Downtime Tuesday Jan. 29th - Youth Squads

Update 11:15 GMT: The deployment has been completed and we're now working on fixing errors as they show up in our crash logs

Update 12:40 GMT: The problem with training exercises has now been fixed

The time has come to start the rollout of youth squads.

Today, we will be deploying all of the youth team functionality, which will result in some downtime today.

The rollout of youth squads will happen in 4 phases:

Alpha 1

In this phase, which begins today, all of the youth squads code will be deployed, but the feature will be hidden from anyone other than us developers.

During Alpha 1, we will keep our hands off of the actual youth squad functionality. Instead, we will be focusing on correcting all the errors that might arise in the surrounding game code because of the extensive changes we had to make in the game's basic structure in order to support youth squads.

In recent months, we have gradually performed many of the major structural changes in the game, in what I have called the "hybrid version", but with today's update, all of the youth squads code will be rolled out.

Alpha 1 will last at least 1 week.

Alpha 2

When all of the bugs in the surrounding game are under control and we have been through at least one season update, Alpha 2 will begin. During Alpha 2, we will be creating a number of youth teams to test with and then deal with all of the bugs we encounter.

Closed beta

In the closed beta, we will invite a number of clubs to play test youth squads and help develop the gameplay and balancing.

So far, we have focused solely on solving the enormous technical challenges in being able to make the game work with more than one squad per team, so at this stage I do not expect youth squads to be particularly entertaining. During the closed beta, the focus will be on developing the feature into something fun.

We will continuously invite more clubs to the closed beta. When we get closer to starting the closed beta, I will be back with more information about how this will work.

Open beta

In the open beta, everyone (who has premium) will be able to participate. At this stage, the feature should be thoroughly game tested and refined, so the open beta will mainly act as a final stress test where we test the stability of the game with loads of youth squads in the leagues.

Expect some instability the next few days

Even though we have carried out extremely thorough testing over the past several months, we won't be able to avoid errors when we roll out the code on the live server. So, for the next few days things can and will break in different places and further downtime and postponements of auctions and matches might be necessary. Of course we will do everything we can to ensure that any bugs are corrected as soon as possible.

Today, all player and employee contracts will be extended by one day free of charge, in order to help avoid any issues if anyone is unable to get onto the site to renew contracts.