Do you find Press Conferences tedious?

[DP]

We all do right? It’s just not impactful enough (rightly so for the most part) and if it’s not fun, why include it?

In terms of an idea, how about; press conferences are assumed to run in the background at a set ‘level’ which means week to week it happens but you don’t need to do anything, the configuration will say there are ‘standard’ press conferences happening in the background and sometimes there will be news items on what is said to add some flavour but you won’t have to do anything.

Then at set points in the season you have the option to throw in some controversial press conferences to impact morale. These will all be completely context based (going for the league, relegation etc) and will only happen once or twice. Also instead of selecting answers you just select a general tone of the conference so it’s easily set without going through each question  

That I could cope with and the contextual press conferences may have a slight bearing on your team’s morale (or maybe the morale of competitors). Get rid of them for each match and get rid of answering each tedious question.  

[Brodie21]

They're dreadful. Same questions, same set of possible answers. I could do them in my sleep

[inacion]

I do some press conferences by my self and others I just send the assistant manager, to manage media handling attributes

[XaW]

I do mine myself, since I don't really trust my assistant to say the right things, but based on that, I've previously suggested a bunch of things like this:

 

[kevaggel]

They are boring and i don't trust my assistant that's why i removed them by using the pre-game editor

[tropicsafc]

I leave it entirely to my assistant who never fails to infuriate me with claims that we're open to offers to our best players. Fortunately it seems to have zero effect on anything other than my own personal temperament so I let it be. As we all know by now, interactions are absolutely shockingly bad in all of their forms within the game. Do away with it.

[Ein]

I play FM for the press conferences..

Joking apart, going forward, they should either scrap/automate the whole thing or integrate some sort of AI chatbot. With the chatbot route, you can have freeform responses instead of the same multiple choice answers. This would also apply to all forms of interactions.

 

[MichaelNevo]

In an ideal world they would make it so that the AI is intelligent. Then you could actually respond with your own thoughts, via a chatbox that someone here has already mentioned. They could keep the temperament aspect, so that the AI could understand how you said something, not just what you said.

[tezcatlipoca665]

Personally, I'd like press conferences and journalist questions to be removed altogether. Not revised or rethought - just completely removed. I don't feel like they do anything meaningful and I don't care what other managers have to say about anything.

If we had the option to speak to some AI chatbot I'd answer 'How did you feel about ____ getting on the scoresheet for his country?' with 'don't ever call this number again' and hope it'd stick.

[Mobius]

10 hours ago, kevaggel said:

They are boring and i don't trust my assistant that's why i removed them by using the pre-game editor

How do you do this please?! 

Genuinely one of the worst things in the game. It's embarrassing they're released in the same state every year. A "disable media" tickbox would be nice because it's beyond awful. 

[warlock]

I'll go against the grain here. I'm happy to do press conferences. I do every one of them, all season long, and I don't just click "second answer from the left".

I take the game at face value - if press conferences are a big part of the game (and they obviously are) then I assume they're important. So I treat them that way. I answer every question in what I think is the best way, I assume my players are listening or reading about it in the press next day, and I try to be aware of the implications for morale and player happiness.

I also recognise that they can be tedious but that's a reality for most managers IRL.

Judging by the common feedback in General Discussion, I believe I have fewer problems with player unhappiness than the average poster, and I over-achieve every season.

[NineCloudNine]

8 hours ago, Mobius said:

How do you do this please?! 

 

Each league/competition has settings for which type of media conferences it uses, whether they are mandatory and min/max questions. All these are editable in the free pre-game editor.

[santy001]

It's a huge reality of football that is a consequence of continuous 24 hour news cycles so SI has to reflect it in game really. Does anyone find press conferences in real life to be anything other than tedious though? Almost all managers are media trained, they rarely put a foot out of place and they're a relic of the time before managers had that training and there were potentially interesting things to find out. Most of the time its the media trying to make something out of subtle gestures, minor details or winding up a manager and getting an inadvertent remark. 

Chris Kamara on Soccer Saturday was the last source of finding out anything remotely interesting from pre-match conversations with managers and they weren't even press conferences. These days it's not even likely to get a Keegan-like interview again, the last on that front was probably Benitez. They're a huge part of football now because 30-40 years ago the less frequent interviews of non-media trained managers turned up cracking stories. They got some longevity out of it when it became adopted at lower levels and caught a new batch of managers without that training but now it's pretty much redundant. 

There is a little utility in doing them if you do them well, they're always a potential hazard which is essentially a reflection of what they really are.

[DP]

1 hour ago, santy001 said:

It's a huge reality of football that is a consequence of continuous 24 hour news cycles so SI has to reflect it in game really. Does anyone find press conferences in real life to be anything other than tedious though? Almost all managers are media trained, they rarely put a foot out of place and they're a relic of the time before managers had that training and there were potentially interesting things to find out. Most of the time its the media trying to make something out of subtle gestures, minor details or winding up a manager and getting an inadvertent remark. 

Chris Kamara on Soccer Saturday was the last source of finding out anything remotely interesting from pre-match conversations with managers and they weren't even press conferences. These days it's not even likely to get a Keegan-like interview again, the last on that front was probably Benitez. They're a huge part of football now because 30-40 years ago the less frequent interviews of non-media trained managers turned up cracking stories. They got some longevity out of it when it became adopted at lower levels and caught a new batch of managers without that training but now it's pretty much redundant. 

There is a little utility in doing them if you do them well, they're always a potential hazard which is essentially a reflection of what they really are.

They don’t have to reflect it like they do though, is the point. You can put it in the background and automate it (without having your assistant do it which is just unrealistic). 
 

90% in real life are mundane anyway. Especially pre match which are basically injury updates. 

Edited April 20 by DP

[jmlima]

RPGs have been trying to do interaction for aeons and they are still lackluster, repetitive and scripted. It's little wonder SI did not fare any better. I mean, they are no different from staff meetings, player meetings and other forms of interaction in the game. Don;t think the model has much improvement that can be done other than in what regards the choice of questions by the engine. Introducing AI would be a can of worms since measuring answer and then imputing that into the calcs to obtain the results in terms of mods would be akin to impossible. I mean you could use a parser but then someone would discover the 'magic words' and answer would become a selection of random words that would deliver max effect in the calcs. And we would be back to this thread.