Навіны

When Hattrick first went online on August 30, 1997, only half a dozen users knew about about it. Today we are close to a million! Ours is a story of a simple game idea that proved so powerful, engaging and addictive that it almost took on a life of its own. One interesting thing we noted when looking back on our history is that out of the few hundred users that signed up back in 1997, ninety-seven are still active as managers in the game today – that’s pretty amazing we think. We’d like to thank them, and the rest of you, for sticking around!

What’s been going on?

The past year has been a constructive one for Hattrick. We saw the introduction of the Hattrick Masters, as well as a modified version of the Cup take effect this season. During the spring, we had the biggest Supporter update ever, the big league reform, and many changes to the interface of Hattrick, as well as the new match order tool. But more importantly, we have been adding a lot of weight to the Hattrick development team.

HT-Magnus came onboard as a game developer one year ago, in spring HT-Berg arrived to take charge of server operations, and HT-David as project manager. In August, HT-Thomas, previously known as CHPP developer Tellerbop, checked in as a game developer as well, and over the next few weeks two more developers will arrive with focus, respectively, on support system development and database administration. It’s all part of a greater plan to make sure the development of the actual game never suffers from all the other things our systems need as they grow - that our game designers can actually spend most of their time designing the game. We don’t think Hattrick could ask for a better birthday present.

On other fronts, we had some fun as the first Hattrick Caffé restaurant opened in Lisbon in July. This project is an amazing idea suggested to us by a Hattrick user and entrepreneur in Portugal, and we have had the pleasure of participating in creating the concept of a high quality sports bar and restaurant. Check our Hattrick caffé page to read more about this project!

New Supporter Package

Now for the birthday goodies! Two weeks ago, we launched the game improvements for all users. Now it’s time for the extra stuff for our Supporters, who make this game possible to run. The new Supporter features this season are:

- Detailed league tables with Win/Loss/Draw/Goal differential columns.
- Show the world what you look like by publishing an avatar/picture with your user details.
- The conference bookmark limit has been raised from 5 to 10.
- We’ve added new interface skins to choose from.
- You can collect flags for playing at home in international friendlies.

The new features might spawn a new category of flag chasers and definitely present opportunities for creative users to express themselves with avatars.

Also, we conducted a poll earlier this year with the owners of the largest federations and got their input on what features they wanted in the feds. We have listened to their wishes and implemented a couple of these features in the new Supporter package.

- Cool statistics for federations (and plenty of room for more in the future!)
- XMLs for federations. CHPP developers may now write programs to help administer federations.
- News letter to a specific role in a federation.
- Automatic joining of the federation conference upon membership in the federation.

Finally, we are adding another new feature for everyone: the option to filter out a single user's messages in a forum thread. Very helpful in the stalking line of business, or trying to get a quick grasp of what someone has been saying over the course of a long thread. Oh, and the start page of Hattrick, the one before you log on, has been spiced up a little too. In case you didn’t already notice.

That said, thank you so much for being Hattrick users. And an excellent new season to all of you!