That feature I’ve told you about

So the Supporter feature we’ve been working on for while hit Stage for testing earlier this week, and while it’s not exactly common procedure to share any information about features being tested on Stage – I thought I should do just that. Because this is not just another Supporter feature, it’s much bigger than that.

This feature is called Tournaments.
You can say that Tournaments are the unofficial club competitions of Hattrick: You can play with your first team without risk of injuries or red cards that could affect your regular matches, and you can play against the people you want. Supporters can create (or join) a tournament, and non-Supporters can also join in for the cost of some credits. Tournament matches are played once a week, on Mondays.

A little bit more detailed tournament matches will use the same match data as regular matches. So your players’ current form, skills, experience, injury status etc on the match day will be used. The same goes for your team’s formation experience. Whether your current team spirit and confidence will be used (or a fixed value) it’s still very much up for discussion though. Tournaments will have their own card status, so any red-carded player in normal Hattrick will still be able to play tournament matches.

Tournament matches don’t count for training, nor do they give any experience (player or formation). Easily put, nothing is saved after the match into normal Hattrick. Moreover, there are no injuries in tournament matches and any card a player gets will only count for matches in the tournament. All in all, this means you can use your best players without risking anything, making friendly cups truly competitive. And may I say more fun and challenging as well?

What’s important to be aware about is that what we’re doing now is the basic version, which will be included in the Supporter package. The cup format will be league with playoff, for either 4 or 8 teams. A tournament for 4 teams will take 4 weeks to complete (5 weeks for 8 teams) and you can participate in one tournament at a time.

If this becomes successful, which we really hope and think it will, we plan to add more options in Hattrick Gears in that case. Such as more cup formats, bigger cups, single matches, more tournaments and so on.

There’s a lot more to say about tournaments, but these are the most important things. And you know, I have to hold on to some exclusive stuff for the release material as well.

About the release, there is not date set yet. It all depends on how the testing proceeds and the feedback we’ll get. So far, however, the feedback we’ve received has been very good. Actually, very very good. I would say it’s likely that this will be the best feature ever.

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