Getting frustrated now ...

[7hegam3]

The transfers in this game are becoming very annoying. If I want to buy a player I will be asked 10-40 times the value of the player only to see him being sold for just over the value to another club. And if clubs bid for my players the bids would be ridiculously low just one example is my star youngster valued at 9m aged 18, chelsea makes a bid of 400k with no clauses.

I think I will try and find my FM11 because I used to play that game is so many different ways. Play to win (attempt to win all competitions from season 1 and play accordingly), play to develop younglings (be the go to club for young ones to develop i.e. loans etc) , play to make money (buy and sell players, develop youth and sell), play as retirement home (buy stars on verge of retirement that still want regular football, boost merchandise) etc. Eventually your club will get enough rep that you can start looking to win things, but these were some ways to go about it to reach your goal.

Now it seems the only way to play is to start to win things from season 1 regardless which club you play, because the transfer market is broken.

How are you guys coping with it?

[forameuss]

First, saying the transfer market is broken isn't starting your thread off very well.  In fact, it's probably easier to argue that it was more broken in earlier games.

First, you talk about value, which I presume is the amount that is displayed on the player page.  Forget about that.  It's completely arbitrary.  There is no relation between it and what you'll get for a player.  Essentially it's a function of a few things - contract length and value and the like - but it's there purely as a guide.  A players value can only really be determined by you - how much are you willing to let him go for?  That's his value.

Second, you say clubs always bid low amounts for your players.  Why should they not?  They're low-balling you, a perfectly valid negotiation technique.  Maybe you should try it yourself.  What they're expecting, presumably, is for you to actually negotiate, rather than see the amount and throw all the toys out.  I've always found it to be pretty easy to read - a club makes a bid that you're not happy with, negotiate to an amount that you would absolutely accept should they offer it.  You mention the player "worth" 9 million.  So say you would let him go, but only for double that.  Negotiate to £18 million.  Without fail, I've always found that teams that are really interested in the player, and not just trying to chance it, will negotiate back with something.  It's probably going to be very far away from what you want, but in my experience if they negotiate once, they'll keep going.  At the end of the day, it appears the AI has an amount that they will offer non-negotiable should you push them that far.  If you do, they offer it, and it's still not enough, then reject it.  If they really want the player, they'll be back.  And also important to note that if you're actively trying to sell a player, you're absolutely not going to get high bids, because the AI knows you want to sell.  

Third, you talk about players who went to other clubs for far less than you were quoted.  Again, did you negotiate?  There's also the fact that if you put the first bid in and that player was unhappy about the bid being rejected, then you've just knocked a considerable chunk of his value off him.  Other clubs are then very likely to get him for cheaper - and so can you.  I wanted to buy a player who I knew was going to cost me a lot of money.  I also happened to be playing his side in the Champions League final.  Two days prior, I put a bid in for his value (circa £52mill I believe).  They countered and wanted £120mill).  I put in a non-negotiable offer, knowing they would reject it.  Player was furious, wanting to return "home" (I was Juventus, he was Italian).  He played an absolute shocker in the Champions League Final, and when I returned to bid for him I ended up securing a deal for £80 mill + clauses.  Because negotiation.

So the key is always to negotiate. People really seem to forget that.  You're now seeing the AI behave fairly realistically around buying and selling, but people just look at quoted values and start to scream blue murder about it.  There's absolutely nothing wrong with it.

[rich10]

I'll use a recent example from my FMT save as manager of Liverpool...

I scouted Martin Odegaard, who is at Real Madrid, and the report came back that they wanted £90mish with various add-ons...so I started negotiating at £40m cash (cheeky), and they stood firm at £90mish, so I withdrew my bid.

I go back and check Odegaard's profile and it seems he is now unhappy, as he wants a move to Liverpool (boyhood fan), so I go back in with a £40m bid again, and they climb down from £90mish and, after much to'n'fro'ing we eventually agreed on a £60m cash bid.

I later rejected him on the grounds of an obscene wage demand and agent fees, so much for the boyhood fan Martin.

So it can work in your favour if you keep an eye on those factors that might work in your favour when it comes to negotiating; I always find keeping any potential target on my transfer list helps with being notified about any cheekily low bids from the CPU.

[Cougar2010]

Just want to add to the posts above use your scouts.

Even with a minimal amount of scouting they tell you approx what the other club want for a player that you want to buy and they are pretty much always accurate.  This gives you a baseline for your opening bid while negotiation should always see you buying within the range the scout estimates.

 

Scout > Opening Bid lower than the bottom of the scouts estimate > Negotiate with the final price within the scouts estimate.

[7hegam3]

Thanks for the advice, but here's the problem...(other than your examples are from reputed clubs)

@forameuss Your 'low-balling' theory would make sense if the bids are negotiable. Most of the bids I get are non-negotiable, unless I have offered the player out for a certain price and they start negotiating. The interest in my players usually comes just before the transfer windows, 1 single bid of a stupid price would come in 'non-negotiable' which would be rejected and the window will end if the interest still high on the player but no more bids. The example given above was one of the non-negotiable bids.

Players moving to other AI clubs for cheaper than asked happens a lot (and no the players are not upset after my bid is rejected) I ALWAYS negotiate. Example: This one save I was playing as R.Sociedad and I needed a back-up for a certain position and was recommended by a staff a player from Southampton, 27 year old. I sent scouts to watch him for some time so I could get a better picture. He was good enough for the role I wanted him to play, in Southampton he was mostly a bench player, making only 10-15 appearances in each season as sub and maybe 1-2 starts. The 'value' was at 1.6m, so I went in and started off with a bid of 2.5m, they came back to me with a 40m package. Negotiations ended when they sent a non-negotiable 34m package. I declined. The player was not upset and no messages popped up in the inbox regarding him. But later that same window he was sold to Middlesborough for 1.8m ... W . T . F . And I have had that problem with various different saves too always get sold to another club (even their rival).

The players I put up for sale I don't bother too much of how much I let them go for. But the bids that come in for players who are in my first-team are the ones I have problems with. So if a big club sees potential in one of my first-team players it is normal to expect a decent bid, so if I do sell I am able to replace him or go and buy couple of youngsters. But when you are offered such low bids which cannot be negotiated you just reject and carry on until the player is no longer useful and you just sell him for peanuts. Unless you manage to get a star player through your ranks and the max you will be offered is just under the value of the player. So the potential of getting a 'star' player from your youths and then eventually selling him to a bigger club for decent money so you have invest to improve your club is not there.

I always negotiate but you cant really do much once the non-negotiable crap comes in.

 

In FM11 I was able to do so much more. I would get good bids, which I could go back in the market to get youngsters and either loan them or stick em in the B team until they are first-team material. Now if I get a young 17-18 year old on a hot prospect contract, no club will take him on loan, if I send to affiliate he won't get the chance to play, if I stick him in B team or u-19 he will complain about not getting first-team football when he is clearly not ready yet. Look for bargains like someone's contract is expiring for free transfers, after a season or 2 get offered a decent bid and sell them, and use profits to develop the club facilities etc. 

 

[Cougar2010]

Quote

He was good enough for the role I wanted him to play, in Southampton he was mostly a bench player, making only 10-15 appearances in each season as sub and maybe 1-2 starts. The 'value' was at 1.6m, so I went in and started off with a bid of 2.5m, they came back to me with a 40m package.

 

You scouted him but did you look to see what the scout estimated for the buying price?

If his value was £1.6m why did you start with an opening bid of £2.5m?

 

Despite what you think that player's circumstances changed (Possibly due to your negotiations) and Middlesbrough took advantage.  At that stage you could have done exactly the same and a bid of approx the same as MIddlesbrough would have been accepted.

 

In terms of selling if its a non-negotiable offer then you are right all you can do is reject and your player will respond to that by either doing nothing (Indicating he is happy where he is) or starting a conversation with you asking for the reason the bid was rejected which is the first step to forcing a move away.

One thing you haven't mentioned is asking prices, set asking prices for every single player in your squad and review them at least once a season.  They should be set above what you would be happy to sell the player for which then gives you negotiation room to drop the price later.

[Guest]

I dont know how people confuse this for clever AI, to me its very unconvincincing AI,

If the AI are making bids to weak to entice people to sell, cant or wont negotiate, If the AI are rejecting good bids for players they dont even really use or want to only give the player away for next to nothing to another AI club a few days later, then that is stupid AI, If we behaved like the AI, we would be stupid. So lets not give credit where no credit is due. AI was smarter 10 year ago. If its simply to add somekind of artifical difficulty thats fine, but lets not try to pass this off as super AI cos its not.

[Cougar2010]

Who has been passing it off as "super AI"?

 

The facts are that the AI managers/clubs evaluate each bid at the moment its made based on the circumstances.  Once that bid is done & dusted then its back to square one and the next bid is evaluated based on the current circumstances again.  Those circumstances can change on a day to day basis in game.

 

The improvement is for AI clubs to remember bids & offers for a set period of time after they are made but atm it isn't viable as it would slow game play down far too much.

 

The idea that the AI was smarter 10 years ago & claiming that its an artificial difficulty  takes away any credit your post had.

[Guest]

It behaved more convincing 10 year ago, you scratch your head at its behaviour now with the only conclusion is that its to stop making it so easy to throw money at clubs for players. I dont pick Man City and throw money at clubs though so I never had that problem anyway.

When ever AI is called into question or any part of the game for that fact people say its not the game, its user. I guess SI look at that and think job well done lads, lets focus on something else instead. 5 year ago, if you called the AI for how it behaved in the transfer market you would get the same its not them its you response then, and now we are told it wasnt very good back then after all, so do we have to wait until 2021 before people will start to look at 2016s AI with the same unbiased honesty.

 

If the game forgets the first bid, so accepts a second bid a short time later, for performance issues, thats a massive weakness in AI, and also shows the AI dont have a reason to reject the first bid other than they arent smart enough to realise it was a good bid. They dont have values for players, its either give them away cos they dont want them, or crazy money cos they do, even if they dont really want them, it just hasnt reached the exact day they realised.

[Cougar2010]

Total rubbish.

 

Sometimes its a case of two steps back, three steps forwards but if you look back the transfer market has generally improved overall.

 

 

[Guest]

Total Rubbish. 2 Steps back, fall down a hole No matter how they go about it, if an older way was simpler, and this way is more sophiscated, if its less convincing the more sophiscated way then I think it means simple but more effective was better. Its not about how complicated the line of code is, its how effective it is.

Ive seen lots of people make this exact same thread now, complaining of something they find unconvincincing. Injfact its one of the things that seems to get more and more complaints every year. To me thats not rubbish but an issue.

[Cougar2010]

I'm not going to argue with you B2KZ as you continually make ridiculous claims that are just plain wrong.

 

Sure the transfer market has been an area that has been consistently complained about but a certain portion of those complaints are down to the user not understanding something.  Other times users have valid claims which I can only presume leads to the improvements we've seen.

 

It wasn't that long ago we saw a long thread where a SI employee gave a very detailed response using behind the scenes data on why a user couldn't sell some players and it showed the depth that FM goes to.

[netking]

Cougar, in the interest of learning, could you share a link to that transfer discussion post if you can find it?

[Cougar2010]

9 minutes ago, netking said:

Cougar, in the interest of learning, could you share a link to that transfer discussion post if you can find it?

 

This one: https://community.sigames.com/topic/341407-why-so-hard-to-get-rid-of-unwanted-players-must-read-thread/

 

Formatting doesn't help with the new forum but look for the posts by Alex on the first page.

[netking]

Thanks

[Guest]

I'm not arguing with you, I'm just giving my opinion. My opinion is not wrong.

If the user isnt understanding something, then that could be the fault of the game maybe not making sense.

The game is deep, theres all kinds going on in the background, and theres many reasons why the game can behave the way it does. Its pattern strange behavior thats not convincing. Not every player youre going to be able to buy, and not every player your  going to be able to sell, but sometimes it doesnt seem a rational explaination why.

 

I dont know how it works, I dont care how it works, I dont want to know, I just want the belief it works, the more you know the code the more gamey it becomes.

 

I havent seen the thread but I read a post about a guy who made a thread about reloading every game so he won or something and wondered why these players did not attract interest from the opposition, not sure if it was 16, and it was argued that that is because the game could tell he cheated, and these players arent really as good as they should be, but doesnt that mean the AI cheats to see what players are worth signing.

[Cougar2010]

5 minutes ago, Born2killzone said:

I'm not arguing with you, I'm just giving my opinion. My opinion is not wrong.

 

Its wrong when you make claims about the game that are factually incorrect.

 

 

5 minutes ago, Born2killzone said:

I havent seen the thread but I read a post about a guy who made a thread about reloading every game so he won or something and wondered why these players did not attract interest from the opposition, not sure if it was 16, and it was argued that that is because the game could tell he cheated, and these players arent really as good as they should be, but doesnt that mean the AI cheats to see what players are worth signing.

It could be a few things the obvious ones that spring to mind are:

A) He rated the players higher than the AI did, these would be the 2* consistent players with a good attribute spread who play well match after match but their CA is just too low to interest the AI clubs with a higher rep.

 

B) His constant success pushed the team rep higher than other clubs leading to his players not being interested in a move to a lower rep club.  Because this all happens in the background the AI clubs know that the player isn't interested in moving therefore don't show interest.

 

C) Along the same lines he had players who had high levels of loyalty/professionalism/ambition which would all lead to the player staying at a successful club rather than moving to a less successful one.

 

A couple of years ago Rooney was often used as an example of a player who you couldn't sell as Man Utd and the bottom line was he was limited to approx 5/6 clubs because of reputation/wages etc.  Hundreds of clubs might have wanted to sign him but they knew they didn't stand a chance and therefore didn't show interest in FM.

 

[netking]

Looking at the link you shared, Cougar:

 How do you find out which leagues a player is willing to play in? I have had problems loaning out players to non-english leagues (they refuse the contract) and I suspect that might be a reason.

[Guest]

In some cases, in some situations I agree, like I said not every player is sellable or buyable, and in some cases you can see the sense, even if you cant you accept its just one of those things, thats not the problem, I think the problem is in the game its the case that theres a lot of players arent buyable or sellable for no believable reason. Its hard to find anybody thats not.

I know theres plenty of reasons why not every player will be sellable or buyable, but I think its too specific, for no sensible reason, theres too many reasons that the game says no and not enough that say yes.

Yes, you should be able to go through a list of players and find reasons why they wont be sold or bought, but the problem is when you go though the world of players and struggle to find anyone that doesnt fall in this not for sale or buy category.

The game has too many no ways, and not enough oks.

 

The AI shouldnt be using something we cant see to judge whether or not to buy a player, form and performance should be No1 current stats and hard work and the right coaching should tell or not he'll be a good PA. I dont think CA or PA should be a thing, but I guess thats another thread, and I guess its be found to be the only real sensible way to SI can do it.

 

I think the year before or the year before that, most players stayed at their clubs until the retired, even if that meant stopping in the reserves for the last 2 or 3 seasons as not needed, these players couldnt play because they wanted crazy wages to go, 3 times as what they were getting, not every player will be happy sitting in the reserves and will only move for an epic payrise, but in that year it seemed almost all chose that route, when I would expect it more to be a minority.

That didnt used to happen, things are going backwards. Players and clubs arent acting believable.

That guy in the thread only had England loaded, thats another thing, you could just load England and that didnt cause the other clubs to be virtually non existant in older FMs, I got bids from clubs I never heard of on some FMs, now we seem the only other clubs scouts range is the clubs three places above or below in the league. Clubs that werent loaded used to be active, now you need to load them in to get the game to work, thats a backwards step.

[Cougar2010]

1 hour ago, netking said:

Looking at the link you shared, Cougar:

 How do you find out which leagues a player is willing to play in? I have had problems loaning out players to non-english leagues (they refuse the contract) and I suspect that might be a reason.

 

You can't, Alex's replies where based on behind the scenes information only SI has access to.

 

Maybe its something SI should look at how information is communicated to the user regarding failed buys/sales/loans.

 

Its partially linked to a player's hidden attributes as well but all you can currently do is estimate the level of the player and of course player's generally are happier to move to their home country.

[Svenc]

On 2.8.2016 at 11:02, rich10 said:

I go back and check Odegaard's profile and it seems he is now unhappy, as he wants a move to Liverpool (boyhood fan), so I go back in with a £40m bid again, and they climb down from £90mish and, after much to'n'fro'ing we eventually agreed on a £60m cash bid.

 

Players becoming unhappy/demanding a move can happen right after a first offer may be rejected, depending on which. So any bid thereafter has a bigger chance of going through. There should be more feedback on transfers in general, not sure if SI would need to make a list of factors that are at all considered (those tend to be quite simplistic affairs in management games old and past), but there needs some of it. What they will likely never reveal is the actually negotations AI managers make to wrap it all up, although that would make for a better understanding how it all came about. What you see is the sum, but not the entire deal, and whether there were deadlines applied which put the selling manager under pressure.

As for the transfer markets, will be intriguing d how all that cash now in the game is going to be balanced out. One two seasons in and even a mid-tier Bundesliga club will have big to huge budgets and just growths in wealth, which eventually naturally rubs off on transfer markets in multiple ways. For one, no clubs needing much to sell unless player may demand a move. On a release a couple years ago there was a bug that made you see private conversations between AI managers and their players, and at least back then in tendency whenever a player would demand a transfer, the AI managers gave in and put him on the list (many human players simply sat it all out and refused). The sums being in the game after but a couple of years are quite absurd. Not sure whether they will reflect actual reality, even considering the ever rising TV deals.

That reload scenario is a non-issue. The aim should be to make AI managers behave like actually managers roughly, that is humans who have all different preferences and squad bias and systems they are looking for, which snooping around in the editor and the traits you can edit for managers, appears to be just that aim. There's nothing AI sees here that you can't, like you being told by  scouts these guys aren't worth it, and if you would go check their profile you'd see that they're bad players. Apart of reloading or editing this could be done by hitting on match engine or AI tactics bugs, oft making players semi-regularly appear in spaces that visibly aren't much marked. If they were, they would underperform and taken out of the game easily. If you'd ever get lowly players competing all up, I'd report it, as it must break the save in several ways and may make it quite unenjoyable as those guys would never attract interest from anyone nor demand a move for a start. You wouldn't buy them, so no AI should either. It would make them less competitive actually, wasting all their funds, as at their teams those players would never perform.

[rich10]

I agree with you that there needs to be more visibility, and some notifications, if a transfer target's happiness changes either way; it would allow us to make more informed decisions, and at the right time.

Regarding the AI transfer negotiations, my guess is that they, by default, set their transfer bids to private, and it is then up to the selling club to make them public.

I also may be incorrect in saying that the transfer fee we see for a player bought by the AI may just be the cash value, and all of the potential add-ons are not reported as being a part of the fee...happy to be corrected here though(?)