Coming changes and additions (03/02/2010 11:33) |
As of next season, there are some important changes coming into the game, along with some very nice new features. The time has come to take the lid off, so you can be prepared for the coming changes. 1: New Player-search systemAs it is today, the search for player causes a dramatic load on the system. Some times, it is so bad, that the entire game grinds to a halt, and this prevents everyone from doing anything while this goes on. This is why player-searching is turned off during simulations, as well as during the first day after the season-change. This is only getting worse as we get bigger and bigger, and we can't live with that. If it gets any worse, nor can you. After some careful consideration, some trial-and-error, and a few good ideas, a new system has been created to handle this better. The short version is: If you want the long version (recommended), then just keep reading, and you will find a lengthy detailed explanation further down. There you can read why this is a huge improvement, not just something that saves server-capacity. 2: Change in how unsigned players (those without teams) are createdToday, there is no real limit to how good unsigned players can be. This has been discussed, and found to be unfortunate. As of next season, unsigned (teamless) players will never be created with a Quality above 74. 3: Change involving buying and selling playersUnfortunately, we see a lot of cases where users try to avoid the rule about "the highest bid must win" when it comes to transfers. We also still see some users abusing transfers and multiple teams to sell good players cheap to their primary team. The following change will make this somewhat more difficult: I guess that means you should consider rejecting bids carefully! B) Another small improvement is that a message is now going out to all bidders (who have not withdrawn their bid) when a player is sold, to show you who bought it and for how much. It makes it a bit easier to track players you have shown interest in. 4: A "fix" regarding player-cupsWinners of player-cups now get a minimum of 1 credit as part of their prize. There was no minimum before, which could lead to a prize of 0 credits, which is just boring! 5: Information about Training-campsExplaining tooltips have been added to the headers in the CAMP-section of the training-page, to explain Location, Accommodation and Intensity. The credit-cost for camps is now easier to see, as it is not just a tooltip, but written under the cashcost. 6: Better performance for you, thanks to jQuery 1.4We have upgraded our jQuery library to the new 1.4 version. This means that almost every single client-action is a bit faster, like drag'n drop, showing feedback, fading up and down etc etc etc. Measures indicate a speedup of about 30% in such cases. 7: Better performance for us, thanks to me!Some serious optimisations have gone into the league-round ticker. Hopefully this should shave off another 3-5 minutes off the league-rounds. Some serious optimisations have gone into the season-change logic. Hopefully this shold shave off an hour or so on the downtime between seasons. Also, the new player-search will give us a much better performance overall, all through the day! 8: Improved back-end and server-monitoringWe now have a more intelligent system for watching over our servers. If the simulator should ever hang again, the system will do a fair job trying to repair itself and get back into action as quick as it can. This should eliminate most of our operational issues, as it can fix every known problem we have had so far. Very exciting and potentially very timesaving for us here at HQ! If the simulators should hang now, it should take no more than 5 minutes before the system is repaired. In our 4 year history, we have had 3 occurences of severe simulator-hangs that have caused problems for teams who had accepted or issued a lot of friendlies. We are now protected from such unfortunate incidents. 9: A smashingly cool achievement-system has now been created! (And it will help new players get into the game as well!)It is all well and good to fight for promotion, or to proceed to the next round of the league-cup, but at times, one can be stuck for quite a number of seasons in "no-mans-land". Also, we have been lacking an ingame "tutorial" for new players. Sometimes, all it takes is a little list and some rewards, and even new players can find out how to do things! So, we came up with Achievements. Achievements is not a new concept, and you can find it in many other games. For instance if you play Fifa 2010 on your console, you probably know you get an achievement after scoring X goals in practice-mode, or after spending 4 hours in real match-time. To my knowledge, Fifa 2010 has 44 achievements. Bah, we say, we can beat that! So we have made a whooping 78 achievements! And we have left room to add lots more over time! These achievements are divided into 5 categories: Basic, Advanced, Superior, Impossible and Special. The basic achivements, and to a certain degree, the Advanced ones, are meant as a helping hand for new users.They involve achievements like "Upgrade your stadium capacity", "Place a player on the transfer-list", "Introduce yourself in your department-forum" and pretty basic stuff. Unfinished achievements in the Basic-category are also listed at "objectives" on your General-page, and a new player should be able to complete all of those very quickly. Achievements are displayed in your team-details popup, in a new "section", just like your Trophies. There you will see which ones you have achieved, and which ones you have not achieved in the first 2 categories. The last 3 categories (Superior, Impossible and Special) are not immediately visible until you actually achieve one. So, everyone will know exactly what to do to complete the first two categories, but the last 3 must be discovered over time. Of course, as soon as someone manages to complete one of these "secret" achievements, the word will spread and you will learn what you have to do to get it. We are pretty sure it will take many seasons before anyone gets them all. It is fair to say that some of the harder ones will be out of reach for most players, as some have different requirements and goals. In a few rare cases, we have decided to make some achievements retro-active. I can reveal right now, there is an achievement for upgrading your stadium-capacity. This would be a bit unfair for teams with completed stadiums and max capacity, so this is one that will be given autoamtically to all teams who have upgraded heir stadium-capacity. There are a couple more, which are much harder to get, that a few teams have managed in the past which we have decided to make retro-active. To name an example, we have one called "The Double", and I have a feeling you can understand what that is about. We will use MLs history to give this achievement to those who have managed to win The Double in the past, as much as we can. Some achievements come with a small reward, like a few credits or a small lump of money. this isn't meant to be a feature that will make teams rich, it is just something to brag with. To enhance the brag-factor, we have also made it possible to post links directly to your achievements-list by using a similar format as the link to your team-details. But instead of writing (TEAM: 12345) you write (ACHIEVE: 12345). (No, it doesn't work until next season, git!) Some achievements are handed out to you just as you complete the objective, while others are handed out a little later to avoid telling you that you have won The Double before you have had a chance to read the match-report from the League Cup finals. Some are handed out during season-changes as well. We expect a number of "complaints" about this though, like "I saw someone with Achievement X, and I have have just done the same thing and didn't get it!". We shall see what happens to the first teams to claim 50, 60 or 70 of them (-: We are quite confident this feature will be quite popular, we sure had a lot of fun when we made them and tested them! 10: Notes have changedDue to input from a lot of players, we are changing the Notes-section. We will, with a small degree of remorse, move away from the "funny looking" draggable post-it notes, to a setup that looks "less funny" but with improved usability. You will understand how it works when you see it, there is no need for further explanations on this point. SummaryWe have made several performance and maintenance-ralted improvements. This will make the game better for everyone, and it will give us more time to spend on other things than monitoring servers and recovering fra system-failures. This is a good thing, trust me (-: We have also added some stuff (You will love the achievements, I promise!) and improved some old stuff (hello Notes!). We have tried to make the transfer-market less prone to cheating, and tried to help new users get into the game a little easier than before. All in all, we are quite proud to present these changes, and we are certain they will all do their part in making ManagerLeague a better game for everyone. In-depth details about the new player-search systemTo try to meet the demand for more information here, I decided to give you the full details here. If you are not really interested, you can stop reading now, because the rest of this article is only about the details. I will start by showing a screenshot that will help me explain how it works: As you can see, it looks fairly identical to what you are used to. Of course, the top right corner is different, as this is where your last 10 searches are displayed. The search-formLets take a look at the search-form first, as it has some minor changes: The observant reader will notice that the checkboxes for "Players on teams" and "Teamless players" have been replaced by a drop-down menu. This has been done due to a search-optimisation, which means you will have to chose which kind of player you want to search for. You can no longer make one search that includes both Signed and Unsigned players, they will have to be done seperately. This has allowed us to speed up searches significantly. We realize this can be regarded as a bit annoying, being forced to make 2 searches in stead of one if you are looking for idenatical players and do not care if they are on a team or not, but we decided it was worth the boost in performance. The default values have also been changed a bit. The current system would default the MAX VALUE to your amount of money. This is a bit impractical, as most users would be able to get their hands on a bit more money if they wanted to, either through sacking someone, converting credits etc.So in the new system, this amount is rounded up a bit. We are quite sure this is a definate improvement in user-friendlyness, and it will save you some manual editing of the value-field. You are no longer allowed to search for really odd values. The Min and Max Values will be rounded to their nearest million, so if you search for a player with a value between 17.895.143 and 34.123.987 you are searching for players valued between 18 and 34 millions. This also make some searches faster, and we do not belive this rounding of numbers will affect users in any bad way. I have also tried to help users from making mistakes here. For instance, if you insert a minimum value that is HIGHER than the maximum value, this oversight will be corrected by the system, and the minimum value will be set to something "sane". The last thing you should know, is what happens, and what does NOT happen, when you click the Search-button! Stored searchesIn the top right corner of your screen, you will see your list of stored searches. If you never delete any of them, the list will always contain your last 10 searches. Keep in mind that only your last 10 searches are stored. When you make search #11, your oldest search will be deleted. Just in case this was not immediately understood, the color of the entry lets you know which role you have searched for. Blue means goalkeepers, green means defenders etc etc etc. Yes, clicking the red X will delete your stored search if you should wish to do so. These stored searches are clickable, and you must click one to see which players were found. Note that the list is updated every 10 seconds. Also note that "unfinished searches" will have a name ending in "...", i.e. "Quality: 75-93 Age 17-25 Signed ...", that indicates that the search is in the queue, waiting to be completed. One very cool thing about this new search, is that it allows for "templates". We know that it is quite common to search for good young players at the start or a season, and that you often perform the exact same search several times over the first days in a season. That is now quite a lot easier. When you click one of these results, it will change all your search-parameters to what you used when you made that search, so if you wish to make an identical search again, you just hit the Search-button right away. Voila. Now, there is one little "thing" you should know about these stored searches. The results they will display when you click on them, CAN CHANGE. WTF??? The actual searchThe main reason for modifying how player-search works, has been the enormous load it causes to our system. Today, it doesn't take more than just over a handful of eager searchers to bring the entire servers to a crawl. This is very visible just after the game is open in a new season, when we have had to disable searches to let everyone log in. As of next season, the searches are performed one by one, picked from a queue in the same order they were placed. One team can have a maximum of 3 searches in the queue. - When you hit the Search-button, your search enters the queue. The delay (oh no!)We can not say how much delay there will be until we see this on the live system, but we have been able to optimize these searches a whole lot due to how we perform them. We also have a kind of "caching mechanism" now, which should increase performance the more searches there are! Even though all tests on other system than the real one must be taken for what they are, a different scenario, we see indications that we should be able to handle 10-50 searches per second on an average. We'll see though! So for all I know, this system will have to be improved on several times before we find the right mix of load VS performance, but at least we now have a way of controlling it all. We are very exicted to see how it will work on the live system, and we hope we will not be too surprised. Yes, there will be quite a queue during the first hours after a season-change, we are aware of that, but that is better than a "dead server". We expect the queue to shorten quite quickly though. A kind of magic? No, it's mostly cheating!Most of the searches being performed are quite similar. You are not the only one looking for that special youngster. User A performs a search for a Q74 17yo GK with a value between this and that. 2 seconds later, you perform the same search. The system will know if there are any new players created in those 2 seconds, and if there are not, it is much easier to simply give you a copy of his result rather than straining the server all over again just to end up with the exact same result! This has the splendid effect of increasing the cache-effect the more searches are being ordered! So it means more performance when it is most needed, which is kind of cool, from a nerdy perspective! (It's like your car increases its engine-size the harder you press that pedal!) We have seen such searches hitting the cache being reduced from 0,5 seconds to 0,0002 seconds, which is , well, very very fast. Search SummaryThis system is guaranteed to prevent ManagerLeague from hanging due to player-searching. This will avoid other problems for us as well, and make the game more enjoyable to everyone.
If you made it all the way down here, I am outright impressed!!! Now you know what you can look forward to next season, while you enjoy this one! Yours truly - Spinner PS: the first one to point out 10 typos wins a credit! Questions and answers in regards to the blog-entrytemujin wrote:
|
Share on Facebook |
This blogger owns the team The Spinners. (TEAM:475) |