It's been a turbulent first season for Rabona and last night, it finally came to an end. Today I'm going to take a look back at the first week of playing the game and give my opinion on the current state of the game and where we might be heading from there.
In case you have not heard about Rabona yet, I did an article giving a first impression last week and everything I've written there still holds true. In short words, Rabona is a football manager simulation running on the Hive blockchain putting you in the shoes of a football manager responsible for all aspects of running an actual football club. You'll build up your stadium, sign and train players, and set the lineup for your matches.
The game is played in seasons with 16 clubs competing in the same league and the top club going up a league while the worst 4 going down a league after each season.
In my first article, I recommended playing Rabona wholeheartedly and I still stand by that point. While my first season was not as successful as I had hoped, I still had a lot of fun playing it. Here's the final table of my league:
My team is Durlacher Deiwel and as you can see, I managed to place just above the relegation ranks. Overall, the league was pretty tight with no single team dominating the league and nobody losing every match. This is to be expected, as everybody was starting on somewhat even footing but it also showcases where Rabona could need some improvements next.
As of now, when a match is played, you are simply shown the result with some additional stats given. You can also see how the line up looked and what players have been used.
As you can see, most of my players were considerably stronger than my opponents team. I still lost this match 5:1. While this is expected to happen in football from time to time, it's a little frustrating that you don't get any indication about what went wrong. From what I've gathered in Discord and some helpful comments, the problem is most likely that my team is really bad at playing 4-3-3 so I should have trained that more, obviously.
What I'd love to see here is some kind of text representation of the match like the old German football managers (Anstoss and Hattrick) did it. So you'd have a play-by-play presentation like that:
Sebastian Martin intercepted the ball and is looking to pass...
--Pass Test--
The pass reaches Ia Du and he's dashing through midfield...
--Speed Test--
Nobody can keep up with him and he only has the goalkeeper in front of him...
--Shoot Test--
The attempt is off and he missed the goal by a meter...
The tests would not be shown and no percentages given, but this way you could deduct a bit what went wrong and make some conclusions on what areas to concentrate on next.
Since the game is only a week in Beta, these things are obviously still missing, but I really hope to see something like that down the road.
Other than that, I highly enjoyed the management aspects of Rabona. I did some trading early on and tried to do some arbitrage. This went better than I expected and I managed to craft one of the (numerically) strongest teams in my league and still walk away with a small profit.
As you can see from these images, the game is still heavily text and numbers based and if you don't enjoy that kind of presentation, Rabona is probably not the game you are looking for, yet. The developers already announced that they will add more images and graphics to the game over time, so this is probably going to change given time.
The 2nd season is already going to start very soon, so by the time you are reading this, it is very likely already under way. While you can join Rabona at any time, playing actual matches only starts with the next season for you. This is not a bad thing necessarily though, as it gives new players some days to build up their stadium and prepare for their first season.
Picking up Rabona costs 5$ in Hive but you get a small Hive payout depending on where you finished after each season. For me, this amounted to 0.271 Hive after season 1. To be perfectly clear here, I'd play the game even if there were no Hive payouts at all and I think it's already offering plenty of content for the price they are asking. Pay2win has not been an issue in my league and I think their approach to that is rather clever.
While you can spend additional money to have more training sessions or scout more players, there are diminishing returns on that until you get to a point where there's not much to be gained at all from spending even more money.
Personally, I'm really looking forward to season 2 and now that I (hope to) understand why my team lost so many games, I'll try to place higher than last season. Going up to league 1 will be really tough, though. With only one team moving to the next league, you need an almost perfect season to make the cut.
If you are not playing already, give Rabona a shot. If you like football, manager sims or both, changes are you'll enjoy the game just as much as I do!
That's all from me today, thank you all for reading and commenting and see you next time!
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
Good old fashioned match commentary is definitely on the list.
Thanks for this detailed review! (:
That's great to hear! Looking forward to many more seasons :-)
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STOPDo not miss the last post from @hivebuzz:
When is season 2 expected to start?
Sorry, totally missed your comment there :-(
Seasons are going for a little bit more than a week, so the next round is going to start in the night between Sunday and Monday.
Thanks for info.
Man Utd got relegated, that's terrible...! Im keeping away, it looks too time consuming for me, and I have become addicted to Footy Manager games in the past.
I know that feeling, I've been playing these games for more than a decade and spent more times on them then I should have.
That said, it's not that time consomuning. Once you have everything set up, you can mostly just let it run and check back every now and then. Well, then again I tend to check the market every 5 minutes to see if something interesting was listed... ;-)