Match Engine - Realistic Ideas for Fixing Problems

[Peter 04]

Guys,

 

there has been quite a lot of negativity in this forum concerning the current state of the FM2020 Beta's Match Engine. I'm not here to complain about the Match Engine again, I think that the problems are known and well documented. I'm just wondering what can be done to make it better and I personally don't believe that it is broken beyond repair at all or that in the last week and a half there is nothing that can be done anyway. So I'd like to start a thread about people's ideas on improving the Match Engine - realistic ideas, not the usual 'start again from scratch' or 'create new animations' and so on. I am aware of the fact that the ME contains very complex and interdependent calculations and changing one thing has trickle down effects. But maybe there are some elements that could be tweaked (personally I would love some sliders to play around with and having people get creative with settings producing different ME experiences, but that's just me).

Some of the ideas I'd like to propose have been brought up by other people in this forum - so this list is not really all my work. I am under no illusion that these ideas will be totally new to the creators, but it seems less frustrating to be positive. Maybe I learn something about your ideas of how it may become the Match Engine that wonderful game deserves!

 

A. I think in an interview Miles revealed one of the biggest problems of the current ME version: offensive play is simply more effective than defensive play (due to offensive movement being a point of emphasis for that ME). In trying to mask that and not let the results get out of hand completely, I believe things like the 1v1-situation, the shots from difficult angles instead of passing or crossing and the penalty disadvantage have been introduced. The main question therefore is imho, how to get a better balance between attack and defense - or simply, how to make the defense look/behave better without obviously cheating and making the offense worse again. Here are some of the ideas I've found.

1. People complained about the back four being to narrow, leaving acres of space to the sides. That is not completely unrealistic: Football teams do try to tighten the space in front of goal, but it is not uncommon for the wide midfielders to track back and occasionally form a back 6 or central midfielders helping out and filling in. I don't know about the latter but the former, the tracking back of wide midfielders would limit the space of the marauding full backs that right now wreak too much havoc.

2. I read that somewhere on this forum and found it a very interesting idea: Could be the big problem of those frequent perfect long passes simply be the speed of the ball? If the ball would be travelling slower in the air, the defense could maybe react better and wouldn't be caught off guard that often. This also leaves room for more visible differences between average and truly elite passers of the ball!

3. I do think that defensive positioning has been improved but I think defensive players could be more intelligent in trying to prevent players from getting the ball in dangerous areas by making them play to the flanks. Maybe you have ideas about tweaks to defensive positioning?

4. On the offensive side of the ball the problems of too many shots per game has been raised. Maybe this could be tweaked by making the players less trigger happy - unless tactically told otherwise. High level football contains a fair amount of probing, patient waiting for space that isn't just there but has to be created by off the ball runs or dribblings or passing combinations. I do believe that the current Match Engine could have it in itself to show more of that - maybe that is too much to ask in this version.

 

B. Another main issue imho is that attacking and aggressive tactics are not being punished enough. I mean by that that even mediocre teams can easily overwhelm good opposition by pushing forward in numbers without constantly getting caught out of possession or just passed put of the park. See how often great teams simply work around aggressive pressing, tiring and frustrating the opposition. What can realistically be done about that?

1. A simple and to my mind realistic and achievable solution I read in the forum was: Harshly improving the 'penalty' for pressing through fatigue. Only a select few teams after very long time of training (e.g. Liverpool) are able to hold up pressing for a long period of time during the game. Being forced to switch back from relentlessly pressing the opposition to a more cautious approach would open up the game I believe. 'Penalties' could be fatigue but also more lapses in concentration leading to errors or cards.

2. A lot of people have complained about the effectiveness of through balls over the top of the defenders - I disagree! It should be dangerous to be very attacking precisely because the opposition exploits the space behind the full backs or in front of the centre backs. Being forced to play with more caution would also help with the amount of shots per game.

3. Right now there is no real reason to prefer cautious approaches to Gegenpress or extremely attacking ones because the AI does not react to them. I think it would be important to make tactical approaches even more of a scissor-paper-rock-thing meaning that there are always antidotes to counter specific tactical approaches of the opposition. If the opposition would try exploit the weaknesses of my approach more ruthlessly I would think again attacking them with all I have playing outsider in a CL quarter final. I have no idea if that latest point is something that you guys already experience in the game - to me I would love to be challenged more by my opponent. Again - maybe with the current limitations of the ME there is not much to improve here but I wanted to bring it up.

 

What do you guys, fellow managers and SI creators, think of all this? Do you have other ideas or explanations?

 

Cheers and many thanks to SI and the passionate FM fan base from Germany!

Peter

 

Edited November 7, 2019 by Peter 04
Corrections

[sporadicsmiles]

6 hours ago, Peter 04 said:

offensive play is simply more effective than defensive play

A lot of the problems people have in defense are self inflicted though, due to how they set up. Attacking mentality, loads of players with attack duties, high lines, counter press. They are setting up to fail. There are two aspects. The first is that you do not break a defensive side down simply by throwing more attackers at them and increasing mentality. You do it by using players to create space and overloads. This is one of the reason why people see negative things from attacking. Creating a bucket load of poor quality chances and complaining they are all missed. The second aspect is that you leave yourself open to be countered playing the way I describe. There is a lack of defensive structure and it can be exploited. This makes it look like defending is bad, because the AI has finished its attack before you get everyone back into position.

Personally, I have never found it hard to play sensible defensive football. Without cheesing anything. Whether that is setting up defensively and playing on the counter, or having transition phase defensive structure that slows down the AI. These things are possible, I think the bigger problem is people do not understand them. Not that I blame them, FM is easy to play and hard to master.

6 hours ago, Peter 04 said:

the tracking back of wide midfielders would limit the space of the marauding full backs that right now wreak too much havoc.

This is something I set up manually, if I want to see it. Man mark the full back with the corresponding wide player. Sometimes, however, I want to leave the player up the field to exploit the space a full back has left. This, I think, is the best balance. I do not want a situation where a wide player always tracks back, and there is no way to stop him. Right now we have the ability to do both.

6 hours ago, Peter 04 said:

Could be the big problem of those frequent perfect long passes simply be the speed of the ball?

Is the ball traveling abnormally quickly? I have never noticed. I assume that the long ball thing will be toned down in the release update. To be honest, I have seen it less and less the longer I have played. I definitely think you are right that they are always too picture perfect from every player (and sometimes from their wrong foot). I would like to see poorer passes make crappier long passes. This is a nice idea (although it would anger everyone when their players miss passes!)

 

6 hours ago, Peter 04 said:

Maybe you have ideas about tweaks to defensive positioning?

Many teams in real life will sacrifice the wide areas to defend the middle. Crosses are not that successful for creating chances, in that you need a lot of them to score. The last thing you want to see if a CB rushing out to help close down a wide player out wide (when you are defending anyway). This is why wide overloads are dangerous, because you are forcing the defense to either lose structure to deal with it, or have their FB isolated. There is also the problem that a lot of people like to use a press, but do not think about how it can affect their defensive positioning. As I said before though, I have no real issues getting my teams to defend well, so maybe I am not the good person to give suggestions here. The one thing I do notice at the moment is it seems that attackers have a much faster reaction time than defenders. Which seems unreasonable. You see this from the long balls at the moment. Where defenders simply do not react fast enough to the movement of a striker. This seems to be compensated by the striker being offside many times they try this. In that respect it could be the defenders playing offside, but by default. It is something that needs to be looked at I think.

7 hours ago, Peter 04 said:

Another main issue imho is that attacking and aggressive tactics are not being punished enough. I mean by that that even mediocre teams can easily overwhelm good opposition by pushing forward in numbers without constantly getting caught out of possession or just passed put of the park.

You mean user attacking and aggressive tactics? Or the AI? I find it can be quite easy to punish the AI for being too attacking. Right now the problem with the AI is that it is reacting to your reputation and form when deciding how to set up against you. Which means if you are a lower rep side they will attack you. This means they will give you plenty of space, and attacking tactics can exploit this. This is the easy side of things. Contrast it to what happens when you are a big club, or your reputation increases as a smaller club. Teams are more defensive, and people struggle to score and break down sides. Because you have to create your own space, and that is harder to do. For me this is the whole reason why attacking tactics are so successful for the most part in FM. What I would like to see is the AI being a bit more dynamic in how it approaches playing games. If, for example, it can see you are going to be attacking and press, it should set up to negate that. I never get the impression it does. They follow a match plan, and respond mostly to the scoreline rather than what happens on the pitch. I am describing quite advanced AI here (many players cannot do what I describe), so I do not expect this to suddenly appear. It is the next step for the AI though.

7 hours ago, Peter 04 said:

A lot of people have complained about the effectiveness of through balls over the top of the defenders - I disagree! It should be dangerous to be very attacking precisely because the opposition exploits the space behind the full backs or in front of the centre backs. Being forced to play with more caution would also help with the amount of shots per game.

I have seen a lot of these balls in FM20, but I have yet to concede a goal from one of them. As I said above, I think that there is some kind of issue with the defenders choice of action or reaction time at the moment. This can see it improve. However in general if you are getting caught by balls over the top, you need to play a lower defensive line. This is very basic tactics, I agree with you. Hell, even with the best defenders I would drop my defensive line against a striker with 19 pace and excellent off the ball, because it would be stupid not to.

7 hours ago, Peter 04 said:

Right now there is no real reason to prefer cautious approaches to Gegenpress or extremely attacking ones because the AI does not react to them.

Could not agree more, as I mentioned above. The AI plays how it wants to play, and does not really react to your style of football. I mean other styles are possible to implement - I had a wonderful season in FM19 counter attacking my way to a top half finish with a newly promoted side. I only had to stop because teams responded to my increased rep and form and were more cautious. I played a good half a season against high lines and attacking sides, ripping them apart with fast forwards. This is something I would have spotted very quickly in a game, and made specific changes to counter this. Again, though, I think it is far from trivial to make the AI do this. It is not really an "if this do that" thing. The AI is not currently good enough in FM, or any game, to do this really.

Nice post.

[Peter 04]

@sporadicsmiles

Thank you for your response!

To be clear, with tracking back by wide midfielders I meant the AI doing that. I know that I can manually set that up and I do that and it is effective - and like you I sometimes like to leave wide players up front in order to set them up for counter attacks. But if the AI would also do that and mark the wing backs it would limit their state of being overpowered I assume.

And I absolutely agree that it looks like defenders have slower reaction times than attackers - I believe that there is something to be done here. I would love to play against teams that are as rock solid defensively as say the last few years Atletico Madrid or some Italian sides by just being extremely disciplined in their positioning and quick to react to attackers, meaning they almost never make 'unforced' mistakes. Increasing the reaction speed of the defenders (again, maybe especially the top class defenders) would go a long way with achieving that goal!

[Mitja]

9 hours ago, Peter 04 said:

4. On the offensive side of the ball the problems of too many shots per game has been raised. Maybe this could be tweaked by making the players less trigger happy - unless tactically told otherwise. High level football contains a fair amount of probing, patient waiting for space that isn't just there but has to be created by off the ball runs or dribblings or passing combinations. I do believe that the current Match Engine could have it in itself to show more of that - maybe that is too much to ask in this version.

 

number of shots seems crazy but that's nothin new in FM. most of first time shots, especially those outside of box are completely unrealistic to be honest. there are way too many such first time pass - first time pass .... - first time shot outside of box.  but how did this guy manage to have 89 shots is beyond me? 

 

[Peter 04]

@Mitja

Yes, the problem is well known - the question is, what can be done about that? I read somewhere that FM counts blocked shots as shots which isn't done in real life match stats. I presume that it is impossible to count them out in order to bring down the number of shots. But since I read that I have been more understanding with having 20-30 shots every game: if you subtract 10 or 15 blocked shots it is actually fairly accurate!

But maybe shots can be limited more by making players refraining from shooting on sight - if not explicitly asked to do so - that often. I guess this would help a lot with the realism and should be possible in the current ME.

[Mitja]

2 minutes ago, Peter 04 said:

I read somewhere that FM counts blocked shots as shots which isn't done in real life match stats.

i'm not really sure about that. avarage number of shots/game is bellow 15 for most leagues. even if you add 50% of blocked shots (which are not counted by FM standards) you get some 20 shots/game. but there are not 50% blocked shots in avarage football match. 

[Mitja]

to me even the shot in 17:15 looks unrealistic or bad animation. player wouldn't be able to shoot the ball first time without controling the ball first. and this is not the best example there are far more unrealistic first time shots happening.

 

[Peter 04]

@Mitja

You are right about the stats, blocked shots don't actually occur that often. But as I said, this thread should be about ideas how to improve the current ME. I am with you that there are too many shots right now but I think there could be ways to change that. Do you have any ideas?

[Mitja]

8 minutes ago, Peter 04 said:

Do you have any ideas?

remove unrealistic scenario first time shots, especially those from longe range.  

[Mitja]

make players more ready to look for pass instead of shooting comes to my mind too.  

 

[Peter 04]

@Mitja

I agree, making players more likely to look for the pass would help with the shooting problem. Maybe it could be combined with more last-ditch defending - I always love it if defenders try to rescue a situation by sliding, even if they take more risks then - improving on the situations that already occur would help a lot!

[HUNT3R]

Just now, Peter 04 said:

@Mitja

I agree, making players more likely to look for the pass would help with the shooting problem. Maybe it could be combined with more last-ditch defending - I always love it if defenders try to rescue a situation by sliding, even if they take more risks then - improving on the situations that already occur would help a lot!

Cases like these are best reported when spotted. A PKM allows SI to look at the code under the hood and tweak things to hopefully get a better, more realistic experience.

[Peter 04]

@HUNT3R

Okay, I try to do that - hopefully it occurs in my next games!

[samuel888]

There are a few issues in the ME but almost all the issues people complain about are bad tactics or not having the right players to play a tactic. Pressing attacking football is more effective irl. There is a reason everyone presses now in high level football

[tts0]

One thing that really holds back ME for years is defensive movement as a unit, which seems nonexistent. Im pretty defensive-minded tactician(also youth coach irl) and I simply cant wrap my mind around some of these stuff in FM - especially defending the flanks and channels. You may see fullbacks pressing the wingers hard(which isnt a bad thing per se), while the whole team stays put. This creates humongous channel for the opossition players to slot in. Thats why 3 striker formation are so OP and 3 at the back pretty useless. But there is more of that. Ocasionally one of the CB gonna slot into DM strata to press, while his defensive partners stay put. Another huge gap created. IRL remaining 3 defenders tighten it up, forming some sort of back 3 in fromt of the aforementioned CB and wingers or central midfielders provides the cover in the wide areas. Thats not a rocket science. In fact, these are some basic defensive movements which FM lacks big time. With that in ME we would experience a whole new dimention of playing and enjoyng the game.

[Peter 04]

@samuel888

Yes, it is very effective - but only, if the players execute it well and if the players have the stamina to hold it up for a while. And there are ways to counter pressing tactics - e.g. passing around it or hoofing the ball up field in order to not lose possession in dangerous areas. The latter is actually quite effective if the defending team is physically stronger than the pressing team (I think Barcelona has had that problem a few times in the last years). - It is not and should not be a no brainer to use pressing, it comes with risks as much as with rewards and I would love to see the risk aspect emphasized.

[Peter 04]

@tts0

I wholeheartedly agree! Great defenses irl move as a unit and make up for mistakes and tighten up very fluidly if necessary. They move towards the side where the ball is played because they know it takes time for the ball to be switched to the other side so they can temporally leave the other flank open.

What do you think, would it help to slow down the speed of the ball for long passes? Could it help to increase the frequency of midfielders filling up holes that defenders leave when they engage an opponent?

[samuel888]

@Peter 04

Pressing can be beaten by going long which is what LFC did to Barca in the CL semi final, but I think this is reflected in the ME with many balls over the top leading to 1on 1s. only problem is 1 on 1 are difficult to score but will be tweaked

[tts0]

13 minutes ago, Peter 04 said:

@tts0

I wholeheartedly agree! Great defenses irl move as a unit and make up for mistakes and tighten up very fluidly if necessary. They move towards the side where the ball is played because they know it takes time for the ball to be switched to the other side so they can temporally leave the other flank open.

What do you think, would it help to slow down the speed of the ball for long passes? Could it help to increase the frequency of midfielders filling up holes that defenders leave when they engage an opponent?

Idk if it has anything to do with ball speed but I dont mind more defensive-aware midfield. Yet I would like to see some sort of tactical awarness presented in the game. E.g. the gap between players cant be more than X yards, so when fullback is pressing hard, creating more space in between teammates, it triggers them to tighten it up and move towards that flank one by one, which obviously would create an ilusion that they move as a unit.