Attributes revamp

[Exius]

There are 36 visible attributes in the player profile screen which are gathered into Technical, Mental, Physical groups. Even for an experienced players it's difficult to orient in this wall of texts and digits. For new players it might be even more frustrating. Not to mention, this huge attributes list is completely unrealistic in the way how real life managers assess players abilities and skills.

The latest FM iterations introduce more and more stats which are used in real life - and that's good! We need even more real-life stats, so the game goes in the right direction here. But what's also needed - a full revamp of how the attributes are shown.

If you look at the real life scout reports which can be found in the internet, you'll see that they don't contain a list of players abilities. This data can't be gathered precisely in real life and actually it's not that important. What is more important - what player actually does in various stages of the attack and defense, his typical patterns of play and preferred moves, his key stats. For example % of completed passes into the box or number of completed key passes in 90 minutes tell much more about the player than just some "Passing" skill which can be interpreted in different ways by different coaches and scouts (and even in the game we don't know exactly what it defines - probability of the successful pass, pass technique or something else).

So, we need more user-fireandly, more readable and more close to real life attributes representation (which means that under the hood they should work as they work now, but how they are shown to a player - that's what needs to be changed).

With permission of @Geoff Newman I'd like to use his idea for this suggestion:

So, the idea is that based on the different combination of particular technical, mental and physical attributes - different assessment of various aspects of the game are performed (as strong and week sides). 

I'd like to improve this proposition even further - the attributes can be assessed in such stages of play:

• Final third (attack)
• Transition
• Defense

And in addition to the attributes, preferred moves related to these game phases can be shown as well to complete the picture of playing pattern.

As a result by having a look at these it will be clear what player does in defense, in transition in the final stage of the attack, what you can expect of him and how you can use him in your tactics. And it will be readable much more clear than currently, when you look at those attributes list, and more realistic as well.

[Señor Dan]

Agree,
Even more: the ratings should be relative (for example at the League level) and not absolute.

In real life it is almost impossible to know if a player who plays in the Bulgarian league and there shows good passing ability, if that same player would be as good in the Premier League. It is very difficult to know. But in FM after doing a scouting bues if you know it: the player has "14" in pass.

That you cannot know that absolute value, just like in real life, would make FM a much more fun game. Anyone knows that 14 is more than 11, then you will always choose the player with 14. But if you do not know, and you have to rely on related statistics, etc ... it would make the game much more fun when it comes to signing players, and more realistic in the sense that it will be more common to make mistakes, and that players who were previously great signings later do not meet expectations.

[Exius]

12 minutes ago, Señor Dan said:

Anyone knows that 14 is more than 11, then you will always choose the player with 14.

Not necessary. The idea here is to show the character of various aspects of the game based on combination of the related attributes - this is something very difficult to understand by the attributes now. Maybe only the most experienced gamers can see these tendencies by judging the attributes, but this is the opposite to the real life. In real life it's extremly difficult, if not impossible, to assess pure technical attribute without mental attributes, because you can judge only by outcome and the outcome depends on the psychology. And it's much easier to assess where and how player plays the ball. So, in our example, let's say a player has 11 passing, but better vision and decisions, so he is more expansive in passing but not very precise. You may prefer picking him for lineup rather than more precise but very restricted in passing player.

[darthrodent]

I like this. My biggest knowledge gap is in how the Attributes correspond to the match engine. Let's take Decisions for example. Faced with Decision A, how does Player A (Decisions: 20) behave compared to Player B: Decisions 1? It implies that there is some sort of objective perfect decision in any given situation. How does the game "decide" what the best decision is? Sometimes the best chess move isn't revealed until 6 moves later. Will a player with Work Rate 1 not close down the opposition? What if he has high Determination? There's too much guess work for me. I look at a player in real life and know pretty much everything about him in just twenty minutes, same as you can pass someone a ball and instantly tell whether or not they can play by the way they trap it.

I really like the idea of giving the players trends, characteristics, habits, reactions, etc. It's so much more realistic and, like someone mentioned, would improve the scouting game no end. You would actually have a reason to scout.

[GIMN]

Obviously slightly biased, but would definitely throw my weight behind this.  Completely understand why attributes are used, and this change wouldn't require attributes to be removed - just not longer visible.  The logic already exists in game, in terms of determining personality, so it would be an extension of this.  Another example to plagiarise: Wyscout

[Dj-Voodoo]

On 31/08/2021 at 06:04, GIMN said:

Obviously slightly biased, but would definitely throw my weight behind this.  Completely understand why attributes are used, and this change wouldn't require attributes to be removed - just not longer visible.  The logic already exists in game, in terms of determining personality, so it would be an extension of this.  Another example to plagiarise: Wyscout

The devs removed the sliders because they knew it was unreasonable and not immersive to use digits to represent tactical concepts. It's been long overdue that the entire attribute display system needs an overhaul for the same reason as OP and yourself and others have said.

 

Also -- young players cannot have top-level physical stats, it's simply not realisitc.

[Powermonger]

I would rather see an option to have attributes displayed on a rating system: A to F. If a player is a extremely fast runner then they get an A rating, poor Jumping attribute they get a rating of D etc.

This is an example template of a PFSA scout report:

Edited October 3, 2021 by Powermonger

[Kyle Brown]

Appreciate the points raised here, I'll collate it together for the features db. 

It may not be something we want to change as the norm, but perhaps as an alternative, akin to attribute masking.