Etebaer

I had a lower league save a few FMs back when i was 7 or 8 seasons in german tier 4 but it was quite realistic as in that league you have only the champion having a promotion play off with another champion and it took 5 seasons to become champ and than 2 or 3 more to win the play offs...but i liked it as it felt precious to win.

I have seen a lot of people underachieve over the years up to this very FM24. Usually they will end releasing YT Vids and Twitch Streams/Vids quite early and pretend it never happened or do not talk about it at all. I myself was recently sacked after promotion in a lower league save bcs the Board believed we could achieve serial promotion with none of the players having a contract bcs of the amateurstatus that would only change after the season had started so i lost the key players, was unable to hire against the more prominent league competition (bcs still low reputation) and i played with Daveincids realism patch and when the promotion did not happen i was made the sinner of the club and released of my duty at 3rd or 4th position in the league.

There you have it...

Bcs. there is a big crowd of players that wants to live the fantasy of being a successful title winning manager or leading their favourite club to success or simply outdo their freinds winning streaks and brag about it and the game has to give this crowd a place to experience that fantasy. FM Online btw. was not successfull bcs there were to many players not achieving that fantasy - you know: The second place is the first loser is the saying i guess and that means with that mindset that there are 15 to 19 or even 23 losers in every league! If you look at the mindset of some football fans in real world look for example at germany an FC Schalke 04 and Borussia Dortmund. Dortmund is at large the more successful club in the recent history and many times is placed ahead of Schalke in the league table but as long Schalke would beat Dortmund at least once a season and maybe have a good GD or more points out of both the home and away game they would be content with any place and call themself the regional champion (Ruhrpottmeister) which is not an official title but a purely made up title so they could feel successfull despite lacking league performances. Now Schalke has been relegated and it works no longer but that is the mindset of many fans and computer players alike: "Give me something special that makes me feel successfull!" In FM that something special is winning trophys and titles! There are exceptionally few players that play a game for a real challenge - not that there is allways a bad motivation bcs if you play a certain game to relax you want the challenge to meet that relaxing gaming feeling rightly. Yet FM seems to not have the tools to make that possible in every specific way that would satisfy everyone...

Well, usualy exactly that happens to me that i make a bid for a player and if he is any good AI Clubs like Sharks reap my bid apart - i need to be ultra agressive doing bids even b4 the scouting is anywhere close to a conclusion so i may be able to grab a player. Yet i play lower league clubs and i guess at some point transfers become easy when your club reputation and team power projection align to outclass the other bidders and suddenly you cant hire all the great talent that is thrown at you for lack of space. I feel its a balance issue...

The entrance hurdle is sky high but after that there is little increase in the challenge so there is the challenge to get into the game but not much challenge after and that drives both beginners and vets either into to back off the entry hurdle or later boredom and retirement. Then there is also the burn out feeling of the content creators...

A small thing about contract renewal negotiations... So, i would like to renew the contract of a certain player - that player wants initially 3 times the wage that the board has set as limit - why am i unable to explain that his demands are simply out of reach and why gets he upset when i promise new negotiations and he claims the same out of reach demands (well it was 2,5 times the wage limit). Shouldnt the players know the limits and either search for a club that can pay the wage demand or accept the lower offer instead of being upset at the person that can absolutely do nothing about it? Other players i wanted to keep show the red "you are unable to pay their wage demand and wont negotiate" message as well which is unfortunate but does not kill the player and team morale at least bcs that player above made the team upset as well!

I really feel this version of FM is the most relating to the mental attributes that make otherwise good players (athletic and technique) suck or stand out - i have found no position and role that can work with under average mental stats. You know its FM when this guy scores the 1:0 via Header around 90 seconds into the game and you equalizer 2 minutes later is ruled out for alleged offside...(still won the game in the end after numerous early subs).

Well, i never played Tier 10 in England, only Tier 6 in Germany, so i dont know the wages average that is common in England for that tier. What i can say is i am only able to hire pretty much u19 coaches that i offer u19 contracts that i change to first team coach after the agreed to such a contract (but have not finally decided) bcs they will still honor that contract and they earn around 20€ a week and have no or the lowest coaching licence. If you search for first team coaches they will ask a premium over u19 coaches, even if its only the contract offer. Scouts are incredible hard to find and usually you will find none 3 or 4 weeks into the season and you need to go for staff with good scouting attributes offer them contracts that include a scouting sidejob - like Recruitment or u19 Perfomance Analysts that agree to wages as low as 8€ a week. If you are lucky you can hire football directors past age 50 with scouting attributes in the 10+ region that will agree to a scout role for only 40€ a week (add high boni as they are 1 time payments and when you negoiate a new contract you minimize boni as only the base wage is the base for the renewal negotiation). Physios are more common usually. All of these have very low attributes but the coaches can be trained rather quickly if they take coaching courses. As soon you have a "headcoach" or "assistant manager" they will filter out the staff that will not come anyway and the search becomes easier. But as i said, this is Tier 6 Germany but i guess it will be similar in England at least in principle.

It seems there are 2 Shops that pretend to have keys available but its almost full price.

A 3 goal to nil lead is pretty much the worst result you can have early in the game bcs it seems to trigger sort of a "complacency switch" and you often see the other team suddenly come up especially if the half time break is still due. Also the tendency to give up tighter leads and receive late draws seems to be more prevalent in FM24 and you need really to be above and beyond the league average to overcome that tendency. Its not bound to exhaustion as fresh players struggle alike exhausted players and usually it is better to try to reinvigorate your goal scoring ability than to strengthen your defense - go for the 5:4 win is in my experience more successfull thant trying to hold off the oponents from scoring.

I only know it the other way around...

Well, i had older Staff (from age late 50s) decrease and some younger Staff increase. Scouts and Physios did increase "at work" a little and coaches due and after taking coaching courses quite a lot at times but also some not at all.

I have staff members increase as well as decrease attributes...but not that many...a few.

I have also the thesis that a good captain will smooth such things out and helps the resolve of a team.

People say FM is easy. This person having a real club football podcast since many years is mostly a beginner at FM struggling to get good results with a not so bad team (Hertha BSC): Could be that FM is one of the games that is hard to learn but easy to master?

There still seem to be variables in that test that are unkown in their effect like tactics. Was the morale of the opponents locked to a fixed value as well? Did the teams have different players or were they cloned? Was the test in a league environment or like a series of friendlies (that would make the test completely illegitimate)? They could have as well created a self fulfilling prophecy with their test setup or a random number generator...

In the end this is a game! You can RP it like real Football, make rules for yourself to limit yourself what real Football resembles to you. You can try to find weaknesses in the ME and exploit it to your hearts content. I honestly find the tactic that the OP posted not that weird - this game is our football reality as managers where our matches happen and our wins and losses. Not adapting to this reality means ignoring the very reality our virtual manager lifes happen in! I can see why the tactic the OP posted may work with the right players in the right positions and i see no harm to use it if you want. Not that i ever would do that bcs it does not resemble my philosophy of football - i want my team work as one cohesive block between the two anchorpoints of the game that is my and the oposite box/goal. You have to secure all the time your box/goal while also endanger the oposite box/goal which means 1 player each aka the GK and a Striker/Goalgetter which leaves you 9 players for the cohesive block and that is what i try to achieve with the means the games tactical menu offers me. I have made the joke (based on some truth) that my formation is not a 4-1-3-2/3-5-2/5-3-2/2-3-5 but philosophically spoken its a 1-9-1 where all players are involved all the time. That is my way to think football but that does not mean its the ultmiate truth or tactic but i will stand to it as i see it the best fit for me - albeit there are many more philosophys and thought schools. I for example would never use Wingers or players that play in the Winger position bcs they do not participate in my cohesive 9 player block but depend on the other players to do the "block" work for them. If you have the rare worldclass Winger they will show their worth in making you win games paying back with success the fact that the team needs to carry the Wingers in every other situation as they are little involved in everything else than playing their winger role. How often do i dominate a team and then a single outstanding winger does an individual action playing out 3, 4, 5 of my players scoring the winner for their team. Also its an easy to understand visually tactic where you can have great success with little thought and it especially does not challenge the intelligence of the ME too much. The ME as good and advanced it is doing so many things right sometimes falls into traps where it can not handle your intentions and does instead idiotic things - Winger Formations usualy are so simple that the ME can handle them well regardless how demanding on the team they are. Usually, when i see Streamers struggle they will try all tactical kind of things out and finally fall back to such a formation and all of the sudden their problems disapear or at least are mitigated. There are much more exploitative tactics around some probably shown in the screenshots in this thread while some of them i deem snake oil but then in the end so much is depending on the player personal. But the OPs posted tactic does not concern me at all - the manager adapted to the perceived match reality and it works out as it does!

The plural of anecdotes is called summed up experience which is resembling empirical data bcs you will face in this anecdotes not singular events but similar events repeating over a long period of time in my case! Holiday results to me mean nothing - i doubt they replicate the Human vs AI matches as in these matches AI acts for the human part making it AI vs AI matches and win loss statistics prove absolutley entirely nothing! (In regard how the Human vs AI results would have been influenced if the Human would not have gone on holiday)

Well, it is one of many anecdotal examples of mine in ~30.000h of FM gaming several version of FM beginning with FM13 and then uninterrupted FM16 to FM24 usually trying with weaker sides to climb leagues to the top. Several pattern occur every game version and morale is one hell of a variable to deal with especially if you have an underdog team. Ofc it matters the less the better your team is, the better your cohesion is, the better whatever else variable there is that influences the outcome of a game. Another thing is i use the realism mod and god knows who that changes the game dynamic regarding morale...but i use that only since FM23 and my "anecdotes" go back to FM13. Then the Ai vs AI matches with generic tactics and staff that has who knows what stats and does who knows what things in these AI vs AI matches do not convince me that they replicate the experience of a Human vs AI match!

Well, i had for example a morale break down after i lost a cup match and then lost the following 4 matches as well until i managed to recover, that alone makes the FM Arena test already uconvincing and to many variables about the test are unknown too. The Season was already around 2/3 played i think and i had 1 or 2 lossses b4 that happened - i have already more points lost in that 4 matches than the mentioned simulation over a season. And honestly i dont trust simulations do getting the best out of a team - thus i stil am very unconcvinced about that!

The option to purchase the ingame editor is in the start screen menu via downloads and i guess it still is possible. If so you then can change your trikot kits colour and if you play the 3D game the style of each part. It should work for 2D mode as well as you are able to change the "icon". PS: Not all editor options are availabe in any of the...uh, i dont know the word...in any of the left side selections for the screen you look at. When you go to competition i.e. you can for sure edit your trikot kit via the pen icon on top of the topbar - chose edit kit from the dropdown menu.

I would say that a significant amount of the injuries my team has occur via hard tackles made against them and have nothing to do with any training intensity and the occasionaly broken arm after my GK saved a shot is a freak incident...

Well, i do not use it but i still have some entries in that list and having it only grow should break the game at some point i guess. There should realy be a way to delete that nonsense!

The game also runs sluggish for me when my PC is waiting to do windows updates (i have them set to manualy start installation) or other updates. Also it could be a drive issue like diskspace or a firmware issue compromising files. Also Cloud synchronization could be an issue should it keep the PC occupied while gaming. Try the cache thing mentioned above first and if not look for the other stuff.