Sponsorship upgrade

I'm working on the sponsorship aspect of the game at the moment and thought I'd give you a brief idea of how it will work.

Gone will be the total randomness with every team having equal chance of good and bad deals and in will come a more structured set of offers.

When not sponsored, each team can have up to 3 new offers a week. You will get 4 weeks to accept or reject these offers so you can wait to see if a better offer comes in, although the longer you wait, the longer you have without any sponsorship money coming in.

There will also be 4 different types of company - International, national, regional and local each offering different amounts. International companies will offer the most for example. International companies will only want to sponsor teams that are in the major cup competitions (Euro and UEFA) also so the offers you get will depend on how your team is performing.

Finally there will be 2 kinds of offers - one will be a weekly payment for the duration of the sponsorship and one will be a lump sum up front.

Basically, you should get more offers and more options. The trick is to accept the right offers at the right time. If you are fighting for promotion do you wait until promoted to maybe get a better deal or take what you can get? Likewise, do you take an international offer just before you get knocked out of Europe?

I'm sure you'll agree that this new system will be much better and yet it will still be simple to accept offers - you'll also get a mail when new offers are there so you don't have to check the sponsorship screen all the time.

New team selection

Just thought I would give you another preview like I did in another post for the new scouting upgrade. This time it is the new team selection page.

As you can probably see, there are major improvements to this particular page on the site. The first is that you can select players for other positions than their own. Even playing goalkeepers up front if you so wish. With the current positions, this probably sounds quite limited but when I bring further positions into the game it will give more scope to set your team up as you wish. Although extra positions probably won't be brought in until the new ratings are being used much more.

The 2nd thing you may notice is the ability so select 3 substitutes who will come on if your players get injured only in the first place. In the future I will give the ability to give instructions as to when certain changes should occur but to begin with it will just be injuries. I'm sure you'll agree that this is a step in the right direction.

Finally, you will have the captain selection only containing selected players and the formation will be updated as and when you make selections. I, personally, think it will be a far better way of selecting a team than the current one.

It won't be implemented for a little while but just thought you may want to see I am making progress.

Discipline chart

It has been suggested to me that a discipline table would be useful.

There were actually 2 suggestions regarding it.

One was to have a table similar to the leading scorers table which would show the worst offenders of a season. I don't really see the benefit of this. All players can have their current status viewed by looking at the individual players' page - a chart showing bad boys seems more a novelty than something of use. I'm open to your attempts at convincing me though as it's not too tricky to develop.

The second option was more realistic - an at-a-glance view of what players are currently suspended for a team. This could be displayed on the team information page underneath leading scorers and we could also have a divisional listing so you can see all suspensions in the division at the current time.

The benefit of the former is so that you can see if your next opponents have players out - the new scouting system doesn't show suspensions and in reality even fans know who is suspended for other teams so it's not something I want to hide. The divisional listing I'm less convinced about although I may well do it. The only reason for this in my view is so that towards the end of a season you can see if your promotion or relegation rivals are short of their players.

Mailbox to Email

I know these ideas are coming thick and fast at the moment but I'm just going through the ideas currently in my mailbox. I'm hoping most of these won't take me long to code and I'd rather get them all done before I move onto the next major changes.

This idea is down to receiving your mailbox mail via your email.

Firstly I intend it to be an optional feature so on your account you will check a box if you want this.

I was going to make it so that every mail into your mailbox will also be received by email but this may not be feasible as some of the messages will be coming from the end of week procedure.

Therefore I changed my plan so that it would be a daily mail to say how many new messages you had (if any) and a link to the site. Perhaps even stating who the mails are off.

Do you see any benefit in having this option? Would you tick the box to receive a daily update if you had new mail?

End of season loans

At the end of last season one team gained what I would consider an unfair advantage by loaning 20 rated players for a very important game. I presume that these players were loaned from teams that had nothing to play for although I haven't checked. The opposition manager rightly complained but it was too late for me to do anything by then. I'm now hoping to have something in place to stop it occurring this season if I can.

Anyway, I need a way of stopping this so am looking for ideas. The only one I have so far is to disable loans for the final 4 or 5 weeks of a season when the important games are. I don't particularly want to disable transfers but just disabling loans may not be a bad idea.

In the future when I have implemented the new ratings and player salaries then it may be something that managers don't want to do anyway but it can always be reviewed once they are in place.