[Challenges / Sign-Ups / Holiday Games ideas thread.]

I've done a little bit of testing now and it looks like people will need to be assigned to teams to ensure they don't drop out of the database when they are unattached. I also think it would be more fun to allow people to play in plenty of leagues rather than limit them to the English leagues - and I think I've devised a way to divide them up into player leagues depending on the level they play at. So, I think I'm going to offer people the opportunity to choose a team within the lower reputation leagues I will be running, or allow a team to be randomly chosen for them. This also gives the fun opportunity, if somebody wanted to, to be an English player, but to start a career in, for instance, Argentina, and see where that took them.

I've also decided that the CA will definitely be the same for everyone, and I might set the minimum PA at somewhere in the region of 90-100 - that means that the worst players should be good enough to play for a team in the bottom division of the leagues that I am running, and would obviously be far too good for some leagues, such as the Conference or Scottish Third Division - but shouldn't really get too much higher than League One level at best.

I'll also just have to put in a blanket statement that if your player is a bit crap and doesn't get that many games... well, that's part of the fun of this particular sign up!

Anyway - with that all in mind, I'll probably start this sometime tomorrow. Any further feedback from anybody is gratefully received.

[Challenges / Sign-Ups / Holiday Games ideas thread.]

Thanks for the positive feedback, everyone.

Originally posted by Whoopy D:

The more I've thought about the random PA idea the more I like it, just a couple of things I was unsure about when thinking how I'd run it.

What club if any would the players start at?

What would the starting CA be?

Would you let people pick some atrributes and if so how because I can't see someone with PA 80 having too many stats at even 12 let alone 20?

I really like the idea though and if you decide not to do it I might have a go at running it myself if that's ok with you.

Whoopy D - these kinds of questions are the reason I haven't gotten around to starting this sign up yet - I think I would need to maybe do a test game or two to iron out all the kinks!

For instance, I'm not sure whether to just run the English leagues or whether to run quite a few regional "hub" leagues so that people can be whatever nationality they want. But if I want to put people into different "leagues" with each other dependent on the level they are playing at, then this would raise issues of which leagues are on an equal "level" - is Serie C1 on the same level as League 1? What league is there in the game world that is on the same level as the Conference N/S? You see the problem. Maybe I could group leagues by their reputation in the editor - as in, have one "league" for people playing in leagues with reputation 16-20, one for people playing in leagues with reputation 11-15, one for people playing in leagues with reputation 6-10, etc. Or I could just play it in the English leagues since that is what people are generally most familiar with.

As far as the clubs that players would start at - I had a couple of ideas. I think my favourite is to put everyone on free transfers, and see who picks them up. But I'd have to run a couple of test games to make sure that everyone was getting picked up - it would be awful if someone didn't even get signed and retired at 19! But I'd try to engineer the balance of CA/PA so that even the worst players in the sign up were still good enough to have a career at Conference/Conference N/S level. The other difficulty with this option is player nationalities - if I decide to run just the English leagues or just the UK leagues, then people of other nationalities might be less likely to be signed. I'm sure there's a way around it - maybe give everyone who does not already have a UK nationality a UK second nationality, since I believe that would give them more chance of being signed by UK teams - or just make everyone be English! - but it'll take a bit of figuring out.

Another option might be to place them randomly at teams in the bottom divisions of whatever leagues I run, and take it from there. I like the idea of the AI deciding where they should go though - but this idea would take a lot of the hassle out of it.

As far as starting CA goes, there are a couple of options - I could just give everyone the same starting CA - say, 55 or something. Some players would obviously then reach their peak a lot faster than others. The other option is to have CA as a function of the PA - so everyone's got plenty of room to grow - for instance, CA could be 1/3 of PA. I think I like the first option best, because people would be at a similar level to start with, so it would be difficult to tell who was going to be good and who wasn't for the first few seasons, when some people started to reach their peak while others still had a long way to go.

With regards to picking attributes - my understanding is that if you give a player attributes in the editor that are way to high for their CA/PA, the game will just adjust them down. For instance, I could put a player with CA 55 and PA 80 into the database with Finishing 20, and when I opened up the game they would probably just have Finishing 12 - however, I think the attributes I set to 20 would still be higher than the attributes which had been set lower or left on random. So that's probably the way to go - let people pick attributes that in an ideal world would be 20, and then we can see if they ever reach that!

Thanks for the offer of running it, but I'm sure I will do it pretty soon - got a bit of spare time on my hands at the moment, so it's really just a case of working out how best to get it all set up. Any further input would be gratefully received though - and I'll make sure to save you a place in the sign up if you like!

If anyone else has any ideas/feedback on how they think this would work best, I'd be glad to hear it.

[Challenges / Sign-Ups / Holiday Games ideas thread.]

There have been a couple of sign up ideas I've been mentally kicking around for some time now. I don't quite have time to set one up yet, but I thought I'd post the ideas here to gauge the level of interest/get feedback on how they should be run/check that nobody's run something similar before, so I know whether it's worth me spending any more time on it!

So, my two ideas are relatively similar, and I think there would only really be a niche for one of them - it's just deciding which one. The first is what I call the "It could be you (who's crap!) sign up", and the second is the "Journeyman sign up". Both ideas spring from the same observation - that most games have people sign up as very promising young starlets with high PA, and follow their career as they develop into worldwide superstars. Which is great fun, of course.

But how about introducing an element of chance into the proceedings? In the "It could be you (who's crap!) sign up" I'd use a random number generator to generate a PA for each user between a minimum of, say... 80? and a maximum of 200. I feel like each user's career trajectory would be a little bit less predictable in this game, as while some would end up at top clubs and playing for their country, some would never get out of the lower leagues.

It would be interesting to see if your player was going to be one of the ones that would develop into something special and where their career was going to take them - since no-one would ever know their assigned PA at the start of the game.

I was thinking maybe I could run it as a striker sign up, and after the first couple of seasons I could divide everyone into different "leagues" depending on what level they played at, so you could follow your progress amongst players at a similar level - and therefore even if your player never made it to, for instance, the Premier League, you could still have bragging rights as the best League One striker. I could also include some sort of overall career goals table - so if you never made it above League One but were a really good League One level striker, you could still be higher in that table than a player that made it to the Premier League but was a little out of their depth there.

The idea is a little rough around the edges - for instance, I'm not sure whether to make it just strikers, or whether to make it only in England or include several leagues. And of course, no-one would ever be told their CA and PA as determined at the start of the game, so they will have to follow their player's career to get an idea of how good they really are.

The second idea is quite similar, if a little simpler - basically removing the random element, but instead of having everyone be superstars, have everyone be the sort of players who never make it into the top divisions and spend their careers playing for various clubs in the lower leagues.

Those are the ideas in outline - any comments or suggestions?

[Challenges / Sign-Ups / Holiday Games ideas thread.]

Originally posted by JoseRR:

Just a note on earlier suggestions - seeing as my Hong Kong Challenge has not really been very popular (And now seems to have died out ), I would be willing to start the suggested Small Club to Big Club From a Big European Nation Challenge if people have got an interest in this idea. (Involving Holland, France, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Germany and perhaps Greece).

I think Greece is already included in Gundo's challenge. The leagues that he ruled out of his challenge were France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Scotland (and England of course, but Dafuge has already got that one covered!), so those would be the ones to go with.

[Challenges / Sign-Ups / Holiday Games ideas thread.]

Originally posted by dafuge:

This was something that I considered when I ran it on the old CM forums, in the end I decided that it was best that each challenge was treated separately so that anyone could join at any time and compete in as many challenges as they wanted. We thought that the idea of an overall leaderboard might put off people joining part way through, because they had no chance of catching the leader. We found that regular individual challenges worked well, because people could dip in and out of it as they wanted.

Fair enough, that makes sense. And I agree on choosing teams deliberately rather than randomly, so as to give as wide a range of challenges as possible.

[Challenges / Sign-Ups / Holiday Games ideas thread.]

Originally posted by dafuge:

If people think a monthly challenge would be a good idea, I'd love to run it. Running things monthly would mean that I could quite easily manage one season for that while continuing with my own long term game. What do other people think?

You've got my vote! As the creator of the most successful challenge in FM, I'd be surprised if there were any complaints!

I was thinking about this a bit more, and here's another thought that I'm not even 100% sure would be a good idea myself - but maybe something to kick around?

Obviously for each monthly challenge, there would probably be a leaderboard/table to show who took part and how they got on. How about, in addition to that, having an ongoing leaderboard across all the official monthly challenges? I'm not sure how you would work out the table as the objectives of each challenge would be different, but it could potentially be done in some way...

It's got both pros and cons - on the plus side, it would encourage people to keep taking part and keep coming back for the next month's challenge, and might be fun for regular players to see how they're faring overall across different leagues (not for the sake of beating other players, but just for their own interest), and if the same players keep taking part it could foster a really good sense of community... on the down side, it might overcomplicate things, might encourage a bit too much competitive behaviour when the idea is just to have fun, and would mean more work for the challenge originator.

Hmmmm... I don't know! Any thoughts?

[Challenges / Sign-Ups / Holiday Games ideas thread.]

Originally posted by dafuge:

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by Jimbokav1971:

How I first got speaking to dafuge was years ago and we did 2 single season challenges on CM03/04 (I think). One was managing East Bengal in India and the other was managing a Brazilian lower league team, (can't remember who), and each challenge only lasted for a single season.

I've been thinking of resurrecting this for a while. Back in the days of the CM forums I started a series of challenges that were based over the length of one season, with a time limit of two weeks for people to complete them. A new team in a new country was chosen for each challenge, with some kind of table produced at the end of the two weeks.

If there any suggestions on this one, we could bring it back. Since then, the challenges forum has been created, so often people have a long term save on the game. How about making it a monthly challenge? Would people be able to manage a season with another team alongside their own games?

It was Santa Cruz </div></BLOCKQUOTE>

I genuinely think this is an excellent idea. I think it would be really fun to have a fresh challenge every month - maybe giving people the incentive to play in leagues they wouldn't normally consider.

Perhaps it could be mixed up a bit too - in that most challenges here start with a tiny team, with the objective being to make them conquer the world. Maybe with these challenges it could be that one month you're managing a tiny team in the lower divisions of Slovakia for a season, and the next month the goal is to win as many trophies as possible in one season with a bigger, better known team in a different league.

If you ask me, it might need to be controlled in some way though - as great an idea as it is, if the forum were flooded with two hundred odd one season challenges for all sorts of clubs, it's going to get pretty crazy pretty quickly. This scenario to me is really not out of the realm of possibility - say someone started a challenge to get Arsenal to win as many trophies as possible, then a Man Utd fan starts one that's exactly the same but with Man Utd instead, and before you know it you've got a challenge for every team in the world with a half-decent fan base. I know that if not enough people are playing them, challenges die out, but it could potentially cause the forum to get a bit clogged up.

So, an official monthly challenge would be a great way to control this and to stop the forum being deluged with them. Dafuge's FM08 demo challenge just goes to show there's an appetite for shorter challenges, and I think that a monthly one season challenge would be really good at stimulating and maintaining interest in the forum.

Just a few thoughts that sprang to mind!