Marc Vaughan

One of the things the 'dev hub' will bring this year is a 'loan' area where you get an assessment on all the players loaned out from your club so you can get a feel for their progression etc.

We do, you might be surprised at some of the ones which are popular for play - especially those selected as 'secondary leagues' (ie. not the one the user starts in, often someone might run a specific league on a continent to 'open' up national teams or improve scouting returns in an area etc.).

One of the reasons for the revamp of that page is to help explain to users 'why' sometimes a price requested is lower or higher than it might be normally ... for instance the assistant will mention that 'Icutini is in the final year of his contract and Sports Interactive risk losing him on a free-transfer' etc. You'll see the opposite mentioned where they state he's a vital player and they won't let him go cheaply - this is obvious to most users I know, but it doesn't hurt to over-explain in my experience

That is obviously your choice thanks for letting us know your preference of leagues to add.

Yes, I'd have liked to add a new league - but it wasn't feasible this year - on the other hand we do have additional licences which is always nice.

The AI for the match engine has been tuned and refreshed (as happens most years) - most specifically this year the movement for inside forwards and midfielders, along with improving how players play out from the back (esp. goalkeeper distribution). With regards to tactics - at the request of a few users I've added some additional roles to some positions.

Work rate is a component of teamwork so if someone has 20 in that its impossible their work-rate is 'bad' (it might not be 'high' but it won't be awful) - the other thing to consider is that players will develop based on the experienced players around them (especially their personal mentors if you set one) ... so if your team is hardworking and professional then that will rub off on them. If someone is reacting badly to discipline and acting lazy in training then that is probably also a sign they're not greatly professional - either you can try and drum it out of them by mentoring, discipline etc. or you can simply cut them from the squad. PS - One of the risks with youngsters is if you sign them with big contracts early on then it tends to make them lazier and unprofessional, so try not to pay them the big bucks from the get-go.

We can't do open-beta releases for mobile platforms because of how they're handled by their platform-owners, we do closed beta testing involving people from the community who are proven to give good critical feedback. (these people have to sign NDA's and for obvious reasons we don't talk a lot about the system involved - if you want to have a chance of being offered such a role next version then please post constructive comments etc. regarding the game, issues and such)

We'll be announcing features for this years game in due course, please be patient.

It's been improved, whether you find it challenging will depend on lots of factors though (both the transfer AI has been improved, but I've also tweaked the match engine and suchlike as well).

Did you make a profit or loss with your transfers that season? - as that can affect the budgets quite a bit if you're frugal during a season then it affects the next ones budget obviously.

While we're not talking about features - I can say I've done a lot of work to try and improve how b-team/reserve teams operate generally.

I'll have a think about this and look into things - the competition for transfers should be tightened up a bit more this version so it should be a tad harder for you (as a small club) to secure quite so many prospects, long-term I'll consider a 'percentage of sell-on' - but its a tad late to do something that major for this years version.

What price were you getting for them out of interest? - I'll consider percentage of sell-on for a future version (far too late for this years I'm afraid), but I want to make sure its needed before I do something like that as I try and keep math out of the game as much as possible* *I actually love math, its one of the few things I'm good at - but I'm aware that most people don't

If you're at Annan and have a $23m budget then can you explain how that is? - did you sell players and accumulate that much money or did you have sugar daddy on? If you had sugar daddy on then simply turn it off, if you sold players and accumulated 23m while in the lowest scottish league then that sounds like a bug/exploit and I'd like to fix it if you can give me more details (and perhaps a save game?).

Yeah I'm afraid I agree with Matias, if a league has 46 matches then requiring a player to play 23 will cut out an awful lot of people ... it's also worth considering that this has to be something that is dynamic and updates as the game plays, ie. after 4 matches the required figure should be different (and the percentage required probably different) thn when 10 have been played and 30 have been played. Ok at present it required you to have played in 25% of matches - I'm upping that to 40%, with the exception of early on when it'll be 50% for the first 8 matches. So: Matches played - required to be shown 1 - 1 2 - 1 3 - 1 4 - 2 6 - 3 8 - 4 10 - 4 20 - 8 30 - 12 So for the 18 shown it'd require 7 matches to be played to be valid (so cut out the examples you showed). Does that seem reasonable?

What do you think a minimum number of games should be at that stage for the average rating? - happy to look at tweaking this, but need feedback and advice as I don't want to go too far the other way either.

There is a minimum requirement for display on most competitions - the ones which generally look 'odd' are those where someone might only play a handful of matches - for example in the FA Cup some non-league clubs might play as many matches as Premiership players because they start at a really early point before being knocked out ... thus they might still top the scoring charts at the competition end etc. despite having only played in 3-4 matches. If you can give me details of the issues you see (competition, player, number of matches - number of matches actually played in competition as a whole etc.) then I'm happy to continue tuning/tweaking this.

If you want your players to be able to maximise their playing time then train stamina as you've guessed, also making sure you have at least one decent fitness coach and good physios and facilities will help somewhat. I'd also recommend subbing players who are tiring off towards the end of a match so they can get a little rest, doing this will lower their wear and tear from playing repeated matches somewhat (so rest them the last 15-20 minutes or whatever if you're comfortable).

After this years game is out I'll try and go through the engine and double check the various combos and such - I'm a tad busy at the moment, sorry (but off the top of my head I think its just pace/acceleration, finishing/long-shots and jumping/heading). There are a load of other 'hidden' variables some of which might be visible in the PC game, these are mainly personality related.

We have moved the games tactical options forward over the years (if you look at the early versions of FMM they were far simpler) but in general some of the simplicity is intentional and many aspects I feel you can do through the current interface. The 'width' you set in the UI at present is used mainly for 'attacking width' simply because defensively teams will tend to defend more narrowly than they attack simply because letting an attacker inside is a 'bad thing' (trade mark pending) ... exactly how narrow your defense is can be determined by the setup you give it, if you put players into DL/DR positions then obviously it'll be wider than if you play with three at the back centrally etc. (I will consider adding in a separate 'defensive width' setting for a future version if lots of people request it, but I am aware that a lot of people do actually like that the game uses a 'common sense' default so they don't have to setup every single aspect of their teams tactics - I believe you can replicate nearly every real-world tactic using the games options as it stands which is imho the most important thing)

Yes within FMM we use the same match engine as one of the older FM PC games and the games contain all the attributes used in the PC game, just for space reasons we combine some of them for display purposes.

It's a little late for a 24 month loan option - but I'll consider it for the version after. With the 'obligation to buy' you can do this in a different manner by buying with the loan-back option (pretty much same thing but slightly differently setup).

It is impossible to make a single game which pleases everyone and it never works well if you try to do so - as you mentioned FMM isn't meant to be a hugely complicated game, it is realistic but it's been kept fast and streamlined because that suits its target audience. We make various different styles of management games however and it might be that Football Manager Touch suits your needs better if you want a slower experience and more poring through data than FMM provides. PS - Because of the limited space on mobile devices some attributes are combined on FMM - finishing & marking are present but are shown as part of 'shooting' and 'positioning' on that product. same thing for jumping/heading being shown as aerial ability etc.

Do bear in mind that judgements aren't 100% accurate and can be biased by form and other factors - also CA/star ratings aren't the be all of players ... because I'm running in debug I know that some of my best performers aren't actually the highest CA's on my team, they just suit their roles and have good mental stats (so don't get overly obsessed with CA, for star ratings its not the only thing taken into account).