Mid-Summer Night release 2017

(20:00 19-05-2017)
After the successful Easter release, we started planning the next release. While we will again include a number of small items, we want to include a medium size development as well. At the same time we are still working on background tasks of moving to new development tools and hardware.

We worked on a plan and now want to inform the Maxithlon community about our intentions. Let us first explain our general approach.

We grouped the requests from various federations into these four categories:

1. Enhancements to game play, mainly in these areas (alphabetically):
a. Calendar: more activity, especially in the first week
b. Heptathlon/Decathlon
c. Relays: Include them in championships and records
d. Second team: to create more activity
e. Youth: more options (we considered combining this with 'second team')

2. Increasing the ease of use: more filters, more history data (these requests are not changing the game, but only make things easier) We might consider limiting these to Maxitrainers)

3. Fixes to misbalances in the economy: mainly related to fans and non-active teams

4. Fixes to bugs

As our team is still new to the development and releasing, we need to take our learning curve into account and should not be too ambitious and not take on major risks. Bearing all this in mind we listed these considerations for the next release:

1. Target release date is the start of the next season: This gave us (only) 10 weeks to go through these phases:
a. Analyze the requirements
b. Specify the developments
c. Development
d. Testing
e. Release notes + news messages

2. We want to include something of each category as listed above:
a. Enhancements to the playing of the game
b. Increasing the ease of use
c. Fixes to misbalances in economy
d. Fixes to bugs

3. We need to consider:
a. the amount of work involved
b. the time available for the people involved (analyst, developer, tester & content manager)
c. the risk of breaking something (the software or the economy)

Based on the above, we will try to complete a version including:

1. Enhancement to the playing of the game: include relays in the ‘individual’ championships
Benefits:
- It is a "semi" major change
- This will be something extra for the users to manage
- It changes the focus on the market (more interest in skills that benefit the relay teams)
- Relays will be something worth focusing more on as there is glory and money to win
- Economical impact: more income for managers with good relay teams

2. Increasing the ease of use:
a. Ranking: option to filter on "Active athletes only"
b. Arena ranking: add Continent filter

3. Fixes to misbalances in economy/fans:
a. Reduce fans for athletes that do not compete
b. Stop the unfair gain of fans when enrolling many athletes in one race
c. Do not show participants when set to "Do not compete"
d. Change the invitations for national championships: additionally invite the top 20 of the regional championships

4. Fixes to bugs & translation


We believe that these goals are a good basis to start discussions in the official federations. Please do not hesitate to join us in the official federations or send us a message if you have any comments or questions.

After the Easter release we got some reactions on the new logo. In the mean time we got some help from PsymonStark to modify the Maxithlon logo and fit it better on the page. As a small intermediate change, we are now publishing this adjusted design. Many thanks to PsymonStark!

Thanks and regards,

Ned, Apolo, Ivanovik & Guyvandamme