New country difficulty calculation

At the moment we're making some preparations to move our servers into the cloud.

As part of this, we've been working on converting some of the really old background maintenance jobs that were written in PHP in Virtualmanager's early years.

One of these jobs is responsible for calculating the relative difficulties of the different countries - this number is used as the basis for determining the amount of prize money and VIFA points you get from a win or a draw in each country.

This job was meant to calculate the sum of player stats of all the players in each country's top league, and from there determine the difficulty. While converting this this job, however, we found a bug many years old that meant that a single club could shift the entire result unfairly.

In the new version, this bug has been fixed, and additionally, we'll now take into account all the clubs in the top 3 divisions, since that will provide a more representative picture of the country's overall level of difficulty.

The calculation will become part of the season update, so number will be updated each Sunday shortly after all league movements have been performed.

In a test run conducted a couple of days ago, these were the results:

Denmark     - old formula:  97, new formula: 100
England     - old formula:  98, new formula:  94
Italy       - old formula:  92, new formula:  94
Germany     - old formula:  93, new formula:  92
USA         - old formula:  96, new formula:  89
France      - old formula:  88, new formula:  88
Greece      - old formula:  94, new formula:  87
Scotland    - old formula:  97, new formula:  86
Spain       - old formula: 100, new formula:  85
Sweden      - old formula:  90, new formula:  84
Brazil      - old formula:  90, new formula:  84
Turkey      - old formula:  91, new formula:  83
Portugal    - old formula:  84, new formula:  83
Netherlands - old formula:  97, new formula:  81

The difficulty index is always 100 for the most difficult country, and the remainder will come in below that.

We're not changing the overall prize amounts at all - just the distribution among countries according to their difficulty, making it much more fair.

You can now also see the difficulties on each country's overview page.

The new formula will be debut during the season update this Sunday.