News

In May we performed a user survey where we asked you what you thought about the game, the community and the site. 191 000 people answered - fantastic! The amount of answers make us proud, but the results make us even prouder and I thought I should share a few of them with you.

Sometimes when you enter the conferences and read a thread about someone quitting you might start thinking people are leaving the game. Well, this survey definitely puts an end to those thoughts. As many as 95% of the Hattrick users say they will be playing a year from now and even more - 97% - say they will recommend Hattrick to a friend. When we got these results we looked at each other and asked ourselves if we were dreaming, then we went down to the local baker and bought a cake. :)
So, there are no people leaving the game then? Well, it would be very unnatural if noone left the game ever, but in fact only 1% say they will not play Hattrick a year from now.

The ordinary Hattrick user is a 21-25 years old male who's been playing Hattrick for 1-2 years and in general spends 3-5 hours each week on Hattrick. Most people say they play Hattrick because of their interest in gaming strategy and football, they're excited by the competition. This also corresponds well with our earlier surveys.

In this survey we asked a little bit more detailed what you thought about seven key areas: User interface, administration of the game, grasping the game, cups, site performance, community/conference and challenge of the game. The challenge of the game is what you think is the most important, followed by the user interface. That was kind of expected. What's a bit surprising on the other hand is that the least important thing according to this survey is site performance!

Our performance on these areas above is very satisfactory according to you, especially the user interface and the adminstration of the game. What's really great is that our volunteer workers are so appreciated. 98% are satisfied with their language version and only 3% say they're not satisfied with our Game Masters and Moderators. Only 3%! That would've been a great result for a pure customer service and for a combined helpdesk, customer service and police (as the GM/Mod task is) it's really astonishing.

So, now you've talken about all the good stuff - where's the bad results you might ask yourself?
Well, it might seem odd but there are no particulary bad area in the game according to the survey. If I should say one thing it will be that only 85% feel enough challenged, but then again 85% is pretty good and it's kind of strange to say that's bad. But it can definitely be improved. Another thing might be that 18% find the conference structure a bit difficult, however the structure is at the same time very appreciated by those who spend much time on the conference. This tells you the conference structure might take some time to get used to, but once you've done that you'll like it a lot.

But even if you think we perform well on all areas the purpose with this survey was not to get flattered, (even if that was a very nice side effect). The main purpose with this survey was to see what you all think is important, what you think needs to be improved. We listen a lot to the community and we closely follow the discussions on the conferences, but we also know we got a lot of users who don't spend much time on the conferences and we like to know what they think too. The conferences offer a good channel for voicing opinions, almost 80% agreed on that in the survey. Still it's kind of clear that most Hattrick users don't spend much time on the conferences, only around 20% spend more than half their time on Hattrick in the community/conference area and around 25% don't spend any time there at all, they find other areas in Hattrick more interesting. This is of course one area which we want to improve, we want more people to enjoy the community part too because we think it's one of the best things with Hattrick. At the same time we must understand that there are people who find other areas of Hattrick more interesting and it's just as important for us to listen to them even if they don't write much on the conferences.

Overall, the outcome of this survey gives us a nice tool to use in the future. We can see what you think is important and where it's important for us to get even better, like the challenge of the game and community part for example. That's two areas we'll focus on, and already started to focus on. There are also other areas which you find not so important (and/or our performance is really good) which then don't need the same focus, like the cups for example.

Finally there are also times when we will not listen that much to what you think. I'm sorry, but we will not listen at all to you when it comes to site performance. No matter how many times you say it's the least important thing in Hattrick, we will not listen. For us site performance will always be top priority, and honestly I think you'll like it that way too.