As most of you have likely already noticed, we’ve made some hefty changes to the way our Cup competition works. Initially, the Cup was a way for players to have a guaranteed chance at playing with some of their friends, as well as having a chance to play against opponents outside of their manager level. This worked out in the sense that you could have more fun by playing with people you knew, and it also lead to some great “underdog against all odds” victories.
However, when looking at the numbers and going through player feedback, it was apparent that higher level managers were steamrolling the lower-level competition. After plenty of debate, we decided that there could be a slightly different direction to take the Cup competition and make it more fair.
Obviously, the first idea to come to mind was to lower the level-gap between managers, maybe pitching teams that weren’t more than four levels apart against each other. This would still lead to too large of a power gap, though, both in terms of ground structures and player quality the higher levels had access to.
In light of this, we took a look at Team Quality as the possible main metric for Cup competitions. By pairing teams of similar quality, together with the fact that you couldn’t afford to lose any Cup match, we noticed that there would be a shift in emphasis from long-term strategy, to a focus on immediate tactics. While you can afford to lose certain League matches in favor of being better prepared for higher-priority ones, in Cup matches, this doesn’t happen. Since Quality isn’t a factor any more, the main aspect that comes into play is the skill of the manager. We believe this supplements the other competitions much better, as it offers a different form and a more fair environment.
Of course, as this is a significant change, we’ll be closely monitoring player behavior and feedback, fine tuning the system as we go. Make sure to let us know what you think, as well as what your experience was like compared to the previous system. You can do so on our Official Forums.
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