General Guidelines

Posted by: Mateusz Mucha on Mon, 28 February 2005 23:05:38 (1560 Reads)

While designing Dribbling, we constantly have to keep in mind general guidelines that we've set for ourselves. Won't this new feature give an additional advantage to wealthier teams? Is this particular way of solving training OK with our rule that says "don't make it profitable to raise one skill far higher than others"? So our General Guidelines is in fact the list of goals that we want to achieve. It's the result of years of experience with other online football management games. We know what we don't like about them and we want to avoid all those mistakes. Read the whole story and see what's important for us.

No advantage for supporters.

We believe we can maintain our project just on voluntary donations. While our "sponsors" would get some neat additional features (statistics, etc.), we want to make sure that wealthier users will not have any in-game advantage over those that play for free.

Skills over "seniority.

What hurts me the most in other games is that old players have great advantage over those that started later. Let me give you a real example: I started playing Hattrick (great game overall!) in January 2002. I was one of the first players and I quickly got to the top. Now my assets (cash, players' value, etc.) and income (what I get from sponsors and tickets) are so much higher than those of people that started even one year after me, that practically they have no chance of catching up with me ever. Even poor managers that started early are higher ranked that brilliant people that started later (my roommate didn't care much about Hattrick, didn't train his players, yet he managed to stay in top division for several seasons). So in brief: we want to minimize the impact of player's seniority and maximize the impact of management skills, effort put in the team and intellectual potential in general. I can't stress it enough, but believe me, it's probably our most important guideline.

Little player specialization.

Great midfielder should be a decent defender. It should be better to have players with diversified skills. No more of this "I'm great at shooting, but I can't pass at all... but it doesn't matter almost at all" crap.

High player specialization (on a different level).

No two players will be equally good for two different teams. If your team tends to play certain tactic a lot, Mark may be much better choice than Paul, even though Paul is a more expensive player. Managers should look for players that fit well into their squads.

Squad diversification.

Just like in real world, every decent club should have good backup players. You can't rely only on your first eleven.

Tactical awareness.

It takes me about 2 minutes to set lineup for every game in Hattrick. Analyzing opponents tactics and reacting to them should be far more important and give a real advantage. Managers should alter their teams' tactics based on what their opponents tend to do.

Tactical variety.

It's not only "I choose to play with strong attack and weak defense" anymore. "Tactics" of a given team should be as complex as possible, but should not be a pain in the butt for those managers that either don't know the game too well or don't want to spend much time playing it.

Complexity.

A game is either complex or it gets boring. A forum post that would sound like "wow, I've been playing this game for 3 years, but I'm still finding new things in it" would make us very happy. So no matter how long you play, the game should remain challenging and almost as demanding as in the beginning. So the longer you play, the better you are, but you can't use the same routine over and over.

Simplicity for newbies.

Have you ever quit playing a game after five minutes just because it seemed too complex? Learning curve should not be too steep. It might be hard to reconcile this rule with the previous one, but hey, nobody said that designing a game is an easy task!

Community.

A lot of people (including me, but unfortunately I don't have much time anymore) like that part of the game the most. We'll put a lot of effort into creating an environment that will let you guys create a colorful, meaningful and fun communities. Shall we try to introduce in-game politics? Very promising and dangerous at the same time (we think politics are interesting, but real life politics stink, right?).

Enforcing user cross-communication.

Football players are not meat that you buy on a market. Want to make a good deal? Search for a player by contacting other managers!

No "set it and forget about it" areas of the game.

Every aspect of the game has a potential to be fun. Why resign from it by allowing such "set it and forget about it approach"? For example, good managers will have to take care of their training on a weekly basis.