Rebalance: Form analysis in the physio department

Work on the rebalance is progressing nicely.

Today I want to show off the new tools which will provide managers with both an overview and detailed information about the decline of ageing players.

If you haven't read my earlier post about age-related decline, then I recommend you do that first.

How will age decline work?

• When players are "born", they are given a secret date that determines when their age-related decline will begin. This will be somewhere around when they reach 28 to 29 years of age.
• The day a player's age-related decline begins, his manager will received a notification informing him of this.
• Every night, age-related decline will decrease the player's physical and technical abilities by a certain percentage.
• Leadership and Perseverance will never decline.
• Since the decline takes off a percentage of the player's abilities, the best players will naturally be hit the hardest at the beginning.
• Age-related decline will start off slowly and gradually increase, the longer it's been since the start date of the decline.
• As a manager, it is your job to counteract the decline for as long as possible, through correct and effective training - or you can just drop him and buy someone younger.
• In the beginning, age-related decline will be small enough that the player's training will exceed it, and the his abilities will still increase overall for a couple of years after decline starts. For most players, this means that they will reach their peak at round 31 to 32 years of age.

Lifetime development

On the player training page, you will get a new chart. The chart shows you the development in player ability sum over their entire lifetime up until now.

The point of this chart is to give you an overall impression of the player's development and form, how well he's training and how quickly he declines as he grows older.

We've chosen to show the ability sum instead of Rating, since as you know, Rating is a number that weighs certain abilities higher than others, depending on the player's position. Since each manager is able to target their training specifically to increase Rating, it is not nearly as "clean" of a number, when the point is to gain an overview of the overall form of the player.

This chart will make up the publicly available information about a player's development, and this will be what you will have to take into account when deciding whether or not a player is worth buying.

Form analysis

The manager who owns the player will have access to far more detailed insights into the player's age-related decline.

In the physio department there will be a new page, where your players will appear when their decline begins.

On this page we will chart both the player's training and his daily decline in xp for the past 14 days. The black line shows you the sum total of training and decline, and will give you a clear impression of where the player is headed.

Those people who want all the details can hover the mouse over the chart and see exactly how much the player has risen and fallen in each ability per day.

This feature will require that your physio department is upgraded to Doctors and in the future you will need VM Premium in order to upgrade to Doctors or above. However, the existing feature that lets you know the exact time that a player's injury is healed will be moved down to the Physical Therapists level.

What will happen to existing players when we release the rebalance?

• We won't change their abilities retroactively.
• From the date of release and from that point forward, existing players will train and decline, subject to the new rules.
• All players will have a decline start date generated. If a player is older than 28-29 years, then this of course means that this date will be in the past and his decline will start right away at a magnitude corresponding to how far in the past this date is. So for instance, an existing player who is 37 years old on release date, will start declining at quite a rapid pace.
• Remember that decline is a percentage of the player's abilities. Therefore, the decline will look rather intense for the best, oldest players in the beginning, since they will have been spared 8-10 years of decline. They will therefore have much higher abilities in their old age than the players who will be born and live their entire lives after the rebalance. These existing players will of course gradually retire and be replaced by new players, whose development will give you a much clearer image of the gradual onset of decline.
• We will generate historic data for the first chart that I showed you. Since existing players will have trained under the old rules, their graphs will look a bit boring at first. For the most part, it will just be a straight line instead of curve.
• The player market (ie. you managers) will of course need time to adapt to the new circumstances. Remember that player values are calculated based upon the trades that are done by all of the managers who play the game. The value calculation will be changed so that it only takes into account the previous 3 months of trades instead of the previous 6 months. That way it will react faster to your changing trading patterns.