[Suggestion] Improved logic for position training / how it affects player ability

[Grez]

Hi,

I've had a lot of issues with position training over the last few years, however the crux of the issue is with positional knowledge affecting the current ability of a player.

What you think is going to happen:

You sign a new player, he's 26 and pretty much at the peak of his potential, and while he has a background playing as a CM (20/20 at CM) his attributes are probably more suitable for playing on the wing and he already knows how to play LW fairly well (14/20). It seems like a very logical signing to re-train and play on the wing.

What actually happens:

You sign the player and play and train him at LW. As his knowledge of LW increases, all of his other attributes absolutely plummet and he becomes a shadow of his former self. Learning a new position (one that he already knew pretty well) made him slower, and stopped him from being able to concentrate or dribble.

I've seen extreme examples of this where I had a young fullback who looked like he should be a good striker. I retrained him to striker to make better use of his attributes just to watch him fall apart and become absolutely useless at everything, forcing me to sell him instead.

It's also a problem when using your reserve teams to maintain fitness because your staff will play players out of position, forcing them to learn new positions and become worse players as a result (this should also stop happening, maybe only gaining positional knowledge while specifically training that position would be a good idea).

The solution:

Change the way positional knowledge is calculated. Don't involve current ability at all, use versatility only.

Use the versatility attribute to define the maximum "positional ability" that a player has. A player with 1 versatility could be capped at around 30 positional ability - they could probably play their main position 20/20, and one other position 10/20. If you try to train that player in additional positions they could start to forget their other secondary positions (so the new position essentially just "steals" points from old positions). Players with higher versatility could be able to learn more positions for "free" before it "steals" points from other positions.

Obviously I don't know exactly how CA / positional knowledge is currently calculated, so maybe this exact solution doesn't work for whatever reason, but there must be some solution to stop ruining players when training positions. These kind of changes can work out well in real life (Joelinton is a great example, he had the correct attributes to play CM so he moved from ST to CM and he played better as a result, but if you were to do something similar in game he would get physically worse).

Cheers,

Grez

[nms1987]

Agreed.  It's also frustrating when you're just trying to ever so slightly tweak a tactic, like moving a DLP from DM to CM or a wingback from D-L/R to WB-L/R.  FM can treat that as new positions and roles to learn, both in terms of their training and knowledge of tactic.

 

 

[Zachary Whyte]

Thank you for the detailed suggestion, we will put this under consideration.