Reflection on FM09 and patchworhy instances

Reflection on FM 2009

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Before the release of the game, I was very dissapointed to learn that the Italian Serie D wasn't to be included. It was too much to hope for, and I adjusted my expectations. When I first started with FM 2009, I was quite scared by the many imperfections I noticed right away. In addition, the match-engine had some terrible problems, even though the patches have luckily fixed many of those. So many areas of the game seemed unpolished, and so many things weren't working right. However, I quickly grew to really like the game. It might have been the three years of desperately waiting for the game in huge expectation that did it. Me and my best friend wanted a game that finally was good enough for us to start our long-term game that will hopefully last us until we're old, and we decided a few years back that FM 2009 would probably be that game. I don't feel it is, but now I cannot wait any longer.

Still, I found many positives. The newgens (FREDs) certainly seem reasonable, which makes me very excited about searching around for players and seeing how things develop in future seasons. I was really happy about the level of detail of the statistics in the game - finally they were amounting to something that would fit my taste. And much of the feedback in the back felt more substantial. I find myself paying close attention to everything said, trusting coach reports, scout reports, media commentary, my board, etc. There might be some flaws in these areas, but on a general level I feel really comfortable trusting the game. Another thing I enjoyed greatly were loans - I find the loans fully to my liking. There are so many of them, and it seems that loans which are common in real life, are also now common in FM. The game keeps surprising me with very interesting inter-continental loans when I browse around teams and competitions. The loans seems logical and really help make every player useful. I love how teams will even loan out a top player if it fits into their plans. Club affiliations seems to work reasonably well - well enough for that part to add to my enjoyment of the game.

Surprisingly, I like the 3D match-engine as well. I almost swore not to use it, but now me and my friend are contemplating watching every match in 90 minutes when we get started. For a first go, SI have done incredibly well with the 3D match-engine. Watching the play flow is very enjoyable, and much of it seems realistic. The graphics are nice, and much smoother and more detailed than I imagined. Even though it definitely has some similar moments that repeat a lot, I love that the game, as I believe Paul Collyer said, allows everything physically possible to happen on the field, meaning there really are no limits to watch could happen. So far, I have certainly had quite a few thrilling moments just during my test-games. One of the fears I had right away was that the 3D match-egine wouldn't represent the qualities of the players sufficiently. And I certainly feel that it doesn't. You don't get the feel that there are any fantastic dribblers out there. You don't fear the smart playmaker of your opposition. You're not amazed or entertained by the great masters of technique. Still, I feel that some things are represented to a certain degree, and I'll settle for that so far. Of course, there is a lot of bad graphic as to the exact physical representation of the actions the players make, whics ruins some of the things the match-engine is trying to show and leaves a lot of things up for interpretation. That's to be expected, though, it just creates a lot of frustration. Some times me and my friend get very frustrated about how certain types of chances happen all the time. The game is not smart enough to create scoring opportunities that are true to real life, but then in some matches, everything seems fine. It makes a great difference to see the whole match instead of just the highlights. It also helps you understand how some of the more "boring" highlights come to be, and that a lot of other things are going on.

A lot of things add up to make the game good. I have to say that I keep discovering things that don't work as they should, and it really does detract from the game. Some of the feedback turns out to be based in nothing. The AI squad intelligence is non-existant and allows the unthinkable, releasing great and well-known talents, buying people they cannot play, re-buying people they've just sold. Atrribute weight messes up CA distribution. There are just too many things.

Patchworthy instances

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While I realise that the road to completing this lovely game lies in the future and continous improvement, there are some things that I believe should be fixed for this edition, either because they should be simple to fix or they simply shouldn't be working the way they do. I want to mention something apart from all the bugs and things that I haven't seen others mention a lot:

• Repeated contract counter-offers: I was in my fifth season with Newcastle. I was making offers for a lot of promising players. I noticed that half of them kept signing new contracts with their teams, meaning the deals were off. Nonetheless, the teams were happy to accept the bids once again and the players happily accepted my contract offers similar to the ones I gave them in the first place. The players accept contracts repeatedly - one of the players accepted a contract four times this way. So, they signed new contracts with their teams, even though, when the finally stopped this, they were happy to sign with me. And why would the club accept the big (nothing was forcing them) and then sign a new contract with the player anyway? The mechanism doesn't seem to be working realistically.
  
• Disruptive features: With the 'continue game timeout', the game shouldn't continue when you are offering a contract to a player. Really cool feature, by the way, but could definately be improved a bit in its responsiveness.
  
• Interface usability: When you go to a player's history, 'entire carreer' should be selected automatically, as this will normally be what you're looking for (for instance, overview of awards for one of your players, or finding previous transfer-fees).
  
• Lacking manager history: In one of my test game, I had created a talented manager, who took a team directly from Conference North to the Premier League. One day, I come back and take the game out of holiday mode. I see that the team relegated from the Premier League, but had won the Championship once again. So, I look at this manager's history, and find out that there is no note about him leaving the club, being sacked, not under 'media' either (even though this would be the most relevant, where you can see why). So, there's no way for me to find out what happened. I've experienced this quite a few times. If it's the contract running out, that should be noted as well. The only way I found out when he left the club, was in their transfer history.
  
• Lacking manager history: I created a lot of new managers in the game. In their history, under 'achievements', there is no note their first club, even if they managed it for years. See screenshot for an example - you can see that the manager's time with Shakhtar isn't represented.
  
• Confused features: Since my game crashes when I use huge database (probably because it crashed when I load all players from USA), I manually select every single nation in the 'load all players from' drop-down. In 'load all players from' a league is removed when create a new game with that league selected. That means that the next time you create a game, it's not selected (though all other countries are), even though not all players are loaded anyway. The game seems to assume that selecting a league automatically loads all players from that country, such as it was the game in some earlier version of the game.
  
• Holiday feature: When you're on holiday, the 'only sell transfer listed players' is not working. First, I thought it was simple down to the chairman having accepted bids or a clause allowing the player to go, but that wasn't alwayts the case, as I later found out. Every time I go on holiday in my test game, the team refused a lot of offers, but ultimatively ends up selling a couple of players for no good reason.
  
• Matches: In patch 9.0.2, I'm no longer able to skip highlights.
  
• Matches: Changing the camera angle and changing it back seems to confuse the game. It suddenly doesn't follow the ball correctly from your current angle any more, and seems to wander around. I haven't tested a lot with this.
  
• Game mechanics: Too many good players not picked up on free transfers. I have seen great players rot, and it was really quite a shame. Players good enough that their agent would have been able to get some club to sign them just by showing a few videos. Also players with great potential - I thought that this added a touch of realism since the clubs wouldn't actually know their potential, but then figured that it wouldn't be possible for an endless amount of scounts to overlook a talent to become the world's best player.
  
• Game mechanics: At Manchester United, I saw in my assistant feedback that Pepe was having problems due to the language barrier. However, 9 of 11 starters spoke Portuguese, and so did about 80% of the first team. Surely, there's no logic to that.
  
• Interface: There is no way to filter transfers by country the way it was earlier. Yes, by clicking a certain nation, you can now see domestic transfers (bad way to hide the feature, by the way), but you cannot filter 'world transfers' by country. If I play in Premier League, it might only be interesting for me to see the transfers involving English clubs. This is really quite an oversight.
  
• When browsing through the transfer overview (at least in 'world transfers'), the game doesn't remember where you were if you click a player and go back. You will still be on the same page, but the most recent trasnfers will almost show. So, to get back, you will have to go to the next month and go back to have the page shown correctly. This really makes it impossible to go through the transfers quickly, especially since the transfer page, as well as the rest of the interface, is incredible heavy and has a lot of delay.
  
• Statistics: Competition summary doesn't work. Nothiung is shown. This is probably the most important statistical information in the game, and it's not there. I cannot believe that even after two patches, this still isn't working. One of the things that helps me set my goals is always the overall league records - for instance winning the league or a cup more time than the record-holders.
  
• Transfers: The retrictions on signing staff seem quite illogical. Even as a big club with loads of free wage budget, you will only be able to sign a very limited number of coaches, not nearly enough to sufficiently cover all traning areas. And if I have reached my limit for coaches, I will be unable to sign a goalkeeper-coach, even if I don't have one. The rest of my coaches are on long-term contracts, so I cannot release any, which basically means that the club won't have any goalkeeper training for several years.
  
• Game mechanics: B teams used very badly. I have tested a lot with this, but what I have found is yet inconclusive. If you affilate one club with another and check 'players can move freely', clubs never really make good use of it, a keep pretty much all players in the first-team. I understand there might be some problems with the Spanish registration, but if the player is registered for the B-team, he should be able to play for the first team as well, right? Adding a reserve team works perfectly for me, but I have found out that reserve teams cannot play in active leagues.
  
• Interface: When you access a reserve-team, they don't link to the reserve league, but instead link to the league of the main team. This is confusing, and it cannot be true that you really have to go to their fixtures to find out which league they are in.
  
• Editor/game database conflict: The clubs don't actually get the finances defined in the database - far from it (reporting: see topic). Anyone wanting to create a rich lower-league club are going to have a hard time. This is actually one of the worst flaws in the game. As of now, me and my friend and waiting to create our game until it gets fixed.
  
• Editor: You cannot change the attendance. This is a problem, a certainly something that's missing. If a nation should need to have 10-20k more people watching their games every match, there is no way to correct that.
  
• Editor: In the editor, you can no longer search for players 'based' in a certain country. This is very important to if, say, you want to isolate all players playing out-side of Italy, in a search. There should be a 'division' as well, where you can select the league that a player should be in, but 'based' is more important.
  
• Editor: Generally, the options in the editor are worse, and despite the hisory bar ('recent items') on the left is really helpful, the editor in itself is not as potent for finding things as earlier. You can no longer search in negatives or add additional conditions - for instance search for players not from specific countries. There are also a lot of things you cannot search for, for instance: stadiums with capacity changes, free agents, preferred moves, no search by continent for clubs, players with international retirement, relationships (finding people who like Arsenal, for instance), It seems like a half-assed piece of work, and I guess it takes someone like me, using hundreds of hours with the editor, to really notice.
  
• Editor: The search term 'is injured' finds any player who has an injury listed, even if it's a previous one.
  
• Editor: If you're adding staff of a certain nation to the game, it's incredibly useful to know the overall amount of staff from that nation. This was in the game earlier, but is now missing. Lets say I'm aiming for having 500 Jamaican players in the game to represent that nation better in the game, but after creating a lot of players, I have no idea how many there are overall. Or if someone would just want to make 150 players for a specific nation to be able to play it - they would have to search for all the players and count them manually.
  
• Editor: 'Hardcore fans' for clubs is not working. It's always 0 when I load the database, and whenever I change it for one team, the number I set i shown for all teams.
  
• Editor: I'm able to set a player's height to2,5 M, but the game will just assign a random height to the player. 2,1M is the in-game limit, so that should be the editor limit as well.
  

Reasonable and valid points, plus well written.

It would be great if people could write to explain why they support these points or give some criticism to what I've said.

I'm hoping we can keep the thread going until SI aknowledge these "patchworthy instances".

I agree at that loans are good. One area seems lacking here, however. I thought that there was a problem with feeder club loans, but so far my tests have been inconclusive. I gave some feeder clubs to Boca and River plate, but even thought their players were good enough to play, they were always listed as 'ine' at their Spanish and Belgian feeder clubs, as if they weren't registered. I made the Icelandic league better, and the team KR loaned out a good youngster to a Norwegian feeder-club they had, and even though he had a high squad status, he only player cup-matches because he wasn't eneglible to play in league games. I have seen many examples of this. In the database I set a player to be loaned out to Dempo in the Indian league. Even though he was clearly the best player in the league, he was never eneglible to play, no matter what date I set at the loan start date. I seems that the time delimations for squad registration don't go down well with loans.

However, in other cases things have been working fine, so it's hard to say whether it's just the clubs not using the players because of their low reputation (regardless of their skill).

Nice post Asjo. Many of those bugs could be listed in the bugs forum, if you want something done about them and are so inclined. Even the minor UI things are valuable feedback for SI.

Finally, a well-written, constructive post about problems in the game!

Many things written here would not apply to me or the types of FM games I play. But I am very much in favour of

- Filtering transfers by country

- Problem when going back to the World Transfers screen after clicking on a player listed there

- The reserve league not being shown as a link on the Reserve Squad screen

I don't really mess with the editor much, so the last few points don't really affect me. But I still congratulate you on a great post, hopefully these changes can be noticed and implemented to make the game even better :thup:

Great post! I agree with most points, and I want to add one minor thing that I just remembered: In the player search filter there should be a "cup tied" option. This would be particularly helpful if you are a club in european competition and are looking to add to your team in the January transfer window, or in the latter stages of the summer window when some cup qualifiers have been already played.

I have now posted a topic in the bugs forum as well, to make sure that this isn't overlooked by SI.