Virtual Manager acquired! :O

FC Clock Face wrote:

Congratulations, the hard work really begins now.

Suggestions. Take a long hard look at the youth teams. When it was announced it made me wince because it was basically a great opportunity that was not being taken. It felt like you where splitting the number of players we can have and just making it a chore to keep them all happy. It needs to bring new elements that are interesting, fun, and give an advantage in some way if employed correctly.
I didn't see any of that in the early suggestions. My honest first thought was 'i hope you get the option to opt out and stay as you are as that is not for me'. To many 'updates' to this game have basically taken away functionally and given us a tedious way to get back to where we where before the 'update'. Taking things out and dumbing the game down instead of adding to it.
Don't make the youth system another in a long line of disappointments.

Well, I'll certainly try not to. But, I think you'll find that with the current iteration of the new mood system, keeping your players in good spirits won't be a huge chore. It is currently based on the level of modd loss that you have currently, only with the "1 minute of play time" trick removed.

When the beta starts, I'll create a dedicated forum for it, to hash out things like this and ensure that it adds something fun.

FC Clock Face wrote:

Staff. The system is an absolute farce. It is tedious, boring, unrewarding to sift through staff to find a decent one. It's so bad that I haven't even trained my players in anything but training match for probably a couple of years now. I just have a goalkeeping coach and one outfield coach and I don't even thing they are top notch coaches.

Absolutely agree, and I think everyone else does as well. The staff system is ancient, pre-dating even me, and has never had any sort of overhaul. It's definitely an area that I want to improve.

FC Clock Face wrote:

Prize money. Absolutely broken. No reward at all for getting better. Again I've sat in division 3 for years and there is no point getting better. I've got over 400 mil in the bank but it's pointless spending it on players as there is no reward and unless I flip players all day I won't get my money back.

Rebalancing prize money is much easier said than done... it's an absolute minefield and takes a ton of work, and still then, it's impossible to arrive at a solution that everyone agrees on. The last attempt to balance the prizes was in 2017. The solution in the blog bost I linked was the closest we could get to something resembling a consensus.

FC Clock Face wrote:

Stadium. Haven't repaired it in years. No point as it's just to expensive. Needs looking at.

Oh jesus, just looked at your stadium... maybe I need to implement punters suing you for wrongful death due to collapsing stadium stands

I'll make a note of it.

Tremendous news and congratulations.
The issues I have have been repeated many times before, but as you are listening, I will summarise them here together:
1. Stop players swapping with each other to retain top league status. If they want to swap country leagues, fine, let them do as most 'honest' players do and take a gamble on which division of the new country they end up
2. Ban Danish-language-only player aids that are "officially tolerated/encouraged". If players are producing such mono-language apps to aid only a subset of players, they should be kicked out of the game as its cheating other players who cant use these aids
3. On the match engine / simulations try to fix corners, players clean through on goal when the attack just stops and introduce headers.
4. Allow midfielders to get further down the pitch without a penalty (tactic squares turning yellow).
5. On auctions allow players to cancel a bid within 30 or 60 seconds in case they made an error
6. Stop the premature ageing! Players should be safe at 29 before their performance starts to wain and their abilities decrease.
7. Change or cancel the end of year prize-giving love-in where a handful of players have the knowledge to be able to vote for teams in the different categories. Its ridiculous. Make it a random draw, less categories, or abandon. Currently it just looks (to most players) like mates awarding each other prizes.
8. Provide clearer explanations to players about how games are decided and the inter-relationship with the simulation you actually see. Your explanation (above in this thread) was tremendous! Thank you.
9. Make VM far more engaging for its customers. Regular polls on what players think, what they like/dislike and what their development priorities are. Make us feel respected and we will return that respect.

Thank you and very best wishes, Rolf

I think the way you’ve gone about announcing this has been good, and I’m sure it will put a lot of managers minds at rest.

I don’t think it’s been any secret that something about the development of this game over the past few years hasn’t been quite right.

One suggestion, I think being realistic with feature releases, timescales etc are vital. Being on the game for this long, I’ve seen (as many others have), so many blogs about features that either never go ahead or take far too long that managers just lose enthusiasm for it.

Quick deployments (even small changes as you referred to in your blog release), are a win in my eyes. Constant progress.

Congratulations on your new business. I think this has all happened just at the right time to be honest to save the game. Good luck with this.

a good start would be make the game more even to people that's not Danish or a mod that buy vm

Blog was an interesting read.

Good luck

I do wonder if this game can appeal to today's culture which is app hungry and looking for instant gratification. It feels like this game appeals more to geeks than the masses. You can't progress quickly on here unless your unemployed and have alot of time on hands

I wonder if you have heard of saying 'under promise and over deliver'. I wonder if there would be less frustration in failure to deliver projects, such as youth squads promptly, if you didn't mention them until they were nearing implementation.

Having said that, we do ask for regular updates and like the fact you engage.

In terms of user retention. I think the graphics aren't quite there for alot of folk.

I also think any negativity on forums doesn't help. Perhaps us users who like the game need to bear in mind that we may be putting of new users with our comments and in doing so negatively impacting our chance of game improving (more uses equals more cash equals more investment in development). I for one will try to remember that going forward

Summy rangers FC wrote:

a good start would be make the game more even to people that's not Danish or a mod that buy vm

What do you mean make it more even mate, im a mod and get no advantage, so not sure what you mean here?

Congrats and explains a lot, sending nothing but Love Respect and Light to You Bro.

Big congratulations, good luck with you plans, looking forward to it

I agree with some of your suggestions, but there are also some that I'm opposed to.

Newcastle U FC wrote:

1. Stop players swapping with each other to retain top league status. If they want to swap country leagues, fine, let them do as most 'honest' players do and take a gamble on which division of the new country they end up

No. Even if I agreed that this was a problem, how would we enforce it, if people just arrange it face-to-face or through other means of communication? And it still is a gamble to move, even if you've arranged a swap with someone, because there's no telling if a stronger clubs also decides to move.

There's a reason that the vacant league spots that arise when a club switches to another country are filled up according to VIFA rank. It is to try to make sure that clubs moving in end up in league that is appropriate for their level.

If top clubs were to be forced into lower leagues when they switch, they'd just steamroller over the lower league clubs, which would suck for everyone involved. The stronger clubs would waste their time, and the weaker clubs would be "cheated" out of their winnings, because they keep getting pushed aside by top-tier clubs on their way up.

Newcastle U FC wrote:

2. Ban Danish-language-only player aids that are "officially tolerated/encouraged". If players are producing such mono-language apps to aid only a subset of players, they should be kicked out of the game as its cheating other players who cant use these aids

If third-party apps/tools are exploitative or put undue stress on our servers, then we ban the users when we come across them.

But, if a tool is perfectly acceptable, then I'm not going to start banning people who make them, for the sole reason that they're only available in Danish, Turkish, Korean or whichever language.

When has any game dev ever been successful when they start banning and making legal threats at their most dedicated fans for petty reasons? It always ends up in total disaster.

The solution is not to demand banning other VM users left and right, but perhaps to engage with the people who make the tools and suggest an English translation, or working with helpful Danes on the forums to produce a translation sheet or something like that.

Newcastle U FC wrote:

3. On the match engine / simulations try to fix corners, players clean through on goal when the attack just stops and introduce headers.

Positioning for corner kicks and throw-ins are in fact some of the things on my very old TODO list of things that were supposed to be improved after the 2013 release - but I've never forgotten them.

Headers would be cool, but we don't have any animations for them. It might be possible to get some produced if I can get a hold of the 3D artist who made all the other animations. They'd obviously need to closely match the style and look of the current animations.

Newcastle U FC wrote:

4. Allow midfielders to get further down the pitch without a penalty (tactic squares turning yellow).

If there was a strong consensus in the community that this would be a good change, then there wouldn't be any problem implementing it.

Once I start mucking about with the match simulator, that's something that could be discussed.

Newcastle U FC wrote:

5. On auctions allow players to cancel a bid within 30 or 60 seconds in case they made an error

That sort of thing could easily be exploited to reveal other people's bids. You could just bid a trillion on every player to find out the max bid, and then cancel it again.

And, it would be a nightmare to implement a procedure to then roll back all the auto bids afterwards.

But, one thing that other have suggested is to allow you to decrease your auto bid, if you're currently ahead... but not below what the current bid is. That will solve the problem if you accidentally add an extra 0 to your auto bid. This feature is already on my TODO list.

Newcastle U FC wrote:

6. Stop the premature ageing! Players should be safe at 29 before their performance starts to wain and their abilities decrease.

I'm not completely opposed to this, but again, it would have to be something that the majority of users agree on.

Newcastle U FC wrote:

7. Change or cancel the end of year prize-giving love-in where a handful of players have the knowledge to be able to vote for teams in the different categories. Its ridiculous. Make it a random draw, less categories, or abandon. Currently it just looks (to most players) like mates awarding each other prizes.

I've sometimes thought about changing the VM Awards or replacing with something different, mostly because it seems to be the same people who win every year. That's why a couple of years I reduced the number of categories and instead added a lot more prizes for the people who vote.

VM Awards really came about because we didn't really have the resources anymore to keep producing a new "Christmas mini game" every year like we used to. I loved the Christmas mini games we used to do, and I'd love to see them return.

Newcastle U FC wrote:

8. Provide clearer explanations to players about how games are decided and the inter-relationship with the simulation you actually see. Your explanation (above in this thread) was tremendous! Thank you.

Agreed. I'm going to set aside some time to update the manual, first of all, with detailed explanations about many of the aspects of the simulation, player stats, etc. Of course, the deluxe version of that, would be to improve the match viewer's ability to make these sorts of things clearer.

Newcastle U FC wrote:

9. Make VM far more engaging for its customers. Regular polls on what players think, what they like/dislike and what their development priorities are. Make us feel respected and we will return that respect.

My plan is to make more use of beta-testing and create dedicated forums when we develop the larger features. We did actually have a polling system several years ago, and by far the most voted new feature was youth squads... better late than never, I guess

But I also have to temper your expectations, because even though I've made a lot of changes that will benefit the development of the game going forward, it is still just myself and "Rasmus 2" here, so we can't just implement a million different new features in no time at all. The reason we removed the polling system in the past, was that we didn't have the resources to implement all of the things that people wanted as quickly as they wanted them after they'd voted for them, so it just lead to disappointment.

FC Sunnyvale wrote:

Newcastle U FC wrote:

9. Make VM far more engaging for its customers. Regular polls on what players think, what they like/dislike and what their development priorities are. Make us feel respected and we will return that respect.

My plan is to make more use of beta-testing and create dedicated forums when we develop the larger features. We did actually have a polling system several years ago, and by far the most voted new feature was youth squads... better late than never, I guess

But I also have to temper your expectations, because even though I've made a lot of changes that will benefit the development of the game going forward, it is still just myself and "Rasmus 2" here, so we can't just implement a million different new features in no time at all. The reason we removed the polling system in the past, was that we didn't have the resources to implement all of the things that people wanted as quickly as they wanted them after they'd voted for them, so it just lead to disappointment.

Would you be opened to some form of "socios" or selling of private shares where you could afford to hire a new developer or contract someone for the match visualiser and other 'voted' features?