In a recent review, a reviewer gave the game a thumbs up but also produced a bit of constructive criticism which I really took to heart - basically that player attributes don't feel correlated with the stats that are being generated.

This particular criticism had a particular impact for two reasons. First, the game does not produce statistics randomly. There has been a lot of time, testing, and benchmarking work to ensure player attributes matter, that better teams win more consistently, and that tactical choices have an impact on gameplay. Second, because this is such a difficult sport to simulate, and because positioning is so important in the match engine, it's quite possible players with lower overall attributes may consistently outperform players with higher attributes.

Many player suggestions are straightforward, but this wasn't really a suggestion - in a desire to make the game "feel" less random, the entire match engine got another look to see which parts could be improved. Overall, a number of calculations have been tweaked and improved to make sure better players are better more consistently. It does not mean the best player can't be worst on ground in a game, but you should see the players with higher attributes top statistical leaderboards with more consistently, and better teams should win a little more consistently than they did in the past. This doesn't mean uniformity, though, and there are some (relatively advanced) areas which can still use some improvement.

As part of this update, the 2025 lists have been re-worked to produce better statistics. There's also a couple simpler suggestions and bug fixes as well, such as adding natural skill to the player editor (once a player reaches their "natural" skill level, which is not guaranteed, they will start to improve much more slowly.)

As always there's still things that can be improved, and if you have any ideas please post in the forum or get in touch on the Discord. Until then, I hope you enjoy this update - a lot of work went into it!