Please Read for FM11 - Improving massively the Fans and Press side of the game

Sure, FM has the football managing part down, it has a great database and all, but I think there is one side of the game that is still far below par.

This is the Fans, Press and sponsors among others.

I know you are going to say this is a Football Managing game, but those 4 things play a major role in the everyday lives of running a football club.

I am sure you guys will come up with many ideas, but I'll just list the main ideas I come up with here:

1. Firstly Press Conferences. They are a pain in the butt, annoying and repetative at the moment, not to mention if you don't want to deal with them, you can be sure to count on your assistant manager to screw them up anyway.

What I would do, is firstly, add around 1000 lines the reporters could say. This way press conferences are not so repetative and annoying and more interesting at the same time. Sure 1000 may sound like a big number, but when looking at the grande scheme of things, It is not that big of a number at all. Plus alot of these lines don't even need to have any in-game effect.

What I would do is depending on the type of conference (pre match, post match, transfer news), there would be different catagories of questions. Each catagory would have several questions for the computer to choose from. Depending on the type of conference, there will be several preset catagories to align with the type of conference. Understand me so far?

Like this, press conferences would still have some meaning and base structure, rather than just being some random questions picked out of a 1000 or so different questions.

I would also make these Press Conference questions easily moddable so people may add more questions to their game if they would like.

Now for dealing with the Assistant Manager. What I would do is make a new attribute called "Public Speaking" or something. This stat would appear on all staff, including yourself, as a regular attribute. This stat will also be on players, but as a hidden stat.

The better the attribute, the better the Assistant Managers are at having press conferences. Also, as well as having Assistant Managers attend press conferences, it would not be far fetched to be able to send your Club Captain or Club's Star players to attend some press conferences either. (Like the Post-Match conference)

2. Fanbase

3. Calendarial Based Events

4. Sponsors and their Role

5. The Board and the President

6. Rumours

(NOTE: It is getting rather late, and I don't think I have the brain capacity to expand on points 2-6 in as much detail as point 1, so I will save these for tomorrow)

Conclusion: There are not too many things FM needs to be improved on, but I think these few areas can be easily expanded enough to provide a better experience.

Some may argue that these things are too gimicky and unnecesary and that if I want these I should play FIFA Manager instead, but I will disagree. FIFA Manager is about improving the manager's(you) life by having WAGs, cars, houses etc. THOSE are gimics, what I am suggesting are not gimics. What I am suggesting is stuff that are part of a managers and clubs everyday life, and should be simulated in a game that is meant to ideally be a Realistic Football Managing Simulator.

To me it seems like SI have a good solid game done, and the most important and basic features are done correctly already, and all that's left in these areas is to get rid of any bugs that are here in Patch 3. And knowing SI, FM11 is just going to be FM10 Patch 3 with an updated database, some bug fixes and the same corner glitches that we will be bug testing until this time next year when Patch 11.3 get's realised.

What I am asking for is that SI add in a few simple to do features to the game that will make things funny and more interesting to FM11, and give some of us an actual reason to buy FM11.

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Like I said earlier, I'll make points 2-6 tomorow as I am already half asleep.