Welcome to my Rabona update post of this week. I am an 1UP Cartel operator and I try to keep all of you up to date with these posts. New operator posts should be published every Tuesday but could be delayed from time to time since I am really busy with my upcoming exams at the moment.

What's new?

Although there haven't been new features introduced in the game, I want to give you an idea of the direction the game is headed to. I asked @mciszczon - he's basically the only person working on Rabona right now - to give me some input. Here are a few things you can look forward to:

• New Interface: Well, that's actually something you can check out already. By visiting v2.rabona.io instead of the normal URL you can use the new interface. The interface is way more modern and will be nicer too use, on PC and smartphones as well.
• A new landing page with a roadmap could be introduced in the future.
• New match forms is another point on the agenda. This could include tournaments and friendly matches.
• The economy and reward distribution will be changed. This covers rebalancing the in-game economy and a completely new reward system. Some basic information about this can be found here.
• Another cool new planned feature is including NFTs in Rabona. That means you could own players as NFTs which will have unique character traits and skills. The NFT hype is massive right now and I am sure that this could make Rabona even more popular.

I like all these ideas and think they could make Rabona way more fun to play. Please be aware that those are all just ideas though and some of them might not be implemented or changed in the future. You shouldn't expect new features to be implemented really soon as well, since @mciszczon is mainly focusing on improving the game structure. This is really important but not that perceptible for users. So please be patient 😅

Do you have any questions about the planned features? Then don't hesitate to write @mciszczon (on Hive or Discord) or share your questions in the comments down below 👇 and I will forward them to mciszczon and share his answers in my next post.

Beginner advice of the week

Increasing ticket or merchandising prices may be tempting but it's no real option in the beginning. Don't change your prices too soon, you should focus on building a strong team and increasing your fanbase first. Once you reach a higher league / a decent amount of fans you can try setting different prices and see how this affects your average utilization (which should be high at all times).

Season 67

I devided this part of the post into different chapters, since I want to cover several important aspects of the game. You can find information about...

• Buildings
• Training
• Game results
• Financials
• Preparations for the new season

Buildings

The upgrades of the Stadium Capacity, the Office Building, the Building Yard and the Youth Academy have been finished. They could be upgraded again and here's what I decided on that:

• The Stadium Capacity will not be upgraded to level 10 for now. The upgrade would cost 8 million RBN which is a lot and for now the current capacity of 6,000 seats should be enough, especially because the average utilization is 69% at the moment. So the goal should be to increase the average utilization first. Upgrading the Stadium should be done at a later time.

• The Office Building won't be upgraded to level 9 because it'll reduce the salary offers on contract renewals by 2% but also comes with huge costs. Currently the total salary per match is ~ 560,000 RBN which means extending all contracts would grant a price advantage of 11,200 RBN / match. If we take into consideration that the upgrade comes with increased operating costs of 300 RBN / match, we can say that up to 327,000 RBN could be saved per season - but the upgrade costs are 1,440,000 RBN. So I'll wait with upgrading the Office Building until the total salary gets higher.

• The Building Yard will be upgraded to level 9 to decrease the upgrade time of future upgrades. This will cost 256,000 RBN & 800 RBN / match which is okay in return for 2% faster upgrades.

• Another building that will be upgraded is the Youth Academy - The costs amount to 256,000 RBN & 800 RBN / match and the upgrade will enable a 2% higher efficiency ratio of scouting. Since scouting will be an important factor in the future, this upgrade should be worthwile.

The upgrades of the Building Yard and the Youth Academy will be finished within 13 days and 22 hours - which will be on 10th March 2022.

Training

I mainly focused on endurance again but also trained speed once. Endurance is so important because I don't have that many players this season and want to avoid that important players get injured. The Training increased the total overal strength by almost 0.5 📈

• 22/02/2022: Trained Endurance with 15 players
• 23/02/2022: Trained Endurance with 15 players
• 24/02/2022: Trained Endurance with 15 players
• 25/02/2022: Trained Speed with 14 players
• 26/02/2022: Trained Endurance with 15 players

Game results

19 games were won by BTCSam FC in addition to 9 defeats and 2 draws. I'm not happy with the end result because I wanted more than 20 victories but my team had too much weak games.

The start of the season was super bad. The first 4 matches were all lost, followed by one victory, a draw and another loss. So BTCSam FC only obtained 4 / 21 points in the first 7 games...

At this point it was obvious that I wouldn't have a chance to reach the first place of the table anymore. What a frustrating way to start the new season! Fortunately the rest of the season went a lot better but in the end it was only enough for place 7 in the league. That's not a good result but I have to accept that and try to increase my team strength for the next season.

Financials

The total income amounts to 75,143,336 RBN which is more than 10 million RBN more than last season! What are the reasons for that? Well, one reason is that the ticket sales increased from 2.6 million to 4 million RBN because of the more expensive ticket prices. And then there's the merchandising income which climbed from a total of ~ 62 million to ~ 70 million RBN. The catering / hotel / Parking lot income went up too - probably because of the increased stadium capacity - but those had nearly no effect on the total result.

Unfortunately the costs increased as well. The total costs of 41 million RBN from last season were almost doubled in season 67. The reasons for that are:

• Player salaries have grown by more than 3,000,000 RBN
• Player purchases and market fees went through the roof because I had to buy a lot of new players (you can read more about that below)
• Other costs went up a bit as well, especially the merchandising costs (~ 2 million RBN)

So the main reason for the extraordinary high total costs were the player purchases. I wish I could've bought the same players for cheaper prices but unfortunately the ones I bought were already the best deals on the market.

In the end the total profit is only 2,209,549 RBN which is way less than last season. I'm certain this value will go up next season because I already bought most of the players I wanted to join my club and I was also able to increase the income by a lot. So next season should be really profitable.

I received a Rabona rewards payout of 0.143 HIVE for season 67. If you add this to the RBN profit (0.088 HIVE) you'll receive an end of season reward of 0.231 HIVE. This is the worst result for me in a long time but like I already mentioned I think it'll go up again in season 68.

Preparations for Season 68

Season 67 went worse than I had hoped. One of the main reasons for this is that I forgot to extend the contract of important players. I won't make the same mistake again, so this time I extended contracts a day before the end of the season.

Here's an overview of the contracts and what decisions I made:

Player	Position	Age	OS	Salary	Demanded Salary	Contract renewed?
Christopher Neubauer	Goal	30	81	29,258	33,171	NO
Tim Wind	Def	29	76	23,867	25,456	NO
Antonio Azevedo	Def	27	82	30,041	33,922	YES
Milosz Marciniak	Mid	26	84	35,255	38,298	YES
Ryuki Iwasaki	Mid	28	82	33,846	35,749	YES

I've extended the contracts of 3 players which led to an increased total salary of 8,827 RBN / match. I also decided to let 2 players go. Here's why:

• Christopher Neubauer: Having a good second goalkeeper is always important because you need to rely on him if your number 1 gets blocked or injured. Neubauer is a good keeper but I am not willing to pay an additional ~ 4,000 RBN / match to keep him. There are a lot of other good keepers out there with reasonable salaries, so I'll find a good replacement in no time.
• Tim Wind: Another player which will get no new contract. Wind is one of those < 80 OS players which I hope to replace with better players by the time the next season starts.
• Antonio Azevedo: He's a good defender and will be needed in the next season. Not sure if he'll be one of my regular players but he's a good alternative if some player drops out for a few matches.
• Milosz Marciniak: I had to extend his contract because he's a good player (OS: 84) and his new salary is still pretty good for a player like him.
• Ryuki Iwasaki: He is another good midfielder which could be important next season.

I tried to sell the 2 players that didn't get new contracts. The prices I choose were the cheapest on the market (compared to players with the same OS): 60,000 RBN for Neubauer and 10,000 RBN for Wind. None of them were actually sold though.

Important note: The contracts with the 3 players mentioned above where not extended. I was so busy writing this post that I planned on extending them but forgot to actually do it 🙈 I can't believe that this happened again but this will be a lesson for me... Well, now I need to buy more players than I was expecting.

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Some new players were bought as well:

• Luo Chang was bought for 150,000 RBN. He's a 19 years old keeper with an OS of 80 and a salary of 29,155 RBN / match. I think he's a good alternative if Jönsson (the number 1 keeper) is injured or blocked.
• The defender Yao Sun is another new player which had been acquired for 2 million RBN. That's a quite big amount but I think he will actually improve the defense a lot (OS: 85). He got a lot of potential as well since he is only 22 years old.
• Another defender - Young-Soo Chong - joined the team as well. He's 22 years old and has a OS of 75. He's a good backup player, although I wanted to avoid buying < 80 OS players.
• The midfielder Ali Krueger (OS: 83) has been bought for 9,999,000 RBN. Although the price was extremly high I don't regret this decision since he's a good player who will strengthen the team and there were no better alternatives.
• Pavel Tarasov (OS: 85) is another expensive midfield player that joined BTCSam FC for 10 million RBN.
• And finally a new striker, Yang Wang, were bought for just 1,000 RBN. He has an OS of 83 but his salary is quite high (51,670).

So all in all I think I made the team stronger in order to get to the first place in the next season. This costed a total of 22,250,000 RBN which is massive but I think I had to invest that much to finally get to a higher league.

Season 68

Buildings

I haven't started any new upgrades yet. Right now I'm focusing mainly on a good performance of my team (with training & good lineups) to make sure we finally end up in the top 3 spots again. I'm satisfied with the current income but I'll keep an eye on further upgrade opportunities in the future.

Training

Since the new season just started I was only able to train once. I bought a lot of new players and a lot of them have quite bad 4-3-3 values. That's why I trained 4-3-3 yesterday and I'll probably train it again in the following days. I haven't made a progress chart because I only trained once and the OS of my players stayed the same (training specific formations won't affect the OS).

• 28/02/2022: Trained 4-3-3 with all players

Game results

The start of season 68 was way better than last season. BTCSam FC won 4 out of the first 5 games and is currently in third place. The only lost game was the one against the Eastcoast CLINTS - another strong team which is in fourth position in the league.

Season 67 had a lot of negative aspects but also some positive developments - for example the increased income. If the team performs better than last season (and after the first games it looks that way) and I can prevent high costs (which seems realistic) season 68 could be really profitable.

Not playing Rabona yet? Start your football journey now by signing up here. See you on the pitch!