Asunto: [News] » NEWS....LOL!!

I'm sure there are some good linguists out there that put in a lot of effort. I guess I'm basing my comment on my experiences from back in the days in like mid 2000's when I was one of the English speaking moderators. There were some good ones for sure, but a lot of it ended up translating to English first which is where the most amount of time went because often the English was written like a second language and often needed English moderators to tidy it up prior to any further translation. I can't recall who the English linguists were (if they were separate then the English language moderators or not).

I guess I just felt that admins and mods ended up doing more work. Then some of admins/mods also assisted with the translation to English which is I guess what shapes my view. If they still use the same forums, there's probably plenty of comments I've made still lying around over the years :)

I have no knowledge of what goes on now obviously and we are receiving more news from devs then we've ever had before (still have serious concerns/issues about what ends up being developed and would really like some changes to help smaller nations as it was a problem before but an even bigger problem now due to time and compounding effects of being disadvantaged for such a long time). That being said, perhaps there is more work then there once was for linguists but that must be a relatively recent thing as it wasn't always like that.

For a good linguist, it is almost second nature, and therefore not a huge amount of work (although probably more now than there has been since the massive jump in number of countries when Sokker was expanding).

As far as mods work goes, I can only comment on what has happened in the forums I look at, and in particular Australia, and since returning to sokker, there has been pretty much no involvement. It has been very disappointing.

I have even offered multiple times to moderate a number of the English countries, but consistently denied saying there are already too many. But given the lack of mod involvement in this community, either mods aren't doing their job, or there are not enough mods.

Anyway it is what it is, and whilst my offer will always remain open, I suspect it will continue to be overlooked and we will continue to receive whatever we get. Fingers crossed it changes, but when I show stats of over 60% of small nations never even receiving news about votes that were happening for the game, it shows that people are not doing their job, and just taking the perks of their job and running with it.

But as cometer says, there are always some good ones and some bad ones, and the bad ones give the rest a bad rap. It's just a shame there isn't more internal control going on to drop the rubbish ones, and promote people who spend more time than they should on this game lol

So this is not the full latest dev diary but it is an important one for us in Australia.


2. Training reform

We are sorry to say it, but despite of our work is already started with that idea, we cant introduce it from next season. Its directly connected with point above - first we need to introduce new code path dedicated for morning updates, and we finally decided that its to risky to do it now, we will wait for seasonal break. After that we will need another few weeks to introduced prepared training changes - it means, that our reform is moving one season later. I will describe it more detailed in next dev diary.

3. Marging small countries is also an topic here

We know about it, but please give us about 2 seasons in current shape - if we will be not able to increase number of players in small countries, we will prepare an solution (probably one "country" named like "rest of the world" and there will be a chance to play there if some nationality is to small for own leagues. If with time number of users of that nationality will increase, we will seperate it as normal country then. But before it - we will start promotion and advertisment pretty soon (we just waiting for new welcome page introduced) - so hopefully it will solve that problem for at least some of current small countries.

At least the merging is now on the cards as a potential, the next but thing to make sure they are looking towards is that when we are merged, we still get to at least keep pulling Australian players not some "rest of the world player" or a random nation. Ideally we would also be able to play in a country cup (Australia cup) for those who registered in it.
It seems like details like these haven't been thought about seriously, because they want to see whether they can increase the player base of us smaller countries, but once the new training and league structure occurs, it will be up to us to bring it to the front of their minds as right now, they are pretty busy with the immediate changes.

The other big update is the training reform. Given this will occur at the same time as the league expansion, next season will still be 8 teams, and training will be as normal next season.

Now I have no insider info about what I posted, just my musings based on how I read the update, so take everything with a grain of salt still.

Good news about merging. The DEVs explicitly calling that out means something.

Not surprised with any of it.

One thing I think they need to consider is time zone differentials when merging countries/areas. You don't want to end up with half a league sleeping whilst others are in the midst of their days. Various reasons for this - one key point being alignment to peak TM times, etc. It will give unfair advantages to some.

I'd be fine if Oz/NZ were put in with East (or SE) Asia, but I would push it any further.

I think for the sake of competition, I would be happy being with anyone.
But you are right, if even more thought it put in to it, merging small countries with timezones that are more similar in nature would be ideal.

+00:00 to +06:00 GMC
+0600 to +1200 GMC
etc etc

Agree. Oz now has close to 2 x 8 teams with live managers....add the NZ, with SE Asia & maybe across to India, & it's a healthy enough situation for a top flight & 4 div 2 comps, & some 3rd tier competitiveness.
Keep the nationalities for NT comps....otherwise forget any merging.

Yep, I’d keep national cups separate also so you still have a competition with fellow country players.

Mainiting the nationalities is a no. 1 requirement here. I can't imagine how would it look like if 'the rest of the world' country was a bag where every person from a smaller nation was put and considered as not attached to any nation. What comes next, a new flag combined of all the countries or just a black rectangle with a pirate sign in it?
The idea of merging itself sounds really nice and can bring a lot of fun to compete with a higher number of players by adding an additional 'rest of the world' cup. But keeping each nation separate inside as a subset is a must here.

I think ideally we would have a "rest of the world" league, then a national cup (from wherever you are from) and then your own countries juniors/NT

I'd rather see something like continents (or sub continents) opposed to ROW.
As I've mentioned, time zones would play a part in the TM & the last thing you want is to be pitched into a league full of European/African teams where they're on similar time zone to that of the bigger Euro nations (where most users & TM activity are).

Yes, dividing it into different continents will be better but on my part, I would prefer English speaking countries over the non English speaking ones for communication purposes on the forum. So the language factor too is a little important.

Having regional leagues would make sense. The rest wouldn't need to change, such as Cup, players & NT aligning to countries.

They should divide 'rest of the world' countries into the fifa confederations. This largely solves the time difference issue, and partly solves the language issue.

Other issue they need to avoid, is disconnecting users within a small country from each other. eg: imagine if our group of ~8 who are active on the forums get split into a 'rest of the world' league with 800 users and are all in different leagues.

Well if they kept your own forum say Sokker Australia that would be less of an issue. We would likely lose say the specific league forum though. Similarly if we kept our national page with rankings/cup draw etc I think we’d be ok. Ultimately, if we merge the reality is many of us would be in different leagues to each other. That being said there’s a good chance many of us will be in the same division.