Suggestion for the Lacunas of the New Tactic System

Dear Sirs,

I would like to make a suggestion regarding the new tactic system.

First of all, the idea of the new tactic system, based on the roles and duties, is very good in my opinion, because it is more realistic and user friendly than the use of the sliders (which are removed in FM14).

But nevertheless I'm a little bit worried that we will be limited with this new tactic system because of the lack of a detailed overview of the default team and individual instructions for each role/tactic/mentality/fluidity.

When you select a team/player instruction, you actually don't know what the default instructions are! In other words: how behaves the player on the pitch by default?

The only thing we have now are the little definitions of thoses roles/tactics/mentalities/fluidities and the Shouts: insufficient for my taste.

The sliders, on the other hand, gave us a better vision of how the players behaved on the pitch.

For example: if you changed team instructions, it was automatically reflected, with the sliders, on the roles/duties, or in other words, on the individual instructions.

Therefore we just needed to check the sliders for each player to have this detailed overview of how they play on the pitch.

With the sliders we could also have an idea about the frequencies of the instructions --> See concrete example at the bottom for more information.

Sliders showed us a more detailed overview of the default instructions for each role/tactic/mentality/fluidity.

Note: I'm not asking for the return of the sliders. There might be a possibility to add more details without using sliders!

This lack of not detailed overview gives a sense of insecurity or lack of control and results to play the game with suppositions.

In Real Life, even if the managers don't use sliders, they know exactly what they told to each player about what to do or not to do on the pitch, and this for all the aspects of the game (mentality, creativity, pass, cross, roam from position, etc.)

Then, if the players apply or not the instructions that is an other debate :-).

Let me explain it now with a concrete example, lets take the Long Distance Shoots:

In the older versions of FM when we clicked on "Shoot less often" every player had his slider on "rarely" for a long distance shoot. But if you wanted that one player has this instruction on "normal" and an other one on "often" you could do it in the individual instructions with the sliders for those 2 players.

Now, how do we translate this in FM14?

I guess that we must first of all chose in the team instructions "Shoots less often", and than we go to the 2 specific players for whom we want to give individual instructions. But the only options we have for them is "shoot more often". Without the frequencies of shots... How can we adjust the frequencies of those shoots on "normal" for one player and "often" for the other player? We should tell them in this case, for example, Sub-Instructions like: "if the opportinuty arise" (former slider on "normal"; "as soons as you recieve the ball on the last 30 meters" (former slider on "often").

In conclusion, I suggest to make visible the default team and individual instructions for each role/tactic/mentality/fluidity in the final release of the game and to introduce more shouts, options or sub-instructions in the future, so people know instead of guessing what the player does on the pitch. These additions will be very nice and interesting.

After all, the FM Series are getting more User Friendly, what I appreciate very much, but it would be a pity if FM should become gradually a Casual Game to be more User Friendly.

I'm a afraid that year after year, FM is getting more and more a Casual Game targeted at a mass audience of gamers.

A good example of this tendency is the introduction of FM Classic the year before.

We should not fall into the trap of confusing User Friendly and Casual Game.

To be fair, I hope to be able to convince the vast majority of the FM Community and the developers of the game in order that, at least, the default instructions will be included in FM14.

I suppose that it is too early to add more shouts, options or sub-instructions for FM14. Let us hope that this part of the suggestion happens in the future versions of FM.

I look forward for your reply and thanks for your reading.

Yours faithfully,

Ali

PS1: check also my other thread that talks about the tweakability of these default instructions.

PS2: I would like to advise you to read those 3 interesting threads, where you can find some really good ideas:

Tactics Creator vs Classic Tactics

FM14 New Tactical Elements

FM14 Sliders gone, thoughts?

Great post Ali!

Thanks greg54, don't forget to make your choice ;-)

Well, this suggests "making the default settings visible" might not look like what you were used to anymore. I understand your point though, SI have always relied on community work to pull off decent documentation. Now that they don't have to explain ambiguous sliders which in isolation are impossible to explain and have decided to go with something more grounded in football reality, they should provide better coverage themselves.

A remark though: What I don't agree with is how this new system is in any kind of way making the game more casual. Changing the abstract system of old that gave like every player a false sense of control anyway in a lot of areas and implementing real-life footie concepts makes the game more easy to get into, yes. But at the core, your sentiment suggests you don't really understand where this is heading (it is strongly suggested in the link though). The TC already made the AI much better than it used to be, for a start, and that was all still based on micro tweaks, rather than a multitude of concepts made an inherent part of the ME and tuned to clearly be visible and distinguishable in the play. There will be far less clicks to be made on abstract scales of whatever interlinking with a myriad of other settings, but each one will carry significant weight.

I totally agree with the OP.

Svenc, I disagree with you about making less clicks, with the new TC I have to make way more clicks during a match to make small changes.

With the new TC I have to make way more clicks during a match to make small changes.

Absolutely.

I find the new system opaque, rigid and time consuming.

The OP's proposition would take some of the guesswork out of it.

I don't think we even need to see the actual sliders settings. As long as we are given a clear and precise description of the concepts and mechanisms influenced by their decisions. But we aren't, and what Ali and others before him said is correct. To perhaps oversimplify things, sure the game tells you that option 'X does Y more than default'. Except right now we don't know what that default is.

Considering how roles and tactical settings have now been pre-set and intertwined and changing them is often no longer a case of moving an isolated slider, I think a great opportunity has been missed – an overview of sorts explicitly showing the effect of changes both large and small when customizing tactics.

Have a clearly defined base value (i.e. default settings or 'all sliders in the middle'), explain what it is ('defensive line halfway between the box and halfway line'...), and then, as the user changes his tactical options, present him with a sort of dynamic overview.

What I mean by that – I have this image of red and green arrows with basic descriptions along the lines of '[huge green arrow] players will press [aggressively all over the pitch]' or '[huge red arrow] the team will [drop all the way down to the penalty area]'. Then, when this tactic is saved and edited further, it provides its settings as the new base value – '[small green arrow] players will [push up a couple of steps forward from the box]' and so on and so forth.

I hope I'm being clear enough. That way you would clearly see the differences between various tactical settings. You would have instant feedback as to your changes without any illogical and ridiculous ambiguity. No more wondering 'what exactly does this button do'.

I totally agree that more explanation about the tactical roles is required.

However, I don't think that these should come in the manner in which they were presented before.

We have to get our head around talking slider-ese. As long as sliders are used to indicate instructions, even if they are just used as indicators, the effects of their removal will be sub-optimal.

What we need is mmore explanation, but such explanation should be provided in plain text and footballing language.

My suggestion is that the vast blank spaces on the individual instructions screen should be used to provide such explanation. Easier to handle than the tooltips on the pitch sector of that screen, more space for explanation and avoiding the waste that lies in leaving so much UI space unused

I'm not bothered about the loss of sliders but I miss the team instructions page and being able to set target man, target man distribution and main playmaker.