Form study

You can see the following in Hattrick's Game Rules regarding player form:


The better form a player is in, the better he will perform. It’s not about the physical context though, it has nothing to do with how well trained a player is. Form in Hattrick reflects a combination of aspects making it possible for, or preventing a player, from reaching his full potential – like for example how his private situation in life is at the moment.

On the player page you can see a player’s "current form". It's the figure applied for matches. An "excellent" player in "wretched" form is usually worse off than a "passable" player in "solid" form for example. Current form is negatively affected by the amount of stamina training in the team; the more stamina you train (percentage-wise) the more negative effect. Training "General (form)" will on the other hand have a positive effect on form.

Additionally, there's a hidden "background form", which is used to compute where the player's form is heading. Each week, during training, the current form of every player will change, moving towards the hidden background form. Current form is not changed immediately to the figure of background form. Instead it moves in steps over several weeks, though the further away from background form they are the larger the steps will be.

After current form has been changed during training, there is a chance that background form is changed for each player. Every player has the same individual chance of having his background form change, and there is nothing you can do to influence this chance. However, when chance decrees that a player's background form will change, there are several factors that influence what the new background form will be:

• If a player has participated in a match during the week. This is very important!
• Training intensity – the harder you train, the better form in general
• Your coach – the better skilled he is, the better form in general
• Assistant coaches – Assistants also help improve form

Once the stamina study in which we tried to know what level each player tends towards depending on his age and the stamina training share was finished, I saw for some time that many threads in which more information about form was asked were opened in the conference.

That information was related to the form's behaviour depending on the stamina training share. There also were many users interested in raising it to keep their players' stamina level, but they feared that they players' form would drop, something whose damage to the team would be bigger than the benefits of having a higher stamina level.

As it can be seen on the information shown in the top of this page, the Game Rules contain information about the variables which affect the calculation of hidden form, and they hint at the fact that the stamina share may affect visible form positively or negatively.

Because of this, I chose to began a new research. This time, we would make an effort to find a relation between form changes and the stamina training share. Obviously, even if we got results, we would only get an estimation, because too many variables have an influence on form, and one of them is a random variable, which makes getting results much harder. But in the end we managed to find them.

Nevertheless, in order to get results, we had to go through the hardest part of each study. We had to obtain data which would be analysed afterwards. We posted a data-gathering form which had to be filled in by volunteers. The data for which we asked in it was:

• Coach skill.
• Number of Goalkeeping Coaches and Assistant Coaches.
• Training intensity.
• Stamina training share.
• Average form of players who play in matches.
• Average form of players who don't play in matches.

We tried to avoid injured players, and we didn't accept data from people who had trained General (Form) recently or when posting.

The main problem with this kind of studies is not ruling out this kind of data, but the lack of users who contribute, and those who do usually have similar training data, so in the end we get much data for some situations and very few for others.

In any case, after analysing the collecting data, I was able to find a pattern. I placed some dots in a graph depending on the percentages for which I had more information and, when I connected the dots by drawing a line, I was delighted to see that it was a straight line. There seemed to be a pattern. The chart is the following one:

When looking at the table, it seems obvious that the stamina training share affects form, but this mustn't be taken on as completely accurate. If you have read all this page, you will have seen that other variables, among which you can find a random factor, affect form; this could cause the table not to fit in each team's case.

We also need to remember that the table shows the players' average form. This means that, for example, if we had 5 players with weak form, 5 with inadequate form and 5 with passable form, our average form would be inadequate. The table data should fit in with the average form, but not with each player's own form.

Press Release: This study was published on FEC website (Federación de Entrenadores de Condición).