More Change than Barack Obama

We are pleased to announce the changes and features coming to you in season 14

For Everybody

Weight and Height (Again) – Much discussion has taken place on this subject, both in the public forums, and the review board forums. Consequently, we have decided to move all weight and height effects currently affecting training, back into the Match Engine. We know this is a mess that will upset managers who had reviewed their training during season 13. For this we apologise, but hopefully you can see that the net result is simpler and tidier, and just better.

We were discussing the current BMI usage with training, and that using BMI wasn’t the best way to do things for all related skills. This meant we would need to have height affect some skills, weight would affect others, and a combination (BMI) would affect others too. This was becoming too complicated and messy, given that weight and height already had certain effects on the match engine itself in areas such as the scrum and lineout, rather than training.

The most logical place to have player attribute effects is directly in the match engine itself. After all, in a physics engine for a 3D game, an object’s weight and height affects how it falls during the simulation, and nowhere else.

So without further rambling, here are the final effects of weight and height on the game from season 14 and beyond.

Effects which have been there since day 1
- Heavy players have more strength (affects scrum, breakdown, maul, attacking plays, and defending)
- Tall players have better jumping (affects lineout, and kick reception)
- Height consistency improves scrum performance

Balancing effects to be added
- Tall players and heavy players will be less agile (affects attacking plays, kick reception, and defending)
- Heavy players will be slower (affects attacking plays, kick reception, and defending)
- Heavy players will lose stamina slightly faster (affects everything)

Club growth system – In the last few seasons, the number of new members your club received were relative to the division you were in, taking into account all divisions at the same level across the world. This resulted an imbalance where a club in a large nation could be receiving significantly less new members than an inferior club in a smaller nation. This will be fixed in season 14, by basing new members on the division within your nation, rather than your division across all nations.

International Season - There have been a few observations about the current international season and there being just one game per week per team. We are going to increase this by compressing the normal international season into half the length of time, and running two seasons in one normal game season, bringing both more games, and more chance for promotion and relegation between international tiers. To bring in a bit more variety as well, there will be auto-promotion and relegation of the top/bottom teams in each tier, and qualifiers will take place between 5th and 2nd. The end of season tour will remain the same since there is more than one match per week already.

Discipline Balancing - There is currently a significant imbalance with discipline where low discipline causes more penalties, but does not cause more turnovers. The indended balancing is for low discipline to cause more penalties, but also more turnovers, and high discipline to reduce penalties, but also turnovers. We’re finally going to re-balance this in the Season 14 match engine. We are also reviewing aggression and it's role in the match engine, but these changes will come at a later date.

Smarter Penalty Kick Decision Making – The penalty kick decision making process in the match engine does not currently look at quality of lineout, or previous lineout success in the current match. Support for this will be added in Season 14 resulting in more kicks for touch if your lineout is dominant, or vice versa if your lineout is weak.

Defense Skill Levels Removal – The skill levels for each of the current defense types will be removed. This means you will be able to use any defense type interchangeably from match to match. As a consequence of this change, National and U20 sides will no longer receive defense hits when dropping players from their squads.

For Premium Members

Saved Replays – Premium members will be able to save replays of any match they desire (with the exception of matches already deleted) match to prevent the commentary from being automatically removed. They can do this to a limit of 50 matches.

More notifications – Premium members will be able to opt in via in-game mail or email to notifications when:
A) A player in their shortcuts list is placed on the Transfer Market, or
B) A player in their watchlist has 1 hour remaining before an auction deadline.

Your points would all make sense if you were right about how defences work, but unfortunatley you are not - not your fault, as the docs on them are not as clear as they could be. The defence types don't defend better against one type of attack than another, they operate differently to that. If what was wanted were defence types that were good against certain of the attack tactics, then the defence types would mirror the attack types and you would then apply various %'s to each, the same way you do attacks. Over on the ME review this option was looked at but then disgarded for the very reason you put up above - namely, it would lead to teams having random attack patterns from game to game to stop defences getting a read on them.

Basically, amongst other things, a drift defence will create more lineouts, through pushing players out of bounds. A rush defence will create more scrums, due to increasing chances of handling errors, while MOM does neither of those, though does cut down on the amount of linebreaks against you. This is not all the differences between the defence types, but until the docs are changed I don't think i should really say more. If you read between the lines of what the docs say now, you will figure out most of what they do anyway.

What is needed is better descriptions of the defence tactics in the docs, which i think is going to happen shortly. Jeremy has given the go ahead to change what the help docs say on them, but I just need to double check exactly what should go in them before I change the docs themselves.

Balancing effects to be added
- Tall players and heavy players will be less agile (affects attacking plays, kick reception, and defending)
- Heavy players will be slower (affects attacking plays, kick reception, and defending)
- Heavy players will lose stamina slightly faster (affects everything)