Match Experience Update and Steam Early Access Exit
Hi everyone
Yesterday there was the first of a series of updates focussing on improving the match experience. The tactics interface along with the squad page have been completely overhauled. Included as part of the overhaul was the new tactical instructions to assign set piece taker/roles.
Lots of the visual elements associated with the match experience were improved including the addition of an event timeline.
The Changelog for the update can be found here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/468070/discussions/1/3819669865031265048/
90 Minute Fever also exited Steam Early Access yesterday. We just wanted to say a big thank you to all of you who have been with us through the Early Access journey. It has certainly taken us a lot longer than we first envisioned, and taken more than a few iterations of league, fixture, transfer and other systems. But we have finally got to the stage where the core gameplay mechanics are balanced, engaging, fair, fun and without fundamental flaws. The barrier to entry for new users is no longer unreasonably high. The game rewards skillful gameplay and has an extremely high skill ceiling. We believe the game is a fantastic option compared to all the other online football management games out there. Thank you for your feedback, both positive and negative, it has been invaluable and continues to be so.
There is a lot more we wish to add to the game. We are currently working on a club records area, competition records, revamping the rankings, access to additional match stats including a wide array of live player stats during matches, further enhancing the new set pieces functionality to include the ability to change the assignments during matches, as well as a match engine logic update.
What can I do to help? We’d love some help in three areas:
We are likely to have many new users asking questions on Discord. Any friendly help and advice you are able to provide would make a real difference to their initial experience of the game.
Help us rank higher on the magical Steam algorithm! Spread the word! We’ll be regularly posting on social media (Facebook, Twitter) going forwards so if you share/like/retweet/etc our posts that would really help.
If anyone has the time and willingness to help with translation of the game into more languages that would be hugely appreciated. Currently the game is fully playable in English, Greek and Brazilian Portuguese, but we would love to make the game more accessible to people who speak other languages. Having additional languages can help a lot, we’ve seen a real surge of new user signups from Brazil and Portugal in recent months. If you are able to help in this area, please look in the translations area of the official Discord server. We’re looking to make this process a little easier than it has been to date, and we’ll be posting updated information on this in the next couple days.
Thank you again for being with us on our epic journey. Good luck for the seasons ahead!
Major Update - Added Cups, Player Search, New Training System, Reset
Hi everyone
There has been a major update at the start of this month including a gamewide reset. This is a major update that touches pretty much all areas of the game but some of the headline changes include:
The transfer system has seen a complete overhaul. Players will now undergo an auction process when they enter the transfer market. After which if nobody bids for them they will be instantly purchasable by anyone in the game. A player search feature has been added to help you scour over the many, many thousands of players that will now be available to you to find and buy!
The league system has also seen a complete overhaul. Clubs are now split into 16 team leagues with the top 4 getting promoted and the bottom 4 getting relegated each season.
Cups have also been added to the game. The top 4 in each of the top division leagues now qualify for the Sans Pareil Cup (a cup with a group phase and then KO rounds) the following season, the winner of which will be crowned top dog. There are also a variety of other cups being added, including a Youth Cup (for the very best youth teams), League Cups (one for each league), and a Cup Holders’ Cup (for the winners of each of the League Cups).
The Training System has been improved. Players will now each earn Development Points when playing matches. These points can be spent to reveal attributes on the “B” training options, to add/change positions of players, and to hasten their recovery from injury.
As we are at the tail end of the Early Access cycle now, a full reset of the game has happened in preparation for the leadup to the official game launch.
Major Update Changelog: https://steamcommunity.com/app/468070/discussions/1/3842179619564672703/
Major Update FAQ: https://steamcommunity.com/app/468070/discussions/1/3842179619564693071/
Feature Spotlight - Training System, Player Contracts, Reset
Hi everyone
Here is a quick outline of a few more of the changes coming in the major update currently in development. Please see the forum post (link below) for more details.
This update is coming at the start of next month (June 1st).
The Training System is getting some enhancements and balancing improvements. The “B” Training Options are now hidden. Players will now each earn Development Points when playing matches. These points can be spent to reveal attributes on the “B” training options, to add/change positions of players, and to hasten their recovery from injury.
You can now extend as many of your players contracts as you want without manager skills limiting this. But choosing to extend contracts for players or not is a big decision! When you extend a player’s contract their wages will increase and you’ll only be able to sell the player for half their transfer value during the first season of their new contract. However, if you let a player’s contract expire you’ll receive the full amount of their transfer value as compensation!
As we are at the tail end of the Early Access cycle now, we have decided to do a full reset of the game at the end of this month in preparation for the leadup to the official game launch.
The game will be going offline at 08:00 UTC on the 30th May and we anticipate that we will have this major update deployed and have the game back online at 09:00 UTC on the 1st June.
More information/details about all the changes mentioned above can be found here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/468070/discussions/1/3843304884851951442/
Cheers!
Feature Spotlight - Transfer & League Systems, Cups
Hi everyone
Here is a quick outline of a few of the changes coming in the major update currently in development. Please see the forum post (link below) for more details.
The transfer system will see a complete overhaul. Gone are the scouting pools and marquee player auctions. Instead all players in the game will undergo an auction process when they enter the transfer market. After which if nobody bids for them they will be instantly purchasable by anyone in the game. This should ensure a huge amount of competition for the best players in the game while also allowing users to get players instantly when they need them. A player search tool has been created to help you scour over the many, many thousands of players that will now be available to you to find and buy!
The league system is also seeing some major changes. The Division/Tier system is still in place, but clubs are now split into 16 team leagues with the top 4 getting promoted and the bottom 4 getting relegated each season. The current match request system will remain in place, so don’t worry, you still have the ability to play 48 league matches yourself against any of the teams in your Division/Tier and importantly, you can still play your league matches whenever you want!
Cups are also being added to the game. The top 4 in each of the top division leagues now qualify for the Sans Pareil Cup (a cup with a group phase and then KO rounds) the following season, the winner of which will be crowned top dog. There are also a variety of other cups being added, including a Youth Cup (for the very best youth teams), League Cups (one for each league), and a Cup Holders’ Cup (for the winners of each of the League Cups).
More information/details about all the changes mentioned above can be found here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/468070/discussions/1/3832043350359533773/
This is a major update touching pretty much all areas of the game, and there are a large number of other changes also on their way. We’ll have another post out during May covering more of the changes.
Cheers!
Player Search Tool - Sneak Peek
Hi everyone
Just a quick post to let you know we’ve been busy working on a major update to the game. This will involve changes and updates to pretty much every area of the gameplay experience.
There will be a big announcement at the end of April that discusses the update in detail.
In the meantime here is a little teaser! Below we have included a screenshot of the player search tool (something that has been requested by many) that is coming as part of the overhaul to the transfer system.
Cheers!
Challenge Cup
Hi everyone
This update sees the addition of a new Supporter Club feature - The Challenge Cup. Within the ‘Competitions’ Menu there are now extra options that allow you to play Challenge Cup matches.
The Challenge Cup is a new feature designed to give extra gameplay for Supporter Club members. Many users in the game play a huge amount of friendly matches each month, and this is designed to give an alternative option with a competitive edge! Some users finish their competitive matches early each quarter as well, so this will offer some competitive action for these users too as they wait for the next quarter to arrive.
The feature allows users to take on the challenge of beating as many bot teams as they can in a row without losing. There are a series of cups of increasing difficulty. Win 10 matches in a row and you are promoted to the next level and your progress is saved. Lose a match and you have to go back to the start of the level. Your progress is saved after each win (so don’t worry - you don’t have to try and complete it all in one session!), but just one loss, and it’s back to the start of that level.
The feature is deliberately very difficult and it isn’t expected that any users will be able to beat all of the bot teams. However, you can have as many goes at it as you wish, so the challenge is there to be taken on! The Challenge Cup Leaderboard will show who has made it the furthest that month.
Additional information:
To ensure that senior and youth fixtures are completed to schedule, the Challenge Cup option is disabled during the final day of each weekly league period for any teams that have league matches still to play.
Challenge Cup matches are treated as friendlies so players can not get injured, and you can use injured players in the matches. Results are shown in the Friendlies tab.
There is a separate Challenge Cup for both Senior and Youth teams, so users can test their squad’s mettle in both and try to get a place on the leaderboards!
The Challenge Cup is a monthly competition. Users restart each month to battle for the top spots on that month’s leaderboards!
Match Engine Update: There’s also a match engine update that includes some improvements and balancing changes. These changes are listed in the changelog below.
Full Changelog
Added Challenge Cup feature (new item within Competitions Menu, Supporter Club feature)
Improved attacking off the ball movement
Improved playmaker role/s logic in regards to teammates looking to pass the ball to them when they are in inferior attacking positions to the player who has the ball
Balancing changes to roles that have instructions to dribble less (they now dribble less then before)
Balancing changes to fouls, in particular more chance that fouls will be called inside the penalty box (i.e. overall increase in amount of penalties during matches)
Balancing changes to shooting accuracy (improved shooting accuracy of poor finishing/shooting players)
Balancing changes to penalty taking accuracy (improved shooting accuracy across the board for all players)
Balancing changes to match stat ‘clear cut chances’. More chances are now counted as being these
Balancing changes to average fixture difficulty (increased fixture difficulty in lower divisions)
Fixed squad bar position plates not showing outline on initial load
Added Training League info in place of promotion/relegation requirements for training league progress
Fixed blank circle on training options
Updates to staff images on title bars and tutorial pop-ups
Full palette of team colours now available to all users whether they have a Supporter Club Membership or not
Easily View Player Attributes During Matches & New Player Portraits
There was an update on 17th August that had 2 significant additions. The ability to easily view player attributes whilst watching matches and a new player portraits system.
Added new feature to view player attributes (including opposition players) whilst viewing matches (by clicking on their name in the left panel)
New player portraits system
Additional player appearance variations (including in the shop)
Updates to player sprites in matches
New task bar icon
Fixed promotion/relegation icons on User History layout
July Updates Overview
31st July:
This update sees the addition of a Wage Cap. The main reasons for this are:
Increases the importance of skill in order to progress through the game
Increase overall amount of transfer market activity
Significantly increase the importance and significance of gaining promotion/avoiding relegation
Stops clubs imploding financially (not necessarily though any fault of their own)
This is discussed in detail on a podcast that can be found here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1035580/11055826
There’s also various other improvements. Full changelog as follows:
Added Club History page (at present only shows seasons that fit within the current competition setup, i.e. June Season and July Season)
Added Wage Cap. The Wage Cap for a club is equal to the Monthly Stadium Income
Manager Skills can no longer be Finalised if a club is exceeding their Wage Cap
Players (except those with zero wages) cannot be signed if doing so would cause a club to exceed their Wage Cap
For the August 2022 season only, the Wage Cap will instead be equal to 125% of the Monthly Stadium Income and Manager Skills can still be Finalised even if a club is exceeding their Wage Cap (to assist with adjusting to the change)
Financial Summary widget on finances and home layouts now contains Wage Bill and Wage Cap information
Balancing changes to player wages (general reduction in wage demands across the board, updated and applied immediately for July season finishing)
Players aged 16, 17 and 18 are no longer paid any wages
If a club is relegated, they now receive ‘Parachute Payments’. For the season immediately following the relegation their monthly stadium income and Wage Cap will both be equal to the amount they were in the division they were just relegated from
Loyalty Manager Skill reworked to no longer provide a wage discount to Academy Trial graduates and instead extend the contract length of the Academy Trial players who graduate at the end of the current season
Revenue Manager skill renamed to ‘Injection’ and rather than increasing daily revenue now instead provides an immediate one off cash injection payment received upon finalising the Manager Skills
Balancing changes to Manager Skill Prices to help with fairness and affordability of key popular skills. Level 1 skills are now generally cheaper. Level 3 skills are now generally more expensive
Changes to how affordability of purchasing scouting pool players and making auction bids works. Now all that matters is if you can afford the purchase price plus signing fee with your current balance, and that the wages of the player fit within the wage cap. In order to make multiple bids you must be able to afford all of them (both in terms of having the bank balance to pay for them and space within the Wage Cap to afford their wages)
Some Manager Skills are now recommended to new users and selected by default (they can change those recommended selections if they wish)
New page tabs design
Improved fidelity of logo on left menu
Desktop application icon updated
Updated Home Page (Various UI Tweaks/Improvements)
Fixed bug that could cause Ceiling rating of keepers to be incorrectly calculated too high
Fixed various localisation issues on homepage
The following roles now move a little farther forward compared to what they previously did when attacking: Defensive Midfielder (DM), Deep Lying Playmaker (DM), Half Back (DM), Anchor Man (DM), Wing Back (D), Inverted Wing Back (D), Defensive Wing Back (DM), Attacking Wing Back (DM)
The following roles now move farther forward compared to what they previously did when attacking: Central Winger (M), Wing Back (DM), Inverted Wing Back (DM)
The following roles now move a little farther back compared to what they previously did when defending: Defensive Midfielder (M), Attacking Midfielder (AM), Deep Lying Forward (ST)
The following roles now move farther back compared to what they previously did when defending: Pressing Forward (ST)
19th July:
The main focus of this update is bug fixes along with improving the matchmaking for league matches particularly focussing on improving Assistant Managers requesting matches on behalf of users.
Improved logic for Assistant Managers requesting matches on behalf of offline users to better distribute them throughout the league/s duration and to better increase the chances they will end up pairing vs online users
Scouting Pool page now shows the contract length a player will have if you were to sign them (note: this column does not sort correctly yet)
Improved version of initial new user signup screens/process
Improved version of login screen message notifications (for example to advise when the server is offline)
Fix to Last Season Rank bar not being filled correctly
Fix to Financial Transactions not loading under some circumstances
Fix to manager skills finalisation process (now Academy Trials and Scouting Pools will refresh so that any skills in these areas will immediately take effect rather than needing to close and reopen client to see them take effect)
Fix to Prestige Manager Skill if selected but Manager Skills not finalised yet
Fix alignment of left panel on shop page
Fix to close button issue on character buggle popup
Fix to promotion target display on league table page for Training League users
9th July:
This update focuses on improving the new user tutorial, in particular, introducing the academy trials feature as part of the tutorial process/new user experience.
New users now get access to an Academy Trial as part of the tutorial process
Any new users who started playing this month and have completed the tutorial up to the point where Academy Trials are now created for new users, have had Academy Trials created for them
Various visual and UI improvements to the tutorial
Player Auctions now include at least 55 players each day (at least 5 of which will be Goalkeepers and 50 of which will be outfielders)
Released trialists no longer show as part of the transfer history
Help ‘?’ button moved from top right (headerbar) to bottom left (menu bar)
New version of logo on loading splash screen
Road to Masters - YouTube video series
Hi everyone
Want to learn the ropes of 90MF? Want to get to the Masters League? Want to improve at 90MF? Perhaps this series can help! A complete playthrough from the Training League to Masters league (hopefully!), with an extensive commentary of thousands of decisions made along the way!
The full playlist can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLO4WvNC3TJwzTsHByDT55h2UDRXJfngu2
Why have we made these videos?
The game has an exceptionally high skill ceiling. This makes the game extremely challenging in nature and is one of the key reasons why people play it for thousands of hours. But it can also make it both intimidating for new users and extremely frustrating for existing users who have plateaued.
We have had a lot of feedback in various forms from people struggling to understand the intricacies of the match engine and various other aspects of gameplay such as the Academy Trials.
It is apparent that many people believe the game does not allow the ability to influence the outcome of matches nor the ability to progress their club up through the divisions - and this is very much not the case! The game absolutely allows those who are good at the game to win and to progress. Successfully communicating this is something that cannot be done simply by telling people that this is the case. It needs to be illustrated by example - and that is what this series is aiming to do. Amongst other things, it tries to help with what to look for when watching matches, to provide a framework of knowledge for the wide array of tactical options that exist in the game, and provides examples of how this knowledge can be applied during matches to secure match results.
90 Minute Fever is a game of small margins - especially in the top divisions, where the teams are very closely matched with fewer weaknesses to exploit. It simply isn’t reasonable to expect to consistently beat other managers at the top level unless you are consistently making better decisions than they are, and some people put a huge amount of effort into this game, having played for many thousands of hours, so this is by no means an easy task. To some large degree, you make your own luck in this game. Sure, you can get lucky or unlucky on a situation to situation basis, but over time, consistently making better decisions will yield better results. Whilst this series does provide some direct answers to various aspects of the game. On the whole, the intention is not to provide answers to a limited amount of specific questions, but rather to provide a framework of information to help you improve your own decision making to better deal with the dynamic nature of the game and the huge variety of situations that can be thrown at you.
We’ve received lots of feedback that indicates there is a potential appetite for this kind of content. We’ve held off creating this ourselves up to now in the hope that a content creator might choose to do something in this area, but the userbase is obviously not large at this pre-release stage, so we have decided to get something out there to hopefully provide some assistance. If someone else creates this kind of content in the future we’ll likely wind these down and not get in their way!
Who are these videos for?
The series is designed to provide information and insight for both new and existing users. It will take you through not only the early decision-making process as you start the game, but also the reasoning why making correct decisions can prove valuable weeks/months down the line as your club progresses. The content is raw and unedited, and therefore, within the matches, provides reaction to game situations in real time.
We have provided an introduction video to the series so that you can get an idea of the kind of depth we will go into regarding tactics and discussion. We highly recommend you watch this so that you can get an idea of what to expect from the series and whether or not it is for you as it certainly won’t be for everyone. Whether you watch them all, or perhaps just pick one or two you are interested in, hopefully you’ll get something from it. Enjoy!
For those who are not interested in the long form content, we intend to do a regular podcast that focuses on discussing in depth a couple of different topics each episode related to helping listeners to improve at the game.
Player Attribute Progression Charts
Hi everyone
This update sees the addition of a new Supporter Club feature - Player Attribute Progression Charts. On the player profile there’s now an extra tab that allows you to see a chart that details how your players attributes have changed over time.
There’s also a series of balancing changes to Manager Skills. The overall objective of these balancing changes is to curb the top end prices of the skills in a 2 pronged approach.
To implement a soft cap on individual manager skill prices that ensures no individual skill prices will become exceedingly high
Some specific skills were too key to not have levels in. There have been balancing changes to these skills to reduce need to have to have levels in these
Promotion points targets have been lowered, and relegation targets increased. The overall average fixture difficulty has also had balancing changes. In particular, the average match difficulty in lower divisions has been significantly increased.
The new user Tutorial has also had significant improvements which should hopefully have a positive impact on the onboarding process.
We’ll be looking to do another mid-month update during July, which will include the initial stages of the Club Profile page being added back into the game.
Full Changelog
Added Attribute Progression Chart feature on Player Profile (new tab, Supporter Club feature)
Changed Promotion/Relegation Points thresholds (effective from July season). Senior Promotion from 115 to 110 points. Senior Relegation from 80 to 85. Youth Promotion from 75 to 72. Youth Relegation from 53 to 56.
Balancing changes to Manager Skill prices (top end prices lowered)
Manager Skill Prices are now the same across all divisions/tiers
Recovery Manager Skill rebalanced from 0/1/2/3 (at levels 0/1/2/3) to 1/2/3/4
Extension Manager Skill rebalanced from 0/3/5/6 to 3/4/5/6
Senior/Youth Scouting Manager Skills rebalanced from 10/15/20/25 to 16/19/22/25
Negotiation Manager Skill rebalanced. Significantly increased (50% increase) chance of receiving a bid without the Manager Skill. Then a 10% increase per level (at Level 3 it's exactly the same chance to receive transfer bids as what it was previously at Level 3)
Balancing changes to average fixture difficulty (increased fixture difficulty in lower divisions)
Improved new user Tutorial (now each tutorial step has a bespoke task related to the previous unlocked functionality that needs to be completed to move onto the next step)
Added Staff Images to top bar and to tutorial text speech bubbles
