forameuss

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.

I honestly hope it's not. And that's not because I don't want to play it, complete opposite. The leak was almost certainly BS, but the thought of them adding it piecemeal is a bit meh. Give it the detail it deserves and release it when it's at its best. Of course if they've busied themselves away and are ready to give us a proper full-featured version, then that'd be great, but from their previous tone I don't think that'd be the case.

It's not really a bug, it's a physical limitation of the technology used. Whether 64 bit OS versions existed back then is irrelevant if no 64 bit FM versions existed. EDIT: Stand corrected based on what EdL says below

It works quite well on my work's M1 Macbook Pro, certainly better than most of my experiences I've had with previous Windows laptops. And to save anymore questions, it's grey, I've got a 30" inside leg measurement, favourite ice cream flavour is raspberry ripple and I'm afraid of spiders.

Ideally you'd have them be a hybrid member of both Africa (like they currently are) and Europe. If you remove Africa you lose the ability to qualify for the African continental competitions, which would make the early period of the game really, really tedious. It would take a long time to build up to being able to win the French Cup, and in those seasons you'd probably be destroying everyone domestically, so you'd have pretty much nothing to do. As it is, you can play in the African Confederations Cup and the Champions League, then have to make do with PSG being the final boss in the Cup.

As an update to this, I started a new save as a club from Reunion Islands and have had a fair bit of success. Decided one season to essentially cheat my way to the French Cup to see if we qualified for the Europa League. Didn't look like we did, but then on checking the French Cup rules in-game, it's specifically stated that Overseas clubs are excluded from qualifying for the UEFA competitions. Which is a bit baws.

And that comes under the same impossible banner to be honest, as there's no way career mode ever gets much attention when FUT makes an eye-watering amount of money for them. Even if that funding source dries up, they'll probably move to cosmetics in pro clubs before they ever turn their eyes towards Career Mode. And remember, SI have already handed them a sound beating in the genre in making them discontinue FIFA Manager.

But even then, it's the trifecta that any competitor would need. It needs the Match Engine, the Database, and the rest of the back-end work. You can have all the data, but if you don't have an interesting and functional way of presenting it, you're stuck. A great match engine in isolation might struggle without the data behind it. A great match engine with the data probably has a limited lifespan if the rest of the game doesn't work well. That's not to say that FM always nails those three, but it's a long, arduous, borderline impossible road for anyone else to approach the flawed point they're at now.

I think there's a number of pretty sizeable challenges any entrant into the industry would face. I agree graphics is pretty far down the list, but licenses are far from the only obstacle. I'd almost say that would be trivial, as presumably if someone wanted to chuck enough money at the problem they could probably hoover up a lot of the licenses (I have no insight into whether there's any exclusives or anything, just speaking hypothetically with it being a purely financial problem). So say you've got the money and you've got the artists, you're still waaaaaaaay behind where you would need to be. Like you say you'd need to build the research network. Given it's all voluntary, you could maybe turn most of those volunteers over to working for your product if it's better, but that's a bit of a stretch for a completely new entrant. But say you manage to get past that too, you're still going to be way behind. I think people often underestimate just how much work needs to go in to getting the product to where it is today. It's far from perfect, absolutely (and they'll likely be the first to admit that), but the match engine in particular is the product of decades of continuous development, expertise and domain knowledge. Let's say you find someone who absolutely knows their stuff in the area but lacks the domain knowledge. You could maybe spend a few years with them locked in.a room and come up with something that comes close, but that doesn't eliminate the gap, it just eats into it, as SI have spent those years adjusting their own efforts too. Or even made greater strides. Put it this way. EA have FIFA, which is not a great product by any means, but still sits fairly clear at the top of the pile with Konami's only response seemingly violent seppuku. Even the strung together series of janky animations they call a match engine is way ahead of where a new entrant would be, and that's in a genre that if someone could do it right, an alternative would be worth a fortune. And no-one of note has really tried. FM by comparison is a far more niche product in a far more niche genre. No-one is going to take on the considerable risk to try and become the top dog. No chance.

I'd be willing to bet a sizeable amount of money that this will never happen, and any vanishingly small chance of it gets smaller by the day.