How to find opponent's players' performance ratings without VIP

One of the advantages of VIP account is that you get to see the latest lineup of other teams, and also the grades of their individual players' performance. What most managers don't know is that you can get this information from the match report although in a less user friendly manner.

Take the latest match report of the team whose information you want to know and hold the mouse pointer over the name of any player of that team, and you'll get the grade for their performance in that match. Of course, you can get the grading for any match this way, but you would most likely be interested in how the players performed in the most recent match.

The information could be useful when you aren't sure which of your opponents' players you should mark. In such cases, the performance of a player in the most recent match could be an indicator to his form and thus help you choose the player to mark.

Give your divas their favorite shirt numbers

It might seem like an insignificant little thing to do, but it's always good to check if your divas have been given their favorite shirt numbers. It's the kind of thing that you have to check once, and then you benefit from it for the rest of the season.

Divas will perform better when they are given their favorite shirt numbers, and their performance drops slightly if they aren't. (That's why they are called divas.) So, having a diva in your team isn't really a bad thing at all, because once he's given his favorite shirt, he will actually play better than others of equal skill.

I've made it a habit to assign favorite shirt numbers to all my players, whether they are diva players or not. I don't think anything has been confirmed either way about shirt numbers affecting the performance of non-diva players, and even if it did, it would matter much less than in case of divas. Nevertheless, I try to assign favorite shirt numbers to everyone in the hope that it does help.

Feature Update: Lineup and tactics page combined

Last week, the Xpert Eleven team released two feature updates that I didn't really expect to see. Neither of them affects gameplay in any way, but they are nice features anyway.

The first was the clubbing together of the tactics page with the player squad page. Now the lineup for the next match is available as a tab in the tactics page and you can no longer use the player squad page to pick players. (Although the player squad page is still available, you can't select the next lineup there.)

I feel it will help managers while setting tactics, as they won't have to go back to the player squad page in the middle of choosing tactics to check something like special qualities or form. Also, the choices you've made in the tactics tab won't be discarded when you enter the lineup tab.

The other feature update is the ability to set tactics for all upcoming matches. You can go to the "coming matches" page from the right sidebar and you'll get links to set tactics for all upcoming matches.

Other changes includes a new flash based interface for "The Game" that looks a lot better than the old Shockwave based one. It also provides some extra stats such as ball possession graph, and standings during match, etc for VIP members.