I have to say it felt fantastic that My Office was so well received. Even though it was mostly designed for new users at the start, I’ve always been confident about it being a good improvement for everyone. Especially considering all the nice feedback we’ve gotten along the way. But it’s always hard to know what people will say about a change like this; not really because of the content of it – rather because it breaks old habits. So, naturally I worried a little about that, which in the end was pretty much uncalled for. I’m really glad you like it, it made me feel really good.
There was one thing though (there always is, isn’t it?). Some seemed to be a bit concerned about the chairman of the board, wondering who’s club it really is. Is it mine, or someone elses? Let’s clear the fog a little.
Contrary to what many may think, the board is not a new invention in Hattrick. It’s always existed. As long as I can remember you’ve been introduced to the board in the first welcome email, but from there on it’s not been very clear that the board has existed. As long as you’ve not faced bankruptcy or been inactive for a while that is. So I don’t really blame you for forgetting about it.
The chairman character in My Office will from now on make their existence more clearer, but as he said: they will remain in the background and let your run the show.
So, nothing has really changed, it’s just been made clearer. Just as you’ve always done you will keep on performing the duties of both manager and owner. You’re still in charge, you’re the boss of your club. It’s always been your club in that sense, and will always be.
What’s the use of the board then? Well, as mentioned above they set some boundaries – one can say they set the limits within you can freely act. You can freely spend the money in your club as you wish, but if you’re below 500k € in debt the board will declare the club bankrupt and sack you. You can login how often you want, but if you don’t login for 7 weeks the board will fire you. I guess you don’t really think of these things as limits in that sense, but that’s what they are.
There are also other things we can use the board for in a similar fashion in the future. For example we do need something that make sure hoarding a huge pile of money (which you can later use to overspend on salaries etc) is not a necessity to play competitively or to win the top series. Or that you can’t spend a lot of money in one go for a cup race, which sets the competition out of play. It’s just not how I would like the game to be played or what I want the game to be about, I would say it’s more a usage of exploits in the current game design.
Here the board can play a role and set a limit to how much you can overspend on weekly basis, or for teams with a shitload of money on their account the board can limit how much of the funds that can be used within a certain period of time. And with this we could make these exploits “real” strategies instead. And as such we can include them in the new staff system, which also means you could manage them (but not totally set them out of play). And if you then use choose to use these strategies, it in turn means that you can’t maximize in the usage of other strategies at the same time.
Just so noone freaks out now; this is not about taking any money away from anyone’s account. Money you have on your account will always be your money, but how much of it you can spend can be limited. As I’ve said before; hoarding in itself is not really a problem, spending it (in a blast or continously overspend) is.
So to sum up, the chairman will remain in the background and let us run the club according to our own wish. As we’ve always did, and always will. There may be some boundaries for how we can spend (a shitload of) money, just as there is already limits for how much below zero we can go. But we make the calls, we’re the bosses, it’s our clubs. As it should be.
And how about designing a Hall of fame Player to be the chairman? Besides the secretary.
I’m still thinking about that, and I haven’t really taken any decision regarding that yet. I mean, it makes total sense that you can choose your secretary, it’s quite logical. But when it comes to the chairman of the board it’s not as logical because of his role. On the other hand I’m thinking that it’s fun to have that possibility and it’s not really such a big deal even it’s not totally logical. Oh well, we’ll see.
You are totally right. It makes no sense being able to change your chairman.
He is our boss; who gets to change their boss at their own will?
I’m against this idea. It’s not logical.
I would, however, like the option to make HoF players Scouts or Academy Coaches. 😀
Having a HoF player as chairman isn’t really illogical.
Niall Quinn is Chairman of Sunderland and also an ex-Sunderland player.
What about making it a bit more realistic. In real life a manager can choose his secretary. As for a chairman. He gets voted in. Could you do something like every 4 seasons there’s a campaign for the chairman position and you could contribute by chosing to support one candidate or another. I dont know, its probably way too much work but its just an idea.
The best thing you could do is to forget the Chairman and just delete it.
Just like the secretary, which is a good thing, we can pick who would become the secretary from HOF, could you make the chairman the same as the secretary, we can choose from HOF to become our chairman.
adding a new occupation (chairman) in the HOF.
Hi! I liked this new system, specially for new users.
I want to ask you if there is actually any influence on the “state” (or the happyness/ sadness) shown by our chairman in “my office”. He doesn’t seem to be happy at all. I remember having read in the Editorial that there were differences, but it never said what their effect was.
Besides, taking advantage you mentioned it, is there any news about the new staff system/ strategies??
Thnks.
The chairman’s mood does not influence anything, and (at least currently) he doesn’t change mood either.
About staff system, I don’t have any news right now. But I’m looking to close the design on it before summer vacations.
Thanks for your answer =)
fine.
Being that we now can convert a HoF player into our Club Secretary – why not the Chairman as well (Or, as another alternative – choose his name (from a random database), modify his appearance, etc…)?
This would have zero impact on gameplay (and yes; this being the case, most managers probably will find this option irrelevant, but anyway…), and the implementation can’t be more difficult than it was for the secretary, so… Am I missing something here?
If overspending is not allowed (or limited) any more, it just means that i have to play with old players (keyword: money reducing 29 up) in higher leagues to be competitive! Or do you see any other chance? (just a short example: mythical pm with 28 costs me around 60’000 chf more a weak then a 32 year old player and has also less experience. 11 X 60’000 saves me 720’000 a week! Is this advantage not enough already?)
PS: The office is a great improvement
The limitation on spending is a great implementation. It is also realistic as clubs usually have a limited amount(which is not just all the cash they have) to spend on player hiring.
It is going to improve game play very much.
Carry it forward.
It will be possible to disable “My Office” for an experienced manager?
I don’t like it.
As the actual recession on HT market (main cause of this is the new training system, it will be take time before market will be stable), did you think that using limitation to how spend money will be increase the price?
It is possible that a lot of player will be “un-sale” at transfer compare price?
Sorry, it’s not possible to disable it. But you can customize it a bit, regarding what kind of messages you want.
Limiting spending is not any measure for increasing prices, and I for one don’t want to increase the transfer prices fyi. That’s a totally different topic though. This is merely about me/us not wanting a game where you first have to save and hoard money for many seasons before you can start to compete. It’s not what this game is about.
Thanks for your reply.
This limitation to overspending will be introduced with the agent from staff?
The staff limitation will be still 30 people?
Don’t jump to conclusions here, what I wrote about here are thoughts for the game. They may – and may not – turn into real game features in the end. 🙂
Regarding staff limit; there will be a new staff system so it doesn’t make sense to refer (or compare) to the current system’s limit.
Thanks for the recent changes, they are great! So keep up the good work! As you have said there will be a new staff system. I am really happy that there will be a new staff system, since I don’t really like the current system. I hope you guys will come up with a great system.I have some ideas about the staff system that I would like to share with you.
First of all, I think the wages of managers are unrealistic. My current manager earns $ 300 a week, while my assistants earn $ 1.800 a week. I would like to see that changed in such a way that the wages of coaches will depend on their coaching skill level. To compensate for this, you might slightly lower the application fees.
I would really like a system where assistant managers are hired as internal or external applicant (and maybe even the youth coach) in a similar fashion to how hire the manager. I would be nice to hire one of your players as the assistant. I would say that fees of hiring should be similar to the fees of hiring a manager, but obviously their effectiveness should be way lower. Than it should even be possible to promote an assistant to your manager. This would create two strategies: on the one hand you might appoint your future manager as assistant or you might appoint lower skilled assistants (which are cheaper to appoint and earn less, but are less affective).
I would like to have one or two normal assistants, a goalkeeper coach and fitness coach. The normal assistants would influence training speed of field players as well as the form of field players. The goalkeeping coach would influence the trainer speed of goalkeepers as well as the form of goalkeepers. The fitness coach would obviously influence the stamina training. Maybe these coaches could have a slight influence on the team spirit as well, with their leadership.
I totally agree with you about the chairman but i think it would be logical if à hof could be trainer for youth team or scout.
why don-t you make a rule that every team to have a minimum 5 players in the team from the home team country i mean if i have a team in romania to have in my start team 5 players from romania or a junior from academy
What would you want to achieve with that?
Cultural and ethnic diversity in matches..
Hello.
Nice addition there, with the secretary and all, thanks.
From your “post” I got worried about this possible future limitation of money spending.
Presently, I’m in .VIII. and saving to buy a certain type of trainer. Will that mean that I can’t save for 3 seasons (example) to get a good one?
Thanks
It would naturally not affect your ability to save money, you can save how much you want and you will of course always be able to get a new trainer as well. Saving is not a problem in itself. As I’ve said in another answer, this is really about it shouldn’be a necessity to save a lot of money to be able to compete. I rather want to treat saving/hoardning as a legitimate strategy instead, but it shouldnt’ be a must to do (first) in order to compete for trophies.
TALE :
(…)
At this point Camillo_camomillo starts to make some calculations… maybe instead of making programs, calculations, training plans and so on.. he should have been a BOT for some season, with a little trading and training, so he would have had a hoard money and be ready with 100 milions to spend
In this way he wouldn’t be damaged by the HT’s mood swings and he can play and live “for the day” in the future. And he has a better team once needed.
Damn! In this way if he has a team which is two times stronger than the opponent one (and with wages 3 times bigger) it’s much more difficult that one of the obscene things mentioned before compromises him, and it’s much more difficult that the match engine damages him.
Of course random can always come [matchid=266280690] : but if your team is two times stronger you win the same.
But then what is Camomillo’s fault in doing this ? What is his fault in being a money hoarder ? (…)
FYI: I’ve edited your comment as it contained quite some hard words which wasn’t really needed. Honestly, if you want a reply or me to treat your comments seriously – be polite.
There is no fault in hoardning money. As I mentioned a few times already in answers here and in the blog post itself, this is not about killing hoarding or taking away any money. But I don’t want hoarding plus later overspending to be the superior strategy (ie a need if you want to compete in the end) in Hattrick, I think it would make Hattrick so dull. I want you to have a set of viable options (strategies) to choose from, where hoarding could very well be one, but where none is considered a must. This can be achieved by strenghten other strategies, but we also have to look at issues like this which sets the ordinary competition out of play and kills the game fun for users.
Put the hattrick in ENGLISH. Go to players page. Click any one of them . Look up on the rigth under LOGOUT.
What is writen there ?
” Owner actions”
OWNER. Does O.W.N.W.E.R. mean something to you ? I’m the OWNER.
IS my club . Not a random guy club . IS not my board’s club , nor my secretary or chairman ‘ club . They don’t have any f. right to decide anything in MY club.
They don’t even existed . Actually they don’t exist , you invented them this season and was the worst ideea ever in this game … already make me thinking to quit.
I signed to manage MY CLUB , not Johnny Random Chairman’s club. I have no interes to manage Johny Random Chairman club.
“Hattrick is the original online football manager game, and it’s free to play. Here you get to create your OWN club, build the team of YOUR dreams, and compete against hundreds of thousands of real people from all over the globe.”
MY OWN CLUB . MY OWN DREAMS.
It’s your club and it’s you who make the decisions, as I wrote above. The board (which as I said been there since day one, allthough quite invisible if you haven’t been inactive or faced bankruptcy) just sets up some rules for it.
seriously, look at what youve written;
hattrick is the original football manager game!!!! Being a manager is different from being a chairman. How boring would it be if you had a football chairman game. Do you want to sit at the computer and put together budgets and targets for your team instead of MANAGING your team???? Seems a bit dumb to me!
why don’t you just scrap the Chairman so you avoid the emotional reactions altogether?
you can always replace what you currently use him for with something along the lines of “the majority shareholder convened an AGM, and 74 pct of the shareholders voted to have you fired unless you take an active role to ensure the club gets out of debt within 7 days” or something along those lines. The Chairman is not all-powerful.
as for the hints dropped about hoarding and the I’ll-believe-it-when-I-see-it new staff system, I don’t really believe those comments belong in your dev blog. it comes across as an artificial bump of Hattrick United, which is unfortunate. you should rather put stuff like this in an editorial within HT – if, that is, there will actually be some action behind the words in the foreseeable future….?
These are my thoughts after all and thus definitely belong here. I very much like to able to share (and discuss) thoughts like this as well together, but no game features (etc) will be introduced here. When these thougths have been made into more proper plans for the game, there will be announcements (editorials) in Hattrick. And I’m quite interested in putting some action behind the words as well. 🙂
Hi
I love your My Office but how come the secretary is a man & not a woman, its not fair as both the sexes should be given equal opportunities. Meanwhile, I had started a new youth academy and had appointed 3 scouts in various areas, would these also be mentioned in Myoffice.
thanks
from:-Manu
We have no female name databases and it’s not really a prioritized development area. And if we should do it, then all types of roles (that is also the chairman for example) could be female.
Regardning youth scouts, they will not (yet) appear in My Office. But things like that are stuff that I want to integrate it with.
Hi Tjecken
I got a note from my youth academy coach today 🙂 Would you consider giving us the option of making a HOF youth academy coach ?
Absolutely. That’s definitely on and so are using them for other roles as well (but exactly when it will happen I don’t know).
I need to aquire some more HOF candidates then. Alas the old players that I’m watching keep ending up in Bot teams 🙁
Hey Tjecken!
I was wondering, would it be possible to have some sort of notification when a player stops being injured? It could be from the “Head of Medical Staff” or whatever, but My Office looks like the perfect way to do it. I know it’s not that hard to go to a certain player’s status and check on whether or not he’s still injured, but it would be a nice addition I think. Thanks!
Hehe, it’s certainly possible and also one idea I had when designing My Office; to make reports feel more alive and then use it to create more reports for things still lacking one (like injuries). To be totally honest I designed a medical report a few monts back (together with improvements of the current injury system, to allow you better information also earlier on), but we’ve not starting working on it yet as there are other things that are seen as more important. But I agree with you – it would be a nice addition. 🙂
I like this idea and was thinking just that. Shouldnt the secretary be a bit more involved like say, when a player is no longer injured or no longer suspended or when one has been bought or sold, all the info a normal secretary would normally have?
Do not you think it is better to give freedom for people to manage money as you want? If the interest is that hybrids are important because they penalizais?
Do not think that if everyone spent the same money, if all have the same players, if we all do the same for motor racing and have a party that is extremely random does not it make sense to play? That’s what the lottery
“Instead of detrozar the game that not mejorais? What sense does the youth academy with one or two games a week with no competition? Why do not you seek the competitive youth teams that have no economy?
For example that all young players have the same excellent performance in all skills but only at the level of skills and creating youth league and cup wins the best tactic.
So we all have our space, but instead of damaging things and playing games with money supporter why do not you try to make things interesting?
I don’t fully understand your whole message, but to answer on the first question:
In principle, yes absolutely. How you want to manage your money should naturally be up to the player, who else? That’s after all one thing that decides if you’ll be a good manager or not.
But the problem we currently have is that hoarding money (in order to later overspend them on salaries and players) is unlimited, in opposite to for example training. You’re totally free to train exactly as you wish, but there is an upper limit both in speed and how many players you can train. Both those limits are managable through assistants (speed) and which formation you use. For hoarding (to later overpend) there is no limit at all, and as such teams can afford a much better team (as they don’t need to care about the weekly expenses and incomes) they leave their opponents with one choice: Either hoard yourself or you can’t compete. And I don’t want it to be a must to hoard money (to later overspend) in order to compete at the top level. That’s not what the game is about.
I wouldn’t say this is a a very big problem, it doesn’t affect the casual player or the normal user. But still, if we don’t do anything it will grow bigger and bigger.
hi, I wanted to say that the “My Office” really great. well, it really rally help me to now the event in a week, also any information that involve my club. great job. 🙂
by the way, about the chairman, I thought it was like Investor, sponsor guy, or something. So, the guy not own the club, he just put some money in our club. the first money when we firstly start the game. So, it should not really bother me or anybody, am I right?
anyway, “my Office” is really really great. I like it, great job mister.
PS: sorry, about my English is not really good. 🙂
Thanks!
And no, you shouldn’t be bothered about the chairman. You will always run the club and you will always be the one who make the decisions about your team.
What you say is not true, you can have a great team with wages with little cash on hand.
Just learn to move in the market.
I think this obsession limiting teams, will destroy the game.
hi i just wonder if you guys have been thinking about the sponsor.it would be cool to have sponsorname so we know where the money come from.
We’ve had, and we’ve also tested a feature where you got a “real sponsor” or where you could make up your own one for a small fee (was included in Supporter I think). We decided not to go for it though, not then at least.
I was going to say what Sammy said. It would make the game more interesting. Teams can sign specific contracts with different sponsors to seek their long/short term profit. Sponsors can set objectives for teams and a prize for achieving them. It would make managers to choose their own way of managing the club and they shall chose if, for example, they want a get an small profit soon or a lost of money over time. There might even be some disadvantage and loss for not achieving clubs goals. We can even show that in the series page. For example, at the beginning the the league, every teams targeted position will be shown to every body and it will create a sense of “rivalry” and excitement for achieving the target we share with other teams.
I really like this idea. Once again makes the hattrick experience a bit more life like. features like negotiating contract deals with sponsors and conditions in the contracts.
eg. sign a 3 year deal with nike for 10k a game and 100k signing, but you have to win the league or the deal is off and they take 50k back or something like that.
and to have a choice of sponsors. Send the secretary to look for potential sponsors and come back with a list of names and offers and you can choose and negotiate from there
I think you should use a two-tier system. Then the actual manager should be the chairman/owner/CEO and that what you call the board should be the supervisory board.
Have you ever thought of teams loaning an Arena? I mean in reality, teams in lower division can’t afford their own stadium. Even some teams in top divisions, like AC Milan and Inter Milan doesn’t have their “own” stadium. They share their own stadium. But Juventus, on the other hand, is building his own. So it seems that teams have their own way of running their club in terms of stadium ownership. So why don’t we implement that in HT? Think of the pleasure a lower division team will get when he finally owns his own stadium, after seasons of loaning one 😉
Hey! Wadda you do with my office? Its gone!
Back to the old, hey?
I think it´s a good idea to limit the possibilities of spending hoarded money, it can´t be fun for anyone to see the opponent in your league spending millions and millions for new players and you can´t compete because you didn´t hoard money for years (for years like some do, not for a season or so)…So the limit is a limit for very few players. because most players save some cash but invest ist soon to be competitve. The “hoarders” are playing “hoarding game” at their own for possibly years and then crashing into a totally different game, where they compete with others that want to play a competitve game. That´s not fairplay, and it´s fun for very few players…Maybe some people didn´t understand that it will be still a big advantage to have hoards of money on your account, but it´s not an automatic weapon for success. By the way: Did Chelsea ever won the Championsleague?
But i think their should be different limits for different leagues (?) 10 million are lot of money for league X, but not much for higher leagues. So it should depend on your league, or your former success.
hi HT-TJECKEN
I hope to be relevant to the question
I wonder if I can edit the CSS classes or creating new id and I wonder if you can create an image map because I can not do it
thanks
Supporters can edit CSS.
Regarding images you can upload images to your media files. Go to the dashbord (in advanced admin) and choose Media.
I am supporter and I’m making changes, but I can not create new classes and new id. Thanks for the reply 🙂
The office was the reason for the downtimes in HT on saturdays, yes or no ?
We haven’t been able to pin that down for sure. So as of right now I can’t give you a yes or no answer.
it’s really a problem to schedule NT match on Tuesday?
Two seasons of work for many people….and all is erased for a incredible, awful, avoidable down?
work one our more…and re-schedule NT match.
OK, thank you for your response !
So i hope hattrick will be healed soon… whatever the causes for it´s sickness are …
my club? my office?
Give us old hatrick. we want only to log-in…. we want only to have a site who works.
No money for hattrickopen…money for good hardware and good software for our hattrick.org.
I miss The Office already.. I understand it is for new users, anyway I’d like to have it back, lol..
Really nice, keep going! =)
Have to be a man for secretary? what about a woman secretary?
Our main disk array has crashed because of a human error. We need to restore the disks from back-up. This will take most of the day due to the large volume of data. We feel confident that we will be back on-line by 22:00 HT time. We apologise for the inconvenience.
Sorry but the NT match….will be delayed???
apologizzatemi ‘staminchia!
I hope that you’ll think the new staff system through before you implement something like that, because it sounds like it’ll make the game much more complex and restricting.
Introducing a spending cap to transfers and wages will only mean that we have to buy older players with the same skills, because they’re less expensive on both accounts. That’ll be the only way to compete and very skilled young players will be shunned.
And what about selling every player on your team at the same time just to replace them with new similar, but a couple of years younger players. Would that even be possible anymore if there was a weekly cap? Sure you could sell the old ones, but you might only be able to buy one or a couple of new players to replace them. Or would selling players raise your cap with the same amount for the rest of the season or something?
It all sounds very restricting and I didn’t sign for a game like that. The fun thing about hattrick is that it’s still pretty casual and doesn’t restrict the way you play it too much. If the new staff system is as bad as I fear, it might be the final nail in the coffin and a big amount of people could leave this game – me included. I’ll think about renewing my supporter only after I find out how this goes. Please be very careful not to ruin this great game.
i really like some of these ideas. th spending cap idea i cant comment on because i havent played long enough. but the imporved chairman and sponsors sound good.
It would be good to have it that little bit more realistic. Like maybe being able to vote in a chairman every 4 months. Having him, and a board, give you season objectives and have them present you with potential sponsorship deals to help you achieve those goals.
Its probably way too much work than its worth but it would be good.
and i dont get why everyone is so pissed off about the chairman thing. It is a football MANAGER game not a footbal CHAIRMAN gam. how exciting that would be . instead of setting up your team and playing games you’ll sit there setting budgets and finding sponsors… how exciting!
I’ve enjoyed reading the posts and comments on this thread. It is clear the creators of Hattrick care and the users of Hattrick care equally. I’m not going to ask for any great changes myself, I know that the right things will be implemented at the right time because fans of Hattrick have methods to express their views, and communication is good from the ‘guys and gals’ behind the scenes.
My only modest request is this: Please give supporters the ability to allow their goalkeepers to have a different coloured strip on the player pictures. It just doesn’t feel right that my goalies wear an outfield strip. Is it possible? 🙂 I’m not asking for a feature that allows managers to design goalie kits. A default goalkeeping jersey would be enough even. Ok, thanks for my 5 minutes of fame.
I think the idea is great. I’ve been playing hattrick for over 2 years. Since I’m late to the game I’ve had no other choice but to try and hoard money in an attempt to buy a winning squad in one fell swoop. There is just no other way to compete in the higher leagues if promoted. You can’t win if you don’t have players. And you don’t have players if you don’t have money. And you can’t buy decent players and put together a winning team with less than 20Million. And there is no way to acquire that money overnight. You have to be determined and patient. Most new players will just walk away from the game after a month if they realize that this is the case. I had a friend tell me “There is just no way to compete with the big dogs who have been playing from the start. They were able to acquire money through loopholes which have been closed over the years. Thus, they have an overwhelming advantage which small fish like us can never overcome.” I think your idea is great for Hattrick as a whole. It is a good way for the game to grow. Which at the end of the day is good for all of hattrick; players and company alike.
Hi,
Are there any plans to make the calendar in the ‘my office’ editable? Will we be able to ever add events/notes/reminders to it for ourselves?
I see this as an opportunity to make a good update a little more personal and ultimately more useful.
Keep up the good work.
Hi there! I really liked the huge idea of giving a “face” to the background of the club like his secretary or chairman, but I also enjoyed the schedule presented by them. I’ve become HT member a week ago and since than the secretary rarely appears! Even when I login… Is there a problem, or it’s something I change in the game preferences? I really would like to have him back to present my schedule…
Hello,
I think My office is a great new feature in hattrick, and I hope you guys will stay improving and developing this concept. To me this is certain a very big similarity to the real world!
Though what I really would like to see, is the participation of former players.
In the real world former / retired players get all kinds of roles within the club. And in Hattrick it is very hard to get players back before there retirement. (for sure, when team go broke, or end up as BOT) Is there a chance for teams whether or not, to accept or decline a role for a player, before he will be: “last seen in a candy store buying Panini pictures”… 🙂
I spend a lot of time in my youth departement, and I see some players go “missing” before they are real mature. Is there someting you guys can do about that?
Looking forward to your answer.
JRB-JRB
Limiting manager from spending a whole lot of money at once, I think it is a good idea. I have been playing this game since 2002 and seeing a lot of teams doing so. I am not saying they are not supposed to do it, but many teams do not care how they are performing in their leauges at all, simply waiting until the Cup gets to 4th round and all of the sudden, buying magical players (low price tag/ high salary) to compete solely in the Cup, then sale players when the team is out of the Cup. I mean, this playing style is alright, but it is not realistic and will definitely kill the game.
Limiting budget will force manager to plan ahead for the seasons, and that is better in my opinion.