News

When is the new staff system due?

The new staff system is already visible on your Club pages, but it will not be live until the start of next season, on April 14th. Until then, you can do whatever you want with the new system - it will have no consequences for your team. Try it out, think about what configuration will work best for your team. The settings you have when the system goes live is what will count for your team for the first week.

How does it all work?

In the Manual and on the Staff pages on the site you will find the new system described in detail. However we also wanted to provide a guide to how the new system compares with the old one.

First of all, why are we making this change?

We want the decisions available in the game to be meaningful and interesting. We also have an ambition to make it clearer to users what kind of impact their decisions will have on their teams.

The old staff system affected similar areas of the game as this new system does, but it was designed in such a way that there was rarely any incentive for users to change the composition of their staff or for different clubs to choose different strategies. Most users would choose one optimal configuration for their backroom staff and leave it unchanged for years.

In the new system we wanted to introduce meaningful choices. You need to decide on a focus for your backroom staff, since it is no longer possible to hire every category of staff. Cost has also become a more important factor since picking the highest skilled staff member every time will become very expensive indeed - it is more likely that the best choice for your team will be a combination of higher and lower skilled staff members.

Find your focus - you can't choose everything any longer

The old system was easy to optimize, and most users that had any knowledge about the game would choose a similar setup and then practically never change it. The new system should reward more active choices by making the optimal choice differ more between clubs.

There is now a total limit of 5 staff members that can be employed at any given time. This means you can't hire staff from every available category, but will need to choose a focus for your team. The advantage of the new staff system is that more powerful combinations are now possible.

How to think about staff levels and salaries

Staff members are no longer anonymous units to add or dispose of at will. They have names, they have individual skill levels (between 1 and 5), and they have at least a semblance of labor rights. They are also able to do more for your team than ever before.

In the old system, each extra staff member was paid the same as the one before, but the more you hired in a certain category the less each additional one would contribute. Many times, the first staff member hired would alone contribute as much as the next 7 or 8 combined.

In the new system, the effects of a new staff member are clearly described and each additional skill level will contribute as much as the one before. The twist is that instead the salary rises, so this now becomes the factor to watch out for. You can progress faster - but will it be worth it?

A level 5 staff member will have 5 times the effect of a level 1 staff member, which is great, but he will at the same time be 16 times as expensive. Lower skilled staff are definitely more cost-effective, but hiring the best can still pay off. Finding a balance for your team becomes an important consideration.

How the new staff system will impact your team compared to the old system

The new staff system does not replace the old one from the same starting point. Even with no staff in a certain category, your team will do better now than it did in the old system when no staff were hired in that same category. For example, your injury risk will be lower today with no Medic than it was without any Physios in the old system. This "free" effect varies a little between categories, but is typically just short of the effect you would get from the first staff member in any category. Another way to approach this change is to say that it is now more about choosing an edge for your team and less about covering the necessary bases. The floor has been raised, and so has the ceiling - for those areas that you do choose to focus on, higher overall modifiers are possible in the new system than in the old. A consequence of this is also that the bonuses achieved by teams may differ more as well.

We hope you will enjoy the new staff system and we look forward to your feedback on the forums!