Visible mood effect and more stable updates at night

Effect of mood on training is now visible

Player mood is one of those things in Virtual Manager, which has never been properly explained, neither in the manual nor in the game.

If you hadn't heard about it from another manager, or read it on the forums, you probably wouldn't have known that being in a bad mood makes the players' training less effective. It has also always been a mystery how much of an effect the mood of players has.

That's why we've added a section on the training overview, which displays a list of your dissatisfied players, and tells you how much their training is reduced as a result.

This will allow you as a manager to make informed decisions about your players' playing time and training.

More stable updates at night

The nightly energy update, age update and automatic contract extensions are some of the vital updates that are performed every night.

Recently we've had a few unfortunate problems with these updates, which has been caused by either server issues or temporary peak loads on the database.

We have tried to address these issues. All three of these update jobs have been moved to a less busy server, and they've reworked in order to make them more resilient towards temporary server issues:

1. Energy update

The energy update have been completely redesigned and now updates players in parallel in smaller chunks. Before, the energy update might fail for almost all 1.3 million players, if only a single player could not be updated quickly enough due to a temporary lock in the database.

Also, we disable training from 23:00 GMT when the energy update starts, until it has completed. In cases where the energy update failed, this meant that you'd have had to wait until 00:00 GMT before you could train, since that's the point where training is automatically re-enabled.

In the future, a database lock on a single player will no longer cause the energy update to fail for all players, but only for a small number, which can more easily be rectified later.

We ran a test with the new energy update last night. The update of the players' energy went smoothly, but a code error had snuck in, which meant that that training was locked until 00:00 GMT. This has now been fixed

2. Age update

The age updater has also been remade completely from scratch. Just as the energy update, the new age updater will update the players in smaller batches.

Also, the age update is now significantly faster. Previously it could take up to 30 minutes to complete it, but now it takes less than 1 minute!

We also tested this new updater last night, and here too we ran into a bit of trouble; this time due to it bumping into the energy update and overloading the database. We have tuned a few things in the database and changed the order of the two runs, so this shouldn't happen again.

In addition, this update will automatically try correct any missed players at 04:00 GMT, so that ever player has his correct age before the transfer window opens.

3. Automatic contract extensions

Quite a few managers make use of the automatic contract extensions, to guard against losing players, if the forget to renew their contracts.

It's obviously quite important that this system runs smoothly as well.

Besides moving this job to another server, in the future it will extend the contracts of players who have less than 30 hours left of their contract, as opposed to 25 hours before. This gives us a safety margin of few extra hours to intervene if this update ever fails in the future.

Have a nice weekend!