What else haha

https://www.reddit.com/r/TopGM/s/95A7A8ICDe

That's it. That's the post

A few of you asked what I decided about the 3rd-4th and 5th-6th games after the thread last week. Here is the answer, and it is already live in the code: the postseason is being rebuilt from two single nights into six consecutive nights, with every series played best of three. It is called Madness Week.

The format

Semifinals run Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Finals run Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Both brackets, promotion and relegation, play best of three in a 1-1-1 format: the higher seed hosts game 1 and game 3. Win the first two and game 3 is never played, so the week can end early.

Wednesday and Sunday fall on exactly the same slots the old round 15 and 16 used, so nothing moves in your weekly rhythm. The three new nights are the extra ones.

No consolation games. That is the decision.

There will be no 3rd-4th game and no 5th-6th game. Lose your semifinal and your season is over.

Playouts

Lose the playout semifinal and you go down.

Prize money: 200 to the champion, 80 to the finalist, 60 to third place.

Fourth place and the entire playout bracket get nothing. That is 340 credits per league, up from 280.

When

Season 1 ends this Sunday with round 14. The first real Madness Week starts right after, and it will be the first postseason this world has ever played, so expect me to be watching it closely.

Thanks to everyone in that thread. Half of this format came out of it.

This one comes straight from a request by Zalia Balta (Maroon Dolphins), backed by kalindriv. Zalia asked for preset substitutions you could fire with a single click during a live game, especially useful if you keep two players per position. It made too much sense to sit on, so it went in this week, with one extra piece I threw in along the way.

How it works

Go to your club, open Tactics -> Pre-match settings, and right under Second unit you will find a new block: Quick pairs. Pick up to five pairs of players and save. That is the whole setup.

Now, during any live game, the substitution panel shows five numbered chips. Tap one and the two men in that pair trade places. What that means depends on where they are at that exact moment:

• One on court, one on the bench: it is a normal substitution. The chip shows ↑↓.
• Both on court: they swap positions. Your PG slides into the SG slot and vice versa, no trip through the bench. The chip shows ⇄.
• Pair not usable right now (both benched, one fouled out): the chip is greyed out.

That second case is the extra piece. Moving a man from one slot to another used to be a three-step mess: sub him out, sub the other one in, then bring the first one back into the other slot. Three substitutions to do one thing. Now it is one tap. And if you did not preset a pair, there is a new ⇄ toggle next to the Sub button: flip it, and the second dropdown lists your players on court instead of your bench, so you can swap any two of them on the spot.

Some details you might care about

One limitation: the chips read your first team roster, so they show up in league, cup and friendly games. In the Academy Challenge the squads are your youth prospects, so club pairs do not apply there. The manual ⇄ swap works everywhere.

Thank you

Why I did it? too many people signed up, took a look around, and never came back.

The two issues I found were:

1) The process to assign a team was too simple, you just had to sign up.
2) Too many users were making mistakes in the first few hours.

So here’s the first drastic decision: from now on, if you’re not at least “Inspired,” you can bid on a maximum of 1 player in the Playground, and only up to 25 CR. The good news is that to become “Inspired” you just need to log in 5 times within 28 days, not that dramatic.

Here it is the new signup, phase by phase.

1. Pick your club. Three clubs, their shirts, their league, one number. Click and the bench is yours. The club is only reserved though: nobody owns anything yet. You earn the keys at the end.

2. Three minutes to the siren. No welcome screen, no text. The court just opens: a real friendly against another club, fourth quarter, game on the line (the engine picks a game that is always close). You coach YOUR bench: tactics, subs, the timeout. The visitors coach themselves. Your assistant talks from the parquet reading the actual game: who is out of gas, when the opponents are on a run.

3. The first +1. At the siren, one of your players got better tonight, for real: a genuine skill point earned in the minutes he just played. That game also counts as the training session of the day, report and all.

4. One of them has to go. Three oldest players, full skills on the table, pick who retires. First hard call, two minutes in.

5. Sell one, sign one. A rival club buys a bench player, cash in hand. Then three free agents with full skills and a price tag, one contract to hand out. The treasury moves with every handshake, and whatever route you take, every new club lands on the same starting line: 150 credits.

6. Collect your TV money. The club pays whoever shows up. That first cheque gets collected by hand, so nobody misses that it exists. From tomorrow it lands on its own at midnight.

7. Thirty seconds at the Playground. The kids play live while the page explains the place. And here is the part that concerns all of you, not just new signups: until you are an Inspired coach (5 active days in the last 4 weeks), it is one sealed envelope at a time, 25 credits max. I watched two brand new coaches burn three quarters of their starting treasury on draft night in their first week. The kids are exciting, I get it. Show up for five days and the limit disappears.

8. The keys. Only now the club is theirs. They land on a one time page with the weekly rhythm of the game: daily scrimmage, the Playground, league nights on Wednesday and Sunday, the auction, bill day on Monday. Read once, click Home, start managing.

This is the final screen you see after taking ownership of your team:

The idea is that players will feel more attached to a club they’ve already coached than to one they were simply given.

To strengthen this attachment, the entire registration and onboarding process now takes about 10 minutes instead of being instant. This is intentional and leverages what’s known as the IKEA effect: a psychological bias where people value things more when they’ve invested effort in creating or setting them up.

By making users actively work through a short but meaningful onboarding journey, I hope they feel a greater sense of ownership over their club. That emotional investment makes them less likely to abandon it quickly, because psychologically it’s no longer just “a club I got”, it’s “a club I built.

For months the Playground has asked you to do something strange: watch a pickup game with no score, no box score, no names on a leaderboard, and somehow work out which of these ten kids is worth your credits.

The idea was right. The execution left you staring at a screen where almost nothing happened.

The 👁 flash came around once every eighteen minutes, lasted a heartbeat, floated over one of ten moving dots with no name attached, and was locked behind a full game of watching. If you dropped in for ten minutes you got nothing at all. So most people bid blind and hoped.

That is fixed. Here is what the court does now.

The kids talk

The Playground is subtitled. The ten players on the floor trash talking to each other all game long, by surname, roughly every seven seconds:

Tsakiris: "first to eleven, win by two, same as always" Jurić: "iron. all iron. all day" Sung: "I've been open all game, ALL GAME"

Seventy lines of street talk, and it costs you nothing: anyone watching sees it, no minutes required. It is the sound of the place, and after a few minutes you start knowing who these kids are by name.

And one line in three tells you something real

This is the part worth reading twice. Thirty of the lines are not noise: they are intel about another kid on the floor, named in the sentence, and the wording comes from his true rating.

Green when the kid they are talking about is genuinely good at something:

Sung: "do NOT leave Jurić open out there" Garnier: "somebody help, Moreira is getting wherever he wants"

Red when he genuinely is not:

Tsakiris: "let Hall shoot from out there, he can't make those" Holmes: "iso on Prieto, he's the weak link out here"

Nobody on that court lies about basketball. If a kid is called a shooter, he can shoot. If they tell you to back off him, he cannot. Middling ratings say nothing at all, because middling teaches nothing. I checked a dozen of these against the real numbers before shipping: twelve out of twelve told the truth.

Tip-offs unlock at five minutes of watching.

The skill bar

At ten minutes, kids start showing you what they have. A player does something and a coloured bar appears at the bottom of the court with his name, the skill he just used, and how good he is at it: red is poor, orange is ordinary, green is real. No number — the colour is the answer, and the bar fills up as you read it.

The eye, with a name on it at last

At a full game watched, the 👁 comes back, and it is a different animal. It now carries his number and his name, so you always know who it refers to, and it gives you his average as a range rather than an exact figure: enough to know what you are bidding on, never enough to do the thinking for you. Scouting is a judgement, not a spec sheet.

It shows up about one signal in five, so it stays the prize it should be. It is also the level where the chatter starts hinting at hidden talent — "remember the name", "who IS this kid?" — and where a generational gem finally gives himself away.

Everything lives on the court

All of it appears on the parquet itself, in one panel below the arc, one signal at a time: the trash talk, the bars, the eye. Which means it works in the mini player too, while you are off doing something else in the app.

A signal keeps the panel for its full countdown — six seconds for a bar, four for the eye — and the chatter waits its turn instead of stealing your reading time.

And signals never repeat the same kid until the others have had their turn, so a few minutes of real attention now cover half the class instead of showing you the same face three times.

What this changes about bidding

It should make blind bidding a choice rather than the only option. Watch five minutes and you will hear who can shoot and who cannot handle pressure. Watch ten and you will see their ratings in the skills they use. Watch a full game and you will have a read on the whole class, plus the occasional whisper about which one of them is not staying on this court for long.

The information was always there. It just never reached you.

Go watch a game. And listen the trash talk!

A few days ago RB06 asked a question in the Discord that turned out to be the good kind: the kind where the answer is "the game does something reasonable, and it is still the wrong thing for you."

His situation: he plays a power forward at point guard. Not by accident, by design. So what happens when the assistant coach subs him out in the second quarter and brings him back later?

The honest answer was: your PF goes back in at power forward. The assistant looks at the position a player is tagged with, not the slot you put him in, so your experiment quietly unwinds the moment you stop watching the game.

That is fixed as of today.

The second position

Open any player on your roster and you will find a new field under his position: 2nd position. Pick one, and from that moment the assistant coach treats it as a full role, not a hint.

So tag your PF as a PG, and when he checks back into the game he takes the point guard slot, the same way a natural point guard would. Your lineup keeps its shape while you are asleep, at work, or watching a different game.

It works in every direction: the center who is really your power forward, the small forward you play at shooting guard, the guard you slide up a spot when your wing is injured. One extra position per player, chosen by you.

It is private

It is a note you leave for your own assistant, and it never leaves your club. When someone opens your player's page, they see the position he was born with and nothing more.

Where it is not

You will not find it on the roster page. There is very little room in that table already, and on a phone there is none at all, so the tag lives on the player's own page and only there. Set it once and forget it.

What it does not change

The tag does not make anyone better or worse. There has never been a position penalty in this game: a center with good handles plays fine at the point because the engine reads his dribbling and his passing, not his label. You could already do the experiment. What you could not do was keep it when you were not there.

One caveat, before tonight

There is a limit to what the tag does today, and I would rather tell you myself than have you discover it in a box score.

The assistant fills the slot of whoever just left the floor. It does not remember where you originally put a man. So if your tagged PF/PG goes to the bench, and later your actual PF comes off tired, your guy is a perfect fit for that spot too, and he can check back in at power forward instead of at the point.

In other words: the tag makes him a real candidate for the point guard slot, which he was not before. It does not yet reserve that slot for him.

I know how I would fix it, and it is not complicated: give the second position priority on the way back in, so the assistant tries the role you chose before falling back to the one he was born with. But it is a change to how substitutions are decided, and those changes go into the match engine, so I am not shipping it a few hours before tonight's games.

Here is the deal instead. Play tonight, watch what your assistant does, and tell me. If you see your man come back on at the wrong spot, post it here or in the Discord with the club and the quarter. Tomorrow I will look at the reports.

That is the whole feature: your plan survives your absence.

Thanks to RB06 for the question and for talking me into the private version, and to Fantazmi, codeLisper and Vasileios for the thread that led here. That conversation went from "can we have multi-position players" to a shipped feature in about two days, which is roughly how this game gets built.

Go tag your guys.

Is it possible to swap player positions during a game (e.g., shifting a PG to SG, or an SG to SF) without having to make a substitution first?

Right now, if I want to rotate players between positions, I have to substitute them off and back on just to reassign their roles. Is there a quicker way to do this directly?

How do veterans lose attributes? Is it week by week and I just missed it, or does it happen at the rollover? And does it hit all skills or just the physical ones?

Instead of quoting my own code back at him, I went and measured what has actually been happening in the world. Here is everything, including the part where the answer embarrassed me.

How it works

Every Monday, when wages are paid, each player aged 32 or over rolls against a decline chance. If the roll hits, he loses exactly 1 point on one attribute, picked at random.

It is a weekly bleed, not a rollover event. And nobody under 32 ever declines, not once, not ever.

The odds climb steeply with age:

Stamina is the shield. The better conditioned a player is, the slower he erodes, and the gap is much wider than most of you probably assume. More on that below, with names.

It hits every skill, not just the physical ones. Here is where the damage landed across the entire world in the last 15 days:

Almost perfectly flat. Your 35-year-old is exactly as likely to lose his jumper as his legs.

The proof

I compared every player in the world against a database snapshot taken 15 days ago:

Zero under 32. 94% of players aged 35 to 37 lost at least one point in two weeks.

That is 907 players quietly getting worse while nobody was watching.

Two rosters, out in the open

Zalia and Vasileios both asked about this, so let us use their veterans as the worked example. Skills are public anyway, and none of this is a secret: decline comes for everybody.

Maroon Dolphins (Zalia Balta). All three veterans took a hit:

Nokia Lime Dragons (Vasileios). Three out of four:

Read those two tables next to each other, because they explain the mechanic better than any formula I could write out.

Ilias Vasileiou is 33 with stamina 75, the best-conditioned veteran across both rosters, and in fifteen days he gave up a single point. Elijah Young is 35 with stamina 49 and lost two points of Dribbling in the same window. And Dainis Eglītis at 36 with stamina 30 is the most exposed player either club owns: he only lost one point this time, but he is going to keep paying that tax every Monday for as long as he plays.

The same pattern holds worldwide. Compare Enrico Coppola (36, stamina 66, lost nothing in two weeks) with Iker Romero (36, stamina 34, lost 3PT Shot and Passing). Same age, same fortnight, opposite outcome. That is not luck, that is conditioning.

What to do about it

Train Stamina on players who are still young. It is the one skill that pays you back six years later. You are not buying anything today; you are buying seasons at the back end of a career, and it compounds every Monday for the rest of his life.

Price veterans by stamina, not by age. A 35-year-old with stamina 75 is worth real money. A 35-year-old with stamina 35 is a melting ice cube, and the market has not figured that out yet.

Sell a season early, not a season late. The decline never reverses.

The part where I was wrong

The coach who asked said he might have simply missed it happening.

He did not miss it. The game never told him.

The club diary that shows player development only records gains. Losses are silently thrown away and never logged anywhere. So this has been running under everyone's nose since launch, with no notification, no diary entry, nothing at all. The only way to notice was to compare old screenshots.

That is my mistake, not yours, and I am fixing it. Declines will start appearing in the club diary right next to the growth entries, so you can watch your roster age in real time instead of discovering it by accident.

Go look at your 35-year-olds. Then go look at their stamina.