Welcome back all,

Firstly, if you are reading this and are not currently part of the game, but would like to be, please go to the link below and click on waiting list, then simply enter and submit your Email or DS Username (you can't enter both) and I will contact you once a league is avaliable. I plan to launch new leagues from next weekend.

http://www.fantasycoach.co.uk

Now for everyone else. I am pleased to welcome batdude_uk1 to the game. I'm sure just like Charlie he will get up to speed quickly. And Welcome back to the rest of you. 3rd season for 8 of us and Charlie is no longer the new boy. This should be our best season yet I feel.

Now for what you need to know for the new season.

We will start, like last year, with the auction. Although it is slightly different this year.

• List prices are gone. Instead you now have a wage budget. Wage demands are set by the game and you'll be able to see these when you login to the site.

• This year we are introducing player contracts. When you buy players, you will have to set when their contract will expire. The shorter the contract length, the less you have to pay in wages to the player.

• You have the option to either sell players before their contract runs out or let them become a free agent at which point you can try to bid for them again.

The rules for the auction

The game begins with the auction on Sunday. The auction will run till the following Friday at 9pm. Each manager is given £80,000,000 as a transfer budget and £600,000 as a wage budget. You may adjust your budget to get more transfer budget or wage budget as you need. Every £100,000 in your wage budget is equivalent to £15,000,000 in transfer budget.

People will not be able to see your bids or the highest bid, but they can see who you have bidded for.

The rules for the auction are:

• You can only bid for 1 player per team (this does not include goalkeepers). For example, if you bid for Robin Van Persie, you cannot then bid for Shinji Kagawa, but you can still bid for David De Gea. After the auction, you can sign a maximum of 3 players per team.

• You can only bid for a maximum of 2 Goalkeepers, 8 Defenders, 8 Midfielders and 4 Strikers in the auction.

• You can only have a maximum of 5 player contracts expiring on the same day. This continues after the auction.

If you hold the highest offer for 48 hours your offer will be accepted. If this deadline goes beyond Friday 9pm, then the highest offer on Friday at 9pm will be accepted. After you make your offer you will be told whether your offer is currently the highest or if it has been rejected. The only exception to this is on Fridays where you will not be told if you hold the highest offer until it is Accepted or Rejected at 9pm that evening. These same rules will apply to free agents during transfer windows in the season.

The Lottery

Any money you do not spend in the auction is lost. After the auction, there will be a player lottery in which the rest of your team will be assigned to you. You will receive 1 player from each team, not including Goalkeepers. You will get2 Goalkeepers, 8 Defenders, 8 Midfielders and 4 Strikers. The contracts for these players will be randomly assigned, spread equally across 4-14 weeks.

All squads will be made up of roughly the same overall wage budget after the player lottery and auction. Therefore, the more you spend on wages in the auction, the lower the wage budget you will have in the lottery.

After the lottery, all teams will be given an additional £30,000,000 transfer budget and £200,000 wage budget.

The Website

Once you submit your team name and team colours I will give you your password. Those who have already submitted their team name and colours should expect their password shortly.

I have only loaded the auction stuff on the site for now. You can fiddle around with it until Sunday morning as I will wipe the bids then anyway. So we can have a sort of mock auction. I wouldn't recommend giving your strategy away by bidding for players you plan to in the real auction, but do bid for big names as it'll be good to see people battling for players in the mock auction just to test everything out.

If there is something obvious I have missed, please let me know. If you find any problems with the site, please report them to me as I can update them before the auction proper starts on Sunday.

Also, make sure your browsers are up to date. The site should work fine on all versions of Chrome and Firefox and latest IE, but I can't say for certain as I can't test on all old browsers.

how can you bid on players ?
having trouble making bids on players

EDIT: Is it working now? I think it was my fault for not giving you a budget?

Yay! Been waiting for this for ages.

I'll have a proper look through after I've eaten to see if it all makes sense

still having trouble with the bids

Yeah the bids don't seem to be working.

I'm assuming something is supposed to happen when you click on a players name but nothing is at the moment for me?

You're meant to "right click" the player, then a menu should appear with one option, "make an offer". It appears to have worked for batdude so far.

If you try this and it doesn't work, then I'll have to change it for time being.

This is why I thought I'd do a mock auction first. Bound to be a few issues.

yep it works.

Ahh good. Sorry it is my fault. It obviously isn't immediately obvious to right click on a web site as very few use right click menus.

The reason I have is because eventually there will be more options.

one suggestion for sunday, can you please have an option to cancel bids.

Ah yeah its working now

Just checking will the lottery work in essentially the same way as last year? ie its the best 11 players (1 GK, 4 DF, 4 MF, 2 ST) for each club that haven't been picked in the auction will be assigned to you? Budget divided by players needed giving the order in which we get a pick?

Can't I'm afraid, as then you could outbid someone and then cancel and then they'd have the leading offer again, but may have already spent the money.

So be careful when bidding from Sunday.

Yes. The only difference from last year is that money does not carry over to the lottery. Your budget for the lottery will be roughly £1.5m minus anything you spend on wages in the auction.

makes the mock auction more valuable, seem like the wage budget would be the biggest stumbling block for people.

Well it is always best to plan ahead. You know you can adjust your budget with the slider right?

another question can you seriously bid £0 and only offer wages.

Just had a question about the new players signed in last couple of days. I will add them before the auction starts on Sunday. (Soldado, etc.)

I plan for Sunday to be like it is now, where you can't see who anyone is bidding for or whether you have the highest offer, then Sunday evening the auction will start officially and you will be told whether you have the leading offer, whether it has been rejected.

Also, for testing the game, try to break the rules in the mock auction. You shouldn't be able to bid for more than 2 goalkeepers or more than 1 outfielder for same team, etc.

If you want me to reset your mock auction bids I can do that if someone wants to carry one fiddling about with what you can do.

Yes. I imagine quite a few players will slip through as free transfers. I doubt anyone major will do that though as you will be able to see how many people have bidded for a player on the playerlist once we get under way.

Suarez in the lottery on a 10 week contract, anyone

Are you referring to the one at 15th December? I had to make sure I could put you guys off just giving top players 20 weeks contracts.

By the way, when you make an offer you are meant to be navigated to the auction status page. I have fixed this now.

There is also an issue where you bid for a player you have already bidded for. This might take a little more time to fix, but should have it done tomorrow.

tried that, but only your first bid counts, so isn't a big issue now.

I think it gets a bit more complicated if you offer a lower offer than your first one. I'll look into it more in a bit.

As I'm sure is expected I have plenty of questions


Can you just confirm exactly what we'll see please? By offers received I assume its all bids not just the succesful ones?

Also say I made an offer for RVP and it was the highest bid, if someone then outbids me will I be notified of this and be able to bid for him again?

Thirdly, do the deadlines roll over if a new highest bid is placed? So say I bidded for RVP at 10:30pm Sunday, Brumball (as they always do for RVP ) then places a new highest bid at 1pm on Monday is the deadline now on Wednesday or is it still on Tuesday?