Hi everyone

This month sees a major Match Engine Update implemented!

A huge amount of the underlying logic has been reworked and improved including Tackling, First Touch, Passing, Crossing, Set Pieces, Heading, Shooting, Dribbling, Defensive Line, Off the ball movement. These changes collectively result in a fresh and improved match experience.

Other than of course intending to generally improve the Match Experience, this update also has some specific objectives:

• To allow more types of tactics to be viable and have a more diverse meta in the game when it comes to tactics and the types of teams you will play against
  
• To make more attributes more important and more types of players viable
  
• To make it more viable to have top class effective players that are not fast

The new match engine has a lot of exploration space and we’re really excited to see what kinds of successful tactics people are able to create! It’s absolutely the case that existing tactics and players may no longer be as good as they were previously, especially in the cases of ‘one-dimensional’ tactics and ‘one-trick pony’ players!

We will be monitoring the results and behaviours of the Match Engine closely this month to see how everyone is using it and make appropriate improvements and adjustments. We’ll also be monitoring the strength of the bot teams to see if they are at the correct levels and will adjust accordingly if required.

Note: We’ve picked up some eleventh hour balancing testing issues with the Defensive Line. For now all teams have a normal defensive line being implemented regardless of the setting.