Dagenham_Dave

And all this means is it's perhaps too easy FOR YOU. If you're enjoying that fine - If you want a challenge, well, you know what to do.

Insane amount of signings every season there.

I genuinely refuse to believe you are this dense.

Oh, Jimmy. I would say 'Swing and a miss' but somehow that doesn't really do it justice.

Hang on, you think this part of the game is 'broken', yet you still happily exploit a 'broken' part of the game, whilst at the same time going into a hissy fit about it being 'broken' in the first place? Spoiler alert - it's not 'broken', it's by design to let people have fun with the game.

It's also the last time I had under 1000 hours in any FM. It got to the point I was deliberately signing slower players to make it seem less nonsensical. I have no idea why that game is revered the way it is. Perhaps because it was so 'easy', who knows?

FM12 was miles and miles easier than the current version, so that blows that theory out the water.

Seething jealousy.

I put players on the loan list and wait for offers to come to me. That's when I usually get offers with the offer of wages paid or monthly fees. Offering out players for loan (or even transfers) makes clubs think you are desperate to loan/sell that player so they will try and get them for as cheap as possible. If your player was wanted by lots of clubs, there was no need to offer him out. These clubs would come sniffing soon enough, then the ball's in your court.

Listen to DD. DD always knows best.

Every single year you moan about the game. On that basis, I expect FM25 will see no difference

Season 10 in game, first full season at Kaiserslautern

You have three active recruitment focuses, is it linked to that?

I've currently got four players out on loan. Wages being paid by the club I've loaned them to in all cases. Not all 100% but a good chunk. Two of them have also got a monthly fee paying.

No. You just don't. The way I play the game is I only sign players who will either benefit my team now, or I think have enough potential to benefit in the long run. If one of those players get's snapped up by a bigger team for a profit, then I consider that a bonus. What I don't do is scour the player search screen and sign endless young kids on the cheap with 5 star potential with the express goal of selling them all for insane profit, so I can then hoover up all the best players and become unbeatable after a couple of seasons. If you want to play that way - fine, it's your game, but you've essentially clicked on 'easy mode'. I get much more satisfaction trying to play the game 'organically', and I feel a sense of achievement if I get any success (it's rare!!) - But as has been said countless times now, that's the whole beauty of FM - The game is what you make it. Don't whine that it's possible to sign 100 players for big profits. If you're unhappy with that mechanic, just don't do it. It can't be more simple than this.

I would argue there is even less reason for ANYONE to have a transfer budget of £2billion.

Or you can leave all your transfers to your DoF. Or you can only sign players you deem to be 'realistic'. Or you can restrict yourself to how many players you sign Or you can only use scouts and not the player search or any other exploitative way to find players. ..... Or you can sign who you want, when you want, and have a fun time. It's called choice and everyone has it. The beauty of FM is its open-endedness. There's no gamey 'difficulty levels', there's no senseless restrictions for the sake of it other than what occurs naturally (transfer budget, wage budget, etc), but on top of that, there's tons of different ways you can play it. There's even countless mods out there that make the game harder, from skins that hide player attributes, to mods that ramp up injuries, and loads in between. Now, this is not to say the game can't improve and become more naturally difficult, but as has been said countless times, the risk of doing that possibly outweighs the rewards. SI are a business after all. They actually do a great job in making sure the game caters for as many people as possible.

So, rather than you stopping yourself from doing it, you want the game to effectively do the exact same thing, presumably leading to the same outcome? Why would SI go to all that trouble to add in gamey restrictions like that when you can easily do it yourself? And if you don't have the willpower, then that's on you I'm afraid.

Never played chess, so I've got no idea what this means.

But adding that as an option to choose would involve a complete re-write of the match engine, otherwise it wouldn't work. It certainly wouldn't be a case of 'just tweaking' something! Given the majority of players who play this game haven't won anything, its fair to say the game will be already doing a good enough job of exploiting weaknesses in tactics. My own personal experience is this is by some way the hardest version of the game I've played in years. Which has made it much more enjoyable (for me anyway). But again, I don't manage in England with its endless riches.

What team are you and what is your database set up?

How, specifically would that work without changing the entire match engine? I mean, it's a moot point, as SI will never introduce such a thing, thankfully, but I'm interested nonetheless. People think it's so easy in a game like this to make these arbitrary settings to make it harder. It would be an absolute nightmare trying to code that, alongside the 'normal' version of the game. Also, if you think the feedback thread is a venomous pit of slime just now, it would be ten times worse if this ever happened. This I do agree with. It was an excellent game mode. Exactly the same as the full game tactically, same match engine, but with a lot of the menial stuff taken care of by staff. PC version should never have been removed. There was also this common fallacy that it was an 'easier' game. This put the purist snobs off even trying it and ultimately led to its demise. It wasn't any easier, in fact the last time I was sacked on FM was on FM Classic.

And you don't have to, that's the whole point. Why? What managers in real life does this happen to? As long as you are sticking to the transfer and wage budget, what's the issue? And there's already a mechanic in the game whereby the more successful you are, the more the board are lenient when you request additional funds, upgrading facilities, etc. The game has to be accessible to every type of play style. If you want to restrict yourself when it comes to transfers, it really isn't that difficult to do.

What most people tend to forget with this is, yes, it might be 'trivially easy' to make the game look 'cosmetically better', but this big upscale in cosmetics still has to deal with the millions of calculations per second that the match engine is based on. It's not FIFA with it's limited palette of build up play and movement (honestly the ME is night and day between the two). To be able to marry FM's ME with FIFA's graphics might be the dream, but that's never happening for a long, long time. In short, it's nowhere near 'trivially easy' to make it look so much better cosmetically, even with the right resources.

If it's breaking immersion for you....just don't do it!! Limit yourself to a realistic amount of signings. Don't use the player search function. Make it you can only sign players your scouts recommend. Honestly, the game is so open ended to play it however you like. People are always asking for arbitrary difficulty levels, but they are already there. You want it dead easy and immersion breaking? You can. You want a more organic, realistic challenge? You can. It's all there for you.