Mystify Soccer - Close to the end?

Close to the end?

This could well be Mystify Soccer's final season. This isn't definite so please continue playing as normal.

I've just spent a few minutes reading the message board on the site and it's pretty obvious my game engine is not impressing people and reading some comments has made me wonder why I'm bothering.

The game started off as a hobby and a way for me to learn website coding. I did it with a very simple game engine whereby the best rated teams were going to win. It was a very simple system and it enabled me to build the website around it.

A few years ago, I realised that it was the same teams winning all the time and so I attempted to make it more of a challenge by adding more skills and and tactics. I knew once I did this there would be (and were) problems and over the years I have made tweaks to sort them all out. I'm still sorting very minor ones out that usually are caused by me adding other things but I always thought this would be the case.

Now, I am actually happy with the engine and I can see games working as I want but because managers don't see the whole game that I can, they are left to judge things off just the statistics I display and presume that players with top skills will be perfect, even if they are up against players rated highly also.

When I started the game, very few people were doing anything similar and I managed to build up a good set of managers. I do know I have alienated some of these managers with my changes - some because they were no longer winning all the time and some because the game became a little more complex and I accept I made mistakes there and the fact there are so many unmanaged teams confirms that to me.

In fact I know I have made errors in several aspects - I know the transfer market is desperately in need of being sorted which is what I planned on doing with a whole contract system. Unfortunately I feel I have had several months/years of complaints and negative comments which have outweighed the few positive comments I get and the more I receive them, the more I don't see the point any more.

Alongside my own failure to build a good game engine, is the fact my time is getting more and more limited. I have/had plans for Mystify which involve the player contracts and mobile apps for the game as well as a host of other things on my list and as I have responsibilities away from the game now I'm finding myself lucky if I get any time at all to progress it.

So, this isn't a definite, but it currently feels highly probable, in 19 weeks the Mystify Soccer game may come to an end.

This isn't a cue for everyone to mail me with their thoughts and nor am I looking for people to talk me out of it. The comments I've read today just added to previous comments that have made me wonder why I am doing it. I thought I should at least give some notice rather than just dropping the site in a few months. I also think it's better to end at a logical point which is why I'll finish the season and maybe I'll get all managed teams in the game into one final cup competition or something.

It has been around 17 years that it has run for and the chances are I will try and come up with something else to run anyway. I did think of a game where results are based on real life score predictions once so maybe I'll re-visit that.