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Three Reasonable New Features


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Hi All,

As a long time player and viewer of the forums (even a beta tester one year) I have seen a fair share of silly suggestions for the next version of the game on the forums.

Well I think I’ve come up with three actually useful and easy for SI to implement features.

Suggestion 1 – Can we have tick boxes in the squad view pages? Often I will want to do the following to several players at once:

- Move them between 1st/reserve/u18 teams

- Set them available for reserves

- Change squad status

- Basically anything on the ‘right click menu’

Now currently if we right click a player, we get the popup menu with the option to do these and many other actions to a single player. So it would be nice to be able to tick several players, then right click and say ‘Move to reserves’ etc. Just a simple tick box by the side of the players name.

Anyone who plays long sessions, especially on a laptop with a track pad I’m sure would appreciate being able to reduce the amount of actions you need to take to carry out this kind of repetitive task.

Suggestion 2 – Behind closed doors friendly’s. Now I’m a Derby fan, but I’m sure that all teams do these lots like the rams do. They will arrange behind close doors matches to try out a few new players on trial, see how youngsters and injured/unfit players are getting on etc.

There are a few key differences between a BCD match and a friendly. That is that usually they are played at a training ground or empty stadium, so don’t have the associated costs of opening the stadium up (true they also don’t have the revenue either).

Also in Derby’s case we often have them against teams from the Prem (so higher divisions) and the prem team - who otherwise wouldn’t have accepted a friendly mid-season for example, (in fact even lower league teams wont play you currently midweek) The opposition also play a mix of players they have on trial, players lacking fitness / back from injury and youth players.

These BCD matches are not always reported in the local media, but sometimes are. In Derby’s example, the local paper (media in the case of FM) will often report Derby have player x on trial who will play in a BCD friendly against team x. Or derby will be checking on the fitness of these key players in a BCD against team x tonight. I’m sure again this would be easy and useful to put in to FM.

Suggestion 3 – A player search filter enchantment. Can we have the option to hide a player from future searches? Often players will play with a large database, now if I want to view everyone on free transfer (for example) with a large database in England, I get loads of players that are rubbish! Could we have an option on the right click menu that says hide from future searches? If this was implemented with the tick boxes suggestion, I can then search for all free transfer strikers, sort them by finishing. Tick all the ones with finishing less than 10, or low determination or whatever, and say hide from future searches. This way I don’t have to view them season after season and my searches are more productive and quicker. An additional option could be put on the filter page to say ‘Show players hidden from search’ or something as a way to bring these players back in view.

I hope you think these are good ideas to and SI take note. I think suggestion 1 and 3 are the most useful and they are usability tweaks really and would speed up playing the game in a way SI haven’t tried before – e.g. something other than tweaking code for matche engines etc.

Let me know what you think…

Ta,

simosupersub

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Suggestion 1 – Can we have tick boxes in the squad view pages? Often I will want to do the following to several players at once:

- Move them between 1st/reserve/u18 teams

- Set them available for reserves

- Change squad status

- Basically anything on the ‘right click menu’

Use control or shift on the keyboard to select multiple players.

Suggestion 3 – A player search filter enchantment. Can we have the option to hide a player from future searches? Often players will play with a large database, now if I want to view everyone on free transfer (for example) with a large database in England, I get loads of players that are rubbish! Could we have an option on the right click menu that says hide from future searches? If this was implemented with the tick boxes suggestion, I can then search for all free transfer strikers, sort them by finishing. Tick all the ones with finishing less than 10, or low determination or whatever, and say hide from future searches. This way I don’t have to view them season after season and my searches are more productive and quicker. An additional option could be put on the filter page to say ‘Show players hidden from search’ or something as a way to bring these players back in view.

It's probably easier to add an attribute filter? filter all Strikers with a finishing of at least 15? and get rid of the poorer players? Filter > Customise > Attributes.

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Use control or shift on the keyboard to select multiple players.

Ok, didnt know you could do that, even as an 'experianced' player. I still think tick boxes would be more usefull. It would be more intuative for casual and new players, who will be more used to interacting with the mouse than keyboard strokes. I mean just having the tick boxes there makes it obvious to someone who has jus poped in an FM game for the first time that you can select and interat with mutiple players.

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"It's probably easier to add an attribute filter? filter all Strikers with a finishing of at least 15? and get rid of the poorer players? Filter > Customise > Attributes." - swisso

Again, as per my previous reply, it would be easier for new players. A casual player doesnt want to have to set loads of player filters up. Surly you would like to just hide some players for ever because you never want to sign them as there not good enough and you will never sign them, and not having them in view will make your searches more productive.

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It wouldn't.

would you like to be a little more productive and actaully say why it wouldn't.

Wouldnt be easier and quicker for a casual player to have that facility rather than spending ages setting up filters. Filters arnt perfect!

I may filter out all stikers with +15 finishing, heading, etc, and see he has pace of 5, and low determinationa and think he's not going to be great and want to hide him.

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I can see where you are coming from, but those 2 areas don't need desperately improving in my opinion. It should be a case of educating new FM gamers as to how the interface works and the Manual probably does this, although i'll concede i've never read it!

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I think the Reserves league is there for the exact same purpose as Suggestion 2 mate. Can you explain the difference between the reserve league and BCD friendlies?

- Because one aim of the game is for it to be realistic, and BCD's happen in real life

- I may not have enterd my team in the reserve league or U18's

- I may want to make more than 3 substitues during the game, I can have 12 subs in my squad

- I can play agasint possbily a higher quality of team in a BCD, depedning on my reserve league

- I may not want as much pulicity, this is behind closed doors, anyone can buy a ticket to a reserve game - including visiting scouts

Just a few I can think of off the top of my head.

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I can see where you are coming from, but those 2 areas don't need desperately improving in my opinion. It should be a case of educating new FM gamers as to how the interface works and the Manual probably does this, although i'll concede i've never read it!

They don't desperatly need improving, but can be easily be imporved quickly by SI. Remeber they sell what something like 100,000 copys of the game, and only say 10% of those come on this forum and are 'experianced' players. We are the minority. Something that SI try to imporve every year, especially for the casual player, is game speed. Now if you can just save 5 minutes an hour with a few interface tweaks for the casual player. Over say a 20 hour season on an 'average machine' (most of us on here have above average machines for the purpose of FM) then thats 90 minutes saved over a season and we just made the game 7.5% faster 'to use' for free (if my maths right)

Also, who (out off all the players, focusing on the casual ones) reads the manual! Less than half, less that a qauter, 10% - especailly the interface section on things like keyboard commands.

Which is the most likley scenario.

a) player reads manaul. loads game, goes to squad page. "ahh i read in the manual I can select multiple players and I can move all these rubish ones to the reserves. Player does this

b) Player cant wait to load game. Might, if at all, flick through manual whilst it loads. Goes stright to manageing a big team (they are a casual player) - ticks all the rubbish players and moves them to the reserves and transfer lists them. because as a casual player and computer user (even of little abillity), they allready have the conecpt of a tick box to make multiple selections then perform an action. Anyone ever ticked multiple e-mails in webmail and pressed delete - thats the concept.

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I think introducing tick-boxes is pretty pointless with the ability to select multiple players. You'd have two features doing the same job. Pointless. Hide from future searches is also a bit pointless. As has been explained the attribute filter is a far better way of doing this. I don't really see the point of BCDs either. You can arrange friendlys where you can make more than 3 subs for the reserves. I doubt a Derby Reserves friendly gets much publicity anyway.

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I think introducing tick-boxes is pretty pointless with the ability to select multiple players. You'd have two features doing the same job. Pointless. Hide from future searches is also a bit pointless. As has been explained the attribute filter is a far better way of doing this. I don't really see the point of BCDs either. You can arrange friendlys where you can make more than 3 subs for the reserves. I doubt a Derby Reserves friendly gets much publicity anyway.

Ahhhhh- no one so far gets this do they. These features arnt massivly for you, they are for the casual player. They are easier for the casual player to pick up.

FYI i'm pretty sure every club has BCD's and they are publised in the local paper. If you don't see the point of adding in a realistic thing that happens at every league club up and down the land, then why are you playing the most realistic managment sim? If they happen in football and they are controled by the manager, they should be in IMO.

hmmmm....this us a loosing battle if more hardcore FM players can't see things from a casual players POV. You need to rember you know more about how the game plays and how you interact with it than say 90% of the games players.

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Ahhhhh- no one so far gets this do they. These features arnt massivly for you, they are for the casual player. They are easier for the casual player to pick up.

FYI i'm pretty sure every club has BCD's and they are publised in the local paper. If you don't see the point of adding in a realistic thing that happens at every league club up and down the land, then why are you playing the most realistic managment sim? If they happen in football and they are controled by the manager, they should be in IMO.

hmmmm....this us a loosing battle if more hardcore FM players can't see things from a casual players POV. You need to rember you know more about how the game plays and how you interact with it than say 90% of the games players.

I fully understand you want to make things "easier" but i simply believe they're "easier" as they stand.

Anyone familiar with a Windows operating environment knows they can select multiple objects using the keyboard Control and Shift keys and if they don't know, they only need to be told once. This is a far far easier method than tickboxes. Tickboxes become inefficient and horrific to use when there's more than say 10 of them.

If you want to select the middle batch of players from a 100 player list, that's going to be quite horrific with tickboxes, can you imagine ticking up to 20 players? Whereas just 2 mouse clicks and the Shift key will do the job for you. We should encourage FM gamers to use the best method and Control/Shift is the best method. An example: When i filter youth players in the Player Search, i do all European Nationals under age 18 for X position and sort by Nationality. I then use Shift and multi-select say the Spanish Nationality and get 1 scout on those and select the Italians and get another Scout on those. A perfect example of how Control/Shift can be used excellently. Tickboxes would be wholey unsuitable for this.

Now you'll probably come back with "why not have them both?". There's no need to introduce tickboxes then "ween" them off once they're used to the game because it's such a minor issue and easy interface tool to learn. If they've become accustomed to tickboxes they may never discover Control/Shift select! I'm baffled as to why you want to make anyone use such a horrific select tool like tickboxes when theres far easier methods.

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would you like to be a little more productive and actaully say why it wouldn't.

Wouldnt be easier and quicker for a casual player to have that facility rather than spending ages setting up filters. Filters arnt perfect!

I may filter out all stikers with +15 finishing, heading, etc, and see he has pace of 5, and low determinationa and think he's not going to be great and want to hide him.

I agree with you, and Mr 28 Posts (M3Bh3...whatever) was not being helpful...and he was wrong. A player with 14 finishing and excellent all other key striker stats would not appear in that scenarion - all you want to do is hide the chaff. Fair enough.

Too many posters giving so called "good reasons" for things not happening in FM if you ask me. Let SI decide the viability of that option, thank you.

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What if these rubbish players progress?

Then you'll have to remember that you "hid" them away and try and find them again! :D You raised an excellent point though. Hiding away youngsters who aren't developed yet will bite you in the long term if you miss out on their transfer later on because you forgot to unhide them.

But in all seriousness, i really can't see why someone would want to "hide" players away. It's nonsense to suggest it will speed up in game play by reducing the amount of players shown to you. They'll still be there in the database of course, just.. hidden?. The filters are a very extensive way of filtering out the "crap" what isn't good enough for your side yet, it doesn't take an age to setup, just a few clicks and with sensible filtering you can choose the players you wish to see and those you wish to exclude.

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Then you'll have to remember that you "hid" them away and try and find them again! :D You raised an excellent point though. Hiding away youngsters who aren't developed yet will bite you in the long term if you miss out on their transfer later on because you forgot to unhide them.

But in all seriousness, i really can't see why someone would want to "hide" players away. It's nonsense to suggest it will speed up in game play by reducing the amount of players shown to you. They'll still be there in the database of course, just.. hidden?. The filters are a very extensive way of filtering out the "crap" what isn't good enough for your side yet, it doesn't take an age to setup, just a few clicks and with sensible filtering you can choose the players you wish to see and those you wish to exclude.

Ok, this is my last post on this topic because (most) people just dont get it I don't think.

I actaully studied usability of software as part of my degree, so i'm not talking utter balls, just looking at it from basic users point of view. I think you over estimate the average IT user. Go and pick some bloke out from down the pub, joe average off the street and ask him how to select multiple items in Windows. He more than likley won't know. Because he has just brought a laptop from PC world so he can go on the Internet and play a few games. Most people with a home PC know nothing about using a PC other than web, word processing, messenger and games where they will be self taught and not have learnt things like that. I mean most people know how to do a print screen, they've seen the button and pressed it and found out what it did. But most might not know how to print screen just the active window? I bet lots of you help family and friends when they screw there PC up, think how little most people know!

Thats one of my main points, no matter how much I say it most of you are still in this. "well i know how to do it, so everyone does" view.

In regards to the hideing players, i wasnt suggesting it would speed the game up by reducing processing time, because as you stated the players are still there. But in removing joe blogs the 28 y.o striker who just happens to have a couple of decent stats, or that yougster stirker with 20 pace but 2 for finishing, I have less to work through and it will make my searching quicker because I have less 'misses' on bad players that I have removed. Also you would be able to remove them from the hidden list (through a feature in filters - e.g. show hidden players tick box) at any time, so after a few seasons you could look at them again.

Thanks all for your comments, esp. Tiggeeeeerrr and anyone else being construtive

simosupersub

P.s. at least this wasnt another pointless post about how we should be able to design the kit, design the stadium, be the chairman, it look like fifa or that we should be able to choose the fillings in the pies at half time!

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There's no need to get itchy just because some people disagree! and i'm actually the most constructive poster in this thread, as i always am in my posts on these forums.

If you've studied software usability at degree level (I'm also studying Computer Engineering at Liverpool JMU currently!) then you should understand that crowding the interface with several ways of performing actions is an absolute no-no. You don't give the user 2/3/4 methods of performing 1 task, you design an interface capable of performing a task as easily and efficiently as possible.

I fully understand your concerns that new users might not be aware of the control & shift method in a windows environment but you're absolutely failing to acknowledge my point of view.

Why have 2 methods of doing something just to cater for a group of users who don't know a feature exists? That's basically the reasoning behind your suggestion, surely ringing alarm bells in your head? There's a feature in FM that not everyone knows about, so lets keep it hidden even further by giving them another feature to do the task instead? Thats just not logical and that's not what Interface design is about.

A simple tool-tip in the game would educate the users, or a mouser-over pop-up or alt-text to inform the user of the ability to multi-select. Education is the best way to inform, not redesign.

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I know about using CTRL and shift for selecting multiple players but I still think that tickboxes are a good idea because there have been many times when using CTRL that I have accidently clicked on the screen, i.e. when scrolling down and this unselects all the players.

I find using CTRL fiddlly.

behind closed doors friendlies could work but getting the AI not to play first teamers could be difficult and trials seem to be less common in FM than IRL in my experience.

I think being able to hide players for a certain search session whilst you adjust other filters would be more helpful in my opinion than hiding players forever just because players develop.

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i think that tickboxes would be a useful idea as currently when you ctrl and a, a list of players you can only move all those players you can only move them to a diffrent team, whereas i would like to be able to transfer list all my reserve players at once rather then having to transfer list them 1 by one.

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i think that tickboxes would be a useful idea as currently when you ctrl and a, a list of players you can only move all those players you can only move them to a diffrent team, whereas i would like to be able to transfer list all my reserve players at once rather then having to transfer list them 1 by one.

You can transfer list multiple players at once. You can also offer them all to clubs at once.

What you can't do is perform an action on say 10 players, when 1 of them can't accept that action. For example you can't select Loaned out players and "Offer to clubs", so if you select 9 first teamers and 1 loaned out player, you can't use the "Offer to clubs" because the game can't perform the group action since 1 of them can't accept that action.

This applies to whatever method you want to use to select multiple players, tickboxes or just using the keyboard.

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  • 2 weeks later...
just checked back on this after not browsing the boards for a while to find two amatures(post rating) (e.g. not hard core players like lots on here) think it would be usefull......hehe point made

Anyway, thanks all for your comments.

I think you will always be fighting a losing battle by trying to argue something from an 'amatures' point of view in these forums. There are not many casual gamers that sign up, so you will only get feed back from more 'hardcore' people.

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i think that tickboxes would be a useful idea as currently when you ctrl and a, a list of players you can only move all those players you can only move them to a diffrent team, whereas i would like to be able to transfer list all my reserve players at once rather then having to transfer list them 1 by one.

Select players -> Right-click -> Set transfer status -> Transfer listed.

Voila!

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