Solving the Problems of FM09: Taking the Tutorial to the Next Level.

This is a proposal that ties together possible solutions for a wide variety of common and not so common complaints about FM09 in a single package that I feel has the potential to elevate subsequent versions of this series not just above current complaints but potentially to an entire new level of sports simulation for this franchise.

One thing that has always been evident to me in Football Manager is that despite the addition of player interaction and staff feedback, the manager has never really felt like he has the elite of footballing knowledge and genius at his fingertips and he certainly has never been able to "talk football" with the games characters in any manner. The greatest tactical and coaching backroom staff in the world do not in any shape or form educate the manager in coaching and tactics; and they should do.

The CM/FM series has always been as much an educational tool for the footballing enthuisiast as a game in the years I have played it. You always know what youngsters to keep an eye out for in real life if you play this series, you always know the rules and regulations of multiple competitions, and there is a vast historical and statistical database within the game that I doubt any single player every really scratches the surface of throughout a career.

My proposal stems from the unity of FM as a source of football knowledge, the depth of the games tactical and coaching systems, the problems of getting to grips with these systems and understanding the challenges faced and the solutions available, and my own dissapointment at the lack of backroom staff interaction and a much wider knowledge base included within the game.

My proposal is the development of an ingame footballing encyclopaedia that contains data relevant to understanding the function of the game from a managerial perspective, and delivering this information to the manager through the medium of club staff. Further the game should track manager behaviour and the behaviour of his opponents and the behaviour of clubs in the managers competitions in key areas and provide feedback regarding trends, assistance regarding weaknesses and advice regarding areas the manager is concerned with, through the medium of club staff.

In short I am proposing the development of a system of game relevant encyclopaedic football information and vastly expanded perpetual contextual support for the player via the backroom staff.

An example of this system would be this:

A manager pulls up his staff screen and looks for the highest Tactical Knowledge attribute in his club. He pulls up the profile of this staff member and clicks on the Tactical Knowledge attribute to reveal a drop down menu. This drop down menu contains the options of Formations : Positions : Tactical Concepts : Tactical Trends of (Your League) : Tactical Trends versus (Your Club) etc. Choosing the option Formations would introduce the manager to a wealth of information regarding Footballing Formations, there real life premises and their relevance and implimentation within Football Manager. This screen would also contain tactical information based upon your own squad and feedback from the staff member regarding the strengths and weaknesses of your players, your squad and your club utilising these formations in your league. In short a tactical discussion with your clubs own tactical guru.

This would work similarly for all areas of expertise in all staff members. Physiotherapists would educate the manager in the concepts behind fitness and suggest strategies for maintaining condition and reducing fatigue through a drop down menu from the Physiotherapy attribute. He would explain every type of injury in terms of game consequences for the manager, and he would describe both problems and solutions to conditioning and fitness problems for every member of your playing squad when asked or when certain values are reached.

Obviously such a system would be a vast undertaking but as the Tutorial system shows such a system is in time perhaps inevitable to deal with the problems faced by such a complex management simulation of a real world game where knowledge and advice and communication is an integral part of the entire experience.

There is one final opportunity and that is to take the entire system of assistance, advice and information online in a wiki format at its basic level where backroom feedback and contextual advice remains the realm of SI developers but where the depth of information held by this system is enhanced by connecting it to the internet and a purpose built football manager wiki. I think this system would supply the only fundamental aspect of management this game lacks in itself, the ability to talk football and learn football within the context of the game.

As mentioned in wwfan’s ‘randomness’ thread, I totally agree with your ideas here.

Indeed this has been one of my biggest disappointments since stumbling upon the game (I live in Australia where the game isn’t as well known) a couple of years back. While the tactical and player/team development side of the game has met and surpassed my expectations, I have always found the lack of man management and squad/staff interaction surprising and disappointing. After all, these elements are as equally important as tactical knowledge in real life football management, so it is a mystery why they are not adequately represented in a game that is regarded as the best and most complete football management sim around. Whiel there have been some attempts in this area recently (ie team talks/player interaction/assistant feedback) these are very one dimensional and provide the manager with very little useful information. For example in my latest Arsenal save, despite having both Walcott and Arshavin in my squad, my assistant Rice always places Eboue in my ‘best eleven’ 4-4-2 at right wing. Now I would really love to know his rationale behind this judgement! Now this is just one basic example, but it does illustrate how the feedback you get from key staff within the game is not only very limited, but it is often counterintuitive and appears to lack any justification. A similar example can be found in the in-game assistant feedback whereby Rice tells me that Fabregas is misplacing many of his passes, yet when I check the stats he has 90% + pass completion. I could probably present several other examples, but my points are that:

a) the amount of feedback and interaction is very limited in the game as it stands

b) this is a fundamental aspect of real life management and if the game is to really be considered as a realistic sim, then this area of the game needs a serious overhaul

c) current attempts to add in interaction and feedback are flawed and often leads to players getting incorrect or counterintuitive advice and no real ‘logic’ as to why that advice has been given

I like it, I like it, but please allow me to divert along a different route. The current debates are often focusing on the interests of the 'serious' gamer like yourself versus the 'casual' gamer who wants to enjoy the FM experience but doesn't have time for in-depth study of tactics, training nuances etc. Personally. I like developments that cater to BOTH groups (and everyone in-between).

Regarding tactics, SI are bringing in the wizard that offers some intuitive guidance for the casual gamer who doesn't have to read through 50 pages of TT&F manual, but which can be ignored or turned off for a greater challenge.

We already have, in FM09, the assman giving useful if currently limited in-game advice that is in accordance with his abilities and can be taken onboard or ignored as the manager sees fit.

These are great developments, and in my last post I added a further suggestion which is to have a wizard for training regimes similar to the tactics innovation.

Now, how can your proposal be incorporated into this scheme? At the moment, I'm suggesting (maybe unfairly) that you are on the 'serious' wing of the spectrum, potentially alienating many less-serious gamers. What I mean is that many gamers wouldn't have the time or inclination to pour through your encyclopaedia. Others would however, so what I'd like to add is a function (or functions) to make your information more accessible to the casual gamer.

It would work like this: take formations for example. In GenieScout there is a 'cheat' function whereby you can find out the utility's interpretation of your optimum formation given the players in your squad. Depending on the tactical awareness of your assman, he could hint at this or a vaguer version. Different coaches might, however, have different ideas as to the best formation depending on their tactical preferences (preferred formations, attack- or defence-minded etc.)

You assman and coaching staff already tell you in the coach's assessment screen that player X is the 3rd best left back in your squad; they could add more detail depending on ability as to why Eboue is preferred over Ashavin. Maybe your fitness coach is biased towards the players' physical attributes whereas your coach with higher mental attributes looks more closely at the players' mental atts. Ultimately, you the manager make the decision.

I certainly think the physios could contribute a lot more - again depending on ability they could advise that your strength/aerobic regimes might be too much for wimpy player Y or player Z took tolerate a little more without increasing the chance of injury. I feel that this would have more practical benefit than an encyclopaedic amount of information on the nature of injuries, but if SI wanted to do the work it could be included for those interested.

So I'm really supporting dz47's emphasis on utilising these ideas in the game through backroom staff feedback. This needs to correlate to their abilities, but needs to be far more detailed and should never be counter-intuitive. The advice could certainly be contradictory as my example of two coaches suggests, and ultimately the decisions must remain the domain of the manager.

I agree with most of what you are saying phnompenhandy. It does seem that SI are trying to incorporate some of these aspects into the game, but i think they are a long way off making these as vital a part of the game as they should be, let alone pushing some of the possibilities to there exciting limits as SFraser is envisaging. I personally do enjoy the challenge of fm, but to be honest, apart from the tactical side of things, I was really disappointed upon getting into this series that there was so little focus on the player/team management and staff interaction. And while they have tried to add some elements of this in subsequent versions, the implementation leaves a lot to be desired, and could still be markedly improved. With the introduction of the 3D engine this year, it would seem reasonable to predict that fm10 will focus further on refining this than on other areas which IMO have been neglected for too long.

Put it this way, if another football sim were to come out with 80-90% of the quality of the current FM match engine, but with a greater focus on player/squad management and immersion in the other key areas of modern professional football management (ie some of the suggestions made in previous posts....not on buying cars, houses and playing golf like on EA manager!) then I, and i would be guessing a large number of others, would be seriously tempted to switch to such a game. Such a game (and i know i'm talking hypothetically) would IMO present a more well rounded experience of football management, which as much as I enjoy this aspect of the game, is not all about tactics and match day.

To me, as much as I enjoy playing FM, I am always reminded of its shortfalls. I can still remember searching on the net 3 or so years back for an in-depth football management game and stumbling across reviews for FM, most of which exalted it as the 'most complete football manager simulation available'. Now that review was no doubt true then and is still true today, but I think this is as much due to a lack of serious competition, rather than the inherent 'completeness' of FM. Now i'm not suggesting that SI don't work their butts off to improve the game each year, but rather that perhaps its time for them to get some perspective and seriously consider what FM could be (as predictd by SFraser for example!) and which areas have been a bit neglected to the overall detriment of the game.

Building on the Eboue example above, such a game would, for example, provide some insight into why Eboue is a preferred right winger. There would be an option to ask for reasoning as to why. I may well get two conflicting reasons from staff as you mention, but I would still be in a better position than I am now because I would be able to compare their reasoning and make my own determination (which I would imagine is very unlikely to see eboue remain as my preferred right winger!)

We're singing from the same hymnsheet here dz, although my loyalty to the brand is such that I'd sooner switch a wife or girlfriend than from FM to another product!

I'm absolutely no codie, but I suspect that your suggestion of interacting with questions and answers would require far too much work for it to avoid repetitive cliches (which we already get in press conferences and team-talks without the interaction!).

I just ran this idea past PaulC in another thread and he said that they are focused on tactics for FM10 and may not have the resources to go into training or other aspects in much depth. I thought they had more staff then that, but what do I know.Maybe ideas for FM11?

Yeah I read that comment from PaulC too. I can’t say that I am surprised, but I am a bit disappointed as I can’t help but feel they are becoming far too focused on the tactical side of management to the detriment of other equally critical areas of management, and possibly to the overall detriment to the game as a whole. And I’m no coder either, but I fail to see how added depth in this area is impossible to achieve within SI’s resources, without it becoming clichéd and predictable. To be honest, I just don’t think they’re really focused on it, which would be what I would read into PaulC’s comment.

I am glad to see such a response to this proposal, and I think that the responses indicate that I am not alone in thinking that the combination of indepth footballing information of both an encyclopaedic and contextual nature to staff interaction within Football Manager would be a massive tangental improvement to the current game as a complete footballing and management experience. That ultimately was the entire point of my post and I am left wishing I could have said so in those terms in my original post.

Regarding the development situation I think that such a proposal at best would not see the light of day in any version of FM for atleast two versions, and that there are significant concerns related to it.

Clearly the current development of FM is focused on gameplay, and of developing the current tactical system into one more easilly accessible to a wider playerbase. There is also the question that these forums themselves and multiple other football related websites could serve the purpose of my proposal should the user decide to use them.

However I would add that combining such information with the current game would make such information instantly available through a few clicks to every user of FM irrespective of their general knowledge and general desire to read and learn and understand footballing concepts, and that combining this information to a context sensitive system of staff feedback would deeply enrich the experience of Football Manager as a management game. It may also challenge these mediums for accuracy, ease of use and users in the long run, but that is no doubt a secondary at best concern.

When I first stumbled upon the tutorial I was interested in its information and excited by its function but deeply disappointed by its depth. When I first experienced the interaction system again I was interested and excited by its function but deeply disappointed by its depth.

The trend was similar when I discovered these forums. To me the information, depth and relevance of specific posts was perfectly spot-on with regards to what information I lacked, and indeed offered information I previously had little desire or knowledge of to learn, such as the WM, the inversion of the pyramid etc. etc. The overarching impression of these forums as a whole however is a segregation between indepth FM technical knowledge and general footballing excitement and education, in combinaton to a wide complaint of a lack of inaccessibilty and incomprehensibility and dissapointment of the games systems amongst those that do not, cannot, will not choose not to voyage into the nether reaches of tactical and training dryness and complexity.

I find myself searching through the posts of Football Manager complaints for the information of footballing gems that I can transplant into my Football Manager save, wishing that some of it would turn up through my backroom staff and that all of it could be discovered whether first, second, or third time through my Football Manager game. After all Ferguson does not glean information from Sports Interactive Online Community, but speaks to his colleagues and listens to their advice.

As I stated in my original post I feel this proposal has the potential to address multiple issues that are superficially unrelated, but that the implimentation would no doubt be a monumental undertaking. I hope that in spite of the details that the principle of this post of providing helpfull footballing information for a wide variety of Football Manager contexts through the medium of the backroom staff is understood and deeply considered for future versions of this game.

"However I would add that combining such information with the current game would make such information instantly available through a few clicks to every user of FM irrespective of their general knowledge and general desire to read and learn and understand footballing concepts, and that combining this information to a context sensitive system of staff feedback would deeply enrich the experience of Football Manager as a management game. It may also challenge these mediums for accuracy, ease of use and users in the long run, but that is no doubt a secondary at best concern.

When I first stumbled upon the tutorial I was interested in its information and excited by its function but deeply disappointed by its depth. When I first experienced the interaction system again I was interested and excited by its function but deeply disappointed by its depth."

Yes, this is absolutely spot-on, and I think the great majority of the community - and SI - would agree with this.

And this: "The overarching impression of these forums as a whole however is a segregation between indepth FM technical knowledge and general footballing excitement and education, in combinaton to a wide complaint of a lack of inaccessibilty and incomprehensibility and dissapointment of the games systems amongst those that do not, cannot, will not choose not to voyage into the nether reaches of tactical and training dryness and complexity."

My concern is that we respect the wishes and needs of both sides and not alienate anyone. I'm sure that SI have good marketing as well as integrity reasons to agree. That's why my focus is on finding ways to keep both sides happy; thus, following the tactics wizard model, to offer options which both aid the casual gamer and add depth to the more serious gamer. What isn't in doubt is what you call the monumental amount of work involved, and I realise that this could take some years, but I do believe that some of us are starting to articulate at least in principal that the possibility of FM being all things to all gamers is feasible and realistic.