Hattrick - scores where others miss! (hattrick.org)

Member Name: alexbr

Product:	hattrick.org
Date:	21/07/03 (848 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Free to play, Right level of detail, Good community aspect to game

Disadvantages: Loading times can be slow, Site is often down

I have played several online football management games but, in my opinion, Hattrick stands out overall and is certainly the best of the free ones. I have only been playing for about three months (the equivalent of one season in Hattrick-time), but am already hooked.

Hattrick has a pyramid structure with one Premier division followed by four Division Twos, sixteen Division Threes etc. Each division has eight teams and at the end of each season, the bottom two teams are automatically relegated. The best teams that finish first are automatically promoted, whilst the other champions must win a qualifier against either fifth- or sixth-placed teams from the division above if they are to gain promotion. Each season lasts fourteen weeks with a fortnight in between seasons. This is because you play each of the other seven teams in your division once at home and once away. League games occur once a week and there is also the opportunity to play in the Cup or, if you have been knocked out, arrange a friendly once a week in addition to the league match.

Hattrick is a worldwide game with a league in most countries. The size of each league and hence the number of divisions varies between countries. To begin with, you must sign up. Then you will be allocated a team after about 2-3 weeks. This delay is due to the fact that a manager of another team must resign or be sacked (if his club is in too much debt or he does not log in for six weeks) before you can take over the team - the team will be reset before you take over though so the team will have 200,000 pounds (or the equivalent in other currencies) and a randomly generated new set of players when you take over.

You will probably be allocated a team in one of the bottom two divisions in your country and will have to work your way up. You can pick a team name, rename your stadium and select your team from your initial squad. Each player is rated in eight areas: stamina, goaltending, playmaking, passing,
winger, defending, scoring and set pieces. Ratings range from 'disastrous' to 'divine' and most of your players will initially be rated inadequate or passable in the area relevant to their position with three or four players rated as solid. Only those rated areas important to a players position are relevant, e.g. for a defender the key rating is the one for defending, although a decent rating for passing and stamina would be helpful, but the goaltending and scoring ratings for this player will be almost completely irrelevant.

From humble beginnings, the object of the game is obviously to improve your team and win matches. There are three main ways of improving your team:

1) Buy or sell players on the transfer market - Players are listed by other teams with a starting price on the transfer markets and these are like auctions with the highest bidder after three days getting the player. New teams will need to buy several players at the start to boost their team, but good players are very expensive. Many teams don't have enough cash to buy though so there are two other ways to get better players...

2) Training - Players can be trained in various areas to improve their ratings. Only one area can be trained each week and an 17-year old player trained by a solid coach would be expected take eight weeks to move from one level to the next up in the relevant skill. Older players trained by worse coaches take longer.

3) Promote players from the youth squad - Teams can pull one player (either a keeper or outfield player) a week from their youth squad. Investment in the youth squad can be small, medium or large (the recommended level in the long run) each week and, whilst any team can pull good youth players, the chances of doing so increase as the youth squad improves through large investments in it. There is no guarantee that even the best youth squads will regularly turn out good players though.

There are a var
iety of formations, the standard one being 4-4-2, but a team will need to play other formations a couple of times before they become used to them. Matches are viewed through a text format with text commentary appearing when an important event in a match happens (there are typically 4-6 such events per half during matches) and at the end of the match, each player is given a rating in terms of number of stars so you can tell how each player has performed. The game is constantly evolving and there are usually a few changes each season to the importance of various factors within the game to improve the game overall.

It is free to play the game, but you can also pay a small amount (just over a pound a month) to get Hattrick Supporter. Unlike most online games, spending money on this will not increase your chances of success - you have as much chance of your team doing well if you pay nothing as if you pay for Supporter. However, your experience of the game will be much better if you do buy Supporter and most people who have played the game for a while get it. You can have a logo for your team, release Press Statements, give numbers to your squad and join Federations (i.e. forums) related to specific topics amongst other things.

I certainly feel these Federations help as they give a community aspect to the game so that you can interact with other players. You can send messages to any other players and, even if you don't buy Hattrick Supporter, you can still join Conferences, which are like Federations, but there are a more limited number and range of them.

The success of Hattrick is shown by the fact that there are several freeware/shareware programmes linked to it. The best of these is HAM (Hattrick Assistant Manager), which basically gives you a rundown over all the essential stats relating to your team and records them on a weekly basis and this software only costs just over a fiver and can be used for as long as you are playing the game.
Other free software includes Hattrick Poli, like HAM but not as advanced, and Criollo Viewer, which updates the text match commentary without you having to reload the webpage.

However, the game is quite difficult as nearly every division is made up entirely of human-controlled teams and it takes time to build up your team to win promotion so you will need to be patient. The chances of reaching the very top are slim with only one top division of eight teams in each country, but you can still have fun trying to get there!

If anyone reads this and plays Hattrick, please feel free to challenge me to a friendly. My team is 'Al's Army' (Team ID: 56547). At the moment I'm in division V.13 in England (which has six levels of division in total) so there's plenty of work to be done on improving my team!

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