NT? No Thanks

Have you ever felt that the entire National Team setup in HT simply makes no sense? Here - for the first time ever - is the explanation in all its glory.

Or something like that...

Six and a half years ago (or 21 HT seasons, if you like…) I wrote a short HT Press article entitled ”A Week in the Life of an NT Manager” (3789), the aim of which was to poke a bit of lighthearted fun at NT managers (myself included) and some of the more obscure aspects of how the National Team mechanics work in HT.

I re-read it recently, and whilst a couple of aspects are now somewhat outdated, I was mainly struck by just how little has actually changed in all that time.

Farms are still pretty much a requirement for success, you are doomed if you don’t happen to live in a European time zone, you have to turn into a highly socially awkward beast with pretend-weak bladder control every Friday to try to “win” a bizarre coach-changing dance ritual, NT managers still have to employ huge armies of minions just to be able to see the skills- and training of a player, and when finally learned then behave like those skills are top secret rather than just clones of what everybody else has too.

- Oh, and Google Translate is still Sith.

Granted, the pace of development for the game as it applies to club teams has not exactly been at ludicrous speed either, but with the possible exception of HM, there is no other aspect of the game which has been ignored by the developers to quite the same extent as the NT scene.

So it struck me: Do the developers actually even know it exists? - and if they do, are they actually capable of navigating their way through the “beware of the leopard” click-maze required for a casual user to even find the NT stuff? Once I went down that route, the answer became self-apparent:

The developers clearly think “NT” actually means “No Thanks”

This would explain why they never, ever under any circumstances venture anywhere near the NT forum. They clearly assume that it means the “No Thanks” forum and is populated almost exclusively by people moaning about stuff (OK, so they got lucky on that one..), but this does also explain why none of the many no-brainer suggestions made and remade umpteen times in the No Thanks forum for how to fix most if not all the NT idiocies have never been acted on.

Many of these same NT managers – past and present – are also typically quite vocal on the Global forum to try to reduce the damage caused by less than fortunate changes contemplated or done elsewhere in the game. The developers are undoubtedly aware that they employ a couple of hard-working people called NT Administrators, whose job they presume to be to flag the most annoying forum users, so they can ignore those posts too. I’m sure they all secretly use Foxtrick since the site is all but unusable without it, and are eternally grateful for the little “No Thanks” warning flags provided by that plug-in.

This naturally just decreases the odds of the continued pleas of the NT managers for the NT stuff to be given just a bit of attention from slim to non-existing.

- But then I had my second Eureka moment: Don’t we have a new pseudo-HT who is also at the same time frantically scrambling to keep Hattrick Press on life support? Surely if a plea to do just a tiny bit of long overdue work on the NT stuff were done in the sneaky guise of a HP article submission he’d either have to draw it to the attention of the developers or disappear in a puff of logic?

Let’s find out, shall we…?

Link izravno na ovaj članak (HT-ML, za forum): [ArticleID=19283]