Fm Live Release Notes

[Mihai]

Desi stiu ca pe multi o sa ii lase rece, periodic voi posta modificarile aduse la releaseuri din beta:

- 7 noiembrie: beta 0.57 build 840

New Features

------------

- replaced rankings income with a new 'daily income' which is calculated from a team's reputation. A team's reputation is a slower-moving reflection of a team's reputation/strength in the GW and a more suitable basis for deciding on a daily income amount which reflects the team's ability to make money through off-field commercial activities.

- added full displaying, sorting, filtering etc. of a team's reputation in the team and user lists, and also added it to the team profile panel by way of a 'star' rating 1-5.

Changes

-------

- improved the categories of transaction shown on the financial projection panel, to differentiate between existing and future player wages and generally chose a more useful and informative set of data. Also packaged all the individual transactions over time that produce this projection so that later we can display a visual representation using a graph.

- improved team financial projection system so that it now correctly takes into account incoming competition prize money from unfinished competition stages, and in the case of a team having qualified for the next stage, any minimum prize money from the stage too. Also now properly takes into account contract auto renewal options (extend or rebid), adjusting the future wage bill accordingly and includes (or not as the case may be) injury insurance premiums depending on whether this is turned on.

- made some changes to the way the user activity_rating is calculated - it should now give a much better overall indication of how 'hardcore' a user is

- enhanced the player retirement code to take into account the player's happiness when he makes his decision. Also added code to ensure that a player will not retire in his prime, or retire due to being unable to find a team if he is still a decent standard of player and hasn't yet played for a team in the game world - this is to try to stop players like Del Piero, Henry etc retiring before anyone has had a chance to sign them, by at least delaying their retirement as long as possible.

- added an extra clause when checking whether a player's manager had a good reason for not playing the player in a match - as well as checking if the player was injured it will now check whether or not he had low condition (less than 90% fit) as well

- made some improvements to the way team reputations are calculated. They are now more affected by the team's financial state and most importantly they now take into account the ability and reputation of the team's best players.

Bug Fixes

---------

- fixed a bug which would cause players to age twice in the first year of a game world

- reset unread mailing list counts, fixed next unread button not working for mailing lists, made sure that unread mailing list counts are not sent to an unsubscribed user, fixed problem where mailing list unread counts were wrong

- combined loan and trial settings for a competition onto one line to remove the need for a scrollbar on the competition editing popup

- added a safety check to post match processing to deal with players whose world reputations haven't changed during the match

Comments

--------

- Going live on Wednesday 7th November afternoon/evening.

[Mihai]

- 13 noiembrie: beta 0.58 build 858

New Features

------------

- Enhanced the 'Challenge To Match' and 'Respond To Challenge" popups to include team head-to-head information and made this popup the thing that appears when clicking on an incoming challenge (either via the drop-down alert, or from the challenges menu), in an attempt to streamline the process of making/responding to match challenges.

Changes

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- Minor wording improvement to comp details popup wizard.

- For all text involving the name of a vote in a sentence, added the word 'vote' at the end to make it read more nicely.

- Added mouse wheel support for Mac.

- Modified chat pages so that a team's reputation is displayed in the mini user profile shown in the top right hand corner for the last person to type something

- Simplified when the bank issues a veto to try and make things clearer; basically if your projected cash is -100k or below then it vetoes. Since the projections are now more sophisticated, this may be sufficient.

- Loans are now between 7 and 21 days (players whose contract wage is under 10k) or just 21 days (players whose contract wage is 10k or over). Also, removed option to recall a player from loan to make a loan more of a binding contract for both parties.

Bug Fixes

---------

- Fixed bug in processing finances caused by it re-evaluating a team's financial state at several different points during the daily update causing inconsistent news items to be issued overnight.

- Fixed a bug on the competition history panel where the stage/round name was blank for single-stage knockout competitions.

- Fixed a rare crash when editing in a text box.

- Fixed bug where a match maker challenge setup on the client wouldn't match the user's match settings.

- Fixed news item that incorrectly talked about the 'First season' starting when it was the second season or later.

- Made some improvements and bug fixes to the player morale code

- Fixed issues in match scheduling that could lead to invalid resolution dates, and general screwed-up-ness of competitions

Comments

--------

- Not a major release, but intended to be the final feature set for the GW4 release and thus needs rolling out for testing.

- Went live on Wednesday 13th November evening.

[Mihai]

- 20 noiembrie: beta 0.60

New Features

------------

- Added 'AI Matches' as a federation setting, which is then used as the default setting for all new competitions created in the federation while still allowing this to be customized afterwards on a competition-by-competition basis.

- Now displays a federation's play times on the federation page.

Changes

-------

- Removed pause button from the ticker. I mean, who ever heard of pausing a ticker?

- Simplified the lower bar area a bit to strive towards a cleaner less cluttered interface by removing the superfluous back/next buttons at the bottom and merging the links menu at the bottom with the history menu at the top, and renamed the history menu to 'Pages'.

- User can now toggle(default off) the navigation section of the team records panel.

- User can now subscribe/unsubscribe to a mailing list from the mailing list page itself rather than having to go into the game preferences.

- Improved manager menu so that it contains entries for the tactics, fixtures, results etc for each of your squads, displaying them 'flat' in the menu if only one squad exists, otherwise placing them in sub menus. Also added a link to the team's main competition or federation and moved the team stuff above the user stuff as it's likely to be accessed more often.

- Made sure all right-click menus for competitions, federations, players, teams, users and votes contain the same options as available in the 'tabs' for the corresponding page as some were missing.

- Renamed 'Feedback Received/Given' on the user page tabs to just 'Received/Given' as it fits better within the context since the main tab already says 'Feedback'.

- Turned off injury insurance by default for new signings, and removed incoming insurance ins and outs from the financial projection system.

- On the pages that contain a 'Description' for a competition, vote, etc made this box the one that resizes, so that the section above can always display all it's information.

Match v655

----------

- Reduced no of dangerous challenges.

- Reduced no of professional fouls.

- Fixed player teleporting bug ( from v653 ).

- Fixed bug where defenders stand off and allow players to run through defensive line too easily.

- Improved player finishing when clean through.

- Fixed play being called back after advantage played and shot taken.

- Fixed obscure crash.

Bug Fixes

---------

- Fixed a bug in which player world reputation would occasionally be incorrectly set to 1 following a match, causing a variety of knock-on effects including causing a team's overall reputation (and hence daily income) to decline.

- Fixed a bug where the last emoticon was unavailable for selection on the dialog; added (N) icon and added (thup) as an alias for (Y).

- Prevented mouse pointer indicating something is click-on-able when it's not.

- Fixed problem where a team\s fixtures/results for the different squads weren't listed in the right squad.

- Fixed bug where no loan period options were shown on the bid popup for established players, and when the user clicked to make the loan, they were booted off.

- Fixed minor bug where it displayed '1 days' instead of '1 day' as a competition's estimated length.

- Fixed issue where if the user entered an unrecognized email address the client would sit forever repeatedly connecting, sending, disconnecting to the login server and getting the same response.

Comments

--------

- Going live on Tuesday 20th November afternoon

[Mihai]

- 23 noiembrie: beta 0.61 build 899

New Features

------------

- added system for helping a user to find a federation, if they don't already have one. This is achieved via a 'Join Federation' option at the top of the manager menu which brings up a popup asking them some simple Qs about their expected times of play and playing intensity and finding the most suitable federation for them to join.

Changes

-------

- relocated the transfers table for a team from their history (obscure, hidden, hard to find) to it's own main tab and added sub tabs for players in and players out to make it more useful.

- team honours panel now separates friendly competitions from official ones.

- Made some further improvements to the minimum world reputation calculations to ensure that youngsters don't ask for too much money too soon.

- Changed the code responsible for updating player world reputations so that it can be called from anywhere - then hooked this into the latest database update along with team squad average reputation recalculation and team repuation recalculation to ensure that all team reputations will be set to where they should be. This will eliminate any external factors and so users should see their team reputation changing according to their on pitch performances and off field purchases (rather than code changes behind the scenes).

- updated freetype font library.

- news items about teams qualifying for the next stage of a competition are now sent as low priority ("Other Recent") to the other members of the competition to avoid excessive inbox clutter.

Bug Fixes

---------

- fixed bug where bookmarks were messed up and clicking on a bookmark took you to the wrong page.

- fixed server errror when clicking a competition link in the team honours panel.

- fixed bug where some alerts would stay on screen for too long.

- fixed bug where sometimes setting injury insurance caused a server error. This occurs when the bank is vetoing the insurance.

Comments

--------

- Going live on Friday 23rd November.

[Mihai]

- 27 noiembrie: beta 0.62 build 901

New Features

------------

- implemented a list of user "achievements" that the user can unlock (for only a cosmetic benefit!) when reaching various benchmarks in the game

Changes

-------

- made the file select dialog look a bit nicer, and made it possible to go to my documents/my pictures and desktop easily (still work in progress here)

- scrollwheel doesn't scroll the match timeline any more

Bug Fixes

---------

- added support for dragging players directly from the player list onto the formation to pick/swap/arrange players in the formation before a match

- added support for dragging the player shirt number column as an additional way to swap/pick players in the team.

- team form records were not being processed properly at all

- the team match records screen code wasn't showing much (or sometimes any) of the data that the server sent it

- some records were processed properly but no changes were commited to the database except where the random chance that j and k in a nested loop were the same value (these were being used in the wrong order)

- Deleted all existing match, player stat and team form records. Transfer and wage records remain intact because they were working in the first place

Comments

--------

- Going live on the evening of Tuesday 27th of November

[Mihai]

- 4 decembrie: beta 0.63 build 916

New Features

------------

- None!

Changes

-------

- enabled achievements tab on the client

- added hyper-links to the sub titles for various pages throughout the game, to make it easier to browse to players' teams, competitions' creators etc.

- made a small fix to the morale code to ensure that player morale moves around a little more, especially for extremely active teams - this is only a short term measure though, as morale will be overhauled more in the near future

- enhanced the user achievements news items by converting references to scores to actual links to the matches

- fixed issue where hovering over a faded colour bar (e.g. a sub title) shouldn't change the mouse pointer to a hand indicating it can be clicked on, if clicking on it does nothing

- now correctly displays the leg number on the match page next to the competition description (Semi Final, First Leg) etc which is shown on the panel frame to the top right.

- it now shows the leg number, where applicable, on the match clip page

- improvements to the file select dialog

- hyperlinked where it displays the competition/stage/round/group etc. on the match page and match clip page in the panel frame title.

- some changes to player progression as per FM08

- some graphical changes

- switched to a slightly more extended highlight mode for the match, as an experiment

- made some changes to the way the number of youth players in the game world is balanced to ensure that youngsters trickle into the game world steadily rather than all flooding in before a period where no new players are created.

- list box now handles scrollwheel when popup isn't present

- list box now handles scrollwheel when popup is present

- list box now (attempts to) scroll to the current selection when you first pop it up

- list box now handles more than 1 character of keyboard input (typing "Sco" will move to "Scotland" etc)

- when an object loses mouse focus then we redraw it so that it loses it's "selected" graphical state (if this exists)

- in second leg matches it now displays the aggregate score beneath the clock, and for matches that went to penalties (and during the shootout) it displays the penalty score here too.

Match v656

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- Stopped players being tripped by opponents but carrying on running with the ball regardless

- Stopped defenders running towards own goal after ball has long gone out for goal kick

- AI teams slightly more careful with width and depth when using defensive mentality

- Improved home advantage slightly in FML

- Improved tracking of opposition players by their opposite number in formations

- Stopped commentary referring to easy chances being missed when they clearly arent easy

- Improved accuracy of lunges at loose ball towards goal

- Stopped ridiculously innacurate near post headers at goal from corners

- Made defensive line drop back to correct place quicker when defending

- Reduced keeper effectiveness slightly

- Made players look to get ball on best foot more often when bearing down on goal

- Improved likelyhood of player trying to round keeper when one on one with him

- Improved positioning of player marking wingers who have ball

- Improved defender reaction to rebounds

- Made players make pass back more often when under pressure facing own goal

- Tweaked number of long shots

- Stopped counter attack flag being set too easily when team wins ball - which had impact on effects of defensive team mentality

- Fixed keepers changing ends too slowly at extra time half time

- Fixed anomalies in clip rating scores in FML

Match v657

----------

- Fix to marking of ball player that should improve defending potential one on one situations

- Jumping influence over ariel duel winner increased

Bug Fixes

---------

- fixed problem of being unable to load skin.bin (aye right)

- fixed a bug in which common names were not being correctly displayed in the user achievements news items

- fix to stop users being logged out if they sign out and back in again

- fixed "zombie" chat screen left after switching to multi windowed mode

- fixed gameworld records defaulting to competitive senior, should be overall

- fixed bug where the directory menu on the file select dialog would stop working

- fixed bug where the user contacts menu was unnecessarily recreated

- fixed bug where gameworld-wide player stats records weren't being calculated properly

- disabled achievements checking for youth matches

- fixed bugs where it didn't display penalty shootout information on the match overview or match report

- fixed career stats panel showing headers and tackles using the passes value instead of the correct one

- fixed spelling error in player injury recovery news item

- fixed typo in the word "decidedly", when telling the user how uncool it is to restart

Comments

--------

- Going live on the morning of Tuesday 4th of December

[Mihai]

- 12 decembrie: beta 0.64 build 925

Improvements

------------

- Removed "Save Match" option from match page for a past match as with the removal of the "View Match" option from the start page there was nowhere to load it anyway. Also made the "Save PKM" option available only to moderators and these two changes free up the space on the top of the panel frame for details of the match competition, round etc.

- Improved the appearance and functionality of the match timeline, adding icons for the key events (goals, bookings, etc) and making these clickable so that you can jump straight to the highlight concerned.

- Finished the implementation of referees; the game will now search for an appropriate referee for a game, based on the reputation of the competition and the referee strictness required and will assign the referee accordingly.

- Made some changes and fixes that result in the match experience being much more verbose in terms of the amount of commentary displayed along the bottom of the pitch while watching the action.

- Added a flashing 'R' to the match pitch to indicate more clearly when it is a replay that is being viewed and not live action.

- Disabled "Matches" tab on the match page as it's probably excessive to have this on the match page now that the match page already has plenty of tabs such as the new "Head To Head" one.

- It now displays on the match overview section the word 'pen' next to the goal time if the goal in question was a penalty.

- Added a new 'Head To Head' tab to the match page which, apart from showing the head to head information shown in the original match challenge popup also lists both team line-ups and their current tactics which are also updated as the match progresses which is intended to help managers understand more clearly why a match is proceeding in a certain way.

- Removed slight injuries from the match overview as they are unnecessary.

- When a player has scored more than one goal or own goal, his name is only displayed once on the match overview panel and his goals are all listed in brackets after his name, rather than have one line per goal he scored.

- Now displays aggregate/first leg scores on the fixtures/results lists. Note; for existing GWs you have to choose the 'Default' view to enable this feature.

- Hyperlinked the subtitles on the match and match clip page, making it possible to either click on the large team name, or parts of the text below where applicable.

- Now displays half time, normal time and extra time half time scores on the match overview as appropriate to show what the score was at these points of the match.

- When starting again, it now resets a team's reputation and a bunch of other stuff it should have reset. Also deletes their financial transactions to date as they are effectively starting from a clean state.

- Added a profanity filter which is on by default and will filter out any banned words that might otherwise appear in the game. This can be disabled via the preferences if you don't mind being sworn at. Note: all text is stored in it's 'raw' form regardless of this filter, so FAO anyone continuing to use bad language should remember that Big Brother is watching you Wink

Bug Fixes

---------

- Fixed problems with the ranking system where points were rarely, if ever, decaying over time. A team's ranking points will now begin to decay if they don't play a match for three days unless they have set their status to 'on holiday'. Provided a team plays one match every 3 days their points won't fall. The exception to this is if a user has had their account decativated, their points begin to fall immediately, even if their AI has played matches on their behalf.

- When hovering over an image that is clickable, mouse pointer now changes, as it does for a button.

- Fixed a bug which could cause some technical attributes to not take into account the region the player is from when initialising values for regens e.g. South American players should get a boost to their technical stats but this wasn't always happening.

- Fixed issue where unviewed match clips weren't being deleted after a set time period, resulting in the DB getting larger and larger and slower and slower and the eyes of those monitoring it getting wider and wider.

- fixed bug where the system incorrectly kept track of the number of teams who had entered a federation competition if some of those teams left the federation before the competition started, which meant the competition could then never be started.

- fixed bug where when setting up competition prize money it incorrectly displayed an error message stating that the allocation didn't add up to 100% when in actual fact it did.

- Fixed a bug in which the overall_scored_in_a_row, overall_conceded_in_a_row, home_scored_in_a_row, home_conceded_in_a_row, away_scored_in_a_row and away_conceded_in_a_row were not being updated correctly meaning that the 'Scoring Streak' achievements could be unlocked incorrectly.

- Fixed a bug in which the 'Last Gasp' achievement would be unlocked if a team scored a goal in extra time in a match.

- Fixed a typo in one of the morale news items.

- Fixed a bug in which it was possible to unlock 'Underdog' achievements by playing against unranked sides.

- Fixed a bug in the achievements code that was preventing the % shots on target from being correctly calculated (and so preventing the 'Accuracy' achievements from being unlocked.)

- Fixed bug in highlighting the correct team name in a list of match clips.

- Fixed a bug in which achievements related to competition wins or prize money payouts were not saved correctly, meaning they could be unlocked multiple times.

- Fixed issue in which the 'Goalscoring Chances' achievements would have misleading text, for example saying 'over 30 shots' when it should have said 'at least 30 shots'.

- Fixed bug where own goal scorers were not shown in the right place on the match overview of the match page and were incorrectly displayed on the match report.

- Fixed bugs in what it displays in the match chat during a penalty shootout.

- Fixed bug on the match clip page where 'Senior Friendly' (or other friendlies) was set up as a page link which when clicked on would produce a server error.

Stuff We've Made Worse

----------------------

- To be discovered!

Comments

--------

- Going live on Wednesday 12th of December, thanks to everyone contributing to testing and helping us improve FML.

[Mihai]

- 19 decembrie: beta 0.65 build 947

Improvements

------------

- Financial projection page now has 'Competition AI Penalties' showing current projections for any prize money penalties based on AI stats for the competition, which was previously part of the outgoing column in 'Competition Prize Money' which was confusing.

- Finances are now fully active before confirming your squad as by not having it this way was causing problems if a person restarted and then had various income/outgoings continuing to occur

- Total wages are less than 50% of the minimum daily income (100k), you only receive enough to cover wages. This is to prevent people signing up with a very weak squad deliberately to accumulate cash which was being bad for the game world and unrealistic.

- It now issues a news item when competition guaranteed minimum prize money is paid out or is about to be paid via installments, and also issues a news item when a team receives any additional competition performance-related prize money. This in intended to help people keep track of what is going on in this area of the game.

- 'Required Ranking' option on the match maker replaced by 'Required Reputation' and made it so that if this is left blank it considers only teams within + or - one star of your team.

- Centralized the reputation "stars" in the filter popup when filtering for certain team reputations.

- Modified the federation finder so that the weekday 'mornings', 'afternoons' and 'evenings' options are split into 'early' and 'late' counterparts to give more flexibility and hopefully more success in finding an appropriate federation.

- In the news item describing which team has the exclusive AI rights for a match it now gives the reason; either they made more challenges for the match or were online for 30 minutes, during the final play time. This is intended to help people understand why they have gained or lost the AI rights for a match.

- Tweaks to the length of time certain match commentary events are displayed; for multi-part events, sometimes the first part was displayed for too short a time in relation to the second part, with this change this is no longer the case and both parts can be more easily read.

- Added user and team descriptions to injury and suspension news items.

- Renamed the match "Head To Head" tab to "Line Ups" and changed it to include the line ups, formations and mini chat and live action panels instead of the head to head information. Subsequently renamed 'Past Meetings' to 'Head To Head' and combined it with the head to head panel.

- When displaying the icons on the match highlight timeline, it now ensures that they never overlap each other and new icons are always moved to the immediate right of the last one, if necessary.

- When the match clock reaches the end of the period, it stays on 45 minutes, 90 minutes etc. rather than count into injury time which is better and more realistic and adds to the tension and also has the useful side effect of fixing the bug in the match highlight timeline where the highlights and icons would jump around when going into injury time, looking messy.

- Tweaked the match highlights so that a highlight ends quicker after the key event has been displayed rather than carry on and potentially merge with the next highlight and thus drag things on a bit for the impatient amongst us (step forward Calvg )

- It now displays the name of each player on the mini formations shown on the match head-to-head tab to make it clearer who is playing where.

- Now displays a team's reputation, using the 1-5 star system, in their page and the match title bars.

- adjusted the match speeds as follows; normal - now 80% of real time, instead of 90%, medium - now 65% of real time, instead of 70%, fast - remains at 50% of real time. In particular, the intention is to see if this leads to a medium speed that is more widely acceptable.

- changed the way it "auto submits" teams on behalf of users so that this is now under server-side control

- Renamed most games without failing to score to most games scored in a row.

- Team records panel now uses single row height when there is no navigation panel next to it.

- Profanity filter just uses stars instead of different characters in place of the filtered word.

- Removed processing of transfer sell on into records.

- Removed yellow highlighting from player history career stats panel as it was confusing and interfering with the blue highlighting of rows in this panel that allow switching of the stats displayed in the panel below.

- When there are too many tabs along the top of a page for them to all fit, the tabs now proportionally reduce in size so that they fit instead of disappearing into a black hole at the edge of the window.

- Removed reference to the 'transfer list' in the morale news items and instead simply referred to a transfer auction which is the terminology used elsewhere.

- I quote "Added myself to credits" - welcome to the FML development team, David

Match v657

----------

- Fix to marking of ball player that should improve defending potential one on one situations

- Jumping influence over ariel duel winner increased

Match v658

----------

- Stopped advantage being played in favour of player on floor

- Jumping influence over arial duel winner tweaked

- Improved marking of player with ball

- Tweaked player marking

- Made players stay with opponent for longer when set piece is taken rather than move to default tactical position

- Made subs more or less likely for AI teams depending on team performance vs expected result

- Fixed bug where injured player sometimes wasnt replaced by AI

- Fixed bug where 10 man AI teams would stick with uneven formation

- Adjusted offside rule to follow new "interfering with play" rules more strictly

- Improved midfielder tracking of opposite opponents by taking more account of forward or back arrows

- Reduced instances of midfielders being caught in possession after dallying on ball in own half

- Stopped both fullbacks bombing forward when not set to make forward runs often

- Made defensive line drop back a bit quicker to desired position when defending

- Improved interception AI a bit

- Made team mate stand with free kick taker at indirect free kick in shooting position

- Improved player reactions to loose balls in area

- Reduced number of long shots from players

- Made type of corner delivery vary more when set to "mixed"

Bug Fixes

---------

- Fixed bug where wage records got processed twice.

- rebuilt all transfer records (lost some wage records though due to bug which should be fixed now!)

- Fixed a rare crash when editing text.

- Fixed issue where some blank match commentary events were displayed on the screen both beneath the pitch and in the match report.

- Fixed bug where ball stopped abruptly when it went off the pitch, sometimes frozen in mid air and seemingly defying the effects of gravity. The more sensible approach is to hide it when it reaches these boundaries.

- Fixed bug where last line of commentary in the match as the players trudge off was often being shown for only a very short length of time.

- Fixed bug where if a player was sent off his 'circle' still remained on the tactics panels, despite being unclickable, draggable etc.

- Fixed bug in team head to head panel where senior/youth meetings section was incorrect and not showing a true reflection of past meetings between the teams.

- Fixed issue where viewing a past match that pre-dated the last rollout only loaded some of the highlight frames, due to the differing amount of highlights generated with the new code.

- Fixed bug where if a player's first goal in a match was a penalty, any subsequence goals he scored would also be listed as penalties on the match overview.

- Fixed bug where missed (but not saved) penalties weren't displayed properly in the match report, and not at all on the match overview.

- Fixed issue where highlights weren't ending as quickly as they could due to a line of commentary being visible on the screen.

- Fixed issue where blocks of players only get 'unlocked' when a team confirms their squad but these blocks were reserved when the user signs up. The problem was that if a user signed-up but for some reason never confirmed their squad, these players would remain locked forever.

- Fixed problem where skins on preferences page weren't listed properly.

- Fixed problem where home page was listed twice on the starting page dropdown menu.

- Fixed problem where invalid date text was shown on form records text.

- Removed 5 character minimum for a contact note, to fix server error.

- Fixed a bug in which teams were receiving 21% interest on the money in their bank accounts, and paying 105% on their debts. This has been fixed to 3% and 15% respectively.

- Fixed bug where unread discussions mail counts weren't recalculated properly when deleted.

Comments

--------

- Expected to go live on Wednesday 19th December.

[Mihai]

Mini-update: beta 0.66 build 952

Match v659 (fresh from the oven)

- Tweaked AI manager expectation of result a bit

- Tweaked AI use of run with ball player slider

- Tweaked AI use of forward run player slider

- Improved individual player tracking of their opposite number in formation

- Made decisive players less likely to get caught in possession

- Made defensive line movement work somewhere in between versions 655 and 658

- Improved marking at corner kicks

- Made central defenders more likely to shift and cover full backs when required

- Stopped defenders backing too far off opponents who are running at defence with ball

- Stopped corners being sent to edge of area when no team mate standing there

- Reduced through balls that are too easy for covering defenders to intercept

- Made teams defend slightly wider so as to cover danger from wings better

Bug Fixes

- Fixed bug where it failed to remember your application settings, sign-in name/password etc.

Comments

- Expected to go live on Friday 21st December.

[Mihai]

Cel mai important update a fost 0.67 - 14.01.2008

New Features

- Added two new tabs to the Finances section of your team; 'Future Profit % In' and 'Future Profit % Out' list all players whose future profit % you have a vested in interest in, i.e. players from whom you stand to gain or lose if they are sold.

- Implemented the 'Swap Position', 'Distribute To' and 'Specific' man marking player tactical instructions and the general opposition player-specific tactical instructions allowing managers to set player-specific Tight Marking, Closing Down, Tackling and Show Onto Foot instructions as is possible in FM.

- Added some useful presets to the squad overview list so you can see at a glance General, Contract, Auction, Private Bid and Selection information and added FM-esque 'Technical', 'Physical', etc. presets so that comparisons can be made between players without having to manually turn on each column (although full customization of the exact columns displayed is still possible.)

- Added a popup allowing more precise control over what exactly the 'Do Not Disturb' user status means, providing check-boxes for individually blocking (or not) private chat requests, friendly match challenges and competition match challenges.

- Enhanced 'future payment' system so that these are now stored in the same format as past transactions and added a tab so that they can be viewed on the team or federation finances page. This will typically list entries for incoming media money and any competition prize money or player transfer fee installments.

- replaced the 'Bids' tab on the player page with a new 'Contract' tab containing detailed contract, auction and bid information as appropriate, including the ability to highlight one of multiple bids and get the information on that bid.

- Enhanced the loan system so that when placing a player on the loan list you now specify the loan period and loan wage percentage required and added columns that display this information on the loan list tab. Also made it so that a team who matches these requirements can sign a player on an 'Instant Loan'. The option to make a different bid (duration or wage contribution) still exists as an alternative.

- Enhanced the 'Transfers' tab on the team page to include sub sections for 'For Sale / Loan', 'Bids Made' and 'Bids Received' and removed these sections from the player search page where they previously resided. This re-organization serves two purposes; 1) allows viewing of individual team 'For Sale' and 'For Loan' lists so folk can share these in the chat rooms etc via pasting a link, 2) nicely ties together all the transfer activity for a particular team.

- Replaced the team 'Honours' and 'Competitions' with a new panel style that combines the information from both these and presents it in a more user-friendly format. Also added a mini-version of this panel on a team's home page (replacing the mini results panel) so that when clicking on a team name it's easy to see what federation competitions they have either won or been runner-up in, further strengthening the perceived significance of federation competitions.

- Changed the sub tabs beneath the 'Competitions' (team page) and 'Votes' (user page) so that they have a more useful split of the different competitions and votes. For example, on the team page there is a section 'Current' under 'Competitions' which lists all competitions the team is involved in. This is basically competitions that they have entered that have either not started, or have started but not finished.

- Implemented a system which allows a user's skill in certain areas to progress over time. This should help to level the playing field by allowing users to make up for their or their team's shortcomings by training skills in related areas to help them out. For example if a team is suffering a lot of injuries then the user could specialise in Physiotherapy skills which would reduce the length of the injuries. If a user was finding it hard spotting talented young players then they may wish to spend time training Scouting skills which will not only allow them to view more players but also allow them to get a better idea of their potential. If the user would like to become more effective at training their players then they can specialise in Coaching skills and so on.

Match v661

- Activated missing tactical instructions in FML matches

- Made playing out of position affect player performance more

- Tweaked default marking player for defenders when formations arent "like for like"

- Further tweak to defender marking positioning against off ball opponents

- Made specific man marking tighter to chosen opponent when ball not near goal

- Made full backs tuck in more when defending against narrow formations

- Tweaked keepers up a tiny bit

- Fixed some legal tactic arrows being disabled in v660

- Made players less likely to prioritise holding defensive line over marking player in dangerous area

Match v660

- Improved defender positioning when marking opponents on or off ball

- Stopped bug that saw AI teams set counter attacking option to on in FML regardless of original human tactic setting

- Tweaked effect of red cards on motivation of both teams

- Tweaked effect of scoreline on motivation of both teams

- Stopped full backs defaulting to marking strikers when up against narrow formations

- Reduced defenders getting dragged out of formation too easily against one striker formations

- Tactics that have players with arrows pointing on top of other players ( or other player's runs ) now have those arrows nulled by the match engine

Improvements

- Tidied up the filter popups somewhat, replacing the "-" and "+" buttons with "Del" and "Add" and fixing the bug that was causing these buttons to have their top 'chopped off'.

- Implemented FM-style field name abbreviations for player attributes "Fin" for "Finishing" etc so that when many attribute columns are displayed it's still possible to understand what information the columns are representing.

- On the mini formation position selector where you click on a position so you can then adjust instructions for it, made it display the small player name for the currently selected position (if someone is selected) and also made the 'faded' non-selected positions a little bit easier to see

- Added sub menus for 'Contract', 'Auction', 'Private Bid' and 'Transfer to the player filter popup, and moved all attributes into one menu as they are in FM. Also moved these sub menus to the top of the list box.

- Added sub menus for team stats and form to the user/team filter popup in a similar vein to the player filter popup.

- For the key actions on a player (making bids, accepting bids, releasing from contract etc.) it now displays a secondary confirmation popup to give the manager a final change to confirm their action. Previously this was only the case when bidding excessively high or accepting an excessively low bid but it now asks for confirmation for all such bids. This is intended to reduce the number of mistakes made, especially by newly signed-up managers.

- Changed the 'Marking' and 'Tight Marking' entries on the team and player instructions panels to use list boxes instead of toggle buttons in preparation for the 'Marking' player instruction being able to specify an opposition player.

- Made tabs truncate more and squash together less when running out of space to fit all the tabs in as this looks better.

- Modified table class so that when a scrollbar is created it creates a blank heading column to the far right so that everything lines up correctly instead of the heading columns becoming out of sync with the contents of the table below.

- Shows last five player form matches on the player lists now, instead of the last ten which was a bit overwhelming and used up too much space.

- No longer displays auto re-bid amount and contract length on the player lists for your players if auto renewal options are turned off. This further emphasises that it is turned off.

- Shortened the text for the auto renew type ("Auto Extend" etc) so it fits more nicely into the available space.

- Changed the word 'Default' to 'General' where there are multiple preset views on a table, so it's clearer what it means.

- Combined the player stats and form table views in the player lists which is possible as a result of some of the above space-saving.

- Added menu separators to the table view menu where there are distinct sections of different preset views.

- Renamed 'Technical Attributes' to 'Goalkeeping Attributes' on player attributes panel for goalkeepers a la FM.

- Prevented being able to challenge a team to a friendly who hasn't confirmed their squad yet, but allow competition challenges as otherwise it could be an exploit.

- Tweaked the news items sent after a match which detail a team's progress in a league or knockout stage so that if it's sent to a user who left the match to their AI, the subject line places more emphasis on the result and the team you played ("Silivrispor defeated by Cardiff Rangers") than on what the result means ("Silivrispor bottom of Premier League") so that it's more obvious in your inbox which matches were played by your AI and which were news items sent after a match you had actively been involved in.

- Now displays a warning that a user's status is 'Away' when you attempt to start a private chat with them and displays a similar warning when challenging a user to a match under the same circumstances.

- Fixed bug where in an auction for a player who is on trial, it gave an advantage to the team he was on trial to in that if they won the auction they would only have to pay the amount of the second highest bid + 1 whereas other bidding teams would have to pay the full amount they had bid. A trial is now considered like a free-agent auction.

- Now displays a greyed-out version of the player contract 'lock' icons for youth players, to indicate who is set to 'Auto Extend' and who could be set to 'Auto Extend' without using up one of the 5 main locks.

- When a result is listed that was played vs the opposition AI then it now greys out aswell as makes semi-transparent the opposition team kit to make it clearer.

- In the match opponents menu, sorted the entries so that the matches needing resolving soonest are at the top.

- Added a variety of missing player contract-related columns to the player list; things like being able to see injury insurance across your whole squad, future profit % etc.

- Fixed irregular vertical size of input text boxes inside popups, in comparison to list boxes and other controls.

- Changed the leave feedback popup so that it no longers has both a simple and extended view and instead forces the user to choose one of the feedback categories. Also did some general tidying up of this popup including removing the "Ok" rating as leaving neither positive or negative feedback is somewhat meaningless.

- Enhanced places where a number has to be typed onto the screen (making bids, filtering etc) and introduced an FM-style menu and +/- buttons to increase or decrease the number to make it more user-friendly, while still retaining the means to edit these fields using the keyboard if so desired.

- Fixed bug when selecting 'Or' rules in a filter popup where if one of the rules involved a text box then it displayed as a black blob.

- Default contracts for players signed in an initial squad are now eight weeks instead of four.

- Fixed incorrect interest paid out to teams on both credit and debts. Rather than be based on a real-life year, as it was, it needs to be based on a GW year, i.e. in the case of 3,000,000 at a rate of 3%, this should bring in 90,000 during the course of one game year, not one real-life year.

- Fixed a minor problem in the table customize view popup where the top of "Repeat Columns" control at the bottom was partially cut-off.

- Cleared down all custom views, filters for the various player, team lists etc as with some recent changes to the available fields for viewing and filtering, some issues may have arisen if this wasn't done.

- Fixed bug where if a secondary 'confirm' popup was displayed and then cancelled, the original popup's button 'enabled' state wasn't always correctly restored and buttons were left enabled that shouldn't be, leading to actions being possible that would produce an error.

- Fixed a small typo in one of the player progression news items.

- Improved the mail and news page so that the page is split with two panels side by side as this allows more news items/messages to be displayed on one page, and there is still ample room to display the contents to the right.

- Fixed some of the overlapping text in some places in the game, e.g. user, team, competition profile pages and the news/mail page.

- Fixed ugly overwriting of text when a title is too long, both on the match page and throughout the game in general.

- Improved where it displays the time on the match report run-down, making it more obvious that you can click on one of these entries and jump straight to that part of the action.

- Fixed bug where an unnecessary unread mail notification would come in when you deleted all mailing list mails.

- Fixed crash when viewing large scoring matches, or match clips inside large scoring matches.

- Improved the way it handles text that is too long in the game by making it add "..." to indicate the text has been abbreviated.

- Player ages are now only updated when the season starts, so a player's age during the season remains constant. This solves the problem of having to try and guess when a player's age might change which is especially important when it comes to knowing who is eligible for youth competition matches.

- It now issues a drop-down alert when the season starts and when the season ends.

- Made some further tweaks to the match highlight length. Enabled some code in the match engine that is smarter about giving match events an importance rating which results in the number of highlights being reduced when there are loads. Subsequently lengthened individual highlights so that they don't cut off so abruptly instead waiting until the general rule of thumb of the ball going out of play - but with the proviso that if there is too much fannying about going on, then the highlight can still be ended before the ball goes out.

- Changed it so that it doesn't consider a match as having been played by the AI if the manager was on holiday at the time, i.e. just treats it as if he had participated and reflects this in his team's AI stats accordingly.

- Fixed bug where saved window size for the main window was ignored in favour of 1024*768.

- Moved 'add_ons" folder into it's correct location inside the application data folder for FML.

- Fixed a bug which was preventing as many youth players being created as there should have been.

- Fixed issue where a substitute goalkeeper (or other player wearing a shirt other than no.1) who was placed in goal, didn't wear the goalkeeper's jersey.

- Prevented any profit being made from any competitions as all this "feature" seems to do is create bad feeling. Now, the prize fund must be at least the total of the entry fees.

- Fixed missing manager and team names on player suspension news items, and fixed user nationalities being round the wrong way in the same news items.

- Fixed bug with injury news items where user and team descriptions did not display correctly.

- Fixed inconsistency where WBL/R would sometimes be referred to as DML/R.

- Fixed bug where a 7-0 defeat was ordered above a 9-2 defeat in the biggest defeat records list.

- In cup ties where neither side can submit a team, make sure that we still pick a winner.

- Fixed server crash due to too many table columns being selected for viewing.

[Mihai]

Noul build v.0.68, de pe 24.01.2008

New features

- Added concept of moderator notes

- Added public and private user and player notes (available to everyone)

- Implemented warning and carding system which allows moderators the ability to issue warnings, yellow and red cards. Red cards result in a suspension from the game.

- Added an ignore user function which greys the user out of chat panels and blocks them from requesting private chats

- Added moderator ability to mute a user. Currently a user is muted for 5 mins.

- Moderators can now review chat logs when dealing with incidents and reports of abuse.

Improvements

Skills

- Changed the way coaching skills impact on player progression which should not only serve to make them less effective but also make them work in a more realistic manner

- Tidied up the skill description items by adding full stops at the end of every sentence - I did get an English GCSE honest!

- Fixed a bug in which players unavailable to be signed (as the user doesn't have enough Scouting knowledge to have uncovered them) could not be viewed on the user's shortlist

- Fixed a bug in which it was possible for a user to learn a skill much quicker than should have been the case if they had been idle for some time beforehand

- Fixed a bug in which the user available skills panel could report that a skill was in progress when in fact it was a skill from a different category that was in progress

- Fixed a bug in which when viewing another team's squad a user would 'inherit' that user's skills, meaning they could in some cases view Potential when they shouldn't be able to etc

- Fixed a bug in which switching from training a skill to training another skill in a different category (i.e. on a different tab) would always display that the user was training level 1 of the skill, regardless of the level they were actually working towards

- Fixed a bug in which new skills could only be learned if the skill was dropped directly onto a blank part of the grid - new skills can now be learned by dropping the new skill anywhere on the panel

- Funked up the user_skills_panel by adding *s next to the level and also made the available skills panel wider (shrinking the description panel) to allow enough space for the icons

- Fixed a bug in which the skills panel table would default to the bottom, it now shows the skills at the top first

- Fixed a bug in which clicking on another user's skills would cause the client to crash

- Made some changes which will mean that a user can no longer see what skill another user is currently training

- Fixed a bug in which if the selected user was currently learning a skill their skill profile would always miss one skill off the list of known skills. This isn't actually an issue now anyway as you can no longer see the skill another user is currently working on, but should we ever bring it back it will work properly!

- Made a change so that clicking on known skills on your skills panel shows a description in the same way as clicking on available skills does

- Nerfed the influence skill so it doesn't take such a ludicrously long time to train any more

- Added an extra check when processing the learning of a new skill which should hopefully eliminate the server error some people have been experiencing

- Added code to ensure that the last_progression_update field is only updated when the user progression is in fact updated - this should serve as an extra check to ensure that user skill progression cannot freeze

Match Engine

v663

- Fixed v662 bug where players stop in their tracks and let ball player go

- Tweaked AI mentality slider ( applies to FM 8.0.2 only )

- Tweaked effect of consistency attribute a little ( a few more off days )

- Fixed bug where defenders may commit foul in area when ball nowhere near

- Fixed v662 bug where player marking ball player sometimes drops off suddenly and illogically

- Tried to eradicate more instances of players stopping on ball and being caught in possession

- Reduced ability of players to change direction with ball at high speed

- Stopped team all out attack setting overriding goalie mentality and sending him forward for corners late on

- Made players move towards ball that is theirs for the taking ( broken in 661 )

- Fixed bug where player set to man mark specific player would drop way deeper than his defensive line

- Made attacking teams a little more adventurous with passing in safe areas

- Reduced instances of refs giving fouls mistakenly when player clearly gets the ball

- Tweaked keeper ratings down a little

v662

- Fixed injury time being extended too easily

- Improved positioning for free kicks around the corner of opponents area

- Spread attacking players around a bit more at corners

- Improved marking at corners to account more for "mark tall/small player" instruction

- improved descriptions for some competition stage / round combinations; basically when there is only one knockout round in a stage, then no need to display '1st Round' etc. as it is meaningless, and the stage name itself should be sufficient to describe the round. Also made it so that in stages that *do* have multiple rounds, it displays things like "Last 16" on all occasions where there are 2, 4, 8, 16 etc teams remaining, rather than sometimes display '1st Round', '2nd Round'.

- Improved position of player standing with taker at free kicks

- Fixed instance of match not kicking off after goal

- Fixed bug where player is fouled but carries on running and then play gets pulled back with no advantage played

- Tweaked AI mentality slider ( applies to FM 8.0.2 only )

- Tweaked assistant manager team talk suggestions ( FM 8.0.2 only )

- Improved AI use of back arrows for one defensive midfielder in 442 formation ( FM 8.0.2 only )

- Improved AI use of opposition specific instructions ( FM 8.0.2 only )

- Improved default player to mark for each player according to formations

- Fixed bug where referee can "teleport" after a goal

- Reworked effect of "creative freedom" slider on player flair attribute

- Made AI teams sub very tired players earlier

- Fixed run past opponent being counted and reported in comms when defender too far away to think about a challenge

- Fixed some instances of players running ball out of play needlessly

- Fixed some instances of player being clean through and shooting first time unneccesarily

- Improved direction of shot when player lunges in on ball close in

- Made full backs stay back more often depending on forward run slider or team mentality slider being very defensive

- Stopped marginal offsides being called when ball has been touched since original pass was made

- Fixed bug where keeper doesnt react properly to slow or still ball and lets attackers in

- Stopped too many players going for same ball when corner swung into far post

- Improved positioning of closing down player when he finds himself being caught wrong side of opponent

- When keeper way out of position defenders now close down ball player immediately

- Fixed bug where keeper picks up ball then clears wildly as if under lots of pressure

- Toned down finishing a tad when chance not clear cut

- Improved trajectory of free kicks on goal

- Toned down length of keeper kicks from hand

- Made players play more back passes when under pressure

- Improved near post flick on from corners/crosses

General

- Removed user date of birth from display in both the user lists and the user profile pages

- Fixed bug where it displayed the wrong player name after "Defensive Instructions" on the player instructions panel on the tactics page.

- all tactical sliders that previously had positions from between 0 and 20 are now just 5-position sliders as it's not really logical for a manager to give a level of precision for, say, closing down, covering 20 or so different settings. As part of this, ensured each of the 5 positions has it's own accompanying text, rather than be able to move a slider and it still say, for example, passing 'Short' for several slider positions.

- Fixed up player attribute processing so that player attributes shouldn't shoot up (or down) to unrealistic values

- Fixed a bug in which players were being processed twice per progression cycle, rather than once - causing players to progress too quickly

- Fixed bug where the shirt number and condition columns on the match player stats panel was too small to display double-digit shirt numbers and 100% condition when the window was at it's minimum supported size (1024 x 768)

- on the team honours panel as displayed on the team's 'Profile' tab, changed it to display senior honours only, not youth honours as the intention for this section is really to portrary which teams are the properly successful ones in the GW. The youth honours, and unofficial history, is all still available on the 'History' tab, but this section on the 'Profile' tab should be reserved for senior official honours only.

- Fixed bug where it wasn't deducting loan wage contributions being received in a team's financial projection if they had loaned a player out and the loaning team was paying a contribution. Since loans can no longer be ended early, and thus the money is now guaranteed, this can now be factored into the projection.

- Fixed a bug in which setting refereeing strictness to lenient in a competition would in fact make the referees stricter, and vice versa! In the process also improved the way referees deviate from their natural tendencies according to competition strictness guidelines

- player contracts are now described as either '1 season' or '2 season' instead of either 4 or 8 weeks, and have been amended so that all new contracts (including auto extends and auto rebids) will now expire during the off-season. Existing contracts will expire as normal until a new contract is signed and aligned to expire during the off season. The intention is to promote transfer activity in particular during the off season, to help compensate for lack of activity caused by lack of federation matches.

- Added code to fix any regens incorrectly created with weak left and right feet

- Added icons to the achievements panel

- Fixed bug where setting the various Do Not Disturb options wasn't properly picked up by the server when it received this request and thus had no effect. Nice touch.

- improved the system for allowing matches to be played against the AI by delaying switching into this 24 hour state for a particular match until the start of the play time that follows the 'final' play time when the match was meant to be played. To accomodate this without lengthening competitions, competitions now schedule their fixtures so that there is a spare play time at the end that can be used for the last of these AI matches.

- Added a morale calculation to the confirm squad request so that team morale is calculated form the moment a user confirms their squad

- Fixed the wording in the 'Accuracy' achievements news items

- Added code to ensure that reputation drops for free agents don't kick in until the player has been a free agent for at least 30 game days

- Added code to gradually drop a player's reputation the longer they are a free agent - this will cause some players who have been unsigned for a long time (for example Buffon) to drop their wage demands

- Fixed a bug in which regens could be weak with both feet

- after a competition match the system re-evaluates all match resolution dates for the competition ensuring an even spread is maintained from now until the end of the stage. This should have the effect of putting back resolution dates for some matches as a user plays matches that weren't scheduled for auto resolution until some time later on, and hopefully having a positive effect on the number of matches that get played 'live'.

- when signing in it brings up the following popups sometimes; 1) if it's their first ever sign-in then the 'Customize Team' wizard. 2) if they haven't picked and confirmed a squad, then the 'Auto Select Squad' wizard. 3) if they have confirmed their squad, but not yet joined a federation then the 'Federation Finder' wizard. This is intended to prompt folk into doing the thing that needs doing, emphasize it's importance etc.

- when entering a competition, it now allows managers with more than one squad to specify the squad they want to allocate to that competition as part of the entering competition step, rather than rely on them explicitly choosing the squad later. This was leading to problems where the system would auto submit an unsuitable squad for a match if the manager wasn't present, leading to a 0-3 forfeit.

- further tweaked match highlights so that it doesn't cut things off so abruptly. This lengthens the highlights overall by a little, but this is not a bad thing as some have commented that highlights are too brief in the current build.

- Added option to see a player's last season stats (will need this code to be active for a season before this takes effect.)

- in the various places throughout the game where it includes a group letter in a sentence e.g. "UFFA Cup Group Stage Group B" then made it so that clicking on this goes to the correct group, rather than defaulting to Group A all the time.

- Added the season number to the bottom left corner of the screen to indicate what season the GW is currently in. Also modified federation competitions so that when a fed competition is created or restarted, it ensures it's 'season' is correctly aligned with the game world season.

- Fixed bug where winning a competition stage (but not the overall competition) was treated as a competition won by the achievements system.

- Fixed bug where no team descriptions were being displayed in suspension news items regarding extended bans for players

- produced a more compact team stats panel, in a similar vein to the player stats panel changes, and similarly combined senior and youth stats on one page, and added tabs for 'This Season' and 'Last Season' so last season's stats can be easily viewed.

- removed the database locking taking place when a match highlight ends and is stored in the DB to try and reduce those long pauses during the match. Locking for this shouldn't be necessary as nothing else should conflict with the uploading of a highlight.

- Fixed incorrect row height for rows on the past meetings table between two teams, when viewed from the team - squad page.

- Fixed scrolling issue on team competition history panel, where the top row wasn't scrolling

- Fixed discrepancy between AF shown on a player's profile and that listed in the player list panel; both should show the 'estimated' value, non-affected by user skills

- replaced player stats panel with a more compact and useful one which shows less information (for example only showing the Passes Completed % and not the individual number of passes and the number that were completed.). With the new size, arranged both Senior and Youth stats on the page.

- Used this new compact panel as part of a player history overhaul which involved ripping out the old 'year by year' storage system and using a 'season-by-season' one instead.

- Fixed bug where the manager's description was a link to the manager's profile. Also corrected the ordering of these on the injury news item.

- Fixed a bug in process_players_following_transfer in which leadership was not being correctly converted to the 1-100 range

- Fixed server error if you reject a transfer bid when the other user has already withdrawn it whilst you are on the reject dialog

- Fixed a bug where the wrong icon would show up on the player feedback history panel

- when a server error happens, all modal dialogs are removed from the screen (this prevents a crash in some circumstances).

- Added code that will make the time remaining on the user skills panel count down rather than staying static

- Fixed server error if you made a bid for < £10 with a deposit of £1, where the client would let you choose an installment option that didn't equal the total balance still to be paid

- Tidied up the player list panel so that if a user doesn't have any scouting skills the panel will not make space for a player potential rating icon (as there will never be one to display)

- Added user and team descriptions to all transfer related news items

- Added missing player name to the title for 'Defensive Instructions' section of the player instructions panel

- replace player and team 'rolling' stats with season-based stats as this fits more logically into the current season-based model used in the game. Stats are reset at the start of each season, so the 'off season' is considered to be the back-end of the previous season since occasionally competitions overlap into this period, with the exception of the build-up to season 1 which is considered *part* of season 1.

- Fixed a bug on the calendar panel where a scrollbar appeared when it wasn't meant to

- receivers now place players in auction with a starting bid of half of their acquisition fee rather than £10k, and set an instant buy to equal their full acquisition fee

- Added user and team descriptions for some finance, world rankings and transfer news items

[Mihai]

Build v.0.69 lansat pe 29.01.2008

Improvements

Skills

- Fixed a bug in which following training the Influence skill it was still listed as available to learn at the same level

- Made further changes to the way the coaching skills impact on player progression so it now plays a significant, but not excessive role in player development

Interface and usability

- ensured all sub menus have an arrow on the menu item that leads to them, indicating there is a menu to be opened.

- improved buttons used on the various wizards throughout the game so that 1) the confirmation button is replaced by the "Next" button until the last step. 2) the "Back" button is hidden on the first step. This should make things a little more intuitive and clean.

- changed everywhere to refer to people in FML as the more appropriate "Managers" rather than the somewhat sterile "Users".

- on the menu bar, split "Manager" menu into two, so there is now a "Manager" and a "Team" menu containing either personal or team-related options. Also added 'Edit Profile...' options to these menus as another way to edit stuff. Renamed the 'Game' menu to 'FM Live' to avoid confusing the word 'Game' with 'Match'. Moved contents of 'Support' menu into this 'FM Live' menu to make space for extra team menu. As a result of this, these menus now have a more evenly balanced number of options in them, and a more logical split.- in all places where the word 'Submit' was given to a button, replaced this with words that have more meaning in the relevant context. e.g. if you are leaving someone feedback then call the button "Leave Feedback", likewise "Create Competition", "Create Vote" etc. This is more user-friendly than just having the bland and ambiguous "Submit".

- changed the auto match maker popup to be a button which either displays "Find Opponent" or "Cancel Finder" accordingly, rather than be a popup that displays these two options but always one of them greyed-out which is silly UI design.

- renamed the "Auto Match Maker" to the "Opponent Finder" and the associated option is now "Find Opponent...". Improved the text in the popups associated with using this functionality.

- renamed the "Auto Squad Selector" to the "Squad Selector" and the associated option is now "Select Squad...". Improved the text in the popups associated with using this functionality.

- renamed the option "Auto-Select Team" to just "Select Team..." and tidied up associated messages.

- Added some text at the bottom of the player list on the tactics page during the match hinting at how to make substitutions. As a result of this, removed mini pitch from tactics page during match as with the above change plus the increased number of subs now available in the game this was making it impossible to see your entire squad without a scrollbar.

- added some table lower titles to some of the tables that didn't have them to make it more obvious what the table contains. For example on the game world page, it now says "World Rankings" to make it clear what the table to the top right of the page means. Generally this approach has been adopted in those places where multiple tables or sections meant it wasn't obvious what the table contained, particularly if it was empty.

- removed goal nets from the pitch that is used as a backdrop to the kit selection part of the preferences popup, as they serve no purpose and shouldn't be there.

General

- Fixed a bug in which the 'Show Me the Money' achievement news items would show a strange character before the threshold value

- Added some extra variety to progression news items to allow for the situation whereby a more senior player trains extremely well

- Made some major improvements to the way player progression works - this should stop youngsters from becoming superstars overnight, particularly if they are not playing regular first team football.

- Made changes to the way attributes improve so we shouldn't see so many extremely technically gifted youngsters any more

- Fixed bug where some transfer news items regarding players leaving at the end of their contract where being categorised as injury news items

- Added User and Team descriptions for competition news items

- fixed bug where the client incorrectly allowed a user to click on the 'Start Competition' button despite there being no media deal in place for the federation to allow the competition to run. The server would trap this error anyway and reject it, but it's better to block these types of thing at the client level first to save on unnecessary server communication.

[Mihai]

Build v.0.70 lansat pe 3 februarie 2008

Improvements

Moderation

- Fixed bug in Ignore Manager function which prevented you from stopping ignoring managers

- Mute function now displays a note to say that the user has been muted.

Skills

- Tidied up the skill descriptions to hopefully make them more meaningful

- Added a 'maximum level' field to the user skills panel to display the highest level a skill can be trained to

- Made a small change to the scouting fee panel so you are now no longer able to 'confirm' your scouting fee if it hasn't actually changed from what it was set to before

- Fixed a bug in which dropping a skill anywhere on the skills page would cause that skill to be learned - it will now only begin learning the skill if it is dropped on the 'Known Skills' part of the page

- Fixed a bug in which the server would get confused if the user requested to learn the same skill twice (which was possible if the game was laggy and didn't update the client fast enough after the initial request)

Achievements

- Added some new achievement icons

- Changed the achievements panel so only unlocked achievements are displayed

- Fixed a bug in which the 'Show Me the Money' achievement news items would show a strange character before the threshold value

- Fixed a bug in which the achievement 'Goal Difference VIII' would be displayed as 'Goal Difference VII'

- Fixed a bug in which achievements would be processed even if the match was abandoned, potentially unlocking achievements such as 'Goal Difference' etc incorrectly. Achievements are now not processed if the match is abandoned

Interface and usability

- made some further improvements to the text in the confirmation popups associated with finding a match opponent using the opponent finder.

- made it so that it alternates the "Wants Match" text with the text "Searching" in the title bar when in this mode, to further emphasize that the system is searching for a match.

- made preferences popup the same size as other similar popups of it's ilk (wizards etc), to maintain consistency

The matchday experience

- changed tactical sliders to be 7-way now instead of 5-way to see if this is a compromise that people are happy with and amended the text associated with each of the slider positions.

General

- improved the way matches that are "left in limbo" when both the controlling managers leave the match are resolved. Instead of the current method of playing a small fraction of the match every minute until it completes (potentially some hours later, and possibly slowing down competition progress in the meantime) it now does nothing for 15 minutes and then plays the match through in one instant. If neither manager has returned for 15 minutes, this is a reasonable course of action.

- added some prize money restrictions to all competitions (including federation ones.). Now, the maximum prize money percentage cannot exceed 2 x the minimum for competitions of 10 teams or under, and cannot exceed 3 x the minimum for competitions of between 11 and 32 teams. All larger (33 teams +) competitions are unrestricted. Added displaying of the maximum prize money on the competition profile page. This new restriction will take effect for new or edited competitions only; existing competitions simply restarted will function as previously.

- Do not allow users to sign in more than once on different machines

- Made a change to the player regeneration code to every now and again allow a newly created player to 'burst onto the scene' by giving them a higher than normal CA.

- improved the news item generated when a team joins a federation by stating when the season starts/started and reassuring the user that if they joined before the start then an organizer will place them in a competition in time for the kick-off. Also added a list of the federation organizers to this news item so that contacting a federation organizer with a query at this point is more easily done.

- enhanced the system for deciding AI match rights by extending to 5 days the period of time when rejecting challenges/logging in during a play time is significant in deciding who is awarded the rights to. Changed the phrase "Resolution Date" to "AI Date" so it conveys it's true meaning better (the date at which AI playing rights are awarded) and amended various bits of text throughout the game to suit the new system.

- Added code to balance the spread of players when creating a new game world - this will eliminate the problem in current game world in which there are far too many players from Brazil for example, and so should in turn help to balance the scouting skills by ensuring a more even spread of players across the globe

- removed 'Commentary Only' and '2D Animation' options from the match page as they are pointless and don't change the speed of the match in any case.

- Profanity filter now does not filter player names

- Fixed up the code responsible for dropping the reputation of players who have been free agents for a long time so that it will now drop players realistically rather than dropping Buffon from a world famous player to an absolute nobody overnight!

- Changed the processing of player data so that player ability changes are deleted on the minutely update cycle rather than only during the midnight update - this spreads out the deletes and should eliminate the midnight lock-up we have been experiencing

- added user and team descriptions to player happiness news items

- added user and team descriptions to player retirement news items

- added more user and team descriptions to federation news items

- added some recovery code so that in the event of a match failing to process for some reason, the teams involved are not eternally left in the match and unable to do anything but play the same game over and over again with the same failure at the end.

[Mihai]

Build v.0.71 lansat pe 7/2/2008

Improvements

Moderation

- Users are now logged off if they are inactive for more than 20 minutes.

- moderators can appoint/unappoint federation organisers from the federations page (i.e. only if that user is already a member of that federation)

Skills

- Enhanced the user skills description panel to give more detailed information about the scouting skills, listing each country that is covered by the relevant skill

- Rearranged the user skills page and added a new panel which will display the skill you are currently working on at all times (and prompt you to learn a new skill if you aren't currently learning one)

Achievements

- Fixed a bug in which the 'Well Travelled' achievements would under some circumstances miscalculate the number of different opponents a team had faced

Interface and usability

- Fixed a bug in which potential ability wouldn't show up correctly for players on loan by adding a new style set

- added a small but significant feature whereby when a user signs-in who has recently signed up, recently joined a federation or has been offline for at least a week, the text in the chat room is amended to indicate this. The intention is to prompt existing managers to help new users or members as they see them sign-in. The 'recently signed-in' feature is only enabled after a GW has been running for two weeks as prior to this most users will be new. The period to determine 'recentness' is 7 days.

- enhanced the in-game mail received after signing-up with a series of 10 steps to get going in the game world, so that there is something in-game for newcomers to refer to.

- made it display the manager status icons next to all entries in the status menu accessible to the top left of the page to further reinforce each icon's meaning when browsing around the game.

The matchday experience

- fixed incorrect position reported for an opposition player on the title bar of the opposition player instructions panel; it was incorrectly displaying the position from the current team's formation instead.

Match v664

- Tweaked AI mentality slider ( applies to FM 8.0.2 only )

- Fixed illogical assistant teamtalk suggestions to individual players ( applies to FM 8.0.2 only )

- Reduced slightly effect of scoreline on match ratings

- Tightened up marking at both set pieces and open play

- Also improved defensive tracking of lone strikers

- Made players more likely to close down when opponents try to play keep ball

- Improved execution of short free kicks to player standing next to taker

- Stopped players taking unrealistic first time shots when ball played in to them fast and in same direction of goal

- Reduced ability of players to "stop dead" when picking up ball at pace

- Tweaked defensive line slightly

- Attackers without high mentality setting now defend a bit deeper

- Tweaked on ball decision making to try to reduce players caught in possession too easily

- Reduced pointless long shots on weaker foot

- Fixed over-long keeper kicks

- Made players help out team-mate on ball more readily

- Fixed players leaving post for no reason as corner swung in

- Reduced condition drop slightly ( aimed mainly at midfielders )

- Increased hit on attributes caused by low condition

- Fixed rare score divergence between platforms

- Improved goalie position when narrowing the angle on attacker

- Made AI ( FM 8.0.2 only ) use man marking on players who dominate possession

Installer

- Football Manager Live now appears in add/remove programs

General

- made some changes in an attempt to reduce database contention when performing news or mail related actions; hopefully this will help speed up the process reading news and mail items.

- Changed multiple sign in from the same account to kick off the one signed in when the second client logs in.

- deactivated teams are now automatically removed from a federation as soon as the competitions that they are involved in have finished

- Added news items concerning the re-signing of a contracted player

- fixed bug where it incorrectly announced the start of a competition play time that was a week into the future, because it fell on the same week day.

- fixed flawed logic which could (and did) result in the season number not incrementing at the start of the new season. Also fixed bug where when a season started or ended it incorrectly sent a season number of zero to the client causing an alert to appear on the screen saying something like "Season 0 has ended" or something.

- Made some changes to the way starting attributes are set for regens, this should spread the attributes better instead of biasing too highly towards technical attributes

- Fixed bug where team name and team description displayed in the wrong order on competition news items regarding a team entering a users competition

- fixed being unable to type some characters into the user contact group name box

- added some more user and team descriptions to competition news items that had previously been missed

- added user and team descriptions for more player happiness new items

- added user and team descriptions to news items regarding comments made after a match

- in the places where play times, prize money or filter condition 'rows' are edited, instead of presenting the user with an empty list box which doesn't make it clear what they have to do next it now populates the list box with the word "Add Play Time" or "Add Condition" etc. so it's obvious what to do. Clicking on the list box will then bring up the options and from then it should be plain sailing (pipe)

- hopefully closed the remaining competition prize money/entry fee exploits by preventing any competition of less than 5 teams from taking an entry fee. In particular, this will put in an end to those dastardly three-team affairs where the creator was creaming off money from unsuspecting newcomers and generally helping to perpetuate a mercenary atmosphere in the game World.

- fixed bug in recently added prize money restriction system where it only worked properly if every possible position in a stage had a prize money entry; if any positions were left with no prize money, the system incorrectly calculated what the maximum prize money for the whole competition could be and thus the check failed.

[Mihai]

Build v.0.72 lansat pe 11/2/08 @ 3.30pm

Moderation

- Added creation of Moderator Room on game world creation.

Skills

- Fixed a bug in which the time remaining on the current skill in the 'Current Skill:' box wouldn't always be correct (as it didn't take into account learning skills)

Feedback

- Made some fixes to the user feedback system meaning it should now work more correctly, this update unfortunately involves all existing feedback being wiped - fresh start for everyone!

Interface and usability

- added a new tab to the mail and news page; "Official". This will contain undeleteable official in-game mails that SI may need to send to all users from time-to-time. Currently, the only mail that will appear here will be the initial welcome mail sent upon signing up for new managers only, but later it may become an option for a moderator to send mails to this inbox under certain limited circumstances. The intention is that if something of vital importance needs to be mailed to managers then this is the portal for it.

- improved the usability of the various filter popups by replacing the green "+" button for adding a new filter condition with a full "Add" menu that brings up the list of conditions in the same way FM does it so that it takes less clicks and mouse movements to set up more filter conditions.

- fixed bug where when a news item was received the incorrect news item count was sent to the user so it didn't show up on their client lower bar area.

- Fixed a bug in the 'leave feedback' dialog box in which the comment field was not big enough for scrollbars to be drawn properly and so typing more text than would fit into the box would cause the client to crash

- restored missing "AI Date" column from default fixture list views.

The matchday experience

- Fixed a minor bug in the match client in which a seperator row would incorrectly appear above the speed selection options

Match v665

- Fixed bug where keeper can fail to control back pass and slice clearance to opponent for no logical reason

- Fixed bug where defender can run ball into own goal instead of making clearance

- Increased no of fouls, cards and penalties back towards v663 level

- Fixed bug where marking at set pieces is too static and sometimes loose

- Fixed corner taker ignoring instructions on where to place corners

- Fixed freakishly long clearances from deep positions

- Reduced careless passes across own area at lower levels

- Stopped defenders stepping out to close down midfielder prematurely

General

- fixed bug where if, after extended server downtime, we'd gone beyond a player's contract expiry date the system released the player instead of applying any auto extend or auto rebid options.

- modified the system that 'expires' news items that become irrelevant (for example, a news item about a vetoed rebid was auto removed when the player's contract expired shortly afterwards) so that this only happens for news items that are not high priority. High priority news items (like the preceding example) should always be reported to the user.

- fixed bug where two team descriptions were being displayed in a competition news item

- Fixed bug where by the news item claimed the user has bidding to retain a player in a wage auction when in fact the player is at another team

[Mihai]

v.0.73 lansat pe 21.02.2008

Skills

- Enhanced the user progression system so it now does updates based on the number of seconds since the last update rather than the number of minutes - this extra level of precision should address the issues of 'lost time' which were causing skills to take longer than they should to learn

- Fixed bug where the user's coaching skill was not being used for players on loan to them.

- Enhanced the Physio skills descriptions by adding each injury covered by the skill to the description

Achievements

- Added more achievement icons

- Enhanced the user achievements panel to show the date the achievement was unlocked by the user

- Fixed a bug in which the goalscorer achievement would sometimes be unlocked too early because it was taking into account goals scored in youth matches as well as senior matches

- The sorting for achievements didn't work properly, and due to the way the data is sent from the server it is a big job to get it to work properly, so it has been dropped altogether!

- Enhanced the user achievements system to track when achievements are unlocked, this allows us to generate stats in a number of new areas. The first use of this extra data is to now display on the achievements panel how many other users have unlocked each skill the user in question has unlocked

Feedback

- Fixed a bug in which, when leaving feedback on a user the confirmation dialog would incorrectly tell you that you had left feedback on yourself

Interface, usability and optimisations

- added custom icon for when receiving official SI mail to your inbox, and also made the mail count flash when a mail is received to further emphasize it's importance.

- when a new manager signs up to the game, they now get an official "Do's and Don'ts" mail to their inbox, outlining some key rules, regulations and conventions of FML

- on the team page 'History' tab, split the competition histories via two sub-tabs into 'Senior Competitions' and 'Youth Competitions' so they can be viewed separately and it's less cluttered for teams who have played a lot in both classifications.

- added a new 'Past Rankings' tab to the team page 'History' tab and added two graphs displaying the progress of world and youth rankings over time. This change is dedicated to GW4s Darcy R.

- it now draws a semi-transparent version of the green icon next to a fixture in a fixture list that is within the '5 days to AI rights' time zone, but not currently within a competition play time.

- Replaced transaction list shown on the team financial overview tab with a line graph plotting the team's cash over the next 28 days.

- Dropped down the refresh rate of panels that are marked for refresh due to a user status change, this will cut down on the number of unnecessary screen redraw events which can contribute to a lag effect

- Made an optimisation to the way the chat and contacts menu works on the bottom of the screen, in order to ensure they are not recreated until the user actually clicks on them (previously this caused unnecessary screen redrawing)

- Low priority match clips (chances, saves, general rubbish) are now only saved for 24 hours in order to save on server space. High priority clips (goals, missed pens, red cards) are still retained for 28 days.

- Removed some unnecessary confirmation popups appearing and annoying new users when they do simple things like select or unselect players or add/remove/move them to different squads etc.

- When listing a team's federation honours, made it so that it groups competitions in the same federation together instead of randomly scattering them about for teams who have played in more than one federation

- Fixed a crash when going to the opposition instructions page (via the game remembering your previous tab) when the opponent hasn't yet submitted his team

- Fixed corrupted '-' button on the filter (and other) popup

The matchday experience

- Enhanced the appearance of the tactics formation by displaying properly coloured shirts instead of circles for each player, and improving the clarity of the text displaying player names underneath each shirt. This change is dedicated to Scott Harwood.

- condition less than 60 is now displayed in red next to a player in the match player stats panel, less than 80 is displayed in orange, otherwise it's green, to provide a more visual indication of which of your useless gits are currently flagging.

- Made some further tweaks to the tactics sliders! Reverted to the FM-esque text, and now they operate with 9 different settings to give a little more control. But not too much (cig)

- Replaced team kit graphics with the nicer FM ones, which includes some new styles, and made the necessary changes throughout the code to ensure there is space to display the relevant shirt. On the head-to-head panel, replaced the team badges with a large version of their shirt.

General

- the option to cancel a transfer auction and keep the player is no longer available once another team has made a bid in the auction. Since making a bid is binding (you cannot withdraw) so should placing the player in the auction in the first place, to keep things fair and stop that annoying situation where you bid on a player in an auction and the seller changes his mind, or worse still, sneaks off and sells to someone else privately instead, leaving you with no player, and perhaps no time to make an alternative plan!

- fixed bug regarding wrong user description, nationality and team description in cup knockout stages news items

- changed disconnection timeout to 2 hours, up from 20 minutes which is too short and annoying people, including me.

- Fixed bug where player progression news items were not taking into account a player that is on loan.

- Made a change to the morale code to ensure the only the absolutely most professional, loyal and ambitious of players will complain if a star player who is also a direct rival to his first team place, is sold.

- if a team does not have an overall ranking position (e.g. it's too early, or they have dropped off due to inactivity) then they no longer receive any more money than the minimum of their wage bill and 100k. This replaces the previous rule that prevented a team getting more than their wage bill if it was under 50k.

- Fixed a bug in which it was possible for a player to request to be transfer listed and then withdraw the request almost imemdiately afterwards, players will now be more certain when they want to leave and will wait longer before changing their mind

- Enhanced the transfer request news items to provide the user with more information about why the player wants to leave the team

- Added some extra checks when a player recovers from being unhappy that his team is underachieving to cover the possibility that the team may no longer be losing matches because they are no longer playing matches whatsoever!

- fixed bug where it could potentially set a team's official league competition to be a youth classified one if it had the highest league level.

- Team financial projections now more accurately predict the timing of guaranteed prize money; previously they projected this as arriving immediately, it's not projected to arrive at the time the stage is expected to end. This is significant in ensuring the new projection graph is accurate in it's depiction of cash over the next 28 days.

- Disabled all prize money restrictions except those preventing competitions of less than 10 teams from taking an entry fee as this should prevent the most exploitative competitions while not making setting up prize money a pain the arse for everyone else.

- Added a 'Projected Points' column to the league tables which uses the average points per match so far for a team to estimate it's final points total. Also enabled sorting of the columns in the league table, so that people can sort by this new column and get an alternative view of the league table.

- String fix for when 'confirm actions' is enabled, removed "you are the current highest bidder" when making a wage auction bid because this is not true and not meant to be visible anyway!

- When starting a competition, made the system preview when the AI dates are going to be scheduled for the first stage, to give the organizer an indication as to whether the play time and resolution settings they have chosen are suitable.

- Fixed bug where team form records didn't get updated if you were on a streak that equalled the bottom streak in your top 25, then went one more to beat this, it didn't realise that you already had equalled the record and treated the new streak as only 1 game long

- Added "drawn in a row" record

- Fixed a bug in which the 'Legendary' description flag was not being retained correctly for all players

- Fixed a bug in which morale and happiness were not correctly updated when a player was transfer listed

- Added some new manager list views to help federation organizers keep track of teams in their federation; firstly the federation 'Members' -> 'Assignments' sub-tab has been replaced by three sub-tabs; 'League Assignments', 'Unassigned To League' and 'Other Assignments' so that it's easier to see which teams have and haven't been assigned to leagues (competitions with a 'league level' set). Secondly, the competition "Members' tab now has an additional sub-tab 'Non Entrants' that appears for federation competitions and lists those teams in the federation who are not entered into the competition.

- Fixed bug where when bidding on a player in a transfer or wage auction resulted simply in pushing someone's maximum bid up (without actually outbidding them) then the bank didn't veto properly, so it was possible to use this to force someone to pay more for a player despite ultimately being unable to put your money where your mouth is yourself.

- Fixed bug where transfer records were not processed for players transferred via accepting a private bid

- Changed it so that federation reputations are displayed using the standard 1-5 stars as per team reputations instead of a number from 1-200, and added these stars on the federation list, federation profile panel and the federation title bars.

- Removed the diagonal player progression arrows from the 'Show Progression' attributes panel as they were giving a misleading picture of player progression

- On the team finances 'Overview' tab, made it display a more compact and digestible version of the financial projection, and added a rough guide to the team's transfer budget. Also added a list of the recent transactions at the bottom of the page to provide an all-in-one at-a-glance can-I-find-another-cliche look at your finances. Also added a 'Full Projection' tab which displays the full financial projection information that was previously on the overview so that this breakdown of information is still available to those who want it.

- Fixed some bugs in the match scheduler where it would keep on pushing back resolution dates when it shouldn't, and wouldn't push them back when it should! Bit of a nightmare really.

- Fixed a problem where the same player could have more than 1 entry for highest wage records (after a contract renewal, for example)

- Federation reputations are now updated daily, and not just at the point at which a media deal is negotiated, so that the reputation can be seen to fluctuate as teams join, leave, rise, fall etc.

- When a user signs-up they are now automatically joined to any super federations (UFFA etc) that exist, to prevent this being a manual step that has to be done later on either by the user themselves or the federation organizer.

- Fixed glitch where when a UFFA organizer granted membership to another team the news item phrased it as the user having been granted membership rather than team. Everywhere else it is the team that is considered to be a member of a federation.

[Mihai]

v.07.74 lansat pe 28.02.2008

Interface, usability and optimisations

- it's now possible to negotiate a private transfer or loan bid, by adjusting the bid, installments etc. to those which you would be willing to accept. The original bidder can then choose to accept the negotiated terms and the transfer will go through, or they can make a new bid.

- when placing a player in a transfer auction, you can now specify a future profit percentage which any team buying the player will have to adhere to if they sell the player for a profit in the future. This is intended as one small step towards encouraging the use of transfer auctions to sell players rather than always inviting private bids.

- added a transfer budget calculator to the financial information panel, which allows a fee or wage to be selected and it calculates the corresponding wage or fee that is allowable within your budget. This should help people understand what they can afford, i.e. if they pay a fee of X then how much in wages can they afford and vice versa.

- implemented a new 'Progression' tab on the player page which allows selecting of up to three attributes for tracking over the player's career via a line graph. The player's ability (1-20) in the chosen attribute is plotted against the player's age.

- colour-coded the player attributes on the player profile and player instructions pages, using blue, green, orange and red to indicate very good, good, ok and weak abilities accordingly.

- the line-ups formations now display using the team kits instead of player circles, to be consistent with the new way of doing things.

The matchday experience

- Made some improvements to the validation of player positions to ensure that a player who has AMR or AML set who isn't a striker will always have a midfield position set as well

v667

- Improved code that assigns default player to mark to each player, to account for assymetric formation combinations

- Fixed bug where centre halves sometimes man mark wide players who have arrows to striking positions

- Toned down accuracy of corners, and all fast paced passes/shots

- Fixed marking bug at corners, that could leave a player free and another double marked

- Stopped players set to man mark specific opponent from leaving their defensive position as soon as a corner is taken

- Tried to discourage centre halves coming out to close down midfielders, or deep strikers, when a team mate could still take responsibility

- Fixed clear foul not being given occasionally just after shot

- Made strikers try to get into box quicker when ball in wide areas

- Improved movement of strikers coming back from offside positions

- Tweaked movement off ball....more strikers going into channels, less bunching around player with ball

- Slight reduction in through balls

- Slightly less easily intercepted crosses

- Encouraged shots from around edge of box when little else on

- Made it harder to head the ball at goal when not really facing it

- Reduced incidences of goalies letting in too many backpasses

- Stopped obscure incidences of goalies taking goal kick and running to join outfield players

- Made AI managers ( FM only ) a little more cautious early doors

- Fixed obscure match ball assert

- Fixed full debug error in match_player.cpp

- Added some extra match stat counts for FML

General

- Fixed bug on competition news items where a team name was being replaced with a team description.

- Fixed a bug in which regens would sometimes be created with names that don't match their nationality, and in some cases first and second names that don't even match each other (Darren Zhang from Argentina anyone!?) Also added code to ensure that in cases where no suitable name can be found for a player from a particular country it will now attempt to find a name for someone from that area of the world, and use that

- fixed bug where a player's stats for his old team still got updated whilst he played for his new team

- Fixed a bug in which players would sometimes complain about too many rivals in the team when they shouldn't (for example if they were very young and shouldn't be speaking out so much)

- Fixed a bug in which once they had complained about there being too many rival players in a team a player would quite often get over the problem very quickly without the manager actually doing anything to address his fears

- improved the way multiple private bids are handled by making it possible to reject them invidually by selecting them from a sub menu, rather than only be able to reject them all (this option is still retained however.)

- fixed bug where it gave an error if you tried to select a number of subtitutes in a competition that was not five.

- Added the concept of a contract extension date to a player so the morale processing now knows not only when a player first signed for a team but also when they last extended their contract. This allows us to implement some more logical behaviour, for example, players now won't complain if they have just extended their contract and so on.

- Removed player description updates from some areas where they were inappropriate, and also ensured that the remaining places where player descriptions were updated have all the data they need to correctly set up the description

- Fixed bug in Goal Frenzy achievement description where "at least" was repeated

- Fixed bug regarding incorrect user and team descriptions in knockout competiton news items

- fixed glitch where the scheduler could sometimes "schedule" a fixture into the past due to the way it cunningly (or not so) tries to balance teams playing a roughly equal amount of games per play time slot, and sometimes due to match rearrangements a slot from the past would become freed up for a future fixture!

[Mihai]

bulid v.0.75 lansat pe 05.03.2008

Moderation

- added three new moderator privileges 'Manage Federations', 'Manage Competitions' and 'Manage Votes' which, when set, give the moderator full control over all federations, competitions and votes in the GW exactly as if they were the founder or creator of the federation, competition or vote.

- Users remain muted when they log out then back in

Interface, usability and optimisations

- prevented someone who has signed up in the past week from being forced to vote in a compulsory vote as this is not very "new user friendly" especially if they signed up a matter of minutes ago and are confronted with a vote for something they don't yet understand

- fixed bug where page 2 on the competition histories table was always blank

- competition histories are now sorted in descending season order, most recent winners listed firs

- if a user enters a value higher than the maximum value for a numeric text box, then the number is automatically changed to the maximum value when the focus moves away from this editbox. This prevents a server error entering a future profit percentage above 100%, for example

- added the ability to use the cursor up/down and page up/down keys to navigate through news items and mail messages.

- changed the attribute colour coding scheme so that it uses levels of blue transparency instead of the colours red, orange, green and blue. This is the FM way, and works better and should also be more suited to people with a degree of colour blindness.

- the customize team wizard now no longer asks a new user, a matter of minutes after signing up, the somewhat baffling question of what pitch size and grass style they would like which is, with hindsight, a ridiculously obscure thing to be asking at such an early stage. Instead this functionality is kept inside the preferences for later possible tweaking and as "something to discover".

- renamed 'Select Squad" to "Auto Select Squad" and "Select Team" to "Auto Select Team" to emphasize that this is the shortcut 'auto' mode. This is after seeing some confusion from new users where they clicked on "Select Team" thinking this was some kind of confirmation of the team they had manually selected. "Auto" is the key here, I should never have removed it (cig)

- all popups involving a question/confirmation and also entering some text now have the appropriate new icon in the popup title bar

- the flashing 'Setup Team" menu at the top now flashes in a way such that the text is visible for 80% of the time, and not for 20% of the time, rather than 50/50.

- the federation finder now always finds a federation rather than gives up if it can't find a "good enough" one, which is better.

- fixed bug where it was no longer showing player progression arrows for your own players

- private competitions and votes are no longer listed on the "Not Started" type sub tabs, so that someone looking for a competition knows that these are all public ones they can enter. Private ones will be accessible from the "Invited' sub tab, if the user has been invited, so there is no need to show these in a place where users are just trying to find a public competition to join.

- on some of the transfer related popups where there was a 'Comment' field both on the main popup and then the secondary "are you sure?" popup, this now exists only on the latter. This is to streamline the interface and not overload the user in the original popup, and also this may give more prominence to the latter version of this field that appears on the 'are you sure?" popup.

Achievements

- Added code to check how many achievements are unlocked following a match, and if it is more than 5 it will lump them together into one summary news item instead of listing them all seperately

The matchday experience

- fixed some dubious chicanery in the code which meant that hints were defined but not working on the tactics buttons (the icons down the right side of the screen on the tactics page). I knew I'd put hints in here ages ago! I blame Graeme McKelly.

- the "Submit Team" button is now visible from all tabs on the match page, and in the case of multiple squads existing it will use the one assigned to the competition one, or if there isn't one assigned, the first (default) squad. This is in response to the confusion new users find in seeing this button disabled while browsing the match page, while already having earlier picked their team.

- removed mini pitch and chat from match stats tab, so it can fit everything on without a scrollbar

- match page now displays the "Tactics & Subs" tab in red when an injury occurs, if you are not already on this tab, as a hint to do something about it.

- action buttons on the match page are now given a more prominent state when the user needs to do something important such as confirm their tactics, or kick off the match etc.- Fixed a bug in which female referees are referred to as 'he' in match commentary

General

- Made some improvements to the regen creation code to ensure that no absolutely awful regens are created, cluttering up the place. Also enhanced the wonderkid code so that in very rare circumstances a superstar regen can be created

- Made a change to the way a player's maximum reputation is calculated meaning it is now more tolerant of high reputations for lower CA players

- added a system that means that all federation competitions, once created or edited, must now be approved by a different host of the competition (normally another federation organizer) before they can be started via a new "Approve Competition..." option. This is intended to safeguard against mistakes being made (or maverick federation organizers!)

- added the option to 'Unapprove Competition...' so that you can change your mind, or withdraw your approval at a later stage and this prevent the competition from starting.

- federation media deals are now negotiated 24 hours before the season starts, and in addition, teams are blocked from joining or leaving federations in the 24 hours before and after the season starts. This is all intended to give some breathing space to federation organizers and try and cut down on the panic problems causes by late federation switchers. Also amended the season start reminder news items to explain this is now the case.

- fixed MacOS problem where the incorrect window style was used when a window was recreated (i.e. switching to/from full screen)

- added the option "Make Response Public" when negotiating or rejecting private transfer or loan bids. If this is ticked then a news item is sent to any teams who have shortlisted the player and in the case of big-name players a news item sent to their federation or to the GW as a whole as is already the case when transfers go through. This allows managers to perhaps reject or negotiate a bid and by making it public try and trigger bids from other teams, or just be a bit of a git about it Smile

- fixed bug in GW creation where some DB fields weren't being set in the game_worlds table and this lead to player and team stats in the first pre-season not being stored properly.

- fixed bug where it could incorrectly project a lower daily income ifyou had only partially picked your initial squad at the time of the first midnight update for your team's finances.

- Fixed bug in which a progression news item could in theory be produced even if the player didn't have a manager, which could, in theory crash the server

- Fixed a bug in which under some circumstances regens would be created without an update index set, meaning that they would be skipped during player progression (this would only really happen with new game worlds)

- Added code to initialise player declared nation and third nationalities where appropriate

[Mihai]

v.0.76 lansat pe 12.03.2008

Moderation

- Updated moderation access rights dialog to display rights granted but greyed out for default access levels

- Stopped user being kicked out in logon when automatic sign in is set.

Interface, usability and optimisations

- Updated default skin graphics

- revamped the process of a new user setting up their team in the game, via the addition of a setup assistant and more text guidance on the associated wizards- ratings for players during a match are now shown in the form 6.8, 7.2 etc. i.e. with one decimal place. This is experimental to see what people think of this increased level of accuracy.

- fixed bug where second and third-level items on a list box couldn't be selected properly in some cases - e.g. on the player search filters changing from "Team" "Is" to "Contract Expires" didn't really select "Contract Expires" as the option, it just changed text on the (collapsed) list box. This meant that the user could sometimes get locked in a dialog (the buttons weren't enabled) and couldn't get out

- Added a "Mark All As Read..." button In The Panel Frame Of The News And Mail Page.

- delete mail/news popups and mark as read mail/news popups both now remember the ticked settings from the last time they were used, and this information, as with all else, is lobbed up to the server on sign-out.

- Implemented proper filtering when filtering players by their reputation

- when a button or label is 'disabled', make it use reduced transparency instead of the 'chiseled' effect, as the latter makes it hard to read, while the former retains readability while still making it clear it is disabled.

- Added 'Reputation' as a viewable player field, displayed as a textual description with accompanying stars (in the same way as the team description is displayed) on the player list panel

- Made some further improvements to player wage calculations - smoothing out the differences between positions (which should help to ease the situation in which currently defenders seem to be asking for too little money.) Also softened the amount by which wage demands drop with age a little further

- fixed bug where you couldn't enter competition prize money above 1,000,000....aint much use for federation competitions!

The matchday experience

- improved the code that decides to highlight the "Tactics & Subs" tab in red when there is an injury to one of your players by firstly making it also do this for red cards too, and secondly making it clear this state down if you kick off the match (e.g. the second half), resume the match, or confirm some pending tactical changes as if you do this then you are effectively indicating that you do not care.

General

- fixed bug where player stats history displayed as "Youth Stats" for the senior history category (the lower panel at the bottom of the page)

- Fixed a bug which could cause morale processing to fail in some cases

- Made some improvements to player wage calculations - smoothing out the differences between positions (which should help to ease the situation in which currently defenders seem to be asking for too little money.) Also softened the amount by which wage demands drop with age a little further

- made some grammatical tidy-ups to the news item announcing the impending start of the new season

- fixed server (SQL) error which occurred when trying to invite a team to a competition if you had already been invited yourself, which is a strange state of affairs but one that the server should have handled but didn't.

- Made some changes to the auto-select code to deal with the fact that wages are now lower than they used to be for lower rep players (auto-select wasn't finding any matching players as they were all too cheap!)

- when a button or label is 'disabled', make it use reduced transparency instead of the 'chiseled' effect, as the latter makes it hard to read, while the former retains readability while still making it clear it is disabled.

[Mihai]

Build v.0.77 - lansat pe 19.03.2008

Moderation

- Updated moderation access rights dialog to display rights granted but greyed out for default access levels

- Stopped user being kicked out in logon when automatic sign in is set.

Interface, usability and optimisations

- Updated default skin graphics

- revamped the process of a new user setting up their team in the game, via the addition of a setup assistant and more text guidance on the associated wizards- ratings for players during a match are now shown in the form 6.8, 7.2 etc. i.e. with one decimal place. This is experimental to see what people think of this increased level of accuracy.

- fixed bug where second and third-level items on a list box couldn't be selected properly in some cases - e.g. on the player search filters changing from "Team" "Is" to "Contract Expires" didn't really select "Contract Expires" as the option, it just changed text on the (collapsed) list box. This meant that the user could sometimes get locked in a dialog (the buttons weren't enabled) and couldn't get out

- Added a "Mark All As Read..." button In The Panel Frame Of The News And Mail Page.

- delete mail/news popups and mark as read mail/news popups both now remember the ticked settings from the last time they were used, and this information, as with all else, is lobbed up to the server on sign-out.

- Implemented proper filtering when filtering players by their reputation

- when a button or label is 'disabled', make it use reduced transparency instead of the 'chiseled' effect, as the latter makes it hard to read, while the former retains readability while still making it clear it is disabled.

- Added 'Reputation' as a viewable player field, displayed as a textual description with accompanying stars (in the same way as the team description is displayed) on the player list panel

- Made some further improvements to player wage calculations - smoothing out the differences between positions (which should help to ease the situation in which currently defenders seem to be asking for too little money.) Also softened the amount by which wage demands drop with age a little further

- fixed bug where you couldn't enter competition prize money above 1,000,000....aint much use for federation competitions!

The matchday experience

- improved the code that decides to highlight the "Tactics & Subs" tab in red when there is an injury to one of your players by firstly making it also do this for red cards too, and secondly making it clear this state down if you kick off the match (e.g. the second half), resume the match, or confirm some pending tactical changes as if you do this then you are effectively indicating that you do not care.

General

- fixed bug where player stats history displayed as "Youth Stats" for the senior history category (the lower panel at the bottom of the page)

- Fixed a bug which could cause morale processing to fail in some cases

- Made some improvements to player wage calculations - smoothing out the differences between positions (which should help to ease the situation in which currently defenders seem to be asking for too little money.) Also softened the amount by which wage demands drop with age a little further

- made some grammatical tidy-ups to the news item announcing the impending start of the new season

- fixed server (SQL) error which occurred when trying to invite a team to a competition if you had already been invited yourself, which is a strange state of affairs but one that the server should have handled but didn't.

- Made some changes to the auto-select code to deal with the fact that wages are now lower than they used to be for lower rep players (auto-select wasn't finding any matching players as they were all too cheap!)

- when a button or label is 'disabled', make it use reduced transparency instead of the 'chiseled' effect, as the latter makes it hard to read, while the former retains readability while still making it clear it is disabled.

[Mihai]

build v.0.78 - lansat pe 27.03.2008

New Features

- Added an 'Activity' tab to the user page which contains two sub-tabs; one showing an overview of the user's actvity in the Game World (how much time spent online etc) including a a summary of recent sign-ins and also a graph showing which hours they have logged in during, in the last 7 days, and another sub-tab containing a full list of sign-ins available for your own page only (i.e. you can't see others').

- Implemented a feature that allows you to set an optional 'auto accept' and 'auto reject' amount for a player, meaning that private bids below the 'reject' amount cannot be made, and amounts that are equal to or above the 'accept' amount force through an instant transfer. Useful for keeping people's mits of your stars with silly bids, but at the same time setting a price tag for them!

- Implemented a new 'Transfer Alert' system. This works by allowing managers to create up to 5 player filters which are then cross-checked against all players placed in transfer auctions or on the loan list. If a filter produces a match, then a news item is sent to the manager. The idea is to further encourage transfer auctions as the best way to sell players by allowing managers to define the characteristics of the players they are looking for and receive news items when a suitable player is placed in an auction.

Interface, usability and optimisations

- on the team kit selector, when choosing a kit it now highlights the currently chosen one with a yellow box around it, instead of simply making the non-selected ones semi-transparent, as the former method did not make it clear enough to a newcomer that they had to click to select a kit. [Flow 78]

- changed the default kit assigned to new clubs to be one which more clearly shows all three colours and thus makes it clearer how the three-colour kit system works to a newcomer. [Flow 77]

- when kicking off the opponent finder, it now mentions at the end that while the system will auto-accept challenges that match your requirements, you can (now) manually accept non-matching ones too (i.e. these are no longer blocked.)

- in the part of the federation finder that asks for your anticipated hours of play, it points out that this does not mean you cannot play matches outside these hours, and that this is, in fact, possible if your opponent(s) are online outside the normal federation hours. [Flow 23]

- in the confirmation popup that appears after joining a federation, it reiterates the fact that an organizer will place you in a suitable competition when the season starts. [Flow 25]

- preceded your current status (top left, on title bar) with the word "You:" to reinforce the fact that it is in fact your own status and is unrelated to the contents of the title bar at any given time, which was confusing for some newcomers. [Flow 16]

- 'Federations' are now known as 'Football Associations' throughout the game, which is considered a more user-friendly term than 'Federation' that conjures up too many images of Klingons and teleporting and slidey doors and stuff.

- in all places where there is a confirm-type button on a popup, generally made this button contain the text 'Confirm' instead of a phrase specific to the action (e.g. it used to be "Place Vote", "Enter" for competitions etc.) as this is deemed to be better UI design and less confusing. [Flow 24]

- minor tidy-up of some popup titles when editing a fed, comp or vote produces an error due to the name already having been taken.

- gave all tables a one-line description which is displayed when they are empty and no filter is in use. This is intended to make it clearer to a new user what the table is going to contain, for example when going to their empty squad page, it will now say "Lists all the players in your squad." to reinforce the fact they have no players yet. [Flow 13,40]

- changed the opponent finder system so that placing yourself in 'Wants Match' mode and setting your requirements no longer blocks other non-matching challenges from reaching you. Instead, the would-be challenger is told what your requirements are and they then have the choice to match them and start the match instantly, or make a challenge with their own settings. While meaning some unwanted challenges may come through, overall this should make the "Wants match" mode a little more logical and avoid the confusing situation of a user appearing as wanting a match but having the match menu and challenge button disabled - especially confusing to a newcomer.

- fixed incorrect default sorting on 'recent sign-ins' section of new 'Activity' tab on the user page. Now sorts with most recent sign-ins visible, not the oldest!

- Increased the size of the view and filter customization popups as they were beginning to develop scrollbars on some of the more complex incarnations (players for example)

- Shows progression arrows on main profile on attributes panel now

- Fixed bug where if you dragged columns on a table which didn't have a 'view' menu it created a 'view' menu ontop of the table as soon as the dragging stopped

- when your status is automatically set to 'Away' this now also cancels the opponent finder

- renamed all the instances of 'Team' to 'Club' where it is referring to the team entity as a whole, i.e. "Club Colours", "Club Name" etc. This now leaves things more clearly defined: Club - topmost entity, Squad - collection of players, e.g. senior, reserve, under-21s etc and Team - the match day team (including subs) that is picked. This is in response to issues some newcomers were having in initially understanding how everything fits together. [Flow 29]

The match day experience

- on the player instructions page, where you choose on the mini-formation the player whose instructions you want to adjust, the highlighted player/position is now done via a yellow box instead of making the non-selected ones semi-transparent, which doesn't make it clear to a newcomer that it is something selectable. [Flow 84]

v671

- Made engine utilise player forward run and mentality settings to realistically replace formation arrows

- Further tweaked rating of goals

- Improved detection of "runs past opponent" stats ( to help judge goals rating )

- Tweaked detection of clear cut chances

- Improved delivery of non direct free kicks in non wide areas fairly near to opponent goal

- Tweaked off ball movement of wingers

Skills

- Made an improvement to the skill planner - if you are currently learning a skill that isn't part of your new skill plan when you confirm it the system will ask you if you want to start learning the recommended skill

- Improved the current skill panel to display the estimated completion date for a skill as well as the time remaining

- set the boost expiry date where appropriate in the skill panel so that the time to learn is correctly updated when the user has a skill boost

- Implemented a 'boost' system to the user skills meaning that if you experience any 'dead time' i.e. time when you are not training a skill, either because you were offline, or just didn't realise your current skill had finished you get some of it back - this is given back in the form of accelerated progression, for example if you experience 4 hours of dead time your skill progression will be doubled for 2 hours when you begin a new skill

General

- Made some improvements to the squad status calculation code behind the scenes - this should address some of the happiness issues experienced (for example players saying they are now happy they are getting first team football even though they aren't playing, and also players complaining when an unknown 15 year old is sold) and should also result in more realistic matches.

- improved the colour clash detection code, now based on the angle difference in a colour wheel

- Match challenges cannot be made nor accepted when match servers are in shutdown mode

- Removed instant buy when listing someone due to administration

[Mihai]

build v.0.79 - 05.04.2008

New Features

- Added extra panels to show the stats for a team for overall, human vs human, human vs AI and AI vs human matches in all classifications (senior, youth, competition etc) , and also added all these as customisable columns to all the lists for full sorting, filtering etc.

- Added a new element to the Setup Assistant that allows a newcomer to setup their starting skills based on them selecting one of 7 broad manage styles.

- Introduced a system whereby it now costs to send mail messages to certain mailing lists. The transfers, competitions and votes mailing lists now cost a fee of £5000 per mail message

- Added code that allows the user to select (via the preferences page) different levels of cache settings, so they are more in control of the disk space that FML is using

Interface, usability and optimisations

- Added tool tips for player and user status icons

- Added tool tips for contract status icons

- User can now only show a maximum of 30 columns in a table view

- Repeat columns setting in a table view is either just on or off, rather than 2, 3, 4, etc etc

- Enabled the 'Acquisition Fee' column to be displayed by default on the auctions page, to help warn people (especially newcomers) that some people are asking more than they should for their players.

- Enabled the small team kit images to be embedded into text and used this functionality on the match chat next to key events in the match (red cards, goals etc) to make it visually more clear to which team the event relates to. [Flow]

- In all places that it asks the user to (optionally) enter a comment for an action (transfer bids, post-match, etc.) it now adds the text "This will be your quote in the subsequent news item" to show what this box is for, as otherwise it's not clear. [Flow 69]

- On the finance transfer budget calculator it now includes a line showing how the approx fees and approx wages are combined to produce a figure for your budget, as it wasn't clear, previously, how this worked. [Flow 56]

- If the best federation found by the federation finder is not really that suitable, it now tells the user, and also mentions what was the optimum one (and the fact that it is full). [Flow 15]

- When changing your status to 'Online' or 'Away' it prompts you for confirmation if your status was previously 'Do Not Disturb' or 'Wants Match' to make sure it is your intention to cancel these states. Likewise, when choosing 'Do Not Disturb' it mentions the fact you are in 'Wants Match' mode if applicable, and that this state will be cancelled. [Flow 75]

The match day experience

- Forward runs are now additionally controllable by dragging an arrow forward (means 'Forward Runs - often'), or back (means 'Forward Runs - rarely') with a lack of arrow meaning 'Forward Runs - Normal'.

- When you first go the match page for a match it now popups to tell you that you need to get cracking and submit your team before kick off. This is handy for new users in particular, as it's not always obvious that the match will start "without you" otherwise. This option can be turned off via a "Do Not Show This Again" tick box. [Flow 52]

- Split the tactics menu into two; one allows setting the tactics to one of the standard tactics, the other is for your own saved tactics and for managing these (deleting, renaming etc.). This solves the problem of 1) having them all in one menu that becomes too big, and 2) ensuring high visibility of the standard tactics which is important especially for newcomers.

- On the tactics page you can now drag a position from the pitch to the player list to the left of it to select or swap players. During a match you can now drag players/positions from the pitch onto the player list to the left, both to swap tactic positions and also to make substitutions. Outside a match, you can now drag a player who is already picked from the player list on the left, to the pitch in an unused position and this will now move him there. Also added full two-way dragging from player lists to and from the formation to both select your team (outside the match), swap players' positions, and make substitutions (inside the match). [Flow 20]

- Fixed bug on the tactics page where dragging a position off the pitch entirely led to the position being moved to the edge of the pitch.

- Fixed bug where it wasn't highlighting the "Tactics & Subs" tab in red properly for timeout-incurring incidents. Changed the way the code for this works, to hopefully make it more reliable.

- Reduced half time to 60s and increased timeouts available to 2mins as this is perhaps a fairer balance

- Match data and match clip data are now compressed in the database, to save space. In addition, only two weeks of high priority clips are now retained, instead of four weeks, and high priority clips no longer include red cards.

- Match servers now have a timed shutdown so they do not allow users to connect after 15 minutes before shutdown.

Skills

- Added percentage complete indicators to the skills panel making it easier to see which skills are partially learned

- Fixed a bug which would cause the skill planner to be incorrectly blanked in some cases

- Fixed a bug in which the skill completion news item would report the wrong target skill in most cases

- Added a new skill completion news item to cover when a user completes learning of their target skill

- Fixed a bug in which it was possible to confirm a change to an invalid skill in the planner, resulting in a server error

- Added some extra content to progression news items to make a special mention of the impact a user's coaching skills have had on the player's progression (if the user is an uber coach)

Moderation and federation organisers

- Added a basic system of being able to lock and unlock a federation or a competition. For a federation this prevents being able to edit it. For a competition it prevents being able to edit or delete it. In each case, it is a specific moderator option that can be set to give lock/unlock rights. Someone with these rights can also override the lock and make edits/deletes to feds/comps themselves without unlocking it and providing access to others. All federations and competitions automatically imported on GW creation are locked by default.

- Moderators can now place fines relating to moderation actions. Disciplinary Statuses are shown on the user's profile and a mail message is sent to the user in question and to the moderators mailing list.

General

- Fixed server error when listing a player

- Servers cleanly log out all users before shutdown

- Fixed bug where server booted people out if they chose a 100% future profit %, which should be allowable.

- Added some extra content to injury news items to make a special mention of the impact a user's physio skills have had on the injury length (if the user is an uber physio)

- user can now search for competitions or federations in the global search box

- Fixed team kit colours so that they have correctly coloured shading and shadows

- Pasted links with player names skip profanity filtering

- Added option for the user to be able to change the timeout/delay before tool tips appear (and to turn them off)

- If customize table popup cannot fit the column names on because they are too long, then use the shorter versions instead, if they exist.

- Prevented competitions of less than 16 teams from allowing the Seed Draw From World Rankings option which was being used as an exploit in certain Game Worlds.

- Creating a compulsory vote is now a moderator-only feature, as there is no circumstance where federation members should be forced to vote on something.

- Prevented being able to create or edit a competition such that it has an end stage that contains multiple groups, as multiple groups should only be used as a qualifying means for a later stage. For any competitions that run as a qualifying competition, an end stage that conforms to this is now necessary.

- For competition and votes, the minimum and maximum ranking positions have been replaced with minimum and maximum club reputations. This brings this area into line with other areas in the game in using reputation as the primary indicator of a team's strength, and also reduces problems of teams joining a competition for a certain rank and then their rank changes dramatically before it starts. Although it is still possible, via reputation, since it is slower-moving it will be less of an issue.

- It now displays some extra text in the news item describing a competition stage draw, mentioning the teams you have been draw with/against and any information about who qualifies for a later stage.

[Mihai]

build v.0.81 - 11.04.2008

The match day experience

- Now displays added time on the match page, beneath the main clock time. e.g. the clock time will stick at "45:00" and a smaller "+ 2.23" will appear beneath it for the duration of added time.

- Fixed bug where it highlighted both the confirm changes button and the kick off match button in red on the match page at the same time - it now avoids this situation, highlighting confirm changes first, kick off match second, after changes have been confirmed.

- Fixed flashing 'R' for replay to make it flash at the normal slower speed

- Removed forward run arrows from line-ups tab, as instructions shouldn't be seen by other managers

- Fixed bug where when you changed to a new tactic using either the custom tactics menu or the standard tactics menu, this would cause your opposition-specific instructions to be lost. This fix is dedicated to Rashidi1 (cig)

Interface

- Fixed incorrectly drawn 'disabled' state of text on some popups, for example the 'Classification' text on the challenge to match popup, and made sure everywhere uses the same method of disabling text in these situations.

Skills

- Enhanced the skills panel so that it now not only takes into account active skill boosts in its skill training time estimates but also anticipates skill boosts which have not yet started - this ensures that the predicted time to learn displayed should be 100% accurate

- Made a change to the user skill planner panel so that it now refreshes whenever skills are updated (previously it wouldn't update to reflect progress made on skills in the planner)

- Fixed a bug in which if a user didn't have a target skill set they would incorrectly be told they were working towards Coaching Level 0

- Changed the code that calculates the percentage completed a skill is so it will no longer round up to 100% as it just doesn't look right!

Financial

- Prevented a team from going into receivership at a debt of 2M if their projected balance is better than 2M, instead classifiying them as 'in financial trouble'.

- Made some changes to the bank veto system. It now vetoes you not based on your projected balance after 28 days, but your minimum balance during this time. This is to prevent the situation where a newcomer, with little money, but a positive projection is able to go into a large amount of debt early on, which isn't sensible (especially if they then go and spend it all on a player worth 1000x less than they end up paying, due to not understanding the economy at this early stage.)

- Because the above has taken away some flexibility (e.g. you might be in debt but with guaranteed prize money coming in) the debt level that causes the veto (your overdraft limit, basically) is now something that is flexible. It starts off at -100k and can extend to an overdraft of -1m at the rate of 25k increase a day, provided you are within your current limit (i.e. once you go over it, it'll stop extending it.) Likewise, going into administration or receivership will reset your limit to 100k again.

- So that you can't just gain 1m for free with the above changes, overdrafts are now no longer interest-free, and are charged at the normal interest rate for debts which is 15%, but as before, adjusted by your financial management skills.

- Added 'Interest Payments' to team financial projections, and showed on the finance page. Also showed what a team's current overdraft limit is.

General

- When a match's AI Date has passed, either manager can now force through the match against the other if he or she is online, rather than just the manager who won the AI rights. However, only the manager with the AI rights can play the match against the opponent's AI if he is offline. This is intended to stop those people who log on during that 24 hours, but refuse to make themselves available to play the match, despite their opponent being online, which is not in the spirit of the game.

- Changed the way activity rating is calculated so that it now works in a much more realistic way. As a result it is now more difficult to get a very high activity rating meaning that match injuries are more likely to 'stick' for most people - be warned ;o)

- Rewrote the training injury code so that it now works better. Also, since match injuries are not as crippling as they once were the likelihood of training injuries occurring has been increased back to something like a realistic amount.

- Fixed broken competition mailing lists (sending a message produced a server error)

- Fixed typo in one of the popups that said transfer 'budged' not transfer 'budget'.

- Hopefully fixed issue where if a server took too long to update the GW it's record in the servers table became out of date and it thus was no longer considered available to connect to, and so users would get the 'No available game server' error. Increased the allowable time to prevent this.

- Made a change to the regen creation code to ensure that it is impossible for a player to be created with no name

- Fixed a bug in which some regens were being created with no DOB

- Made some improvements to the way PPMs are calculated for players, so we should no longer see regens created with PPMs which are not appropriate for their position (a GK who plays with back to goal for example!)

- Removed 'Skills' section of setup assistant, as this is now superceded by the 'Select Starting Skills' wizard, which explains everything in here instead, and allows us to cut down the welcome guide a little.

Mac

- Fixed crash which could cause launcher or client itself to crash when disconnected from the autopatch server but continuing to attempt to retrieve the current download kb/s

- Fixed bug where alerts window didn't take the menubar into account(and hence got cut off)

[Mihai]

build v.0.82 lansat pe 16.04.2008

Moderation

- Added a new moderator option that allows the cancelling of an unfinished competition, which involves deleting all matches and associated competition data (stats, challenges and so forth) and reversing any financial transactions for the competition. This is intended as a last resort for a competition that for some reason has become corrupted, like the Psycho Cup in GW6 for example!

The match day experience

- 184 - Temperature in match screen being displayed as 'Dry 22iC'. (removed weather from display, as this feature isn't currently implemented.)

- 526 - There is no icon for disallowed goals on the in match timeline.

- 555 - Fixed timeline extending over the play/pause buttons when match goes to extra time.

- 963 - Opposition line ups should be hidden until both teams have submitted teams.

- 1657 - Fixed problem where the game becomes stuck when selecting to move a player on tactics to the edge of the screen.

- Re-worded some of the player match stats, eg "Tackles Key" now reads "Key Tackles"

- When a player takes a knock in a match (but not a big enough one to display a green icon, merely a condition drop) this is no longer a cause for an emergency timeout. In addition, it displays the text "XXX took a knock" in the chat area to differentiate between this type of minor injury and something a little bit more lasting.

- Fixed bug where the 'Kick Off' match button was not displayed in red for the away team.

- In all places where it warns a user that they are bidding too much for a player in relation to his AF or wage demand, or accepting too little, this now appears in red text in the popup to draw their attention to it. It's also now worded without the exact % more or less that you are bidding, simply saying "considerably more" or "considerably less" which is more friendly. These popups have enough numbers on them, without adding more superfluous ones. The main point is that they are bidding too much or accepting too little.

- Improved the in-match place bet on winning text to acknowledge the other user has accepted the bet.

v675

- Tweaked choice of default opponent a little more

- Fixed anomaly regarding motivation resulting from scoreline in 2nd leg matches

- Lowered effect of match day motivation slightly

- Stopped player back at corner going awol due to human tactical change while waiting for it to be taken

- Force players with very low condition to be taken off as injured

- Stopped players getting very low match rating after lots of shots that missed target without being good chances

- Stopped defenders ignoring player at edge of area who picks up clearance from corner

- Fixed players booting ball out for goal kick instead of taking first time cross

- Stopped full backs bombing forward too early leaving centre halves with less options to pass in own half

- Made defenders retreat to half way quicker when ball lost in opp half

- Reduced centre halves being pulled apart by regular striker movement when playing zonal marking

- Try to make defending team players get goalside of default opponent quicker

- Made wide players look for earlier crossing opportunities when applicable

- Reduced high number of indirect free kicks vs direct ones

- Tweaked goal award ratings

Interface

- 1849 - Tooltips should show whether a column relates to senior or youth stats.

- 1941 - Expanded the range of ages available in the filter so you can now filter for users anywhere between 10 and 805 rather than the player-based 15 to 45. Chris Holman is once again viewable to all! ;o)

- 1900 - Made a change to allow values over the drop down maximum to be specified for player stats i.e. even though the highest drop down value for Goals is 100 a higher value can be set manually

- standardized the size of the various wizard popups throughout the game to keep things consistent, and avoid the situation where clicking on different things from the Setup Assistant caused the cancel/ok buttons to jump around a bit by virtue of the different wizards having a different vertical size.

- Player and match lists now display a maximum of 500 rows, as an optimization to reduce load on the DB server.

- Centred the 'Retain Existing Team' check box in the auto select team popup, to be consistent with other places a single check box is used on a popup in this way.

- Added code to display a tooltip if text in a text box goes off the side of the screen, for example in the General Happiness area of the player profile page. This will allow the cut off text to be viewed.

Skills

- Added a function which should refund users any lost skill time by giving an appropriate skill boost

- Tidied up the tactics panels so it is now clearer which sliders are enabled and disabled

- Fixed a bug in which if attempting to choose a starting skill set when one has already been selected a server error was returned rather than a more useful 'skillset already chosen' message

- 1977 - Fixed a bug in which the team and player tackling instructions were being unlocked too early

- 1991 - Fixed a bug in which in some cases later tactics skills such as individual Player Closing Down could not be learnt beyond level 1 (and in other cases a higher level could be learnt before level 1)

- 2004 - Fixed a bug in which some of the later tactics skills would be learnt instantly

Financial

- Prevented it increasing your overdraft during the first 7 days of signing-up as this could give an advantage to those first out of the blocks. 7 days is a reasonable time for a GW to initially fill so everyone should be on an even keel.

- When starting again, made it reset your overdraft limit to the default of -100k, which is probably the sensible thing to do. Could act as a useful deterrent to starting again.

General

- 74 - There should now be an option to auto-start a new competition when all the spaces are filled.

- 294 - Cannot remove contract lock from player once he is in a transfer auction.

- 289 - Players should now not be able to be in transfer auctions once they enter the last 24 hours of their contract.

- 407 - If a shortlisted player that you also own gets injured, you should not receive the shortlisted player injured news item.

- 659 - [Exploit] Players can use fake competitions to distribute cash between players.

- 792 - Turning injury insurance off just before midnight and then on just after avoids having to pay any premiums.

- 929 - "Future Profit % Out" button needs to be renamed

- 962 - Confirming squad for new teams not working.

- 994 - bookmark link shortcut keys don't stop at F12

- 1189 - Bid Details from another player appearing in a player's contract details.

- 1234 - Reducing Prize Fund should automatically reduce the Entry Fee.

- 1447 - User on holiday permanently showing as having one minute remaining.

- 1498 - "Make Comment" pop-up after match completed has incorrect text (or it doesn't work as it's meant to)

- 1619 - Ending a transfer auction/instant buy feature removes future profit sell on percentage from the deal.

- 1656 - fixed crash when pressing No on the exit game dialog on the add ons screen

- 1703 - Cannot change the 'Wants a Match' criteria without having to exit it then return back into it again.

- 1739 - Unable to respond to loan negotiations.

- 1772 - If user sets up competition with prize money but no entry fees then there should be a warning before confirming.

- 1817 - fixed crash when starting again

- 1827 - Making a private, compulsory vote stops non-invited users from playing matches.

- Added an indicator of the general atmosphere amongst the -players in a team to the team profile panel

- When setting contract expiry date, if it's within the first 7 days of the season start, then 1 season contract will now simply be until the end of the season (previously it would have lead to a 1 season contract actually being a 1 and 3/4 season contract in this case.) Additionally, the actual contract expiry date is now randomized within the off-season, rather than occur at the same time of day the original contract was signed to avoid the exploit where if you start an auction at say 4am then all subsequent renewal auctions will be at 4am too. Now it will be a random time in the 24 hour period.

- Improved team activity rating calculations so they aren't as strict anymore, it is now much more likely for teams to get a high activity rating

- Reduced the frequency of training injuries which should bring the match v training injury ratios more in line with reality

- Fixed the last remaining issue in the starting skills selector wizard in which skills in progress would be either lost completely (if they were not the 'base' skill for the category) or progress would be lost

- Fixed memory overrun which causes large competition KO rounds to incorrectly be drawn, leading to the competition becoming corrupted.

- Fixed a bug which could cause team morale to be incorrectly calculated in some cases

- Recalcualted PPMs for regens, this should have the effect of fixing all 'broken' PPMs for existing regens, making testing the latest changes more straightforward

- Reduced worse-case interest rate on debt to 11% (from 15%), which will now scale between 11% down to 6% according to skills, compared to the interest rate on credit which remains ranging between 3% and 8% according to skills.

[Mihai]

build 0.83 lansat pe 23.04.2008

The match day experience

- 419 - When a player has been sent off, it now treats things properly in terms of players adjusting their positions on the formation panel, e.g. two MCs move slightly closer together if the central MC has been sent off in a three-man MC.

- 749 - Cannot "Confirm Changes" in match if other user has not submitted their team.

- 1912 - "Revert Changes" button can be frustrating as there is no way to just undo the previous change. [Made this a 'Revert Changes' menu with two options, one for reverting all changes, one for reverting the last one]

- 2027 - Cannot set forward runs to rarely on sweeper via pitch panel.

Match v676

- Fixed silly indirect free kicks taken near corner of opposition area

- Fixed extreme overhit crosses/passes

- Fixed bug where penalty shootout isnt completed due to injury just before final whistle

Mails

- Anything sent to email by FML now has it's subject line preceded by [FML XXX] where XXX is either News, Mail, or for internal use, things like Error etc. This is intended to aid filtering of incoming emails by your email client.

Interface

- Hooked in the new logo to top right of screen, replacing the spinning logo.

- Fixed bug where clicking on the down button on a scrollbar for a table scrolled it in the wrong direction.

- Fixed bug where you could drag two sliders at once if you clicked on one of them and then moved the mouse over another one above or below it.

- Fixed bug where when hovering the mouse over a slider with a 'granularity' setting (e.g. on the tactics page where you don't have full access to all the slider positions) it could cause the slider to jump to the next legitimate position even though you hadn't clicked on it yet.

- Added tooltips to news and mail panels

- Added tooltips for the 'Find Ranking' button on the ranking panels

- Added tooltips for competition, federation and vote page action buttons.

- Added tooltips for team and user page action buttons.

- Added tooltips to action buttons on various pages

- Added tooltips to the match action buttons to explain what 'time out' does etc.

- Added tooltip to 'Invite To Chat' button inside the chat when inviting one of your contacts

Skills

- 2030 - Fixed a typo in the Tactics skill description

- Fixed a bug in which the Marking tactical skill could be unlocked without first learning Tactics lvlI

Achievements

- 1545 - Fixed a bug in which under some circumstances a user could receive a news item telling them they had unlocked 0 achievements following a match

Financial

- 428 - Financial transactions screen should show aquisition fees for the players selected in your initial squad

General bug fixes

- 13 - Random letters "RRRR" appear next to club shirt in The Lobby Chat Room after sending a message.

- 65 - Team stats screen sorting incorrectly when sorted by 'penalties'.

- 80 - User can accept u21 challenge even though he doesn't have enough available players to play the match.

- 311 - Fixed a bug in which the player filters for height and weight would not adjust according to the selected unit type in the preferences. Also removed the option to search for players with height of 0cm etc

- 399 - Team that has been in receivership unable to end auctions of players that have been at his club less than 7 days.

- 479 - Removed news items about suspensions for players on a team's shortlist as nobody was really interested. The will probably bne re-added later when we have optional news item filters, allowing anyone interested to view them whilst everyone else doesn't have to!

- 521 - Made the Date of Birth player filter much more useful

- 609 - Fixed an issue in which searching for players who were not signed to a particular team would not return free agents when logically it should do

- 775 - Official Votes from other Federations should not be visible to the user

- 908 - Fixed a bug in which it was possible to leave feedback on a user without selecting a single category to leave feedback on

- 926 - Second stage of a competition fails to start when the stages have odd numbers.

- 934 - Cannot have all 4 teams qualifying from a 4 team round in competitions. [NB the bug was that the popup allowed this, the system isn't designed for stages that have all teams "qualifying" for a single later stage, as this is somewhat nonsensical]

- 1091 - Fixed a bug in which sometimes player filter conditions that were disabled (unticked) would still be used when filtering for players

- 1169 - Added a new player search filter 'Region' allowing users to filter players by the region they are from (these match the Scouting Skill regions making identifying players in the areas you are most skilled in easier)

- 1399 - The [bid] tab isn't greyed out and is clickable despite the fact the Starting Bid and Instant Buy amount is the same.

- 1003 - Added an icon to the Potential N/A so that it looks nicer when lined up with players who have star potentials set

- 1066 - Contract Wage not included on 'general' loan list view.

- 1100 - Long finished votes are still appearing in the 'current' tab and unfinished votes appearing in 'Finished' Tab

- 1102 - Fixed a bug in which on the player comparison screen the goalkeeping attributes group would be incorrectly referred to as Technical Attributes

- 1164 - Made some improvements to the way player height and weight are calculated for regens and progressed over time for all players. This should get rid of the situation presently where players start off heavy and then get progressively lighter!

- 1257 - Editing competition description requires every entrant to re-confirm their entry. [cosmetic edits to a competition no longer require re-confirmation or, in the case of feds, re-approval from another host/moderator before they can start]

- 1348 - Getting disconnected every time user tries to change the loan listing on one of his players.

- 1424 - Votes - Not all choices display the number of votes made

- 1441 - Fixed a bug in which it was possible to enter values over 10 into the average rating filter for players. Also changed the filter to a drop down to allow for decimal places

- 1485 - Fixed a bug in which searching for players with less than x appearances wouldn't return players with 0 appearances

- 1496 - Fixed a bug in which it was possible to select a blank position in the player filter which would return no results

- 1499 - Fixed a bug in which on the player filter if filtering Morale by 'Is Between' or 'Is Not Between' 'Very Poor' and 'Very Good' both go off the edge of the page

- 1592 - Fixed a bug in which the player progression graph would not always correctly display the player's progression

- 1619 - Ending a transfer auction/instant buy feature removes future profit sell on percentage from the deal (earlier fix only fixed 'end auction early' problem, this fix also fixes 'instant buy' problem.)

- 1645 - Wage bill displays different figures on club profile screen and senior squad screen. Nothing like watching your finances eh lads and lasses - one of the more active amongst you was paying 90k more each day than you should have been Smile

- 1685 - Once team setup assistatant is run and user is taken back to assistant the assistant is shown over the squad overview not team profile screen.

- 1760 - Commenting on votes does not function- 1908 - When attempting to sign a player on loan the bids are rejected due to auto reject amount set for transfers.

- 1968 - Loan report news item is incorrectly sent to the parent club

- 1983 - "Ends Within 24 Hrs" filter's restrictions are incorrect..

- 2010 - Competitions do not display the entry fee by default..

- 2048 - Make it optional to display the user activity graph (av mins signed in) and the corresponding data from the sign ins table (select 'Hide sign-in information' from preferences - communication tab)

- 2059 - Server error when attempting to edit a competition. [NB this was happening if no play times were specified for the competition.]

- Fixed a bug in the player filter which was preventing filtering for morale between x and y from working

- In the message "player X is not contracted to a team" replaced the incorrect 'team' reference with 'club'.

- Fixed bug where after cancelling injury insurance, the options wasn't available to uncancel it again until after the next midnight update.

- Fixed a bug in which dressing room atmosphere would not be correctly calculated for some teams. Sorry Immi!

- Drumm roll please - finally added a 'Contract Status' filter to the player filter to allow users to filter for free agents without faffing around with 'Club is blank' shenanigans

- Match server will now boot any connected clients and free up the memory associated with a match 5 minutes after the final whistle, just in case the clients haven't disconnected themselves for some reason.

- Tided up some elements of the chat server including fixing a memory leak where all chat messages being stored prior to purging to the DB were not freed from memory, and so the longer the application remained running the more it would continually use up.

- Client will now automatically disconnect itself from the match server if the user hasn't been on the match page for 5 minutes, with the exception of their own match if it hasn't finished. Previously, it would never disconnect from their own match, even when it had finished and they had browsed off.