Inbox slowness in later seasons

Hi,

I've only been playing for a bit over a month, and am currently well into the third season of my first game (as the SJ Earthquakes in MLS).

Starting sometime in the second season, the inbox screen has gotten increasingly sluggish. Initially I thought this was because I had too many subscriptions (I had starred a ton of players), and in fact removing those did help things. However, over time it's gotten worse and worse - loading the inbox usually takes about 30s now, and just clicking between items takes 5-10s each, even for things I've already read. I am down to a bare minimum of subscriptions (my own league, basically).

Performance of all other aspects of the game is fine (except for team meetings, which I gather from reading these forums is a known issue). My machine is not spectacular (Quad 2.4Ghz, "4Gb" of RAM which is really ~3.2 since it's 32-bit Windows XP), but it was plenty to run smoothly in the earlier seasons. Looking at the Task Manager, whatever the inbox is doing is clearly CPU-bound (memory usage doesn't seem to be a problem). I run with the virus checker disabled, and the save has a "small" database.

Is there something that accumulates over time that I should be clearing out somehow, beyond subscriptions? (i.e., is there some way I should be purging my inbox every so often?) Or is this just an issue with the game itself? I don't see too many other people complaining about it so I'm wondering if I'm the only person who sees it.

Thanks!

Check how many scout reports you have. Clearing most of the useless ones helped speed my game back up when it was becoming very unresponsive.

Pressing F4 used to work faster for me on older versions.

Check how many scout reports you have. Clearing most of the useless ones helped speed my game back up when it was becoming very unresponsive.

Thanks, I'll give this is a try. Is there some trick to deleting a lot of these at once? I can do it on an individual, or a small number (5?), but if I try to delete from ~20 players at once, I get a different set of menu items in the right-click menu and "Remove Scouting Reports" isn't one of them.

Should still give you that option :confused:

How are you accessing the reports? The best way is to go to search screen, remove all filters and sort by recommendation. Then just highlight a selection (for example everyone below 3 stars) and right click - remove.

Ah, I think what's going on is that some of the ones I had selected before didn't actually have scouting reports for them -- I was starting from the top, and I think some prominent players have built-in star ratings. (I don't remember scouting Messi for MLS, but somehow I still know he's a 5 ). Working in reverse from the bottom seems to be working better...

Hmm, well, this doesn't seem to have helped much. I cleared out the scouting reports up through 2.5 star, which was a good chunk of them. It does seem very slightly faster, but having not done real benchmarking before hand I can't say for certain. It is still around ~25s or so to load the inbox.

AHA! Oddly enough, I think the problem was notes. I had 80-100 of them, because when I was newb I would save every match report and every pre-match scouting report notification (even though the latter is useless to save).

It seems that something about the note system scales really poorly - if I had to take a crazy guess I'd say it had to do with the way the game automatically categorizes notifications saved as notes. Deleting all the saved notes (which has to be done one-by-one ) seems to have solved hte problem.