Change Game Year in Editor

[JP1990]

While I can completely see why being able to roll the game forward would be something SI don't want to add (because then you'd get people updating the database each season rather than buying the next game), I think it would be awesome if you could roll it back to a different year, so there was the possibility of creating historical scenarios.

I would love, for example, to play with the treble winning Man Utd team, or the Arsenal Invincibles, or even further back with the Liverpool teams of the 70s/80s, the England World Cup winners of '66. Everyone is going to have their favourite eras and teams that they would like to manage (maybe you want the Ajax team from '95 with all the talent that was there?), and having real players appear in youth teams as the seasons went on would be great as well. Obviously then you'd have people stockpiling Ronaldo, Zidane, Messi, etc. but setting them with a broad Potential Ability would mean that maybe they don't always become the superstar they were in real life anyway.

In an ideal world, SI would create databases for us but I don't see that as feasible, certainly not straight away, but if you look at a community like the TEW series (basically a wrestling version of FM) and see what has been produced in terms of custom databases, there is no reason why FM players couldn't contribute to creating historical databases if the option was there. It would be a massive undertaking (and I imagine the game worlds would be a lot, lot smaller so it might not run as smoothly as the main game) but it would be a fun twist to the game.

The big stumbling blocks (aside from the mammoth effort required by whoever made the databases) would be rule changes but perhaps that is something SI could code into the editor so that certain rules come in at certain times so they are only active when they would be in real life (I'm thinking Bosmans, Transfer Windows, etc.). 

[Maaka]

Wouldn't hold my breath if I were you.. This is not exactly prioritized by SI now, and I doubt that it'll be in the foreseeable future.. OOTP and the hockey spin-off, FHM, have gone in that direction, but tbf, the baseball and hockey worlds are quite a bit smaller than the FM world, especially what the FM world would be if you were to have db's for every year going back in time......

[CFuller]

I'd echo what Maaka said, and I'd also point out that retro databases have been discussed at length before and will not be feasible any time soon. Indeed, the OP himself has admitted that there are plenty of issues and other stumbling blocks relating to this.

[Neil Brock]

Reviewed so locked.