FM12 idea: Steam friends / online network play

Steam already have decent community tools. Steam integration is clearly something SI are comfortable with.

So why not go another step. Allow the traditional method for joining other people's network games online, but also allow us to invite each other via Steam. That way a Steam group / friends list could be used to manage and run long term FM12 network games.

Even more important now FML is dead :(

if done right this would be a big plus for me as i like the network games but always frustrating when one person can get in and another cant

Even more important now FML is dead :(

Yeah. The best thing SI can do is try to recapture as many of those players as they can to the main series by improving on the online elements.

another thing, possibly worth a new thread, would be the ability to "share" any page in the game. Right now we can upload videos of our goals or tweet achievements. Why not let us click "Share page", leading to the game taking a screenshot and uploading it to a partner site, throwing us a link. Within a minute or so we could then link friends to our new regen centerforward without messing around with print screen, saving to the right file type and manually uploading.

I have posted a few times about the state on online multiplayer in FM and how improving it will make a much better game. Definitely integration with Steam, and I have asked for tools to be made available (much like the Editor and the Resource Archiver), an option for a Dedicated Server which could run in a CLI (command line interface) rather than a GUI (graphical user interface) - that would enable people to run games on a dedicated server, opening options that were never available in the past (companies might sell to people FM Servers).

The best game I ever played on FM was an online game with 3 other people on FM2010 in the Welsh League. It was a very hard challenge, and there were a few cup finals and semi finals against my friends that went all the way into extra time or penalties (and that's 3-3 or 4-4 or 4-3 at the end of the game before penalties) - the most exciting games ever! The biggest problem though was those playing had a lot of lag - As the host, my upload rate was only 30kBps on average - whereas the people need to download megabytes of information per minute (each click they make is a request from the host for the information on that screen).

Hosting a Dedicated server (e.g. on Amazon EC2) enables upload speeds of 10Mbps - that's a big capacity for a group of 10 players to play the game with no issues.

However don't forget that SI are working on a title called Football Manager Online following a deal with a Korean company, so this is probably unlikely to happen. Miles has even said so on twitter.