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Dear Nordeus,
I have been a loyal player of Top Eleven for 3 full years now. I'll be unlocking that achievement this week in fact.
I would like to write this letter to give my feelings about the directions I see the game going, and offer some feedback and suggestions about the future.
I was inspired to write this letter after witnessing Microsoft torpedo one of their most well known pieces of software, Skype. Skype has always been known to me and the vast majority of its user base as a more "professional" program, and often used as a business tool. The main feature for Skype which nearly all users were attracted to were the ease of voice and video calling, and the relative simplicity to stay in contact with friends and family overseas, and business contacts. This was a nice little niche they had, as it was a different type of program and appealed to a different kind of audience than social networking aps such as Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, etc. which are more used by teenagers and other young people for fun.
Microsoft recently decided in order to compete with the huge success of social media networks, they needed Skype to become a social media network. They attempted to turn themselves into Snapchat, by adding childish layouts and flooding the screen with emoicons and making it all about sharing photos publicly among your friends. The result was a complete abomination that I would honestly be embarrassed to release if it were my company. It has numerous glaring issues, including, but not limited to...
You can't change your status. You can't see who from your contact list is online. The screen is cluttered and the buttons are tiny and very close together. Notification don't work at all, meaning unless you're actually actively talking to the person, you won't get any notification whatsoever that they called/messaged you. Call quality and reliability significantly dropped. The layout looks like it was designed for kids. In other words... This new software is just flat out broken.
Skype has completely lost sight of who they are and what they did well, and instead tried to become yet another social media network, and have fallen flat on their face.
Skype currently is averaging 1.5 stars on the apstore, which is actually an improvement, it was at 1 star for the first day after release, and is getting 90% 1 star grades with brutally honest feedback about how everything went wrong.
So how does this all relate to Nordeus?
Well Skype has responded saying that they are very pleased with the new Skype, and that they only added features that their users were asking for. I have also been following the Skype and SkypeSupport on Twitter, and they are very quick to reply to anyone who gives a positive feedback, but do not reply or address any of the concerns or complaints about the dozens of negative comments. Does this sound familiar?
I see Nordeus unfortunately making many of these same mistakes, and I will point them out.
Starting with the advent of Associations, those who were around back them may recall that it was one bug after another and nearly every week there was some kind of major software error.
The entire problems with Associations did not stop there, as the leader boards were quickly overrun with cheaters using the "loan trick" to acquire 9 star teams for free using a multi account trick. While this has since been closed, it took many months, and it allowed those teams to build so strong they had many more months of powerful teams for free. Currently you have many other suspected hackers and cheaters high on the list, who are able to sustain teams over 9 stars by "tanking" (losing all your league games on purpose so you never promote and lose a star).
These are bugs and loopholes that should have never been allowed to enter the system. I can understand the loan trick and tanking stuff, no one could reasonably predict that people would exploit the system that badly, but they shouldn't be allowed to continue that long, and still be happening today.
Now I will move onto the game play mechanics. People have been complaining of unrealistic stats and results from the beginning. I remember back in the day when there was a "double corner" glitch, which I successfully was able to explain on the forum as to why that glitch existed. It was fixed shortly after (I have no idea if it was just a coincidence), but there are still problems today. Shots and possession seem to rarely tell the story, and teams with no manager present have an uncanny ability to score on their only 1-2 chances the entire game, while the stronger active team will be lucky to score 1 or 2 with their 10 chances. Something feels off here. I understand teams have bad days, but the stat sheet needs to at least make sense. The strong team at home with 70% possession shouldn't have 10 shots with 2 on target while the weaker team with 30% possession has 15 shots with 3 on target.
Again, these are bugs and elements which should be address and improved upon.
Now I will address some of the features which were missing from the old version of Top Eleven, which never made its way into the new version. There is a reason that many people still used the old version and were sad to see it go.
Club History -- this is so important to long time players, and even new players will want a record of their accomplishments as they move up the ladder
Average Form -- This is very important in decided which players should be playing, but was taken away long ago.
Trophies -- The trophy room was another nice record of our accomplishments which was washed away.
Flags -- This was a neat little feature that was enjoyable. Why take it away?
Ability to see profiles/trophies/achievements of friends. Again, we could do this before, why not now?
Here are some minor annoyances which aren't so much features but things which could clearly be improved on.
Ability to see the profile of a team I want to negotiate players from: I'm Level 40, it's silly to try to get a player from a Level 40 or lower team.
When I have multiple friends playing at once, when I support one friend and hit back, I want to go back to the fixtures page, not the home page. This forces me to do lots of pointless clicking to support all my friends.
Ability to see live form on the home page during match. I have no idea why we still cant' do this.
Show what the injuries are. Why just days now? Details add substance to the game you know,
How about some new ideas?
Set a selling price for those on negotiations before offers come in. I'm sick of getting 0 token offers for 3 position 18yr olds with SAs.
Activate "dead" features, such as captain. Why not give the captain some kind of bonus and some criteria to how much? Height/Weight, do these matter? Foot? These should all matter but many question if they do.
Make money useful. High levels money is meaningless, give us something to buy!
There are many more things which can be done, but instead I'm going to move on to my final section because I've made my point. Nordeus has plenty of things they can do to continue to develop and improve upon the current product without having to change anything. These are all additions, and I would find it hard to believe that anyone would complain about a single one of the things I just listed.
So what did Nordeus do instead?
We got a new transfer market, which from my readings and research is met with generally negative reviews. Worse yet, it has many features which made the game great missing altogether! No longer do we sell our players to other managers, or buy players from other managers. This was a major feature of the game and losing it greatly hurts the overall experience.
To make matters worse, Nordeus even tried to cover up this fact until I collected enough evidence and posted about it here, and it was finally confirmed. On top of all that, on one occasion recently a Nordeus support team member flat out lied to me and told me that the players on the TM were from other managers. He backtracked of course after I called out his BS, but still, is this what we're coming to? I suspect those that like the new TM would quickly sour on it if they knew they are not buying from real managers, and only the system is buying their players, and no human ever sees them.
Nordeus claims that people love the new TM, but every message I see is complaints. I read the Facebook and the Twitter, and I can say that the majority of the reviews are negative. I will not rehash here why and what all is wrong with the new TM as if Norderus doesn't understand it by now, they never will. However an interesting thing I noticed on Facebook, is that any praise of the new TM was very quickly replied with thanks, while complaints were ignored. This certainly gives off the impression that user's opinions only matter if they are aligned with yours.
Now we have mini games, another feature which no one was asking for, while many of the other issues or missing features continues to go unaddressed.
So how can we tie what Nordeus is doing, with what Skype just did?
Both appear to have lost their way, and are in the process of taking a very neat product and attempting to change it into something it isn't. Skype does not need to try to be Snapchat any more than Top Eleven needs to try to be whatever it's been doing lately.
Top Eleven has a very special niche which clearly has served them well over the years. Sure the game wasn't perfect, but they were constantly ADDING features and improving on the existing game rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. The best example of this was the new training system. FINALLY the training is extensive and makes sense. Adding this was a huge addition and made the game even greater. If Skype wanted to add some of the Snapchat features to their program, they could have perhaps done that, but tearing down the whole software and replacing it with new stuff that no one asked for is why they are lucky to have 1.5 star ratings right now.
Nordeus, do not make this same mistake. Remember who you are and build on the very nice software which you have created and don't try to change into something you're not.
I write this letter not because I hate Nordeus or because I am angry at Top Eleven, in fact it's quite the opposite. I have loved this game from the start and still do play it every day. I have met many great people and had many great experiences because of this game and I care about the direction it's going. It scares me to see so many similarities between the paths of these 2 programs.
I hope that Nordeus can find some of this helpful as they continue into the future.
Sincerely,
Jay -- FC BridgeGoth
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Originally Posted by BridgeGoth
