When arranging friendlies.....

if I select a date it would be rather nice if teams who aren't available on that date (and maybe a day or two each side) were greyed out rather than me having to click on them all to check their fixture list.

Good call

Your feeder and/or parent clubs should be on an easy to get to list in the friendly options as well.

I've mentioned this before but didn't get any response, but it certainly would save a lot of stuffing around.

i agree 100%

parent

whoever designed the arranging friends process needs to find a window and climb out of it.

Would love this feature.

Especially when you have a league, and have 3 teams,

<pre class="ip-ubbcode-code-pre">

Arsenal

Birmingham

Liverpool</pre>

and it says "Liverpool aren't available to play on this date" - so you swap them, and then it says "Birmingham aren't available to play on this date" - so you swap them too, only for it to say "Arsenal aren't available to play on this date"

Are you kidding me. Why didn't you just tell me at the start, that none of the teams I've chosen are open to play.

If you arrange your friendlies early you'll find that most clubs are available.

If you arrange them a week before the season starts (early-mid June in England) you should be fine.

PS I don't mean play them early-mid June, just arrange them then.

The latter case would be fine, but the general case is totally infeasible. Essentially what you are expecting is a huge amount of totally un-necessary pre-calculation to basically work out for every single club in the game whether they are available on a given date or not. Even if you limit it to just the ones in the Major clubs list you are still talking loads of pointless calculations when you are not remotely interested in playing 99.9% of those teams anyway.

Originally posted by glamdring:

The latter case would be fine, but the general case is totally infeasible. Essentially what you are expecting is a huge amount of totally un-necessary pre-calculation to basically work out for every single club in the game whether they are available on a given date or not. Even if you limit it to just the ones in the Major clubs list you are still talking loads of pointless calculations when you are not remotely interested in playing 99.9% of those teams anyway.

I agree, unless they mean it works the way it does now just when you select a team it superimposes their availabilty over/next to yours, that would be handy (if difficult to add).

Yeah, anything more helpful after you have selected a club you want to play is fine, just not something so generic.

If you select the club before selecting the date to play them on, it greys out the dates they are not available.

So for example, as Man Utd you might want to play Milan. Select Arrange Friendly, Choose club first, so in this case Milan, and when you come back to the Sate screen, the dates Milan cannot play because of other games, etc will be automatically greyed out, leaving you free to choose a date that suits you.

Originally posted by glamdring:

The latter case would be fine, but the general case is totally infeasible. Essentially what you are expecting is a huge amount of totally un-necessary pre-calculation to basically work out for every single club in the game whether they are available on a given date or not. Even if you limit it to just the ones in the Major clubs list you are still talking loads of pointless calculations when you are not remotely interested in playing 99.9% of those teams anyway.

You what ? All it has to do is check whether clubs are playing on that date or not , no more intensive than say, pulling up player search and filtering by attribute. They either have that attribute or they don't and shows the ones meeting that criteria. More players than clubs in the game I'd say.

I'm not saying it is a vastly complex amount of processing in absolute terms, I'm saying in relative terms it is a total waste - a function still has to run through every club and check its availability when you don't give a toss about most of them.

Sure payer filtering is more extensive, but then player filtering also takes quite a while too. I don't want it to take that long just for me to do one friendly, especially since at the moment you have to do each friendly one at a time, pressing the Arrange friendly button every time when you want to arrange 6 friendlies at once. Either it would have to store all that pointless club availability information (which is only worthwhile for until you next hit continue since it'll maybe change after that) or it has to recalculate it every single time.

Either way, it is inefficient.

As a compromise, maybe it would be best if you could select numerous teams for one date, say 10 teams, then click a "request availability" button. That way you could see which teams, out of the 10 selected, are available on the specific date you want. Make sense?

excellent idea.

At the moment it's bloody irritating to have to select a load of teams and then find out none of them are available.

Similarly the assman is useless - he managed to organise the grand total of 1 friendly for me this season - useless!

Originally posted by Simms:

As a compromise, maybe it would be best if you could select numerous teams for one date, say 10 teams, then click a "request availability" button. That way you could see which teams, out of the 10 selected, are available on the specific date you want. Make sense?

this would be a better way in temrs of realism, as you wouldnt have a complete list of every teams schedule, just like your pa has informed you that only 3 out of the 10 teams are available/willing to play on that day, please choose the one you would like to play.

What kills me, is when you set up a Friendly Cup, all going well, and then about a week beforehand the whole thing gets canceled as one team has got an InterToto Cup game or something.... That's the worst thing!

I think there should be a revamp in this department, maybe a button asking the assistant or whoever to search for suitable teams to play, and then a day later a list will be brought up of available clubs and you can choose a team to play against from here.

Or for the Cups in the pre-season, something similar, a small 10 to 12 club list of teams who would be willing to participate, and then you can choose. Far more realistic than churning through any old clubs and then setting it up, only for someone to pull out.

Some good points and good idea being raised here. Here's what I would like -

Your assistant manager compiles a list of teams who are available, but then he goes one step further, and filters them by how amenable they would be to the idea of a friendly. Examples follow below.

A) Galatasaray would be interested in taking part in a friendly cup, should you be able to arrange one.

B) Luton Town would be interested in a friendly, but may insist on staging the fixture.

C) Siena would be interested in a friendly, but would insist on being paid a fee of £XXXX.

D) Dundee United would be very interested in a friendly match without conditions.

I'm sure there are other possibilities, too. I just get fed up of every team I want to play in a friendly rejecting the offer.