Subject: Ballmanager - New manager online

Hello guys ,

If you are interested to play a new Football manager game , Ballmanager its the perfect chooise !

Link to the game : www.ballmanager.abola.pt

Ball Manager is a football manager game where you take charge of your own football club.Your job is to buy and sell players, setup tactics, train your squad, manage your club's economy and much more. The action is shown in the form of 2-D and isometric matches and the competition takes place in a world league as well as in small tournaments between friends, even for prizes..

Ball Manager features full-fledged training systems, upgrade options, a transfer system, the economic side of a club to look after, as well as many options for interaction between managers.

In your battle for glory you'll make friends and rivals among the other players. Make the right decisions and become the next 'Special One' !

In the same time i want to tell to you that this game its not created by countryes , its created by words. So you can be in a league with foreign managers etc.

The game is available for the momment in just 6 languages , so if your language its not available yet , you can try to translate the game in your language.

Good luck !
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Terrible name.

Graphically looks better than Sokker though, which makes me sad and further enforces my feeling that this game will be dead within 2 years because of the lack of progress.

soz but im not interested.

matches every day? not for me... but good and simple web design.

btw please don't spam all freestyle forums with that topic, here should be enough.

Boring. No matches, just like hattrick. Made my team to advertise Sokker a bit :P

Actually you can view your matches in a 2D format... :)

give me direct link to the game

ball manager... a manager that teaches me how to manage my own balls?!



EDIT: Hehe, the matchviewer is from footstar
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This game is made by the same group ;-)

ball manager... a manager that teaches me how to manage my own balls?!

you're still too young to talk about that, first get off from mama's milk then talk about that stuff ! ;)

I already register there, but for now I dont like it :)
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Registered too... I think this game is quite promising and has got good potential: Looks like the match viewer, the match engine and the scope of tactical options offered are a real challange to Sokker. The opportunities for newbies are brilliant, but the community ... well, there is not much of a community so far.

If you register, please send a sokker mail: I look for somebody to talk about the game. :-)

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Here is my extended review:


Basic Game Design, Opportunities and Community

Ballmanager is a Portuguese online football manager, hosted by a national sport magazine called Abora. (Dont mix it up with a german-online game, which has got the same name) In Ballmanager there are two matches a week and 16 teams in a league, so each season last for the same period of time as in Sokker. Ballmanager provides Live-Matches with 3D match-viewer similar to Sokker. The game claims to be for free, but this is just theory: There are no in-game advantages, but unlike Sokker the match-viewer is only free for 2 weeks, so its quite pointless to play this game without becoming a supporter. Prices are reasonable: € 23.-/year. There are also subscriptions for 17 days and three weeks. If you want to play in cups you have to pay about 4.-/year additionally - So the same scope of services costs almost exactly as much as in Sokker. You have to pay via Credit Card or Pay Pal.

The game is new and still evolving: They are just playing the second season. While in Sokker a newbie has to face countless established managers and therefore never will reach the top, in Ballmanager he still has got all the opportunities to form the best team in the world. Actually the chances of doing so are so much the better as there are many "worlds" in this game: Instead of national league systems competition is organized within more than 120 different "worlds". In each of these worlds managers of all nations can join. I do not know wether i like this system or not: Considering the fact that the vast majority of the users is Portuguese - most of the others are Brazilian - up to now a national league system would not be a sensible alternative.

While a non-national league system may be practical there also is a serious downside: It is quite difficult for the community to organize. You can change the language of this game into English, there is an English forum and also an English manual which is very helpfull. But up to now in Ballmanager there is no sign of an active online community like in Sokker. (I do not know about the Portuguese Forum though, but I doubt that there is much difference).


Skills, Training System, Strategies for Team Development:

The skill-System of Ballmanager is quite similar to Sokker. Players have got 11 technical skills and 2 physical skills. All of these skills have got 20 skill levels and can be trained in daily trainings sessions. Just like in Sokker the training progress depends not only on the age of the players but also on his talent, which is called "Potential Ability" in Ballmanager. However there are two important differences between Ballmanager and Sokker:

1.) The talent of a player is not disclosed but visible like any other attribute.
2.) There are almost no restrictions in training. Each player can be trained and each player can be trained in a different skill. There are no coaches and so the quality of the training does not depend on their quality. The only restriction in training (beside the lack of talent) is a possible penalty, which depends on the current state of fitness of a player: The more the fitness of a player sinks below 90% due to exhaustion during matches and earlier training- sessions the slower gets his progress in training. To avoid this penalty the player has to regain his fitness in special trainings sessions.

My first impression of the skill system of Ballmanager: I like it. There is more detail than in Sokker, still there is not too much. Skills are Stamina, Speed, Positioning, Tackling, Heading, Technique, Dribbling, Game View, Short Passes, Long Passes, Crosses, Long Shots and Finishing.- Another important attribute of a player is his accustomed position: Playing in another position leads to severe penalties. Its too early to tell if those skills are well balanced or not. But shaping players you like out of these attributes might be fun.

While the skill system is more disdinguished, the training-system is simpler than in Sokker: Anything goes. Which skills to train up to which level stays a tricky question of course but thats it. I prefer the old training system of Sokker because it is not only linked to other aspects of the game, but it is also some kind of event: The thrill of discovering a talent is something Ballmanager will allways lack.

Concerning possible team development strategies, the crucial question seems to be if you should try to optimize either individual training or team training. In the first case all talented players stay away from matches and just concentrate on training. You therefore acquire a First Eleven, consisting old players with little talent left, who play all the matches and mostly train fitness. If you decide for team training you invest all money in talents and put up with the loss of individual training hoping for a better training progress of the whole team. As far as I can see most managers have decided for team training so far. Believing that only the best individual training will pay off on the long run I will go for the other way.

Tactics

Ballmanager offers many options to create an individual match tactic specifically for each team and each opponent: On a very basic level the tactical-editor discerns 5 different player-positions (Wingers/Forwards, Advanced Mids, Central Mids, Def-Mids and Defenders) and 5 horizontal positions on the playground (Right and Left Side and 3 positions in the center) - Within this framework you can set up a formation according to the skills of your players. This basic set up has to be improved by a set of match orders for the team as a whole: You have to decide about vertical and horizontal spread of your players, if there shall be a player who acts as organizer of your play, you can appoint players to different kinds of set-pieces (corners, penalties, free-kicks) etc. Beside these match-orders for the team as whole there is an advanced set of indivdual orders for each single player: e.g: You can decide about his tendency to make long distance shots, his tendency to clear the ball, where to run or to pass to... The list of match orders is much longer, but I guess you can see how it works)

After playing two matches it seems to me that Ball-Manager provides a deep tactical complexity similar to Sokker. The differences are obvious: In Sokker you can direct the movement of every player in every situation - and all of them follow your tactic as if they were bots. In Ballmanager you can give them a position like "Left Defender" and a guideline of what to do in a wide range of situations... But there is no way to control his actual movement on the pitch which not only depends on the movements of the opposition but also on his attributes ("Positioning" and "Gameview"). While I for myself like the approach of Ballmanagers tactical set-up, I am not sure about its realization: I can not tell yet, if and to what extend you can actually shape the play of your team. I do not need to have the same extend of control like in Sokker, but I want to have a certain influence on what happens on the pitch. There is still a lot to explore...

Live Matches and Match Engine

The match-viewer and its graphics are on the same level as in Sokker: In some respects the representation of the players has got more detail, but Sokker's animation of movements and tackles still looks better. A clear advantage of Ballmanager's match-viewer is that there is not only a bar implemented, where you can jump to any moment of the match, but also an option to rewind and a further to replay every goal. However there is also a downside: So far I was neither able to get some audio, nor to watch the matches in full-screen-mode. But up to now I did not care to solve these problems and it might very well be that I am the one to blame for them...

Regarding the match engine of Ballmanager my first impression is quite mixed: On the one hand I have got the feeling that it might have the tendency to produce tactical stalemates, where almost nothing happens and matches end in a draw or are decided by pure coincidence. This might be quite realistic, but still I prefer the admittedly inflated drama of a good old Sokker-match. But if you look at individual situations of the matches, than I have to say that the match engine of Ballmanager is good, maybe even better than Sokker's. The only exemption from this are Throw-Ins, which are very poor and just do not work out. But in all other respects the match engine seems to be very well tuned. This is especially true for the implementation of passes: While we are used to see too many long passes in Sokker, in Ballmanager there are much more short passes just like in real football. And moreover most of these passes are quite accurate and really make sense... Provided there is enough time and no opposition this is even so in case of players who have poor levels in the respective skills. This is nice to watch and also much more realistic than Sokker.

Economy, Academy and Transfer Market

Playing only a few days its much to early to judge the economy of Ballmanager. Hard to say if it is well balanced. Here are just some facts: Main income of the clubs is the gate money. Expanding the stadion is cheap, but the number of visitors depends on the numbers of supporters your team has gained. To get more supporters a club must win as many matches as possible in a row.

Main expenses of a club are the wages of the players and the maintenance and the extension of the youth academy. Player wages are tied up in the contracts of the players, which last from two to five seasons and have to be renewed after each transfer. Since the players want to earn more money each time they get a new contract, their wages might become higher than in Sokker. I guess it could be hard for a team to afford the wages claimed by expensive players. Another way to burn money is the youth academy. Each club gets 10 young players each season. Their potential quality depends on the level of the youth academy. While the arena is cheap, the expansion and the upkeep of the youth academy is not.

Finally just some plain facts about the Transfer-Market: Because each player is linked to his accustomed position there should be greater need to acquire a big squad of different players than in Sokker. Wages of players do not (only?) depend on their skills and will therefore affect their market value. Players can either be sold in an auction or sold directly to another manager (Switch this feature off for all player you want to keep. Else you will pestered by ridiculous offers). There is also the possibility to loan players. If a player is sold in an auction you can not only set a starting offer but also a final offer, which automatically gets acceptance and ends the bidding.

Hope you promote Sokker as well on other pages! :)

After reading this post, I promote Ball Manager in Italy and some sokkerians are trying it.

I think the game at first it's more complex than Sokker but I feel that in future we just need to manage, reducing our online time on game.

Well, we're on the game :-)

edit:
imann_the_noob / US Massese, Mundo 110
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