Barring any last minute complications in testing, next Monday (13th December 2010) will see the next update to Football Manager Live being rolled out to the gameworlds.
You might ask, however; “Why’s it called Version 1.6.7?”, “Where’s Version 1.7, the next major update you’ve been banging on about recently?” and it would be understandable to do so.
The reason we’re calling this update 1.6.7 and not 1.7 is quite simple. We decided that the headline feature that was planned for this update (Player Reports – we’ll be talking more about these on the blogs over the next week or so), was not quite ready for release yet and needed a little more testing.
That left us with a conundrum to solve. On one hand, we didn’t want to hold back on getting all the great smaller improvements, which had been made over recent weeks, out to the gameworlds any longer. On the other, after discussion with the BETA testers, we didn’t feel it quite right to call this update Version 1.7 without its headline feature. Hence why we decided to go with 1.6.7.
Youth Academy
Player Reports will therefore be rolled out on its own (or at least with not much else) under the guise of 1.7 early in the New Year once we’re confident it’s ready for the live gameworlds.
With that all explained I bet you’re keen to get to know the details of what’s in the next update. The two biggest items are Youth Academies and the integration of YouTube & Twitter, which you can read about in previous blog posts but there’s also a whole load of other smaller additions, tweaks and bug fixes. Check out the full changelist on the forums.
Spoiler: show
If you’ve got any questions about the update and the effects it might have, please post them in the above thread. We’ll monitor it over the next few days and compile the answers into a follow up Q&A post before we go live.
The Economy
Finally, there’s been a lot of talk about the economy recently and a general feeling that there currently isn’t much money in the gameworlds. We’ve been keeping quiet on this till now (mainly because it’s taken a while to do all the research necessary to come to a decision) but we’ve come to the conclusion that, although we believe that the economy would recover of its own accord if given time, we do want to give it a bit of a kick to try and kickstart things again.
To do this, we have both a long term and a short term plan.
The short term plan is to temporarily increase daily income in the gameworlds to bring some money in. This will be done by changing the span that daily income can be from 50k – 250k to 75k – 300k. This will mean that even those in the lowest daily income bracket will see another 700k come into their accounts over the course of the next season. This change will happen immediately on the day that 1.6.7 is rolled out.
We don’t think this is a long term option however and have concerns that leaving the income at this rate could cause long term inflation – which would be almost as bad as the current recession, so we’ll be monitoring this regularly. We do, however, promise that you will be notified of any reduction in income at least a month in advance, so you have plenty of time to plan ahead.
The long term plan is a little more complicated and we’re currently at the stage of running some experimental tests in the BETA gameworld, Miller. Essentially we’re looking into ways of 1) underpinning the economy and 2) the possibility of dynamically adjusting income and prize money to match the economic conditions in a gameworld.
We’ve started up another thread in the forumsfor you to discuss this and, like the 1.6.7 update and if there are any, will collate any pertinent questions to try and answer them in a follow up Q & A blog later on.