PowerPlay Magazine

Hello friends

During the last 10 days we have continued in optimizing the server, which has been more or less successful and we managed to lighten the load on the server and make the calculations much less demanding. It was necessary because the load on the processor and RAM was at times almost the whole day on 100%. Gioel did a great job and we even created a little cushion which we can build on in the future. Regarding the restrictions that it brought you will only notice a few things:

1. Players from the sports academy that you take you’re your team will not join the team immediately but within an hour and you will be informed about this in team news.
2. Player that you fire will also leave your team within an hour and again you will be notified about this.
3. Team news older than 112 days are deleted.
4. Game summaries of games older than 112 will also be deleted – you will only see a brief summary in the calendar with the result. The PRO pack feature will allow you to archive the game summaries.

As far as the server is concerned, the move to a new one will take place some time next week. This will cause the game being down but it shouldn’t last more than a few hours. New server should help moving the whole project a step further.

We were forced to do some changes after analyzing the economy of the first season. We found out that player market and daytrading in particular has caused anomalies on the market, which we cannot have in the full version. We also found out that youngsters from the sports academy were coming in with the average quality between 50 and 70 and had a very high overall rating from the start. What this caused? Managers got richer by buying and selling immediately and there are teams that have the level of some facilities at 9 and others have more than 100 players. The reason for this was that juniors had a high overall rating and they were much better than the original players. This anomaly would disappear later on because the youngsters would not be as good as the trained players in the team but this would come back after the restart so we had to take action. The managers liked the high average quality of the juniors and were glad for it. But what could this cause in the long run? Players with the average quality between 60 and 80, which were regularly coming out of the sports academy, were really great because there are three attributes that are important for a player in each position plus possibly shooting. And when the average quality is 60%, it can mean that the important attributes have a quality greater than 90. These kinds of players were a plenty in the first season. That is with only 2-3 players from the sports academy in one batch and soon there will be groups of 8. What would be the result? Each team would have a wealth of good own players, the sports academy would be predictable and the market would become useless. That is what the game was heading for. What have we done to avoid this?

1. We implemented a fee to the hockey association of 5% from the total player salaries for every player over the number 40. You are informed about this in team news ever day. We cancelled the restriction regarding the maximum number of players. Having up to 60 players in the team should not be a problem but any more than that could be really taxing.
2. The service charge for a player transfer is set to at least 5%, but the minimum fee was raised to 10 000. The market was flooded with players of poor quality who were sent to the market for a small fee instead of being fired.
3. New players from the sports academy have about 20% lower overall rating than before. But the rating keeps on growing with the level of sports academy and other factors as was the case before.
4. New players from the sports academy have a maximum of average quality between 40 and 60 instead of 50 to 70. But there is still a chance to get great player and it increases with the number of incoming juniors.

We are planning the following precautions in the near future:
1. Service charge for a transfer will increase to 10% if the team has more than 10 outgoing transfers during the last 112 days and to 20% if it has more than 20 outgoing transfers.
2. If a team acquires a player it can only be sold for the same amount that it was bought for during the next 112 days. This does not apply to juniors and the original players.

Please modify your strategy according to these changes. We believe that they will increase the enjoyment of the game in the full version.

New features:

• You can click on a team profile of the manager in his/her profile
• The average practice improvement of the team is displayed in the Practice page
• If the manager has a blocked access to the game it is displayed in his/her profile
• We added a team news if the player is not sold on the market
• The accumulated sum of bids sent on the market cannot exceed the current balance of the managers account (if the manager had 1 million on the account it was possible to send a number of bids of up to 1 million simultaneously)
• You can see the education progress of the staff members in their profile
• In the education center you can see the average improvement of the staff members
• It is not possible to fire a player when the number of players is at the minimum -  17
• The current running version of the game is displayed above the logo in the top left corner of the screen in the hockey account so you can track the small changes in the game
• The chat link is on the right side of the screen in the hockey account

As you may have noticed we have made a simple forum for all hockey news.
Have a nice day.

Ivan alias tuttle