Q4 and Development
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Hi Everyone,
The team has a lot on the GO (ha!), and I thought it might be nice to share what we’re working on in Q4. If you have any questions, please let me know and I’ll do my best to answer them. As you read, please keep in mind that with forward-looking posts like this, anything can happen. It will be interesting to see what actually gets done in Q4, and what distracts us.
Most of our effort in October is focused on Custom Teams. Custom Teams, as one community member put it, is an open draft-like functionality for APBA GO. But, I don’t like using the word draft, as down the road ‘draft’ will take on a very specific meaning in GO, and I don’t want to cause confusion.
Essentially, Custom Teams will allow you to make new teams, and assign players to the roster from any team in the catalog you have access to. Subscribers will be able to put any player from the APBA catalog on a team together. Imagine the mayhem! Players from different eras, from teams spread over 100 years of baseball, coming together to face similarly constructed opposing teams in head to head battles for the title of ‘best team ever’, (or worst team ever?). It should be a lot of fun.
From a product perspective, Custom Teams and Subscriptions go hand in hand, but for those not interested in subscribing, Custom Teams will be part of a new paid unlock that will one day include league play-related functionality (like a proper multi-manager Draft, league formation, scheduling, etc.).
Other fun facts about Custom Teams:
- Custom Teams will have a minimum 25 man roster, and a maximum of 30
- They can be flagged on and off for multiplayer games - if you want to play historic teams only, you can make your intentions known in challenges.
- Custom Teams can be curated between games to enable roster management - switch a player out due to injury, offline trades, etc.
- Lineups will not be set through the Custom Teams, but by saving a lineup during game start up using the Custom Lineups functionality you’re already using today.
- They will be the foundation technology used for League Play (when we get there), so feedback for Custom Teams will benefit a lot of APBA GO tech (and your game play experience) down the road.
But what else are we working on?
Tournaments v2.0 is in the works. I’ve been carefully cataloging your feedback and there is an evolving plan for what’s next. We’ve had a lot of bugs to work out with the initial roll out, and with today’s release there are only a few known bugs remaining (in case you’re wondering: reactivating user online status for game availability, and handling last game in tournament forfeiture resets are the biggies). I cannot stress enough how invaluable your feedback has been during a technically challenging rollout!
What’s going in Tournaments v2.0 so far?
- Improved communication - Similar to shared Tournament Collections, we’ll be implementing a shared Forum group chat for Tournament participants. Linked from the Tournament Collection, it will allow participants to chat in real time, leave messages and see older messages in case they are behind on current events. This should make it easier for Hosts to manage their tournaments and keep the conversation in one place.
- Different tournament types. Round robin is fun, but so are single and double elimination tournaments. We hope to add at least single elimination tournaments for v2.0
- Credits for wins - We hope to offer a nominal amount of store credits to the winner and runners up for tournaments, the amount of which will be based on the number of active tournament participants (with a minimum number of participants in play).
- Add alternative win criteria - loosely inspired by Home Run derbies, we hope to add the option of ranking participants by total home runs.
I’m not guaranteeing all of this will make it but that is the general direction I want to go at this time.
Furthermore, while it might not make a 2018 release, we are going to dedicate time in December to address the rules-based issues you have been reporting. By this I mean bugs related to the APBA rules not being correctly followed in certain circumstances. The detailed support tickets I’ve received will go a long way to making the process of replicating and fixing problems easier, and for that we are very grateful.
Finally, I would really, really like to completely rework the substitution system as it has been a running thorn in our collective sides, but we might not have time to make it into Q4 and might be relegated to the New Year.
This is going to be a busy quarter for us and I’m excited that you’re all here to enjoy it with me. All of the above work is in addition to addressing the bugs that arise as we go. Good times! I will also be running the annual customer feedback survey early in November, and there will be the release of the 2018 season, which should be a great time for all.
Thanks for reading this book! I hope to do these more often in 2019 as we forge ahead.
Forever grateful you’re on this journey with us,
Jeremy -
@apba-go-jeremy Awesome Jeremy! Thank you!
