What have we been up to?

I know that many of you would like to hear what we've been up to lately, and you might feel it's been a bit quiet here on the blog.

Since last time

For the past month or so we've had to work on a number of boring (but necessary) tasks down in the Virtual Manager "engine room". This includes things like upgrading our Ruby-on-Rails installation, which is the framework that the entirety of Virtual Manager is running on - it is necessary (but often time-consuming) to keep these sorts of things up to date so that we avoid problems with stability and security.

We have also been working on systems for collecting statistics about exactly how players use Virtual Manager. It is incredibly important that we're able to collect accurate, objective data about these things, because we know that the minority who comment on the forum is not representative of the entire Virtual Manager user base.

In fact, only about 6% of the active clubs ever write anything on the forums. The 94% who never comment also need our attention and that means we have to find out exactly how they play the game.

With good solid data in hand, we can do things like examining exactly how far a new user progresses in the beginners tutorial, and at which point they might drop out. We can also investigate how, and how much, the various features in the game are used - both before and after we implement fixes and changes.

Accurate statistics can also give us information about how quickly a club works its way up through the leagues and expands their facilities, so that we can fine tune things like difficulty and income/expenses. All in all, it gives us much better insight into the game, so these sorts of statistics will be an important part of our work, going forward.

In addition, we have begun work on scrapping one of our oldest web servers in order to replace it with a virtual server.

So in short, we have been working on a lot of things that aren't very exciting to talk about, which is why it has been quiet on the blog.

New player listing

We have heard from many people that the players listing was not very useful - mainly due to the fact that the value and transfer status amounts were shortened, which made it impossible to get a quick overview at a glance. Therefore, we have tinkered a bit to make room for the full credit amounts. We're still not 100% satisfied with its appearance, because it was necessary to squash and reduce some elements, but at least nope we've got the first draft implemented.

Crew day

Last weekend we held our almost annual crew day here at our office in Viborg, Denmark.

On crew days, we invite our volunteer supporters, cheat-hunters, ombudsmen, etc. out to our office to discuss topics such as administration tools and regulations - all in order to optimize the way the volunteer work is handled and how we manage things like anti-cheating and the social element of the game.

Despite a small delay due to technical difficulties, we had a pleasant and very productive day.

Weekly updates in the future

We know that some managers tend to get a little nervous about the direction of the game if we don't write frequent updates.

So far I have only written on the blog when I had something new, exciting or super important to tell you - mostly because it requires much more work than you would think.

When I put up a blog post, I need to write it both in Danish and English, being extremely careful to express myself accurately, and trying to predict which parts might be misunderstood. In addition, I have to take great care with my punctuation, otherwise we get complaints (unbelievable but true).

The main workload happens after I've put up a blog post, though. After a blog post has been written, I have to dedicate the rest of my working day to handling the comments - both Danish and English. What often happens is that a single person misunderstands something I have written, or makes a false assumption - and then writes about that in the comments. If I'm not on hand to correct and clarify immediately, a false assumption can spread like wildfire, and the comments get out of hand. And since I am only at my desk during normal office hours, there is ample opportunity for them to go even more off track when I go home for the day. And, I'm sure we all know how bad comments from anonymous people on the internet can get - just look at how much effort YouTube has had to put in just to get a little bit of a handle on their comments.

At the same time, we have statistics that show that only about 1.4% percent of users ever write anything in the blog comments. It makes absolutely no sense that so few users take up that much development time.

Therefore, we are trying something new. In the future I will write a blog post at least once a week, and share what we've been working on lately. It will usually go up on Thursday or Friday, even if there isn't anything exciting to tell you about. In order to make this possible, we have removed the ability to comment on the blog. This allows me to write updates more often, without it having to take up an entire working day.

Next week

Next week will continue the work on the servers and software. We will also have another look at match engine bugs, as there are still some strange things happening in some matches.

Have a nice weekend

That's all for now! I'll be back with another blog post in about a week.