We run ProMatch Lab, an asynchronous football management game in the browser. It has been live since July with real managers, and we would like some feedback from people who actually build these things.
The shape of it: a season is 22 match days over 11 days, and two fixtures are simulated every day, at 10:00 and 18:00 Central European Time. You set lineup, tactics, training and transfers between the ticks. There is nothing to sit through and nothing to miss if you are asleep. Every other club in your league is run by another person.
No pay-to-win. The pre-match simulator runs against a league-average opponent model, never against the real opposition squad, so paying cannot buy you information about your rival. Pro is $8 for three months and unlocks deeper analysis and club identity tools. The kickoff page plays one full match without an account if you want to see the match engine before signing up, and the interface is in English, Czech, German, Spanish and French.
The actual question, and the reason we are posting here rather than somewhere else.
We recently audited four seasons of our own game and found the transfer market completely dead: 134 listings, zero bids, zero completed transfers. The bots were listing their weakest players and only bidding when a listing exactly matched the position of their own weakest player with a higher rating, which in practice almost never happened. We have since rewritten the bidding to evaluate each listing per position, and we will know whether it worked at the next transfer window.
The same audit turned up a second one. Fitness drained roughly 20 to 30 per day against a regeneration of 8, and lineup selection sorted purely by overall rating and never rotated, so human squads were playing at a fraction of their strength while bots reseeded every season and never noticed. Nine of twelve human clubs had most of their starting eleven at zero fitness.
Both are the same class of bug: a subsystem that looks fine in isolation and quietly does nothing for months, because nobody complains about a market that is simply empty.
So, for those of you running persistent worlds: what do you actually watch to catch this? We are after the specific number you check, not general advice. Right now we log average fitness daily and check completed transfers every fortnight, and we suspect there are three more we have not thought of.
The game is at promatchlab.com and the no-account demo match is at promatchlab.com/kickoff.
Michal, ProMatch Lab team