[Will anyone be buying FM21?]

Just now, Icy said:

But if on the other hand, the decision making is based on where the players are at a given time, it could explain why a fast player, now faster because the physical edits, might be more open for that through pass and the midfielder might see him and pass it. So indirectly, a change in the game physics, without changing the decision making process that is not editable, could output a different result that looks like a better decision.

This is also true. But it can also output a result which looks like a worse decision.

And the decision making logic (and thousands of hours of testing of the decision logic) including the parts of the decision logic which are supposed to make some players better at decision making than others is based on a different set of assumptions about how players move

[Will anyone be buying FM21?]

39 minutes ago, GloW said:

The question is, how a placebo effect, who doesn't make modifications to the ME, can cause "problems with the overal realist" or "strange results" as Neil stated above? Isn't just a mere a "graphical patch"?

Some of the default player movement animations look a bit awkward in real time in the ME. The mod changes the speed they're executed at, which might look like slicker football even if it's less representative of real life movement capabilities and reaction times.

 

Presumably the speed players run and turn at does affect the player position calculations in the ME, but not the decisions. If the decision-making is based on assumptions players move at different speeds, presumably it results in players making worse decisions.

[Random Number Generator (RNG) when players becoming backroom staff]

18 minutes ago, zindrinho said:

Some great answers man, thanks a lot!

Do you know if their coach-potential is set from the start of your save-game, as in before they retire, or is it set rather randomly once he gets his staff stats page?

I assume it's generated on the day they acquire staff attributes 

[Random Number Generator (RNG) when players becoming backroom staff]

There are some future role preferences set in the database, and the RNG will bias towards tactical styles/formations common to the player's nationality and ensure only keepers become keeper coaches

It would be nice to see some logic about tactical preferences linked to styles, but for every Guardiola or Allardyce whose tactics epitomise the player they used to be you've got surprises like Zidane being a pragmatist focused on wide play or ordinary defender Bielsa becoming a total football innovator

 

3 hours ago, zindrinho said:

And a question at last, if I continue my save when Paul Verhaegh starts life as a Nat C coach would that mean he can become a better coach than if he starts with the same stats but as a Nat A badge coach? Since he then can get more badges and increase his stats even further?

Depends on whether his starting attributes are as good for a start. In theory low coaching badges make it easier to improve staff with coaching badges, but they have hidden fixed potential like players too 

[Great quote from Rodri, sounds familiar.....?]

He's just pissed off it autosaved before he could reload...

[Do They Just Not Want To Sell a Rival Club?]

Barcelona were willing to let Suarez leave to a non-rival club for nothing. Demanded (and got) money from Atletico when the player tried to force the transfer through.

I think the high fees sometimes asked in FM when a club really doesn't want to sell are often silly, but double the market value to a rival here sounds quite plausible. It's how they'd justify it to fans.

[Big asymmetry in newgen production]

It's inevitably uneven, but probably not as uneven as before.

I played for a decade as England manager with the full Football League, and no foreign leagues loaded. I think I did start off with high rep foreign players loaded

Only got a couple of players actually getting to 160+ CA which seems similar to other elite nations, only player with a higher PA than Kane/Sterling probably won't make it, seasons where no England-qualified newgen had PA higher than 150. Other big nations seem to have world class newgens coming through their domestic system. Best defender in the world was a newgen from Serie A, which sounds plausible.

[FM vs Realism]

12 hours ago, Pasonen said:

I'm a little surprised how many don't see game missing mistakes. Of course player movement and mistakes like worse passes go hand to hand. I understand If game is build around static formation system then there's not much room for passes or crosses that are not perfect. Maybe in future there could be more not so perfect passes, not so perfect first touches and more decisions to go temporary positions with sprints or runs. More reacting to ball movement when ball is in the air, this is almost non existent at the moment.

I think the main reason is plenty of mistakes are made, just not necessarily the same as IRL (e.g keepers rarely flap compared with RL, but there's plenty of bad marking at the back post)

[Pregens have incredibly low attributes]

3 hours ago, HUNT3R said:

The PA cap (so CA will be under that) for filler players used to be 119 PA. IIRC, it has been increased to 140 PA. They're not meant to be amazing, just to fill squads, so it's by design. 

There used to be different caps depending on when the players were generated: based on previous experiments adding a league in the second season results in some of the pregens in that league being much higher than the start of game cap (plus there'd be some ordinary newgens with high potential)

So if the OP wants to play a completely fresh Premier League, the best approach might be to start with a low level foreign league, and then add PL, Serie A, Bundesliga etc in the second season

 

It'll still be a bit weird/easy though because I think the generated players are supposed to be mostly reserve team level or below for the club, and it just doesn't generate enough players for balanced squads

[Bale - attributes - question which goes to the core of FM]

I'd probably wait for Bale's attributes to actually be mediocre in FM21 (they probably won't be) and for Bale to actually perform like a great athlete (tbc) before using it as an 'attributes are flawed' argument...

[Lesson learnt - Never let your DoF handle players' contract renewals]

Assume he was a prospect before.

Yeah, even in games where I've had the DoF make all incoming transfers [if I approve], I haven't trusted him with even the most basic contract renewals to stop him doing this (or accepting stupid min fee release clause requests)

It'd be nice if the automation features let you set a max salary cost so he had to come to you to ask if you actually wanted the player if he couldn't get a cheaper deal

 

At least Liverpool can afford it, I guess

[FM20 - Step up in difficulty after promotion = concede all the set-pieces]

The match engine doesn't care what division you were in last season.

Si it's not so much 'how FM deals with it' as  [i) lots of goals are conceded from set pieces IRL, especially by weaker sides giving more of them  [ii] your defenders probably aren't great for the level and so get easily outjumped unlike the season before [iii] you probably have a tactic that overperforms in other areas (lots of pressing, creates more counters etc) so your overall play is better than the lineup would suggest but doesn't have any tactical advantage over much better teams at set pieces [iv] your set piece setup might actually be genuinely bad; the default setups are.

 

[[FM20] Stuniverse's FM20 Adventure]

Haha, Italy get knocked out of a World Cup by Scotland so they decide they need your Scottish experience 

Love the Derby connections in the backroom team

[5-2-1-2 with Libero]

It's nice to see someone overperforming without turning up pressing  

But its a well balanced formation on FM because back threes are excellent defensively as already mentioned, wingbacks on attack duty are practically supermen in giving you aggressive runs and width in attack and then a proper back five when the opposition have the ball for any length of time, you've got two strikers and two additional players running into the box, and your AM  will offer much more in defence than, say, an IF.

I think you're probably also right in saying other teams underestimating you helps the overperformance as you're not set up to stretch a really defensive team.

[An issue with 5-2-3: WB goes into libero's position to cover, instead of the side CB tucking in]

I've played this formation a lot with very high pressing and not seen this kind of defending. 

tbf I think the wingback would still have had to tuck in anyway because of the amount of extra players the opposition has arriving in the middle of the park, which is a weakness of a 5-2-3 shape especially if the libero roams wide, but the wingback moving inside Holding instead of them both tucking in is strange. Only time I can imagine that happening in a real world game is if one of them was man marking or Holding was asleep.

I do think a midfielder on defend duty might solve this issue by being deeper and either doing the closing down that Ajer does or filling in his place in the middle instead of the wingback. Also wonder if the Carrilero in front makes the wingback more likely to leave his flank as theoretically the carrilero is tasked with supporting defensively in wide areas.

But I also think it's something SI's bugs team ought to have a look at, as it's a bit odd and taking place at elite level. I can see how it can happen in terms of player instructions [DCs default to holding position and wingbacks have more freedom to roam and fill gaps] but this is a situation where the defensive line ought to coordinate its shape better with no man marking to worry about. And tbf the ME is usually very good at making wingbacks drop back into a properly shaped defensive line: if anything they're normally a bit too disciplined!

[[FM20] Stuniverse's FM20 Adventure]

tbh I knew you weren't going to leave when you signed Stevie Mallan

[Regens]

There are also the 'greys' the game generates temporarily to fill squad spaces in clubs - typically foreign and lower league ones - that don't have enough players in their squad so you actually have an opposition to play against!

[Alternative to potential ability system?]

On 20/08/2020 at 12:50, laurentius82 said:

I see no reason why growth could not in principle be infinite? Of course, in practice it would have to be adjusted so that we never actually see infinite growth (with other factors like age weighing in), but a hard ceiling for development makes no sense to me. 

Since growth of footballers isn't infinite, and most players hit a hard ceiling, it makes no sense to develop a game based on the assumption the opposite is true, particularly since the fixed potential is also very useful in making research and the in-game transfer market a bit more convincing.

 

On 20/08/2020 at 21:41, DementedHammer said:

What I am in favour of is raising the PA ceiling a bit, but making it much harder for a player to reach that limit. This would avoid the issue of users that inspect the PA and CA values thinking that a player has peaked early. (Although, in my opinion those values aren't really meant to be known to the user in absolute terms anyway, even if they are absolute values under the hood.) 

If users want to look at hidden values but have a problem with actually knowing them, that's their own issue, not SI's and it has a much simpler solution...

[Does the game like to keep things interesting?]

No.

[Will anyone be buying FM21?]

5 minutes ago, Matt_Ray said:

Onto the second part of your needlessly confrontational reply, how would the lack of a new release result in "not having many people actually playing the game"?  Do you believe that if SI said "Really sorry but there's not going to be a new FM this year" people would immediately stop playing the current version?  Of course they would not.

No. But if the 'current version' is two year old code which the company has decided needs such a radical overhaul they've decided to sacrifice a year's revenue to do so, more will have changed than if the 'current version' is twelve month old code and therefore bug reports will be less useful.

May I humbly point out that if you expect mutually respectful exchanges of views on the internet, it helps not to initiate confrontation by responding with 'What? xD'

 

 

[Will anyone be buying FM21?]

1 minute ago, Matt_Ray said:

What? xD

If you honestly find it difficult to understand that skipping a release results in SI having half as much sales revenue over that two year period and a big gap in user feedback, I'm not really sure why you're offering SI advice on their release cycle...

[Will anyone be buying FM21?]

2 hours ago, Matt_Ray said:

I really think the franchise could benefit from SI taking a year out from doing a new release and instead making sure that the current release is as good as it can be.  There are still so many little bugs that get carried over from version to version --like auto-sizing columns not working properly, ongoing since FM16 or so-- and the game would be so much less frustrating if they could squash all those bugs properly before they worry about adding new features. 

How on earth is halving their budget and not having many people actually playing the game to find the bugs going to help with that?

[Alternative to potential ability system?]

An 'ability to improve' factor would effectively be PA (unless growth is infinite) but more deterministic in how the player improves and how accurate scout reports are and less intelligible to researchers guesstimating which players will make it in their club's first team and which won't.

 

'Ability to improve'-type factors would make more sense in addition to PA to bias the type of player growth given [e.g. a factor for physical maturity to reflect the likelihood one 18 year old is likely to grow in the next two years and the other isn't, a factor for 'experience' to determine whether players' rawest weaknesses are likely to get ironed out now they're at a better academy or develop more slowly and evenly etc]

[Are "mark tighter" and "aggressive" tackling a must for a solid defensive setup?]

I've always done fine without hard tackling.

Occasionally tun it on if I'm struggling and the opposition have a lot of possession, but I'm not convinced collecting cards and giving away free kicks is actually a good idea

'Easy' tackling for a fullback is an invitation to let the opposition cross though.

 

Never quite made my mind up about tighter marking, but I doubt it makes much difference to centre mids closing down wide players. Turning up pressing or if you really need the support giving them roaming defensive roles like BWM or Carrilero much more likely to help

[Will anyone be buying FM21?]

3 hours ago, Deisler26 said:

I'll buy it.

I've played less of FM20 than any other in the last few years and this is because, in a staggering reversal of most people's opinions, I've loved the ME this year (apart from the set pieces) and disliked the new Club Vision/Culture/Pathway to the First Team ideas. Great concepts, but badly executed, IMO

As one of the people who also likes the ME (post-patch anyway), I'm a bit surprised these concepts were even noticeable, though I guess it does depend on whether you have strong reasons to want to play at a club with a really annoyingly-implemented vision. But yeah, should be something they fix the rough edges on.