Virtual Manager acquired! :O

So, as the blog post says, I blew all my savings and bought the company I've worked for the last 12 years.

So we no longer have 6 different owners and ever-changing CEOs - now it's just me :O

It's been a long and arduous journey, but now that I'm finally done with all the practicalities of buying a company, learning how to operate it and stopped the bleeding due to silly expenses, I can finally start to look ahead and plan what's to come in 2020.

So if you have any comments or questions, put 'em here.

Congratulations once again Dennis, = it's good to have you in sole charge, & I do hope everything pans out well for you
If there's anything else I can help you out with I'd be more than happy to do so!

Congratulations Dennis hope it all works out for you .game still gets my vote as best around

That is all great to read!

I'm sure it's been stressful investing so heavily into the game but it sounds like you've approached things very sensibly and it's wonderful to hear you're through the stabilization period.

I am sure there are at least several of us here that sympathize greatly with the ownership's unwillingness to prioritize maintenance.

I am also very glad to hear you'll be prioritizing the match engine again. The dot engine was what brought me here in the first place and though I've never been as thrilled with the newer engine it sounds like it has the potential to improve as well.

While you're thinking about these things, one thing that I've personally desired ever since the new engine came out was much, much more in depth player performance statistics. Goals, assists, and some nebulous rating system just doesn't do enough to let me know what is working and what isn't working when I set up tactics.

More flexibility in tactics sounds great, but without good ways to judge how those tactics are influencing matches other than eyeballing it, understanding how tactics impact games and interact with each other will still be far harder than it should be.

I don't really know what kind of more advanced statistics would be useful, but passes completed vs passes attempted, the same for interceptions and tackles, maybe some kind of xG stats would all be good starting places. Even more impressive would be stats that indicate how your tactics caused your team to overperform expectation or cause an opponent to underperform, but if we had open access to things like xG for ourselves and our opponents we could probably figure that out on our own.

Anyhow, I'm glad to hear things are going well for you and excited for the future.

Thank you for all your hard work!

Congrats! I hope is goes smoothly

Bayern Munich wrote:

That is all great to read!

I'm sure it's been stressful investing so heavily into the game but it sounds like you've approached things very sensibly and it's wonderful to hear you're through the stabilization period.

I am sure there are at least several of us here that sympathize greatly with the ownership's unwillingness to prioritize maintenance.

I am also very glad to hear you'll be prioritizing the match engine again. The dot engine was what brought me here in the first place and though I've never been as thrilled with the newer engine it sounds like it has the potential to improve as well.

While you're thinking about these things, one thing that I've personally desired ever since the new engine came out was much, much more in depth player performance statistics. Goals, assists, and some nebulous rating system just doesn't do enough to let me know what is working and what isn't working when I set up tactics.

More flexibility in tactics sounds great, but without good ways to judge how those tactics are influencing matches other than eyeballing it, understanding how tactics impact games and interact with each other will still be far harder than it should be.

I don't really know what kind of more advanced statistics would be useful, but passes completed vs passes attempted, the same for interceptions and tackles, maybe some kind of xG stats would all be good starting places. Even more impressive would be stats that indicate how your tactics caused your team to overperform expectation or cause an opponent to underperform, but if we had open access to things like xG for ourselves and our opponents we could probably figure that out on our own.

Anyhow, I'm glad to hear things are going well for you and excited for the future.

Thank you for all your hard work!

That's very interesting suggestion, and it does address an issue with the current match viewer: it's just not good enough at providing a good insight into what actually happens during the simulation, including how your settings affect it.... and I'd like to come up with a way to improve that.

But, your suggestion to add more statistics does present us with a problem, since the match is only fully simulated during the highlights that you can see.

What happens is that we have a rough simulation that works out how much "pressure" each team is applying at any given moment, and this is directly shown by the ball that moves back and forth outside of highlights.

At certain intervals which can be both random and triggered by a team's pressure reaching a certain threshold, the simulation decides that it's time for a highlight. At this point, the ball and the players are arranged on the pitch according to the type of highlight and which team currently has the most pressure. The pieces are arranged on the board, so to speak. Then, the detailed simulation is started, in which every player acts as an independent, thinking agent who performs to the best of his abilities. This short and highly detailed simulation is what you can see in the match viewer during highlights.

So, we could easily log all of the different statistics that you mentioned, but only during the highlights, so the numbers would be far lower than you'd expect for a 90 minute match. I suppose we could "cheat" and multiply the actual numbers from the detailed simulation by some fixed factor to scale them up.

I've had some other ideas on how to make it more obvious what's going on. One idea was to add a commentary track to matches, that would hint at what the players were doing and thinking, like the commentator saying that "Player X looks for an opening to pass the ball to Player Y", or something like that.

Another idea would be log a lot more data about the decisions the players are contemplating, and somehow letting you open an overlay that shows you things like which opponents they're feeling threatened by, where they're aiming their pass or shot and a cone that shows you their accuracy. Lots of details like that could be shown more clearly.

Congrats again Dennis - glad to see the game is in safe hands and has a new lease of life. Really looking forward to seeing where you take it.

FC Sunnyvale wrote:

So, we could easily log all of the different statistics that you mentioned, but only during the highlights, so the numbers would be far lower than you'd expect for a 90 minute match. I suppose we could "cheat" and multiply the actual numbers from the detailed simulation by some fixed factor to scale them up.

How are shots/on target handled currently? I believe they "cheat" too, right? So that approach would be in line with current behavior. Honestly, though, even numbers lower than one would expect would be good if they're helping us understand the engine better.

FC Sunnyvale wrote:

Another idea would be log a lot more data about the decisions the players are contemplating, and somehow letting you open an overlay that shows you things like which opponents they're feeling threatened by, where they're aiming their pass or shot and a cone that shows you their accuracy. Lots of details like that could be shown more clearly.

This does sound like it would be brilliant in terms of getting a much better understanding of what is going on.

That said, one reason I suggested statistics is because of the sheer amount of games you have in a season against a variety of tactics- needing to watch matches through to understand what is happening could get out of hand quickly, whereas statistics are much easier to take a look at, crunch the numbers for, run spreadsheets on (you're probably tired of those, after all that accounting!), etc.

I can see that these things are complicated, but I am heartened that you are interested in ways of making the match engine provide better insight into what's happening, and would happy to bounce ideas back and forth if it would help you.

This is fantastic news, there was times in my mind that a childhood game that I’ve enjoyed for years was going to disappear thankfully there will be a person whose always been dedicated to the game.

Tell your friends and family about the game, spread it on social media. Would be great if there was official accounts on Twitter and Facebook I would happily promote these. As I followed it on Facebook once and I’ve just checked an it hasn’t updated since 2018. Feel that If you can get it out there on social media, there’ll be a massive rise hopefully in new managers. New decade, new freshness. Good luck.

FC Sunnyvale wrote:

So, as the blog post says, I blew all my savings and bought the company I've worked for the last 12 years.

So we no longer have 6 different owners and ever-changing CEOs - now it's just me :O

It's been a long and arduous journey, but now that I'm finally done with all the practicalities of buying a company, learning how to operate it and stopped the bleeding due to silly expenses, I can finally start to look ahead and plan what's to come in 2020.

So if you have any comments or questions, put 'em here.

HI Dennis, and congrats on the achieving this objective. Your blog post comes at a critical time and I feel it will make a lot of people very happy, me included, which will influence the retention of the existing/older users.

First i'd like to know when the beta sign-up system will be released and how can we register? Is it a setting in the account?

Also I'd like to point out the need for updated manual and better description of the match engine.

Also another suggestion is a tweaking the scouting [as with more scouting the reports are not more accurate, as described/advertised] and potentially the training [as the lower training facilities are virtually worthless].

Also you mentioned that the computing power is much more accessible so why not make a complete match simulation instead of only some specific actions. This way, if for example one player is way superior it will reflect more on the final result. Adding the option of playing with a target man could also be a good addition to the tactics. I'm looking forward for the changes to the me and the match simulator as I noticed a lot of problems between tactics set and the actual applied tactics, for example having my defender pass to opponents forward despite the fact that the tactic is to play long passes.
I couldn't find the details you mentioned about distances nowhere. Or other time when in a cup match the oponent player rated 30, with 10-15% energy played way better than my 58 rated forward with 40-50% energy resulting in loosing the match.

I have developed the backend for a match engine in Java and I've included match details, I'll take a look at my old project for some samples to send you. I'd also be interested in helping out with this if you are interested.

Thanks for what you are doing and best of luck!