News

Last year, we made big changes to player contributions and to the staff system, tweaking existing mechanics in order to make the game more balanced and the in-game economy more stable. Since then we have done a lot of work on the Hattrick back end, rewriting the software that handles the Hattrick game simulation and moving it to a modern development environment. For users, this change should not be noticeable at all in the short term, but it makes a big difference for our dev team since it becomes a lot easier to work with the heart of the Hattrick code - easier to build new features, easier to chase and find bugs, easier to train new developers and less frustration for everyone that works near the Hattrick match engine.

As always when we have been “stuck” in the back end for long, we are eager to start working on something that will make a difference to users. And the big project we have for Hattrick this spring is something that we have been eager to do for a long time, and which has now become a lot more workable to dig into. We are working on a big re-imagination of the live match experience in Hattrick, finding ways to make it more action-filled, suspenseful, informative and interactive. In other words, more fun and more worthy of spending an hour or two following your matches and others. (And no, we are not building a 3D viewer - we prefer to think of this as “Hattrick as it should have been done from the start!")

The new match viewer will be more visual and have a “real time” feel to a much higher degree than the current viewer. Our guiding principle is to make the most out of the relevant information in the game, finding new ways to present stuff that happens in the game that haven’t been reported before. We also want to create a stronger sense of context between your game and what goes on around it - in your league, in the Cup, in the stats tables. We have a vision for this that we won’t complete with the first version of this new viewer, but we think that what we will manage to release in early summer will be really cool and a big improvement on what we have today.

We have a few smaller projects to complete as well.

Starting next season we are also removing the last effects of the “old” pullback system, and these effects will now be completely covered by the new and more predictable match dynamics system. Please refer to the manual for more details on how teams will now adapt their offensive play if they grab or extend a decisive lead.

A tiny change to be implemented some weeks into the season is that we will again show skill and rating levels above Divine. One level above Divine will be spelled out Divine (+), two levels Divine (++), and three or more levels will be written Divine (+3), (Divine+4) et cetera.

The mentorship system has shown tremendous efficiency in keeping new users engaged in Hattrick, so we are planning a new update to the mentor system to keep both mentors and mentees more motivated to be involved.

We will also make a few improvements in the National Team systems, working from a wish list that we asked the National Team managers to vote on. The key changes here will be that NT coaches will no longer be old players - instead, all NTs will have access to the same coach values and to the new Tactical Assistant features that launched last summer. This will be more fair for everyone. We are also creating a match order window (four hours before kickoff) in which any changes to the squad will be invisible to anyone beside the NT manager. This will be a big relief especially for NT managers in time zones where it is often night when NT matches are played. We are also adding live ratings to NT games and will add an automatic live link for all users to promote their NT when they are playing a game.

Finally, an update on the changes we made last year and the economy. The balance between team incomes and team expenses have now stabilized, which is very much an effect of the new Staff system. We believe that this, together with the change in training speeds from the Staff reform, will have a positive impact on the transfer market over time. So, for now, we are content with what we are seeing. No new changes are planned for the economy, but as always we continue to monitor to what is going on with it.