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Holding the Ball Online Management Game Discussion

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Pusti

Pusti

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Jun 27, 2007
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Just a heads up to anyone looking to play an online Aussie Rules management game. There's a new game currently in development called Holding the Ball.

The developer is hoping to have it ready for beta testing in mid-2012 and fully ready in September 2012.

More info here: http://www.holdingtheball.com/

At last some relief on the horizon for all us long-suffering OTBers!
 
I've been playing Tony's other game - www.trackking.org since beta. It is the only online game I play. The amount of detail put in and the amount of user feedback that is listened to is amazing. Tony is regulary on the forums talking to any of the people who play his game.

Well worth the time to set up and play anything made by him
 
will give it a go when it comes out. back 7 or 8 years ago i was well into hattrick and later got into on the ball and battrick (even though i didn't like cricket), but truely over those sort of management games, but hopefully this will be enough to keep me interested.
 

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Tony Carbone (The developer) has been giving updates on facebook and it turns out the open Alpha testing will be starting at the end of this month/start of december.
Super excited about this, i think it can become a decent game.
 

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I wasn't too sure what is was about too but my experience has been really good.

I signed up and was given a team in div 3 league 15.

You have 30 players to start with and up to 42 in total and you can draft players and sack players.
You play a game over 4 nights - 1 quarter per night Sunday to Wed.
You can set tactics and field positions etc
You train players each sunday night.

I really like it because im so busy with work that I can never find time to sit down for a full game of ff etc but I can logon and in 10min set my team up and away I go.

You can also pay some money and set up team colors and other team stuff.

There is about 400 teams signed up.

:)
 
Kerleys Ghost said:
its just like hattrick, buzzerbeater, fromthepav, battrick etc. but for footy

virtual players are generated in a draft and teams make offers and assemble a squad.

tactics are designed, fatigue and injury come into play.

players have skills that are trained, also visible and invisible traits that can change over time or with training.

its a bit clunky at the moment, but will improve a lot. the guy doing it is really helpful, hes really relying on the users to report the bugs and their experiences to him so he can continue improve things.
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Been waiting for something like this for ages heh. Had pretty epic teams in FTP and Battrick at one stage but jeez it sure shows you aging. I remember trying to get to a computer to pull a player on the first day back when I was like 16 (2006). He actually went on to sell for 3.1mil. Ah....good times.

Of course well over it now but keeping the teams alive.

Think I'll join up here and see how we go.
 
Just joined up, but not really sure what I'm doing. Seems to be a lot of bot teams. How do you get to play other people? My team is called Black Range and I'm in Div 4, League 27.
 
Footypie32 said:
Just joined up, but not really sure what I'm doing. Seems to be a lot of bot teams. How do you get to play other people? My team is called Black Range and I'm in Div 4, League 27.
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From memory, the first thing I had to do was renegotiate all my players' contracts, most of them will be worth 100k-150k, 250k max for those starting players. Then just delist the ones you don't want. You need to go to the players' individual pages and there's a contract/stats tab with a delist button. I'm pretty sure this is also where I had to go to renegotiate contracts.

Go to your clubroom and use your weekly facility upgrades (you get 5 per week). I've been using all mine on the training facility for like 10 weeks, don't use them on the admin facility until you have finished delisting your shitty players (I've made a good 30 delistings -- many of the players that I foolishly drafted myself). When you delist a player rather than waiting for his contract to expire it takes a point off your admin facility, so just leave it at 0 for a while.

Set all your players' training either from their personal page under the skills tab, or from the squad page (scroll all the way to the right and click on the training column to set it to skillset A, B, or C)

Go to the draft and draft good young players with good traits, don't be hesitant because you can always delist them again while your admin facility is at 0. always go for an overall rating of at least 30, ideally 40 for young players. Kicking is easily the most important skill I think, probably followed by speed. Height and jumping are the most important things for rucks.

Read all the help pages on the site and the conversations and announcements on facebook

http://www.facebook.com/HoldingTheBall

https://www.holdingtheball.com/help.php

Really important info there, especially on player development, signings, tactics and the strange fixtures this game has.

Study your list and set your lineup, this is hard to get right, so expect some beltings while you fine tune everything, positioning everyone etc. Remember that the players also apparently have some invisible attributes too, and I have noticed certain recruits will be inexplicably good at certain roles/positions, and inexplicably poor at others, but I think traits is the main factor involved here. Much of tweaking your lineup really just seems to be experimentation.

Before each quarter of a game you can give a team talk, this is important. You cant give the talk before the 1st until you name your lineup, so in the tactics section be sure to name not only your default lineup, but also your lineup for that specific match. Then you can give the team talk on the matches page.

Challenge me/accept my challenge in the cups section if you want, I will probably smash you if you just joined, but ive got all youngsters and this game is still pretty buggy, so you never can tell. And your squads ok, but really old, I would delist all those over 30s straight away, even though they are your best players.

Yeah, lots of bots, but they are easy to beat, so you just need to build a good young squad and win promotion, lots of humans in my league, probably because I joined so early. The friendlies have just been introduced and there's going to be proper cup competitions soon, so that should keep you entertained while your battling it out with the bots.

1st quarter of the league match starts later this afternoon, so chop chop. The match engine is still pretty awful, really annoying and amusing mistakes, but I have seen it improve heaps in just a few weeks, so another 6 months and it should be pretty decent.

The guy running the thing is really helpful, and he is desperate to keep improving the site. Email him with any glitches or issues bugs@holdingtheball.com, he normally gets back to me in like a day.
 
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Kerleys Ghost said:
hey Golden G, I assume you run the Golden G Stars? We played a couple of friendlies I think, my team is The Magnificent Fighting Dogs.
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Hey Kerleys Ghost ! Cheers yes Golden G Stars is my team. Im really enjoying the game/website. The site has really improved the last 2 months and im really liking the friendlies. The game was begin to feel hollow without any interaction with other teams but now im meeting other people like yourself which has returned the enjoyment for me :).

Great write up about the game must admit ive done aliitle in the trading side but wanted to play with the current crop of players to get an idea of how the game engine plays. In a funny way the players that were crap at the start of the season are much better now with the website being updated !
 

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Golden G said:
Has anyone played around with training much ? Im struggling to tell how much the player is increasing with training. It would by good if after training it would say x players has +2 kicking -2 mark etc
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Was just going to ask this.

Does it show 'pops' when players increase or do we need to manually record every number and track for updates?
 
Armitage2Riewoldt said:
Was just going to ask this.

Does it show 'pops' when players increase or do we need to manually record every number and track for updates?
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Im not even sure if tyhe players have skill numbers. Ive only found the rating bar for each stat ie marking which has sections to it. You have so many players its pretty hard to track all of them. Numbers would make it easier for me to track for sure, you could write them down each week ect and follow that way.
 
Golden G said:
Do you mean when watching the game the field is small ? Or do you mean in general use of the website ?
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When I look at the squad the table requires scrolling left and right, I know it's not a big deal, I was just wondering if there was a setting I missed where I could make the working area larger. Bigfooty is just the same, there's a Collingwood player enjoying his Adelaide opponent right there >>
Three inches of grey over there <<<
 
Golden G said:
Im not even sure if tyhe players have skill numbers. Ive only found the rating bar for each stat ie marking which has sections to it. You have so many players its pretty hard to track all of them. Numbers would make it easier for me to track for sure, you could write them down each week ect and follow that way.
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you serious? all the skill numbers are on the squad page man, how have you missed that? you can also see fatigue, form, training (and you can change training by clicking it), age, height, weight, footedness, position last played...

I really can't imagine how anyone would run a team without it.

and you've beaten me in a friendly before... how?
 

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