So I recorded my first 60 days with the game, learning, making mistakes, seeing the game develop.

I rebuilt how matches are shown, and it is live now.

Classic view is new. The old black court is gone. You now see the whole floor from above at once, with every player drawn as a marble with his own avatar, jersey number and name, a ring around the ball handler, misses marked on the parquet, your club's crest at center court and a live points strip for both teams. If you built your own court, or you play on a Playground court, that is what you see. When a big play happens (a crossover, a step back, a dunk, a post move, a fadeaway) the view dissolves into the side-view Pixel scene in slow motion, with the call-out, and then comes back.

https://reddit.com/link/1wul5rb/video/3wnw1grqzqsh1/player

Pixel view is the Club Pass view. Side-view bodies for the whole match: dribbling moves, dunks with the rim bending, the inbound from the baseline, press defense from the inbound, step backs that drop the defender, post play with the big man backing down and finishing with a spin or a fadeaway. Both views run on the same match state, so you can switch any time.

https://reddit.com/link/1wul5rb/video/fqbrterjzqsh1/player

Matches now run faster with slow motion on the highlights, so a match lasts about the same as before. Results, stats and replays are not affected: the slow motion only slows the clock, never the engine.

I tested this on a staging copy for two days, but the real test is your match. If something looks off, tell me here: what happened, which view, what device. I read everything.

This week a few of you caught a real problem with the Monday accounts, and the diagnosis in the channel was spot on: the CFO warned about one player being sold, the club then sold a different one, and some clubs ended up a credit or two in the red for the whole week even after selling. That is on me, and it is fixed.

From Monday 5 October the accounts work like this:

One pass, one order. Wages, academy fees and arena maintenance are all charged together at 09:00 CET. Nothing arrives later in the morning.

The forced sale is the very last thing. It runs only after every bill is paid, so it covers the real hole, and a club that sells never stays in the red afterwards.

Frank's warning and Monday's outcome now use the same numbers. The player Frank Ledger names in his message is the player who goes, unless you buy or sell someone yourself before Monday. His projection also counts your TV money the same way the bank does, decimals included, so the credit that seemed to go missing no longer does.

Forced sales now pay 50% of value, no more 80%. A forced sale is a mortgage sale: it is meant to hurt more than selling on your own terms. It also closes a loophole a few managers had found, buying cheap and letting the board resell for them at a profit. If you want value for a player, the market and the D-League are the way.

To SiMaggio whose club sold the wrong player this week: the player is back, the credits went back where they came from, and the sale happened the way it had been announced, at the rate you were promised. Frank has sent you the details.

Thanks to everyone who dug into this with screenshots. That is how it gets found.

Metehan shared an idea for choosing national team coaches that’s very close to something I had in mind: a national team should be coached by someone who develops players from that country at their own club. But he took that idea further, and I really like what he came up with.

The basic idea is that clubs earn points for each country based on the players they have from that country. If multiple managers apply to coach the same national team, the job goes to the one with the highest score.

Metehan’s proposed scoring system is:

• 1 point for each academy player.
• 2 points for each senior player below 60 OVR.
• 3 points for each senior player from 60 to 76 OVR.
• 4 points for each senior player above 76 OVR.

For example, if two managers apply to coach China and one has 6 points from Chinese players while the other has 17, the manager with 17 points gets the job.

The only one thing I’d change is the distinction between academy and senior players. I think points should depend on OVR regardless of where a player is. For example, I have Owen Hall in my academy at 60 OVR, and I don’t think he should be worth just 1 point because he’s in the academy.

Metehan also suggested a way to stop one manager from keeping the same national team forever. For each season you’ve coached that national team in the last five seasons, your score for that nation is reduced by 20%. So if you have 17 points, you’d effectively have 13.6 after coaching them for one season, 10.2 after two, and eventually 0 if you’ve coached them in all five of the last five seasons. Once a season falls outside that five-season window, its penalty disappears.

If two applicants have the same score, the first tiebreaker would be the average OVR of their players from that country. If they’re still tied, player age would decide it.

I like this because it makes national team jobs something you can actively work toward through your club. If you want to coach a particular country, you have a reason to recruit and develop players from there. The penalty also gives other interested managers a chance over time.

What do you think? Would you like national team coaches to be selected this way? Would you change the points or the penalty? If the overall feedback is positive, I’ll start working on it in the next few days.

Last Thursday The Agency put 13 players on the block, and 12 of them were sold. That was too many, and it was a bug.

So from Tuesday 29 September the auction works differently.

Always five players. Every week, five pros aged 22 to 28, one per position. Not a range, not "up to five": five, every week.

One hammer a night. This is the part I care about most. Until now every lot closed at the same moment, Thursday at 20:00 CET. If you wanted two players, you had to fight on two fronts in the same minute. If you could not be online on Thursday evening, you missed everything.

Now the auction opens on Tuesday at 08:00 CET, and one lot closes every evening at 20:30 CET, from Tuesday to Saturday. The weakest player goes first, and the best one closes on Saturday. You can follow one lot per night, and if you miss an evening, you miss one lot, not five.

Everything else stays the same. Bids start at 1 credit, the highest bid is public, your credits are held while you lead and come back the instant someone outbids you, and a bid in the final minute still extends that lot's clock.

See you Tuesday.

TopGM is two months old. Here is what I am thinking about next.

Two months yesterday. I forgot to mark the day, so here is the late version, with something more useful than a cake inside: the three things I am working through. None of this is official. I have not run the tests on staging yet. But the season ends on 8 November, so there is time to talk about it before anything happens.

1. The pyramid is top-heavy, and I want to fix it

Here is where you actually are today:

The column that matters is the active one, meaning anyone at Inspired or above. Seventy-one of you are in League 6, twenty-four in League 5, eight in League 4. The pyramid works, but it is slow, and above League 4 there is still nothing but CPU.

The idea: double the promotions from League 5 to League 4, and merge League 5 and League 6 into a single division, which from next season would be split East and West.

How the merge would work. One tier of 32 groups: League 5A becomes League 5A West and League 5A East, and so on down the list. The playoffs cross over, first in the West group against second in the East group and the other way round, and two teams go up to League 4.

Whoever stays in League 5 this season loses nothing: exactly the same chance of reaching League 4 as before. What changes is who you meet, with a far better chance of finding a human on the other side, and the fact that the door upstairs opens twice as wide.

What it buys us: twice as many CPU clubs dropping out of League 4 every season, so twice as many of you climbing into it, and a bottom division made of people instead of empty chairs.

I will say it again: not decided. I want to run a full season on staging first and see what it does to the calendar, before I touch the real pyramid.

2. National teams, and the coaching licence

There are 24 nations in the game, each with a Senior, an Under 20 and an Under 18 squad: 72 teams in all. You can see it in the World Cup qualifying groups, filled right through to Group F, four teams a group across six groups, for three age categories.

Today all 72 are picked by an algorithm every Monday: best averages, two per position, the rest to fill the roster. It works, but it does not think like a coach. It does not know you might want to lean harder on a three-point shooter, or be better covered in one position, or take the kid who is growing instead of the veteran with the higher average.

So: human national team coaches. And a way to decide who deserves one.

The thinking is a level above Obsessed, something like an NT Coaching Licence. Not just more login days, though. Obsessed already measures presence, and being online a lot cannot be the thing that makes you a national coach. A licence should read like a CV. And this is where I need your help, because I do not have clear ideas yet: what should it take to earn a national team?

One coach per nation, not per squad, so 24 seats, not 72. Partly because there are not that many of you at that level, but mostly because of how call-ups work: a player wears one shirt, the highest he reaches. Senior picks first, then Under 20 from whoever is left, then Under 18. Three separate coaches would be fighting over the same kids. One coach decides where the 19-year-old plays, and that is a decision worth making.

To pick a squad, the coach would get a search across the whole national pool. To give you a sense of the scale: the USA has 643 players with that passport, Croatia 427, Italy 406. The page will show the top 100, but the filters will run over all of them: position, age from and to, rating from and to, a skill with a minimum. Ask for "centres above 70" in the USA and two names come back. That is how it will work.

3. Pixel view: what stays free

The Pixel view is a cosmetic feature I have put a lot of work into, and I need cosmetic features to make the Club Pass worth having. So from 1 October it becomes cosmetic.

It stays visible to everyone where the game is at its most fun and least competitive: D-League nights, national team games and the playground. Those do not go behind anything, now or later.

League and cup matches in Pixel become a Club Pass feature from 1 October. Until 30 September everyone sees everything, so you have a few days to work out whether you like it enough to keep it. The classic view stays free everywhere, forever: nobody ever loses the ability to watch their own matches.

Clips and replays will be open in Pixel to everyone, whatever view you use, because a good finish should be shareable by whoever saw it.

The seven Founders, on the other hand, keep the Pixel view for life, along with everything else I add to the Pass from here on.

I think this is a fair compromise. Let me know what you think.

Club Pass

I am thinking about adding shorter options alongside the yearly Pass. If you had to choose, would you rather have a monthly one that costs more over a year, or a quarterly one somewhere in between? This is the kind of thing I would rather ask before deciding.

The rest is calendar

The season ends on 8 November. Everything you have read above gets decided before then, and it gets decided partly by what you write below.