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An interview with Ratsia

Written by HT-Tasos

Ratsia (88666) is the 'most stalked' user in HT (except HTs): more than 400 users bookmarked him to read his posts, he's playing the game since 2002 and he's well known as a very interesting person. And when editorials are published, a lot of users start to look for his posts, to check the ideas of an HT user "who knows". With this interview, we try to give you some more information about him, and his ideas/proposals about HT.

Hello Ratsia and thank you for the great chance to interview on of the most popular managers in Global. We read your posts in the forum every day but only few of us know who is the real person behind the avatar of Ratsia. Let's start with an easy one. Could you please introduce yourself?

Oh, but this is the hardest one...

I am a 36yo guy from Finland, living with my baby girl and her mother in Helsinki. I am a computer scientist, working on machine learning, artificial intelligence and data analysis at University of Helsinki, where I lead a small research group. During my free time I enjoy board games, good food, and all the usual stuff like hanging around with friends. For some weird reason, most of my friends are also in academia but working in different fields, which might have an influence on my communication style.

The above is who I am today, but during the soon 13 years I have played the game I have naturally gone through various stages in life. I started and finished my PhD studies while playing HT, got married and divorced, and both bought and sold my first apartment. If you remember my writings from days long gone, the posts probably do not reflect the current me that well.

You play Hattrick since 2002. Obviously you have achieved a lot. Can you tell us the short version of your team story? Do you believe that you have reached your limit or there are other things that you would like to do with your team?

I think I could write thousands of words on this, but I try to be brief.

I indeed started in 2002, right before the Finnish league started growing rapidly. I started in div IV and promoted twice in a row, only to find myself in div II after less than two full seasons of playing while at the same time the new managers in Finland were being placed in div VI. Combined with a serious fan bug that gave some teams (like mine) hundreds of fans at once, this gave me a very strong head-start compared to the masses. Nevertheless, it still took me 10 seasons of playing in div II and III before promoting to Mestaruussarja, the Finnish top division that by then was the most consistently strong series in HT according to Alltid. I went on to play 12 seasons in a row there, winning the national title four times in 2007-2008. During the first three I was playing the best football in the series, but the forth one was a real fluke; I didn't lose any matches and won by 12 points even though the series had one very strong trader and several other teams that were better than mine.

Roughly around the time I finally demoted from Mestaruussarja, I stopped playing the game for real. I have always had very strong voluntary constraints for my team and around that time I started to increasingly feel that there is too much mental pressure for me to continue even a semi-serious effort. I had always avoided trading as much as I could (though I must admid I took part in the events that resulted in invention of skilltrading; I stopped doing it as soon as I realized what it was about), I intentionally stayed away from the most profitable training types, and I never took advantage of the ridiculous interest feature we had back then. However, by 2008 or so I had come to realize that even if I ignored all those elements, my total wealth (and hence team strength) would still be almost solely determined by how much I take advantage of the "gray area", such as reaping some hundreds of thousands extra when buying or selling a player, or by using player types that are known to be more powerful than what the community realizes. I could not continue playing with the constant pressure of "If I sold one guy today and replaced him with a slightly better one, I would earn 300k for free" looming over me, so I decided I will not even try. Since then, I have been casually cruising around, ending up as a medium-quality div III/IV team that will definitely not promote any higher. Nowadays I also completely lack motivation (and largely time) and a few times I have also forgot to place a lineup, so there really is no risk of progress. I no longer even have a youth squad and I do not have energy for using the transfer list, but I should still be able to hang around in div IV for as long as I want to.

In HM I never had good success, though I managed to win a few matches there. I've also never been in the cup finals. Both of these are consequences of my playing style: I always cared more about consistency and the overall progress than individual matches, refusing to buy any kind of temporary players except in some very rare cases (and 99% of time I would not have money anyway). Related to this, I feel that my biggest achievements with the game are also in the consistency regime. FC Vompatti sits on third place in the all-time list of Mestaruussarja and played 22 seasons in a row in div I/II between 2004 and 2010, in a country that back then was amongst the strongest ones, if not the strongest. The other thing I am somewhat proud of is having reached at least the 5th round in the national cup every single season I have been in the cup. This includes even the very first season in 2002, so the streak covers soon 13 years of cup seasons with at least 5 rounds. Is there anyone in whole HT who can beat that?

How could contributions (and possibly tactic effectiveness) be tweaked so that there would be multiple equilibria and no single "best" line-up.

The easy way out would be to make the different lineup choices to have clear drawbacks, by dramatically changing the non-linearities or even by adding explicit penalties like "with only two defenders the opponent gets a few CA events for free, with additional 50% boost for attack ratings". Then we would get something like 4-5-1 beats 2-5-3 which beats 3-5-2 which beats 4-5-1, but without other major changes this might actually just make the game worse. Such second-guessing mechanics essentially reduce the game into a glorified rock-paper-scissors, which I personally do not like at all.

A more practical way would be to just tweak the player contributions to better balance the various overall tactics and lineups. The core of the engine works well, so we would not need any dramatic changes. Instead, a competent game designer should spend some weeks carefully analyzing, simulating and tweaking the player contributions and other numerical details. This has never been done, yet it would be way more important than adding new elements or re-designing some particular current elements completely.

Let's say they will let you run Hattrick for a year. Which would be the very first 3 things you'd change or implement?

This might come as a surprise, but none of those things would be about the game itself but instead about how it is run. The first thing would be to completely change the way the developers interact with the community; instead of explicitly avoiding contact with the community, the all developers would need to allocate time for community relations (primarily via forums). The second change would be to hire a game designer, a person capable and responsible of balancing the numerous fine details in the engine etc. The third change would be to incorporate more data-driven decision-making, especially to further improve the financial status and user-base; HT has full control on their platform and hence could very easily record a lot of data about their customers to influence decisions on interfaces, supporter prices, moderation policies, and whatever.

What about the new staff system? Do you think it has achieved its purpose or need some changes/improvements?

The old staff system was, in terms of low-level mechanics, the most poorly designed part of the game. It had zero transparency, required no action ever except to utilize loopholes, and even had some choices that were strictly worse than some others for all relevant variables. In practice we could, however, ignore it.

The new system is clearly an improvement, but only because it is more transparent. There is still never any reason to touch the choices except again to utilize loopholes and possibly when switching from one extreme tactic to another if one is into such things. Roughly as good system could have been designed and implemented in a day or two at any point during this century, so in the end we didn't get anything out from the hugely delayed "major change". Renewing that part of the game was perhaps the best opportunity ever of improving the core game, but the developers passed it.

Luckily we can still completely ignore the feature. I wouldn't even remember what kind of staff members I have; when the system was launched I picked some, and have no intention of ever changing them.

Thank you for your answer. As I can understand, you are not satisfied with the current status. Without spending a lot of time on it, what do you think that has to be improved in the new staff system?

What it would need is purpose, and probably the best one would be more medium-term decisions. HT has short-term decisions in form of lineups and long-term decisions in form of squad selection and training, but very little medium-term ones besides TS management. Staff would be a natural instrument for introducing more of those, things we set for perhaps 4-8 weeks and that has notable effect. The Staff member choices of all clubs should also be public.

A practical example of could be: "Counter attack consult for 6 weeks. Improves CA conversion rate by 2%/level during the first week, 4%/level during the second week, and then 6%/level for the following 4 weeks. Hiring a CA consult blocks all other consult types for 12 weeks."

I have read many times in forum the idea to split the training to different percentages for more than one training type. For example, instead of training 100% on scoring, you could use 50% on scoring, 30% on short passing and 20% on wing attacks. How can you imagine the results on the economy of this? Do you think that training system can be improved with another way?"

I have no idea on the economic impact, but I do not see how it would improve the game. If anything, it would probably lead to more stagnant squads and lineups, simply making the game more boring.

What makes - or made - Hattrick fun for you? Can you give an advice to the managers that read this article?

For me the important aspect of HT was always the slow enough pace, and in particular that doing more of some repetitive manual labour every day was not rewarded as much as it is in many other games. That is, HT is a proper game instead of a glorified clicker game that is all about doing the same thing more often than others. There might be better games out there today, but I no longer have a need to play one so I have no need to even try them out. Naturally also the forum has played a big role.

My main advice is not to take the game too seriously. The more seriously one plays the more the faults and issues bother. Just ignore all the elements you find boring or irritating, so that the time spent with the game goes for the fun stuff instead. Sure you will not be as high in the league pyramid but if that is all you care then HT is probably not the right game for you anyway.