Football Manager 2021 Official Feedback Thread

[WilltheWolf92]

Very happy so far with the game guys, it's since FM15 that I had this fun, but only playing for 5 hours so my opinion is on going

Edited November 25, 2020 by WilltheWolf92

[kiwityke]

3 minutes ago, witticism said:

I will keep an eye out, I dont recall having seen it in previous seasons and I did have a performance analyst. Thanks for looking out

I have completed 5 seasons and been sent the report 1 time...

[Sunstrikuuu]

1 minute ago, XaW said:

Yes, and I agree, if it had been a patch. But you don't have release notes in a new game. You don't see devs pushing out "these are the issues we fixed before the game was released" in any game. They do whenever they do an actual patch (as they did just now, where they stated the they fixed crashes for Korean language).

Now, I agree, that since we here on the forum have mostly played the Beta, it feels like we got a patch, but in reality we just finally got the real game and what we played before was just a sneak peak.

I actually think release notes are pretty common now for games with playable betas.  They weren't normal because access to the game in beta wasn't normal.  For example, these are the patch notes for the 1.0 launch of Deep Rock Galactic: https://store.steampowered.com/newshub/app/548430/view/2185880025242975626

And for The Forest: https://endnightgames.com/updates/v10

[witticism]

1 minute ago, WilltheWolf92 said:

Very happy so far with the game guys, it's since FM15 that I had this fun

I mostly feel positively about 21, helps that 20 was dire but even with a lot of the new UI changes putting things in places I cant find it's still a recommend overall

[xray1324]

is this an intended feature/behaviour: If you individually talk to all three groups (Defenders, Midfielders and Attackers), any status changes they gained (seemed motivated etc) become neutral - if you talk to just two groups, they stay

[XaW]

2 minutes ago, witticism said:

There's also the whole can of worms that it's only bad if it feels bad, if undocumented changes were received positively by a hypothetical end user no one would care for patch notes

Yeah, it's that as well, but I don't really see the huge need for release notes personally, I think it's a nice thing to have. But for the software company I work for, we have logs as to how many actually opens the document for the release notes, and let's just say, I think I could host it on a potato and no one would miss it...

2 minutes ago, Dissepointed said:

Well, Call of duty just did it. And hundreds of the 550 games I have in my steam library have done it, expecially the aRpgs I play

Well, COD is mostly a PvP game, I doubt they patch things up much for the single player part...

[XaW]

2 minutes ago, Sunstrikuuu said:

I actually think release notes are pretty common now for games with playable betas.  They weren't normal because access to the game in beta wasn't normal.  For example, these are the patch notes for the 1.0 launch of Deep Rock Galactic: https://store.steampowered.com/newshub/app/548430/view/2185880025242975626

And for The Forest: https://endnightgames.com/updates/v10

Yeah, as I said, I understand why some would want it, but SI have a known history of not having release notes for the transition from beta to full version, so I'm not sure why anyone is surprised by this (unless it's the first time one are playing the beta, that is). And they have stated they don't do it, so it's kind of a moot point to discuss, really. I can see the want, but I also struggle to see the outrage that some (not you!) feel about this.

[JordanMilly]

38 minutes ago, duesouth said:

fair enough a large part of the community plays with these tactics (maybe even the majority) 

A small minority use those tactics, because only a small minority even know those tactics exist to be downloaded from different sites. When a lot of those sites have their download numbers on there, and only a couple of thousand people download at most, compared to the over 1M people who played FM20, it's a drop in the ocean.

[witticism]

1 minute ago, XaW said:

I doubt they patch things up much for the single player part...

The perfect counterpoint for this argument would be Dwarf Fortress, specially in regards to the single player procedural ai emergent behaviour aspect, those patch notes are detailed, long and famous

[Dissepointed]

1 minute ago, XaW said:

Yeah, it's that as well, but I don't really see the huge need for release notes personally, I think it's a nice thing to have. But for the software company I work for, we have logs as to how many actually opens the document for the release notes, and let's just say, I think I could host it on a potato and no one would miss it...

Well, COD is mostly a PvP game, I doubt they patch things up much for the single player part...

They do, but it doesnt matter anyway. To be fair the beta last more than two weeks, and nothing wrong with that. Its so many reports that doesnt make it in the full release so I really dont understand why they just dont extend the beta period. But notes on updates, and release are quite common. People usually make a big deal out of it aswell, looking forward to read them etc

[Sunstrikuuu]

Just now, XaW said:

Yeah, as I said, I understand why some would want it, but SI have a known history of not having release notes for the transition from beta to full version, so I'm not sure why anyone is surprised by this (unless it's the first time one are playing the beta, that is). And they have stated they don't do it, so it's kind of a moot point to discuss, really. I can see the want, but I also struggle to see the outrage that some (not you!) feel about this.

Yeah.  I'm not mad about it, I'm just trying to point out that if you don't want people saying you made changes, tell people what changes you made.

[witticism]

5 minutes ago, xray1324 said:

is this an intended feature/behaviour: If you individually talk to all three groups (Defenders, Midfielders and Attackers), any status changes they gained (seemed motivated etc) become neutral - if you talk to just two groups, they stay

I thought I was imagining things with my halftime team talks figuratively bugging out but maybe a literal bug instead

[WilltheWolf92]

6 minutes ago, witticism said:

I mostly feel positively about 21, helps that 20 was dire but even with a lot of the new UI changes putting things in places I cant find it's still a recommend overall

I'm most happy that they're more professional this year, searching more developers for the ME, if they can update this in the next editions that would make this game perfect

[Sunstrikuuu]

1 minute ago, witticism said:

The perfect counterpoint for this argument would be Dwarf Fortress, specially in regards to the single player procedural ai emergent behaviour aspect, those patch notes are detailed, long and famous

Patch notes are so much part of the brand for some companies.  Purge's First Impressions video for the 7.07 patch of Dota 2 was ten hours, ten minutes long.

[themadsheep2001]

5 minutes ago, XaW said:

Yeah, as I said, I understand why some would want it, but SI have a known history of not having release notes for the transition from beta to full version, so I'm not sure why anyone is surprised by this (unless it's the first time one are playing the beta, that is). And they have stated they don't do it, so it's kind of a moot point to discuss, really. I can see the want, but I also struggle to see the outrage that some (not you!) feel about this.

And TBf to Jack, he actually mentioned the things they did change, such as refereeing bloopers.

[XaW]

1 minute ago, witticism said:

The perfect counterpoint for this argument would be Dwarf Fortress, specially in regards to the single player procedural ai emergent behaviour aspect, those patch notes are detailed, long and famous

I haven't played it, so I wouldn't know. I've only heard about the game, so I don't know the elements there and I can't really comment.

1 minute ago, Dissepointed said:

They do, but it doesnt matter anyway. To be fair the beta last more than two weeks, and nothing wrong with that. Its so many reports that doesnt make it in the full release so I really dont understand why they just dont extend the beta period. But notes on updates, and release are quite common. People usually make a big deal out of it aswell, looking forward to read them etc

Sure, I can see why it's wanted, but I can also understand why they don't for a full release.

Just now, Sunstrikuuu said:

Yeah.  I'm not mad about it, I'm just trying to point out that if you don't want people saying you made changes, tell people what changes you made.

Of course, I'm all for transparency in general, but it also demands more of how the issues are logged. You don't always want to give away internal information in headlines for a release log. Especially to external users, such as a game.

[ferrarinseb]

I don't know what happened but since last update. I was stuck here for a while after i done my pep talk.

First it stuck here

Now here

Where should i post this?

 

[witticism]

Just now, XaW said:

I haven't played it, so I wouldn't know. I've only heard about the game, so I don't know the elements there and I can't really comment.

Oh no worries, if you've ever bored on the internet look up articles about it it was a popular article subject years back with highlights of the 15 years or so of patch notes.

On topic

I wish there was an easier way to "scroll" through a match's highlights.
The vcr buttons:

Are functional but not quite as easy to find points in time between the pre-defined "highlights"

[craigcwwe]

One thing that I noticed in the beta and is still in the full release. Team stats on the home page. I've got the best defence in the league this season, only conceded 3 goals in 9 matches but it says we've got the worst defence in the division. 

[Double0Seven]

I noticed this was an issue for some weeks, are people still having problems with it? 

[kiwityke]

The entire release of FM for a major game is kind of bizarre to be honest. Announcements are spread over:-

Youtube

Here

SI website

Twitter x2 (Miles and SI)

Twitch stream

And this year that new FMC club...

Then you have the 2 week Beta then the full release. I don't know of any other major release that has such a convoluted process.

So its no surprise we don't get change logs as theyd probably spread them cryptically around the web anyway.

[craiigman]

40 minutes ago, hoddle1404 said:

Its just happened last weekend 

 

Doesn’t make it hurt any less 😭😭

[XaW]

3 minutes ago, witticism said:

Oh no worries, if you've ever bored on the internet look up articles about it it was a popular article subject years back with highlights of the 15 years or so of patch notes.

On topic

I wish there was an easier way to "scroll" through a match's highlights.
The vcr buttons:

Are functional but not quite as easy to find points in time between the pre-defined "highlights"

Yeah, I read that they removed the timeline for realism, and I can kind of see what they mean. I'd still like to have it for AFTER the game, if I'm rewatching it to look for certain things tactically or just the few minutes of buildup before a goal or something. And I think I've seen quite a few people ask for it, so I'll just hope it returns in any form.

[Flußkrebs]

10 hours ago, CJG21 said:

Anybody elses xG table looking like this at the end of the season? Every team in the league is outscoring the xG, and nearly every team is out conceding the xG. Surely this means the xG is being underestimated? 

Maybe it's just a fluke season.

Out of interest, how much of this season was played in the beta vs the full release? I raised as a bug report that xG was consistently being overperformed (to levels that are statistically just not possible) and was told that it was a known issue. If xG has made it into the full game like this then that's worrying. (You can find in my post history the statistical analysis I ran on the beta xG tables, I haven't played a full release season yet to run the numbers). I won't run the numbers on that league table you have above either, but I'd hazard to guess that if you did you'd find the odds astonishingly low that this would be the case (all teams outperforming their xG). Unless the underlying statistical average isn't that the difference between xG and G is 0 in the FM model.

I saw someone replied to @CJG21 saying (to paraphrase) "well that's because xG is based off the average player taking those shots, and the prem has above average players, so everyone will outperform xG". Unfortunately that just isn't how xG works in real life. Here's a good primer on that topic:

https://statsbomb.com/2017/07/quantifying-finishing-skill/

I currently suspect that the way that FM is built unfortunately doesn't really line up with reality. Finishing skill is real, but it's not as clear as you might think:

That's from 2011-2017. But I am not convinced that the FM simulation can mirror the real life underlying probabilities of football. Even a player like Messi, the (tbf out of date) xG model reckons outperforms his xG by just 17% (going off that above graph). Which is kind of astonishing. xG models work in the lower leagues as well, you don't need to build new ones for each league. It just turns out that the vast majority of difference between a premier league goal scorer and league 2 goal scorer are the number and quality of the chances they take. They get into better positions more often and take more shots from these positions. Finishing skill is secondary. 

I'm 100% sure the guys who built the model are aware of all this, I'm not trying to explain down to them, but I suspect that there is probably at it's heart an unreconcilable difference between the way FM simulates games via it's hard coded attributes and the way football works IRL. That's completely fine, FM does a bang up job of simulating football and this match engine is better than ever. The problem comes when in real life we start to "get into the code" i.e. the probabilities underlying football and then there is widespread demand for that to be implemented in the game, but the in game models don't match the real world ones.

I really really hope that I'm over worrying about this- that either the problem doesn't exist in the full version, or if it does it is because the model is miscalibrated rather than some irreconcilable differences. Because then it means it is something that can be fixed via trial and error and the next game will be even better than this one.

For the sake of balance, here are two articles by Dan Altman, who suggests that finishing skill is more of a tangible thing than some of the xG model proponents might suggest:

https://smarterscout.com/articles/premier-league-pierre-emerick-aubameyang-arsenal

https://www.northyardanalytics.com/blog/2014/02/07/breaking-down-goal-difference/

The top of that Statsbomb article I linked also contains some links to the debate on finishing skill.

 

 

[witticism]

Just now, XaW said:

I'd still like to have it for AFTER the game

If we are going for realism, how poor is our video department we dont have access to that after the match is played.

[Domoboy23]

Anyone elses game just randomly updated? 250mb file

[HUNT3R]

Just now, Domoboy23 said:

Anyone elses game just randomly updated? 250mb file

 

 There's a pinned thread announcing the hotfix.

[Jack Joyce]

2 minutes ago, Flußkrebs said:

Out of interest, how much of this season was played in the beta vs the full release? I raised as a bug report that xG was consistently being overperformed (to levels that are statistically just not possible) and was told that it was a known issue. If xG has made it into the full game like this then that's worrying. (You can find in my post history the statistical analysis I ran on the beta xG tables, I haven't played a full release season yet to run the numbers). I won't run the numbers on that league table you have above either, but I'd hazard to guess that if you did you'd find the odds astonishingly low that this would be the case (all teams outperforming their xG). Unless the underlying statistical average isn't that the difference between xG and G is 0 in the FM model.

I would suspect that a large chunk of this season was played on the beta. Some shots were incorrectly being left out of the xG totals which meant they were coming out a bit lower than they should be. Fixes will only affect newly played matches.

[Flußkrebs]

4 minutes ago, Jack Joyce said:

I would suspect that a large chunk of this season was played on the beta. Some shots were incorrectly being left out of the xG totals which meant they were coming out a bit lower than they should be. Fixes will only affect newly played matches.

Ha, I'm sure you are getting tired of me raising this  Fingers crossed all is well when the numbers come in during the full season! 

[Nahuelzn]

Well, if the ME hasn't changed and we're seeing some odd things, then necessarily the ME has to change in coming updates to accurately reflects how those changes impact the game. I don't have any reason to not trust SI when they say they didnt modify anything substantial. And that was why I was cautious and maybe was just some outliers. Will play some more matches today, the long shots and long balls are the things that worries me a lot as it's a total buzz killer.

On the bright side, there's definitely some substantial changes in morale now. The usual talks don't work as well anymore and there seems to be an uptick in difficulty. If they achieved this by tweaking how the AI managers plays or how our players are affected by these changes in the morale, I don't know. But great to see improvements in this area!

Edited November 25, 2020 by Nahuelzn

[Domathon]

Injuries are as strong as advance forwards were in the beta 😂 

[CM]

Not xG but half way through season with Brentford and most teams outperform their expected points by 12, 8, 4 and etc. in Championship. Btw I underperform my xG by 3 but the difference between XPoints and my current point is 12.

[Flußkrebs]

1 minute ago, CM said:

Not xG but half way through season with Brentford and most teams outperform their expected points by 12, 8, 4 and etc. in Championship. Btw I underperform my xG by 3 but the difference between XPoints and my current point is 12.

How do you see xPts totals halfway through the season? Is it just another tab on the stats page? I thought that xPTs table with xG/xGA was only an end of season thing...

[CM]

Just now, Flußkrebs said:

How do you see xPts totals halfway through the season? Is it just another tab on the stats page? I thought that xPTs table with xG/xGA was only an end of season thing...

Competitions and then Teams stats, at the bottom of the page you can change which stats you want to see.

[AlexJames]

6 hours ago, JordanMillward_1 said:

Then report those UI bugs so they can be fixed 

 

Report this to the ME - AI and Tactics forum.

Yes, thanks, and I will. But this is also a feedback thread, and that was my feedback.

I understand that software bugs will always exist, but to encounter 4-5 fairly obvious issues within just a couple of hours of play is disappointing from an end user perspective. 

I also understand that certain bugs are harder to fix than others (ME, for example), however some of the UI/UX issues that myself and others have encountered and raised here - especially if they're part of the bells & whistles shiny new features that are being advertised - are the type of things that should be nailed on day one of a major game release, in my opinion. Otherwise it just looks like a shoddy release. True, they might not be game-breaking, but they add up.

Either that or extend the Beta period so that valid feedback from end users can be properly crowd-sourced and issues/ improvements actually fixed prior to full release.

 

[Tony Wright 747]

1 hour ago, XaW said:

Yeah, I looked back a month or so for that one. I also tried a random match from last season in my league and the same worked. I also tried for a random team in my league from last season and that also showed me the goals when I did the same. So unless I'm misunderstanding you, it works fine.

Thanks a lot XaW

[CJG21]

33 minutes ago, Jack Joyce said:

I would suspect that a large chunk of this season was played on the beta. Some shots were incorrectly being left out of the xG totals which meant they were coming out a bit lower than they should be. Fixes will only affect newly played matches.

 

27 minutes ago, Flußkrebs said:

Ha, I'm sure you are getting tired of me raising this  Fingers crossed all is well when the numbers come in during the full season! 

Yeah half of the season was played on the beta build (good point!), good to see that it's been fixed for the full release.

[XaW]

2 minutes ago, Tony Wright 747 said:

Thanks a lot XaW

No worries, happy to help.

[jase19]

Does anyone else have a problem with mousing over the "i" for players to see their info?  If I mouse over one player, it doesn't go away when I move my mouse away and onto a new player.  I have to click somewhere and then find where I was. 

[ottey_swe]

Is it only me or are the player rating stars a bit grainy/lowres on retina displays?

Edited November 25, 2020 by ottey_swe

[Gah Rii]

10 minutes ago, ottey_swe said:

Is it only me or are the player rating stars a bit grainy/lowres on retina displays?

looks awful to me in that screenshot alright, the edges of the stars are super blurry

[redmeister]

Im unable to sort the league table by media prediction as the option is greyed out, is this a bug or can you only view it at certain times now?

[JordanMilly]

1 hour ago, ferrarinseb said:

I don't know what happened but since last update. I was stuck here for a while after i done my pep talk.

First it stuck here

Now here

Where should i post this?

 

Looks like the same issue as this.

[LucasBR]

Venezia name turns to Venice on the match UI.

[JordanMilly]

1 hour ago, Flußkrebs said:

Out of interest, how much of this season was played in the beta vs the full release? I raised as a bug report that xG was consistently being overperformed (to levels that are statistically just not possible) and was told that it was a known issue. If xG has made it into the full game like this then that's worrying. (You can find in my post history the statistical analysis I ran on the beta xG tables, I haven't played a full release season yet to run the numbers). I won't run the numbers on that league table you have above either, but I'd hazard to guess that if you did you'd find the odds astonishingly low that this would be the case (all teams outperforming their xG). Unless the underlying statistical average isn't that the difference between xG and G is 0 in the FM model.

I saw someone replied to @CJG21 saying (to paraphrase) "well that's because xG is based off the average player taking those shots, and the prem has above average players, so everyone will outperform xG". Unfortunately that just isn't how xG works in real life. Here's a good primer on that topic:

https://statsbomb.com/2017/07/quantifying-finishing-skill/

I currently suspect that the way that FM is built unfortunately doesn't really line up with reality. Finishing skill is real, but it's not as clear as you might think:

That's from 2011-2017. But I am not convinced that the FM simulation can mirror the real life underlying probabilities of football. Even a player like Messi, the (tbf out of date) xG model reckons outperforms his xG by just 17% (going off that above graph). Which is kind of astonishing. xG models work in the lower leagues as well, you don't need to build new ones for each league. It just turns out that the vast majority of difference between a premier league goal scorer and league 2 goal scorer are the number and quality of the chances they take. They get into better positions more often and take more shots from these positions. Finishing skill is secondary. 

I'm 100% sure the guys who built the model are aware of all this, I'm not trying to explain down to them, but I suspect that there is probably at it's heart an unreconcilable difference between the way FM simulates games via it's hard coded attributes and the way football works IRL. That's completely fine, FM does a bang up job of simulating football and this match engine is better than ever. The problem comes when in real life we start to "get into the code" i.e. the probabilities underlying football and then there is widespread demand for that to be implemented in the game, but the in game models don't match the real world ones.

I really really hope that I'm over worrying about this- that either the problem doesn't exist in the full version, or if it does it is because the model is miscalibrated rather than some irreconcilable differences. Because then it means it is something that can be fixed via trial and error and the next game will be even better than this one.

For the sake of balance, here are two articles by Dan Altman, who suggests that finishing skill is more of a tangible thing than some of the xG model proponents might suggest:

https://smarterscout.com/articles/premier-league-pierre-emerick-aubameyang-arsenal

https://www.northyardanalytics.com/blog/2014/02/07/breaking-down-goal-difference/

The top of that Statsbomb article I linked also contains some links to the debate on finishing skill.

 

 

I believe that has been tweaked, as in the beta I don't think I had a single game where I had over 1.0 xG that I didn't score 2/3/4 goals more than the xG. Meanwhile, following the full release, I've had a couple of games against 3 at the back teams where they constantly kept me out enough that I was only able to take inaccurate shots, and so ended up with like 1.5 xG, but no goals scored.

EDIT: Missed that Jack had commented on this, so yea, shots that should have added to xG weren't in the beta, which would explain the overperformance against xG.

[matisptfan]

How can I export the match highlights package video in FM21?

I remember I could do it in FM20 by accessing the match after it took place.

[LucasBR]

So Roma was bought by Friedkin and I still got messages saying the club is about to be sold? This doesn't make sense at all.

[Niyas46]

So.... I have reached half time and I am smashing a team and my players must be loving it and gaining experience and growing in this game, at half time I have not done the team talk as I want to rest a player and bring in a young gun, so I go to tactics make the change and find out there's no way back to complete the team talk... GREAT!!!! 

[Johnny Ace]

It can't be just me but the football is tiny, I struggle to see it, the painted lines are twice the thickness of the ball

Edited November 25, 2020 by Johnny Ace

[Niyas46]

The new icons representing players condition I don't like as there's only a few sections representing there condition. I think it is a good idea with out numbers as you can never know a players real condition due to good and poor stamina and fitness etc.. The levels on this new condition icon is poor it should more be a meter reducing its self with no numbers but still using the colours but instead of going green, orange and red it should gradually go through the colours. At least any way I think the new system is poor in 2020 and all previous atleast I know when I'm taking on Barcelona there 33-35 year olds are struggling so I can tactically do my business, now what do I do with oppositions player conditions... Jeez!!!