Missed Pens

[Lee MMM]

Has this still not been fixed ????

Laughable now really

 

 

 

[FrazT]

Welcome to the forums.

To answer your specific question, no it hasn't been fixed because it is not broken.  The game code's success rate for penalties is based on actual statistics but there will always be users who are more or less successful than the average.  There are several player attributes that contribute to a good penalty taker and you need to look at these and choose the taker with care.

[enigmatic]

Just scored all my penalties in an African CON final shootout

Scored about 80-90% over last three seasons at club level

Maybe you need to change your penalty taker

[Spurs08]

Are you getting Sturridge to take penalties with his crutches or something?!

[Dagenham_Dave]

In real life, the team I support were recently involved in the lowest scoring PK shoot out in Scottish football history, when we lost 2-0 to Inverness in the League Cup. The first five pens were all missed. (In our next game, we won in normal time 2-0 - both goals from penalties!)

Remarkably, a few years ago we were also involved in the highest scoring one ever, triumphing 13-12 over Hurlford in the Scottish Cup

The moral of this story is that penalties are sometimes missed, and penalties are sometimes scored. 

[craiigman]

I went from missing 0, to missing all of them, to now just random. It happens in real life too

[TheRealTactician]

7 hours ago, FrazT said:

Welcome to the forums.

To answer your specific question, no it hasn't been fixed because it is not broken.  The game code's success rate for penalties is based on actual statistics but there will always be users who are more or less successful than the average.  There are several player attributes that contribute to a good penalty taker and you need to look at these and choose the taker with care.

If you are so sure that is the case, i would genuinely be sure if everyone were to check the average conversion on penalties in the premier league in their saves it'd be considerably less than in real life. A comparison the in real life average of the premier league is usually high 70% to low 80's, there are some outliers however. Now if everyone were to send screenshots of the league penalty conversion rate, i assure you it'll be far lower than the actual average because there isn't enough reward for good stats in all the attributes in taking penalties.

[HUNT3R]

3 minutes ago, TheRealTactician said:

If you are so sure that is the case, i would genuinely be sure if everyone were to check the average conversion on penalties in the premier league in their saves it'd be considerably less than in real life. A comparison the in real life average of the premier league is usually high 70% to low 80's, there are some outliers however. Now if everyone were to send screenshots of the league penalty conversion rate, i assure you it'll be far lower than the actual average because there isn't enough reward for good stats in all the attributes in taking penalties.

I've checked in my own save, the PL, Serie A, La liga, Bundesliga etc (all loaded and running full detail for years) and all of them average around 80%. My own team at the time sat at 82%.

If you have something different in either your own league or another league in full detail where the averages are quite different, I'm sure SI will appreciate the save.

[LilSaint]

Question I have about this, do previously missed pens influence the penalty taker as well?

I've had my left winger take them, who on a sidenote is the leagues top scorer but he's now missed 3 or 4 pens in a row.

[Cougar2010]

1 hour ago, LilSaint said:

Question I have about this, do previously missed pens influence the penalty taker as well?

I've had my left winger take them, who on a sidenote is the leagues top scorer but he's now missed 3 or 4 pens in a row.

Missed in different games? my educated guess would be no.

Missed in the same match? Yes.

Selecting a penalty taker has always been trial & error for me and you shouldn't just look at the penalty taking attribute because there is far more to it and even different types.  Things like technique & balance I suspect will help but overall it comes down to the mentality of the player and until you see them take a penalty I have no clue how good/bad they will be.  Once you've seen players take a few penalties you get to know what they are like, some simply smash them, others place them.  Some are confident, other look nervous and that can depend on hidden attributes/morale and how the match is going.

[LilSaint]

Yeh sorry, forgot to mention. It was in different games, all in fairly quick succession. In one game he'd actually already scored twice. I was preparing a round of applause for him to complete his hattrick, but stared at my screen in shock instead.

By the third one, I thought to myself.. He's surely not going to miss 3/3 as he ran up, but sure enough, he sent it wide. Wondered if, like IRL, it gets in a players head.

[Cougar2010]

4 minutes ago, LilSaint said:

Yeh sorry, forgot to mention. It was in different games, all in fairly quick succession. In one game he'd actually already scored twice. I was preparing a round of applause for him to complete his hattrick, but stared at my screen in shock instead.

By the third one, I thought to myself.. He's surely not going to miss 3/3 as he ran up, but sure enough, he sent it wide. Wondered if, like IRL, it gets in a players head.

I would say it would add like a goal drought, lowers morale, maybe increases pressure.

So if the player is struggling to score then it would effect the penalties he takes.

However if he was scoring reasonably regularly but still missed his last 2/3 pens I don't think it would make any difference to the next.

[Karnack]

I have similar issues some season whilst other seasons (like my current) we haven't missed a single one (6/6). But the season before that we only converted 3/9 penalties. So the ratio might be correct over time, it's just weird when some seasons are extremes in either direction.

2 missed penalties in a row and I change the pk-taker. 

[suncrush]

2 hours ago, Cougar2010 said:

Missed in different games? my educated guess would be no.

Missed in the same match? Yes.

Selecting a penalty taker has always been trial & error for me and you shouldn't just look at the penalty taking attribute because there is far more to it and even different types.  Things like technique & balance I suspect will help but overall it comes down to the mentality of the player and until you see them take a penalty I have no clue how good/bad they will be.  Once you've seen players take a few penalties you get to know what they are like, some simply smash them, others place them.  Some are confident, other look nervous and that can depend on hidden attributes/morale and how the match is going.

Finishing definitely seems to matter. 

[Cougar2010]

1 minute ago, suncrush said:

Finishing definitely seems to matter. 

Its interesting as finishing was never included on the list when looking at penalty takers in game but it got added in the last couple of versions.

Its not something I've particularly looked at myself but I always thought penalty taking took the place of finishing same as long shots does outside the box.  Maybe it implies that penalty taking is more of a modifier then.

[Svenc]

Reading that "trial&Error" part is pretty interesting. Part of the problem of selecting a penalty taker as of FM is also that the sample sizes are incredibly, incredibly tiny. You could argue this replicates real football to an extent, as penalty training is no fully substitute to the in-match situation, some of which having more pressure to it (friendly at 4-0, match is settled anyhow) some less so (world cup Final minute 89, 0-1 behind). But still any in-match samples are incredibly tiny, and when starting out into a save, there is also no long-term records to go by. Which still would make it difficult except for the select guys who regularly step up to the spot, and did so for quite a number of seasons prior. And then this could still fluctuate purely by random chance (as if the game models this correctly, even the "worst" fooballers would simply mostly convert, as penalties are the no. 1 scenario in which the keeper is actually placed at a huge disadvantage, and FM doesn't deal in simulating that local pub team kicking it about after having twenty pints prior and after).

Assuming the average conversion ratio is roughly 80%, which is 8 out of 10. Bit of crude Maths, but pick a ten sided dice and roll it five times in a row, every time it shows a number of 8 and below, you score. Do that a couple times, you may still find you get streaks of misses. E.g. Leverkusen last season missing like 8/12, in parts the same players who a season prior converted everything. West Ham fans better pray this was random chance taking it's toll. As FM also isn't football, that could be both more likely to happen and less likely so. From my experience it is the shoot-outs that oftenly produced the most curious dynamics on this game for whichever weighting reasons. That they are treated specifically is hinted at in a couple widgets with players confidence revealaed specifically during such.

[HUNT3R]

47 minutes ago, Cougar2010 said:

Its interesting as finishing was never included on the list when looking at penalty takers in game but it got added in the last couple of versions.

Its not something I've particularly looked at myself but I always thought penalty taking took the place of finishing same as long shots does outside the box.  Maybe it implies that penalty taking is more of a modifier then.

It isn't something I personally agree with, but the way I understand it, Finishing does play a part which is why the game lists it.

So from my understanding, it'll be Finishing, Penalty Taking and Composure, which the game lists. Body Language (whether a player is nervous, complacent, composed etc) will obviously also play a role too. Then there's also Pressure, which is a hidden attribute.

 

[enigmatic]

IIRC an SI employee recently confirmed that "Finishing" wasn't used in determining the outcome of a penalty (presumably it appears on the screen because "finishing" definitely applies to any rebounds offered up).

This is the sort of detail that really ought to be cleared up with in game tooltips and a proper user guide though. There's still plenty of unexpectedness in the outcome of a penalty as it is without people having to guess what attributes matter.

[HUNT3R]

1 minute ago, enigmatic said:

IIRC an SI employee recently confirmed that "Finishing" wasn't used in determining the outcome of a penalty (presumably it appears on the screen because "finishing" definitely applies to any rebounds offered up).

I'd love a link to it, if you have one or can remember where or when. I must say, I like the explanation and I do agree with it.

[enigmatic]

I beg your pardon, it wasn't an SI employee, it was you!

 

[westy8chimp]

17 hours ago, Lee MMM said:

Has this still not been fixed ????

Laughable now really

 

 

 

Bit of a cheat/exploit... set your keeper to take pens if it is really killing you. Their conversion rates are awesome.

[Neil Brock]

The conversion rate is exactly the same for AI as it is user, so there is no advantage or disadvantage. The overall conversion rates are slightly lower than real life, but to make any changes would require a substantial rewrite of the match engine which just isn't possible at this stage. It's not just a case of tweaking something up slightly - there's a huge amount which would need to change which would affect the entire balance of the game.

We appreciate some people find it frustrating but as said the overall conversion rate is only slightly lower than real life (I think IRL it's around 70-80% and in game it's closer to 65-70%).  

[Svenc]

65% long-term would be an interesting figure, IIRC have never seen a quote estimating this "low" -- often times in-game it was actually higher than in real-life. Would explain some of the frustrations, as that "dice" (to simplify) weighting in at such possible rates makes a string of misses naturally a tad more likely than one at 80% (which is slightly a cut above RL conversions). Reckon a mix of ball physics, inherent player decisions and keeper modelings, which affect everything, not only penalties. This article in between the lines also kind of goes into the topic of small sample-sizes, it's easy to fall into the trap of going: Penalty rates in the Chamions League going down (just the same as I find the notion nonsensical after internal tournaments that goals from set-pieces etc. would be on the rise, as happened after the last World Cup, as those last at best 64 matches). Just because you've seen something happening over a few weeks in the Summer doesn't mean it will shake anything that's ever happened prior in the last couple years, sometimes decades [that's not only fans and punditry admittedly, there's still a wealth of clubs that buy players based on their performance in such tournaments, which at best are like 5, 6, 7 matches]. Some of it was attributed to the introduction of vanishing spray, and in some leagues (BL) this happened to coincidence with a short rise in goals from DFK's, but AFAIk that was only a short trend over a few months, and either way is far too early to tell, as by nature, the sample sizes for free kicks are tiny.

In other words, you could realistically do everything "right" here even when in balance, and still have a bad spell, and Leverkusen better not shipped Chicharito to West Ham purely because a couple of missed kicks from the spot in the last season (who knows). And speaking about that above linked to Telegraph article musing about a significant drop in penalties converted a couple weeks into the 2016 season --- at the end of it it was a pretty decently 76% of them being scored (81 out of 106), not anything particularly low, just average. Given the nature of small sample sizes, Fm makes it hard to assess thus, harder than real manager would have it, as training matches etc. are being skipped out of the equation and set piece stats etc. reset at the start of each season without them being stored for future reference points. Given it's admitted to that currently the rates  are a slight cut below RL figures, I therefore challenge the aforementioned notion that the defining contributing factor to missing 5 in 6 was the pick in penalty takers, some of which probably were even adviced by the staff, who knows.

[alanschu14]

4 hours ago, HUNT3R said:

It isn't something I personally agree with, but the way I understand it, Finishing does play a part which is why the game lists it.

So from my understanding, it'll be Finishing, Penalty Taking and Composure, which the game lists. Body Language (whether a player is nervous, complacent, composed etc) will obviously also play a role too. Then there's also Pressure, which is a hidden attribute.

 

I figured the Penalties stat must also include some level of effectively not telegraphing what you're going to do?

(I'm not a football player and this game is my intro to the sport but I assumed some players may telegraph what they're going to do even if they don't realize it?)

[ermant]

I still have this. It was an endless loop.

Maybe my case was a bug or something but apart from that I definitely can't accept someone saying "penalties are justnormal". If it happens to someone, it is just a possibility but if everyone suffers, it is not.

Anyway, what i can tell is, if a player misses penalty, change him. It seems too much related with consistency and having a good run on penalties.