Don't expect FM to get any better until FM21 (2021)

[alian62]

21 hours ago, sporadicsmiles said:

I never get people who complain about the defending in FM. I conceded 15 goals in my last season in my current save. I always rank close to the top in terms of goals conceded in my league, regardless of the team I play as. Even as a struggling team, teams do not put lots of goals passed me. Also, mistakes leading to goals happen. My captain and best defender in my side made an absolute howler in a Champion's League Quarter final that saw me lose 1-0. It looked horrible, it was horrible. It was not "bad defending by the match engine" or a bug. It was just a mistake. They happen. People have unrealistic expectations about what they want to see out of the ME; their team always playing perfectly and never ever making mistakes. The mistake leading to the goal I speak of was down to pressing forcing the mistake, which if my side did it I would see as excellent play by my attackers. Same goes here, well played by the AI. I can also take the blame for noticing their pressing but not changing how I distribute the ball from back to front.

 

The ME in Fifa Manager was absolutely awful, and there was a vastly different behaviour depending on how you watched the match. It was the first football manager game I played, when I was 11 or something like that. So it was exciting and new, and I too look back fondly. But as a football sim it is nowhere close to FM. Go back and play it to see.

 

If your tactic stops working because of an update, you were doing something that was exploiting a weakness in the match engine. The patch closes the loophole, the tactic stops working. I have used basically the same tactic for 3 iterations of FM now, without any problems.

 

I agree completely with this. The game makes incremental improvements, and this makes the game better. For example, the dynamics thing this year is absolutely excellent. Being able to tell a team leader to sort out problems in the dressing room for you, and it actually working has completely changed how you have to deal with the squad. No more having to have a chat where none of the options are what you want to say. On your point about people wanting to always win, and seeing any mistake their players make as a bug is part of the problem. In reverse, when a player scores a goal they see it as good play, their tactical theorems opening opposition defenses.

Anyway, ultimately we can debate this until the cows come home. We will always all have different opinions about the game, and there is not really a right or wrong, especially when it comes down to personal enjoyment. Feedback and ideas are also good, because they stimulate discussion and may lead to further improvements in the game.

Its a shame you don't get it 

[bbuullddoogg]

On 2/20/2018 at 14:02, bassistuk said:

Having now clocked over 2000 hours, Im finally stopping playing FM18

The game has been out for about 100 days. 2000 hours is 20 hours per day every day since the day it came out!!! At this point I think it would be a GREAT idea if you stopped playing ALL video games for at least 3 or 4 years!!!  Might want to open front door and venture out there and see what you can see!!!!

[CaptainSa]

On 21/02/2018 at 12:37, Baodan said:

They had a sort of sim city feature where you could build or improve facilities including subway access and better parking, hotels and such. Some of these things drained money while others generated money for the club.

You also had the option to actually use the money you earned in game to buy houses, cars and other luxury goods. Or alternatively buy stocks or put the money in a savings account to try to maximize profits. You could also donate money to your club or by a club outright.

You could chose to periodically get a girlfriend with random attributes, who you could then have children with or break up with and find a new one. Your children could become interested in football and become players in the game, coming up trough your own clubs youth academy.

Merchandise was a much bigger part of the game, because you could chose what kind you wanted to sell and buy advertisement or place fan shops in countries with a lot of football fans or simply countries where you had players from and was more well known. 

The match engine was also more entertaining, in my opinion.

I'm still missing out on a lot of things here I know, but its been a long time since I last played Fifa Manager.

They did the manager part very well but the football part less well.

I just remembered you could also build and upgrade youth camps and hire coaches to train those players. You then had the option to transfer any good youth players from the youth camp to your own youth team, if that was your wish.  I'm also pretty sure you had more youth teams U19, U17, U15 and such. In general you had much more control over that entire aspect of management, compared to FM.

 

You could also build a girls school to ensure none of your youth players ever dropped out (this may have been removed in later versions but it was in there back when it was Total Club Manager).

[Baodan]

On ‎24‎-‎02‎-‎2018 at 02:32, CaptainSa said:

You could also build a girls school to ensure none of your youth players ever dropped out (this may have been removed in later versions but it was in there back when it was Total Club Manager).

Fifa Manager had a lot of crazy things, so that sounds about right.

[roger redknapp]

Good post, I’m a FM fantatic but I do feel it needs either competition, or an overhaul of a few things:

Press Conferences, Interaction - as AI improves over time, I would like to see them be able to develop a more personalised capability to answer questions and get a more immersive human feel to the social feeds, conversations and interviews as well as your own responses. 

Unresponsive player AI - eventually the unrealistic behaviour by goalkeepers, defenders and attackers has to go. Poor team instructions does not equal below pub league incompetent behaviour in any circumstance. Poor instructions leading to 50 yard pot shots is not an excuse, real players in real life sometimes ignore instructions but that doesn’t lead to stupidity. 

Transfers and negotiations - It is very suspect that you can go 300 days with no interest in one player, and upon offering him for a cut price £2.5m you get 3 identical offers for £1.3m + instalments and the exact same wage contribution from 3 different private bids. 

Contract negotiations have improved but not in the sense of the game being relatively the same for 10 years. 

Staff - scouts don’t feel intuitive and like they are giving £2k a week input. Horrendous lack of people with the tactical knowledge attribute in the game also.

Sports Scientists, DOF and HOYD feel like rushed and poorly implemented inclusions into the game and are still inneffective or unclear, are of far less helpfulness than scouts and coaches. 

Staff attributes are as a majority horrendous. DOF and HOYD can not be trusted to sign or approach decent players despite being paid thousands show little common sense to justify their positions. 

Youth Recruitment - The most broken dated part of the game, HOYD poorly implemented, Youth are not selected IRL based on one persons personality and certainly not based on one persons footballing outlook over the manager or the clubs. The current Intake setup is a series of random spawns leading to the database bloating with a lot of 0.5-2* players better suited to keeping their day jobs.  This needs an overhaul so that over the course of the year a HOYD identifies 15-20 candidates that you yourself meet or have a look at, and have to pursuade to join your club and not a rivals.  - The alternative is that’s you are basically paying someone £2-10k a week for one nights work that even then they often mess up. 

Tactics - Have improved since the sliders, but could be refined.  There is an abundance of misleading titles, descriptions on different settings that accidentally mislead a user and will inevitably lead to frustration for people new to the game.  Some player roles should be explained better and scrapped off pretentious foreign names. 

Like in Pro Ev, the ability to break down instructions to when in position or out of possession would be good. 

Greater control over vertical and horizontal width between defence, attack and midfield. Again, based on in or out of possession is desireable.

Passing into space is a tactic better suited per player rather than a blanket team instruction. 

Applying tactics should yellow warning tactics that will definitely or may cause contradictions or problems based on the opposition being narrow/wide or other reasons. 

A defensive, rigid tactic should effectively grey out any or nearly all individual instructions on players. 

After 5 years at the club, learning from you, your assistant manager should not suggest that you play direct and pump the ball into the box if that’s something that you guys have never ever done. - advice needs to be far more meaningful. 

The ability to have a meaningful conversation at half time or from the touch line and ask a player “Why are you not picking out X’s runs and laying the ball off to him faster or at all?”

[theonets]

I really disagree. I don't have FM18, but I got FM17 last year, which was my first FM since FM14. 

 

The entire ME, tactics, system is so radically overhauled that I almost felt like I was learning FM all over again. 

 

I think I'll skip FM18, and go to FM19 directly, but that's more me making financial choices

[westy8chimp]

On ‎06‎/‎05‎/‎2018 at 10:27, roger redknapp said:

Applying tactics should yellow warning tactics that will definitely or may cause contradictions or problems based on the opposition being narrow/wide or other reasons. 

A defensive, rigid tactic should effectively grey out any or nearly all individual instructions on players. 

basically applauding myself as I raised this last year in the tactics forum

But absolutely spot on. The fact you can say 'Play Direct' (desc akin to; play fast penetrating risky passes) and then go and select 'Work Ball Into Box' (desc akin to; patiently probe for the ideal opportunity)  

People wonder why the tactics forum and GD is full of users disenchanted with the franchise because they can't win or they've created such a moronic tactic the AI can't cope and all systems are broken.

It's easy to rip someone apart for choosing those instructions ... but the game is marketed to all comers not just football fans with a reasonable grasp etc

--------------

It's like when I order from Dominos and they give you an option to change up to 3 toppings for free. So I order Hawaiian but replace the ham, pineapple & mushroom with tandoori chicken, red onion and chilli peppers  

[KingCanary]

One thing I'd say is whizzy new features are often not what makes the difference to a game. 

For example on of the changes that has made the game much better in recent years (in my opinion) was the match engine finally working out pull backs. So rather than knowing every time your player got to the byline that he was going to shoot from a stupid angle, you could actually score goals! 

Yet I don't think FM would have marketed that addition of the game with 'pullbacks work now!'