[Who was your original FM wonderkid that you first fell in love with?]

Haruna Babangida. Took me up like four divisions to the Prem, after which Man U wanted him; I said "no".

Regen-wise, I bought an 18-year-old named Fernando who was the "Brazilian Pele", and playing up front on his own, he was a one-man strikeforce, carving up Serie A for years.

These were both many, many years ago.

[When are you supposed to get the Going Places achievement]

Talking FM19 here, but I just received it after the 18 month planning stage happened. So I got it when the stadium started being built.

[Football Manager 2019 Official Feedback Thread]

8 hours ago, Mitja said:

Here's teams parking the bus. There's so much wrong with both teams positions, it's unbelievable. Such situation would never happen in fm17.

Want more?

Both of those screenshots are crazy. And the wide players left in acres of space is something I see game-in, game-out.

This is an issue I think that is fundamental to why Attacking is so terrible. And yet I don't think I've ever seen the specifics of it pointed out.

Simply: Fullback's Defensive Positioning is truly awful. The narrowness with which they often defend - even if you have Defensive Width to wide - is just egregiously wrong. They defend like they're wide CB's in a back 3. They typically defend ridicously narrow, leaving wingers/wide-midfielders in acres of space out wide. Which causes the ball to constantly get funnelled out wide. At which point they have to race out to close him down (which for some bizarre reason they don't seem to do until he's received the ball, rather than when the pass is obviously being played to him).

This happens on all setting. Defend Wide. Tight Marking. Hell it can even happen if you set them to specifically man mark the winger.

 

This is exacerbated, and hidden by the following issue:

The number of blocked shots and crosses is ridiculous -  again no matter if you have "Work Ball into Box". This comes down to Attackers not being coded smart enough. Run a subroutine through their head - weighted by their decisions -  on the likelihood their shot/cross will be blocked. The more likely they think it will be blocked the less likely they should be to shoot/cross. Now I'm sure it probably works this way anway - and always has. But clearly in this iteration of FM there is something seriously wrong with this processing. Which is a significant part of why you get game after game of this nonsense, and such a lack of efficiency in attacking.

I had a game yesterday where my team -  despite Work Ball Into Box - had THREE blocked crosses in the space of less than 5 seconds. Just crazy.

 

How many times does this passage of play happen: Fullbacks too narrow, ball gets played out wide, Winger makes a stupid decision to cross with a Defender too close, cross gets blocked. Repeat, ad infinitum. Or, ball gets funnelled into the middle, Attacker thinks he has more space than he has, shoots from range, blocked. Repeat...

It's like the "Work Ball into Box" is broken.

 

There's so many things wrong with the ME it's beyond reporting.

I seriously see things that are straight broken that I've never see mentioned, because we're all consumed with the other 93 more serious issues were currently discussing.

I'll give you one of the top of my head that I see constantly - in fact it just happened, and I've paused the game:

After the keeper pushes the ball wide, the Attacker gets to the ball first, typically back or side-on to goal, and they just literally stand there with the ball, waiting for a Defender to come tackle them. I've seen this dozens of times in this years FM and probably never in real life. It's so obvious, that I know what's going to happen as soon as I realise the Attacker is going to get to the ball first.

 

In 20 years I have seriously never seen the match engine in such shambles. And this last beta patch seriously did nothing for me. I'm frankly shocked at the failure, and lack of expediency/ability in sorting it out. Can't see me ever buying FM again unless my faith is somehow restored in this version.

[Football Manager 2019 Official Feedback Thread]

Jack, first of all, thanks for sticking your head above the parapet and coming to this thread.

I have a number of issues with the game, and SI atm. Primarily these:

 

1. Why on earth isn't there an SI posted megathread of all issues that the team is working on?

An SI thread with a list of, to them, the major ME issues (Striker movement, Long shots goals too frequent, Defenders clearing headers aimlessly, Fullbacks defending too narrow, ETC) would go a long way . Especially if you updated it with how those improvements were going.

As it is there's bits and pieces of SI communication all over the place, with no real understanding of what's happening to change them. We don't really know what's going on.

If you fail to effectively communicate your acknowledgement, and progression, with game issuesthen you get what we've had here, over the weeks and months: customer frustration and venting.

 

2. The Public Beta.

I signed up for this in December. We haven't had a ME update in weeks. What's the point of a Public Beta for feedback if you're not going to update it so we can give feedback?

I posted feeback about one of the early updates saying how certain things in the ME had improved. I can't do that now because where's the updates?

Are you seriously saying in a month you can't make a single tweak to the effectiveness of long shots (or the keepers ability to react from shots from range) to reduce their effectiveness by 30% or whatever? Really? If you realise that would skew goals down too much, well, then that brings up the Striker issue that is the reason for this...

 

3. The lack of acknowledgement for feedback is staggering. And I'm not talking about the venting in General Discussion. Go check the Public Beta, or Match Engine bug, forum and see the effort that people are putting in to make threads about issues that plague the game. The great majority are either unanswered, or unanswered but for a "post PKM". When someone does, once again often dead air.

I posted a follow up to someone else's post about "Defenders Bad Clearing Headers". SI ask for PKM. I post a PKM and screenshot, and again no response from SI. Not even an acknowledgement. This was two weeks ago.

Are SI now looking at this? Do SI not think this is an issue?

I don't know, because the Staff ask for help and do a bad job (in a lot of cases) of following up on it.

How you expect constructive feedback, when your feedback to our feedback is so poor, I don't know...

 

Conclusion:

I really think at this point SI is not helping itself. IMO this is the most egregiously flawed (I don't mean it's necessarily the worst) Match Engine there's ever been - the lack of Striker involvement frankly makes the game lopsided and at times anti-football. For those that would refute this, go check the league's top scorers and compare to real life.

Scorers of 20+ goals:

PL over last 5 years (data from here): 18

FM PL -  a full league I've never had a team in - over last 5 years: 4

I could pluck out dozens of other details like this:

Average goals for 2nd top scorer: PL: 24.4, FMPL: 17.4

Strikers, and therefore top goal scorers, are just broken.

I've shipped out half a dozen strikers (and their replacements) over the last five years, until I just recently full realised: it's not the lad's fault he gets a 6.4 most games. It's the match engines...

 

While I'm (mostly) enjoying the game - because I always have - I've never been more disappointed with SI than this. I am on the edge of quitting (despite being a staggering 500 hours in) until the next major patch (my aggrieved strikers probably have started a petition for my sacking) and will probably never buy this game before March again, unless something about the way SI currently operates changes...

 

Thanks for reading my thoughts.

 

[The Ultimate Personality/Media Handling Guide]

Just wanted to (belatedly) make a post saying how awesome this is.

Really SI just needs to change things up and have a better indication of your team players "hidden stats".

I've just had a young player leave my club who was never happy with us, to now find out the fans are glad to see the back of him. Looking him up on your guide I see he has very low temperament.

Player Profiles should list them all:

Temperament: Very Low

Sporting: Low

Consistency: Good

Etc.