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Hello friends,

The time of the launch of the beta version of soccer is almost upon us. Our testers will be given access to the game today or tomorrow. Their task will be to make sure everything is ready for the launch of beta. They will not have too much time because the tentative plan is to launch beta on April 7, 2010. This may of course change depending on the complications we encounter. Please do not consider this a fixed date.

I will now explain how the beta version will work. There will still be a lot of features which will not be available at the beginning of beta. We will be adding them along the way.

Because the development of soccer and the purchase of servers are financially very costly and our servers cannot bear the load that would make it possible to let everybody into soccer at the same time, we have decided to grant access into the beta version in batches. First of all we will grant access to the PPM team members, which is more than 300 people. This includes captains, assistants, translators, moderators, helpers etc.

We will also grant access right from the beginning of beta to those managers, who support us financially and who will spare a few credits to help the development of soccer. Everybody who is interested will be able to create a team for a fee of 30 credits. The funds earned from these credits will be used to solve the server issues for soccer. Only these managers will be allowed into the beta version for the first 14 days. After this period, it will be possible to join without paying the fee, but there will be daily quota for the number of teams that can be created. Everything will depend on the capacity of the server. For example we may set the daily quota to 500 new teams per day. It may happen that by the time beta is over, everybody will have a chance to create a team but it is also possible that there will not be enough room for everyone.

Everybody will be allowed to create a team (as long as the daily quota allows it) regardless whether they are in the soccer waiting list or not. The waiting list will be the determining factor for assigning teams into leagues in the full version.

At least one league will be created in all the countries which have their own hockey leagues. Others will play in the world league. The duration of the beta version is not yet determined. The launch of the full version will be announced in advance. Of course, everything that happens in the beta version will be irrelevant once the full version starts. There will be a complete restart and everybody will start from scratch again.

The PRO pack features will be available for all users during the beta version. Unlike it was in the beta version of hockey, the game will run in real time. That means one game a day. However, we will be testing the system of multiple time zones in the soccer beta version.

That is all for today. I think there is a lot to look forward to.