IrishRovers
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Posts posted by IrishRovers
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Why does nearly every team I play against with a back 4, from L2 to the Premiership, play with an inverted fullback or wingback? Most teams in real life don't do this as far as I have noticed.
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I've been saying this every year for a while now, but the squad building issues really do make the game a lot less fun. It's especially egregious at midtable teams in the top flight, where in reality there's a fair bit of churn with new managers adopting new systems, players running down contracts and so on - in FM Everton, Brentford, Brighton etc just have the same squads for years and years and years. Very boring and very immersion-sapping.
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2 hours ago, Fr0ufrou said:
I very much like the FM series because it's unique and it's the only game in this niche, I also love football but seriously this game has no respect for us or our time. It's like a big brother that gives you the second controller and promises you are doing something.
Most of the systems in the game straight up do not work, we all think they do so we are having fun nonetheless but we are just roleplaying. We are imagining playing our great link up attacker as a false 9 works well and is some Pep genius while he would in fact score as many assists in any other attacking role. He would overall perfom better, both as a creator and a scorer as an advanced forward with the "take more risks" instruction. We might think it does, because it makes sense and it should, but the truth is it doesn't. There are litteral millions of FM-Arena simulated matches that point to this same exact conclusion every new game and every patch.
Most of the attributes are broken. Every year, someone over there tests the attributes and finds out half of them are useless in this game engine's iteration. Who could have guessed tackling and marking are useless attributes for central defenders? No I'm not pulling your leg this is the actual state of the game, test it for yourself and see.
Training is a scam. After watching evidence based football manager's training videos, I felt really defeated. All this time spent planning training for the month amounted to nothing, it was all a useless joke. In fact it was often even worse than doing nothing at all: I was replacing general training with specialized training which is straight up worse in every way. It was all some busywork to make me feel like I was in control. It did nothing for player progression and it didn't have any influence on the matches. This kind of gamedesign is really cruel, it's akin to candy crush saga and it's really a slap in the face.
When someone on these forums pointed the Devs to the EBFM video "does match preparation raise your chance of winning?" (the answer was no of course). I remember reading the feedback would go upwards, they would investigate and do something about it. Well they did, they simply removed the system in this year's iteration. Oopsie, it was never there, this system was broken but the rest of the game works, promise.
Most roles are completely dumb and are just a strictly inferior version of some other role (check FM arena and test **** for yourself). When it comes to tactics, most of the instructions barely do anything while a few of them do everything. Very high line and press have been broken for half a decade now and it's pretty much the only thing that actually matters if you want to win. Formations are an afterthought, just set your mentality to attack, your high line, 6 or 7 of players on an attack role and enjoy your 5-2 win. There is this elitist mentality that some of us are better at the game than the people who just "download a tactic". Well that's just really ironic because in their own way the people downloading tactics were right all along. Tinkering with support roles based on real life football is indeed a waste of time. Of course it's fun, and thats the important thing, but we are just roleplaying and making our own fun. The game itself does nothing for you.
Staff is useless, loan managers, technical directors, data scientists ("wow he is very good at analyzing data, that must be super helpful for a data scientist!") even coach star ratings barely amount to anything. It's all mindless excel busywork, a fantasy about making your numbers go up. The simulation itself might be even more shallow than cookie clicker.
Here's what some of you are going to tell me: "Don't use the broken stuff, make your own fun, play the game in a way that's fun for you etc.". Well yeah, I kind of tried that, I could maybe roleplay a smaller side with a defensive tactic and fight to avoid relegation. That might be fun until I face Liverpool or United playing attacking gegenpress. This is a sports game, the goal is to win, why would anyone purposely avoid using a good strategy in order to have fun? First do not use high line, then don't use attacking mentality, then don't use Attack Wingbacks (yes fullbacks are very much a scam by the way), then don't use low crosses. Congratulations, you are now losing games, you are getting the real manager experience, come back next year to buy our next 60$ database upgrade.
The worst part is that this **** has been broken for years and that SI, on top of not fixing it are just adding more busywork on top. Player agents are still as shallow but you have to go through an additional useless dialogue now. They added Club Vision so that your board can enforce the same stupid arbitrary requirements every time you play (preferred: make the most of set-pieces) ".
Now I know some of you are hardcore FM fans that are going to deny that the stats provided by FM-Arena users and the Evidence based Football Manager youtube channel are true. "These people don't know how to do proper data science and their evidence is flawed :nerdface-emoji:".
Well yes, those are amateurs that play the game like you and me, not actual data-scientists. They poured hundreds of hours in testing the game, if you were intellectually honest and actually watched their evidence and methdology, you would realize they are most definitely right about the stuff they find out, it's all so painfully obvious.
The reason the game never truly explains its mechanics is that they do not work. Every single piece of evidence points to that. I don't get that some of you hardcore fans are defending it over and over again. There is this ridiculous fan culture here and on reddit defending the game tooth and nail. Just stop silencing us, help us call out the ******** and give actual feedback. Help us make the game better instead of defending every bad practice. Football Manager could be a great game but it is not, help us complain and get the devs working on the right stuff.
I am not trying to ruin your fun, playing FM can be incredibly fun, even in its poor state. It's a great roleplaying tool in a big sandbox simulated world which is the best kind of game. But the reason the game is good is ourselves, we are creating our own fun. The game itself is just helping. And it could definitely help a lot better than it currently does.
This is exactly right. It's Potemkin villages all over the place.
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I get the impression that longterm saves are being phased out in favour of short stints with big clubs. The way the gameworld develops over ten years or more is profoundly unsatisfying to me. But maybe I'm just jaded and nostalgic. I just feel like things used to be more fluid and surprising, and now when I get promoted to the Premiership after eight years or whatever it's still Mount and Haaland and Saka running riot. That might be just the way football is now, I guess - who could afford to buy Haaland - I dunno.
I'd also love the new job press conference, the only one I ever do myself, to vary depending on club. Nobody's taking over at Halifax and saying they're a massive and ambitious club.
Finally, I did win the league with a midblock 433 so credit where it's due, I do think the hegemony of high lines and nonstop pressing has beeb addressed to some extent at last.
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I'll concede that this is a minor issue but it annoys me - the excessive and hyperbolic descriptions of goals in the text commentary! I just conceded a messy goal to a very physical Cardiff team (against my beautiful, tiny boys at the Barcelona of the midlands, Derby). No problem with the goal at all; in fact it was cool, it felt like the kind of goal you do concede against horrible teams in the Championship when you try to play it on the deck. But the commentary was like 'What a goal! One of the best you'll see all season', or whatever, which they basically say for every goal. It bounced off someone's head, bobbled around the box and someone smashed it in. There should be more variety in the way the text expresses the action, surely, especially to reflect the types of physical, messy, non-skill-based goals you see in the lower leagues. I guess nobody reads the text other than me, haha, and I know the tone is intended to reflect the hyperbolic tone of contemporary football language, but it could just be toned down a wee bit in my view.
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One of my favourite ever FM saves was about seven years ago, eventually winning the SPL with Dundee Utd having initially got them promoted from the second division. I was also finishing my PhD at the time and staying in a friend's flat while she was on holiday so it's especially vivid in my memory! I can't remember which version it was, though. We played a 4-4-1-1 with a wide playmaker and a winger, some brilliant football. I think it's actually not as hard as you'd think, because most of the other teams in the SPL are *****, so as soon as you start getting third or fourth regularly you can easily build up some cash reserves, improve the squad, bring in younger players and so on. I think I won the UEFA cup before I won the league.
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I've played three seasons with Charlton, finally in the Championship in the fourth season after two years of playoff misery. I like the match engine this year, so far.
My main issue is with the dynamism of the gameworld. Issues with AI youth development are part of this and being discussed elsewhere. But for me it's also just a lack of flux, transfer movement, change, especially in the lower leagues. In real life the team I support, Sunderland, has gone through about five first 11s in five years; that is common in lower league football but not really reflected in the game.
So four years in, I'm now playing Championship teams that look much the same as they did in 2022, but older. Bit boring.
The ideal for me would be improving the manager AI so that you can see transfer preferences play out - Tony Mowbray likes young technical players, Alex Neil likes physical experienced players, etc. As it stands AI squads are very static, full of unhappy players who aren't playing, and often lacking basic components like full backs or whatever. It really pulls me out of the gane, sadly. Not sure how hard it is to implement that technically.
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I would really like the graphics to change; not to be 'better' in the sense of being more photorealistic, which I don't really care about, but in the sense of being more attractive, more stylised, more aesthetic. Things like giving you a sense of different pitches, changing seasons, the different attributes of players ... for me the dream would be a sort of 2D engine but a really beautiful one, not trying to look 'real' but trying to convey something of the impressions you get when you're actually at a football match. But I imagine I'm on a hiding to nothing there.
I won't buy the next one, mostly because I'm after starting a new job that's going to be more timeconsuming, partly because I find the game increasingly ponderous and boring and hard to understand.
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Slight update. I got promoted as Bradford and am now in the Prem, finished midtable in the first season. Tommy Doyle (an upgrade on Wiredu technically and mentally) scored 15 goals from midfield in the CM(A) role in a 433. Feels like there might be something to tweak there, maybe it's to do with late runs into the box not being tracked? In a way it's good because it's a role I could never get to work last year, but it seems slightly too good.
On a completely unrelated note, I think the media 'language' could do with being a lot more nuanced in the top flight (or top flights) to reflect the grotesque disparities that characterise modern football. Obviously SI don't want to be too critical of that situation, even implicitly, but it feels a bit silly when I'm getting told we're in crisis constantly after two losses on the spin, considering we were in League Two five years ago, have the smallest budget and attendance in the division, and so on. This has a bit of a knock-on in terms of player morale as well, which is annoying; when the expectation is that we're going to get relegated and we're 12th, getting spanked off one of the Manchester teams should be a shrug and a move on, not a 'why have you been so bad at home lately' or whatever. All feels very mechanical and trite, that side of the game - plus ca change.
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I'm in my third season with Bradford. Some quick thoughts - I do think it might be slightly too easy at the moment. Playing a 433 with a slightly modified gegenpress (an inverted wingback and a winger on one side and a slight toning down being the main modifications) I romped to title wins in the first two seasons and am now third in the Championship with a squad that should really be midtable at best. Brendan Wiredu, who's a decent, athletic midfielder but hardly Frank Lampard, has got 15 goals midway through the season as a central midfielder with an attack duty. Paudie O'Connor - again, a decent, slowish, aggressive defender who's been with us since League Two, has a 97 per cent pass completion rate or something along those lines, which seems implausible.
On the other hand, I don't see a lot of the problems adduced on here about style of play. My inverted winger behaves more or less as I'd expect him to; I've also seen some lovely central play and a wide variety of goals. I'm enjoying it, although I feel slightly unsure of the source of my unexpected success. I know that part of it is just the momentum thing, which makes starting with a biggish club below their station a bit of an easy ride, but I'd anticipated more of a challenge in the Championship. Although I did get spanked 3-9 by City in the cup, with a couple of lovely consolation goals from my man Wiredu.
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In the English lower leagues I often ask my assistant manager or DoF for advice on who to sign on a free - it's a good mechanism for that level because the pool of available players is pretty limited, and sometimes they find an unexpected gem who you'd not have known about otherwise. And it feels diagetic. A small but annoying thing in FM21 is that they seem to suggest (not exclusively, but pretty often) either players who are willing to sign in principle but want top-flight wages, or players who won't get a work permit. Surely it wouldn't be that hard to tweak this so that they only suggest realistic signings, as they used to in the past?
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According to the in-game panel (the touchline tablet), almost every AI manager in almost every shape or formation plays at least one mezzala. This bothers me for several reasons - firstly, there can't be that many mezzalae in the English lower leagues, or that many managers who want to play with them; secondly, conventional wisdom suggests that playing such an aggressive role as a mezzala in a 442 or a 4231 is a bad idea, but they all seem to be doing it. Is this a problem with the tablet, like, are my probably analysts mistaken?
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It feels. slightly too easy to make a killing in the transfer market this time round, although I'm not totally sure if this a bad thing - it might signal more aggressive and pre-planned squad-building from the AI, which would be a good thing I guess. Maybe it's something to do with Brexit? For example, I just sold a young English centre-back for £13 million - I bought him for nothing from TNS, loaned him out to Doncaster in League One for a year (average rating 6.56), he's never played a game for me (Oxford in the Championship). He's got high potential, it might happen in real life very occasionally, but I dunno - feels a bit too easy. I also sold Chris Mochrie (who I signed for £90k) to West Ham for £10 million - albeit he had a good season in the Championship, but again, it feels a bit too easy.
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One small tweak I would like to see, and one which doesn't seem that it would be all that hard to implement, would be to the promises system. I feel like if you promise someone you're going to play them in centre midfield but you end up playing them in front of the defence, for example, you should be able to say to them - at any point, not at some arbitrary point given to you by the game - 'look, I know I said I'd play you further forward but you're playing well in this position / but such-and-such a player is injured / but such-and-such a player is in great form', or whatever, and get a response. It would make it feel a wee bit less loaded and unreal if in general the promises could be a wee bit more dynamic, more subject to change, and more open to intervention from the player.
As it is I just try to never make any promises to anyone ever, because it feels like a hostage to fortune - one day I'll need to play Joe Rothwell on the left and he'll lose his head and smash up the dressing room, or I'll miss out on promotion by a point and Max Power will come round my house and kidnap my family. Better to opt out of the system at all - which is fine, but it does mean there's a whole system that SI have spent time and money on which I and I bet loads of others just circumvent.Oh, and as an addendum to this, while I think the slightly more intense scrutiny you get about loan players is ... partly realistic, I guess, I think it's a wee bit too much. Nino Espirito Santo is on the blower to me every fortnight telling me he wants me to play Dion Sanderson as a wingback instead of a fullback. Get out of my grill Nino, haven't you got more important things to be doing?
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To be fair after posting in here I got spanked every week in the Premiership and am rooted to the bottom of the league in January, so, eh, maybe I spoke too soon.
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I forgot to add, the third factor I've noticed is that newgens seem to be too good right off the bat, with 18 or 19-year-olds more than able to tear up the Championship. Obviously that's true of some players in real life, but I've got half a team of them here, some of whom I've been able to tempt away from top or mid-level Premiership clubs really easily.
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My impression is that it might be slightly too easy, although I think that's kind of an imprecise way to think about it. In a sense it has to be 'easy', maybe, since good decisions need to lead to good results in the context of a game; real life it doesn't work like that because there are so many more variables and no developer with an incentive to make it an enjoyable experience, as anyone who's been to Preston will have realised long ago.
But yeah, I have just taken Forest Green to the Premiership. We've got an average gate of 5,009 people, and our record signing is a guy - Clarke Oduour - who I thought I was signing for free, only to realise when he turned up that I owed Barnsley 1.5 million quid or so in compensation. I was raging about that. He's not even that good! Playing a 442 with wingers, box-to-box and ball-winning midfielders, higher line and higher engagement, counter, positive mentality, think that's it. Concentrated on getting fast and strong players. That might be 'overpowered' or whatever but if so that's annoying, I guess, because I'm making the choice to play like that with those kinds of players because it's what I'd want the team I support to do if they got promoted beyond their capacities, not because of any meta-gaming tendency.
It's hard to say but I think (a) morale is playing a wee bit more of a part than it should, meaning that my very happy team can rinse much better teams (b) it's been to easy for me to build a pretty decent team by picking up the scraps of top teams and by getting a senior affiliate. The latter thing is obviously my own 'fault' in the sense that I know it's an easy mechanic to game but I'm gaming it anyway, but I dunno - as with the high-press 442, there's a fine line between making 'good' decisions and taking advantage of the game's mechanics.
One of my favourite games of FM for years was in FM18, I got Wrexham to the Championship, loads of youth team players, playing a pretty attritional 4141. It finished after I'd spent a few years in that division because we just couldn't quite muster the funds or the skill or the tactical nous to get out of there and take that next step. But it was great crack trying to! To return to what I said in the first paragraph, it's obviously tricky to allow for 'failure' in games, whereas in real life nearly all footballing projects end in 'failure', but it should still be possible to 'fail' in a satisfying way, ideally.
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A minor irritation for me is the little pop-up that tells you a player has a knock and suggests a sub. In theory, this is a good quality-of-life adjustment - a quicker way to take off players who pick up niggles during the game, and a reflection of something that would happen in real life where a fitness coach or whatever might have a word in the manager's ear if a player's looking uncomfortable.
In practice it's broken for two reasons. Firstly and most seriously, the suggestions for who to sub on are a wee bit off, so they want me to play a striker on the wing when we've got a like-for-like replacement on the bench who's being ignored. Secondly, less seriously but annoyingly, they often use a formulation like 'so-and-so has taken a bang to the knee, but they should be fine to continue - I recommend we replace them with....'. Make your mind up!
I was thinking about this yesterday evening. On a more general level than this admittedly superficial complaint, it's pretty unusual and worrying, in my opinion, that the best way to play the game is to ignore almost all of the prompts, suggestions and advice that are given to you in the game. If you made all the mentality changes and substitutes the game suggests that you make, you'd be snookered! And that's fine for me, since I've been playing FM since the days before assistant manager advice and I ignore it as a matter of principle, but for people without all those wasted years under their belts it must be confusing to have a game that you need to ignore in order to succeed.
This is perhaps a slightly strange thought experiment, but compare it with something like Yoshi's Island on the SNES, where you're constantly being taught new things which you then put into practice on the following levels. During the first Covid lockdown my girlfriend and I played that all the way through on an emulator. She'd never played it, never had a console as a kid, doesn't play games at all, but she loved it, because it kind of holds your hand through all the mechanics (while also being fun, challenging and so on). Compare that to FM now, which pretends to hold your hand but is actually leading you into, like, a dark alley where Sam Allardyce is waiting with some snooker balls wrapped in a sock. I think the in-game prompts and advice are a good idea, but they really need a lot of work to stop being misleading.
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Hi - I have a quick question about FM21, although I didn't play FM20 so this might also have ben the case in that edition. It seems like rather than clicking through to your U23s, B team, whatever, you now filter it with the button on the far right. That's fine, but what's annoying me is how it seems to be changing the situation with goalkeepers.
Like Neil Warnock, I never name a sub goalkeeper on the bench. On the rare occasions that the goalkeeper gets injured I throw an out-field player in. I also don't like to have a second goalkeeper in the first-team squad, because if you ask the assistant manager to pick the subs, which I often do for unimportant games, he always picks a second goalkeeper. But I make sure that I have a reserve keeper in the U-23s, so that they can move up if the first-choice one gets a serious injury, because if you don't have one a greyed-out player gets generated, then the assistant manager picks them.
In this edition it seems like a greyed-out goalkeeper gets generated even when I have a reserve goalkeeper in the U-23s. Is there any way to stop this happening? I appreciate that this is a small, pedantic and perhaps slightly anal concern, but I'm so used to the squad only having one goalkeeper in it that it's winding me up to have to have two. Thanks!
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Football Manager 2024 Official Feedback Thread
in Football Manager General Discussion
Posted
I'm having a fun save with Bristol Rovers, although 2 playoff losses in 2 years tested my patience.
My two main bits of feedback are firstly that squad building feels two easy - in the Championship I've managed to bring in players on a free, sell them for loads of money, replace them with better players on a free, year on year. I know it's always been a bit like this but I think it's easier than ever in spite of the shonky scouting mechanisms.
Secondly a specific goal where a corner gets cleared once or twice and a player, often the corner taker, pops up on the angle of the box to score, recurs incredibly often. Again there's always been patterns of play you start to see recurring if you play too much but this one feels especially egregious (and not like something that happens v often in Real Football).
Overall though I'm enjoying it. The Premiership is beckoning this year, trust the process.