forameuss

I would've thought they could build an editor that was public-facing and also one that researchers could use for 25 without exposing this kind of stuff. It seems like actually using these properties just doesn't work, so seems a bit slap-dash to have it in there just hanging out. Maybe there's more to it.

It is and it isn't. I think probably the majority reason behind it is to drive pre-orders, because, although the labelling is "beta", and the intention is that it's not going to be fully working and that everything should be raised, SI know that the vast majority of people are purely buying to play it early, not to muck in and help. That being said, it does have value for SI as a pure beta, I'd imagine. Two weeks isn't going to be enough to unearth anything ground-breaking that they won't already know about, but it's always useful to let the game reach the infinite possibilities of different specs and setups, and, even for issues that they already know about, one user's particular instance with supporting evidence might just be the one that lets them make a breakthrough.

It is not at all like that, and it makes you look a hell of a lot more unprofessional than if you just release fixes when they're properly ready.

Because if they give a date and miss it - which would be far more likely to happen than people realise - then people like you would be the first to drag them over it. Not to mention that giving accurate dates for these kinds of things is borderline impossible. It makes absolutely perfect logical sense to say what they said.

This attitude is really, really reductive. Literally my whole point has been "don't sit miserable and actually seek out enjoyment for yourself". That couldn't be more about the end-user. But by all means, do the Freshers Revolutionary act and believe that everyone's against you and sit miserable. In the meantime, I'll make do with what we've currently got, enjoy something I paid for as best I can, and hope for positive updates in future. Like a normal, well-adjusted person would.

They're not very good analogies though. If you want to make them more accurate, you would say that you bought the coffee, it tasted awful, but the person making it tells you that they're changing their machine, and it'll taste better than it's done. But they've no idea when that'll be. They also have other coffees that are OK, but aren't quite the same as what you want. You, in this case, would sit there waiting for the machine to be fixed, rather than get a different coffee in compensation, or, you know, just go somewhere else. Again, you seem to be under the impression that anything other than sitting in a huff is somehow letting SI off the hook in some way. You can report bugs and expect fixes whilst still working around them in the meantime. That's the whole point. Anything else is just being purposefully miserable.

You're acting like the product hasn't always had its bugs. Every single piece of software ever created has had them, this isn't some new phenomenon. There are plenty of examples of really old games where they had to create physical media and distribute them to fix anything. If they did at all. Nowadays everything is far more public, and yes, there are some developers that take the **** (Hello Games did, but they've acknowledged and gone some way to making good, CDPR did and...well, kind of did). But the attitude of "it should be released when it's ready" is just a route to misery, because 1) ready is entirely subjective, and 2) that definition is probably going to be impossible in a lot of cases. Even more so on a game that sits on a yearly cycle. Even if it was a 2-year cycle.

You can say it as many times as you want, it's still going to sound a bit mental.

So, basically, you don't want to do anything to make your personal experience any better whilst you wait for them to look at fixing them properly? Bold. It's not about "blatantly ignoring" issues. Quite the opposite, in fact. You can acknowledge them, and still make moves to work around them so you can still enjoy something. What's that, the water's off? You're providing bottled water down the street? Nah, screw that, I'm going to sit in a huff until it's fixed. Harrumph. Have you met people? Believing that a "perfectly patched up game" is even possible, let alone likely, is not realistic. But it's still more likely than "stopping forum sniping". People will find something to be mad about, particularly when you ally it with the previous point that the game is never going to be bug free, and to some people it's always going to be "unplayable", even if that's in a stick-in-your-own-spokes kind of way.

End of the day, users have one of two choices. Endlessly complain and pitch all their hopes on an update at some later date that may or may not fix whatever their issue is, or use what they do have at their disposal to make things better for themselves. Bonus of the latter is you may well get to benefit from the former too.

One idea I always wanted to get working was a sort of winner-stays-on style tournament. You'd have an initial champion, and then a random team from a set division would be served up. Then the winner of that match goes up against a random opponent in the next one. And so on and so on. I believe I had it semi-working, but from memory there were a few issues. It was using basic rules, mind, so expect I could probably have solved some of them using advanced rules.

Yeah, as far as I know that was always the thing, you needed to replace a nation rather than add (unless you completely rebuilt everything).

Although I can see some things in the editor are noticeably slower to the point of dragging, there are certain bits that are significantly quicker than 23 weirdly. If you return, say, 50000 objects, and then want to bulk edit a parameter inside them, 23 would end up taking a long, long time to even open them, then just as long to make the change and export them. On 24, this particular process is noticeably quicker. EDIT: And just to add, I expressed earlier in the thread that I was worried about what had changed given what I was working on, but turns out there's relatively little changed on the pure data side. Competition and Club now has a gender option, but as far as I can tell, that's it. The XMLs have a few version strings updated, but then that was always expected. Everything has just worked so far.

No-one outside of SI has any idea what the real story is at this point, and I suspect that "real" story is one that can't be told, like others have said. The most believable given what we do know (Japanese licenses and approach to them is very difficult) is probably that when the feature announcements were made, everything was on track. They hadn't received the licenses, but there was nothing pointing to the fact that they wouldn't by release. The question then is whether they had confirmation that it wouldn't be available by the release, or whether it was one of those things where they were just hearing absolutely nothing, so it could arrive in a couple of hours, or never. Should they have said something prior to release given this? Probably. But attributing some malicious edge to it doesn't seem particularly fair (unsurprising though, given the absolute heads gone a lot of people are having). Relying on an external party - particularly one that is known to work a fair bit differently - and then having the rug pulled isn't necessarily amateurish. They wanted the license, plenty of others did, so they went for it. And they've been burned. The bit we can hold them to account for though is the next few weeks and how they'll react to it.

So if someone buys the game and actually enjoys it, they're a "problem"? Because they don't agree with you? I mean, question is rhetorical given your previous absolutely mental assertion that SI having an awkward release is somehow just as bad company-wise as EA and their near-decade-long commitment to turning their product from an enjoyable game to a cynical, engagement-based slot machine. SI should do better, but pretending like they're anywhere near as bad as that just sounds like a tantrum. And one further edit on this subject. You can probably tell my opinions on FIFA/EAFC given the above. I would like to be able to play a "proper" football game alongside FM, and have done in the past. But I'm not going to support EA on their anti-player crusade, so I stopped buying it. But you know what I don't do? Charge around calling everyone else wrong for doing the opposite. I expect there are many, many thousands of people out there who don't really see things the way I do. They'll probably still enjoy the game in spite of all that. Good for them. I'm still 60 quid richer each year, and much, much richer in time. You've done the same for FM - good for you, you're also monetarily richer and can spend your time on something else. But again, treating anyone who doesn't have the same issues as somehow wrong for spending their own money on something they actually enjoy is...well, it makes you sound like someone who "do not understand others opinion", doesn't it?

With all the supporting changes making it into the db for women's football, I wonder if there's enough of the building blocks to make a fist of adding that for 24...

I'd love to know the thinking behind a few of these weird ones. You can set the day of the intake, great. Why the variance though? What's the necessity of making the date dynamic behind the scenes?

Yeah, I get that what I'm trying to do isn't really what the editor is for, but there's a lot of work that could go in to making it a lot more user-friendly to work with. Lots of obfuscation and closed-off parts that make it a lot more awkward than it could be. Still, it remains a massive credit that SI continue to offer such a powerful tool for free, even if it is ugly as sin.

Nah, nothing secret, although it will likely end up just something for me (more out of being a complete mess than me hoarding it to be fair!). I've always wanted to do much larger edits rather than just a couple of things here and there, so I've always wanted something that could bypass you needing to sit on the editor and painstakingly use their (largely terrible) interface to do those edits. Always imagined using an Excel spreadsheet (because I find it easier to visualise data using it) that could let you map out your data, change little bits of it, and generate a new edited XML using that. Tried it a few years ago and it was a bit **** really, but past few months I've tried again and this one seems a lot more stable. Still working out a lot of the issues, but managing to generate a medium sized edit using it. End result is being able to do a total world conversion with it, but we'll see if it ever gets to that point. I assume the new editor will at least have a few new data points (gender already being pointed out). But pretty much everything in the editor has at least one random number associated with it (some multiple numbers), and even though I expect not much will have changed, I'll still need to check over all of them to make sure they're consistent.

Paying close attention to this thread before I can get my hands on it too. I've been working on something Python-based to go alongside the editor and I'm not looking forward to having to find out every little bit of data that has changed between 23 and 24.

This is how I've been doing it. For single objects, you're probably good doing this. In bulk though, you'll likely need to do something on the other end to parse everything you're getting out. I wanted to extract all the person names in the database for certain nationalities, and did that by selecting all objects, changing the name to something fixed, then exporting (which takes the editor a looooong time to achieve. Once you've exported the XML, you can use Python to get rid of all the stuff you don't care about and extract each name. Wouldn't take too much to change that to extract the db_unique_id value, or even to assign that value to a specific name. Would also add though, if you're assigning, for example, Real Madrid to some value in the database, then it uses two different IDs, the db_unique_id, and a "short" id. I'm not sure yet whether you even need the short_id for the editor to accept it (you don't need db_random_id on import, for example)

As far as I know that kind of thing wouldn't be possible in the IGE anyway.

I don't believe Rangers do anymore. They've had a weird relationship with youth and B teams, and have withdrawn from a number of competitions, preferring to organise their own games. Currently only Celtic B and Hearts B compete in the Lowland league (where, amusingly, the former are getting roundly pumped). Might be that the B team just continues to work as a separate entity in Scotland, but safer option might just be to remove it entirely and return the Scottish pyramid to something not beholden to the Old Firm.

That's quite a come-down from "the worst in FM" to "the worst out of 3 editions". Even as the goalposts have disappeared down the pitch, I'm not even sure that holds much weight. SI have had some pretty rocky beta releases with a lot of vitriol getting fired around. This one has been pretty smooth-sailing, and outside of some stuff they're looking at, the game is in a pretty decent state for one that hasn't reached it's "official" release yet. Does it mean it's perfect? Absolutely not. But expecting that would just be eternal misery. If you can point to where I "dictated how someone should feel about the game" then I'll apologise for it. Good luck with that. Problem with that argument is that's it's usually in response to someone doing exactly the same. They're welcome to think whatever outlandish stuff they want, just like anyone else is welcome to think it's lunacy.

To relate it to the (frankly ridiculous) claim that this is the worst beta they've ever had, I was just realising how few moon-howler type threads we've had this year that get locked when someone thinks that their poorly-thought-through feedback deserves their own thread. There's definitely subjective aspects to the game, but it would be massively, MASSIVELY stretching it to suggest that this is anywhere close to the worst version of FM there's been. The only reason I can think of for something like that is just angry hyperbole.