FM..... Too many conflicting opinions making life difficult?

Just trawling through the forums over the last few months and it is so obvious to me as to why so many people struggle and why others are finding themselves unhappy with the game. In a nutshell there are far too many confliction opinions and surely the time has come for SI maybe to clarify certain things 100% once and for all and with a black and white explanation no grey areas.

Examples are numerous :

A says "Players need to get used to your tactics or you will never get any consistency."

B says "You need to keep changing your tactics around or you will get too predictable and the AI will suss you out."

A says "Creative freedom is a flair modifier and best used sparingly on players with high flair and decision stats."

B says "Creative freedom needs to be quite high on all players to allow them to make decision for themselves".

A says "Time Wasting is to see a game out, quite literally wasting time".

B says "Time Wasting means your team will take time on their build up, passing it around and will allow your players to make less hurried decisions."

A says "Counter attack can be used with an attacking mentality"

B says "Counter attack should be used with defensive formations".

A says "mentality, closing down and defensive line are linked."

B says "mentality, closing down and defensive line are not linked."

A says "direct passing is the ball in the air."

B says "direct passing is just getting the ball forward quickly."

A says "when protecting a lead take a forward off and put a defensive midfielder on."

B says "Don't try and protect a lead, just keep playing the same."

A says "man marking works best."

B says "global marking works best."

A says "You want your furthest forward striker making lots of forward runs."

B says "You don't want forward runs on your strikers in case they are offside."

The list goes on and on and I am sure that you can all name a few more conflicting opinions. Now football is about opinions and I accept that you can't make a manual outlining every little thing because you lose personal decisions as a manager but certainly I think we need a real explanation for things like what creative freedom actually is or what exactly does direct passing actually achieve, or what does time wasting do? Just the basics so people can find tactic building a less confusing experience.

Thoughts?

Everyone has an opinion, and there's no one way to make your team win.

It all can work, it all can fail. That's football.

People need to give up on the idea that this is like a Mario game, sometimes the Goomba just stomps on you.

Well a couple of those are mixing facts with tactical choices.

Man Marking and Global Marking.. what works best? Whatever works best in your situation. That's a fluid changing dynamic choice that has no 'right' answer.

Everyone has an opinion, and there's no one way to make your team win.

It all can work, it all can fail. That's football.

People need to give up on the idea that this is like a Mario game, sometimes the Goomba just stomps on you.

Yes but surely as I say the basics need to be clarified. It's very difficult for someone to design any tactic with not actually knowing what creative freedom or time wasting actually do for instance.

Your examples are mostly people giving wrong info and being corrected. The problem with the forums are there are a lot of people who give wrong advice and have no clue about what they are speaking about, there are only maybe 4 users who post help i would listen to in GD, you will never find them contradicting themselves or each other, the rest as far as im concerned do more harm than good most of the time in terms of advice.

Yes but surely as I say the basics need to be clarified. It's very difficult for someone to design any tactic with not actually knowing what creative freedom or time wasting actually do for instance.

Then they should be in the tactics forum reading Cleon's sports centre, its all in there. If you really want tactical help with FM, then the tactics forum is where you should be GD is just full of rants and moans, with people not really interested in help, but venting, go to the tactics forum and its a lot different.

Yes but surely as I say the basics need to be clarified. It's very difficult for someone to design any tactic with not actually knowing what creative freedom or time wasting actually do for instance.

Time wasting = players take longer when on the ball before making a pass for example, so it can be used to waste time at the end of a game or for slower build up play.

Creative freedom = how likely a player is to do something different when they have the ball, allows for them to do more than what their instructions are.

The confusion comes from people using GD to talk about tactic's. The confusion comes from users giving advice and stating something is a fact when it really isn't. If you want proper, clear advice then the tactics forum is what you want. It's much easier to keep to facts in the tactics forum compared to here due to less users and it been a specific forum.

will try to respond in bold:

Just trawling through the forums over the last few months and it is so obvious to me as to why so many people struggle and why others are finding themselves unhappy with the game. In a nutshell there are far too many confliction opinions and surely the time has come for SI maybe to clarify certain things 100% once and for all and with a black and white explanation no grey areas.

Examples are numerous :

A says "Players need to get used to your tactics or you will never get any consistency."

B says "You need to keep changing your tactics around or you will get too predictable and the AI will suss you out."

both aproches work, but the AI dont figure you out if you stick to one formation, but sticking to one formation may limit your flexibility in dealing with whatever weakness that one formation you do use may have

A says "Creative freedom is a flair modifier and best used sparingly on players with high flair and decision stats."

B says "Creative freedom needs to be quite high on all players to allow them to make decision for themselves".

im honestly not sure if any of those are right, maybe to some extent but not exclussivly so, I think it depends a lot on what you want from the player in your tactical system

A says "Time Wasting is to see a game out, quite literally wasting time".

B says "Time Wasting means your team will take time on their build up, passing it around and will allow your players to make less hurried decisions."

its B, time wasting is pretty much how much patience your team plays with

A says "Counter attack can be used with an attacking mentality"

B says "Counter attack should be used with defensive formations".

it can work with both

A says "mentality, closing down and defensive line are linked."

B says "mentality, closing down and defensive line are not linked."

to be honest I dont know the answer to this one, and its not anything I have payed a great deal of attention to figure out

A says "direct passing is the ball in the air."

B says "direct passing is just getting the ball forward quickly."

its B

A says "when protecting a lead take a forward off and put a defensive midfielder on."

B says "Don't try and protect a lead, just keep playing the same."

you need to read the game and observe what is happening in the ME, it depends on the situation and how well or poorly the team have played so far and also how far ahead you are

A says "man marking works best."

B says "global marking works best."

for me agressive full Zonal have always worked better, maybe the football upbringing I have had make it a lot more easy to understand this particular system better, and hence make it easy for me to implement it on the game, but there's also a lot of ppl having succes with hybrid systems or full man marking (Cleon mostly notably for this one I supose), so well it depends on your style and how you wish and expect your team to play

A says "You want your furthest forward striker making lots of forward runs."

B says "You don't want forward runs on your strikers in case they are offside."

again depends on the tactic and what you want your striker to do

The list goes on and on and I am sure that you can all name a few more conflicting opinions. Now football is about opinions and I accept that you can't make a manual outlining every little thing because you lose personal decisions as a manager but certainly I think we need a real explanation for things like what creative freedom actually is or what exactly does direct passing actually achieve, or what does time wasting do? Just the basics so people can find tactic building a less confusing experience.

Thoughts?

So is it a case that every instruction has a pro and con to it, even negative instructions, like time wasting?

I suppose the best way SI can remove all ambiguity is to have a more in-depth description on each instruction in the TC, including the pro and con of each tactical connotation. And/or, the TC shouldn't allow you to choose contrary tactical instructions, which can lead you down an incorrect tactical path, and that may send the ME haywire, creating dodgy moments.

That way player instruction definitions that are really opinions wouldn't be necessary.

Yeah, it couldn't go wrong with more information being presented to the user (though it should probably be via an advanced button somewhere to avoid clogging up what is already a pretty packed screen).

Not that it adds much to the discussion here, but I've often felt that, for all the talk of tactics, skill etc., one of the biggest determining factors in football is luck. Obviously, as the better sides and the bigger clubs tend to win more, it can't purely be all about luck, but I do feel that, in any given match, quite a lot comes down to it - whether it's a lucky decision, a lucky break of the ball, a mistake by the opposition, that kind of stuff.

Then they should be in the tactics forum reading Cleon's sports centre, its all in there. If you really want tactical help with FM, then the tactics forum is where you should be GD is just full of rants and moans, with people not really interested in help, but venting, go to the tactics forum and its a lot different.

Oh sure the Sports Centre is a fantastic piece of work that is invaluable and Cleon is and has been a massive help to me and I am sure many others over the years. However for any struggling newbies it can be an extremely daunting piece to read through so I thought maybe a basic "Hints and Tips" or "Layman's Terms to FM" could be also there possibly where people could look if they so wished or leave it if they wanted to do their own thing.

It's just I have noticed a lot of threads where people are having a hard time this year, more than usual I think, and that's a shame. So a very basic help centre if you like could assist a lot of people who may have been swayed by other incorrect advice that they have read.

I couldn't agree more with the OP. While it's true that there isn't one "right" way to play and many different approaches work, it's daunting for a newcomer to understand (and even worse if you know nothing about football tactics in general). People like Cleon do a good job of presenting concrete examples -- specific situations, accompanied by a single tactical change and the subsequent effect on the match (by the way, I find this much more helpful than the TT&F, which really suffers from lack of examples). But I somehow still find myself wishing there were more information straight from the source. Let's be honest: the manual is woefully inadequate. SI has never even attempted to document how things work in detail, and instead has forced the community to do this work on its behalf.

There is a huge number of variables at work in the match engine, and while it's easy to write about it in abstract terms that reflect its mimicry of "real-life" football, the problem is that we do cannot interact with it in the same way as we would as a real-life manager. We can't just have conversations with players and tell them to specifically do X and Y -- we only have a limited set of options for interacting with the computer and influencing players' behavior. These means don't always work in the ways we would intuitively expect them to. Confounding the problem is the fact that the match engine is an imperfect approximation of player behavior and probably has bugs to boot. I imagine that many of us would be surprised by what the code is actually doing were we given access to it (not that I'm asking for this, however). Just my two cents.

I like the game and, after many many hours of play, am only beginning to understand how the match engine appears to work. It's too bad that the only way to become a great FM player is tons of practice, since ultimately it's just a game and not a full-time job. But some people like it that way, I guess.

Plus I must add that I am sure I am not the only "Classic Tactics" manager left, (I hope they will always remain or I'm stuffed!!) and we tend to create say two or three tactics that we religiously stick with. Therefore I am sure some basic hints on how things work and what they mean helps Classic Managers massively because with the TC things like CF, Closing Down etc are pre coded.

Plus I must add that I am sure I am not the only "Classic Tactics" manager left, (I hope they will always remain or I'm stuffed!!) and we tend to create say two or three tactics that we religiously stick with. Therefore I am sure some basic hints on how things work and what they mean helps Classic Managers massively because with the TC things like CF, Closing Down etc are pre coded.

I may be misunderstanding your comment, but I think duties and roles in the TC are just out-of-the-box configurations for the "classic" sliders. So to see what a specific role/duty actually does from a classic perspective, change a player's role/duty in player instructions and see how it changes the sliders.

Plus I must add that I am sure I am not the only "Classic Tactics" manager left, (I hope they will always remain or I'm stuffed!!) and we tend to create say two or three tactics that we religiously stick with. Therefore I am sure some basic hints on how things work and what they mean helps Classic Managers massively because with the TC things like CF, Closing Down etc are pre coded.

The TC is just templates over the classic tactics, everything you can do in classic is laid out simpler in the TC. Think of the TC as being a tool to explain how things work and make things much simpler than figuring out slider combo's.

In reply to your previous post, the thing about football is its not simple in a tactical sense, massive amounts of detail going into preparing for a professional game and FM tries, and fails sometimes, to replicate this, if you want a simple football game then there are FIFA and others that dont require a lot of footballing knowledge, FM is more the geeks football game imo. Its never going to be a pick up and blast through game, not the PC version anyway, the Iphone version is more along those lines to be honest.

The confusion comes from people using GD to talk about tactic's. The confusion comes from users giving advice and stating something is a fact when it really isn't. If you want proper, clear advice then the tactics forum is what you want. It's much easier to keep to facts in the tactics forum compared to here due to less users and it been a specific forum.

I couldn't agree more with the OP. While it's true that there isn't one "right" way to play and many different approaches work, it's daunting for a newcomer to understand (and even worse if you know nothing about football tactics in general). People like Cleon do a good job of presenting concrete examples -- specific situations, accompanied by a single tactical change and the subsequent effect on the match (by the way, I find this much more helpful than the TT&F, which really suffers from lack of examples).

I think part of the problem is that many people post in GD because they can't accept that their tactics are to blame and it is usually AI cheating threads or rubber banding threads that get the most posts.

However, as Zoetermeer has touched on, it is the defence against these rants by the likes of Cleon and WWfan with excellent examples and explanations that often help the less experienced player understand the game mechanics better and while these threads are probably a source of frustration at times they do actually help some people.

This is a forum so many opinions are to be expected, especially with a game such as FM where there is not always one correct answer due to the various ways of management style. Just don't take every opinion as fact as you'll be ok.

The TC is just templates over the classic tactics, everything you can do in classic is laid out simpler in the TC. Think of the TC as being a tool to explain how things work and make things much simpler than figuring out slider combo's.

In reply to your previous post, the thing about football is its not simple in a tactical sense, massive amounts of detail going into preparing for a professional game and FM tries, and fails sometimes, to replicate this, if you want a simple football game then there are FIFA and others that dont require a lot of footballing knowledge, FM is more the geeks football game imo. Its never going to be a pick up and blast through game, not the PC version anyway, the Iphone version is more along those lines to be honest.

Oh I'm more than aware of that. I've played since early Champ Manager and I am pretty comfortable with how it works. I just don't like the TC and the shouts but that's a personal opinion. I only started the thread because I saw that many people especially some new to the game find it very daunting and are unhappy with a lot of things but with as I say a basic hints and tips would at least iron out once and for all some of the conflicting opinions you get on the forums.

What's "GD"?

general discussion