Comunio

Comunio

Senior Developer	Fabian Loschek
Erstveröffent- lichung	2000
platform	Web browser
genre	Manager simulation, browser game
language	German, English, Spanish, French, Turkish, Italian, Portuguese, Greek, Dutch

Comunio is a German online soccer manager and belongs to the browser games category . In contrast to purely virtual online managers, such as B. Hattrick , the game principle is based on real events in the Bundesliga and the ratings of individual football players through the online sports portal Sportradar.

The online manager was developed by Fabian Loschek from Munich, who first discovered the game idea in a baseball manager game in the United States and wanted to transfer it to football. The game went online for the first time in the 2000/2001 season and has since recorded a steadily growing number of players (2005: 250,000, 2006: 350,000, 2013: 610,000).

history

For the first two years Comunio was an advertising-funded project. In 2002, for financial reasons, the game was divided into three account variants: the basic version, which is still free, and the paid plus and pro players, which have additional comfort features compared to the free version.

Since 2004, offshoots have been offered for other leagues, first for the 2nd Bundesliga , 2005 for the Austrian Bundesliga , 2006 for Serie A , 2007 for the Spanish Primera División , the Süper Lig , the UEFA Champions League and in 2008 the Brazilian Série A , the Portuguese SuperLiga and the Premier League . Due to the increasing Spanish interest, the Spanish Segunda División was added in 2009 . The French Ligue 1 has also been available since 2010 . Furthermore, there is now the Liga Sagres, the Portuguese soccer league. In 2007 the game principle was transferred to other sports for the first time and a manager with four disciplines of winter sports ( biathlon , alpine skiing , Nordic combined and ski jumping ) was offered as a winter comunio. In May 2009 the beta version of the Formula 1 offshoot comuniogp started, in which the game principle was projected onto another sport once more. As of the beginning of 2011, both variants are no longer in the beta version and are active. In April 2013, comunioblog was launched, which provides editorial support for the various games and provides tips and tricks.

Up until 2005 the scores of the kicker were used for the evaluation of the soccer players , since then the scores of the online sports portal Sportal.de have served as the basis. At the end of May 2015 it was announced that at the beginning of the 2015/16 season, the scores from the new partner Spox.com , which, like sportal.de, also belongs to the Perform Group , will be used to calculate the points. On August 2, 2017 it was announced that with Sportradar a new partner for the player ratings at Comunio had been won. Sportradar rates based on statistics and maintains, among other things. a. Cooperation with UEFA and the IOC.

Gameplay

The aim of the game is to collect the most points in your community. For this purpose, at the beginning of the game you can set up your own community with friends, acquaintances or hitherto unknown people, or join an existing game community. At the beginning, depending on how they play, each player receives a team with 15 football players from the 1st Bundesliga and 20 million play money, or no team and 40 million play money. All teams are about equally strong at the beginning. Each player tries with the limited starting capital to improve his team by buying and selling players. This not only requires football expertise and foresight, but also luck as well as financial and diplomatic skill, because there is only one football player per community. You can trade with other members of the community and the computer, which - depending on the attitude of the community leader - puts new players on the transfer list daily or several times a week, on which bids can then be made.

One of the cornerstones of the game is the daily changing dynamic market values of soccer players. Just like in a free market economy, these are based on supply and demand. For example, "star players" who score a lot of goals are worth significantly more than most other players. If a player is injured, he will be sold by many other players and accordingly also lose value.

The winner is whoever has achieved the most points at the end of the season. The points are evaluated after the match day, they are calculated for each Bundesliga player according to the score achieved, the goals scored - whereby the points depend on the position, a defensive player receives 5 points, but a striker only 3 points per goal, penalty always bring the same number of points, regardless of the position - and the received red or yellow-red cards on the relevant game day. After that, the points of the eleven placed players are added up and scored for each player.

Additional services

In 2005, a web service based on SOAP was implemented to enable the external development of additional services. Since then there have been offers operated by fellow players such as community-internal and cross-community trophies, statistics pages and blogs. Some functions of the web service can only be used with the paying game variants.

In addition, several cross-community cup competitions (mostly independent of the web service) are offered, in which the communities can compete against each other. The active and discussion-friendly community around Comunio sets the manager game apart from its competition. Many fans come to Spox in time for the announcement of their marks to discuss, and they are constantly actively commenting on forums and blogs.

Awards

On November 28, 2013 Comunio was voted “Most Popular Website of the Year” in the “Games” category.

Games of similar principle

With the increasing number of users of browser games, the game principle from America was also adopted more or less identically by other providers such as Go4Soccer (2005, now discontinued) or Fooma (2006, 2012) and their own portals were started. The differences usually only consist of individual features, different rating scales or other grades. Kicker has also expanded its manager games with the Pro version in a similar direction for the 07/08 season and bild.de also offers an online Bundesliga manager.

For the 2010/11 Bundesliga season , sport1.de also started with a manager, with a normal and a pro version. The grades awarded for the performance of the players are determined by the website itself and are also based on the market value.

The newest player in the "Bundesliga Manager" category is called Kickbase (formerly KKSTR). In contrast to Comunio, the company, which also sprang from Munich, has been offering an evaluation based purely on statistical values since the 13/14 season. Every pass, shot, etc. immediately gives the manager a score. Voted App-Des-Tag by CHIP, Kickbase is limited to mobile devices, but plans to retrofit it with a browser version soon.