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Sustainable and fun team training

Geschreven door SH-Patrick

A quite simple suggestion to improve the gaming experience and avoid dull rebuilding phases

Since the beginning of Hattrick, the duality of your league match and cup/friendly match giving you your weekly training has seldom been questioned. However, this setting does not always lead to an enjoyable gaming experience, as you often have to decide between being competitive and training your next generation. In reality, this results in many teams "dropping out" for quite a while to train their future stars. In an ideal world, this could be avoided.

I know that opinions may differ , but in my eyes, the goal has to be to always field your best players in league and cup matches and still be able to train your next gen of players - e.g. managing your team sustainably.

But how can we achieve that? - Unlikely possibilities:

A complex solution that would need a lot of careful tweaks and thoughts would be the introduction of a "second youth team", for your players of, say, age 17-21. That would close the enormous gap that your academy players start their career with to your A-squad players. However, this would also have extensive consequences to both the sum of overall training and the transfer market that would make such a change risky (but add an interesting new layer to the game).

If you don't share my view that the best players should be fielded in the cup, another approach to improve the situation would be to introduce separate team spirit categories for league and cup. This way, dropping out of the cup at an early stage because of training (or really bad luck...) wouldn't have a second downside in the league (where most of your opponents might still PIC for several additional rounds). It's not really plausible to have separate team spirits, though, so it's rather a technical solution.

A much simpler solution
A much simpler solution that I would root for is the introdution of training matches.

It could work like this: As long as you are in the cup (national or lower cups), you'll get the option to book a training match (i.e. a third match of the week). As soon as you do that, your training effect moves from your cup match to your training match. (resulting in your cup match not giving you any training anymore for that week).

This would have several advantages. Firstly, you could field your best players in the cup (as it should be in a cup). Secondly, you'd have a perfect opportunity to train your young players up to a competitive level without having to drop out for seasons (which honestly kills a lot of fun) or risking early eliminations. This also could lead to more managers staying with the game, as I've seen a lot of people dropping out during a "rebuild". You would also have it easier to include some homegrown players into your squad. In my naive technical view, this also shouldn't be a major change in the game's code (HTs may prove me wrong).

To simplify things, you could have bot opponents (i.e. "local boys") to play against in training matches, thus making match booking and the search for opponents (esp. in the early cup stages) unnecessary.

So what are the downsides? To be honest, I don't see a lot of negative sides (naturally, it's my suggestion...). One effect would be of course, that the strong teams at the top would have the advantage to field their best team, thus decreasing the opportunities for weaker teams to have a cup surprise, but in my eyes, this is the way it should be. Everyone has the chance to create and have the better team.

A big question is the overall balance of teams. As some will argue, the structure we have nowadays is wanted by the HTs to avoid teams being at the top for too long. In my eyes, my suggestion wouldn't be a massive advantage for top teams, as you still have to have an excellent long-term plan and will still have to compete against saver-money-burners and long-shooters. As someone who wants to train sustainably, you will however have better chances - and a richer experience - than before.

It could also motivate more managers to stop hoarding and burning, and move the game towards a more realistic approach. The biggest problem for sustainable teams nowadays is that they'll most likely get stuck at the bottleneck of div. IV-V., at least in the bigger countries. My impression is that with my suggested change, that would improve, so that you'll be able to compete 1-2 divisions up higher.

Some open questions remain. The overall sum of training and effects on the transfer market would have to be monitored. Also, there's the aspect of experience. In my opinion, if you book a training match, the match experience gain should stay with the cup, as it is the most logical solution. A training match wouldn't give a lot (if any) experience. This would of course present a challenge to give a decent amount of experience to your young players, but hey, we still need a few tough decisions in the game. It shouldn't be the decision to train or to be successful, though.

To sum things up, the option to book training matches in cup weeks, thus moving the training effect from cup to training match, would create better opportunities for managers to form sustainable teams, include homegrown players, avoid boring reconstruction and saving phases and in that respect create a richer and more realistic experience that would hopefully keep more managers at the game, in the long term.

Thank you for your time. I'm looking forward to your constructive feedback, either in the comments or in the according forum thread: (17569806.1)