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Subject: [Idea] Merge of small countries/leagues

2022-04-11 23:44:06
No it won't, but some countries never became countries with enough players to have even 1 full first division, and not even when Sokker had 70K users. Half of that was Poland, and many from in the larger countries of today.

Even with bonus Plus for recruiters, and Plus bonus for new managers recruited by managers, the small countries never had real competition. And I know because I was very busy with Sokker in those days, also as recruiter. I posted the link on pages that accepted links. Posted the name Sokker, where ever I could. Tried to get the other rectuiters more active (again). Many countries just didn't get new managers.

Maybe one moment it did, when a FB campaigne was suddenly released, but Admins couldn't keep up to sign up all those new managers, new managers had to wait to long for full access. And without a good tutorial, the same happened as what happens most of the time, still today, one loggin, and never come back.

And when the number of managers was going down, as linguist I got Sokker on the first page of Google in Belgium and second page in the Netherlands, with search words like online football manager game. Used the part that is made for that in database. But it didn't help, not in the Netherlands.

So I'm not talking about dying countries, I'm talking about countries that never had enough managers, as in just a few, which is boring, It is already difficult enough to get new managers, to get them in bot leagues is a killer for those countries


EDIT: forgot to write this, with merging countries, all 200 (little less or more) countries can be added to Sokker, all countries around the world, how ever small they are.
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(edited)
2022-04-13 10:09:30
To grow the game you can’t afford to continue to bleed and lose countries (unless you want it to be a domestic game only). Growing a product at some point in time usually results in expanding into areas where the market doesn’t exist but has the potential to.

I understand the need to focus on what brings the greatest return on investment but I think in this scenario it could have been done in a way that doesn’t basically destroy the already struggling smaller countries as a final death notice.

The system was broken before and it’s even worse now. The “improvements to the game” do not exist for us, it’s actually a downgrade. Every second season we are going to get bots into our top league (others may always have bots) which will create carnage on income/supporter sizes/sponsorship. This is and has always been the biggest problem in the game in my opinion (even more so then sides being stuck in leagues because at least they can continue to improve their side quicker then those of us without enough competition). Increasing league sizes makes this worse and now brings other nations that were just ok into the same scenario. Everything income wise revolves around fan sizes way too much. Fan sizes also depend on other fan sizes so because bots don’t improve everyone else suffers because of it. In larger nations you shield against that by promoting through leagues to the point you fill out a number of divisions but smaller nations can’t even fill their top league and have nowhere to escape that scenario and are therefore handicapped as to how far the fan club size can rise and by association handicapped with in terms of revenue (gate receipts/sponsorship/fan mood/fan expectations/fan club size growth) all of that is handicapped if you have to deal with non growing bots. Add to that the enjoyment factor is lost because you’re not playing human competition. The problem is in the core mechanics of the game as it was never designed correctly to begin with (works in the base case with large users but fails as soon as bots are thrown into the mix). So unless you want to go ahead and fix all that (and I doubt that’s easy to do) the next best option is to look at ways to remove the negatives and merging is a great opportunity to do that. This should be looked at, otherwise you will have spent all this investment into improving the game and you will have lost most of what is left of the international market and you will miss out on growth opportunities outside of the domestic market and a few countries who think they benefit by this.

I’m not saying 12 team leagues are a bad priority (as I think this would work with enough users) to make it easier to move between divisions but it needs to be balanced with the negatives it has now created for many others. I’d love to be able to have an opportunity to experience the intended game rather then some watered down demo version.
2022-04-13 11:17:50
To grow the game you can’t afford to continue to bleed and lose countries (unless you want it to be a domestic game only).

that's why they are concentrated on countries that are actually still alive - the biggest ones

Australia etc. are at the same state since years...if someone was about to leave, he left
keeping 2-3 users from current 18 doesn't really make a difference in the perspective of whole game, right?

give them time, let's wait and see if/when they finish all the changes...how they will change the game, how they will promote it, will it work...

merging countries might sound easy but I doubt that it is, even changing the league system took them lots of time and STILL had many bugs and problems when implemented...and people would like to have a merged league, but country cup and country nationality/NTs...which I would imagine would be a very time consuming thing to implement in the game
2022-04-14 11:08:53
The problem of small communities has been raised for years and ignored. Devs could have integrated the merging of leagues countries or even switched to an international championship at the same time.

Now it is more than improbable that the league system will be re-programmed again due to all the troubles its cause ^^
2022-05-04 02:51:09
With training now confirmed to be linked to playing stronger or weaker teams, this merge must happen ASAP.

There are top players from 60-70 countries in sokker who do not have a choice to play stronger teams and are forced to play teams no much better than bots, or even play bots themselves.
2022-05-04 10:15:53
Well, this new rule is not a really a good news for top rank teams for sure. I suspect that's the only reason why you dont want this rule ASAP :-p

You speculate about few situations and bonus training, but nobody knows how it will work, even maybe the devs themself for now. But whatever. If it could hit again small counties or not, small countries are already dying for the lack of challenges for all the many reasons you know. Without merging - at least - small countries, nothing better could happen, even with better or not training rules.
2022-05-04 11:07:21
I am one of the teams, which would suffer from new training system if there is a bonus for playing against stronger team. In my country there is 1-2 teams stronger than me for the last decade. Even in this situation I strongly disagree with merging leagues with other countries.
We have our community. our history. What we want is not the national leagues merged, but the normal international league!
Also as mentioned by juytt we have to wait and adapt.
Yet, We know nothing, Jon Snow!
2022-05-04 11:25:26
Well, this new rule is not a really a good news for top rank teams for sure. I suspect that's the only reason why you dont want this rule ASAP :-p

Jokes aside, I doubt that very much. I suspect it's more around concern for those of us who continually play the game with a disadvantage/handicap and having yet another handicap potentially being imposed on us.

You speculate about few situations and bonus training, but nobody knows how it will work, even maybe the devs themself for now. But whatever. If it could hit again small counties or not, small countries are already dying for the lack of challenges for all the many reasons you know. Without merging - at least - small countries, nothing better could happen, even with better or not training rules.

Yeah, it hasn't been implemented yet so a bit early to making any real assessments. However, realistically if that's not a translation mistake then there's really only one variable they're going to look at which is supporter sizes. We know (well assume) league prestige (how strong a league is), is what is used to determine sponsorship ranges for each league (and we saw the effects of that with a league restructure since it is heavily influenced by supporter sizes of clubs in the league). We also know match expectations are based on differences in supporter sizes. We even know supporter mood is tied to that also as is gate receipts. Based on that pattern alone if I was purely speculating here, supporter sizes would likely be the variable they'd use here as well because ranking points are easily manipulatable and avg ratings would seem a bit weird if we're going to have to train trainees in league games.

Not going to start complaining too loudly at the moment but come next season when it's all been developed and released I really hope that it's not tied to supporter sizes, otherwise merging countries really will become an immediate priority.
2022-05-04 12:17:31
i can imagine that many users are not really concerned with dying communities and disadvantage/handicap, but It's nobody s fault if teams are not in small countries. Blame the game not users.

Merging countries is not only a solution, it is the only one. It is not one supposed handicap addition that will change anything.

And to reply to fornado : merging countries leagues doesn't mean merging communities and history, nobody asking to remove country forums, player flags, NT teams....
2022-05-05 04:49:46
That's it. The way the game has been, and continues to be developed, merging countries is the only solution. To do so is a lot less work than fixing the countless issues.

The Dev's have coded for one type of game, and then produced a different type of game. Both are good, but they aren't compatible with one another.
They have coded as if all teams are in one big league structure, but have produced a game with 100 different leagues.

And as juytt said, merging doesn't mean losing removing flags, forums, NTs etc, it's just merging the leagues together so we all get competition and can all improve rather than getting stuck at a very low ceiling (and the ceilings are even lower in countries with less than 3 users). Besides the actual merging, the only small thing that would be implemented is a forum for each individual league of the merged countries. The rest would all still exist as it does now
2022-07-02 10:10:10
Just giving this a bump as it has previously been stated about 2 seasons from introduction of larger leagues to look at merging.
One season in now, seeing loads of small nation users getting terrible sponsorship money due to increased number of bots in their 1st or 2nd division, making it even hard to keep up with large nations or to even hold on to previously held players.
2022-07-02 14:18:23
+1
2022-07-04 20:42:03
+1
2022-09-23 09:32:37
And another season down
2022-09-29 21:47:42
At least the fixed the orders, finally ;)

So there is still hope ...
2022-09-29 21:55:27
Yes! There is still a hope to do! :-p