ManagerLeague History : The first year (22/03/2013 16:25)

For our launch, we had help from another designer to come up with something quite different when it came to the look and feel of the game.

The first clue of the new design was this little teaser:

 

 And when the day came, the game looked like this:

Many of you will of course recognize the design here, as the design stuck for quite a while. It is referred to as "the black ManagerLeague" by many, and some of our old-schoolers still think this is the best design we've had. (-:

So what was the game like at this point? Well, it's core was not very different from today, yet still it was a different experience.
One thing that comes to mind is the word "unstable". Limited hardware, limited experience and lot's of bugs that crashed different pieces of the game. Oh, and of course there was not dynamic feel to the game, each action you did reloaded the whole page. There was no mobile interface either of course, that came quite a bit later. As you can see fomr the screenshot above, you replaced 1 player at the time, and if you wanted to change the formation, well, you had to go to a different page (-: "Inconvenient" is another word that springs to mind (-: "Ugly" too perhaps (-:

As you also might have seen, there is no "data"-menu, or "cups"-menu. They came a bit later as well.

Anyway, the first few days were rather chaotic, but extremely fun! Check out some of these announcements during the first days!

September 21st, 2005:

For the curious types out there, I have pulled out some simple statistics that might amuse you. 
- Daily page-views are about 62.000 (today we are at about 2.200.000!)
- Net team-count have climbed from 1550 to over 1700 the last 3 days (currently around 45.000)
- There are currently 1143 posts in the forum (heh, nowadays we see 2000 posts every day)
- 2034 player-to-player messages have been written and sent (automatic messages not counted) (Nowadays..err..no idea...lots!)
- 3434 players have been sold / bought (not bad, even after todays standards!)
- 88 "News-entries" have been written by players (this number has reached 27300, but they were purged in 2009 and the counter reset)
- 1588 friendlies have been played (riight...I reckon we do 10.000 per day now!)
- 450 teams are ready to go on a training-camp in round 10 (haha, cute!)
- 1700 managers are having fun (hopefully the number today is "somewhat" higher)

 

 September 26th, 2005:

 

At approximately 16:01 today there was a server update. Some small fixes went in that have been requested, but nothing major. However, the important part of the update was a system-change that should help to avoid the impact on the server while the match-simulator is running around 15:00 and 03:00. Whether it was very sucessfull or not, well, we shall see when the next match takes place. If this doesnt help noticably, well, there isnt much choice, we need to buy another server  

You will be notified of further progress on this matter.

 

 So as you can see, it didn't take more than 11 days from we launched until we started seeing a load-issue on our servers (-:

September 29th, 2005:

 

Once again, some improvements have made their way onto the servers. The updates affect the match-simulator, the ticker, and some other things. 
First of all, a logical bug has been bothering me for a while, connected to promotion and relegation. I couldn't really make heads or tails of it, until I finally stumbeled upon it two days ago. So after 48 hours of quite intensive testing, I am confident it has been fixed. 
Secondly, even though pages now work quite fine during simulator rush-hour, I decided to add some "breaks" for the simulator, to allow the servers to deal with web-requests better during those times. This means that matches will take slightly longer to calculate, but nothing too drastic. This issue will be monitored for effect and impact. 
Third, a little change in the promotion-rewards. Now, the end-of-season reward is more dynamic, with a minimum of 3.000.000 $ for promotion, plus 1.000.000 per division above 5th you promote from. This means, if you get promoted now from 4th to 3rd, you get 4.000.000. If you promote from 5th to 4th, you get 3.000.000. 
Fourth, there have been some very small updates on some of the pages, nothing important, just some visual improvements, a few new "tooltips" added, and some better explanation texts here and there. 
Fifth, there is now also referral credits to be made from SMS-purchases, even though this is certainly at quite some expense to us. Oh well  
At this point, I do not think there will be more updates or additions this season, and that things will progress smoothly from here on. 

It is with great pride I notice we have passed 2.000 teams today, which is quite good  Keep em coming! 

 

So, that was the trip from 0 players to 2.000 players, in our first 14 days. It was easy to grow back then (-:

October 6th, 2005, looking towards the first ever season-change:

 

There are a few updates going in for Season 2. ManagerLeague is still a very young game, after running live for just 3 weeks. New features are coming, exisiting ones are being upgraded. And such is also the case for Season 2. Here are some of the improvements for Season 2. 

Fixes: 
- Various smaller fixes, i.e. in replying to messages, quoting, small xhtml-fixups, standardisation issues 
- Fix for Finances: Custom Cup income is now correctly placed in the right round in Finances 
- Fixed a problem with messages on the portal site 

Adjustments: 
- Player salary adjustment, a bit higher wages for the higher quality players 
- Player value adjustment, a bit higher value on high quality players 
- Reduced the number of visible friendlies to 30 to avoid the HUGE pages some saw. 

New features: 
- Brand new sponsor-system, with a lot more intresting sponsors to chose from. Not just upfront and per-round payouts, but performance bonuses as well, so pick your sponsors carefully. 
- Brand new case-system for dealing with cheaters and abusers (ok, normal users wont see this anyway, but I thought it would be nice to know we emphasize a lot of taking out those who refuse to play by the rules) 

Improvements: 
- 2 new skins have been made, specially for Internet Explorer users. The skins look practically the same as the existing ones do, but they are without the colour-changes when the mouse-pointer hovers over table-rows, and reduces rendering time for Internet Explorer users dramatically. Again, we recommend you use a browser that works according to the standards (FireFox and Opera are the best 2 free alternatives), but if you must use Internet Exploder, and want pages to "load" much quicker, select one of these new skins in Options / Preferences. 

I hope you like the additions / changes, and that you will help us spread ManagerLeague to as many people as possible, the more the better! 

 

So, since back then, season-change has provided improvements for more than 8 years. Wow, I can't belive I've been doing this stuff for that long!!

October 26th, crossing 3.000 managers for the first time...

 

Today, the number of teams in ManagerLeague is expected to cross the 3.000 barrier. This is good news of course, and an important milestone for us all. The campaigns set in effect to attract more players seem to work, and we will continue our efforts in this area. Our goal was to have 5.000 by the end of the year, and this is within reach. We are not selling as many credits as we hoped for, but you can't have everything  :)
Season 2 has proceeded as planned, just over half-way through now, and teams are fighting for positions and victories every league-round. 

Once again, there are improvements to the game to look forward to in the next season. Both regular improvements, new features and new sections can be expected, and we hope you will like them. Exactly what they are will remain a secret just a bit longer, but many of them are things asked for in our ingame Suggestions-forum. Some portal-upgrades will also be applied, and all in all we hope to bump the quality of ManagerLeague further up once again. 

Dont forget to join the new competitions running, there are credits, fame and fortune to be won  :)

Good luck to you all in the last half of Season 2, may the best teams earn their promotions rightfully! 

One of the improvements for season 3 was the ability to upload a team-logo!! Wow! And here is my first one!

I have selected out a few of the earlier key-updates and here they are:

• In season 4, the game was made available in multiple languages.
• In season 6, Open Challenges were introduced.
• In season 7, the economic balance was heavily adjusted.
• In season 8, the simulator was dramatically improved, and the feature "Team History" was introduced (today just a part of the team-details window)
• In season 9, Staff was introduced, with a leetcode window-system that was extremely cool, technically speaking (well,it WAS, at the time!) Oh, and "Decay" was introduced as well!
• In season 10, the number of free credits given out was increased from 3 to 5. Cute (-: Season 10 also introduced our "support-ticket-system" on the portal.

By March 2006, we had 6576 managers in the game.

Remember, at this early stage, there was only ONE league (the one that is now called International, but in that league, we got our first Champions. Here are the first 5 League Champions in our history:

 

• RAUAGJRE managed by Gjwreio
• THAVEGETABLES managed by Selleri
• JAMARIANS managed by Jama
• BLACKPOOL managed by SirLance
• TEAM MAGIC managed by Bad Babba

And the first 5 League Cup champions were

 

• KLANG VALLEY CHICKINS elkempo
• THAVEGETABLES Selleri
• THAVEGETABLES Selleri
• VARTDAL FK Sir Johnny
• BENKERNS VÅLERENGA benkern

 

 

And one year after launch, ManagerLeague had reached 12.508 managers...