News

In this roadmap our focus will be a tender reimagination of two critical elements of the game - the match order page and the training page. As with the youth update in December, we are looking for ways to boost Hattrick's user-friendliness while also improving functionality. We want these pages to work more like the Live Viewer and the Team Analysis pages - dynamic, and with all the info you need to have at hand.

Here are a few new features worthy of special mention:

* The new Match Order page will increase the number of substitutes to seven, and also have a more flexible system for subs making it possible, for example, to set Wing Back subs. Substitutions due to injuries will be more flexible, and may be pre-planned in a similar fashion to how other substitution orders work today.

* We’ll introduce Man Marking as a new option. You’ll be able to instruct one player on your team to mark an opponent and, if successful, reduce his impact on the match. Using a man marker will always come at an expense to your own performance, whether the marking succeeds or not.

* We’ll review Specialties - meaning you can expect some changes to how Specialties work. We will make the announcement later this season, and the actual implementation will take place two seasons after that in order to give everyone time to prepare.

The match engine will also get some attention. We have three points we will be working on:

* We will be looking into how events are distributed across matches and tweak this so that they do not "stack up" at the end of a half, as they often do today. We’ve added a lot of new events types over the years and the match engine needs a better way of handling them to make the matches flow better.

* Reducing outliers. This involves reducing the amount of "extreme" outcomes in the game, where the better team not only loses, but loses by a wide margin. Please note that matches like these are already rare, but we will reduce the likelihood of such results further.

* Scorer probabilities. Make the simulation take into better account side of attack and scorer skills when deciding which player gets credited with a goal.

In addition to this, we’re extending the Chat system. We will be adding chats for each Series in the game, as well as for all Federations. The Series chat will be linked to the Live Viewer chat for that series, and the Federation chat will be linked to any Tournament that Fed arranges. The Fed chat will also be linked from the forum for easy overview and access.

For CHPPs, we’ve added the possibility for any developer to use Supporter for free for test purposes, something we hope will make their lives better. We will also be rewarding the top CHPP developers with free Supporter for their own teams. More info about these programs can be found in the CHPP forums.

Finally, we’ll continue to add new events to the Live Viewer, both a previously announced batch of new variations for the general match events, but also completely new events.

The theme here will be events that are much more context-sensitive: They will be triggered by data that normally are never considered in a match report, such as the result in other games being played at the same time.

That's all from us for now. Please enjoy yourselves out there!

The HT-team