Project Granddad

Next to our work on the new scout, we have also begun to outline some long-awaited changes in the way that the oldest players develop.

For many years, Virtualmanager users have pointed out one thing: It makes no sense that the oldest players are the best on the pitch.

Also, the situation today is that all players train the best when they are about 27-28 years. This is too old, we feel.

We can also see that a huge majority of players never even reach a higher rating than about 20. This can give many managers a feeling that there is not much progress in their team.

If we look at the players who are currently in a club, grouped by their rating, the distribution looks like this:

Rating Percentage
   0-9: 62.5%
 10-19: 18.8%
 20-29:  9.3%
 30-39:  4.8%
 40-49:  2.5%
 50-59:  1.3%
 60-69:  0.5%
 70-79:  0.2%
 80-89:  0.05%
 90-99:  0.03%

So, 81.3% of the players in the Virtual Manager have a rating of 19 or under! And this is only looking at the players who are currently in a club and actively training.

We'd like to address these issues, and we have a lot of ideas for changes that we hope will make the development of your team more fun and more dynamic:

• Players will have an individual age where their training peaks.
• A player who peaks early, for example, might improve much faster while he is young and shoot straight to the top.
• You won't know in advance when a player is going to peak.
• When a player is a few years away from peaking, your physio department will give you a hint about when they think it will happen. A better physio department will be able to give a more precise estimate.
• Once the player has peaked (or some time thereafter) your physio department will let you know for certain that it has happened.
• The oldest players' physical abilities such as endurance, speed, and acceleration will start to fall. The decline will be more dramatic, the closer the ability is to 100, and it will require special effort from your coaches and physio department to keep them on top as long as possible. That will be the price of having an absolute top club.
• The age at which players' abilities begin to fall, will be different from the age at which their training peaks, but there may be a correlation between the two.

It will take many months to complete Project Granddad

These things are actually very easy to implement in the code, since it really only involves changing some numbers and formulas. It is, however, very hard to get everything balanced in a way that makes the game fun for the greatest possible number of managers, and not just a small group.

Therefore, we will proceed very cautiously. Over the next few months, I will draw upon the expertise of our crew and discuss with them how best to balance the numbers. When we approach a first draft, I will write about it here in the blog - there will be lots of examples and graphs :)

And remember, EVERYTHING I have written above is only at the idea stage right now. Many of the details are guaranteed to change, as we discuss them.