[Does anyone actually enjoy the media and player interactions?]

On 01/11/2023 at 16:04, Tonton_Zola said:

Sorry how is this materially different?

 

a big difference would be to have only a handful of meaningful interactions in a year (let’s say between 6 and 10)…

These happen as spot moments emerging from media events, press conferences, club live streams, interviews, off the record phone conversations whatever…

each interaction spawns four or five possible responses, each with transparent logic and outcome probability.

 

e.g

A journalist grabs you for an off the record conversation after a media event…

”Haaland isn’t as prolific as last year, is it true you are alarmed by his form?”

1. “Look I am not being drawn on this. My loyalty to players is supreme”

80% chance newspaper runs piece on tightness of your group. Morale and manager closeness up 10% 

 

2. “Haaland needs to improve. He can be monstrous, but he isn’t working hard enough”

(based on Haaland personality - driven)

60% chance blog post published on private account, Haaland responds “I am determined to prove the boss wrong”

30% chance blog post published, Haaland responds, “that’s it for me and the boss. Hands on transfer request”

too busy to write out examples, but you borrow logic flow from games like CIV / paradox interactive etc,  and bake in personalities into the outcome probabilities. Outcomes are material and clearly communicated, making these interactions feel meaningful and less chore-like!

 

you would look forward to these moments during a calendar year…

 

 

yeah this would transform the whole interactions thing into something Paradox-esque.

CK3 with all its flaws in terms of combat and strategy still ends up hugely successful, largely because of the amazing roleplay element.

Obv FM is supposed to be a bit of a different genre but I feel that plenty of people still play their saves as a roleplaying experience. Something like this would elevate the game to a whole new level.

[Does anyone actually enjoy the media and player interactions?]

At this point I'm interested in seeing SI's evidence of players constantly whining to their teammates and managers irl.

Present the evidence, otherwise you're just making stuff up from your arse.

All the "improvements" they've made this year is more power to the players and less to the manager. Great, now every club is like PSG. I'm sure Man City players dare to whine constantly to Pep after a treble winning season.

Where's the testing? Where's the f***ing QA process? Did anyone seriously in their right minds play the product for more than a season and thought, "this is fine"?

If this is the direction SI want the game to head towards, they should rename the game Nursery Home Simulator 2024 instead.

[Does anyone actually enjoy the media and player interactions?]

The important point of OP's post is that if you can't make a feature well polished enough for the majority of players, you should at least add an option to completely disable it.

Players who enjoy them can keep them on, and players who absolute do not want to get involved can turn them off. It's not like FM is a competitive multiplayer where they need to keep everyone on the same track.

The fact that they haven't implemented something like this is incomprehensible to me.

[Locker room revolt]

Almost every single version people complain about the interactions being annoying, unrealistic, etc. 

SI never seemed to care.

Instead, they've decided to add even more of them (afaik I can tell anyways) in this version.

At this point you simply have to assume that someone on the dev team is a huge fan of them for whatever reason.

[Criticising player training performance]

Seems like it's tied to player personality (i.e. hidden attributes such as professionalism) in FM24. There're a few players in my team whose personalities aren't ideal, and they are the ones that reacted poorly to the criticism.

While it makes sense from a realistic pov, professionalism is already one of the most important stats in the game so I'm not sure if I find it good for the game.

[Different version, same comical old player interactions]

Jordan Pickford (as Everton captain in August 2024) just complained about "the squad lacking depth in centre back position". And with whatever voodoo he's been employing he's got almost every player in the squad agreeing with him.

The four centre backs at the club are Jean Todibo, Strahinja Pavlovic, Leo Ostigard and Jarrad Branthwaite.

So apparently, after spending quite a lot of money improving the defense, Pickford reckons that pissing Mason Holgate and Michael Keane are better players?

If you can't fix player interactions to make them remotely realistic, just remove them from the game. Stuff like this simply breaks immersion and provides no value to the experience.

[Players asking for absurd amounts of playing time]

This one is even more egregious. "I'm feeling alienated because even though my contract says regular starter I think I should be a star player"? Surely there's something wrong with player ambitions in this year's version.

[Players asking for absurd amounts of playing time]

What exactly is the point of "actual playing time" if players don't even care about it? This was not an issue in FM21 but in FM22 players have been completely unrealistic in their playing time expectations.

[If stats are to be included in the game, respect it in your engine.]

2 hours ago, HUNT3R said:

Firstly, there's nothing artificial in the game to 'increase the difficulty' as you claim. The ME also cannot distinguish between human and AI, so there's no bias there either.

It's quite possible to over-perform vs your xG. You're going to have to look at how you set up, the type of chances you're creating (both in terms of where, how much space and whether it's a shot or header etc) and also the player(s) the chances fall to. 

In FM20 and FM21, I massively over-performed against my xG. I'm even doing that right now, even though my team is one of the worst in the league and sitting in 13th out of 15. I'm sitting at 1.21 goals/match vs 1.13 xG/match.

If a team can consistently overperform xG, then there's either something wrong with the engine, the xG model in the game, or the team consists of multiple Messis. The types of chances really should have very little to do with xG conversion rate, as that is part of the consideration within all mature xG models; if the game is letting in a 0.05xG header 10% of the time on average and a 0.05xG volley 2% of the time, then again either the engine or the xG model is faulty.

[If stats are to be included in the game, respect it in your engine.]

My team is underperforming xGD by 0.5 per game, which is literally even worse than Brighton last season. Whilst the performance of Brighton in real life can be attributed to the lack of quality in their squad, my team should have easily above average finishing skills in the league. And no, I didn't put an outfield player in goal.

Nobody enjoys playing saves like this. If you want to increase the difficulty of the game, do it by having the AI employ better tactics. Not by having your engine **** over the player for reasons completely outside of the player's control.