Things that grind my gears...

Computer games are meant to be fun, right?

I'm guessing that notion was lost on whomever developed the contract negotiation system in this year's game. I mean I thought patience was meant to be a virtue, that was until I came across SI's attempt to personify it in the form of a pernickety p**** supposed to be an agent with a rating of 19 that forces upon you the most mundane grind of a routine, which involves repeatedly toggling down a bunch of unengaging numbers through an unintuitive interface that takes an age because seemingly nobody at SI had the wit to realise that most of us playing the game are blessed with a keyboard in addition to a mouse. How much less of a drag would it be if we could actually type in an amount rather than be pounding a mouse button for a successive period, and then having to repeat the entire process all over again as we indulge in what SI's conceit would have us think is 'haggling'. Absolute rubbish! The whole negotiation mechanism is hideous, it's meant to be a game, not a Freudian test of anal retentiveness!

What has really left me peeved is the fact that SI's latest patch is tantamount to them remotely sabotaging my enjoyment by breaking my game from their headquarters after taking my money! In doing so they've inseted new graphical glitches and doubled down on elements in the game that never had translated especially well from reality for instance the coach allocation system which now feels arbitrarily limited, counter-intuitive and even more artificial!

SI why don't you make real changes that would streamline our experience of the game? For instance when managing in the UK and offering a group of players out on loan why can't we have the option of setting the desired period of the loan from the outset rather having to renegotiate 50 or so offers individually from 3 month lengths to season-long loans?

And why all the unneccesary padding? For instance when you renegotiate an offer, what is the point of the opposite party sending a new offer with the terms you just suggested, and then you having to re-approve those terms that you requested? The futility of the whole process is magnified when you have to go through it over and over with each loan deal. Just cut to the chase already! Rather than have another offer made if the club is willing to meet the offer you negotiated that you then have to action, you should just have an inbox message that the offer has been met and the club are negotiating with the player.

There's so many stupid little things! Why can't you sell a player bought in the same transfer window, even though this obviously happens in reality? Why does it take years and years of positional training for a player to become "natural" in a position even though in the space of a year between new installments of the game, players like James Milner for example can go from being a winger to a central midfielder, making a mockery of the ingame process; a mockery compounded by the players having to remain in training for that position for an indeterminate perios so as not to completely forget how to play there, even if they consistently are fielded in that position. Ridiculous.

Also what is the point of being cryptic about the attributes that make non-players effective other than he fact that SI are too lazy to go the whole hog of overhauling the backroom staff recruitment system? A while ago I googled the attributes of physios and came across the most profoundly depressing page I've ever seen on the web. Someone had actually gone to the extent of performing bona fida statistical analysis to find the characteristics of a good physio on Football Manager, charting numbers of injuries per season, length of time players spent out comparitive to predicted time spent out, relative to various attributes. Now there's someone who ought to be in a lab somewhere investigating efficacy in pharmacological interventions in cancer patients or something and instead his/her apparent obsessive-compulsive tendancies are being exploited by the ambiguities of Football Manager!

You know what? I'm going to go OTT: SI Games, you destroy lives.

I hate It when a member of SI tracks me down and takes my money as well. oh wait....

haha i fail to argue with a few of those points but it's christmas new patch out end of January maybe one small one before lets see and trust me i am one of the most anti fm 2012 players on this forum

Two thingsn its just a game and it wast just money. There are far more important things in life. Yes its important to campaign for change but - personally can get past the little things and I find an enjoyable game underneath.

Two thingsn its just a game and it wast just money. There are far more important things in life. Yes its important to campaign for change but - personally can get past the little things and I find an enjoyable game underneath.

Nine-iron, I've been playing Football/Championship Manager for over 10 years now, so don't talk to me about finding the enjoyable game underneath. Some of the things I mentioned have been repeated for more than 5 seasons now and it makes me question whether the people designing the have spent any time playing it themselves? Sometimes it seems like they're operating on the premise of "don't get high on your own supply"