forameuss

This annoys me too. I've no idea why there seems a persistence on adding information to various social media accounts and blogs exclusively, or to long-form youtube videos, and neglect to post an actual readable version on their own official forums. I've no real interest either on signing up to another website just to find out something I'll find out for myself in a few weeks anyway.

I get the feeling that Miles is treating it like standing at the door and keeping the wolves at bay. He seems happy enough to get the abuse so he can dish a bit back, and if he becomes the more "public face" so to speak then the developers aren't getting it. Not saying it's a good strategy (although seeing the seethe he develops is always funny) but it maybe partially explains it.

So idea A gets considered, even worked on, and the populace is absolutely delighted. Unfortunately, idea A ends up not working the way it should, and gets shelved. Populace is outraged. I get where you're coming from, and I would also like to see that kind of information put out, I'm just not sure the wider community is mature enough to get that information without it going wrong. Once you start saying "ok, but we won't tell them this" and "we can't tell them that" then it strips away more and more use from what they're saying and it all ends up being performative. I'd far rather the developers actually developed, rather than spend their time trying to mould some announcement into a form that won't get them heat with people who were always going to think one way anyway.

On FIFA - sure you can play other modes, but the whole thing is set up to funnel you towards playing FUT and ultimately (no pun intended) spending all your time there, and hopefully - for them - your money. And the former part is important, because EA have become a lot more insidious about it. The game is far, far more engagement driven than ever before, probably because people kept crowing about how they hadn't spent a penny to get that team they've spent 8 hours a day for 9 months grinding for. The house always wins. But that's off-topic really. As for the communication part, I'm not buying the mod argument. You can't just point to them and say, "well we've got mods" and excuse away the abuse the developers regularly got. If someone ran up and punched you in the face but they were immediately arrested, you'd probably still rather they didn't punch you in the face in the first place. Plus SI do listen to the community if you say it in the right way. They brought in the feature requests forum, and you can trace a line through some of the stuff there to making it into the full game. But for every one person who can articulate a bug report to make SI's life easy, you've got 10 more coming in saying completely ludicrous stuff with no basis that simply isn't worth replying to. Guess which ones are more visible?

It's hilariously ironic that you go after FM for being a second job, when FIFA itself has devolved into a grindy part-time job that endlessly strips you of your time, while hoping it can strip you of your wallet too. Plus, I literally said that they weren't a direct comparison, just that they were the closest to be able to draw a comparison. They're both generally football games, but one has a much, much, much wider market to sell to. I could say it, but I didn't. I mentioned nothing about how big companies were, I specifically mentioned the products. FM is a niche product. FIFA isn't. That's how it always going to be. I'd al The one part I actually agree with. If you're not happy with the direction the game is going in, don't buy it. No ifs, no buts, it really is the only means to show your displeasure. Worst case scenario, you're largely alone in that, and SI are actually going the way the majority want, but you're still 40-odd quid richer. Best case, the numbers actually taking action make SI rethink. By all accounts it seems like communication used to be better, but I can absolutely see why it isn't now. Generally, people can't be trusted to communicate effectively. Which obviously spoils it for those that can, but hey ho.

But you're not comparing like for like. DICE's market for something like Battlefield is absolutely enormous, and FMs is not. From a quick google, FM claims - from Miles itself - to have sold 1 million copies of FM22 as of August this year. FIFA - probably your closest genre sibling (although not a direct match) sold (allegedly, according to EA so...lol) 9 million units in the first few months of its life. So even within football it's niche, and doesn't have the pick-up-and-play nature that FIFA has (despite that product being a horrible, grasping amalgam of a casino and a pub toilet). Battlefield One was pretty well received, and DICE have claimed there have been 25 million players. Now I take that number with a massive pinch of salt given they're not mentioning sales, but it's not even in the same ballpark as the reach FM has. So whether the numbers are exaggerated or not, I expect they're along the right lines, and if we're following your line that DICE had to make a difficult decision, the decision would be magnitudes harder for SI, especially given they've repeatedly said that people would be surprised what systems people play on. The size of the problem of scything off a good portion of your userbase is likely exponentially and inversely proportional to the size of your audience, and people seem to be keep glossing over that because they want something shiny.

Let's not pretend like the free database updates are going to be anywhere near as reliable, detailed or as high quality as the official ones. That's not to say they'll be perfect, or that the completely hypothetical situation of only getting a database update would be acceptable (because it wouldn't, I agree on that), but it's much the same as getting more detailed licensing. Sure you can go and find some edited file that plugs gaps, but it's a sticking plaster over something that would be better fixed at source.

It might not be an exaggeration for you, but it is massively subjective. I honestly couldn't care about that as a feature. Those don't seem like a basis for an editor, they're all data points that could drive other non-visual things. Undersoil heating is going to drive whether matches get postponed or not, and probably a similar deal to the roof options. If it was a basis for a proper visual editor there would have been a lot more points of editing before now. Suspect it's the usual mix of "it's not a direction we want to go down" and "it's not a direction we're allowed to go down".

That would be fine if people were buying new laptops for FM. People will be playing on laptops they bought ages ago with specs that were probably entry-level back then. Again, every time this comes up, SI literally have the metrics on this and know exactly what people are playing on. They've come out and said that people would be surprised what they use. EDIT: In fact, it might even be more the case now that tablets are so ever-present. 5 years ago you'd probably find people that had a laptop for sitting on the couch with that they might have chucked FM onto every now and then. Some of those people have probably migrated to iPads and the like because it does pretty much everything they need (apart from that). Are they going to go out and buy a current laptop just to play FM? Unlikely. Particularly if the potato one they used to muck about on still works, and still plays the game.

Unfortunately the concept of upvotes in this forum is completely tainted by there being no counterpoint. You could pick a topic, have two people write completely different posts at either extreme and have them both be frankly offensive and they'll both likely get upvotes.

You'd have to ask SI about the first part. Second part is wild conjecture. I believe it's been hinted that this pot was separated and contingent on only being used on that, so it wouldn't have been available otherwise. Well here's an idea, if you're so powerful and the sole reason for why they exist, how about you maybe don't buy the game and send a message that way? If it makes a difference, then you're right, and if it doesn't, then maybe SI know quite a bit about the direction they feel is best for the game to go rather than cherry-picking single opinions. And as for the second part, you know what I'd do? I'd stop buying the game. That's the power as consumer. FM's been on the very edge of being a worthwhile buy for me for a while. It's probably just about scraped through again this year. Just. FIFA would've been an auto-buy for a while, but they're utterly shameless in their approach, so I haven't bought the past few editions. It's really not hard. I dare say it'll make at least as much difference as improving the graphics* would, and likely more. * insert your own personal feature du jour here

Which would be fine if they hadn't already said a number of times that the focus on the women's football feature is basically sitting in a different pot of resources unrelated to the main game. And I'm not sure how they can be "disrespectful" in choosing the direction of their own product. It's not compulsory to buy it, that's your job as a consumer to decide whether you agree with their direction. Ultimately the problem with the post I replied to isn't the not being interested in women's football as a feature. I imagine there's going to be loads of people in that boat. Saying "I'm not interested in women's football" is absolutely fine. Continually - because this isn't the first time - talking about how no-one else will be interested is something else entirely. For me the addition of a completely new way of playing will probably be the best addition they've made in a long, long time, and would trump a lot of the things that people talk about as being "essential". Difference is, I don't pretend like that opinion is somehow the consensus through some weird dislike of women's football.

Yeah, imagine they deliver essentially a completely new game mode and experience, but still have graphics that you don't even really need to see if you don't want to. Wouldn't that be just awful... Something tells me you're projecting just a wee bit here.

I'd argue that this mythical massive group of potential fans of the game who would want to buy the game but don't for whatever reason just doesn't exist, at least not in anywhere near the sort of numbers that would warrant excising what seems to be a sizeable proportion of the user base. I fully expect that ending support for older machines would lose far more customers than the improvements would gain.

Not at all. The addition of the women's game is far more likely to lead to improvements across the board than if they didn't do it. If they're doing it properly - which they seem to be in how long it's taking. I presume there will be at least an alternate version of the ME, if not a full-blown new one, and the work that'll go into that will probably give them rare time to step into the ME and ask the sort of questions that lead them down paths of improvement. They could do that in a normal development cycle, but there's always going to be less opportunity than if you're working on a feature that isn't under the same time pressure. If it was just "same as FIFA" they would have released it two editions ago.

Where did I say they weren't? Their focus is on that. I'm saying it shouldn't, particularly when the amount of work it would likely take to bring International management up a few levels is relatively small given how much it's been neglected. What is "more pressing" is always going to be a massively subjective thing.

I wouldn't hold my breath. You say "lack of real new features" but I'd say numbers wise, there's the same level of new features as there has been in previous years. There's significant work in getting them into the game and playing nice with the larger codebase, then there's bugs that come out the back of that. Then there's more major bugs left behind. If you're talking about long-standing bugs that have been in years, I'd be amazed if too many of them were addressed.

The game is called Football Manager, not Club Manager. If International Football is an avenue you can go down, then it should be far better featured than it is now.

And isn't at all to me. That is how it is but isn't how it should be.

Many thanks. Hate this new trend of absolutely everything needing to be a video. So in terms of what's there... Squad planner - remains to be seen how it works in practice, but looks a good addition. Nothing you can't do elsewhere if you really wanted to, but nice to have it integrated. Scouting in general - not really too exciting personally, it's one of the things I charge through without getting into much detail Recruitment meetings - nice to see them developed a bit more. I liked their addition but agree they get a bit formulaic. The game badly needs some chaos thrown in at times in a lot of areas, so this is a start Match Engine - *shrug* hard to get excited about it much when you're actually playing, let alone when it's words on a screen. Remains to be seen UEFA Licenses - big who caresies Sleeve patches - bigger who caresies Licensed music - a muted but still big who caresies Supporter Confidence - a good addition, but depends how it works. The social media stuff could've been interesting but ended up nonsensical. Can't wait to see fans take a wild swing over something inconsequential...the supporter profile stuff does look promising though. There's already a number of data points for fans that don't really seem to mean much at all. Hopefully this changes Dynamic Manager Timeline - on the face of it, something that could be really really good. I was pretty active in the FMCU board, and FM can be absolutely brilliant as an aid to tell stories. For this kind of stuff, having a timeline sort of thing in the game could be brilliant, and could be the sort of additional context that the game DESPERATELY needs. I'm cautiously optimistic though, because I think it might end up being a bit rubbish In isolation it doesn't seem like much has been added, but in FM terms it's an...OK list I guess. As always, the real feel for how much has changed and what it means for the game won't be seen until it's actually released and the whole product is experienced.

Is there a text list of the changes anywhere in this thread or elsewhere? Much better than being forced to watch through a youtube video

Licensing is always going to be important as I'm willing to bet the majority of people who buy FM don't even know that you can "fix" the issues it causes. Some people just buy the game and play it. Plus SI know exactly what each license is going to cost, and they'll have enough knowledge of their own product to know whether that amount is worth paying based on what they imagine it might bring to the game. There's plenty of non-exclusive licenses they could go for that they don't, presumably because it doesn't add enough value for the outlay. This one clearly does. Whether that's because they feel it's valuable or because it was relatively cheap, or a combination of both, only SI know.

Completely false. It's subjective, at best. As previously stated, if they turned around in 23 and gave an absolutely impeccable visual representation, what sits behind it would still be as sterile, static and severely lacking as always, and my experience would be unchanged. Having a poor quality meal out doesn't suddenly get better because I'm wearing a suit and they've put the food on a fancy plate. It's far easier to build a graphics engine around a series of scripted sequences that you get in mobile games than it is around the far more sophisticated match engine FM has. Could they be doing better? Probably. But it remains a terrible comparison to draw.

Yes, to each their own, but if they announced tomorrow that they were putting a fully featured FIFA-style presentation on top of matches, it's going to be a superficial sticking plaster over the vast array of issues in the back-to-middle end. The AI is severely lacking in a number of places, the game is incredibly static with how it presents information, the match engine the visual representation would use creaks in places...I could go on. It doesn't take a "type of player that instant results" to see that.

There would be several single-spaced A4 pages full of stuff I would rather they tackled before they even thought about how a match looks.