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Remember the name, Wayne Rooney

Warning: A lot of text.

A few days ago, Rooney, the manager of Manchester United Esports announced that he will be quitting the game. Rooney is a player that has been here for a long time, that has been involved in many changes and additions to the game, and that has been a part of many communities. Seeing him quit, and leave shortly after Salvarity did, is difficult. But it is characteristic of this game. Over the last few months many people have quit, people that were very well known, think of Jordian, Crash, Immortal, DPS King, Xenoon, Salvarity, Xcellenz, Mackko and of course so many more.

Rooney has always been active in the community, first being in INF and when INF died he left for TC, but he was always talking, even if it was just joking and memeing, he was there and he created a lively and cheerful atmosphere for everyone to enjoy. Seeing him quit now, in this era where well known players quitting is so prevalent, is not a surprise but it is very saddening and hard to see.

There are changes being made to the game but they are being made too late, the amount of people that have quit the game is insanely high, and it doesnt only involve the well known players it involves the new players, the players that won't be remembered. The ones that weren't a part of a community, and yes thats the nature of the game, but a lot of this could have been prevented if changes were made earlier. Fact is they didn't and what has been done has been done, but recent events should be a warning and hopefully a wake up call for the developers and for the community itself.

We have lost too many players, we have lost too many friends, and we he have lost too many opportunities to fix these issues, but we wont give up, the players that are still here, the ones that are reading this right now, if you are not in a community, join one. If you are, think to yourself “Am I active enough? Could I be a little more involved? If the answer is yes then go do it. This game will die if we do not come together and create more communities and create more incentive for people to keep playing the game. Make your own community, start a club post on the forums for help, for people to join you. But do something. This separated mobamanager where we have one part of the community that is the well-known part and that has their own secluded community and the other part where people play on their own and have no interaction with the entire community at all, will be our downfall.

Together, we make mobamanager better.
Together, we make the communities better.
We are mobamanager.
You. Me. Rooney. Everyone.


- The Fish

P.S If you're looking for a TL;DR go fuck yourself <3
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club soda is looking for more members for anyone who is out there ;) you can find clubs under community tab to the left
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This is also kinda the nature of an alpha game, which MM feels like
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ZlatanW FeelsBadMan.
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FeelsBadMan Football teams quit esport investment gg
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Must admit I go through phases every now and then. I'm not sure whether I'm even playing this game right anymore. I seem to login, see how we have done and log back out. My Eli has tanked 150 in the last few days. Just doesn't feel that rewarding anynore
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First of all, thank you Weedfish for this post :)

I think I can speak for the whole development team that all these issues that you pointed out are something that we are not closing our eyes on. Our team can promise that we will keep on working on these issues daily and always, I mean always listen to our community to provide the best improvements for the game. Current focus is to roll out the economy boosting features with the new season that will make the game feel much more rewarding and less flat. More stuff will follow.

This past half a year for MobaManager has been hectic it has had its ups and down but believe me when I say that the brightest days are still ahead. I am personally working every day to find ways to get more resources working on the game, it has been really hard but I believe that I am getting close.

Not to mention yesterday that was a really good day for us brining in almost 3000 fresh players, lets keep up the good vibe and tell the newcomers why we love this game!
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Rooney (JimR3) is an amazing person and we will surely miss him.
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First of all, thank you Weedfish for this great post, it's really appreciated.
Today's the day I quit this game, it's been a hell of a ride here, countless moments that won't be forgotten such as the whole DEUS VULT meta, Team Infinity, memeing, shitposting, zlatan memes and much more.
I have no words to express how awesome this community is, club rivalries aside, you guys are awesome, never change!
The game is awesome, aside from the random debugging (aka hotfixes Kappa) it is really good, I hope this game reaches its funding goal to go to the next level and be even better than it is now.
Thank you for everything, this is Rooney (JimR3) out.


DEUS VULT. BibleThump
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Rip Crash <3 if you come back I miss ya buddy
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"Over the last few months many people have quit, people that were very well known, think of Jordian, Crash, Immortal, DPS King, Xenoon, Salvarity, Xcellenz, Mackko and of course so many more. "

1. I have not played the game since forever (think season 2 or something like that) and have not even logged on since then other than one single time. There was nothing wrong with the game. I just did not have time to play and play attention to my account due to things getting quite busy in real life.

2. Xenoon quit the game? Does anyone happen to know why?

Sincerely,

Immortal
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No one knows really, people just either lose intrest or don't have time anymore. It's the nature of every game but given how close nit the community has becone, a few big people leaving tends to have a big impact. It's easy to forget that this game is also played by thousands of others who don't get as involved but still find enjoyment here.
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I think a lot of you older players are pretty deluded as to the state of the game. Playerbase is growing.

Before, there was a smaller amount of players but it was more close knit, people all joined discord, knew each other ect.
Nowadays, people aren't as social because they play in friend groups. I have around 8-9 friends that all play, we don't communicate or talk to anyone about the game outside of our group, to you guys, you see old players leaving and not many people joining discord/your social circles and you think that the game is dying, in reality, tons of people are joining, but the game is that good, people don't need to make friends with people through the game, they just get their own friends to join and they speak to their existing friends about the game so there's less public socialising, which gives the impression the game is dying butin reality that is far from the truth.
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Well the numbers dont lie either, we can see how many active teams there are and the number is a lot lower than that it used to be,
So no the playerbase isnt growing, it has influxes at times because of reddit posts/tweets from well known people etc. But how many of those players actually stay to play the game?

And i can't speak for everyone ofcourse, but a lot of people that still play this game that i know of, play it mostly for the community, personally if it weren't for the community i wouldn't be here anymore. If that dies out eventually the playerbase will deplete even faster
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Ok , the obvious drops in player population has to do with many of the newcomers only staying for short-term phases, Majority of the new players don't have an understanding of how to manage your players and become lost on how to progress in this game, I think that it is not the developer's fault because they just make the game for our entertainment and to make profit to keep us entertained. People have to understand that this game is exceptionally realistic then other manger games, it is really complex, therefore, in order for you to enjoy the game you must reach a certain point in this game where you have steady income, good players, consistent new players flooding into your roster to replace the 25 yr olds in your team. It takes TIME and WORK to reach this stage. But I believe you can enjoy this game if you jump in with the right "connections". These "connections" are the older players who are more experienced in MM. It is your job to make sure you teach the newcomers how to stay on track and give them a more advanced understanding of the game then the guide. I personally feel that if new players had mentors to keep them from becoming a bad manager. I myself have been playing this game for only 3wks and I enjoy this game despite not winning a single tournament and the fact that I am a new player. The reasons why I enjoy this game is thanks to the older players who took the time out to help me, gave me some new ways to play and utilize my player's full potential and taught me some things I never would've thought of. I thank JulleBelle and Club Soda for this :).
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Well there definitely are mentors available, check out the academy project. These guys will help you and I have been doing work to expand the areas with other languages to chat. I also have some of the best resources available, if you follow my guides and use your own brain, you can easily make top 100.

The numbers are available, however the good fact is the game feels more populated than before, division 3 is actually a challange for teams. There are thousands of players I have never spoken too, but have put 100+ days into the game. Many of them seem to be enjoying the game which is great.
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Thank you, I highly appreciate the effort to make this game better. We need more mentors with your mindset
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I agree with Rokn. We should invest more attention to making the freshlings stay than to get more freshlings. People don't really know how this game works the first couple days, weeks even months and they start losing interest. Just look at me. I played this game for 11 seasons and peaked around 1800 elo by guessing how things worked. I started losing interest because I felt like I couldnt progress any further. I had periods where I wouldn't check this game for 3 to 4 days and then coming back just out of curiousity how my team was doing. Then one day I felt like joining a club and I saw New Dawn was recruiting. I applied on MobaManager but their club info said applying on discord had more chance of getting accepted but I didn't feel like doing so because I had never used discord, thought it was just a voice chat program. A day later I got a message from New Dawn's founder Timaus that I would get accepted if I joined discord and something in his message convinced me to do so, so I did it. Immediately I got so overwhelmed by other friendly players that I had regrets that I hadn't done this earlier. After I got accepted I had a chat with one of their leaders bedwyr who helped me fixing my strategy and picks & bans and oh my god what an effect that had! Six days in a row I kept winning my league and ranked games without even one single loss! I got from 1800 elo to 2400 and I couldn't believe what was happening. This and the fact that everyone in New Dawn is super friendly and helpfull made me love this game again. I'm now super active again and chatting with my fellow clubmembers.

TLDR: Long story short: joining a club made me more active because people help each other in a club and it's nice to talk to people about the game. Focus should be made around keeping new players and giving them incentive to join a club and seaking communication with other players.
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Honestly I tried tap, who helped me from div 5 to 3. I plateaud since. Lately my elo tanked from 2200 to 1900 and player wages have gone through the roof. I'm sort of losing interest to be honest...
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Quote: ”No one knows really, people just either lose intrest or don't have time anymore. It's the nature of every game but given how close nit the community has becone, a few big people leaving tends to have a big impact. It's easy to forget that this game is also played by thousands of others who don't get as involved but still find enjoyment here.”

While I do agree with your analysis of the situation, in this particular situation it is possible to point out at least one very specific reason. I base this claim on my own observations and conversations I have had with other Alpha and Beta players.

From what I have both been told and experienced people have literally gotten bored of the game due to lack of DIFFERENT viable strategies. This lack of diversity pretty much killed most of the interest towards this game. Other parts of the game (making money, how to train players etc.) are all pretty straightforward after you get hang of the basics. It is quite easy to iterate specific numbers pretty fast. You either used variations of one single viable strategy or just gave up. Winning and losing was often decided by as little as allocating just 10 points slightly differently. You either picked 5-10 point more def or dmg as long as the basic set up remained exactly same and if not you got destroyed.

Very good example of this is the top lane carry strategy. It was fun for a while but when everyone started using it soon became party killer. Again you either used it or lost. People did try to crack it. It is the same with me. I even came very close but after running some numbers and a conversation with Xylaa I realized I was just wasting my time as it proved to be impossible due to combination of the way dmg was calculated back then and how utility worked. I believe I did talk with Henry about this one single time and he confirmed my speculations. Anyway the only possible way to beat it was to use a specific utility based strategy during a period of time when utility was plain out bad and sucked. Came very close, did not work, case closed.
People used to spam sandbox games in order to figure different strategies out, which lead to some people hiding their real set ups. These brief periods of testing, tweaking strategies and coming up with new ones were always fun. Regardless optimal set up eventually always leaked and spread out fast and soon you had pretty much all the top people using very close to same exact strategy. Granted I messaged people strategies and tips on what to do since they were stuck but so what (i bet others did that too). The core issue and my point match engine being too simple still exists.

To get back to track I and bunch of other people soon realized there is always just one optimal strategy, which reigns supreme till match engine is changed. Once you figured out what it is there was no longer any reason to log on other than to renew your contracts and chat with people. This is what other beta players talked with me and something I soon came to agree with. Once you figured out the optimal strategy entire game became BORING. There just was not a lot to do at all.

Since I do not know how it is now I went and asked around about current situation. Apparently it is pretty much the same. There seems to be one or two viable strategies (perhaps those two are even same exact template with few tweaks), some kind of “40 min blank” strategy with this and that. I was told yesterday that people find this lack of diversity in viable strategies boring. To me it seems nothing has changed.

Those same people (back when I still played) all wanted there to be MULTIPLE viable strategies at the same time so that teams would not be carbon copies of each other but have their own style of play and flavor, which comes with it. You could have a team whose identity is aggressive early game and fast pushing or perhaps team whose identity is to stall the game and farm etc. There are multiple possible different combinations and team identities. Should match engine be BALANCED or should I say GOOD ENOUGH you could achieve this via training your players to fit whatever strategy and team identity you wish to have and use. Players do even have attributes like Teamfights, Aggressiveness, Knowledge, Laning, Positional, which could all be used to achieve desired effect. You want to have an aggressive team, which ganks and dives a lot and pushes fast? Well train your players to have high aggressiviness. Since you cannot obviously have it all then said players would have a weakness in other stats.

From what I gather this is still not the case. There is still one strategy, which reigns supreme. You either use that set up or something close to it or lose. When match engine is changed a little people will just figure out new dominant strategy and then cycle will repeat itself. You still cannot use all these player attributes to achieve this or that playstyle making all those attributes useless filler.

Do not get me wrong. I do like the game a lot but this particular aspect of the game can and should be improved a lot and I am wondering why something has not been done. Time has passed by.


Sincerely and with best regards,

Immortal
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Yea, this is probably the biggest issue with the game right now. The variaty of strategy just isn't there because it's simply the case of numbers vs numbers. Henri has discussed a potential solve to make the game events based, however this has it's own drawbacks as well.

Another option is to consistently change the game sim, however a downside to this is unbalanced strategies that don't get tested enough.

@creative very happy you have found your way in the game. The community is here to help everyone who does want to get involved. We want to see more clubs and more competition. To anyone looking for help to improve or just looking for friends, take a look at tap, start talking to club leaders and just get involved. Discord is very easy to use and great to keep up with people..
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Constantly changing the game is the best option, will keep things fresh and fun. Even when broken patches go out they are still fun for a bit. As long as the changes are constant it doesn't matter, even this GE was fun for a bit.
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To add on what ed said, TAP is indeed available for all new players and there are quite a lot of people there that will help you and if you show initiative you will get picked up by a club.

Lots of clubs will take you on as a trialist if you just simply ask them, i know for sure that we (OG) do this, just hop into our discord (https://discord.gg/Am3Asnd )
and ask if you can join us, we will take you on as a trialist and see where we can go from there.

And yes i agree with immortal as well and this has been an issue in the game since the start and yes its making the game very repetitive and boring for most of the players who have figured out the GE, we need more frequent updates and preferably multiple viable strategies.
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I strongly agree that new players should join TAP on discord and slowly go from there, by asking questions or talking in the channel or its participants. I am a new player too, I never knew this game existed up until a month ago. TAP in Discord kept me interested because I could ask any question I wanted, and noone ever found it stupid. I managed to research about the game, show my work to members of a club and join them. This club now are people who I occassionally talk during the day, and the conversations are always interesting, especially when it is about researching the game.

It provides a whole new level of motivation and interest for this game, when you have other people to discuss and share ideas with.

Also, regarding strategies and how some of you think the engine is always the same. Let's say that ALL players have figured out the best strategy and options to put in the Strategy section. How can someone defeat the other? Well, I can assure you there is always something you can change to beat the other guy, even if you have the same strategy. There are things that are best put at a certain way for everyone, but also exist things that can COUNTER any opponent's strategy, but you have to always be changing depending on the opponent. This is a very interesting process of the game. Having better players is one way to dominate someone with the same strategy, but counters definitely exist too.

The above however should by no means relieve developers and exclude them from their obligation to try and make the game better day by day. They still have their part. Also, every player should be realistic in terms of his goals and how far he can reach in the game at a particular point in time. You cannot simply reach rank #1 in 1 month played, even if you have everything set optimally, because other people are playing for a year or so, having millions of dollars ready to be invested by their teams and also have their youth academies running for some time now etc. New players have to observe, learn, be patient and creative. Oh, and join TAP too :P
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"Also, regarding strategies and how some of you think the engine is always the same. Let's say that ALL players have figured out the best strategy and options to put in the Strategy section. How can someone defeat the other?"

Roughly +3-5 or -3 to -5 points to either dmg or hp (if hp dmg obviously goes down by the same amount) while keeping rest of the set up same. This has been tested and proven. I am thinking about making a post about how to fix quite a few things so I may go more into details in that post should I end up actually writing it.

" Well, I can assure you there is always something you can change to beat the other guy, even if you have the same strategy. There are things that are best put at a certain way for everyone, but also exist things that can COUNTER any opponent's strategy, but you have to always be changing depending on the opponent. This is a very interesting process of the game. Having better players is one way to dominate someone with the same strategy, but counters definitely exist too."

Nope. when optimal strategy for current engine has been figured out there is no such thing as a counter strategy. Nada, zip, zero strategies available to use as a counter since simply put such thing as a counter does not exist. At this point match engine itself has to be changed. Such situation has already happened more than once. You may come very close to making a counter such as utility strat during top carry meta but very close does not exactly count when the strat still ends up losing in the end no matter what (It looks really good and makes close games but still loses.).

Now I wish it was not like this but that only goes so far. It is all related to how match engine works. Now I do have some ideas of my own how to improve things but I came back only few days ago and need little bit more time to think, calculate and test before posting anything related.

Regards,

Immortal