As the daily bug patching slowly comes to an end, today features a slightly bigger update than usual!
To start, there's a new feature for those of you who don't want to be tempted by editing, and some quality of life improvements for the free agency period!
A feature that's been requested for awhile was turning off player editing. This is now an option on game start - "hard mode." You cannot turn editing on once you've turned it off! This will likely be extended to team editing as well in the near future - don't worry, player name editing and number editing hasn't been completely removed.
Some quality of life things have been done around the off-season, including more notifications about free agency and draft days which weren't triggering, and a fancy new chart on the list management which shows you which players you've offered contracts to. There's also a fix for bidding on players who have been offered contracts by other teams - you'll be told they have an offer on the table, and they'll make a new offer that's higher than whatever their initial offer was. There's also more information about what period of the free agency window you're in, and an option to stop the game when the trade period opens. There's still an issue with some free agency notifications but those'll be sorted shortly.
Work's also been done on the online multi-player module, but it's not quite ready yet.
To start, this patch fixes several crashes and bad bugs. First the crashes:
- The game should no longer start off screen or partially off screen. Thought this had been fixed before, but it wasn't, so hopefully that's the case here, but it worked perfectly on all of the testing computers. Most users weren't impacted by this, but it was a really bad bug for the ones that were.
- The game was crashing when shortlists were being saved and then re-loaded, this was newly introduced from a couple patches ago. Your save games should return without any problem, but you may have to re-create your shortlist.
- The game wasn't randomising coaching attributes properly, so when some specific coaches were loaded from the database and got hired, they would crash the game.
And the bugs:
- Team statistics weren't saving at all.
- Sometimes interchanges wouldn't clear properly if they were cancelled. If this happened right at the start of the game, the player on the bench would be flagged to interchange but the on-field player wouldn't, meaning the player would never interchange in and play 0:00 for the game.
- The AI team selector was having difficulty with selecting multiple rucks and then substitutes not getting playing time.
- If you accepted a trade for draft picks, the other trades with those draft picks wouldn't go away.
- Expansion teams couldn't trade draft picks
- Fouling wasn't utilising the entire 1-100 attribute scale, you probably won't notice since it's not a huge change, but this has been fixed.
- The AI list manager code was occasionally delisting players who won awards. This has been named the Doug Rattray rule, after a completely ordinary fictional player in someone's fantasy draft game averaged 40 disposals a game in whatever league he played in, won the Best Player in the League award after getting drafted mid-season, and was then unceremoniously delisted. (It's unclear why he was so dominant. That's something to look into.) AI list managers will now keep players around if they're award winners.
There were a couple small tweaks to the database, and youth players had their skills reduced as they were coming into the league too powerfully.
But wait, there's more! League editors will find a couple fixes - the stadium screen shouldn't jump to the top anymore, commissioner mode should let you draft for every team again, and 24-team leagues now let you edit every team at the start of the game.
Glad you're still enjoying the game and please pop in the game hub or the discord if you have any issues or suggestions!