This is a big update, so you need to know and prepare well in advance.
Player Rating Calculations
We have finally decided to include the Experience attribute when computing a player's rating. The main motive behind this is to make player ratings more accurately reflect a player's actual ability to perform, rather than managers having to look at two different things in rating and experience. This will also make team and league ratings more accurate, so comparison between teams and leagues become more straightforward than it is now.
The major implication that it will have on the game is that there will be a significant change in player valuations. Low experience players will now have less value and this will affect the overall economy of the game to a big extent. We will anyways try to balance it out in a way that we don't need to make too many changes in other parts of the game to reduce this impact.
Use of Potential and Learning in Training
We have been thinking about this change for quite sometime, and finally decided that the Potential attribute will no longer relate to the total of all attributes a player can gain. Instead it will now refer to a hard cap on the maximum each individual attribute of a player can be trained to. Individual attributes can still go slightly above the Potential value but not to the extents that we see currently. We feel this is a more accurate reflection of what that attribute is actually meant to be, and will also make the attribute a bit more important than it is now.
Learning attribute will be revised in a way that a player can still reach his potential with 1 star in Learning (if trained properly), but it will take double the time to reach there than a player with 5 star in that attribute will do. This should be a slight boost in desirability of players with low Learning, especially if they start training at a really young age with excellent coaches and training centre.
Introduction of Payments in the game
We have been struggling with supporting the game without any revenue from it, which as you can assume affects the resources and effort that we can put into the development of the game. This is one reason the evolution of the game has been quite slow since launch. There are a lot of features and enhancements we have on our plans, but money is actually a big concern when thinking of speeding up development.
Having said that, we really do not want to make this game a pay-to-win, in fact we do not want to give paying users even the slightest of advantages when it comes to succeeding in the game. But we can still provide our users some features that can be bought which will reduce their time and effort spent on the game compared to a non-paying user. And of course we can make the cosmetic stuff a paid feature since that will only enhance user experience and won't affect gameplay in any way.
At the moment, the plan is to give our users an option to buy Coins using real money and spend the coins to avail the various paid features in the game. You can also subscribe to an "F4football Plus" membership with a certain amount of coins which will unlock extra reports and tools for managers during their period of subscription. More details of what features and reports will be made available will be announced soon.
These updates are just some of the many that are yet to come, and everything is possible only because of the support of the great community that we have here. So feel free to discuss, always listening as we should be :)