ai2ker
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So this post was inexplicably removed without explanation, but its very pertinent to the general tenor of this thread:
FM21 has been released and I'm flabbergasted at how bad some of the changes made are. There's clearly some sort of 'bell and whistles' directive coming down which is why the UI is constantly tweaked, with shaky or non-existent justifications. I think the notion of leaving things well enough alone should be taken to heart. Frankly, I think it's probably too late for a lot of this, but at least I'll feel better having aired it all and maybe the next iteration can be saved. I've also tried to offer compliments where possible so this isn't all one way traffic. Anyways to the point, and I'll have shots of FM20 as well for comparison.
Pre-Match, FM20:
Cleanly presented info, lack of clutter. This screen is now gone. Instead we have this:
Where's the game? Who's the ref? What other games are going on right now? Recent Form? Previous Meetings? Prefered Formations? Upcoming Fixtures? Who's injured for the match? Why did we lose all this information? The game now feels like it is in a vacuum, not part of an on-going league or cup. Not to mention we've lost all the tabs I've highlighted in red in FM20.
Thing I like: For Next Match only - good if you want to change mentality specifically for a game against a league leader or minnow, but don't want it to be a permanent adjustment to the tactic.
In FM20, during the lead up to kickoff we have this great graphic showing the lineups, uniform colors AND formations:
For comparison, here's a real television pre-match screen:
Now we have this:
No formation, no headshots; a stark white sheet with a rough font instead. In FM20, you can drill down into any of the players listed if you'd like - cannot do that in FM21. We do now have a simulacrum of social media on the left, which is entirely ignorable (just like real life, or this post - perhaps I'm getting too meta). Oh and we now know who the ref is. Who the ref is is not very important, but it's a nice piece of immersion.
What I like: The match sheet could have an old-timey, authentic feel, especially with lower-league clubs, but it should be in addition to, not in lieu of the formation screen.
Next pre-match screen, the pep talk. In FM20:
Again, clean, easy to read and use. Now FM 21:
I know this has a snowball's chance in hell of being changed as what we're looking at is one of the big 'features' and others have posted about it, but it's cluttered, confusing and an eyesore. Relabeling aggressive, cautious, etc. to thrash arms, point fingers, etc is pretty underwhelming. If you cannot represent the players beyond a box with their name in them (I mean at the very least add the headshots like in dynamics), there's little reason to arrange them in this difficult way to read. I can promise you it does not feel like a locker room with me the manager in the center.
Anyways - we give our pep talk, and onto the match:
In FM20, there's several things to note - first, we have a timeline, if want to rewind or see something again.
We have full club names (even if they're the FM trademark-avoiding version) with logos (when I have the pack installed), which again can be drilled into if you want to easily see the page of the team your playing (or your own).
We have customizable match information allowing yout display what you want, and not what you don't.
We have updates, which allows you to see the live standings.
We have all the coaching tools on the top, while commentary runs on the bottom.
In FM21:
The timeline - where is it?
The club names are all again in the same harsh font of the team sheet and strangely truncated and without logos. It's a weirdly, self-enforced limitation and makes it less obvious who you're playing. You cannot drill into the names to see. Not an improvement, in fact a decided downgrade. I like to play in unfamiliar leagues and it's not easy to always know who's being played in-match at a glance.
We've completely lost the ability to curate our match information on screen. The tablet is a poor substitute. I'm sure this was 'by design'.
Updates only flash when they change - I have to activate the tablet to see them now, taking up one of two available screens there.
The tactics and subs being adjacent to the commentary is confusing and cluttered. I accept that this may just be an adjustment to make, but the commentary is a lot easier to follow when it's the sole thing on the bottom of the screen. I understand the tactics bar can be minimized, but if you're using it, it'll be visible a fair amount.
What I like: Not much to be honest, this was the chief driver of me making this post.
What about between highlights? FM20 vs. FM21
I won't even touch the memed-to-death-already passing chart in 'the dugout' but again this is not an improvement. Information is more scattered, less intuitive. My team is still on the bottom, theirs is in formation on the right. What use to be a simple scan across is now similar to the pep talks one of up down over and around. Are you guys trying to limit screen time through sore eyes?
What I like: How much that passing chart made me laugh - I think the sub recommendations are okay but will surely become 'overrun in midfield' tedious. Post Beta Edit: This has been fixed, sort of.
Finally, let's talk goals and substitutions:
Why are there no headshots with goals? When are you ever going to see them? When you drill into their individual details only? This change is inexplicable to me. Again because the bottom of the screen is now cluttered, it's actually somewhat easy to miss events. In FM20 you have goalscorers and subs prominently at the top.
I could very well go on further, but this is enough. I realize this may read like a complete trashing, and that's not the goal. I'm obviously a fan of FM and a lot of what is done is positive- FM21 has greater speed and an improved ME which I am a fan of. Would just love a more intuitive design and things to not be so unilaterally removed when there's no demand for it. This isn't even getting into the insistence that there is only one skin (from 3 default last version) that primarily consists of purple and snowblind white. I know people will have different opinions and I welcome them, but to me this new UI/UX is obviously less clear and informative, more click-intensive and graphically worse. I am more tempted than ever to just remain with FM20 than to persist in this purple purgatory but I am hoping some of this can be redressed.
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On 01/12/2020 at 12:06, Double Indemnity said:
More fun with UI/UX, this time in a match:
There are four ways to meaningfully affect how the match engine screen displays. They are in ... four different corners of the screen. So I've pointed them out with arrows!
In the top left, we can hide or unhide the Match Stats and Notable Events panel. This wasn't clear to me initially, because the blue icon is a little hard to parse at 1440p and uses no familiar interactable iconography. You cannot customize this Match Stats panel as you could in the past (more on that in a second!), and you cannot shrink or adjust the size of the Notable Events section, even though it takes up a huge chunk of dead space. Clicking on the team names or clock also controls this panel, rather than, say, taking you to a team screen or pausing the clock.
In the bottom left, there's a (hugely important) expand button for Tactics & Subs that gives you access to in-detail stuff. It's kind of buried at the end of an eye scan, which is weird. Also, once you expand this panel, you have to close it by clicking cancel in the bottom right, which is another long journey for the eye and the mouse. Almost none of the other interactions use this sequence! You cannot click the button twice to collapse the expand, even if you didn't take any actions; likewise, you can't click in the open space above the expanded panel. This panel also re-animates every time you click a tab (Tactics, Player, Set Pieces, etc.), which is a bizarre and disorienting choice. The distance from the tabs in the top left to the cancel button in the bottom right is, again, a screen width.
In the top right, you have your match speed, viewing options, play/pause stuff. There's actually a nearly hidden bar that allows you to record, rewind time, etc. ... though it's divorced from the game clock in the top left, and the absence of a timeline reduces player control overall. All of these options are uncoupled from all the information panels that would cause you to interact with them.
In the bottom right, you can hide the Tactics & Subs panel, even though it uses the same coloration as the SUBS button below it, which actually flicks between substitutes and players on the pitch (unhelpfully labeled "PITCH" rather than "ON PITCH" or "PLAYING"). This may just be me, but I found the label inconsistent with what's being shown: at a glance, I thought it was showing subs when SUBS was the label; it's the reverse. You can also show/hide the Touchline Tablet here ... provided a highlight is playing. If a highlight is not playing, the icon stays there but no longer hides the window, which feels bad. In general, the game does a poor job of distinguishing between "in highlight" and "not in highlight" than it used to, though the motion graphic in the top left is appreciated.
Some questions:
- Why are these four discrete interactable areas not combined as tabs or better arranged to minimize eye and mouse movement?
- Why are they so poorly labeled?
- Why do they all use different and internally contradictory interactions?
- Why does the interaction icon for "Tactics & Subs" work differently than the interaction icon for "Instructions" even though they're the same icon?
- Why, if I open a Shouts panel, am I able to click outside it to cancel, but can't do that with Instructions or Tactics & Subs, even if I haven't made any changes?
- Why do some of these icons lose functionality in different game states?
- Why are there no hover states or tooltips for these buttons?
- Why are there no keyboard shortcuts? If there are keyboard shortcuts I'm not aware of, why are they not shown to the player?
- Does a new user know to use spacebar to play/pause? How?
Let's turn to that Touchline Tablet, which basically lets you blob some (not all) of the old widgets and rearrange them. It's on the far right of the screen, past a lot of dead space (highlighted in yellow), including the wasted notable events space and wasted "dugout" space that rarely populates (and sometimes vanishes before you can act on it). My eye frequently has to "read" past these blank spaces.
Vitally, I cannot drag or rearrange these panels, which is a major step back from previous versions, and the panels pay no respect to higher resolutions; I cannot even resize Match Stats or The Dugout. Also, if I see something actionable on the Touchline Tablet, my eye and mouse now have to jerk all the way back to the bottom left to make adjustments. Some of what's in this screen is redundant or unhelpful. It duplicates player information shown in the bottom bar (albeit in a much more readable list format)! It duplicates match stats! Yes, it lets you customize them, but you won't see that customization reflected in the top left, because someone at SI has decreed that the customization and flexibility present in earlier versions has to go in favor of a "realistic" touchline tablet that is anything but realistic.
So we're left with an active impediment to clarity that fights the user's eye and is uncoupled from the actions you might take in response to it, which are scattered in the corners of the screen. And because this is the defined vertical height and layout of the panel, you frequently have to scroll information within the panel because you can't pop out or resize the information as discrete panels. Again, you used to be able to do this! It was granular and great!
Some bonus questions:
- Why are the team names shortened at higher resolutions? It seems unnecessary.
- Why is game speed set to max by default in FM21?
- Why do left clicks on the subs product menus similar to right-click menus throughout the rest of the game? Meanwhile, right clicks here do nothing?
- When I'm viewing my substitutes, why does clicking them do nothing? Shouldn't I at least be able to select "Substitute On"?
- Why is Notable Events not available in the Touchline Tablet? If I use the (superior) Match Stats panel available the tablet, I can't turn off the leftmost panel without losing the events.
Just gotta say, PREACH! You're hitting a lot on my complaints here:
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2 hours ago, rdbayly said:
I want to start with a positive about the game. The ME is the best its been in years. From my perspective, the success of an iteration depends almost entirely on the football we are presented with on the pitch. If I feel that my tactical decisions and tweaks make a tangible and visible impact on the outcome of a match - for better or worse - then that makes me feel like a manager. Variety and unpredictability are key to achieving this, which I have to say has been achieved this year. Well done SI!
Now the criticism. I genuinely lack the vocabulary to communicate how much I despise the match day UI. For me, the design choices taken here have me in a state of bafflement and bewilderment in every match.
FM is a decisions-based experience. We absorb huge amounts of information, and use it make informed decisions. We rely on this information to plug the gaps in the simulation that we miss due to not watching the entire 90 minutes. I have never felt less able to be in a position to make sound and timely decisions during a match. I've lost count of how many times I've missed a player picking up a booking or slight injury in a match.
If there are genuine justifications for any of the below, or I am missing something very obvious, please do let me know:
- Why have the yellow and orange booking / injury indicators been removed from the central panels?
- Why can't I customise the match stats panel underneath the timer? (and instead, am forced to duplicate it to my liking in the tablet, taking up precious panel space)
- Why can't I customise the information we receive from our staff via the disastrous dugout panel?
- Why does ALL match information disappear from view like a Tinder swipe when a 3D highlight begins?
- Why were widgets removed? ('realism' is a fundamentally flawed argument, as their needs to be some common sense applied to what we need to function properly in a simulated world)
- Why are my eyes always forced to the extreme edges of my monitor to scan for critical information in tiny text? (when it should be displayed clearly in a central location)
- Why arrange players both vertically and horizontally on the team talk screen? (I've been teaching people to read for years, and it's been empirically proven that this takes longer to scan and decode)
- Why can't I access full player stats during a half? (I see a player's rating dip to around 6.3, but now I can't quickly establish why. The statistical tools have been taken away and they are now fed back to me one column at a time through laborious singular drop down menus)
- Why don't the analytical tools work? (I assume they are bugged and weren't fixed for release)
The ME has undergone the equivalent of open heart surgery, and survived. What I find incredulous is that having achieved the most difficult feat, the game has voluntarily given itself a metaphorical skin disease.
Great Post - my addition to this:
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4 hours ago, Jamman said:
Oh dear, what have you done to the match day UI? Dont want to be overdramatic but its ruined for me.
Feared the worse from screenshots and the odd stream pre-release but after trying demo its as bad as I thought.
It looks nice enough and some of the touches are nice, the team list and the TV like goal graphics, but as a football management game its awful.
When Im watching the game I want more than pretty presentation, I want to see stats and information that give me a quick and easy view of how the game is going, how we are performing and how each player is doing. When there is no information on the screen apart from that bottom bar I cant see anything and to get what I used to be able to see at a glance whilst the game is going on you have to keep popping the stats up. Ive attached the view I normally have in 2020, theres normally a league view too. As you can see I have all the information at a glance whilst watching the game, now I dont see any of it without manually checking.
This for me is a massive step back from previous versions and looks dumbed down.
This is the first version of FM Ive seen since 92 that I havent bought at release and I cant see myself buying it at all.
Raised this along with other issues in Beta - No changes, which fine, it was a big ask. But no official response either other than 'wrong subforum' which is pretty poor considering the popularity of the response.
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More bad match UI feedback, to add to my ever-growing list.
This is the second leg of the Europa League - the score is 3-2 after the first leg - where on Earth would I be able to see this in match?! Why was this removed?
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Would love some official feedback to this thread:
Particularly with why headshots have been removed from the match UX.
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This is more curious because my cursory search for info didn't reveal anything - but shouldn't youth players be able to be registered with any concern for a limit? Also if you start a Beta with these issues in place, will an update fix a save or would a new save be required?
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Crossposting from the UI forum, because I didn't know about this thread
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5 minutes ago, RobertPage said:
3 screen shots showing an example of the poor intelligence in the game. The first screenshot clearly shows a perfect opportunity for a straight forward run for #8 (Icardi) through ball and a straight forward through ball for Mane. Instead the run isn't committed to and the pass isn't played. Sure i scored, but it's these things that are too often occurring and wasting good positions
Any sort of breakaway or break where the attacking team has numbers invariably leads to a shot 30 yards out of bounds or the sole defender tackling the dribbler while 3 unmarked men wait in the box.
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5 hours ago, Dagenham_Dave said:
In previous versions, when you got a team report from a team, you'd then get a separate news item highlighting any players available for loan from these clubs. But now, these players go straight to the scouting section where they will be alongside any other players you've scouted, making it more difficult to identify them. Something else which worked well in previous versions that they seemed to have changed for no benefit. Not loving the scouting system this year. It's got potential, and the little white scouting cards are good (well, they would be if you could scroll through them without them disappearing forever no matter what option you click), but the implementation has been messy at best.
Exactly this - What if I want to add a guy to a shortlist and keep scouting? Can't - choose one option and the card is gone. What if I'm scouting a ton of regens and am quickly clicking through discard/keep scouting and make a mistake? Can I go back and find the card I just made a mistake on? Nope.
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Just now, Karnack said:
I was specifically giving this view because there have been a few outcries about "If it's this bad for me, imagine what it's like for a completely new player!" - A new player would be ignorant of any other version or flavor if you wish.
Yeah but it doesn't make them right. It's obvious the UI has significant issues, these 'things are fine' posts don't help at all.
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2 minutes ago, Karnack said:
I introduced a colleague of mine to FM this year and he instantly got hooked (47 year old, not computer-savvy, never played computer games to any larger extent, got serious problems with finding the right buttons on the controller in FIFA18).
Just to give a different view on the whole "UI is hell, imagine what it's like for new players?". He got no problem using it as soon as he got going and with some friendly hints from me where he could find the things he was looking for. I think his biggest problem so far have been to comprehend what is actually possible to do, to understand how deep the rabbit hole goes. But there has been zero complaining about UI.
This is like being introduced to only vanilla ice cream and thinking it's the best flavor, being ignorant of any other.
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6 minutes ago, turgi said:
I can't find where to create a new assignment for my scouts...
The other issue may be under staff responsibilities - in my case my Chief Scout had defaulted to making these assignments.
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5 hours ago, Per Annum said:
It took it being mentioned on here for me to even notice but I really do miss the pop-up with scorer/card information during a match. Like, a lot. Would like it back.
This is one of the worst design decisions they made. It's now so drab and underwhelming.
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Football Manager 2021 Official Feedback Thread
in Football Manager General Discussion
Posted
Well considering there's been NO official response to all these very question UX moves, just moderators doing their underappreciated job, it seems unlikely. Not even receiving a 'we decided to change it to this, don't like it play something else' I'd say they're just planning on riding this out because they know there's a sizeable percentage who will buy it regardless, so it's moot.
The hope is that they can revert some of this for 22, but let's be honest, considering how unpopular the changes made are it's clear the user doesn't mean much to the powers that be.
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