Swedish Hattrick started around 1997 and few years later became online soccer manager game available via any Internet browser. It never was a complicated game - each player has 8 basic parameters that describe his skills on positions (goalkeepeking, defence, playmaking and scoring, winger) and additional skills (set pieces, stamina, experience), which made its engine rather simple (read more about it in how to build game engine, part 1), but at the same time that simplicity made Hattrick very popular. At one point Hattrick had around 1 million active players.
The simplicity made the game popular (it was easy for new players to get a grip of the basics without any problem), but at the same time in long-term it became the curse. Yes, the game was very popular, this meant that a lot of players were trying to join, so new users were starting in 8th or even 10th division level, which was a bit frustrating. With 8 teams in each division it made season (1 match per week) take 14 weeks, so it was possible to play less than 4 seasons each year. It means that users starting in 10th division in most optimistic (and completely unrealistic) scenario it would take them about 3 real-life years to reach the top division and fight for championship.
But with popularity another problem arose - there was not much to do in the game. All the transfers were done via auctions, you could play one league game and one cup or friendly match, training report was done once a week, so all you had to do throughout the week was to log in once, setup starting lineup for next match and... that's about it. Unless you were very active on transfer market or message board the game was a bit too simple for a lot of users.
To make things worse the promotions and relegations system made only one team promoted automatically and second team was fighting in play-offs for promotion. Since the whole structure of the league was pyramid-shaped (one 1st division, four 2nd divisions, sixteen 3rd divisions, and so on) after each season as much as half of the teams could be replaced in any division below 1st: best team promoted automatically, second via play-offs, worst team relegated automatically, the one that finished 7th via play-offs.
The simplicity of the game made problem in one more part - tactics. The match engine itself was very simple and put a lot of emphasis on central midfielders - if you had very good midfielders you gained more goal chances, which meant you will most like score more goals. This lead to formation 2-5-3 being the most popular in the game, and to be clear it meant 2 wingbacks, 0 central defenders, 3 midfielders, 2 wingers and 3 strikers. The authors were trying with time tweak the match engine to make it less predictable, but their approaches usually made the game just a bit weird, not better.
After the mess in mid 2010s the game lost a lot of users, not because the game was bad, it was just that the simplicity with time became a bit boring and with a lot of competition Hattrick had less and less to offer. The changes to the ownership and mismanagement of premium accounts also did not helped the game to progress and since its days of glory in early 2000s Hattrick became a stale and a bit forgotten game.
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