New auction rule

Today I've got a mini update for you. We have just introduced a minor change to which durations you can choose when you place a player on auction.

As you may know, if your player's contract expires, you get 1 chance to sell him and get paid.

Normally, the system automatically puts the player on a 24-hour auction with no minimum price when he leaves the club. If someone then buys him, you'll receive the proceeds of the sale.

However, if you put the player on auction yourself and his contract expires before the auction ends, this auction will be your one chance to get him sold. If no one bids on him, then a new auction will start automatically, but you won't receive the sale amount.

But, it's been a regular occurrence that managers contact support because they have let their player's contract expire while he was on an auction they started themselves - but they set such a high minimum price on the auction that nobody bid on him.

These support cases always result in a lot of wasted time and unhappy faces all around, so we'd really like to be rid of them.

Therefore, your player must now have at least 1 hour of contract left over at the time the auction ends. So if your player's contract is about to expire, you'll need to either choose a shorter auction duration or extend his contract.

Updated design

The old auction start page was looking really sad, so since we were working on it anyway, we decided to freshen up the design a bit.

Here is the old page:

... and here's the new one:

In addition to a new design, we've added some information which may be useful when you are starting an auction.

We also show you up front when the auction will end, depending on the duration you choose. If you choose a duration that is either outside of the transfer window or that does not leave the player with at least 1 hour of contract left over when it ends, then you get an explanation right away.

Transfer listing bids and accepting incoming bids haven't changed

The change has no effect on the auctions that start automatically if you bid the transfer list price on a transfer listed player or if you accept an incoming bid.

In these situations, the player is guaranteed to be sold, so it isn't necessary to protect against the situation I described earlier.

Therefore, these types of auctions are still allowed to end after contract expiry.