So after a little discussion on new updates for FM23 I realised that I felt a little disappointed that there haven't been any radical changes to the actual way the game is played since.. well a very long time. I've played this game since it was Championship Manager, which is decades! The core of the game is very similar, but each year new features are added, things are imperceptibly tweaked under the hood, the interface changes a bit.
Over time the game has grown and grown, but it's also very similar.
The way I play the game is also very similar, no matter what version I'm on. There are some things I do a lot
Play with my tactics on the tactics screen
Look at my players
Go to my inbox and hit space thousands of times to get through my emails
Play a football match
Go to my inbox and hit space thousands of times to get through my emails
There are some things I might do a few times a season such as
Look at staff
Sort out my training
Check my finances
Do scouting
And there are A LOT of other things in the game that I never do. There are a lot of screens I never use, there are screens I did not know exist. I could easily get lost in the game, but I don't because I stick to what I know and don't venture too far.
It occurred to me that the game has a lot of bloat and it is unwieldy. I said in another thread that it reminded me of Microsoft products like Word, where the core functionality of the program, the thing I needed to do to achieve my goal when using it, becomes lost under layers of added features that only a tiny percentage of people actually use.
On top of that, bloat extends to every screen. From a design perspective almost every screen is very hard to read and consume because there is so much to take in. Again I've been playing for decades so I know which bit of a screen I need to pay attention to, which means I basically ignore most of the info presented to me. If I didn't ignore it I would never be able to finish a season in my lifetime.
So essentially what I'm saying that personally I not only ignore 80% of the features and screens of the game, but 80% of the content on each of those screens. So I wonder what is the value for it to be there, and wouldn't it make sense to design the interface in a much more streamlined way that fits the way users actually play the game.
So thats why I wondered am I alone in playing this way? Are other people spending their time playing FM by endlessly ignoring everything on screen until they get to the interesting bit. I know SI wanted to change this behaviour but I haven't seen much in the way of radical change.
Am I alone here? How do other people play the game? Do you read everything? What do you ignore? Do you mostly just hammer your way through your inbox till a non skippable action occurs or a game?
Let me know.