Rabona Reloaded: A Plan for the Future

Welcome to Rabona Reloaded! In this post we'll share with you the summary of first half of 2021 and plans for the second half of the year. There's a lot to cover, so let's get right into it!

⏪ A recap of H1 2021 Roadmap

Before the year took off for good, we've shared a Rabona Roadmap for the first half of 2021. We planned to release the Tournaments feature, as well as work on Bank of Rabona and the possibility to introduce shareholding of teams. The plans were grand, too grand probably.

Unfortunately, we were not able to finish working on mentioned projects. This has many reasons, both personal and non-personal. One of the main reasons for failing to deliver new major upgrades to the game was the lack of workforce needed to do so. Up until now Rabona was a duo of @rondras and @oliverschmid. This is a lot of work for just two.

This all led to our community starting to doubt whether Rabona will continue to evolve and offer new great features in the future. We understand that and we hope that this post will be a confirmation to all of you, that Rabona's team is highly comitted to make Rabona the best game on Hive!

👥 New team members

As we mentioned, one of the major problems for Rabona was a small team working on it. We're happy to announce that recently the team grew by two more memembers!

@mciszczon

We are extremely pleased to welcome @mciszczon on board as official team member and developer moving forward. Many of you know that he is the developer behind dGoal—another UI for playing Rabona. After a few months of dGoal development @mciszczon will now join Rabona team as well. Adding him to the team makes use of his fantastic programming skills, already deep insights into the game itself and a strategic view for game development in general.

@uwelang

We also welcome @uwelang as team member who will dedicate some of his time in marketing the game to attract new users in- and outside the Hive blockchain ecosystem. He adds PR and marketing skills to the game having worked in his normal life for some blockchain projects already and many technology companies in general on a global scale.

Both @mciszczon and @uwelang are highly motivated to bring Rabona to the next level by supporting the team in developing and promoting the earlier promised features. We wish them all the best and are confident about the Rabona future.

⚙️ Work report

Since the joining of the two, we have finally managed to get rid of two very annoying bugs that were frustraiting both our users and us since months already. These are:

Request Header or Cookie Too Large Error which often times made it impossible to use the game without first clearing the cookies.
Lineup Encryption Error which appeared for some lineup that were sent to the blockchain. This one was affecting both Rabona and dGoal.

We have already started some very much needed maintenance work to clean up the game's code and make it run much faster than previously, as well as providing a strong foundation for future development.

🛣️ Roadmap for H2 2021

Finally, we would like to share with you our updated plan for the second half of this year. There's a lot to come, so let's dig in!

Tournaments

This is obviously the main objective for these few coming months, since we are already a few months overdue.

You will be able to create your own tournaments according to your own rules. There will be tournaments hosted by Rabona and tournaments hosted by you. There is a tournament creation fee that will be burned.

The new match algorithm for tournaments is separated from the match-algorithm for the league. There will be no financial consequences for your club when participating in tournaments. Cards are counting only for the tournaments, the number of fans doesn't go up/down, and statistics (player/club) do not change. The only exception is injuries.

— A quick recap on Tournaments feature

The Tournaments module proved to be more complicated that we initially thought, requiring more planning and development. With the limited workforce of only one developer the work has been going very slowly.

Now with the new team members we are ready to again work intensively on Tournaments. We are making some finishing touches to the feature's scope, to make it a lot of fun for players. The frontend module for Rabona is mosstly ready and needs just a bit of work. The backend still needs some work, but the new match algorithm is already in place, as well as some other functions.

Overall, we think that Tournaments are 60% ready already and need just a little bit more work.

dGoal and Rabona

Another major announcement that we want to share with you is that we will be bringing Rabona and dGoal closer together. dGoal has been around for almost half a year already, with more and more features being slowly added to it.

We've followed dGoal from the very start and gladly supported it as well. We've seen that many users are happy with this new interface and would switch to it completely if it provided all Rabona's features.

Now, with @mciszczon joining the team, we decided not to split hairs. We are happy to announce than in future we will be making dGoal as the official interface for Rabona. Once dGoal offers all the same features (or more) than Rabona, dGoal will stop existing and its interface will be available at Rabona.io.

The road to that is a long one, of course, so for the nearest futures both projects will operate independently and users will be able to use either Rabona.io or dGoal.app.

Improvements requested by users

Apart from the objectives above, we also want to listen to our lovely and lively community. Since few months we have been collecting all the feedback and preparing a prioritity list of all features requested by our users.

We finally have a compelling list and in the upcoming months will work one by one on these community propositions, all to make the game even more fun to play.

Here are just some of the most requested features:

Customizable autoplayer (default formation other than 433)
Show suggested selling price for the player
Saving more team formations
Adding formation skills to Team page
Batch freezing/unfreezing
Batch scouting

The team will work on these and other feature requests—feel free to comment with any suggestion which we will compile in a report, prioritize and update the community on progress on a regular basis.

We also suggest you to leave your ideas at dgoal.nolt.io, which is a feedback board set up for dGoal. However, you can also leave general ideas there as well, even if they are not directly related to Rabona.