dorianwhite

Question: Is there a way we can make the active player instruction for passing visible? Currently the white text listed under Passing Directness in the Player Instruction shows the "offset" compared to the active Team Instruction. I would love it if I could know how short/direct each player is passing. For earlier FMs, SI did not set global passing for different mentalities/styles and now we have things like Play Out of Defence. I don't mind using the tools available to me to set and tweak the tactics, but it makes no sense that the skin would not show what the current level is set as.

At least not if you are making the same mistake I was. The TL;DR is: This does not mean your player is playing short passing. If you thought that, read on to learn where we went wrong. --- PASSING 442, Balanced, no team instructions added - let's take a look at the passing of my Defender Centre: This to me meant that this player is currently on a standard passing directness. I can for this player click on shorter or more direct passing. So: what is listed here = the set passing range for that player. I thought the team instructions were reflected and shown in the player instructions screen. They are not. Let's set team passing to Much Shorter and see what happens to our DC: Ah, my defender is now playing shorter passing, and I can click the grey box to make him play more direct passing. Everything makes sense, thank god! (You wish) Now let's try the team instruction Much More Direct: ... huh. Playing Balanced with Much More Direct gives me Shorter Passing on my DC? What about on Defensive and Attacking: Ooookay, is this just the Defender? Why don't we have a look at my Winger (a), Advanced Forward (a) and CM (s): Yup, every player in my team, when team instructions is set to Much More Direct, says "Shorter Passing". The way I see it, this can mean two things: Either: Direct Passing Team Instruction is completely bugged at the moment. Or (and this is what I believe): What is listed there in the white text is not actually the player's current setting, but only a tool that can sometimes let you offset the team passing by passing shorter or more direct. Makes sense? But that would mean: There is no way of us actually seeing what each player's current passing directness is set as. And keep in mind in FM13 for example, passing is not global in a team. If you play Positive, passing is shorter for defensive roles and more direct for attacking (to retain possession and be more direct in the final third). Only if you play Cautious on FM13 does your DCs have above-medium passing directness. So you can't see who plays shorter and who plays more direct. More than that: often you can't even decide to change it. Instead of showing us the current passing setting for each player, we are in some cases seeing what is active with one option to offset, and in many cases actually presented with the opposite instruction as green boxes that can not even be clicked. (please god can someone fix this in a skin?) -- TRIGGER PRESS Quick example to show this confusion extends to other settings. This is my Advanced Forward, in a team with Attacking Mentality, High press, Much Higher D-line, Trigger Press Much More Often: A green filled box I can't interact with with the text "Trigger Pres Less Often". Not very intuitive, I have to say. Finally, one thing about team instructions that kind of follows this confusion in taking away the sliders: ---- WIDTH What might be good to know for this next part, is how it used to be presented, and how I think the system is still built behind our UI: This is FM13 and a more clear representation of what you are actually changing with instructions. Let's only focus on Width here. Basically you have a slider here with 21 steps. If you go up one level in Mentality, Width goes up 3 ticks. If you select "Close Down More", D-Line goes up 2 ticks. So for FM24, we have five steps (-2, -1, 0, +1 and +2). We can tell that the entire range is set after your Mentality. But, what happens when you click + or -? Does each step in the "slider" change your width equally? I am here to tell you: probably not. Let's look at Balanced: Narrow - Fairly Narrow - Standard - Fairly Wide - Wide. This would make it seem each step actually does change it equally - maybe for FM13, this would be the same as changing 4 with each step (2 - 6 - 10 - 14 - 18). However, if we look at Defensive, our brains start to hurt: Narrow - Fairly Narrow - Fairly Narrow - Fairly Wide - Wide. Not only do we get two in the same name and visualization here, but it also skips Standard and bring us all the way to Wide. The same (inverted) goes for Attacking, so I don't think it is a mistake: Narrow - Fairly Narrow - Fairly Wide - Fairly Wide - Wide Now we have to ask ourselves: is the mid option set to mentality as in FM13, and then we get equal ticks with misleading names - OR is the game "thinking for you" by making the range a lot larger and uneven (letting you play Defensive with a Width equivalent of like 17-18)? -- AND FINALLY, MENTALITY: In all of the previous FMs, we used a slider with 21 steps. Now when you check Mentality, you have: Very Def > Def >Cautious > Balanced > Positive > Att > Very att But I will bet you anything, that you actually have a mentality of 0 to 20, and that they are split into threes. (Very Def = 0-2, Def 3-5, and so on). This means a player on Cautious and Balanced might have different mentality ticks but be shown as the same Mentality in FM24. This is not a bad system I think, because these words are more intuitive than naming a player "7/20" in his mentality, but I still think it's worth bringing up that I believe a lot of things that impact the tactics, we don't have tools to change. -- What does this boil down to? 1. The UI/UX for team and player instructions could use SOME WORK. 2. I think too many instructions are kept away from us and even if I like descriptors rather than numbers or ticks - we should have more freedom to always offset them. Give us -2, -1, +1 and +2 on EVERYTHING from mentality to tackling.