Release 3.5
Coaches are people now: every club employs them, they negotiate, they get sacked and poached. Plus a full light theme, player careers in every kind of world, and a bomb defusal engine that plays like the real thing.
MAJOR RELEASE
56 notes across 9 sections
Coaching staff
- NEWEvery club in the league employs real coaches, not just you. They have names, ages, wages and contracts that run down, the better ones sit at the bigger clubs, and hiring is competing for someone rather than shopping from a list.
- NEWEach kind of world hires its own kind of coach. A tactical club hires an Aim Coach and a Site Anchor Coach, a football club hires a Striker Coach and a Head of Medical. Every board carries fifteen or so posts, with at least two in each area, so a long career keeps finding staff it has not hired before.
- NEWAppointing a coach is a negotiation, in the same shape as a player contract. Length works the opposite way round to a player deal: a coach is one bad split from unemployment, so a four year offer buys you a discount. A big club pays under the going rate and a small one pays over it.
- CHANGEA near miss comes back with the figure they would actually sign for, and that figure is honoured, so you negotiate instead of guessing. Only an offer they find insulting costs you, and each of those hardens the ask, so lowballing repeatedly has a price.
- NEWThe coaching carousel. At every rollover, clubs that finished in the bottom third with a losing record part company with their coach, clubs with money go shopping for a clear upgrade, and everyone still short fills the vacancy. Sackings follow the actual table, so they read as consequence rather than a dice roll.
- NEWYou can poach a coach who is under contract by paying a release fee, and that fee moves from your budget to the selling club's. Your own coach is never sacked or poached behind your back: every move against your club goes through a decision you get to make. The staff board carries an "around the league" strip so you can see who moved.
- CHANGECards say what a coach delivers in numbers you can check elsewhere in the game: "milestones 13% sooner", "+4 chemistry", "18% fewer injuries". They used to quote an internal figure that appeared nowhere else. Values shown are what that coach delivers at their rating, not what the job could deliver at its best.
- CHANGEPreparation is replaced by Recruitment, which feeds the one formula every free agent uses when choosing between offers. A club whose coach players want to work for wins signings it would otherwise lose, and so do your rivals.
- NEWWorld authors write their own staff board in the editor: post titles, what each one leans into, how many specialists a club may hold, and a wage scale. You can also name individual coaches, put them at a club and in a chair, and leave the rest to be drawn as usual.
Light mode and display settings
- NEWA display settings panel, reachable from every navigation bar. Theme, navigation layout, mirrored layout, typeface and text size, as a popover on desktop and a bottom sheet on phones.
- NEWA full light theme across the whole app and website, not a handful of retimed screens. It is applied before the page paints, so there is no flash of the wrong colours on load. Dark mode is unchanged.
- NEWMore typefaces to pick from, a website sidebar rail, and an icon first top bar inside a career so it fits one row without scrolling.
Player careers in every kind of world
- NEWMyPlayer runs on the shipped worlds of every type. You can play a career as a footballer, a basketball player, a car ball player or a battle royale pro, not only as a shooter.
- NEWA battle royale career plays the full week. Advance Week stops on your match day, the coach makes a pre match call, match prep training unlocks, and the post match interview fires, so fan reputation, coach trust and your persona actually move in a lobby career. It used to quietly sim the week past you.
- NEWThe drop board reaches player careers, so you pick where your squad lands, per island. Watching a drop and simming it now agree with each other, and the squad that called a spot gets to stand on it.
- NEWLive drops ask you things. The viewer pauses on a real moment, asks what you do, and your call carries into the rest of the game as a genuine change in how you play. Measured across eighty squad games, almost every squad now gets asked something, where before only the late game survivors did.
- FIXLobby tryouts were being scored against a bar they could not reach, so mid table clubs turned down players who had just out placed most of the field. A poor session now lands around 45, a solid one around 70, and an outstanding one above 95.
- NEWPromotion and relegation in player careers. Your club can go up or down and takes you with it, with your contract untouched, and the record still says which seasons you spent in which tier. There is a toggle for it on the career structure card.
- CHANGEThe recommendation board can reach everyone you know. A career across two or three teams builds a network of a hundred people, and the board used to show six. It is now searchable by name, role or club, sortable, and shows rating and club on every card.
- CHANGEThe player creation screens have been rebuilt, and every screen names things the way its own sport does.
Battle royale seasons with a memory
- NEWPer player stats are recorded. A lobby week used to apply points to the table and throw the games away, so a battle royale career had empty stat pages in both modes. Topping a thirty two squad match day now counts as a win.
- CHANGEThe scoreboard reads in the format's own terms: survival, wins, top ten rate and average finish, with milestones scoped to your role. It used to run on the shooter's board, quoting a season kill to death ratio in a format where you die once a game.
- CHANGELeague tables show wins, average finish, eliminations, games played and points, instead of thirty two rows of nought wins nought draws nought losses.
- NEWMatch days come in different shapes, and the shipped worlds rotate them through the calendar: a kill race, a cut that thins the lobby as the day goes on, and sudden death.
- NEWA match day is drawn as the race it is. The chart plots every squad's running points across the games, so you can see a squad lead for five games and lose it on the last drop. Yours is always drawn and always highlighted.
- CHANGEDrop plans are real plans. All five used to collapse into one aggression setting on generic sectors. Contesting a hot drop and winning it now pays two squads' worth of loot, so an aggressive plan trades kills for a worse average finish rather than being strictly worse.
Bomb defusal, properly
- NEWTactical worlds have their own Search and Destroy engine instead of borrowing the arcade one with a bigger round count. A map that reported eleven minutes now reports around fifty, because the clock includes the buy phases, the breaks between rounds and halftime, which is most of what a bomb defusal map actually is.
- NEWMoney carries between rounds, so pistol rounds, saves and anti ecos exist and the scoreline has a shape. Every round used to be fought at identical strength.
- FIXA site the defence is standing on is worth defending. Attackers were taking nine to eleven rounds out of thirteen; across four hundred test maps between even sides they now win 51 percent.
- NEWMaps can have a third bomb site. The editor has a C tool, and the sim splits the defence three ways on a map that authors one.
- NEWIn the map veto, the team that did not pick the map chooses which side it starts on, and it chooses by reading its own roster: entry heavy sides take attack, anchor heavy sides take defence. Picking a map you are strong on now costs you something.
Seasons, groups and brackets
- FIXSplit groups genuinely change. They are now seeded from the previous split's final table rather than a fixed preseason ranking, and a pot holds two seeds instead of one per group, so finishing bottom of split one really does drop you a pot. Existing careers keep the groups they were created with, since a schedule is built when a career starts.
- NEWA group draw ceremony, so the re draw is visible at all. Teams are dealt pot by pot, so you watch the top pot empty first and see which group caught which contender. It is skippable, and the skip is remembered.
- FIXA triple elimination event pays out four places, not eight. Nothing below the loser of the lower final is ranked, because the bracket gives those teams no order.
- FIXA match can only be played once. Two overlapping completions, such as a manual sim landing while a batch sim is in flight, could file two different results for one fixture, which is where contradictory scoreboards came from. A finished match now refuses the second write, and the archive repairs an entry that disagrees with the bracket.
- FIXRefreshing the page no longer re draws a bracket that is already in progress.
- FIXSplit length is whatever the world authored, and the manual control actually reaches it. The season opening event is seeded from last season's finish.
- FIXSimming a whole tournament from the advance blocked popup no longer crashes the tab with an out of memory error on deep saves.
Playbooks and the team sheet
- NEWEach sport has its own playbook, and picking one changes the match. Football gets formations such as 4-4-2, 4-3-3, a high press and a low block, basketball gets systems, a battle royale gets drop plans and car ball gets rotations. Before this, a football manager was choosing between "Hardpoint: Rush" and "Overload: Contain", and the choice did nothing at all.
- NEWWorld authors can write their own playbook in the editor. Plans are shown as leans away from neutral, so a plus twelve percent on aggression reads as what it is. Arcade, tactical and hero worlds keep their hand tuned doctrines and say so.
- NEWThe lineup board picks the side. Tap a player, tap where they go; two taps makes a substitution. The arrangement is saved per team, survives a reload, and moves the roster, so the side you arranged is the side that plays. Shooters are untouched.
- NEWMinute plans for football and basketball, so you decide who plays how long rather than watching the sim decide for you.
- CHANGEStats and growth pages speak the sport. A football career sees Top Goals and Goals per Match, and a striker is no longer told to keep fragging toward his next kills milestone.
- FIXVetoes and simulations only offer maps that are in the current rotation, so a map that has been rotated out cannot turn up in a match.
Pro types, community and publishing
- NEWCar ball and sports worlds are Sandbox Pro types. You can browse them, look inside them and read every world page for free, and unlocking one plays a proper unlock sequence rather than throwing a modal at you.
- NEWPublishing a world now runs through the server, and creator credit comes with it. A world built on someone else's reads "Based on X by Y", maps carry credit to whoever made them, and a world that is entirely your own work can say so with a badge.
- CHANGEMap pages carry more of what they always should have: other maps by the same author, other maps in the same mode, the pace of the map, and how many people have saved it.
- NEWClub crests and authored accent colours for the shipped worlds, real cities behind the basketball league, and generated portraits for players.
Fixes worth knowing about
- FIXA few weeks into any non hero career, opening a player would take down the whole page with an application error, including on resume if you had left the game on the Profile tab. Fixed.
- FIXExporting a career and importing it back used to revert every edit you had made in the save editor, and quietly dropped lineups, strategies, staff, season history and role training as well. An imported career now comes back whole.
- FIXTalking to someone answers what they are waiting on. The missed message count could only be cleared by opening one specific thread, so it behaved like a permanent black mark. Conversations, situation responses and squad sessions all count now, a person holds one live ask at a time, and the phone shows which messages still need a reply and when the window closes. Inflated saves recover on their own.
- FIXLive viewers show the scoreboard, stats and event log while the match is streaming, instead of only after it has finished calculating. Hardpoint no longer draws a dead map picker over a match that is already playing.
- FIXThe score progression graph for a tactical map draws on the same clock the match reports, so the last round no longer stretches across half the chart. Teams also stop calling a timeout after the map has been decided.
- FIXDrawn league matches were being deleted from the table rather than recorded, and a level score was going down as an away win. Football also stopped vetoing six stadiums before kickoff, and a club can afford its own squad.
- FIXA qualification cycle with no tournament still shows in the world builder, with a way to add one back, instead of vanishing from the list along with its qualifier weeks.
- FIXMoving between pages no longer flashes the navigation bar, the sign in state or an advert. Pro subscribers stop being offered Pro for a beat on every navigation.