Status of new servers + refund of Federation tickets

It has now been 2 weeks since we moved the entire site to brand new servers and we have spent the time fixing bugs and tweaking our setup.

Besides 2 crashes that happened during the night in the first days after the move, there haven't been any major issues and the new servers have now run 2 season updates without any disasters.

The thing that caused most of the minor issues has been the change of time zones on the servers from CET to UTC. Having these issues crop up has actually been beneficial, in a way, because it led us to examine some areas where we haven't handled other time zone well.

One example is the drop-down menu on the leagues' fixtures page, which previously didn't work well for people playing from a time zone other than CET. Our seasons run from 00:00 Monday to 23:59 Sunday in CET, so the league fixtures page has always included 7 days: Monday through Sunday.

However, for anyone living in a time zone that is behind CET, a season actually extends over eight different calendar days in their local time zone. You don't go further than the UK before this becomes a problem: When we play the first matches of the new season on Monday between 00:00 and 01:00 CET, it is still Sunday in the UK.

Previously, those matches have not been visible on the league's fixtures page because you could not pick Sunday from the menu - and this problem was even greater if, for example, you live in the United States, which is further behind.

But, we have now manage to sort that out, so that there are no longer any invisible matches if you live out west.

Further issues relating to time zone might still pop up, but it seems that most issues relating to the server move have now been dealt with.

Refund of VM Tickets used on Federations

As you know, the Federations feature was discontinued in connection with the server move.

Today we have refunded all the VM Tickets that have been spent on creating Federations. It came out to 17530 tickets in total!

Back to Youth Squads

Now that the server relocation and a number of other major tasks have nearly all fallen into place, we can once again concentrate on youth squads.

Functionally, nothing is really missing. Our small group of testers have discovered the most glaring bugs, and we have implemented several small improvements to the UI around youth squads.

The only major task left is to properly balance player slots and the new mood system.

The new mood system is what will require the most getting used to, and it is important that we get the balance just right. During our testing period, it has become clear that our first draft of mood loss factors was too aggressive. Our testers have had a pretty hard time keeping players' spirits up, so we'll need to test out a few different adjustments in the coming days.