My (Probably Rubbish) Suggestions for FM2012

As we all know, it's never too early to get these things in circulation, no doubt every single one of these has been discussed to death by everyone. Nevertheless here they are based on what I've played of FM2011 to date:

Players/staff:

1) Players appear to have a decision date mid summer where they look at their careers are headed and sometimes retire. The problem with this at the moment is that there are some perfectly decent players retiring before their thirties because teams can't get work permits for them/aren't even trying to sign them. The consequence is that national teams who might use those players (thereby requalifying them for work permits and potentially saving their FM careers) no longer have them available for selection. This causes selection problems if you happen to be managing some of the more obscure nations (and a few not so obscure!), and makes the game easier if you are managing a higher profile nation where players aren't retiring at the drop of a hat and happen to be competing with nations filled with greyed out players. The solution could be to "sign" these under 30 guys to club sides residing within those nations whose leagues have not actively been loaded into the game. The logic applied in FM2011 is more or less ok first players over 30 and as such is fine for them.

2) If a guy on your shortlist retires from playing and becomes a staff (looking at you Diego Tristan) they should be removed from your shortlist automatically. I've no idea what happens if they retire right out of the game but I certainly hope those are removed from your shortlist too.

3) Add some obvious "safe" options for player discussions, not necessarily ones that will say, stop them from handing in a transfer request, but safe enough that they don't register you as tyrant of the year in their disliked personnel and proceed to emo over it for the next 9 months or so.

4) If a player/staff find your terms acceptable during negotiations, they should not turn down the contract a few days later if they have no other offers.

5) Would quite like to be able to hide the silhouette that replaces pictures for real players where no picture exists, but keep real pictures and newgen pictures active.

Club/Board/Confidence:

1) It gets really boring watching guys in the same strip season in season out. In fact kit stagnation is the number 1 cause of journeyman careers in my household (I'm that fickle, sorry). Give us the opportunity to modify our kits every season. Sometime around the time that the groundsman pays his annual visit and you get asked about reserve and under 18 teams. Obviously don't necessarily let us edit the home colours, but the away colours and the finer details on all strips (stripes, v-shapes etc) should be fair game.

2) Dynamic rivalries please. There should be 2 types of rival (still split between fierce and other depending on a out of 20 score). These should be geographical proximity (permanent, never changes) and competitive proximity. Did Manchester Utd ever have any kind of rivalry with Chelsea when Chelsea were down in league 2? I doubt it, and I bet any kind of rivalry between them would die out if one team dropped away down to the darkest depths of beyond. Obviously if Team A's proximity rivalry with Team B was relatively low, making them an "Other" rival, if the competitive rivalry rose higher than that it would supersede the proximity value, possibly making them a fierce rival. Essentially the higher rivalry value would supersede the other.

3) Still getting the fans were disappointed that you released this rubbish backup guy about 9 months ago type messages in the monthly board confidence. What should be considered is having 2 types of confidence messages, minor and major. If minor then they should valid for show in the confidence summary for 1 or 2 months, if major then obviously they might be displayed for several months.

4) My job security shouldn't magically dissipate during the close season, at present it goes on summer holiday and never comes back. however it should drop heavily if the opening few games go very badly and the chairman is not patient.

International:

1) I would like a way to subscribe to all international job availabilities. At the moment we seem to get the major ones but not the more obscure nations where you may have to begin your international management career to get on that ladder.

2) Let us declare interest in international jobs.

Press Conferences:

1) Ask the community to provide you with press conference questions to allow you to expand this feature. In fact ask your staff and club researchers to come up with one each. If a good number of them were implemented it would become one of richer areas of the game.

2) Give us the option to block some questions from being asked, there are still some that get asked before and after every. single. match.

3D Match View:

1) I would like a free camera that I could control with the mouse (direction facing)- wasd (moving up/left/down/right) - and the mouse wheel (zooming in/out).

2) Bring back the info panels being your team/opponent team rather than home/away.

3) Make the info panels resizable by mouse click drag.

4) Allow the transparency of the info panels to be modified by the user.

Training:

1) Quite frankly, I bet many users neglect this area of the game because it simply isn't fun. I know I do and it frequently results in youth players failing to develop. Allow our assistants/coaches to generate new schedules according to their training attributes.

Social Networking:

1) Now don't get me wrong as this kind of stuff isn't really my thing, but facebook might be a good shout particularly as APIs for posting to it seem to be common around the web.

Editor

1) This one is a big ask, because it has a lot of knock on effects, but it would be absolutely fantastic if we could amalgamate multiple countries into one league structure and have that calculate properly for continental competitions (example merge Eng/Sco/Wales/N.Ire or N.Ire/Ire or Swe/Den/Fin/Nor or Netherlands/Belgium etc and have the coefficients calculate and allocate competition qualification from season 2 onwards based on the fewer setups, with season one remaining as those sides who qualified via the real life structures from last season).

Other

1) Don't shoot me but: Chairman Manager mode, go on, you know you want to...

Well written thread and some good suggestions there. It's nearly lunch time so couldn't read through it all but will have a closer look later

Agreed- well presented thread there with some really good suggestions- particularly the press conferences and interactuiion ones.

Love the idea of the kits, i would love my teams strips to change every season!

Facebook would be nice, posting anything you want to fb (eg signings, match results, run of games unbeaten etc)

Youth development is very big for me, one of my main focuses in fact.

All reasonable ideas, although these ones would be most important for me

Good post. Agree with all the points, but especially these ones:

• "safe" options for player discussions
  
• hide the silhouette that replaces pictures for real players where no picture exists
  
• opportunity to modify our kits every season
  
• Dynamic rivalries please
  
• Bring back the info panels being your team/opponent team rather than home/away.
  and anything that improves long term games (and youth development)
  

Agree that in the longterm things should be more dynamic.

The two main things I want to see is More options when sending a player out on loan and Assigning roles and instructions to the player rather than the tactic.

I usually play as Man Utd and as you probably know have a lot of talented youngsters in need of a good loan spell for first team football. In any one season I may loan out 10-15 players. many of them all at the same time. Say I loan out 10 players and recieve 10 offers for each player, that is 100 news items that need responding to. Thats quite a lot and takes a bit of time.

When im loaning out my youngsters, obviously its for first team football. So an option to only offer your players to clubs that will take him as a 'valuable member of the first team' would be a massive help. Im not interested in sending out my players to clubs where he will be a back up player. If we cant offer him just to clubs offering first team football then at least be able to reject offers automatically which dont match a certain criteria.

In a players setting for transfers there are many options. Accept all offers above X Pounds. Rejects all offers below Y Pounds. This takes away the burden of responding to all the messages that you dont need by them automaticcaly being rejected or accepted. The only option available regarding loans is Accept all loan offers. We need more options here. Like I say, if I have 100 messages for offers for players, anout 45 of them might be offers for 'backup for the first team', which I dont want. AUTOMATICALLY REJECT THEM! Better still, allow us the option to only offer them to clubs which will take him as a 'Valuable member of the first team'.

So............after all the ones you dont want have been rejected we are now left with the 55 ish messages for players which will be a valuable first team member. So far so good. Now comes the next problem. In the message, all we have is the name of the team that want the player. How useful is that? Not at all really especially if you are many seasons in and you dont know who has been promoted or relegated.

As Man Utd I usually want my players to play in the highest league possible. This is where an option would be useful to only offer a player to teams in a certain division. That way I wont have my best youngster which could play at Championship level, recieving offers from League 2 teams which get rejected. If this isnt possible then at least inclube more info about the club making the offer. Which league they are in would help for a start. The only way of knowing at the moment is to click the team in question so their squad comes up to see which league they are in. When there are 55 message left to go and you need to do this for every one to see which leagues the teams are in is annoying to say the least.

So after you have gone through you remaining 55 or so messages and rejected all the offers from teams in leagues that are too low, you are now left with say 25 messages for players where the player will be a 'Valuable member of the first team' and in the highest league available from all the offers. If that was to be that it would certainly make me a happy man. Saying that, there is more info which could be included in the initial message which would allow you to pick and choose which offers you accept or reject more carefully. At the moment we do see how long they want the loan to last in the message. That is good. What we dont see is if they will pay any wages to the player of a fee to the club. To view this info you again need to click each offer and look at what is being offered. The constant flicking back and forth between screens is very tedious. And as you can imagine, doing this for 100 messages for all the other things is certainly starting to grate now.

In summary, I would like:

Options to offer players on loan only to clubs where he will be a Valuable First Team Player

Option to automatically reject any offers not meeting this request

Option to offer players to specific leagues

Option to automatically reject any offers which are from teams outside of the leagues offered to

Another thing which would make the game, not nesessarily easier but quicker and a lot less tedious to play is to assign specific roles and settings to a player rather than to the tactic. For example, in my tactic I have two strikers. One a Complete Forward Support (Rooney) and a Trequartista Attack (Berbatov). If I sub Rooney off for Owen, Owen automatically becomes a Complete Forward Support even though he does not play like this. I want Owen as a Poacher Attack so I then have to change the tactic just because I have swapped a player. If the role was saved to the player and not the tactic, it would automatically change. For people who like to micro-manage this is fine but for quite a lot of people its annoying and tedious. Especially when playing friendlies and your changing more than 3 players constantly.

So with this you would have your tactic set up which would consist of your formation, mentality, tempo, passing and so on. But each individual player would have their own roles and instructions assigned to them so no matter who you put into your tactic, the players would already be set up to do what you want them to do.

I'm all for dynamic rivarlies.

Yes:

Dynamic rivalries

Community coming up with press conference questions (yes, yes, yes - let's have a bank of thousands of questions which might actually make this feature interesting)

Info panels resizable

Youth development the responsibility of your acadamy coach rather than you if you delegate control over to them

Less inflamatory options for private chat interactions with your players

Minor and major concerns in confidence screen

Manager confidence not disappearing during the close season (didn't realise it did tbh)

Setting loan criteria as described by StevoRobbo

Option to assign tactics to position or player. Sometimes I play a game where the tactics are the be all and end all and sometimes I play where the players dictate how I play, so I would want a choice here.

No:

Choosing kits - not the manager's job.

Chairman Manager

I actually like that shortlisted players remain on my shortlist after they've retired

My Suggestions:

I can have a private chat with a player and warn them I might be selling them, but I can't tell them it's due to the club's financial situation. I'm more than £1m in the red as manager of Boca Juniors and a few of my players went emo on my ass when I transfer listed them and tried to tell them. You can tell them the club needs money after you've transfer listed them, but not before, and by that time they're one razor blade away from full-on emo mode anyway.

I'd also like a much bigger stats model in the game. I can see it's been improved this year, and I like the news items that say that "Player X has completed X% of passes, the highest in the league", but I'd like to see others that say "that was the first time club X won at Club Y in 30 years". The only problem there is that all past fixtures would have to be inputted into the database so I'm not sure how feasible that is, but I'd love it to be in there nonetheless!! Just pay a data monkey to do it and it should be ready for FM2014!

I like those ideas and they would be good.

I totally agree with the suggestions from StevoRobbo about player loans. This was brought up and suggested before so I am not sure if it was rejected out of hand, or is difficult to implement, or is under review.

I like the ideas generally. I'd probably throw my support behind the training idea. "Allow our assistants/coaches to generate new schedules according to their training attributes." This makes a lot of sense and would be a good way of making the training attributes of your coaching staff more important...

Good suggestions here in both SteveRobbo and Ng's threads, I came across the loan player thing when looking to loan out Aaron Spear in my Newcastle game last night.

Definitely agree with the above suggestions on being able to specify options when offering players out on load - being able to specify squad status/league/etc

It would also be good in the accept/reject all transfer/loan offers dialogue box to be able to further specify the details of the deal. So, for instance, if I receive 15 offers for a player, I am currently able to say 'accept all the offers over £10m but reject the offers below this'. But that doesn't preclude me clicking that option, but some of the offers over £10m being over 48 months, some being full cash in advance. At the moment if i don't go through the deals one by one i sometimes have a situation where i end up with my player going to a club who are paying me over 48 months so i don't have the transfer fee available to reinvest. It'd be great to diversify the accept/reject option to include what types of payment you will/won't accept.