Community » Hattrick Press

If I Were In Charge

Written by Broughy1322

We all have wonderful and sometimes crazy ideas about what we'd like to see happen in Hattrick. From improvements and fixes to complete overhauls and brand new concepts, the Hattrick community has suggested it all.

But what if YOU were in charge of the HT team? You wouldn't have the unlimited resources, time, or desire to implement every suggestion, and some things will no doubt be more important than others. This is the situation I decided to put myself in whilst writing this article, as I detail exactly where I'd direct the HT team's efforts if I were in charge, taking into account not only the needs of the users, but the needs of the game too. Do you agree? Read on and let me know!

Hi. I'm Broughy1322 and I've been on Hattrick for 8 years. Over that period I've fallen in love with many aspects of the game and devoted a lot of my time to it, resulting in my being successful on many levels, including with my club team (62264), achievements (759 pts), federations (102444), flag collecting, NT/U20 teams, and more. I've also written a few successful global articles before but they were helpful guides. This will be my first opinion piece.

Because of how I feel about the game it causes me great pain to see it have any problems, be they self-imposed or just coming from an unhappy community. I've written this article to put forward my thoughts on the direction I feel Hattrick should move in the reasonably near future, in the hope that maybe some ideas are heard and implemented, or some even better ones come out of the discussion this article will hopefully bring.

Please be aware that I've basically put myself in the position of being in charge of Hattrick. Therefore my concern is not just whether I'd like to see a feature in the game (which is as far as most people think when they present ideas), but instead more all-consuming regarding the success of the game in general and satisfaction of the majority of its members. Most of these ideas I feel wouldn't take much time and could really help turn the game's fortunes around.

So without further ado, let's get into it.

The Problems
In terms of the game as a whole I feel there are three main issues at this moment in time that need addressing:
- Keeping Old Members Happy
- Stopping New Members Leaving
- Attracting New Members

Keeping Old Members Happy
This never used to be as much of an issue as it is now. However in recent times the money making aspect of Hattrick has been focused on almost entirely, to the detriment of core game development. Whilst I don't necessarily think there is anything wrong in monetising the game in moderation, with so many (sometimes controversial) money generating ideas being implemented one after another it is bound to get older members who want to see some proper game development a bit annoyed. These are members Hattrick doesn't want to be losing as they're more likely to be paying supporters.

Stopping New Members Leaving
Hattrick's new user retention is truly awful. No matter how many times an introduction for new members is developed, there are some fundamental aspects of the game which just turn new members away when there are so many alternatives. Yes Hattrick is a very different game to most, but it can still have mass appeal with the right tweaks. There is no point trying to grow the game when 99% of those who sign up don't stay.

Attracting New Members
A game can't grow without new members. There is only one idea I'll present for this beyond the usual marketing techniques and it's a much bigger undertaking than anything else I'll suggest, but we'll leave that for the end...

The Solutions
So what can be done? The majority of the suggestions you'll see below shouldn't take too much time or resources and, based on their potential gains, I think are definitely worth the effort. These are the things I'd want HT to focus on if I suddenly started making the decisions for them.

1) More Transparency
The first is something that HT-Tjecken has actually mentioned recently - more transparency. These days Hattrick isn't anywhere near as much of a mystery as it once was. The community has largely figured out the secrets behind almost all aspects of the game and the majority of top players already know these secrets. It's not as if they're hard to find either - there are websites and forum threads dedicated to them.

That means the only thing that these secrets are now doing is being a barrier to entry. After a month or two of stumbling around a new user who is interested enough will start to learn about all these nuances, but in that two month period hundreds of other new users have gotten frustrated and already left the game. We already have a little more transparency than we used to after the introduction of the ratings predictor, and we should have even more when the new staff system is introduced, but I think we need yet more still. We need to make the game more accessible. By that I don't mean easier to play, but easier to access the information needed to play well.

Start sprinkling some of that "no-so-secret-anymore" information around the site in various places and the game becomes more accessible to new players without actually changing anything about it.

2) More Entertainment
For a new user Hattrick can become stale very quickly. There may not be that much to do after the initial rush of manager licence challenges. Equally older managers can become bored with the same old thing if nothing ever improves. Because of that we need Hattrick to improve it's entertainment value, and matches should be the main beneficiary of this. League matches especially should be a really important event that you actively want to be online for once a week to watch. To that end, I'd want match reports to be more entertaining. It has been suggested before that the announcement of a free kick or penalty being awarded should come before it has actually been taken, but I'd go one further and do it for every event. I'd also show directly in the match report the different type of normal chances (exclusive/non-exclusive) in the name of transparency.

Take this as an example of what an exclusive, right sided chance might look like:

Some good build up play from the baseline of TeamA allowed a chance to come their way on the right...

Then 30 to 90 seconds later the outcome of that chance is actually reported:

And it's a goal! Player1 goes to celebrate with the crowd after smashing the ball into the back of the net.

Obviously there are a lot of different options for this but you get the idea - more uncertainty and suspense during a match to make viewing them more fun. In addition, some kind of match viewer is something that would be high on my list of priorities. Even a basic 2D version that just shows replays of match report phrases (which has been done before via CHPP) would be enough for now. Hattrick needs to get a bit more visual and altogether more entertaining to keep up with the competition.

3) More Fairness
there are a small minority of people who want to change the whole league structure in HT to make it more accessible to new users and fair to current users, but it's totally unnecessary and is a bad idea for a number of reasons I won't go into here. At the moment it is true that the promotion/relegation system is slightly flawed, and to stop current users getting frustrated there is a very easy solution which is also by no means revolutionary. Automatic promotions should be based on league strength rather than points accrued (with the winners of stronger leagues getting promoted over winners of easier leagues) and qualification games should be played in neutral stadiums. Add on to this an extra friendly game for all those who don't get qualification games and we take a big step forward in removing unfair aspects of the game which make users frustrated.

4) Less Confusion
There are enough things in Hattrick to get your head around - there's no need to add any more unnecessary confusion. This is better described through examples, and the fixes for these are surely very resource- and time-light.
- Let's take training intensity. Is there really any need to have it? How many people actually change it? It's just another thing to make people confused.
- Confidence drops at high levels are another very frustrating thing as they contain some random. Why not just make confidence act the same way as team spirit so there's a bit more predictability?
- Even something like player experience. Why over-complicate things by having users search external sites to find that they need 28 "points" per level and then make them work out the different values to each game? Just tell people how many XP points a player got for a specific game and put in the manual how many is needed for a level (again more transparency).
In some areas of Hattrick random and uncertainty just cause unnecessary confusion and I'd want to rid people of this if I were in charge.

5) Promote International Competition
International competition is largely ignored in Hattrick. The Hattrick Masters and the World Cup should be pinnacle events in the game and they deserve more than a facebook message about who won. Previews/roundups should be posted to the community regularly to keep people informed and give them reasons to follow the action. Individual communities can only do so much to get their users interested - something needs to come from Hattrick to get people watching. An improved match viewing experience should help too, and a complete overhaul can come later down the line. It's all about entertainment!

6) Achievements
Not everyone likes achievements and that's fine, but they are a big part of gaming in general these days and have amazing potential within Hattrick. I'd want more achievements and I'd want them to encourage good game behaviour from new players (showing progression, learning the game, etc) whilst presenting a new challenge for everyone else (without needing to completely ruin your team to get them). I could go on about these for days, but I'd basically want a complete overhaul of the achievement system.

7) A Fully Developed Mobile Application
And so we come on to the "big idea" I was talking about earlier. In my opinion Hattrick is missing out on a massive market of potential players and this needs to be addressed as soon as the above is complete. These days more people play games on phones and tablets than ever before, and a lot of people don't even use a standard computer to access the internet most of the time. Everything is mobile now, and Hattrick needs to get mobile too.

I'd want to see a fully developed mobile application for Hattrick. It would need to be able to do literally everything - forums, messaging, complete team control, etc. It basically needs to be the entire website but in a visually appealing mobile app form. It can even be part of a site redesign if necessary and include paid-for unlockable features (extra push notification types?). But from achievement integration to being able to buy supporter and credits on the go, it needs to really have everything to be successful. A casual tablet gamer should be able to sign up and completely run a successful team without even logging in to the main site once.

This would obviously be a benefit to current users too, but in my opinion only by tapping into this market and actually throwing some weight behind it will we start to see Hattrick grow again.

The Future
Beyond this, I'd want to get the focus back on major core game development. Things that might actually change the gaming experience. But I wouldn't want to put resources behind that until the game is a growing, or even stable, entity. It's all about priorities, and you can't devote an inordinate amount of time to a brand new game changing (or money making) feature, when users are leaving constantly and new signups aren't staying. Once that reaches a nice equilibrium there will be more time and less pressure for developing or changing larger aspects of the game.

Your Thoughts
Thank you for staying this long. Be sure to give the article a like if you enjoyed reading it, and please feel free to post your thoughts and opinions on this article in the comments below or on the dedicated forum thread (16336631.1). What would YOU do if you were in charge?

2013-08-17 12:18:08, 4951 views

Link directly to this article (HT-ML, for the forum): [ArticleID=17243]