Hi everyone!
The new update is here!!! We know it’s taken us a little longer than we hoped to get here, so thank you very much for your patience.
This post summarises the changes - and there are a lot, so have a cup of tea ready!
We have released a podcast to accompany this forum post. This update announcement summarises the changes. The podcast discusses many of the important points in more detail. It is recommended to familiarise yourself with this announcement before listening to the podcast so that it’s clear what we are discussing.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1035580/9636262
Overall Aims of the New Update
At a high level, the aims of this overhaul of the game are as follows:
Better fit with modern industry standards and new user expectationsThe upcoming changes are designed to better fit with modern industry standards. Many people ‘expect’ to be able to play online games, unrestricted and indefinitely, for free. Even if someone can try a game for free, the idea that they would have to pay something in the future to play that game long term, can be a big enough deterrent for many people, that it would prevent them from even trying the game to begin with. Providing the main features of the game for free is a key change in this direction. These changes also enable us to deliver a single consistent gameplay experience to everyone regardless of whether they are paying or not.
Providing more things to do in the game that matter outside of just playing matchesWe want to provide more interest in the day-to-day running of your club. A real influence over which players you bring in through your academies and how your players develop, allowing skill to come to the fore. The Academy Trials and new Training Systems are pretty much second to none in the online football management game genre and we want to make sure that they make a real difference to success and failure within the game. There are a variety of reasons why people play games of this genre - we want to cater to a wider audience.
Improving the Match Experience and Moving the game in more of a PvP directionTo enable the aesthetic-based approach to prove successful we need to ensure that player vs player matches are far more common than they are now. The change in the fixture scheduling system opens up the design space that allows the addition of PvP scheduled tournaments, which we want to be a key feature going forward. The match experience is a far more engaging experience than anything found elsewhere in the online football management genre, and we want to encourage users to play and enjoy the challenge of ‘live’ matches. There’s now a new retro visual representation of the match experience inspired by old school games such as Kick Off and Sensible Soccer. As well as a completely new match UI with a streamlined tactics interface, and lots and lots of core engine improvements and bug fixes.
Making the game more approachableThe game has had major approachability issues to date and has really struggled to attract new users. With many put off very quickly after first launching the game. Whether it was because of the poor and outdated UI. Bland and non-appealing visual aesthetic. Non-intuitive game mechanics. Poor game/client technical performance. We have added a lovely new modern UI design that is far more intuitive to use. A more engaging and less passive gameplay experience. We have been streamlining the gameplay mechanics whilst creating additional depth to the gameplay experience. Alongside this there has been a complete technical overhaul of the client design that now includes client side caching, resulting in dramatically improved performance, especially for those outside of Europe. The end of day processing has been shortened significantly, reducing the impact on gameplay for those that would ordinarily want to play around that time. We’ll continue to address the approachability issues of the game including the addition of a proper tutorial to the game in the near-term future.
Monetisation:
PhilosophyThe big change here is that we want more of the game to be available to everyone for free. Many of the features that were previously only available under Pro Memberships are now available to all. This includes the Youth Squad, Youth Academies, Manager Skills and the new Training feature.
The monetisation of the game is now primarily based around aesthetic features. This is one of the key reasons why the visualisation of the match engine is an important feature for the success of the game. As well as making it more accessible for a wider group of people, it also allows us to provide opportunities for people to enhance their playing experience in an aesthetic way, in turn, making it viable that far more of the core gameplay can be on offer to everyone for free.
Fever Tokens - There are now Fever Tokens in the game
- These new ‘Fever Tokens’ are separate to the previous (Legacy) tokens
- Fever Tokens can be used to purchase National Teams for the current season. In the near term future you will also be able to use them to customise the appearance of individual players in your squad
- Supporter Passes are now purchased directly with cash and CANNOT be purchased with ‘Fever Tokens’ (but they do include some Fever Tokens with them when they are purchased)
- The old Legacy Tokens can no longer be purchased. But anyone who had some will still have them
- Legacy Tokens can be used instead of cash to purchase Supporter Passes
- Legacy Tokens can be converted into Fever Tokens (Important Note:- it might be prudent to not convert all your Legacy Tokens to Fever Tokens if you think you’ll be interested in getting Supporter Passes in the future)
- Separating out the Fever Tokens from the Supporter Passes not only simplifies things and provides additional transparency about what costs what, but also allows us to do more flexible things going forwards (like offering Fever Tokens included as part of the Supporter Pass, or rewarding them to users for various other reasons)
Supporter PassesPro Memberships have been removed from the game. These have been replaced with Supporter Passes. Starting from January these will run for 3 months. For next month they will run for December only. Supporter Passes expire at the end of the Supporter Pass period irrespective of when they are purchased (i.e. to get the full duration of them they need to be purchased at the beginning of the Supporter Pass period). When a Supporter Pass expires you’ll no longer have access to the additional options it unlocks and any club customisations will revert back to how they were before the Supporter Pass was purchased. Any users who had an active Pro Membership that ran into December has received a Supporter Pass for December - and will also have their Supporter Pass extended until the end of December for free, even if it was due to expire earlier in the month! The data add-on will no longer be available. Those who had it have received 106 Fever Tokens instead of the 53 Fever Tokens.
Supporter Passes include:
- Include Fever Tokens (53 Fever Tokens for December)
- Ability to upload club logo
- Extra kit designs
- Enhanced colour palette for club colours
- Ability to reschedule home fixtures
- Ability to export various game data to .CSV
- Supporter rankings (compare your club’s performance against all other Supporters in your tier)
- Ability to assign specific squad numbers to specific players (due next month)
- Various seasonal reporting/statistical comparison/gameworld news immersion features will be progressively added starting next month and throughout Q1 next year
All Managers, including those without a supporter pass will have access to many features, including:
- Manager Skills
- Youth Squad and Youth Competitions
- Youth Academy Trials
- Contract Extensions
- The new Training Feature
- The new Medical Centre Feature
- The new Position Learning Feature
National Teams - National teams are now purchased for a fixed price (doesn’t change during the season)
- National teams are now immediately taken control of when they are purchased (i.e. you manage them for the current season, not the next season)
- You can no longer add/remove players from national teams. The pre-selected team is the team you have to work with for the season
- We plan to do a big overhaul of how the national teams work
Player Customization (During next month)We will be revealing details of this new feature soon.
Match Engine Changes
- New retro visual representation of the match experience
- Completely new match UI
- Streamlined tactics interface
- Lots of core engine improvements and bug fixes
- The Home Advantage has been heavily reduced. Now away team players’ attributes are reduced by -1 rather than by -3 (and Support Manager skill only applies when the home team is losing)
New Training Feature
We know that many of you love to nurture and develop players from a young age and get satisfaction from seeing some of them develop and progress into their senior squad. With this in mind, there has been a complete overhaul from the ground up of how players’ attributes change throughout their careers.
Players will no longer progress/regress passively. Progression will now be controlled by training decisions made by you as the player’s manager! The new Player Training feature will allow managers to have a gameplay-balanced but very direct choice on which attributes their players develop in.
- Players earn Development Points throughout the season by playing matches
- Each player has a points cap (Determination and Natural Fitness attributes dictate this cap, the older a player the more important the Natural Fitness attribute is in determining this, the younger a player is the more important the Determination attribute is in determining this)
- Youth players have separate youth and senior points totals
- Points are earned by playing matches. Youth matches count towards the youth points total and senior matches count towards the senior points total
- Points are earned on a match by match basis for each player that plays in the match. The formula is player match rating out of 10 (doubled if the match result is a draw or tripled if the match result is a win)
- Players earn points based on their ratings if they play in a match (whether they play 1 minute or 90 minutes). Therefore skillful use of substitutes can make a real difference to player points
- Players are ranked against other players the same age as them at the end of the season. Higher ranked players have a higher chance of getting better training options the following season. Players have an indiactor on their profile that lets you know how their ranking is looking during the season compared to other players the same age in your division
- Each season each individual player will have three training periods. For each of these training periods a third of their attributes will be highlighted (i.e. 7 at a time for outfield players, 6 at a time for goalkeepers)
- You’ll receive two options for how that player can train for each training period, and you’ll be able to see how each of the attributes will be impacted as a result of choosing each training option before you have to finalise it
- Training options can also include a bonus. At the moment this can either be a free contract extension for that player, or a free extra position for that player (the position is indicated)
The new training system means that every match (Senior and Youth) matters for player progression even if the match in question doesn’t have that much on the line. It will be a real challenge to try and get game time to players without adversely affecting results!
New Academy Trials System
- Academies are no longer a Pro Membership feature. Every club in the game now has one each season
- Academy Trialists are no longer be tied to a single club throughout the season. Instead, you will be competing directly against other managers to identify and sign up the best prospects
- Every club now starts the season with a number of Academy Trialists at their club. As with the previous system, these trialists will start with very few attributes revealed
- Each club has 6 “Hold” slots, which they can assign to the trialists that they want to keep hold of based on the attributes that they can (and can not) see at the moment
- Between 3 and 6 of the players will graduate at the end of the season (depending on manager skills). Some of the “Hold” slots are marked as “Graduation” slots to indicate the players that will graduate if they are assigned to these slots
- Note: a “Graduation” slot is functionally the same as a regular “Hold” slot right up until the last day of the season when at the end of that day during end of season processing those assigned to Graduate will end up in your squad but those with the regular “Hold” slots will not
- Each trialist that you have assigned a “Hold” slot will be kept at your club from one day to the next throughout the season until you decide to remove the "Hold" slot from him (or when the season ends)
- You no longer release trialists. Instead, any players that are not assigned to a “Hold” slot are discarded and do not stay at your club
- The trialists that you don’t hold on to will pop up in someone else’s academy the next day. And some of the trialists that other users have discarded will end up in your academy! This means that over a season you have access to a huge amount of different trialists
Changes to Players
- Players now have lower attribute values across the board
- Starting attribute values of players are now between 1 and 60 out of 99 (so in Youth Academies all attributes start between 1 and 60)
- Positions are now more scarce. Players only ever start with 1 position (however players can learn up to 2 additional positions and have 3 positions in total)
- Extremely high attribute values are now exceptionally rare
- Changes to wages, now directly tied to Overall Rating (the Overall Rating as it was at the start of the season, so current season wage demans of players do not change during the season)
- The average of a player’s attributes is now shown in the coloured hexagon on the player profile. Also shown next to that is a transparent hexagon containing an average of the ‘ceilings’ of each of a player’s attributes (i.e. the coloured hexagon contains an average of the player’s current attribute scores, the transparent hexagon contains the average of the player’s current possible attribute scores)
- The “Quality” stars (shown on a player profile and in the squad list screen) shows how good a player is compared to other players that play in the same Division as that player. For example, a player shown as having ‘4.5 stars’ in Division 2, might have ‘3 stars’ if he was instead playing in Division 1
Transition
With the huge amount of changes involved in the latest update, transition between the old version of the game and the new is significant. This is discussed in depth in the podcast.
Player Transition - Each player currently in the game has been ranked against all other players the same age as them. Their main position is then determined, which is the position they played in the most during the previous season in official club matches (including youth matches). If they didn’t play at all, then a random position will be chosen from the positions they are proficient in
- For each player of each age currently in the game, a new player has been created and their career ‘simulated’ up to their current age
- Then, for each age grouping, we will find the best player currently in the game, then find the best ‘new player’ of that age for their main position, and then ‘link’ these players
- The linked players will then have their attributes mapped across from the new player to the existing player
- Each player starts with a single position which is their ‘main position’ as noted above
Manager Skill Points and Stadium Income - For the time being, Manager Skill points will be assigned as normal based on previous season performance. However, we intend to change the system in the future so that the Manager Skill Points will be earned and spent during each season. More details on this will be announced closer to the time
- Stadium Income is now determined by what Division your club is in (rather than by your club reputation)
Temporary Player Sales TransitionTo enable users to react to the changes in their players, users will be able to sell players for their previous value (i.e. their value at the end of November will reflect their old attributes) for the first 7 days of December to ensure that they are able to recoup the value of the player if they no longer wish to keep them.
Transfer System Changes
The upcoming changes to the transfer system are designed to provide more exciting moments. It combines the competitive feel of going up against other managers while also making it a much more hands-on and challenging process to work to build a squad. Whilst adhering to our commitment to keeping 90MF a competitive and fair gameplay experience that isn’t compromised by cheating.
Players can now be acquired in 2 different ways:
Buying Marquee Players - Each division has its own Marquee Players list each day. This limited list of players is available to clubs via an auction process
- The manager who bids the most for a Marquee Player, gets that Marquee Player, for an amount equal to the 2nd highest bid. If there is a tie for highest bids then a winner is selected at random (to ensure time of login is not advantageous), and pays an amount equal to the tied highest bid value
- Marquee Players are players of special status. They are the very best players in each tier that are currently available and are therefore likely to be in high demand with a lot of managers vying for their signatures
- A manager can bid any amount they can afford up to the maximum bid for the player (but those monies will be ‘tied up’ and unavailable for spending on other players, including other Marquee Player bids)
- A manager can bid for 1 Marquee Player per day (manager skill increases this), so how much and who you bid for will be of critical importance
- There is a maximum and minimum bid amount that can be made for each Marquee Player. In the case of the minimum bid amount, it is there to ensure that the system cannot be exploited, especially in the case of lower tiers that have very few active users at present. In the case of the maximum bid amount, it is there to prevent users from ‘shooting themselves in the foot’. If multiple users bid the maximum bid amount for a Marquee Player, the player will go to one of them at random and they will pay an amount equal to the maximum bid amount. If only 1 user bids for a player, they will win the player for the minimum bid amount. The existence of, and values of these min/max bid amounts will be kept under review and possibly changed or entirely removed in the future
- Note:- The ability to see the results of the previous days' Marquee Players auctions is coming soon
Buying Scouted Players - All other players are split up into different Scouting Pools
- A Scouting Pool is a ‘per manager’ pool that is between 20 and 50 players (depending on manager skills) with a reasonable spread over different positions and ages
- You can only buy players who are in your Scouting Pool or who are Marquee Players.
- Every night the players in everyone's Scouting Pool will change and can move to other users scouting pools within the same Division
- If a manager buys a player from their Scouting Pool they get the player instantly
- Putting the effort in to look at the players in your Scouting Pool to find those that improve your squad will be really important
Selling Players - You can now receive transfer bids for your players from the AI (there is a new manager skill that increases the frequency of these received bids)
- A player whom you have received a transfer bid for today, can be instantly sold to the pool for the amount of the transfer bid
- A player whom you have not received a transfer bid for today, can be instantly sold to the pool for the amount equal of 50% of their transfer value (the transfer value being equal to the most recent bid amount received for the player, or if you’ve never received a transfer bid for the player (and the player was purchased from December onwards), 50% of the amount you paid for them)
- Ensuring that you keep an eye on the transfer bids you have received to find opportunities to get a good price for players you may want to offload can make a big difference
- Players aged 18 and younger do not receive transfer bids
- There has been significant improvement to the player valuation system logic
Youth Competition Changes
- The Under 18 and Under 21 Squads have been combined into a single “Youth Squad”.
- Every club in the game now has a Youth Squad, which participates in a Youth League every season
- Youth Squad division mirrors the Senior Squad division. I.e. If your Senior Squad is in Division 2, then your Youth Squad will be in Youth Division 2
- Results in youth games carry significantly more importance/significance if you want to optimise the development of your players
Squad Management Changes
- The squad limit has changed. There is now a 22 outfielder + 3 goalkeeper limit for Youth (=22 years old)
- Minimum squad size for Youth is 16+2 and minimum squad size for Senior is 16+2. You cannot sell a player if it would take you under these limits
- Youth players can be (visibly) added to the senior squad via right-mouse-click (they will also remain in the youth squad). They can later be removed from the senior squad (again via right-mouse-click). When added to the senior squad they do NOT take up a senior squad spot (i.e. they do not “count” as a senior player for squad limits)
- You can still sign players when you have reached the squad limit. They will go into your ‘Unregistered Players’ list. This allows you to sign players without having to sell players before you know you have signed them (i.e. you can sell other squad players after you know you have secured the new player you want!). You pay their wages but they aren’t in your squad. When there is space in your squad, you can add players from your ‘Unregistered Players’ list to the relevant squad. If a player is on the ‘Unregistered Players’ list for 7 consecutive days they are released on a free transfer
- Players can be released from the ‘Unregistered Players’ list at any time (as free transfers)
- During season finishing when players are added/moved to squads (i.e. players turning 22 or academy trial graduates), places in squads will be given priority to the players with the highest overall ratings (ties decided randomly). The other players who don’t have space for them will be placed on the ‘Unregistered Players’ list
- Note: 15 year old players cannot be purchased from the pool so there are no ‘pending transfers’ anymore (except for the academy trial graduates)
- If during season finishing, after all various transfer activity (contract renewals, retirements, academy trial graduates, aging players, etc), a team is below the minimum threshold for a squad, then players are automatically signed to bring them up to the minimum squad size
- As part of the transition, players who start as ‘Unregistered Players’ after the transition, if released as ‘Unregistered Players’ after 7 days, the owners of these players will receive compensation of an amount equal to the player's Sell Price at the end of November before the transition. This ONLY applies in this specific scenario (which is to ensure people can transition without losing the value of their players). In the future they will be treated as normal unregistered players and will be released for free
Physio/Injury System Changes
- There is now a Medical Centre where you can get an overview of all the players currently injured in your squad
- If you have the “Treatment” Manager skill, it will enable an option to be able to use a “Squad Treatment”. Using a Squad Treatment will fully recover from injury all of the players that are currently injured in your squad
- Be wise in using these, they are a (very) limited resource!
Notes on Some Specific Manager Skills Changes
- Graduation: this skill converts base ‘Hold’ slots into ‘Graduation’ slots. So you always have 6 total ‘Hold’ slots. It’s just that between 3 and 6 of these will be converted into ‘Graduation’ slots depending on what level you have in the manager skill.
- Quality: this (slightly) increases the overall quality of trialist players that are rotated into your trialist pool each day. It starts working at the end of the day after the skill is confirmed.
- Training: these skills give senior training points to all players who are in your squad of the set age at the time the skill is confirmed. Players signed after the skill is confirmed do not get the points.
- Conditioning: this skill has been nerfed and now recovers ‘Up to’ an extra X% condition for each player at half time rather than exactly an extra X% condition at half time.
- Discipline: this skill has been buffed and now prevents your players from getting yellow or red cards rather than just straight red cards
- Investment: this is now a multiplier of your base dividend threshold (which is determined by the tier you are in)
- Revenue: this now increases your daily stadium income by a %
- Scouting: these skills increase the amount of players available in your scouting pool. They immediately apply and more players will appear in your scouting pool when the manager skill is confirmed
- Loyalty: now reduces wages for players at your club who were Academy Trial graduates (rather than players who had been at your club over a set amount of time). Players who are Academy Trial graduates that were sold then later repurchased do not have their wages reduced by this manager skill
- Extension: you must get at least level 1 in this skill in order to get any contract extensions for the season
- Learning: this skill now provides an amount of position Learning instances that you can use on players in order to assign an extra position to them (one position to a player per Learning instance)
- Support: this skill has been heavily nerfed and now only provides the advantage when your team is playing at home AND LOSING
Benefits for Having a Club in a Higher Division
To ensure that users are properly rewarded for getting their team into as high a division as possible in every possible season, there are a number of changes. These are outlined in the table below:
Benefits / Differences
Masters
Div 1
Div 2
Div 3
Div 4
Div 5
Base Manager Skill Points
150k
125k
100k
75k
50k
25k
Base Dividend Threshold
£60M
£50M
£40M
£30M
£20M
£10M
Monthly Stadium Income
£30M
£25M
£20M
£15M
£10M
£5M
Trialist Pool Quality
Superb
Excellent
Very Good
Good
Average
Mediocre
Challenge Cup Entry
Stage 4
Stage 3
Stage 2
Stage 1
NA
NA
Minimum Player Purchase Cost*
£320k
£160k
£80k
£40k
£20k
£10k
* But generally speaking much better players in scouting pools and marquee player list
Fixture Scheduling System Changes
- Fixtures are now displayed in your local time
- Matches now start at their scheduled fixture time
- Five minutes before a match starts, a countdown will begin. Once the countdown hits zero the match will begin (there is no ‘pre-match’ time) so make sure you have your team picked and your tactics submitted before the countdown gets to zero!
- Friendly matches have a 1 minute countdown (to avoid unnecessary wait times but still ensure there is time to check your line-up!)
- If you have a Supporter Pass, then Home matches (both Senior and Youth) can be rescheduled by up to 48 hours earlier than their original scheduled fixture time (but can not be moved to within the next 48 hours from the current time)
- You can not move a match to within the next 48 hours so that you (and your opponent) will know that any matches you (and your opponent) have scheduled in the next 48 hours will not have their times change, whether they are home or away matches
- We believe this system will result in more Player vs Player matches
- We will use the design space this system affords to add a new ‘Scheduled Tournaments’ feature during Q1 next year
Feedback
As you can probably tell if you have managed to read this far, this update touches every part of the game, so we fully expect that there will be some issues that we have missed in testing. Please report any bugs/issues you find using the “Provide Feedback” tool (now located in the “...” menu in the bottom left of the client). Bug reports in particular are very helpful and much appreciated if they are submitted through the client rather than on the forum because of the technical information/error log that is sent to us along with the feedback text you write.
Thank you very much for reading this extensive announcement. Please do listen to the podcast if you’re interested in knowing more about the update. Good luck for the new season!
