is FLAIR key for AMC's ?

I found a fantastic player in cska moscow.He 's Alan Dzagoev got suberb attributes but flair 8. Can he deserve 17M € transfer bid?

http://img190.imageshack.us/my.php?image=alans.jpg

what am I supposed to do ?

I found a fantastic player in cska moscow.He 's Alan Dzagoev got suberb attributes but flair 8. Can he deserve 17M € transfer bid?

http://img190.imageshack.us/my.php?image=alans.jpg

what am I supposed to do ?

It's not vital as such, but a high flair attribute would mean he could pull off the totally unexpected in a game; an overhead kick, a scissor kick, a fantastic shimmy or dummy to fool a defender. I look for flair in my Wingers mainly because i want them to pull off a trick, beat the fullback and whip a cross in or cut inside.

As i said it's not vital to have high flair, but it does help when you're playing against top defenders and the attacking player has a trick up his sleeve.

It depends. He's fine if you want a playmaker type AMC who focuses more on distribution but if you want the type who dribbles through the middle and beat defenders I'd look for someone else with higher flair.

in 4-5-1 tactic with one dmc and two mc adding two wingers. What is your advice axel witsel or alan dzagoev for mc player ?

in 4-5-1 tactic with one dmc and two mc adding two wingers. What is your advice axel witsel or alan dzagoev for mc player ?

alan dzagoev

In my opinion, it's not really important for an AMC but it's essential for a striker.

I've bought yer man - he got injured before he played his first game and was out for 8 months. Now he's fit and blending into my side, he's not setting the place alight but he looks like he'll be the real deal.

With low flair, you'll want to tone down his creative freedom, but he can still be a damn effective AMC. Flair is good, but not essential if other attributes make up for it. FWIW my other AMC is Buonanotte who is brilliant apart from his STR of 6 - powder-puff boy. Again, his all-round ability compensates for that one weakness.

I would crank his Creative Freedom up to compensate for his lack of Flair. I interprete Flair to be like Natural Creative Freedom, the attribute that determines whether a quality winger is a show pony or chooses to keep it simple.

With Dzagoev and Buonanotte in your side you should have no problems opening up defences, though both players have low Anticipation which can be a hindrence.

SFraser,

"crank his Creative Freedom up to compensate for his lack of Flair"

- another interesting and unconventional interpretation!

"I interpret Flair to be like Natural Creative Freedom, the attribute that determines whether a quality winger is a show pony or chooses to keep it simple."

Doesn't that mean you're asking your KISS player to be a show pony? i.e. to play in an unnatural manner?

How far would you push this: high flair = lower CF? Lower league players with low flair = global high CF? Seems counter-intuitive to me. I'd appreciate some deeper analysis since I do enjoy your inputs and try most of them out in my matches!

Think Paul Collyer commented that the creative freedom slider just acted as a multiplier on flair in that it makes attempts at the more difficult more frequent when increased.

But increasing creative freedom for players without the technique is in most cases counterproductive because they will just fail in the attempt, usually grotesquely so and the last thing you want is a failed attempt at a 40 yard cross field ball coming straight back at you down the channel for the opposition striker to get on the end of.

Increasing creative freedom for players who do have the technique but not the 'natural' flair will see them attempting the impossible on a more regular basis. Likewise if you have a high flair player who doesn't have the technique, there's a good case for limiting his creative freedom.

Technique is definately a critical element in setting Creative Freedom according to Flair, but another critical element is a players vision and awareness of the game. A lack of Anticipation, Creativity, Decisions and Teamwork will mean that the "Flair Player" is little more than a tunnel visioned, bee-line for goal merchant irrespective of his Technical abilities. Ofcourse if that particular player happens to have the attributes of Cristiano Ronaldo and is playing as a Striker then it is not necessarilly a bad thing, as that is what he is best at.

Conversely you could have a player that has the vision of Nostradamus and the Decision making of a calculator and then you have someone that can use High Creative freedom to maximum creative effect, spotting the passes that you don't even see, but if he lacks the passing accuracy and technique then most will go astray.

To get the most out of Creative Freedom you have to measure technical ability alongside decision making and match awareness, or "footballing intelligence" within the context of that players position and role. A front pairing of Berbatov and Cristiano Ronaldo would benefit from giving them both High Creative Freedom, but for completely different reasons.

One question that I have that is key here is exactly what is the relationship between Flair, Creative Freedom and Instructions? Does high Creative Freedom ignore instructions altogether, or does it provoke highly audacious moves based upon player instructions? My own experience tells me the latter is true, which is not the commonly held view. The reason I say this is from granting maximum CF to wingers and then setting Crosses to rarely from mixed, which resulted in my wingers refusing crosses when near the byline, instead looking for through ball cutbacks.

If this is correct then player instructions offer a degree of control over the extent of the Freedom allowed by the CF instruction. It certainly does not completely refute CF altogether, but I rarely see longshots or the like from high CF players set to rarely longshots. I think the commonly held view on CF may be much like the common idea that multiple Free Roles would result in an incoherent mess of a formation. The ingame tips say use Creative Freedom sparingly, but it gives no further clues as to why.

I'd always assumed that player instructions over-ruled (to a large degree) certain aspects of a players game - I'm not certain though that those particular instructions are related to creative freedom and flair. Flair moves always seem to be signalled by the text descriptions (eg "attempts a banana shot") and I've not really seen such indicators attached to things such as through balls and crossing, although I could be misinterpreting descriptions of an action in the text as not being 'flair' related when in fact they are.

In fairness, for the vast majority of teams, setting a lot of free roles will result in an incoherent mess - I think that you can get it working is a tribute to your tactical ability and your ability to marshal the resources of your chosen team in order to get such results. I think something similar may hold true here - for the vast majority of teams and tactics, too much creative freedom would be counterproductive (solely from a player ability point of view), although it should equally be possible to maximise everything with the right players using the right tactics.

I don't think that the text descriptions are a good indicator of the context of the action which is often the key factor in determining whether or not an action is, or could be, considered high risk and audacious. I find the text indicator to be useful tool in describing which action has been taken, for example the difference between a surge and a dribble past a defender, but there is no way of knowing outside of the "banana shot" type text clues how risky and ambitious a manouvre is without watching the replay. While the text may say "X plays it through to Y" it is the replay that will show your Central Midfielder chipping it over the head of his marker to a striker that is 50 yards from goal and in the only real space on the pitch in a tight match.

The same holds true for Free Roles. I have said all along that to make considered and deterministic use of Free Roles the user must be aware of those that do not have Free Roles and how this influences space on the pitch. If multiple Free Roles results in a degenerative mess of a formation it is because the user has not taken into account the context within which the Free Roles operate.

Ultimately the only true judgement of Flair comes from observation of player behaviour over long periods of time and comparison of that behaviour under various CF settings. It is this observation that has lead me to view Flair and Creative Freedom as the audacity of individual actions determined by both attributes and instructions. While FM09 Ronaldo for example cannot hope to execute a first time through pass recieving the ball from the 12 o'clock position and playing it to the 7 o'clock position with his body 90 degrees to the goal line, his Creativity and Anticipation means he will not even see the pass in the first place. Assuming he could both see it and execute it then TTB set to rare would mean the odds are 5/1 against him trying.

Personally I think Flair and Creative Freedom is manifest in every decision making process, and have said before that Flair and Creative Freedom act as "caps" upon the extent to which a player has moves available for consideration. A player with 10 Flair and 10 Creative Freedom may only have 1/4 of the possible options available to him, and the chosen option from this limit would be determined by his instructions and attributes. Thus the problem with Creative Freedom and Flair is not that he "attempts the impossible" so much as it is that he has so much more scope to make a bad decision.

Not sure I agree with you to be honest SFraser. The text description I think is essential for understanding player choices - a simple example would be when a cross fails, the text description actually tells you what the player was attempting to do eg X puts the ball into the six yard box. Context will allow you to judge other factors (is the player being pressed heavily etc) and thus decide about what factors may have influenced the decision, but the decision chosen is clearly flagged by the text description and is very adequate at flagging up moments of magic. Relating that back to the appropriate skill/s is another matter of course.

Wonder whether someone still has the list of text descriptions which reflected skill use? 'Surging' past a defender IIRC implies an advantage of speed. 'Uses skill' implies something more technical. Your example of chipping a ball over a defender's head etc would be amply flagged up in the text description as something different.

Tinkering with creative freedom over many years, watching every match on full over many years from text based, into 2d and now in its 3d format makes me somewhat sceptical of your belief that watching the match in 2d to try and judge a player's body positioning (?!) etc is anything but in addition to the text description. It's the same engine generating all 3 forms after all...

Of course flair and altering its threshold will have an impact in every applicable decision.I think we're 'arguing' at cross-purposes here. My post was actually agreeing with you that player instructions will 'channel' uses of flair but that I've not seen any indication of a use of flair in the match engine when related to through balls or crossing. At least nothing which could not be equally attributed to decision making, creativity or crossing or passing ability.

If free roles result in a mess of a tactic, it could equally be true that the hidden 'free role' attribute may not be adequate in the players being given the free roles and is no reflection on user skill in tactics. Without the players with the ability to perform the tactic (and it relying on a hidden attribute too) then I'm not sure you can base such claims on 'awareness of the use of space' on the part of the user. For sure it helps, but you still need the players to pull it off, which I can guarantee 99% of the teams in the game do not have.