Your wish IS our command

Some managers have been saying that we do not implement what you - the users - want. Such a statement is not aligned with the truth, so I would like to clear sum things up.

First of all, it would be non-rational to change the game in a direction we believe you would dislike. Why would we want to do that? To those of you who actually think that we're trying to change the game in the opposite direction of what people what want: We are of course not trying to do that.

So what are we trying? We're striving to make a game as many people as possible will love. This is because we know we cannot make a game that everybody will love. It's just not possible.

In order to achieve this goal we absorb as much feedback as possible. This comes in the form of personal letters, support tickets, forum discussions, ideas in the I/D forum and user surveys.

But with the current percentage of payers and the current price on VM Premium it is just not possible for us to dedicate enough resources to read through all of your feedback. We just can't do that. We could try, but that we leave absolutely no time for development which is not what we believe most of you want.

So if your idea for a feature have not been included in the game it is not because we ignore you or don't like you. It is simply because we might not have seen your idea yet or because we don't believe most people would want us to focus on such an idea. Put in another way, even though we might like your idea we might still refuse to implement it because we could spend our time more wisely in order to reach our goal of making most people happy.

The feedback that we do manage to absorb and interpret is very valuable to us. We use this information to form an idea of how we reach our goal in the best way. This is often by following the wishes of the majority, but not always. While it might sound counterintuitive to not do what the majority of the users want, that is sometimes the right thing to go. As I suspect some of you disagree on that statement, let me give you an example.

The last 10-12 months we have been doing a lot of maintenance work on Virtual Manager by improving the stability of our platform. This has resulted in fewer updates/improvements during that period. If we a year ago asked the users whether they would like us to work on a new stadium editor or on improving the platform (which yields no visible gains right away) a very high percentage would probably vote for a new stadium editor.

This is because the average user simply do not have the same overview and understanding of the project as a whole as we do. As we spend each day all year working on this project it is very natural that we know the project better than the average user. Therefore, it is absolutely clear that it is not always optimal to follow the wishes of the majority. If we back then would have neglected the need for maintenance work I can assure you, Virtual Manager would be a much poorer website today simply because the maintenance was needed.

During this maintenance we have among other things optimized the club profile, transfer list search and much more simply because it would be wise to do so along with the maintenance work. Seen from the user perspective I understand this sometimes can be perceived as we're doing something the users have not requested.

So, when should we listen to the majority? As I said, most of time when it makes logical sense to do so. For instance, we learned from the latest user survey that you really want a new tactics editor. Therefore, a tactics editor is on the top of our todo list. However, before we got the results from the survey we started converting the player search section to our new modern platform (as a part of the maintenance). We need to finish this before moving on to the tactics (you can expect a new auction search and free transfer search soon).

So to sum up; the majority of you guys want us to focus on improving the tactics section. Therefore we prioritize this the highest, and will start working on that section as soon as possible.

I hope the above have made some things clearer for those of you who believe we are not trying to give you what you want.

Your opinion matters a lot and we will continue listening to your wishes and ideas as we've done for the last five years.