http://www79.hattrick.org/Community/Press/?ArticleID=18589
An interview with Ratsia
作者 HPE-Dantekavala
Ratsia (88666) is the 'most stalked' user in HT (except HTs): more than 400
users bookmarked him to read his posts, he's playing the game since 2002 and
he's well known as a very interesting person. And when editorials are
published, a lot of users start to look for his posts, to check the ideas of
an HT user "who knows". With this interview, we try to give you some more
information about him, and his ideas/proposals about HT.
Ratsia经理创队2002年，是一位以有趣闻名的经理，是除了官方人员外最受瞩目的经理，
有超过400人标注他看他的文章。当官方社论被发布后，很多玩家开始看他的回文，
看这位HT万事通的想法。
这篇社论是他的专访，是他对游戏的分享。
Hello Ratsia and thank you for the great chance to interview on of the most
popular managers in Global. We read your posts in the forum every day but
only few of us know who is the real person behind the avatar of Ratsia. Let's
start with an easy one. Could you please introduce yourself?
你能介绍自己吗 ?
Oh, but this is the hardest one...
也许这适最困难的问题..
I am a 36yo guy from Finland, living with my baby girl and her mother in
Helsinki. I am a computer scientist, working on machine learning, artificial
intelligence and data analysis at University of Helsinki, where I lead a
small research group. During my free time I enjoy board games, good food, and
all the usual stuff like hanging around with friends. For some weird reason,
most of my friends are also in academia but working in different fields,
which might have an influence on my communication style.
作者现实生活自我介绍，略。
The above is who I am today, but during the soon 13 years I have played the
game I have naturally gone through various stages in life. I started and
finished my PhD studies while playing HT, got married and divorced, and both
bought and sold my first apartment. If you remember my writings from days
long gone, the posts probably do not reflect the current me that well.
以上是自我介绍。我也玩这款游戏13年了，HT横跨我人生很多阶段，攻读博士(开始HT)、
结婚、离婚、买人生第一间房、卖人生第一间房。
以前的文章无法完全的反映、诠释现在的我，有跟文的老玩家是知道这点的。
You play Hattrick since 2002. Obviously you have achieved a lot. Can you tell
us the short version of your team story? Do you believe that you have reached
your limit or there are other things that you would like to do with your team?
你从2002开始玩HT，能简单介绍你的球队历史吗。
你认为你的球队已经到达了极限 ? 还是仍然能开发出开玩法、新可能性 ?
I think I could write thousands of words on this, but I try to be brief.
对这点我有很多能说，不过我会试着简短表达。
I indeed started in 2002, right before the Finnish league started growing
rapidly. I started in div IV and promoted twice in a row, only to find myself
in div II after less than two full seasons of playing while at the same time
the new managers in Finland were being placed in div VI. Combined with a
serious fan bug that gave some teams (like mine) hundreds of fans at once,
this gave me a very strong head-start compared to the masses. Nevertheless,
it still took me 10 seasons of playing in div II and III before promoting to
Mestaruussarja, the Finnish top division that by then was the most
consistently strong series in HT according to Alltid. I went on to play 12
seasons in a row there, winning the national title four times in 2007-2008.
During the first three I was playing the best football in the series, but the
forth one was a real fluke; I didn't lose any matches and won by 12 points
even though the series had one very strong trader and several other teams
that were better than mine.
我从2002芬兰语开放后开始玩HT，从四联开始，接着两赛季连升两级。
升二联的同时期，芬兰的新玩家已经要从六联开始了。
得益于当时的球迷bug，有些球队(比如说我的球队)，立刻得到了数以百计的球迷，
比起其他同期的球队，我的球队因此得到了非常有优势的起步。
尽管如此，在升上芬超前，我花了10个赛季在二联、三联，
根据alltid，芬超一直是HT竞争最激烈的联赛小组。
我在芬超连续待了12个球季，在2007-2008拿了四次冠军，
其中前三次，我是实至名归的最好球队，而第四次冠军是侥幸，我没有输任何一场球、
领先12分的优势夺冠，但是当时有个非常强的交易型球队，也有一些比我好的球队。
Roughly around the time I finally demoted from Mestaruussarja, I stopped
playing the game for real. I have always had very strong voluntary
constraints for my team and around that time I started to increasingly feel
that there is too much mental pressure for me to continue even a semi-serious
effort. I had always avoided trading as much as I could (though I must admid
I took part in the events that resulted in invention of skilltrading; I
stopped doing it as soon as I realized what it was about), I intentionally
stayed away from the most profitable training types, and I never took
advantage of the ridiculous interest feature we had back then. However, by
2008 or so I had come to realize that even if I ignored all those elements,
my total wealth (and hence team strength) would still be almost solely
determined by how much I take advantage of the "gray area", such as reaping
some hundreds of thousands extra when buying or selling a player, or by using
player types that are known to be more powerful than what the community
realizes. I could not continue playing with the constant pressure of "If I
sold one guy today and replaced him with a slightly better one, I would earn
300k for free" looming over me, so I decided I will not even try. Since then,
I have been casually cruising around, ending up as a medium-quality div
III/IV team that will definitely not promote any higher. Nowadays I also
completely lack motivation (and largely time) and a few times I have also
forgot to place a lineup, so there really is no risk of progress. I no longer
even have a youth squad and I do not have energy for using the transfer list,
but I should still be able to hang around in div IV for as long as I want to.
文实在太长了，从这里开始就不翻了..
In HM I never had good success, though I managed to win a few matches there.
I've also never been in the cup finals. Both of these are consequences of my
playing style: I always cared more about consistency and the overall progress
than individual matches, refusing to buy any kind of temporary players except
in some very rare cases (and 99% of time I would not have money anyway).
Related to this, I feel that my biggest achievements with the game are also
in the consistency regime. FC Vompatti sits on third place in the all-time
list of Mestaruussarja and played 22 seasons in a row in div I/II between
2004 and 2010, in a country that back then was amongst the strongest ones, if
not the strongest. The other thing I am somewhat proud of is having reached
at least the 5th round in the national cup every single season I have been in
the cup. This includes even the very first season in 2002, so the streak
covers soon 13 years of cup seasons with at least 5 rounds. Is there anyone
in whole HT who can beat that?
How could contributions (and possibly tactic effectiveness) be tweaked so
that there would be multiple equilibria and no single "best" line-up.
The easy way out would be to make the different lineup choices to have clear
drawbacks, by dramatically changing the non-linearities or even by adding
explicit penalties like "with only two defenders the opponent gets a few CA
events for free, with additional 50% boost for attack ratings". Then we would
get something like 4-5-1 beats 2-5-3 which beats 3-5-2 which beats 4-5-1, but
without other major changes this might actually just make the game worse.
Such second-guessing mechanics essentially reduce the game into a glorified
rock-paper-scissors, which I personally do not like at all.
A more practical way would be to just tweak the player contributions to
better balance the various overall tactics and lineups. The core of the
engine works well, so we would not need any dramatic changes. Instead, a
competent game designer should spend some weeks carefully analyzing,
simulating and tweaking the player contributions and other numerical details.
This has never been done, yet it would be way more important than adding new
elements or re-designing some particular current elements completely.
Let's say they will let you run Hattrick for a year. Which would be the very
first 3 things you'd change or implement?
This might come as a surprise, but none of those things would be about the
game itself but instead about how it is run. The first thing would be to
completely change the way the developers interact with the community; instead
of explicitly avoiding contact with the community, the all developers would
need to allocate time for community relations (primarily via forums). The
second change would be to hire a game designer, a person capable and
responsible of balancing the numerous fine details in the engine etc. The
third change would be to incorporate more data-driven decision-making,
especially to further improve the financial status and user-base; HT has full
control on their platform and hence could very easily record a lot of data
about their customers to influence decisions on interfaces, supporter prices,
moderation policies, and whatever.
What about the new staff system? Do you think it has achieved its purpose or
need some changes/improvements?
The old staff system was, in terms of low-level mechanics, the most poorly
designed part of the game. It had zero transparency, required no action ever
except to utilize loopholes, and even had some choices that were strictly
worse than some others for all relevant variables. In practice we could,
however, ignore it.
The new system is clearly an improvement, but only because it is more
transparent. There is still never any reason to touch the choices except
again to utilize loopholes and possibly when switching from one extreme
tactic to another if one is into such things. Roughly as good system could
have been designed and implemented in a day or two at any point during this
century, so in the end we didn't get anything out from the hugely delayed
"major change". Renewing that part of the game was perhaps the best
opportunity ever of improving the core game, but the developers passed it.
Luckily we can still completely ignore the feature. I wouldn't even remember
what kind of staff members I have; when the system was launched I picked
some, and have no intention of ever changing them.
Thank you for your answer. As I can understand, you are not satisfied with
the current status. Without spending a lot of time on it, what do you think
that has to be improved in the new staff system?
What it would need is purpose, and probably the best one would be more
medium-term decisions. HT has short-term decisions in form of lineups and
long-term decisions in form of squad selection and training, but very little
medium-term ones besides TS management. Staff would be a natural instrument
for introducing more of those, things we set for perhaps 4-8 weeks and that
has notable effect. The Staff member choices of all clubs should also be
public.
A practical example of could be: "Counter attack consult for 6 weeks.
Improves CA conversion rate by 2%/level during the first week, 4%/level
during the second we