My biggest beef with iFHM....and how to fix it...

[mrpeeps]

Edit: I mean iFMH!!

Marc,

I have great appreciation and respect for the way you (and some other SIers) make yourself available to us in the forums.

I've been playing FM for about five years on my Mac and I was ecstatic when SI first introduced FMH for the iPad.

I understand the limitations of the handheld game and don't expect it to ever replicate the Mac version completely. However, I do enjoy it and I believe FMH can be a lot better with some major, yet very doable, tweaks to its visual presentation.

My basic premise is that most of us play FM because:

1-we love football...obviously.

2-we're interested in the strategy of football

3-we love the stats, data and ratings that play such a huge role in the FM game

In response to those three criteria, FHM offers:

1-football...yes, it's in the game!

2-strategy...yes, also in the game. Although we will debate about the pros and cons of the match engine, AI, etc in every version of the game, strategy is present in the FM game.

3-this is where the game fails horribly. If you're still interested in my opinion, I'll offer some instances below...

-- why should I have to scroll through EIGHT pages just to see all the info pertaining to one player? On the sizable iPad screen, this should all fit into no more than two or three pages.

-- why should we have to scroll to see the entire league table? It could easily be a slightly smaller font, put in two columns and viewed on a single screen. Same as all the team and individual stat categories.

-- player searches also take too much scrolling and moving around. There's no reason we should be able to see twice as many results on a single screen.

-- same thing for the mail. Information that could all fit into one screen is spread out over numerous screens.

-- the list goes on and on...team selection, formations, detailed views of the squad....

-- it's hard to believe that a game that is crafted with so much attention to detail and pride is presented in such a ham-fisted, awkward way. So much thought obviously went into presentation in the Mac version....that same consideration should be given by SI to FMH.

To summarize, it think the game needs to visually tighten up. Make better use of the space, make information more presentable... Right now, half the time spent playing the game is scrolling through pages to find information, instead of actually analyzing the information. If this was tightened up, the whole experience would bemore enjoyable.

I believe that a lot of us enjoy the data/stats/ratings of FM, so I urge SI to consider how improving this aspect would improve the game.*

As a point of reference, I suggest you download the iPad app for Out Of The Park baseball to see how they designed the data presentation in their game. It doesn't hold a candle to FM in most ways, but it could definitely offer you some layout ideas.

Thanks for taking the time to read.

Mrpeeps

[gooseta]

I agree, I also have an idea for player search to have a max. value of 500k, 250k, and 100k for playing in lower leagues. It makes searching for players easier when playing with Luton or something.

[Marc Vaughan]

The iPad version will continue to evolve its UI over time, however please do bear in mind that we have a whopping two coders on the handheld team so unfortunately we can't do everything at once (for which I apologise - but we are doing our best).

[enthon]

Very good comments and I agree with all of them. By all means there was almost nil improvement since FMH 2010 for this topics and I am getting a bit tired hearing that progress will be made in the future. I suppose a different approach fot ipad and Iphone is up for 2013.

Sorry Marc and Team - you know I really appreciate the game but the progress since 2010 and three fully paid annual versions is just not what a lot of people expect.

On the other hand Sega makes massive money using bit improvement / many promises / many excuses strategy and I suppose that this is out of control for employees like Marc. So no blame at all,

Well, I hope for you Guys that there is no other developer using the shortfalls and hammer out a real competitive option in the future. As we all know from companies like Microsoft and Apple, no real competition leads always to a lack of customer focus.

Finally and again - If you are not in position to improve the stats and information part as requested just give as an export of the player information and we deal with analysis on our own.

Thank you as always for your passion

Oliver