The recent changes to the specialist rating need more explaination. Main reason is that we needed to adjust some values after the update – which by the way is totally normal for such a large change, as the behaviour of thousands of users is simply not a thing we can test beforehand. I am quite confident that most of you are patient enough!

The new specialist rating

First things first: Why did we change the specialist rating in the first place?

There actually are plenty of reasons: The old specialist rating (SR) was hard to understand, even for power gamers. It was rather intransparent. Sometimes it even was misleading, because you could easily setup a bad SR5 team. Furthermore, in 541 a SR of 5 was nearly not achievable. And finally, it made it nearly impossible to add new specialists. That said, let’s conclude that it a good thing to replace the old SR by something better.

Now the new setup screen allows you to see at once if a specialist is positioned correctly or not. Still, you need to understand things like:

– DM headers are strictly worse in defending than CB headers and thus are not counted.

– In contrast, in 343 DM headers are counted as offensive players who DO work.

– In offensive formations, the hammer does nothing and is not marked neither counted.

– Crossing specialists are only counted if you have at least one offensive header because defensive headers only are not very effective.

– Man-to-man-markers do nothing in 541, as they are designed to „close holes“, and five defenders leave no such „hole“.

– Crossing players also work on central positions

– But headers don’t work if placed on the wing.

The experts among you knew all of that before, but now each and every manager can immediately see it, and that’s a good thing.

That said, the new specialist rating is still not perfect. For example, if you place two man-to-man-markers in 442, only one is actually effective, but the SR will count both, as they are both positioned correctly. Same is true for two CB HE. Aces are always marked, even in 442 if you have no playmaker.

We are going to improve that in the near future, but not neccessarily in the rating, but on the specialists themselves. Our objective is to make the simulation transparent for all of you!

Specialists in the analysis

As you know, the analysis sometimes shows „Specialists“ as reason for a match result. It does so, if it sees a relevant difference in both team’s specialist rating. Before the update, that relevant difference was 2 or more. Obviously, as specialist ratings now can reach 11 and are not 5, we needed to tweak that value, so we changed it to 4.

Unfortunately, it turned out yesterday that this was not enough. Many teams with previously strong setups with new specialist ratings 6 or 7 lost to a SR 11 team and then concluded that they also would needed to switch to SR 11 – and that meant remove all superstitious players.

Of course that was wrong, because we did not change the strength of those formations at all. Still, you can loose with such a formation – but not because you lack specialists, instead the reason is simply bad luck or the other team was equally strong in total and then there is no guarantee you always win. Some managers even started selling their superstitious players instead of waiting until we do the right thing – adjusting the analysis output.

That’s what we did this morning: The threshold for the analysis displaying „Specialists“ has been raised to a SR difference of EIGHT or more. And, yes, if a team with SR 11 beats SR 3 (or SR 8 beats SR 0), then the lack of specialists is really propably a reason for the result.

So, as a round up, let me say thank you for your positive feedback on our largest update since many months. We are confident that the changes are great to have and we say thank you for your support and patience!

Here’s and wrapup of what happened previously:

We told you about the new Hammer specialist, then the EU-Data privacy stuff came over us and now we can finally continue to work.



What about the Hammer? What is he good for?

To answer that, have a look at the formations he is made for: 343/532 and 541/4231. In 343, if you play against 541, your sometimes are the better team but simply do not score a goal because of the defensive formation you don’t have lots of chances. The hammer will help here because he adds some shots on top of that. That said, to make sure the stone scissors rock (SSR) system isn’t negated, we are going to increase the number of counter attacks slightly.

When playing 541, you sometimes have the same problem, namely when playing against 442 with strictly lower strength. You should win that normally, but sometimes the weak 442 simply does not create enough counter attacks. In that case, your Hammer will jump in and hopefully score the desperately needed goal to make you win.

Alongside with the addition of the hammer, we are going to simplify the Specialist Rating system drastically. It will simply count all specialists setup in a meaningful way (except superstitious). On top of that, all those specialists (those positioned correctly, that is) will be marked with green color in the setup screen. So the new specialist rating will be from 0 to 11 instead of 0 to 5, which is important to know but easy to understand.

New building

As KiO 9 is a large update, it will bring more new stuff. This:



This is the new Luxury Training Center. It produces up to one Extratraining Boost item per day (similar to the Booster Coach) during normal training. You can of course decide to keep your existing Training Center if you more like the (very low) propability of creating a specialist out of a vanilla player. The Luxury Training Center won’t do that!

Clan Championship

We strongly believe that the changes we made to the clan championship during the last months made sense. For example we once had four weeks in a row with four different clan champions, and that’s nice. But we also believe that currently power gaming (playing for many, many hours each and every day) is rewarded at least twice but shouldn’t. First, when power gaming, you can loads of free items, morale 10 (or 11) and loads of cash, enabling you to always have the best team possible and winning championships. Second, during power gaming, you win many tournaments, gaining additional clan scores. Also, wo make progress in your clan challenge. We came to the conclusion that only success in the most important clashes should be rewarded in the clan championship alongside with the clan challenges (which are scaled with the clan strength). Because of this we will remove the clan scores for standard tournaments (like Platinum Cup and so forth), tentative.

And all the rest

There will be another improvement to the game in the KiO 9 update, but it’s not implemented yet, so we cannot show it now. You’ll have to wait until next week, then we are going to undisclose. The improvement is related to the simulation, and it will not make it worse, that’s granted!

Now, have a great weekend!

Welcome to another issue of KiO Week!

EU Data protection regulation

Most of you, at least if you are living in Europa, have heard of the new data protection regulation which will come into effect by may 25th. It involves improved protection of personal user data, YOUR data. Of course we as Ludetis also take appropriate action. While we anyway store only a very small amount of personal data (namely your email address, if you have set it), we also updated our privacy policy. And this requires that you accept this updated policy explicitely. Because of this, in the next days KiO will be updated and then during next start will ask you to accept the updated information before you are allowed to continue.

Clan Cup vs. Leagues

This week we did some cleanups, and while at it, we made all clan cups start exactly on the full hour (plus or minus 1-2 minutes) to make this easier to remember. Additionally, to make sure that Clan Cups don’t collide with league matches, we are going to adjust league starting times slightly this sunday. All leagues will start between minute 20 and 50. So make sure when you enter your league that you check when it starts!

Kicktipp

For the (real) worldcup there will again be a Kicktipp prediction game. You can easily join here (they support different languages). Make sure you use your team name as your nickname as there are ingame rewards! The winner of the game will receive 3 large ruby packs, the runner-up 2 large ruby packs, place 3 gets one large ruby pack, and place 4 to 10 one small ruby pack each.

Now that’s it for this week. Of course we are observing what happens in the clan championship, which currently sees TRM on place 1. We’ll see on saturday if they can stay there. And now, let’s kick that ball into that goal!

Welcome to another issue of …

Nope.

Today it’s time for the very first preview of the next large update which is scheduled to come to your devices mid of june.

We do this because for some feature changes it is vital to know about them as early as possible. And this is definitely the case for:

Specialists Re-vamp

First question first: Why do we even touch the specialists? Aren’t they working properly?

Well, mostly. But first of all, the specialist’s abilities are not very transparent. Yes, they are documented properly in the Wiki, but you cannot directly see inside the game how specialists work. And this is going to change.

KiO 9 will mark properly positioned specialists on the setup screen. And the specialist rating will be just the number of players marked that way. (Obviously, this does not apply to superstitious players, as their ability counts towards their strength independent of their position, and they also never count towards the specialist rating).

Of course the match analysis will also be changed slightly to cover this change, because the new specialist rating can have values from 0 to 11 while the current can only reach 5. Also, specialists who would do something, but not as much as they could, will not be marked and not counted towards the specialist rating.

Two examples should help to understand how this works.

If you have a crossing specialist but only a header specialist in your defense, but not in your offense, the crossing specialist will NOT be marked or counted. While it can happen that he plays a crossing to your center back header who then could score a goal, this is rather rare compared to the situation where you have offensive headers.

Also, if you have an ace specialist in a non counter formation (not 541/4231), he will not be marked as positioned correctly. Yes, playmakers like to play deadly passes to aces, but those don’t get any bonus when shooting on the goal. So this is clearly inferior compared to having a superstitious striker with reasonably high bonus.

The new, completely transparent specialist rating will also allow us to introduce new specialists without changing the rating formula, as they simply count 1 if positioned correctly (which you will be able to see in your setup) or 0 if not. And we use this option to introduce the…

The Hammer

We are introducing the Hammer as central back and def midfield players only. He will be able to fire long shots towards the goal, but mainly when playing defensive formations 343/352. This significantly improves those formations when playing 541/4231, as they often have problem to score enough goals to win. We know that this used to be frustrating, so we’re gonna change it.

While we’re at it, we are also slightly modifying…

The Cat

But why? Isn’t the cat great and perfect? Yes, he is. He is so great that each team has one. And that’s exactly the problem. If each team has the same goalkeeper, it makes no difference. No strategic options. No use of synergies. Same setup also means more random influence. So we’re going to make the cat weaker and this will make the superstitious goalie playable, if you have enough mascots or boosts. It’s important to understand that we change the cat to reduce random. Also it’s important to understand that this change can have influence on prices on the transfer market, or on your decisions which player to fetch when you activate your next rookie contract. This is exactly why we communicate this change so early. Now you’ve plenty of time to think about possible changes to your strategy before the change becomes effective.

Spring Cup

Now, enough words, let’s join this weekend’s Spring Cup! Win presents for 1st and 2nd place, and have fun playing!

And while you’re at it, we are going to work on the update. Seeya!

Our game celebrates 8th birthday (of version 1.0) this month, and next month the world championship in Russia is going to start. That’s a perfect time to release a great large update, KiO 9.0!

We cannot unveil the details yet, but we can promise many new features like new buildings, improvements to the simulation, tournament systems and much much more.

Until then, let’s keep this message short, so we’ve more time for programming 🙂

Welcome to this issue of KiO Week – and it’s update preview time!

The next update will come on April 29. It’s not a large update (the next one will be). In short, here are the new features:

– Players currently not in your setup, but saved in any assistant coach’s setup, are marked with a new icon

– For newbies with eh … problems with their cash flow, so-called bankruptcy, there will be a new repair worker in the premium shop who repairs all buildings in one go. This worker does nothing on building sites of new buildings!

– Vibration alarm before tournament, league and cup matches (in tournaments, only before the first round match). This allows you for example to join a tournament, then put your device into your pocket, and as soon as you feel the game (ha ha) you know the action kicks off. Also the vibration reminds you about your league matches. This feature of course can be turned off in the profile screen.

This weekend season 387 will end propably with a great clash in the clan championship, as the new fusion clan JVP battles many-times-champions GVV for the title. And then, there’s of course the Easter Special!



From friday, 10 CEST, until monday, 22 CEST, we will hide easter eggs in the game, or, to be more precise, in certain play actions. You’ll have to find them and collect them. On saturday and sunday, the secret location will change to somewhere else! But we’re sure you’ll collect many many colourful eggs. Whenever you have 5 eggs of one sort, you can activate them in your inventory to get a free item. The egg’s colors vary by rarity, so the golden and striped ones are only rarely found. For example 5 of the striped eggs give you one platinum specialist player contract, so you’ll want to find as many as possible!

Additionally, you get 3 free extra ruby for each pack purchase until monday evening.

Before you start searching for eggs, we’d like to announce the next large update for june this year. You know we’ll celebrate our game’s 8th birthday end of may, then we’ll have the KiO Team Worlcup and of course there’s the real world cup this summer – enough reasons for an exciting update with great new elements, we’re sure you’ll love them. So stay tuned, more on this is to come soon!

A last message from our developer section: The match analysis result „no defensive header“ now actually works at last. We managed to hunt down this bug. So now if the analysis thinks the match result has been influenced by this fact, it will be displayed.