Interview HT-Johan & Co

We did an interview with HT-Johan, one of Hattrick's owners, and I hope you'll enjoy reading it. :)

1. Hello Johan, many thanks for taking part in our interview! You have now been part of Hattrick for more than 15 years. When you look at this time: What were the highlights? And how does the current phase relate to this history?

Thanks! It’s pretty incredible really, it feels like a different world today than when I first got involved back in 1998. I certainly could envision Hattrick still being around and such a large part of my life almost two decades later.

Hattrick does have a very different part of my life than it did back then. It was more of a mortal struggle back then - we had no money, no one understood what we were trying to do, we had to work double jobs to make end meets, get by without sleep and so on - and all that made it just incredibly fun. Today, I have so many other responsibilities in life that needs to be fitted in and Hattrick plays a different role. It’s my job, but fortunately a job that we have shaped to be very flexible so I can work when I want and work mostly on the things that I enjoy doing. I’m very grateful to Hattrick and also very proud what we made of it over the years.

2. How has working changed since the team has become smaller? Do you sometimes think that you would like to implement more than you
actually can? Has it become more relaxed? More difficult?

I think the key word is that it has become simpler. We are fewer people, there are less time wasted on overhead, management, meetings and documentation. We meet when we need to, make the decisions, and then get to work. Since this is the kind of persons we are, it is also a lot more fun than it has been in a long while - probably a decade or so. We all have more to do, and probably smaller margins, but it is still more relaxed.

3. Are there aspects of Hattrick that you would construct differently with today's knowledge? Which ones?

There are some technical things that we did the wrong way around back at the start, such as not separating userIDs and teamIDs, that I can regret sometime. Now users take over teams, and when they do, data gets lost. It’s not a huge deal, but it has annoyed me many times over the years. On a more philosophical point I would have worried less if we did it all over again. I’ve given Hattrick so much of my emotional capital over the years, at the expense of everything else, and most of the times it would have served everyone better if I just played it more cool and business-like. But at the same time, maybe we had to care so much to get it all done.

4. Let us take a look into the future. What are the 3 areas of
Hattrick in which in your opinion the game should change the most to improve it further?

Well, we are preparing for a big push into mobile, and that is very clearly where games need to go. Just making the game easier and more fun to play from mobile devices. Secondly, I would say a big area that is getting ready for review is the actual game simulation, which we haven’t touched for a long time. Finally, I believe we can do still more in improving the social and community aspects of the game, for example mentoring schemes.

5. Can one reckon with changes regarding the match engine in the long run, or is that an area you rather don't touch? Do you even think it’s possible so extend the strategic possibilities of the engine?
Currently, the engine clearly favors certain strategies, e.g. it is
much easier to create wing attack ratings than central attack ratings, and certain formations and individual player orders make much more sense than others. Do you think this is a problem?

No, of course this type of changes can happen and have happened many times in Hattrick’s history. And as I say above, it is an area we keep our eyes on - or at least I do.

6. A topic which is (surprisingly) not discussed very often is the
training system. Training is a crucial area in Hattrick, but it's not
an area in which you have to make a decision very often. Most of the time one chooses a training type and then leaves it untouched for many months. In that sense it's not a "fun" feature. Do you have ideas to change that? For example by (somehow) overcoming the rule of the one training type per week for X players? That would also make it possible for more teams to train a youth player for the own team, because one would not necessarily have to align the whole team training to him
anymore for years.

I think it is a good idea. I think training is one of these areas that are always seen to work “well enough”, but as you say it is a really important area in Hattrick and there are probably quite a few things we could do to make it more fun and strategically interesting. No plans to do that, though, but an interesting idea.

7. How high does the Youth Academy rank on your agenda? Many managers think that it's a rather nice feature (by the way the training is more interesting there), but it is like it is for quite some time now and has not been adjusted after other changes. It's noticeable that the market strongly focuses on very young players - any players which cannot be promoted with 17.0 years have a training disadvantage compared with players trained in the main team, and because of that one earns much money for very young and good players and much less for all others. This emphasizes the random factor of the Academy - success depends not so much on how well it is managed, but on how often you scout 15 year old top players. Do you have any plans in this regard? Or maybe plans for other Academy extensions?

We don’t have any plans to update the Academies. There is a small bunch of minor things that I would like to change, but that has more to do with interface flaws and small rebalancing of things that I think we didn’t implement well enough when the system launched. The problem with the Academies is that it is really is a huge subsystem, so it requires quite a lot of “mental energy” to go in there and start assessing the code. I’m sure we will get around to it some day, but at the moment there just seems to be more promising things to develop.

8. Can you say something about how the new staff system has influenced the behavior of the managers? Is more money being spent? Is the average training speed higher because many managers have assistant coaches? In general, do you make such analyses at all and derive something from them?

We don’t have anything to share on this topic (yet), but of course we keep our eyes on how such a big change to the system affects economy and gameplay over time.

9. Do you think it's possible that you will adjust the effects of the
staff types after some time? And do you have plans for new staff
types? The transfer agent has already come up in the discussion - or do you hesitate to currently restrict the transfers with the market in mind?

If needed, we have absolutely no problem making adjustments to any game functionality - as we have showed many times in the past!

10. The are some things in Hattrick about which (roughly speaking) almost all users think that they're not balanced very well, for example fan mood with its very drastic ups and downs (especially if a team has a bad run, but also already after single games). Do you intentionally not change such things, or are other topics simply more important? For the fan mood it seems that it could be improved without much effort by adjusting some parameters.

Well, it may seem so, but actually the fan mood happens to one of the most complex algorithms in Hattrick - unfortunately. It’s an example of someone trying to do something that is very, very smart and ending up a bit short in that respect. We still think it is better than what we had before, but again, it is one of the features that requires a rather big effort to analyse and update, so it has to wait for later.

11. How can we imagine how you decide which topic you tackle next? How when it comes to fine-tune things, e.g. set values and percentages in certain features? Does someone make a proposal and then you talk? Do you make simulations? And which role does the forum play in this process? Rather little, or by single good posts, or by the mass?
Conversely, are there cases in which you want to change something for the best of the game but don't do it because the community would protest?

It all really starts with a decision about in what area we think the game needs improvement, or rather, what kind of impact we want to have on the game. For example, we have had a theme now for some time that is all about trying to push the game towards higher engagement - from nudging new users to more active series, without bots in them, to adding social features such as inviting users to empty slots in your league, to creating the new Cups and raising prize money, so that there is always something to fight for. There are lots of small bits and pieces and we don’t expect each one to have that much impact, but as a whole we do feel that we push the game in the right direction and that is what is important to us. I think we have deliberately stepped away from trying to please the forum at every step of the way - we’ve tried that in the past, and we end up paralysed and indecisive when we listen and participate too much. But once we nail down what we want to change, then we are super happy to use the energy and creativity of the forums to speed up and improve the development process.

12. Tjecken said in an editoral that in the future the Hattrick fun
should not be built up of the fact that the effects and meanings of
certain things are not clear and the users can find out, but on all
things being as transparent as possible, so the users can use that knowledge for strategic decisions. Is that still explicitly on your agenda? Do you think it's possible that you will expose certain existing mechanisms (e.g. the meaning of the youth player all rounder message, aspects of SE calculation)?

It is still on the agenda, but perhaps not as prioritised as before. The new staff system is much more transparent, but I am not sure that transparency makes it that much more fun. But in the choice between obscurity and transparency, our bet is definitely on transparency now and in the future.

13. What's the name of your cat? And will there still be Hattrick in 10 years?

I’m a cat lover, but regrettably my girlfriend isn’t so we decided to have kids instead. :) I think there is a pretty good chance there will be a Hattrick in 10 years, and I think the next few years after that.

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