Player Development & Newgens

[Soulseeker]

2 hours ago, TheAwesomeGem said:

Has this been fixed on the latest FM? This is the reason why I stopped playing FM 23 as the average of every teams increasing a lot by the end of year 4.

Yeah, I wish people who ran those simulations for 10-15 years and compared how many NT worthy players the game generated versus how many were generated in real life and the average age comparisons would do this again for 24. If it's still that bad, it's time to refund.

Edit: in fact nothing's stopping me from running some simulations myself given that I have the early access so let's see how it works in 24.

Edited October 22, 2023 by Soulseeker

[Zapoleon]

There was certainly an improvement be it I think tiny with this issue with the latter updates for fm 23. IMO still far from ideal, but there was actually younger players breaking through and getting picked in NT's where before such updates they were not. For me the question with 24 was would they build upon that progress or would this regress where its too broken again. 

With 24 I have seen tiny little positive things like much younger players getting picked and called up. Defo did not happen in 23. But in general, giving it some slack of course because the proper game is still not out, I would still question if the ai is good enough at things like squad rotation, using subs and so forth to help develop players. Is reputation still overvalued by the ai. 

As of now I'm not sure what I have seen is that great of an improvement on 23.  But I do think they will listen to feedback and improve the issue in future patches and updates.

 

[Soulseeker]

Ok so I ran the simulation (1 season vs 10 seasons) is here are my findings. I focused on comparing average ages of arbitrary clubs and national teams and U25 players. Why U25? Because in 2033 this is the age of the first wave of newgens. 

Here are the caveats:

1. U25 in 2024 and 2033 are very different thing. There will be many more players in the range between 18 and 24 in U25 in 2024, while in 2025 U25 will be comprised at least by 75% by 25 years old players.
2. AI does very bad job at developing players. Obviously it's speculative without the in-game editor but at a glance, even the starts of the future like the top Madrid striker would have stats that I would give 160-170 CA at most. Not terrible at all, but definitely not world start level. You can also see that in the media descriptions. Qualifiers like "elite" or "world class" are very rare and they usually tell the story about CA.
3. I expect the numbers to be somewhat better once this stupid issue of the AI completely ignoring the fitness of the players and therefore not making subs or rotations based on that. Even if it would yield 10-15% improvement between the game's results and the real world's, it would essentially fix the issue.
4. National teams seem to hand call ups out to pretty clearly underserving players. Like a third of Brazil in 2033 consists of players who barely play in their teams, which makes no sense and inflates the stats in favour of the game when it comes to the national teams.

So what can be done to improve this still leaving a lot to be desired situation:

1. As mentioned before, fix the damn rotations and subs. This was literally presented as a feature of the new game and it's worse than ever before. What are you doing SI?..
2. Make AI managers play high PA players from time to time just for the sake of their development, literally starting from them being fresh out of the youth intake.
3. Make players force their way out of the club if they are blatantly underutilised. Everyone's favourite example is Mukouko for a good reason - he never gets any play time in Dortmund except when he needs to come out as a substitution for an injured player. Even in a well functioning game engine (that it's not right now), this sort of situation would happen occasionally as they are a part of football. Great - just make it so that the players like that would leave, simple as. Transfer request etc. If you truly implemented the new "smarter" managers who buy people that they actually need, this would play very nicely into that improvement as well.
4. Finally, if everything else fails, just make players' attributes to grow faster from training and playing in lower divisions on loans. Like literally take the current rate and multiply it by 1.5 (at least). Everyone would like that, no one playing FM likes the current rate of player development and this is surely one of the issues at play here.

[Dotsworthy]

I'd be interested to know how this looks in 2043, when the real life players are all but retired.

[trevjim]

There's an easy fix to playing time. Currently the AI just picks on CA.

 

They need to start picking/rotating in youngster (let's say u23's) using an average of the CA and PA combined.

 

 

[Sophos]

One thing I've noticed is that national teams are more willing to call up young players, to the point where they call up players who really don't merit it.

In a save I ran as a test, I'm in July 2028. Excluding Rico Lewis, an already established player, there are 6 U23 players in the England squad. The most experienced of them, Ashley Phillips, has played five Premier League games. Of the others, Will Lankshear (23) has none, Ishe Samuels-Smith (22) has none, and three regens (all 20) have one, three, and one. They've all played a decent number of Championship games, however.

This suggests that maybe reputation increases too fast now, while player development is still really poor?

[Purple]

Increasing the major nations youth rating in the pre game editor will help improve the quality of the new gens 

[Robioto]

6 hours ago, Soulseeker said:

Ok so I ran the simulation (1 season vs 10 seasons) is here are my findings. I focused on comparing average ages of arbitrary clubs and national teams and U25 players. Why U25? Because in 2033 this is the age of the first wave of newgens. 

Here are the caveats:

1. U25 in 2024 and 2033 are very different thing. There will be many more players in the range between 18 and 24 in U25 in 2024, while in 2025 U25 will be comprised at least by 75% by 25 years old players.
2. AI does very bad job at developing players. Obviously it's speculative without the in-game editor but at a glance, even the starts of the future like the top Madrid striker would have stats that I would give 160-170 CA at most. Not terrible at all, but definitely not world start level. You can also see that in the media descriptions. Qualifiers like "elite" or "world class" are very rare and they usually tell the story about CA.
3. I expect the numbers to be somewhat better once this stupid issue of the AI completely ignoring the fitness of the players and therefore not making subs or rotations based on that. Even if it would yield 10-15% improvement between the game's results and the real world's, it would essentially fix the issue.
4. National teams seem to hand call ups out to pretty clearly underserving players. Like a third of Brazil in 2033 consists of players who barely play in their teams, which makes no sense and inflates the stats in favour of the game when it comes to the national teams.

So what can be done to improve this still leaving a lot to be desired situation:

1. As mentioned before, fix the damn rotations and subs. This was literally presented as a feature of the new game and it's worse than ever before. What are you doing SI?..
2. Make AI managers play high PA players from time to time just for the sake of their development, literally starting from them being fresh out of the youth intake.
3. Make players force their way out of the club if they are blatantly underutilised. Everyone's favourite example is Mukouko for a good reason - he never gets any play time in Dortmund except when he needs to come out as a substitution for an injured player. Even in a well functioning game engine (that it's not right now), this sort of situation would happen occasionally as they are a part of football. Great - just make it so that the players like that would leave, simple as. Transfer request etc. If you truly implemented the new "smarter" managers who buy people that they actually need, this would play very nicely into that improvement as well.
4. Finally, if everything else fails, just make players' attributes to grow faster from training and playing in lower divisions on loans. Like literally take the current rate and multiply it by 1.5 (at least). Everyone would like that, no one playing FM likes the current rate of player development and this is surely one of the issues at play here.

This is hugely disappointing. It seems a lot of these promises for FM24 are unfulfilled, it's incredibly frustrating

[fc.cadoni]

1 hour ago, Robioto said:

This is hugely disappointing. It seems a lot of these promises for FM24 are unfulfilled, it's incredibly frustrating

 

[Soulseeker]

2 hours ago, Robioto said:

This is hugely disappointing. It seems a lot of these promises for FM24 are unfulfilled, it's incredibly frustrating

Exactly. if they just do what they promised - better rotations and longer development periods for players, it would fix this issue. I'm actually kinda optimistic about this. Surely they can't promise something and just do exactly the opposite (no subs/no rotations) and release the game like it's nothing. I honestly expect them to fix this bug in the full game release and we'll see a great improvement immediately.

[Robioto]

1 hour ago, Soulseeker said:

Exactly. if they just do what they promised - better rotations and longer development periods for players, it would fix this issue. I'm actually kinda optimistic about this. Surely they can't promise something and just do exactly the opposite (no subs/no rotations) and release the game like it's nothing. I honestly expect them to fix this bug in the full game release and we'll see a great improvement immediately.

I hope you're right, but this wouldn't be the first time promises were broken. So I'll wait and see.

[-Jef-]

7 hours ago, Soulseeker said:

Exactly. if they just do what they promised - better rotations and longer development periods for players, it would fix this issue. I'm actually kinda optimistic about this. Surely they can't promise something and just do exactly the opposite (no subs/no rotations) and release the game like it's nothing. I honestly expect them to fix this bug in the full game release and we'll see a great improvement immediately.

We also need more data and not 10 random clubs which show same amount of median age and same amount of u25 players down the line. How's that disappointing? I honestly do not understand. I am the first one to bash them but c'mon.

[XaW]

8 hours ago, Soulseeker said:

Exactly. if they just do what they promised - better rotations and longer development periods for players, it would fix this issue. I'm actually kinda optimistic about this. Surely they can't promise something and just do exactly the opposite (no subs/no rotations) and release the game like it's nothing. I honestly expect them to fix this bug in the full game release and we'll see a great improvement immediately.

Have you posted this in the bug tracker with examples for SI to look at?

[Soulseeker]

43 minutes ago, -Jef- said:

We also need more data and not 10 random clubs which show same amount of median age and same amount of u25 players down the line. How's that disappointing? I honestly do not understand. I am the first one to bash them but c'mon.

I don't even understand the point that you are making. I reiterate for the third time that I merely want SI to follow through on their promised for two features that they specifically promised and we can clearly see that one of them (rotations and subs) are straight up not working at all right now. They clearly changed something in the engine, but it yielded the exactly opposite outcome in the game. Bug tracker is full of the reports that there are no subs or rotations unless players get injured or suspended. Are you denying this or what? And in turn, are you denying that this by the nature of the issue is hampering the development of young players? 

 

[Soulseeker]

2 minutes ago, XaW said:

Have you posted this in the bug tracker with examples for SI to look at?

Like I said, I suspect that the discrepancy is mostly because AI is not using younger players enough in the game, particularly because of lack of subs and not rotating the squad enough between the game, which is seen by it using unfit players in the games. Good thing is, the bug tracker is full of the reports about it and so I expect SI to fix this issue and that would be about it for the development discrepancy.

 

[XaW]

1 minute ago, Soulseeker said:

Like I said, I suspect that the discrepancy is mostly because AI is not using younger players enough in the game, particularly because of lack of subs and not rotating the squad enough between the game, which is seen by it using unfit players in the games. Good thing is, the bug tracker is full of the reports about it and so I expect SI to fix this issue and that would be about it for the development discrepancy.

 

Sure, but if you have the file and can give SI more details, then why not do so? I'm not discounting your find, so please don't take it like that, I've been a stickler for long term development for a while, but I haven't gotten long enough into a game to see how it works yet. I just want as many reports with as much details as possible, the more info SI has, the more likely it will work as well as we all want.

[fc.cadoni]

3 minutes ago, Soulseeker said:

I don't even understand the point that you are making. I reiterate for the third time that I merely want SI to follow through on their promised for two features that they specifically promised and we can clearly see that one of them (rotations and subs) are straight up not working at all right now. They clearly changed something in the engine, but it yielded the exactly opposite outcome in the game. Bug tracker is full of the reports that there are no subs or rotations unless players get injured or suspended. Are you denying this or what? And in turn, are you denying that this by the nature of the issue is hampering the development of young players? 

 

You don't understand what he said to you, but you understand perfectly fine how the development works which is multiple things to consider. Ok. You also reject to report it to SI, but you are being dissapoint for "unfulfilled promies". What kind of sorcery is this? You don't even read the response from the developer. 

[Soulseeker]

8 minutes ago, fc.cadoni said:

You don't understand what he said to you, but you understand perfectly fine how the development works which is multiple things to consider. Ok. You also reject to report it to SI, but you are being dissapoint for "unfulfilled promies". What kind of sorcery is this? You don't even read the response from the developer. 

Do you suspect me in having a hidden anti-SI agenda or something? Another weird reply, where the point eludes me completely.

[fc.cadoni]

Just now, Soulseeker said:

Do you suspect me in having a hidden anti-SI agenda or something? Another weird reply, where the point eludes me completely.

Did I said that you had an anti-SI agenda? No. Did you read the response from developer? No. Did you post your finds (you claim that is not working) in bugs reports? No. Your post is weird actually, not mine.

[Soulseeker]

12 minutes ago, fc.cadoni said:

Did I said that you had an anti-SI agenda? No. Did you read the response from developer? No. Did you post your finds (you claim that is not working) in bugs reports? No. Your post is weird actually, not mine.

Not only I read the response from the developer, I replied to it in that very thread several hours ago. I also posted this here 

Does this satisfy your requirements for the post weirdness check now? 

Still don't understand your point. If you think there is no issue here - great, why bother even reacting? Leave it to SI to double check. If there is? Cool, let's work on resolving it. I genuinely don't understand what is this about.

[TheAwesomeGem]

Welp noy buying FM. Even FIFA have better AI Manager. This game is too easy after 4 years.

[trevjim]

On 24/10/2023 at 08:07, fc.cadoni said:

You don't understand what he said to you, but you understand perfectly fine how the development works which is multiple things to consider. Ok. You also reject to report it to SI, but you are being dissapoint for "unfulfilled promies". What kind of sorcery is this? You don't even read the response from the developer. 

Please stop being so argumentative. There is a valid issue raised here by the community and whataboutism is not going to help.

 

It was a major selling feature and currently it's not present in the game. So it needs to be addressed.

 

Arguing with forum members is just going to take away from the point at hand.

[fc.cadoni]

1 hour ago, trevjim said:

Please stop being so argumentative. There is a valid issue raised here by the community and whataboutism is not going to help.

 

It was a major selling feature and currently it's not present in the game. So it needs to be addressed.

 

Arguing with forum members is just going to take away from the point at hand.

Ok 

[tonidopa]

En 21/2/2023 a las 0:34, Wealthy individual dijo:

I found a 198 PA 24 year old in PSGs reserves, listed as unavailable for loans. In real life these clubs have loan armies, but in FM they're hiding Messi's reincarnation away, making sure that he will never develop

There's definitely a problem with big clubs being unable/unwilling to send players out on loan to improve their CA and reputation. Just compare the initial numbers of loanees in the game with succesive seasons and you get a glimpse of the problem.

DaveInci's awards file tends to improve the development of youngsters because it makes them more "desirable" to managers and clubs, but the loan issue persists, as lower league teams would rather renew contracts than bet on a young loan.

[Zachary Whyte]

Hello everybody, thank you for posting we appreciate the feedback. 

To answer some of your questions:

. We have identified an issue which is causing a lack of rotation with AI teams. We are looking to make changes/improvements to this in future updates.

. Another known issue we're investigating is the AI not using their substitutions enough during games.

. In terms of the AI making transfers, there will always be instances of new signings not playing or making the breakthrough at new clubs. It was not our intention to make the AI transfer market mistake free.

- If you have good examples of bad transfers or poor squad building, then we will need save games provided at the start of transfer windows, or just before bids for players are made, in order to fully investigate, thank you.

The changes we have made to AI Squad Building for FM24 cover some of these other aspects:

- A players form is considered more when the AI target a player for a transfer, so you might see a player from a less high profile league but in good form getting moves to bigger leagues
- AI managers targeting players based on their tactical style more. For example a Wing Play manager will look for pacy wide players and target men strikers, Control Possesion manager will look for Techinchal Central Defenders, Gegenpress manager will look for energetic midfielders etc
- Managers will now better identify gaps in their squad based off their style and look to make signings suited to their style to fill those gaps
- These tactical styles will also help to improve user and AI manger decisions when sending young players out on loan to better aid their development
- Some managers will now have more of a preference for PA in backup/rotation shortlist slots than in previous versions. Where CA would be preferred resulting in ageing players often being signed for backup/rotation slots.
- A review of how players reputation can increase/decrease based off of in match performances, meaning that players reputation can increase/decrease more naturally over the course of a save game

[ViG1980]

On 24/10/2023 at 03:33, Soulseeker said:

Not only I read the response from the developer, I replied to it in that very thread several hours ago. I also posted this here 

Does this satisfy your requirements for the post weirdness check now? 

Still don't understand your point. If you think there is no issue here - great, why bother even reacting? Leave it to SI to double check. If there is? Cool, let's work on resolving it. I genuinely don't understand what is this about.

This was the reason I didn’t buy FM23. And that might be the 2nd or 3rd version I have not bought since CM1, so 30+ years. The game world is just too boring after about 5-7 years. 
 

I’m guessing it’s harder to implement than we think (which I still find hard to believe, just have managers look at PA more than CA and have them picture their squad in various stages in the future to build for. 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, 5 years. And then weight those timeframes accordingly (based on manager, teams current position - might buy older if they’re thinking more short-term etc., manager style etc).  
 

Obviously I’m speculating, but I think the most likely reason is more because working hard on this doesn’t create a feature they can market the game with. It’s not sexy and most players don’t play the game long into the future. I forget what the average number of years people played when someone posted it but it was pretty short term - maybe 3 or 4 years.  

Edited October 28, 2023 by ViG1980

[Robioto]

On 28/10/2023 at 15:32, Zachary Whyte said:

Hello everybody, thank you for posting we appreciate the feedback. 

To answer some of your questions:

. We have identified an issue which is causing a lack of rotation with AI teams. We are looking to make changes/improvements to this in future updates.

. Another known issue we're investigating is the AI not using their substitutions enough during games.

. In terms of the AI making transfers, there will always be instances of new signings not playing or making the breakthrough at new clubs. It was not our intention to make the AI transfer market mistake free.

- If you have good examples of bad transfers or poor squad building, then we will need save games provided at the start of transfer windows, or just before bids for players are made, in order to fully investigate, thank you.

The changes we have made to AI Squad Building for FM24 cover some of these other aspects:

- A players form is considered more when the AI target a player for a transfer, so you might see a player from a less high profile league but in good form getting moves to bigger leagues
- AI managers targeting players based on their tactical style more. For example a Wing Play manager will look for pacy wide players and target men strikers, Control Possesion manager will look for Techinchal Central Defenders, Gegenpress manager will look for energetic midfielders etc
- Managers will now better identify gaps in their squad based off their style and look to make signings suited to their style to fill those gaps
- These tactical styles will also help to improve user and AI manger decisions when sending young players out on loan to better aid their development
- Some managers will now have more of a preference for PA in backup/rotation shortlist slots than in previous versions. Where CA would be preferred resulting in ageing players often being signed for backup/rotation slots.
- A review of how players reputation can increase/decrease based off of in match performances, meaning that players reputation can increase/decrease more naturally over the course of a save game

This is very reassuring, thank you. I hope these tweaks and fixes are made for the full release next Tuesday, especially as they formed a large chunk of the marketing for FM2024.