous this update was, and we expect to have them cleared up very soon.

Improvements to the tactics editor

For the new tactics editor are we looking at two things.

First of all, the "Adjustments" panel needs an overhaul. We see that a lot of managers set up invalid substitution rules, and then report it as a bug when they're not executed. This is because the user friendliness of the system simply isn't good enough.

In the short term, we will ensure that the creation of certain invalid rules will be impossible and we'll be writing a new manual section that properly describes the rules of the new system.

In the longer term, we'll look at the possibility of providing you with better feedback when creating adjustments, so that you can more easily see if the rules you create will never be executed. We'd also like to display more information after the game that tells you exactly why certain adjustments were not performed.

We will also look at the possibility of implementing certain individual instructions. If we decide to go ahead with that, it won't be as many different instructions as in the old one, though.

Before we rolled out the new match simulator, we examined how many managers actually use individual instructions and it turned out to be only about 3-5% of the active clubs. Therefore, there are currently other improvements that have a higher priority, but we will be taking a look at it in the spring.

Documentation

The new match simulator, tactics editor, stats and all of the associated new pages represent a gigantic update of the game. So far, all these new changes have not been documented in the manual, and we obviously need to get that done.

The new stats, which were developed in parallel with the new match simulator, give us the opportunity to describe exactly what each attribute does in the game. That was impossible with the old ones as they had to go through a lot of transformations before they were used in the old match engine. In addition, many of the old stats had no direct impact as they were simply added up and distributed across the actual useful stats. This was the case for "Creativity", for example ... I mean, how would someone implement creativity in a football AI, and how do you explain the exact mechanism of action to the users?

Therefore, we will be adding a new chapter in the manual that tells you exactly what each attribute does in the game. This will make it possible for the skilled manager to assess exactly which player stats are important for his particular line-up and style of play.

The new stats and training

We still have a big job ahead of us with regards to the new stats and training.

Right now the training system uses the old stats, which after every training session are converted to the new ones via an intricate formula. It's a mess, and it makes it even harder to understand what the individual player attributes actually do on the pitch. This is also the reason why we can't just continue using the old stats, which some users have suggested, even though that would technically work.

The main advantage of the new stats is that we can now be 100% crystal clear about what each attribute does in the game. The stats must no longer be the total mystery that they have been previously.

If a manager asks me about one of the old stats, for example "what does creativity do?", I'd have to go into an explanation about it being spread out over a number of the other stats, which are then converted according to a complicated formula into new stats, to eventually be used in a certain way in the match simulator. That simply won't do.

Therefore, the training system needs to be adapted to the new stats. We need to make up new training programs and find a good way to display the training data.

Because the new stats only extend from 0-100 , we have a huge challenge in making training interesting and give you a sense of progress. We can't just change the stats displays to use decimal numbers, and it must be possible to tell the difference between a good and a bad player. One of the ideas we've been kicking around, is that each attribute can have some sort of level bar, which shows you exactly how far they are from levelling up. Increasing the span of the stats to a higher number than 100 is also on the table.

Once we've got a draft proposal of how this'll all fit together, we'll be posting an update here in the blog.