Sunstrikuuu

I find it's a big problem specifically with recruitment and performance analysts, and with sports scientists and physios (as always, talking solely about in prior versions here. Have not bought '23, will not buy '23). There are lots of generated staff who are recruitment analysts (20 aptitude for the role), and have good stats to be recruitment analysts, but are for whatever reason only willing to consider jobs as performance analysts, which they're much worse at, and vice versa. Those two job pairs specifically have been annoying.

The bug tracker's not pointless. I've had issues raised there be taken seriously and addressed quickly and effectively. And I'm glad it's as easy to use as it is. It isn't perfect though. There are definitely important limitations. One, which I've posted here about before, is the difficulty in raising pattern-of-behavior bugs. There's not a good way to raise issues relating to things which can happen but aren't guaranteed to happen happening too often or not enough. A bigger issue for the kinds of problems that often get brought up in the Feedback thread is the reliance on user-provided save games. In order to report bugs with interactions, contracts, transfer offers, and other out-of-the-blue non-ME events, users are expected to have saves from before those events occur in which those events will occur. That places a major burden on the player. Some bugs have such long time horizons that it's not practical to report them (in FM 2022 I had an under-construction stadium disappear and break my ability to ask for anything stadium-related. Is it really practical to keep a save from 2026 on the off-chance there's a related bug in 2030?). Others only reproduce occasionally. Some, like aberrant transfer offers, can hit any day over a 90-day period, meaning the user needs to save daily, which slows an already-slow game to a crawl. And some aren't relevant at the start of the game and only become apparent several seasons into a long-term save. How many saves are players expected to make and how long are we expected to retain them? Is it really a good idea to train your users to save-scum by constantly reloading to before problematic things happen? If a player experiences an annoying problem but doesn't have a save, what are they supposed to do? If they post about it here, they're told to go to the bug tracker. Posting in the bug tracker without a save just clutters things up for the devs and support team; they can't do anything to investigate, it's practically spam. So the forum-user experience feels pretty negative; you have a problem and there's nowhere appropriate to talk about it. It's actually kind of important that players get to post in the Feedback thread about bugs they experience, because it keeps venting posts and posts that don't have the necessary information out of the bug tracker. And that's not getting into all the offshoots -- being told that the problem is a problem, yes, it's been reproduced but won't be fixed until the next year's game. Or being told that the feature is working as designed, and make a new feature request (really, wanting a guy who gets a red card in the 19th minute to have a match rating below 7.0 is a new feature request?). Or being told that the problem has been addressed, only to find that no it actually hasn't. All of that is tremendously annoying, and it's mostly directed at people who are on the forums because something has already happened to annoy them.

Another example of something that has been reported in the bug tracker, and in the old bug forums before that, which is part of why people complain about it so much.

Do you mean player behavior in the match engine, or outside it?

I think I've won one, though it was several versions ago.

Battlefield, Call of Duty, Overwatch and Counterstrike are all multiplayer AAA shooters, but they're wildly different. Mass Effect changed AAA RPG development forever by proving that Bioware-style RPGs were possible with a voiced protagonist. The influence of Far Cry and Assassin's Creed is all over the industry, not always for the better. And you can see how much Assassin's Creed has had to change as the open-world, icon-based style has taken over the ARPG genre. All of the development in the survival/crafting genre leads to Valheim. What Hearthstone did in 2015 lead to more successful implementations in Legends of Runeterra and Magic Arena. Skyrim's open world leads to Witcher 3's leads to Red Dead Redemption 2's leads to Elden Ring's. Yes, games within genres share features. They're adopting the most successful ones from across the genre. If there are fewer developers working with the genre, there's less chance of successful experiments.

My 'undecided' verdict turned pretty quickly into 'no'. I just wasn't interested. The beta went buy, then it was released, then it was on sale at various points in the fall and I haven't been the least bit tempted. Until interactions and promises are fully reworked or removed, I'm not buying another one, and I want major transfer logic improvements too. I can't deal with that garbage any longer. Life's too short to field £16m offers for a £100m-rated 22 year old international captain with three years left on his contract every three days for a summer.

Where it gets really frustrating is that certain things seem to update *before* the season ends. I've been sacked for not achieving promotion or avoiding relegation when I still have a playoff to play. I've lost playoff promotion finals because they squad didn't realize the season wasn't over yet and got upset they hadn't been promoted. I'm sympathetic to 'it's hard to fix', but that can't be a reason not to change it.

I feel like it's not a great advertisement if "play three tall strikers" falls into the territory of exploitative. That's the kind of thing that you could pretty easily arrive at by accident; it's not like you're having to set up intricate, highly unrealistic instructions to do it.

Well, reputation. Not tactically (though that's always been an explanation given to people who complain that their tactics stop working in January; their team's reputation has increased and the league takes them more seriously now), but in terms of transfers. Reputation's a two-way street, though, and while it helps teams like Manchester United and Barcelona year-on-year it's not great for teams that don't start in that exalted position.

I got a new stadium in '22 after being promoted from the National to Ligue 2. Then I got promoted again the next season, so the minimum stadium requirements were different, and the in-progress stadium vanished. I could never build a new stadium, expand the first stadium, or buy the one we had to rent again.

Ok, but there's actually no way to know any of those things because the match engine is a black box to the users. Raising issues can't depend on knowing the unknowable.

When it was introduced in FM21, xG considered defender positioning, shot speed, body part creating the shot, type of the attack, shot location and angle and the creation source, including qualities of the incoming pass. I mean, it still might not know that it's an open goal, but that would be a case of the feature not working correctly.

I don't understand this at all. The thought you put into it should be the same squadbuilding question you ask about every player: is this the right guy? what resources are appropriate to secure his services? And the offering club ought to be asking similar questions: what am I looking for out of this loan? Is this option the best for me? Are the finances right? Is is optimal for development? Whether the offering club is looking for financial relief or development, player role shouldn't be a particularly important factor. I'm not talking about positions here. If a team wants to offer a player out and asks that they play in central defense rather than at right back, that's fine. That's fully within their purview. The problem with making role a part of it is that roles are so nebulous that there ought to be no way for an observer to know some roles from another purely through watching from the stands. What's the visual difference between an advanced playmaker on support in central midfield and a central midfielder on support with the Shoot Less, Hold Position and Take More Risks instructions? Or an Advanced Forward who presses more versus a Pressing Forward on attack, a role/duty combination that in the text says it functions like an advanced forward in attacking phases? And that's before you get into the silliness of, like, games in the French 6th tier that aren't on TV or streamed, have tiny crowds, and the players being from teams that can't really afford scouts. And even after that, I mean jeez. I can't speak to '23 specifically, but in the past the AI has had an absolute hard-on for player roles in loan negotiations. They'd rather have their player rot on the bench with the proper role than play all the time in the wrong one. This is a very bad combination in a series of versions that's emphasizing playing time more and more for youth development, a thing the AI famously struggles with. Add to that there are already tools for making loans difficult. Leagues have rules about how many players can be loaned. Loans don't allow your team to build year-on-year chemistry. Relying on loans as you move up the leagues means you have to replace key players every single season, and that means you have to change tactics and playing styles to suit whoever's available in the market. And if that's not enough, there are already clauses that can be put into loans to make them more restrictive, like fees, wages, bonuses and required playing time. And frankly I'm not sure why making them difficult ought to be an objective. The game should be modeling a realistic environment, not adding artificial impediments.

And I'd bet that you couldn't really negotiate that point of the loan, because the AI will neck itself before it allows its left fullback to play as a Wingback (defend) instead of a Fullback (support). That's how it was in '21 and '22, and I'm assuming it hasn't changed in '23. It's a bad design decision and it ought to be fixed. Only a very small handful of teams and a small subset of players should get that kind of scrutiny.

That was how I felt last year when transfer valuations were acknowledged as bugged in long-term saves and, so sorry, they'd be fixed in FM23. The other day, for my sins, I was watching a Youtube video on terrain traits in Hearts of Iron IV by 71Cloak, a streamer and Youtuber who's exceptional at both understanding and explaining the mechanics of that game. Hearts of Iron IV has six terrain types: plains, hills, mountains, forest, jungles and swamps, and three major modifiers, river crossings, forts and amphibious landings. Certain division types (it's a war game, if you don't know) have different bonuses in different terrains, and adding Engineers to your divisions modifies those further. For example, buildings Forts on terrain imposes an attack penalty to units attacking into that province. Adding Engineers to the attacking unit grants 20% additional fort attack and 35% additional fort defense. Except that fort defense modifier is an orphan modifier: it shows up in a tooltip, but Forts do not affect defense at all, and Engineers do not change that. The +35% Fort Defense effect of adding Engineers does not work. That bonus is indicated by a tooltip, but it applies to zero situations in-game. Amphibious landings are even weirder. Naval invasions impose a 70.7% penalty to stats; the Landing Craft I tech reduces that penalty by 15%. Researching Landing Craft I reduces 70.7% to 67.7%; the keen-mathed among you will see that that's not 15%; it's 15% of 20. If we take all the levels of Landing Craft, we should have a 65% reduction to the penalty. It actually only reduces you to 57.7%, because again it's being applied to 20%. And that's one small corner of the game. A DLC a year ago introduced Officer Corps as a big feature. Looking at the Air Force Command spirits, several of them either do nothing or do partly nothing (+5% Escort Efficiency, +5% Ground attack factor; escort efficiency does not do anything, it is a fake value). Anyway, I bring this up because I'd be shocked if Football Manager didn't have equivalent situations. In fact, we know it's had them in the past -- halfbacks, liberos and inverted fullbacks at various points have been non-functional. And if it does have them, like if the Technique attribute just didn't work at all and calculated every match engine situation as if the value was 10 for every player... would anyone be able to tell?

Out of curiosity, are there any free-scoring CMs or AMs? I assume the overall numbers are way lower because of all the AI teams playing 4-2DM-1CM-3 and similar formations, but there might be a team playing an attacking mid or CMa or a mezzala racking up numbers. FM22 had similarly low-scoring wide players, and I had multiple seasons with central midfielders getting 20 goals in lower leagues.

It's always possible to explain a bad moment in Football Manager by saying 'well, it's a black box and any number of things could have caused it, and besides this stuff happens IRL too'. And that's fine and good and correct. But also it means a lot of feedback has to be, by necessity, "I know this can happen but it feels like it happens too often". And that feedback is so inherently subjective and impossible to demonstrate on a forum -- how the hell are you gonna show something happening 1.5% of the time when it really ought to happen 0.25% of the time? -- that it's very easy to ignore. And it's especially easy to ignore when you go looking for something like that pass in the stats after the game and the only thing you see is a misplaced pass; it's not an Error Leading To Goal or a huge demerit on match rating or whatever*. The stats often don't match what the game shows you, so you're left feeling like something's wrong but it's very difficult to show it unless you play the game like a Q&A professional. Speaking as someone who's simmed multiple seasons specifically to test 1v1 success rate, it's a lot of work and not fun. It's a terrible way to spend your time if you're not getting paid. *This really bothered me about FM22. Long balls would be aimed right behind the central defenders, who could head them away if they took a single step back. But they wouldn't, and the ball would go over their head by just a little bit, and the attacker would run in behind and have an easy one-on-one. Shkodran Mustafi did this for Arsenal one time (albeit in a cup final) and the fans hated him forever. But it didn't impact CD match ratings, and you couldn't find it if you looked in the stats because it wasn't a missed tackle or header or mistake. So unless you dedicated yourself to tracking it over a multi-season sample, good luck showing it as a repeatable pattern of behavior.

Probably the same time it is every year. I'm surprised to hear that. The FMG subreddit seems pretty positive. Maybe not as happy as it is most years, but it's consistently very high on the games. Not a lot of griping I can see.

They've gotten it 0% right. Interactions are consistently the worst bits of the game, and have been since they were added. The upside for using the system is a minor morale boost, and the downside is blowing up your entire team for multiple years. The system is a black box, with terrible feedback and really no way to make educated decisions. Options come and go seemingly randomly, and the player-manager doesn't get to say what IRL would be the logical thing to say half the time. The writing of the options has frequently obscured the actual effects of what you're saying. Honestly, the system would be significantly improved by stripping out every mechanical effect and leaving it just as a flavor generator.

How successful have you been with those tactics? It seems like low block/limited pressing systems are the ones that people have struggled with more than anything. I don't know because I don't have FM23, but for the last several years it's been easier to play high line/intense press systems, since so many of the drawbacks are either limited in effect (match fitness/condition/injuries; it's too easy to keep players healthy and in shape while simultaneously mega-pressing for a full season) or totally nonexistent (developmental effects on the front or back ends of the age curve).

Wait, seriously? One of the bigger differentiators of how teams defend IRL is just *gone*?

"Well, you'll play him every day, right?" "lol of course not, he'll sit on our bench"

I am completely serious when I say that non-negotiable offers should be removed from the game. Teams receiving transfer offers should be able to make non-negotiable counter-offers, and subclauses should remain non-negotiable, but fully non-negotiable unsolicited offers are a) extremely annoying b) unrealistic and c) asymmetrical in their effects on the teams involved. Last year I was fielding multiple non-negotiable offers per day through the entire transfer windows. The year before that, the same. It is long past time for this to be dealt with.

Under the new training system, I've never noticed differences in development that couldn't be explained by playing time, with the exception of rare regens who show up as 180 CA 16 year olds. But even something like 'all the development happening between 16 and 22' is an example of what I'd like to stop happening. The other end of the development curve, the decline phase, is still really flat, it seems like. Again, I'd like variance. Admittedly, I can't speak to FM 23. Maybe it's all different and better! I don't know, I didn't buy it because there are other problems unrelated to development and AI squadbuilding that are absolute dealbreakers for me. But it is nice to see the same issues coming back year after year.