Asunto: [News] Combination Play and Ticket Prices

Starting with Wednesdays friendlies we are testing a new version of the match engine. In the new engine we have added a little more combination play with short passes to make matches more nice to watch and to further decrease the strength of defensive tactics (tactics like 532). We are also allowing managers to set their own ticket prices.

Combination play

It might look like this is a little change.... but that's not true. In fact the modification is much bigger than the ticket prices added. As with that change there is a related testing process that took a number of weeks. How do we test? We generate hundred of matches and run them repeatedly. It takes up to half and hour. Than we analyse the statistics we get from the matches like average score, shots on the goal, number of passes, long and short, average pass distance, and dozens of similar stats. We check in the statistics to see if the engine performed close to what we wanted to achieve (usually its not:), view some matches and than make some parameter tuning and engine corrections and then repeat testing.... over and over for weeks. Despite this laborious testing, we are still not sure how the engine will perform in every single match. We have already tested combination play a few seasons ago, but that time it failed and we removed it from the match engine. Hopefully this time it will be a success as it is now a much better balance. Please report bugs on Bugs / Ideas (en) forum with match ID and minute, report bug only if weird situation is repeated at least twice in single match and if it is passing bug - especially if player passed instead of shooting or passed to the wrong player. We are mainly interested in NT matches bugs or with top club teams playing their first team squads. Reported bugs in other situation will make it hard to determine if the player was just low skilled, or the engine generated the mistaken action :]

Ticket prices

We are now allowing you to set your match ticket prices for each stand. Prices are able to be set on your stadium page. How expensive or cheap compared to the default price in the rules you set is up to you. We recommend you set prices depending on the size of the supporters clubs of both teams. The better the teams playing the higher you can expect to put the ticket price and still expect the same number of supporters attending your match. So you would get a higher income. Good club teams may expect even one and a half times bigger (150%) higher incomes on matches than before. Notice that if you set the prices much too high less supporters will come, and you can expect lower income. Same if the price is much too low, more supporters will come, but not so much to compensate for such a low price. You will get the highest income if you set the right price for class of teams playing in the match. Of course, if your stadium is little and you expect many supporters to attend the match, more than the total number of places in the stadium, you can set a higher price to get a higher income. However you don't get so high an income compared to extending the stadium.

Reason for the change, apart from making the game more varied and interesting, was saturation of the market with good players at high skills and high wages. Top teams, in many situations, were forced to trade many players to balance their income with expense on wages.

Sweet. Thanks for the heads-up.

the news is a day old on the main page... :)

just noticed this with the ticket prices (as I'm looking to expand seating soon)....very interesting & will be keen to see how this pans out.

I'm not a big fan of the ticket price change.

Its not a bad idea, but in other games I've played its either an onerous task that I don't want to do every week, or its a "set once and forget" kind of system.

Given the state of my midfield, I'm absolutely devastated about the changes with combination play :P

I'm glad I've kept some benches. Considering the massive demand for them (they always massively outsell the seats), I can't see how with the same price as seats they won't still fill up with the cost of an upgrade?!?!

Given the state of my midfield, I'm absolutely devastated about the changes with combination play :P
You shouldn't be :p. This gives those with midfields so much more of an advantage if they've got the strikeforce as well. That's if watching friendlies tells me anything ;).

note to cometer:
learn to read irony :P

How are we going to play it with the ticket prices information?
We have two options:

1. We share the information of crowd figures and ticket prices for the benefit of us all.

2. We don't share the information and take the competitive approach instead.

I vote for opening up the books, so we can learn from each other's settings to find out the best ticket prices. That way we all get the maximum out of our ticket prices and grow as a whole.

I think we at least need a how-to for newbies and a rough guide on some good basic ticket price settings.

Hard to say, if we were just an isolated country without the others I'd say option 2. My problem with that is we almost destroy ourselves from being able to be competitive against other countries, so I'd be leaning for an option 3. That being option 1 but in some private forum where only Australian users can get access to that data/info. That way we maximise our own knowledge and prevent it being leaked to outsiders. The problem with that approach I guess is that those without plus will suffer and by the looks of things I'm going to soon be plusless for the first time in 4 years.
(editado)

I agree, private forum.
You can look at it two ways.

If we share the information, we get up to speed faster and everyone makes more money.
If we don't share the information, some managers will benefit over other managers.

In Cup games, it's in our interests for our opponents to be getting maximum $$ from their stadium, 'cos the away team gets a cut. :)

The more data we compile, the faster we all learn how to exploit the ticket prices algorithm.

No more mod button?

Will you surrender 3pts on the pitch if I share my info?

:)

The way things stand that appears to be the most likely situation which is disappointing.

Well... my 5 cents...

Since apparently the new max income is somewhere around 150% of the pre-ticket feature implementation. I'm going to try something simple.
I have 26000 seats covered on the side and 24000 seats coverd behind the pitch which makes things very easy for me to put in an equation. Old max income was 26k x $14 + 24k x $12 = 652k
So 652k x 1.5 (150%) = 978k

In an equation we get: 26x + 24y =978
Now if anyone can solve this with real numbers, I give him a million.
So let's make an asumption... behind the cage I'll set the seat price at $18 which seems to be sensible compare what I tried against AS.
x = (978-(24x18))/26 = $21 once again it appears to be sensible in comparison to what I tried last sunday.
There we go $21 on the side and $18 behind the cage...

Mood is not top but I'll give that a shot...

you went to all that trouble when all you really needed to do was multiply 12 x 1.5 and 14 x 1.5 and you end up with 18 and 21 :p.

So when do I get the million ;).


Quite clearly if you have an equation where everythings scaled up by the same % that equation is easily solved....
(editado)