Create Manager - Place of Birth (Wales)?

The QA team will look into this further and see what may have happened with the list of locations.

Update following 24.2 patch:

This issue is STILL not fixed! An A-Z has been added, but just categorizes the very limited places in Wales that you already had, into those letter categories!

According to FM, there are only 45 villages/towns/cities in Wales? This was never an issue in previous FMs. You have clearly lost your original list of Welsh places. Do you really think there are just 7 places in Wales that start with the letter 'L'?

For instance, St.Asaph in north Wales is a city (albeit small) with a major hospital and one of the most common birth places in the region. It used to be detailed in the game and now it is absent.

Please correct this issue properly as it stops many Welsh players from starting a save when these details are incorrect.

@Michael Sant Please confirm that this bug will be looked at again. Thanks.

I've passed this one internally to try and find out a bit more about what has happened. 

So, in the case of St. Asaph's, as it closed in 2012 its no longer available for newgens to use. Broadly speaking in the working of the game, locations can be marked as "Do not use as place of birth" and so only 45 out of the 137 locations are available. This aspect is currently working as its intended. 

On one hand, in the situation of Wales with 137 locations in total making them all available doesn't sound unreasonable, but contrast that with say Italy which has over 10,000 locations in the database it means there are very different situations for different nations. 

On 01/12/2023 at 19:50, Michael Sant said:

So, in the case of St. Asaph's, as it closed in 2012 its no longer available for newgens to use. Broadly speaking in the working of the game, locations can be marked as "Do not use as place of birth" and so only 45 out of the 137 locations are available. This aspect is currently working as its intended. 

On one hand, in the situation of Wales with 137 locations in total making them all available doesn't sound unreasonable, but contrast that with say Italy which has over 10,000 locations in the database it means there are very different situations for different nations. 

@Michael Sant I appreciate your efforts in providing the explanation.

As FM is a game that prides itself on detail and immersion, I find reducing the places of potential birthplaces for newgens to be an appropriate step.

However, I don't think this should be reduced for adding managers to the game. Even if a hospital may now be closed, that place is still a significant birthplace for many people in the region. It would feel wrong to select an alternative birthplace, especially when I have been able to use the real birthplace in FM for years previously.

In relation to St.Asaph, the replacement major hospital is nearby in a town called: Bodelwyddan. This is outside of Rhyl, but this town does not feature as a possible birthplace either. Therefore, Bodelwyddan should certainly be added.

Can more options please be added for newly created managers only? Could we just include the 137 locations for Wales as it is a limited list, if it won't affect newgen players?

As a last resort, can a certain place be amended in the editor to allow it to be a birthplace, so it can be used when creating a manager?

Thanks.

Having done a quick check, the in-game editor doesn't allow you to edit the players place of birth from what I could tell. When being on a player information page it guides you back to attributes for editing and it is not on that page. 

In terms of different options for managers, that would fall under a feature request to create that specifically. If you would like to see that in the game, so that you have the same options as previously you can request it here: https://community.sigames.com/forums/forum/680-football-manager-feature-requests/

The change was made to better reflect reality, and of course as you've highlighted there are some towns/cities that slip through the gaps. Wales with 137 locations in the database as mentioned before, it doesn't seem unreasonable or even too difficult to present that in-game. It's when moving to nations like Italy which have over 10,000 locations that it presents a problem. I won't pretend I knew how it worked before with Italy as that nuance in the data and game set-up is not an area I looked into at the time. There's a huge contrast in the number of towns/cities in the database from one nation to the next.

Bodelwyddan may currently not be in the database at all. So I'll have to check in with who is responsible for that particular part of the database.