The next era in ManagerLeague was quite eventful and very positive. Being small, it was "easy" to grow, and at the same time managing a small community is a lot less work than managing a big one. There were also some elements missing from the game, that everyone takes for granted today.
I had been trying to come up with better designs for the game, with little luck. Unfortunately, graphical design is not one of my skills, and I am horribly embaressed to show you these two designs that luckily never made it into the game.
And, maybe even worse:
What we DID manage to do though, was a new design of our frontpage, which was cleaned up a lot, and had basically only 3 buttons, simplified to the core:
And still, the old GooseGames-logo was present in the center of the ball :)
Anyway, back to the game!
Since I mentioned missing elements of the game, back in the early days, there wasn't anything called "events". They were introduced, in a very limited edition, in season 22, then slightly improved and re-implemented twice over the next 5.
Also woth mentioning, ManagerLeague only had ONE LEAGUE up until Season 25! The whole system was based on everyone being in the same league, so it was quite a large and complex job as I recall it. Jolly nerve-wracking! But the change was appreciated by the majority (not by everyone of course!) and there have been no regrets here!
So, having Leagues opened up soem new possibilities (and several new bugs to fix), but even so it took 9 seasons before Champions League was introduced, the first one won by Tore Pupper from Norway. He was even interviewed by a large online media site, and had his (our!) picture taken as well. You can see it here: http://www.nettavisen.no/sport/fotball/article1840011.ece
(In case you wondered, Tore Pupper in Norwegian is roughly the same as calling your team "Ig Tits", so there is a play on words there, further enhanced by "Tore" being a very common name!)
The simulator, extremely limited as it was back then, was under continous development. It was also quite slow and unoptimized back then, and the system as a whole could handle about 7 matches per second. For comparison, todays simulator do roughly 5 times as many calculations per match, and can do more than 80 matches per second! It's not a very fair comparison though, as back then the simulator was running on two CPU-cores alone, simulating 1 match then moving to the next one, while today we have 2 servers, using 8 cores to simulate 8 matches at the same time etc..
During years 2, 3 and 4, we always had severe load-issues around 15:00 and 09:00, so a lot of work went in to alleviate these concerns, one small optimisation at a time. The game was actually often quite non-responsive during the whole simulation-periode. Today, this isn't an issue.
Rewarding work when it helped, but extremely dull and non-creative (-:
During these times, we also got our first simplistic mobile interface on http://mob.managerleague.com. It was extremely limited, only 5 pages, and didn't let you do much of anything, mostly showing you fixtures, results, your team and messages. And since we are talking about "Mobile", we even tried to sell our own mobile flip-phone! And the slogan was, hehe, priceless: "Your Team, Your Call!" The price? 1600 credits! Another fun fact right here, the order-page is still up, you can find it here!
Even if we have persisted over these years, several partners have not. Since those days, we have changed sponsors, payment-providers, offices, internet-providers etc several times. And yes, it's always a bit of work (-:
By the time we approached 2009, we started to feel a bit old-fashioned, and had gained a lot of knowledge about the strengths and weaknesses of the game. It was time for some BIG changes...
