News

The new match order form has been the biggest project of the year for us, and it is very important for us that this core part of the game is as good as it can get. Since the initial release, we have continued to improve the new match order page. Today, we’d like to sum up all those changes!

We’d also like to ask those of you have opted to continue using the old match order to please give this new one a second chance. We think many issues that were raised by you have now been resolved. Maybe you’ll like it better now, and if not, we’re still curious to hear what more we can do.

So, what’s new since August?

* When entering the new match order, you are no longer required to visit the first tab of the match order flow, where previous or default lineups can be loaded. If you have already submitted an order for this match, or if this match has a valid default order, you will start on the lineup tab instead. This saves time. Of course, if you need to, you can always step back to the loading tab and do your business there. And if that submitted order or default order that you already sent in has been made invalid for some reason, due to injury or a player sale for example, you will be prompted to the first tab as well.

* Many of you wanted to keep the old player sorting which used only primary skills, rather than the new ones which calculates the best players for a certain position. We have now added that option back in, so you can now sort your players any which way you want.

* When hovering over a player, the player card will no longer open up “inside” the player list, but at a designated place at the bottom of the list. This makes the whole experience of looking at your players a lot less “jumpy.” We have also made other changes to make selecting a lineup a smoother experience.

* We have added Specialty icons to all players that are picked for the lineup, giving you a lot better overview of what specialties are represented on the pitch. We have also added shirt numbers in the lineup view.

* We added back the “blue ribbon,” which, when setting orders for a mid-week game, signals that a player played during the weekend game. This is a visual cue to help you optimize your training.

* We’ve clarified the individual order process. Now, there is a shadow background added to the player currently selected. We also inverted the arrow colours. The new background should make the edges between players clearer and reduce the risk of mistakenly deselecting a player that you are focusing on.

Apart from these general interface improvements, we also made many small tweaks and fixes to the mobile experience, making the new match order form easier to use on smartphones and tablets. The most important one of these is that we improved the way you “tap and select” players for the lineup on mobile, since this previously sometimes broke down and became unusable.

Finally, a mention about youth match orders. We’ve changed it so that everyone will see the potential skills of youth players on their player cards, even users that have disabled the skill bars option.

We’ll continue to improve the new match order form, but wanted to give you this progress report and also invite those of you that already opted out a chance to revisit again. You can always change back if you still prefer the old format!

New "Rate this page" feature

One more thing! This week we roll out a new feature, "Rate this page". It is a very, very simple function that allows you as a user to rate any page on Hattrick between 1 and 5 stars. This is not something you ever need to do, it can be safely ignored, and it is also very discreetly tucked away at the end of the page. You will not be able to write any comments, and we will never give you any feedback directly on your ratings. So what’s the purpose?

Well, we wanted to add this function to give us a chance to measure where on the site we may have pages that are not working that well for our users and, also, to see if ratings on a certain page change for the better or for the worse after a release. If the page rating signals that a page needs more work, we will make our own analysis of it, and maybe also ask for your feedback through surveys and forum discussions, before making the improvements.