Do you want to be able to more easily customise your FM experiance? Opinions wanted

All of this came from a different thread but I thought it was getting increasingly off-topic (my bad) and probably deserved it's own thread. So I stuck it here. I hope moderators don't mind.

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I think there is always going to be a struggle to please both the 'hardcore' and the 'casual' fan at the same time. If you visit this forum you are probably going to be closer to the former than the latter.

I don't want difficulty modes. FM seems to pride itself on being a fairly credible simulation rather than just a game and in most games difficulty modes seem to involve empowering/depowering the relative strengths of the human or AI players.

Instead what I would I like to see are lots more optional handicaps. These would focus on removing information that you have access to which there is no parrallel in real life. For instance i'd like option at the start to go without the 'Player Search' tool.

Now people might say: Well duh, you could just not use Player Search, no one is forcing you too stoopid. But you know what? Not everyone operates like that. For me that's like telling me if I don't like medpacks in a shooter then I should simply refrain from picking them up. It's missing the point.

I both similtaneously want to use everything at my disposal to win, yet at the same time I don't want to have things at my disposal that feel overpowered. Fair enough if people want these tools in the game. All i'm asking for is the ability to turn them off if I so choose.

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Ticking an option to disable the player search is no different from not using it,

I completely disagree. Picking rules at the start of the game that you can't retrospectively change and don't have to enforce yourself is essentially different from choosing to play in a certain way.

Having to constantly consciously exercise restraint is tedious and distracting. Doing so makes me feel as if i'm pulling in two directions at once. I'm not talking about bugs or exploits, i'm talking about things specifically designed to make the player's life easier.

Nope, they're not - you're missing the point. You play the game in whichever way makes you enjoy it.

I disagree. This is at least partially an issue of balance.

As a long time user i'm intimately familiar with FM as a game and that makes it so much less of a challenge and therefore less fun. I always win and it sucks. For goodness sakes the last time I got fired as manager was back in 08' . I'm not trying to brag or pretend that i'm the world's greatest FM player, because i'm certainly not. But for more experienced or advanced human players the current toolset is too powerful. The game is far too easy to be a satisfactory challenge and I think that's something a significant number of FM players have been saying for a while now.

Here’s an allegory:

In multiplayer or PvP games the weaknesses or unbalanced elements of a game are mitigated by the fact that human players automatically adapt to these problems. For instance, say we are all playing an online multiplayer shooter. In this shooter a gun - let’s call it the BOOMSTICK - happens to be overpowered. Surprise surprise everyone ends up using it.

By comparison in FM11 the game essentially pits the player against the game world.

Allegorically speaking we know that the BOOMSTICK is where it’s at. But unlike human players the AI is utter balls at recognising, exploiting and adapting to weaknesses. It can still barely discern between a pistol and an assault rifle, never mind figure out they should just stick to the BOOMSTICK the whole time.

But you know what might be better? Letting the player select an option that automatically randomly rotates guns when they respawn. They wouldn’t have access to the overpowerful BOOMSTICK everytime and will probably get additional satisfaction from having to try new guns and figure out new playing strategies.

Sure they could do this manually freaking every time they freaking respawned but you know what would be nice? A little tick box that let them select the option once when they load up the game and forget about it forever afterwards.

Would that really be so horrible?

With options such as 'Mask Player Attributes', 'Valid Takeovers Only' and choosing your starting Reputation already in the game there is precedent for this kind of user customization in FM. Why is more of that bad?

with the exception that the needless addition of code could have far-reaching consequences.

Would there really be that much needless addition of code? In the example I gave theoretically you are removing access to that feature, not changing the nature of the feature itself.

EDIT:

Conversely-speaking, suppose a player fancied playing without those pesky injuries. Would it really be so terrible to allow the user to disable them?