Judging players for Roles

[petertr]

Let's assume we have a big long list of accurate scout ratings for, let say Sweeper Keepers & 10 of them are 4* and in my price range.

I pull up their attributes - how do I decide which is the best?    Using attributes only (so not considering other factors like hidden stats etc), do I ONLY care about the attributes that are called out as important for a SGK?

Handling, Aerial A, Throwing, Reflexes, Passing*, Pace

Is it that simple?

 

Because if we then move to Pressing Forwards, then surely Shooting is still important??, even though the attributes listed by the game are

Movement, Decisions, Strength, Tackling, Teamwork

 

Such a shame the game doesn't extend the star system to roles, not just players.  Its ok for the desktop version, as you are sat as a computer.  But on the move, I really need to get this stuff reported direct to me without having to write stuff down.

 

Also, PLEASE let us amend the column headers on the player/scout search screens & Shortlist.  I want to see Star ratings and expected asking price - Value is useless to me as it tells me nothing about how much I'll need to pay - but I have that information if I go into each scout report one by one, which is super-tedius.  (wage, same)

*Note:  Passing isn't shown for Goalkeepers - is this a bug?  Is it supposed to say Kicking?

 

 

[Marc Vaughan]

1 hour ago, petertr said:

Let's assume we have a big long list of accurate scout ratings for, let say Sweeper Keepers & 10 of them are 4* and in my price range.
I pull up their attributes - how do I decide which is the best?    Using attributes only (so not considering other factors like hidden stats etc), do I ONLY care about the attributes that are called out as important for a SGK?
Handling, Aerial A, Throwing, Reflexes, Passing*, Pace

These are the attributes which are especially important for that role - this doesn't mean that they are the only ones which are important.

1 hour ago, petertr said:

Is it that simple?

Because if we then move to Pressing Forwards, then surely Shooting is still important??, even though the attributes listed by the game are

Movement, Decisions, Strength, Tackling, Teamwork

Yes obvious attributes will still be important - but the ones which make a player effective at 'pressing' are emphasized as those are the ones critical for that specialist role - eg. if someone isn't interested in working for the team and unable to tackle then he won't be that effective as a pressing forward obviously. 

1 hour ago, petertr said:

Such a shame the game doesn't extend the star system to roles, not just players.  Its ok for the desktop version, as you are sat as a computer.  But on the move, I really need to get this stuff reported direct to me without having to write stuff down.

This is intentional I'm afraid because I find it confusing to show 'stars' for roles - to try and explain why this is:
I have player 'x' who has wonderful attributes and shows as a 4* Pressing Forward and 3* Poacher.

I have player 'y' who has average attributes and shows as a 5* Pressing Forward and 4* Poacher.

Which player is better, what does the star rating actually mean in that instance - is one player 'better' than the other because he has higher stars or just more suited to that particular role etc.

By restricting stars to coach/scout reports where its (hopefully) a clear indicator of the ability level of the people I hope to avoid these issues.

1 hour ago, petertr said:

Also, PLEASE let us amend the column headers on the player/scout search screens & Shortlist.  I want to see Star ratings and expected asking price - Value is useless to me as it tells me nothing about how much I'll need to pay - but I have that information if I go into each scout report one by one, which is super-tedius.  (wage, same)

*Note:  Passing isn't shown for Goalkeepers - is this a bug?  Is it supposed to say Kicking?

Passing - I'll take a look into this and try and clarify things if needed, bear in mind us game designers/developers are human and make mistakes (and tbh no one has mentioned this to me before).

[petertr]

41 minutes ago, Marc Vaughan said:

These are the attributes which are especially important for that role - this doesn't mean that they are the only ones which are important.

Yes obvious attributes will still be important - but the ones which make a player effective at 'pressing' are emphasized as those are the ones critical for that specialist role - eg. if someone isn't interested in working for the team and unable to tackle then he won't be that effective as a pressing forward obviously. 

This makes it difficult to judge then?  How do I know which attributes to check against?  IIRC the "full" game has primary and secondary.  i.e. shooting is not a concern of a centre back.

The scouting search options only look for the attributes listed for the specific role.  But the players on those results could be appalling in other key areas.

 

41 minutes ago, Marc Vaughan said:

This is intentional I'm afraid because I find it confusing to show 'stars' for roles - to try and explain why this is:
I have player 'x' who has wonderful attributes and shows as a 4* Pressing Forward and 3* Poacher.

I have player 'y' who has average attributes and shows as a 5* Pressing Forward and 4* Poacher.

Which player is better, what does the star rating actually mean in that instance - is one player 'better' than the other because he has higher stars or just more suited to that particular role etc.

Isn't this simply stating that there is an underlying problem with the system?  If we cannot trust the star system in your example, then its broken and of no use. 

Why would a player with bad attributes for a role have more stars than a player with great attributes for that same role?   That's telling me I cannot rely on  EITHER stars or attributes.  Which takes me back to the point of this thread - I don't know how to tell which player is better than another and none of the in-game tools help.   Can you help me here, because if I'm limited to pretty much just guessing, then it makes me not want to play.

 

41 minutes ago, Marc Vaughan said:

By restricting stars to coach/scout reports where its (hopefully) a clear indicator of the ability level of the people I hope to avoid these issues.

Is this confirming that the Star rating is a comparison of CA / PA between the player in question and your squad?  This is what I expected it to be.

 

41 minutes ago, Marc Vaughan said:

look into this and try and clarify things if needed, bear in mind us game designers/developers are human and make mistakes (and tbh no one has mentioned this to me before).

Apoligies if it seemed like a complaint, I'm only asking questions that will make the game more enjoyable for me, and thought it was worth pointing out something that I didn't understand and/or could be a typo/bug

 

Thanks for taking the time to reply

 

Edited July 11 by petertr

[Marc Vaughan]

3 hours ago, petertr said:

This makes it difficult to judge then?  How do I know which attributes to check against?  IIRC the "full" game has primary and secondary.  i.e. shooting is not a concern of a centre back.

Ok in the full game does the stars rating for a role mean they're 'good in that role' or relate to the players ability in that role? - ie. if someone is 2* in a role and another player 2.5* then does that mean the second player is better or that they are more suited to that role but might not actually be 'better' as a player in that role?

3 hours ago, petertr said:

Isn't this simply stating that there is an underlying problem with the system?  If we cannot trust the star system in your example, then its broken and of no use. 

I'm not sure what you mean - I was indicating why I don't show stars for the roles because it can be misconstrued or mis-understood by people.

I also try hard not to have the game actually make the fundamental decisions in the game for the user and to force the user to have to make a lot of judgements, this is intention because I personally don't think its a lot of fun for someone to simply click a button and have a game simply indicate 'you won' now and again

(I might be wrong about that and at some point do think it'd be fun to make a 'chairman' style game where you only sign players etc. and hire a coach to do the rest just as a 'casual' style product)

3 hours ago, petertr said:

Why would a player with bad attributes for a role have more stars than a player with great attributes for that same role?   That's telling me I cannot rely on  EITHER stars or attributes.  Which takes me back to the point of this thread - I don't know how to tell which player is better than another and none of the in-game tools help.   Can you help me here, because if I'm limited to pretty much just guessing, then it makes me not want to play.

I'm meaning 'bad attributes overall' - ie. if someones attributes are all under 10 and another players all over ten, then if the 'under 10 one' has strengths (relatively to his other attributes) in attributes for say a central defender and the other player didn't (ie. say he was really short) ... then I'd personally expect the first to have a higher star rating showing he's better suited to that role than the other person.

3 hours ago, petertr said:

Is this confirming that the Star rating is a comparison of CA / PA between the player in question and your squad?  This is what I expected it to be.

Within FMM the star rating shown is always relative to your club. This is because that is the most useful to a user imho, ie. it compares against your existing situation.

This is also incidentally why sometimes if you play as a small club and go up through the divisions why your players star ratings might drop - ie. that 5* player in the lower leagues is only an 'average' player for the new division that you've reached and your club reputation has risen to indicate that you really could do with considering replacing them.

3 hours ago, petertr said:

Apoligies if it seemed like a complaint, I'm only asking questions that will make the game more enjoyable for me, and thought it was worth pointing out something that I didn't understand and/or could be a typo/bug

Thanks for taking the time to reply

Not a problem at all - I try very hard to answer questions about the game and clarify things, for various reasons - including that once upon a time I was someone who only played games and wanted to know more about how they worked ... and would have loved someone to be open and discuss them with me

PS - If you have any suggestions to improve something that irks you in the game then by all means share, I'm not overly precious about my game designs

[petertr]

5 minutes ago, Marc Vaughan said:

I'm meaning 'bad attributes overall' - ie. if someones attributes are all under 10 and another players all over ten, then if the 'under 10 one' has strengths (relatively to his other attributes) in attributes for say a central defender and the other player didn't (ie. say he was really short) ... then I'd personally expect the first to have a higher star rating showing he's better suited to that role than the other person.

Ah ok, I see why we are at odds here.  

You are talking about rating a player's roles relative to himself.  A comparison of his role suitability relative to himself.  That's not what I mean here.

I'm suggesting what we need in this game is a scout to tell me how good the player they just scouted is as a B2B compared the all of my current players in the B2B role.  Comparing like for like at the role level.  "Hi John, we're weak in the ball playing defender position - please can you go and find me some that are better than what we have in our squad".  Its a really simple task and something a manager will send his staff to do IRL - I'm not trying to break the illusion of the game here.

Because without that, I only have a relative comparison of CA/PA and then I have to determine if the attributes make any sense at all - which is a hell of a lot of work for a mobile game where I don't have excel or notepad open at the same time & even if I did, you've just confirmed that the game doesn't tell me which attributes I need to look at, only a few specific ones that differ between the roles.

 

So I'm back to square one really: Guesswork.  Sorry to sound so brutal about it

[Marc Vaughan]

18 minutes ago, petertr said:

I'm suggesting what we need in this game is a scout to tell me how good the player they just scouted is as a B2B compared the all of my current players in the B2B role.  Comparing like for like at the role level.  "Hi John, we're weak in the ball playing defender position - please can you go and find me some that are better than what we have in our squad".  Its a really simple task and something a manager will send his staff to do IRL - I'm not trying to break the illusion of the game here.

Ok cool - makes sense, the reason it just does it with 'ability' is that allows you to do a rough comparison against all players in that position within your team ... the reasoning being simply that just 'because' his preferred role is say a 'winger' it doesn't mean that you might not decide he'd make a fantastic poacher.

In real-life this happens and often a player is restyled as a striker or whatever over time (Thierry Henry started as a winger for instance, as did Ronaldo).

Thus to just 'judge' them in a specific role would be to ignore that they might actually be competent in several and that you might reshape them through training for a specific role later.

(that being said I'll have a think about ways that we can show their suitability for specific roles - tbh I think how we do it presently by highlighting specific attributes on their profile which are seen as 'needed' for that role works reasonably well, yes it doesn't show 'all' attributes only the main ones - but hopefully people find it helpful?

18 minutes ago, petertr said:

Because without that, I only have a relative comparison of CA/PA and then I have to determine if the attributes make any sense at all - which is a hell of a lot of work for a mobile game where I don't have excel or notepad open at the same time & even if I did, you've just confirmed that the game doesn't tell me which attributes I need to look at, only a few specific ones that differ between the roles.

You don't really need to be 'that' in depth generally imho - but if you want to maximize things optimally then I'm sure it helps ... I personally play at a slightly more casual level than yourself using a combination of the attributes and my 'feelings' about how a player performs, which is how I expect most people play.

In general the importance of some attributes varies according to how you're playing which is why its doesn't list 'all' items ... ie. if you're counter attacking them that emphasizes a need for pace, etc.

18 minutes ago, petertr said:

So I'm back to square one really: Guesswork.  Sorry to sound so brutal about it

Not at all - I'm sorry you find the game slightly frustrating in this manner, but discussing it is giving me an idea of what you find frustrating and hopefully at some point I'll determine a way to make you happier while retaining the core challenge that a lot of people want (from ascertaining things without being overly handheld by the game).

In the meantime I'd suggest you use the following:
* Coach/Scout report star ratings with some guidance by the highlighted/recommended attributes when it comes to roles
* Back these up with how players actually perform on the pitch and results when they're playing

This should give you a reasonably quick way of ascertaining a players suitability for the team, then use their underlying attributes a little biased by how you've set your team up.

(and in case of frustration hit 'pick team' to get a 'template' to customise)

PS - Some of the game being 'feeling' is actually somewhat intentional as irl there isn't a tag on a player saying '99/100' or whatever and part of managing in the game is feeling out things a little with regards to the players and their performances etc.

[petertr]

Thanks Marc, you've given me enough to work with I think.