Hattrick 6.6
The following contents are based on official Hattrick documents and/or official statements — which usually means they should be trustworthy.
My Hattrick message:
| 14-06-2004 This is Hattrick 6.6 | |
| Hattrick 6.6 is arriving today, stuffed with major changes to the transfers, new salary formula, a truckload of minor improvements to the match engine and some other changes. The full documentation is available at Hattrick 6.6. That document is huge, so we've also compiled a simplified HT 6.6 at a glance for those of you that find the full document overwhelming. Please try to read the full document though.
The changes will go online during the day, except for all changes to the match engine that are not purely presentational - these will be activated for all matches starting after Wednesday 11:00 HT-Time. The new rules for transfer fees will take effect for all players put for sale after 11:00 HT-Time today. The new salaries will of course take effect next week when the new season salaries are set. | |
See also:
The HT6.6 Document
It is time for a new version of Hattrick, Version 6.6. The new version has a focus on:
- Important changes to the transfer market
- A whole bunch of relatively small changes in the match engine
- A completely new formula for calculating player salaries
- A few other minor changes
The documentation on these changes can seem rather overwhelming, so we've created a separate simplified summary at HT 6.6 at a glance.
If you find the text below hard to follow you can use the "At a glance" guide and perhaps digest the details later. However, we strongly recommend that you read the full descriptions on this page.
Transfer changes
An important part of the HT 6.6 changes relate to the transfer market.
The purpose of the Hattrick transfer market is to allow teams to sell players they no longer want and buy new players to improve their team. Like in the real world, an important part of your job as club manager is to find "good bargains" and to get the most for the players that you sell. When the transfer market fulfills that purpose, it also adds a lot of fun to the game experience.Like in the real world, an ambitious club manager spends a lot of time searching and waiting for the perfect reinforcement for his squad.
As we all know, many of the transfers today take place as part of short- or ultra-short term "trading". While this has a place too, it does not make sense (not realistically, and not for providing an interesting challenge and excitement to the "normal" HT manager) that so much of the transfers takes place as "Day Trading".
The changes to the transfer market that we're now releasing are targeted towards bringing the transfer market back to the club managers who want to sell and buy players for their squad.
Buying and selling players solely for "trading purposes" is still permitted and should still exist on the margins, but it should not be allowed to become the main route to success in the game, and it should not be the main purpose of the transfer market. Since Day Trading is done solely for monetary profit, we have concentrated on monetary measures when trying to change the pattern.
Now, Day Trading does fill one important role: helping the market to work properly. It has prevented new users from losing players at unreasonably low prices, for instance. Day Trading has been a kind of oil in the machinery of the transfer market. So, if we reduce the amount of Day Trading, we will have to take other actions to make the market work better to compensate for this. Therefore we have added two measures that do this: Regional Transfer Lists and Transfer Compare (and the renaming of "Assessed value" to TSI, see separate Chapter, will also serve this purpose).
Agent fee
Previously, an "agent fee" of 5% was paid by the seller on all transfers. We are now replacing this flat fee with a new fee that heavily depends on how long the player has been in the selling team before he is placed on the transfer list. The shorter the time, the higher the fee. The following table shows some examples of how the formula works. The exact agent fee for your players, should they transfer-listed right now, can always be seen on the Player Details page, right below the "Place on transfer list" option.
| 0 days | 14% |
| 1 days | 12,45% |
| 2 days | 11,95% |
| 3 days | 11,59% |
| 4 days | 11,3% |
| 5 days | 11,05% |
| 6 days | 10,83% |
| 1 weeks | 10,62% |
| 2 weeks | 9,55% |
| 3 weeks | 8,76% |
| 4 weeks | 8,12% |
| 5 weeks | 7,57% |
| 6 weeks | 7,09% |
| 7 weeks | 6,65% |
| 8 weeks | 6,24% |
| 9 weeks | 5,87% |
| 10 weeks | 5,52% |
| 11 weeks | 5,19% |
| 12 weeks | 4,88% |
| 13 weeks | 4,58% |
| 14 weeks | 4,3% |
| 15 weeks | 4,03% |
| 16 weeks | 4% |
Note: Players promoted from your youth team and "original players" (from when you got your team first) are considered to have belonged to your team "forever", so for them you always get the maximum possible fee of 4%.
Last owner money
In order to gain money from the sale a player who previously belonged to your team and is being sold from his next club, the player must from now on have played matches for your team. Instead of the old "flat rate" of 3% regardless of the number of matches, the following scale will be used:
| 0 matches | 0% |
| 1 matches | 0.25% |
| 2 matches | 0.5% |
| 3 matches | 1.0% |
| 4 matches | 1.5% |
| 5 matches | 2.0% |
| 7 matches | 2.5% |
| 10 matches | 3.0% |
| 20 matches | 3.5% |
| 40 matches | 4.0% |
Regional transfers
As the number of leagues have grown over the seasons, it has finally reached the point when we think it is time to group them together into larger areas. We have chosen not to use "Continents" to group them together, because that would have meant that the European list would have been too big. Instead have created the following zones:
| Official English name | Zone | Number of users |
| Northern Europe | Northern Europe | 121525 |
| Western Europe | Western Europe | 97472 |
| Southwestern Europe | Latin Europe | 145493 |
| Central Europe | Central Europe | 149321 |
| South America | South America | 103204 |
| Eastern Europe | Eastern Europe | 53840 |
| North America | North America | 15848 |
| Asia, Africa and Oceania | Asia, Africa & Oceania | 22095 |
What "zone" a certain country belongs to is shown on its League page.
Transfer Compare
On the Player Details page, for your own players and for players currently on the transfer list, there is now a new feature called Transfer Compare.This brings up a list of recently-sold players with similar statistics and how much they were sold for.This will make it much easier for average users and newbies to get some kind of rough idea of how much they should demand for their players.
Match engine improvements
We've made a couple of minor improvements and adjustments to the game engine.
Counter-attacks for all
We've added the possibility for all teams, not only those who are successfully using the Counter-attack option, to get a counter-attack. The chances are small, and obviously those who use the CA tactic have a much bigger chance of launching a counter-attack. These "tactic independent" counter-attacks do not require that you have an inferior midfield.
Reduced midfield penalty for CA tactic
Previously you lost 10% of your midfield capacity when choosing the CA tactic. This has now been changed to losing 7% of your midfield capacity with that tactic.
Less randomness in attack/defence
We've slightly reduced the influence of randomness when the match engine determines whether a certain chance becomes a goal or not. The practical effect of this is that attack and defence ratings becomes slightly more important than before, relative to the midfield ratings.
Very minor adjustment to Defender/Keeper importance
We've made a very minor adjustment in favour of defenders at the expense of keepers in the defence ratings. It will hardly be noticable, but it is only the first of such very minor adjustments that will, over the course of several seasons, correct what we think is a slightly excessive influence in favour of keepers compared to the defenders in the defensive skills of teams. Let us underline that even the total change that will take place over several seasons will be rather limited, and the part of that change that is happening now is very limited indeed. This is not a revolutionary change.
More common weather/specialty events
There is a category of match events that make players with a certain specialty do especially well in a certain type of weather, and especially badly in another type. The chances of these events happening has been so small that it has hardly been worthwhile taking them into account when selecting your lineup. We've now made these events significantly more common, and it is now recommended for teams aspiring for the top not to ignore this tactical aspect.
Clearer confusion events
Whenever confusion happened, you were previously just informed with a "confusion event" in the match report, without being able to determine the size of the effect. The events will from now on use the scale "disastrous to excellent" to describe how team organization is after the event. A confusion event saying that team organisation fell to "wretched" means that it was very bad, while a drop to "solid" has only a very limited effect. Please note this is only a change to the way this event is presented - the formulas that determine if and how much your organization drops have not changed.
Smarter chance reporting
Here is another change that only affects the way events are presented in the match report, not the actual simulation of the matches (not affecting match outcome): Previously, once it was determined that a chance was missed, it was completely random whether the missed chance would be reported or not - it did not have anything to do with how close the match engine was to generating a goal. This has now changed: All missed chanced that are reported will now indicate that it was indeed close to generating a goal. Consequently, if your team was very far from turning a certain attack into a goal, it will not be reported. In other words, the match engine now works the way you would expect it to work: If you come close to scoring, it will report it. If nothing significant happened, nothing will be reported.
More intelligent fans
The old formula that determined how your fans reacted to the outcome of a match has been replaced by a new one. The old one had some bizarre traits that made it sometimes more popular among your fans to lose 4-5 than to win 1-0. The new formula now means they appreciate wins more and get more upset by losses. It is still less unpopular to lose 4-5 than to lose 0-1 though.
Please note that (like before) the results at home, where your fans can actually see the game for themselves, affect their mood more strongly than the result of away matches. If you win in front of your fans, they get happier than if they hear on the radio that you won away. Similarly, losing at home will make them angrier than losing away.
The effect for top clubs that get knocked out of the cup by a low-level team has been excessive, especially since, with the growth of Hattrick, "low-level teams" no longer necessarily means bad teams. In all the large leagues, there are a couple of really good teams in Division VI. So, we've limited the effect that the difference in division level has in how supporters view a cup match.
Better penalty shoot-out
The old code for determining the outcome of a penalty shoot-out has been replaced by a smarter one that takes into account all the old factors (keeper skill for the keeper and set pieces skill for the kicker), uses them more intelligently and also takes into account scoring skill and the "technical" specialty, which both help the kicker to score.
"Assessed value" becomes TSI
Each player has had an "Assessed value" automatically calculated until now. Every experienced HT user knows that this value has in fact very little to do with how much a player is actually worth if he is placed on the transfer list. All experienced users (and CHPP helper applications) instead use this value to measure how "high and low" the player is in skills and to track skill, form and health changes within a level.
The problem is that newbies easily get the impression that "Assessed value" has something to do with transfer prices. This is bad for the newbies and for the functioning of the transfer market.
We had two options for how to address this: First, try to rewrite the formula that determines the "assessed value" to make it follow the transfer market. For two reasons, we did not choose this option: First, it is nigh on impossible to absorb the entire transfer market into one formula, so any such attempt would still generate very inaccurate "assessed values". Second, changing the formula would all of a sudden make "conventional wisdom" regarding how the "value" relates to high/low and various skill differences completely obsolete. We think this would disrupt things too much for many users.
So instead, we will simply rename this value and keep it as a kind of skill comparison value. Instead of "assessed value", we will henceforth refer to it as "Total Skill Index", or simply the acronym TSI. We will also show it without recalculation into your currency and instead show it in a nameless "currency" with currency rate 1000:1 to the default internal HT currency. This is easiest shown with an example:
(Old) "Assessed value" in UK ￡: ￡200,000 (Old) "Assessed value" in Euro: €300,000
(New) Total Skill Index (TSI): 3000
Another player with an (old) "Assessed value" in Euro of €14,000 would get a TSI of 140.
To allow people to get used to the new TSI, during a transitional period of 7 weeks after the launch of HT 6.6, we will be showing the TSI both as the actual TSI under the new formula, and as a TSI "translated" into your currency, like this:
Total Skill Index (TSI): 2000 (old format: €200,000)
New salary formula
We've completely rewritten the formula that determines a player's salary. We've done this without changing the "Assessed value" / TSI (for details about new term TSI, see above) formula. Previously, the salary was completely dependent on the "Assessed value"/TSI, except for a few minor health and age adjustments. The new salary formula has been disconnected from the TSI.
Health removed from formula
The new salary formula ignores the health of the player. The old formula had the weird effect that it used to be very advantageous if your best player got injured in the last match of the season, because then his salary would drop for all of the next season. Since the salary applies to the entire season and since health is temporary, salary now ignores injuries.
Stamina only affects playmaking
In the match engine, stamina only (except for some VERY marginal special events) affects the playmaking skill. Whilst this may change at some distant point in the future (to allow stamina to matter for other skills as well), the current formula for salaries surely should reflect the current way skills affects performance. So, in the new formula, stamina only affects the component of the player's salary that comes from Playmaking skill. The old formula had the bizarre effect that it was desirable to have as low stamina as possible for all players except midfielders. Not anymore.
Multiple skills cheaper
We have repeatedly stated that in the future we want to see more players with multiple skills. Currently few people train the secondary skills of players, for instance defence and passing for midfielders. This leads to a less varied game than we want.
As a step in that direction we've made secondary skills have much less impact on salary. The new formula simply adds the "cost" of each skill, instead of having a "multiplying" effect. For instance, a player with two "supernatural" skills and the rest of the skills "disastrous", will from now on "only" cost twice as much as a player with one brilliant and the rest disastrous. Previously such a player would have cost much more than twice the single-skill player.
The sum of the changes
A change such as this one is obviously impossible to make without some teams turning out to be "winners" and others "losers". This is inevitable. Those players who have always, until now, got a huge "discount" on salaries thanks to having a low stamina will lose this discount and their owners will have to pay the full salary that other teams have always played for a player with the same skills (except for stamina). We think this is the right thing to do, although teams that have "optimized" salaries according to the old "unfair" formula may notice that their salaries will rise.
Similarly, we cannot make economic changes to stimulate training of secondary skills without this affecting teams with a lot of single-skill players negatively. But the new formula is more adequate and it also stimulates the game in the right direction, so we think this is the right thing to do.
The total sum of salaries with the new formula will generate slightly lower wages, seen on a global scale. However, since new teams and teams in the lower divisions tend to have more multiple-skills players (for instance solid-solid) while the top teams tend to have more single-skill players (for instance divine-solid), the new salaries will generally lower the wages more for lower divisions than for top clubs. Some top clubs that have not heeded our hints that multiple-skills will become more important in the future, or that have had comparatively low salary by taking advantage of the health/stamina oddities, will in fact suffer from higher salaries.
Team ratings split 1:2
The team ratings (you know, "Midfield: brilliant; Right Defence: Supernatural" and so on, that is shown on the match report page) have suffered from the fact that teams become better and better each season. A large number of teams now regularly reach the Divine level (especially the national teams, but others too). This means that it becomes impossible to see the difference between two teams that have reached the limit of Divine.
To remedy this, we are now changing the scale to make it twice as hard to qualify for a certain rating. So rating values that previously rendered you a "Magnificent" rating (the 12th value) will now only render you a "Passable" one (the 6th value). Another example: A high formidable rating (the 9th value) in the old system will now be called "inadequate" (the 5th value).We realise that this will be very confusing at first, but since all the old ratings will automatically be recalculated to the new "harsher" scale, we're sure we'll all get used to it soon.
We should point out that nothing has changed in the match engine relating to this. This is purely a presentational thing that makes the game capable of handling the ever increasing skills of the HT world.
UPDATE (version 6.6.1) Due to feedback from many users, we're making the team ratings more detailed. Each rating will get 3 sub-levels: (+), (-) and nothing. So, instead of just having "Formidable" you'll get one of the following three ratings:Formidable (-) Formidable Formidable (+)
These obviously indicate that "Skill is in the lower/middle/upper third of the range called Formidable". So, effectively, after these changes, the new scale will give us the best of both worlds - the new scale can handle top teams, yet both minor and top teams actually get a 50% more detailed scale than before.
Note on effects on global economy
Let us underline that we always monitor the state of the global HT economy. Whenever it starts moving in the wrong direction, we will take action. When designing the changes that are part of HT 6.6, we have taken the current trends in the HT economy into account. However, since some of the actions we take are deliberately trying to change behaviours, we need to monitor the economy extra closely, and if need be, we may make some minor adjustments at the half-way stage of the season.
Also, remember that it is the overall state of the economy that we monitor, not the fluctuations of the transfer market.
