Community » Hattrick Press

Editorial: The sinking ship called Hattrick

Written by DEL_Frank_

In this editorial, I expose how years of mismanagement will inevitably lead to the end of this game. When will they pull the plug on Hattrick?

When I entered the game back in 2005, Hattrick was booming. I even had to wait for several months before I received my team, because the GM could not handle the avalanche of new members. If I remember correctly, Hattrick had some 750k members at the time and was quickly rising to the magic number of ONE MILLION users. World domination just seemed one small step away... But, as we all know, we never made it to the million. As a matter of fact, we have fewer users now than several years ago, and somehow, it seems impossible to attract new users. (http://www.maptrick.org/graphs.php) How much mismanagement do you need to ruin a once-successful game? Let´s have a look.

Failures

In the end of 2006, HT´s decided they had to do something to make the game more attractive in order to retain the users. So, they decided to start the new Youth Academy. It was chaotic and bugged from the beginning. When the first youths were pulled, the community was shocked to see players with horrible side skills. The first reaction of the HT´s was per usual: blame the users (for not training good enough). But in the end of 2007, they suddenly boosted the youth skills. More changes were introduced during the next couple of years, mainly converting the simple and fun idea of having a youth team into a counter-intuitive and difficult to understand youth academy. As announced, the academy was fully abused as a test ground for experiments that never made it into the adult team. And now we are struggling with its legacy: it´s only a small minority of users that really follows the youth league standings or prepares every single match. Most of us use a default line-up and that´s it.

Next season the adult training speed will be increased, so training youngsters (at a slower speed!) in the academy will be even more a waste of time. Of course, the HT´s are deaf to the many complaints in the forums and react very defensively to the idea of redesigning the youth system.

That brings me to HT´s forum communication in general. Only HT-Josef knew how to talk normally with users, but he left for some extended vacation; HT-Tjecken isn´t that bad, but he is not around that much (only when a big change is implemented); Flameron is very active, but not a very capable communicator, creating an aggressive atmosphere in the discussions; and than there is HT-Anne who has to clean up the mess. The rest of the HT´s cannot seem to be bothered to play the game, let alone to appear in the forums. We also saw some HT´s quit their job (HT-Sara and HT-Thomas for example, but there are many more): maybe they had the same sinking-ship-feeling that I have... The result of this lack of commitment is that users feel ignored and HT's have lost touch with its user base.

Of course, I can´t write an article in HT-Press without mentioning some aspects of this utility itself. As most of the time happens with the release of a new feature: the idea was good, the start up a failure and after the most urgent flaws were fixed (some months later) HT´s interest seemed to have vanished completely. For over a year now, editors are begging in the forums to get more tools and better interaction with readers. Now it is finally possible to edit texts, but it is still impossible to rate articles, sort them, or leave comments. I guess the HT´s think the whole web 2.0 hype will soon blow over and interaction between writers and readers is just too overrated.

Well, I can continue - achievements were implemented by the end of 2006. Three years later (!) I finally received the achievement points that I earned slightly before the introduction. At least I received them... I can´t say the same about the Hattrick History book that was promised in 2007, to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of the game. For some unclear reasons, it was never published, despite having hired a professional journalist to do the job. Ah, and you remember the “regainers”? They were the first of a series of players with new specialties that never appeared... Rumor had it that HT-Sara invented them after a crazy night out and than forgot about it.

Other failures include a lack of community interest in HT-Masters and National Team Elections (99% of the users never vote), the flawed fan mood system, a 1990's-forum system (without search function!) and mods and GM, with zero transparency and lacking oversight of workers´ behavior.

And then, there is the match-engine, the core of the game. But I have given up complaining about that because I lost interest years ago: it is too random, relying on too much midfield domination, and it's predictable - I promoted to III this year mainly because I dared to pay the salary of some Magical midfielders. That´s all.

Hattrick is going down

No wonder, after so much mismanagement, that Hattrick is slowly dying. Just look at your first league ever and find out if one of your former league buddies is still playing the game; there is a big chance you´re the only one left. Or click on a random 30 year old player and check his transfer history: most former owners left the game a long time ago and even the team names disappear: Hattrick isn´t proud on its history.

Another example of this sinking ship called Hattrick: try to find an active federation or regional forum. There are still some big ones left, but, as I discovered myself recently, there are loads of federations with 10 or 20 members with NO active threads in their empty forum and only an archive that reminds of better times. Entering these feds and regional forums I cannot resist asking myself “What am I still doing here?”

The national forums are not much better; most of them are so strictly moderated that the average user prefers to stay away as far for fear of being banned, fined or engaging in bad atmosphere. I mean, who feels like reading pages and pages of special rules for each different forum before posting a message?

Some other signs of the decadency of Hattrick: CHPP programs that lack updates or disappeared completely; once-famous pages dedicated to Hattrick that are out of the air and an ambitious Alltid integration project that after many months (or years? I lost count) still does not work properly.

In the meantime, people are fed up, lose interest, leave the game, and worst of all: new users stop logging in immediately after finding the game impossible to understand within an afternoon of rule-reading. That just seems one of the consequences of HT´s maniacal game-changing behavior the last few years. I invited 3 friends to come and play. They were not new to the football management scene: for several years we played offline management games together. I told enthusiastically about HT, explained them the basics, but guess what; I am still the only one playing.

What´s next?

So, what will happen? When will the mass exodus of HT users begin? Or did it start already? When will Extralife pull the plug or sell Hattrick? It only seems a matter of time. The main question is: Why continue with an internet game that actually shrinks? There are millions of other ways to make more profitable investments on the web... Just look at all the booming Facebook games.

It seems just a matter of time when Extralife will realize this - maybe now is the best moment to pull the plug or sell the game so the responsible guys can jump from this sinking ship and blame the bad economy for the black spot on their CV - but if they do, they cannot deny this crisis stems from the mismanagement I have outlined.

And we, the users? Well... anyone still remembers PC-Futbol, Bundesliga Profi Manager, Championship Manager or anything similar? Just like that, Hattrick will soon be a nice memory from the past.

And speaking for myself, despite the challenges, I´ll keep struggling until the bitter end.

-

((Editor's Note: Discussion about this editorial can be found in the Global forum here: (14219964.1))