ViG1980

Great news. Can’t wait for 2025. Smart marketing for when we get a crappy 2024. It’s because they’re working on 2025 which will be amazing so I want to give them my money!! 😂

I did all of this in FM22. Altered the reps of all the youth awards and even youth leagues and cups. Didn't really impact the way the AI managers handled youngsters. It might increase reputation a little bit but not enough for the AI to give younger players a chance. Still way to simple the way the AI seems to pick their teams. I don't know this for sure but it looks like the AI picks their best 11 when available, with just a few apparent nuances to this - formation (and a player's fit to it) and fitness seem to be by far the most important. This results in managers not trying youth and thus their ability and reputation never developing as they could.

The graphics argument makes no sense to me. Every other game out there has advanced its graphics and their sales have not gone down because they stopped catering to those with older machines by doing so. In fact the PC market has almost doubled in value in the last 10 years (almost $50B now) and that is not because people are buying old games for their old machines. So unless FM has a huge majority of players from countries where an average wage doesn't allow you to buy a new PC once every 10 years, the argument is just plain silly. SI have chosen not to focus on the graphics because they are prioritizing other things. What exactly that is, I am not sure because the last few years have not seen many advancements in the game. Manager timeline headline feature??? Give me an effing break - if my dev team came to me with that, they'd be fired - I'd expect that as a cool little thing a dev put together in his free time, not a headline feature. It feels to me like they are spending too much time tinkering behind the scenes when the impact to the overall game is minimal. The match engine and the AI is better than it was 3 years ago, yes, but is it so much better that it's worth the rest of the game having not really advanced? I'd argue, probably not. I'd also argue, that you should have a dev team fully focused on the AI, one focused on the match engine, one potentially on bugs/maintenance (depends on build structure because it might have to be the main squads) and then the other teams/squads focused on real changes. That's not the exact set up but the point is to have dedicated teams for those areas that are complex and really make or break the game. Then you have other teams which can be dedicated or rotate - quarterly or after each release so there is a particular focus for each release. You could then have a team dedicated to graphics for one release and spend a 1-2 years on that and then rotate them more when it is more about iteration vs big changes. These are things that impact the experience of the game Of course, I don't know what budgets they are playing with so maybe that is not possible and they have a more shared resource model. Maybe they are already thinking like the above but if they are, we are not seeing the expected impact and so I'd look at how they are setup to achieve success. Are their KPIs/OKRs wrong, are their processes wrong such that they are losing focus or people are getting dragged off their main priorities to fix things. I guess where I am going with all this drivel is that saying graphics are **** because they need to cater for low-end PCs or they will lose a large portion of their user base doesn't seem to add up. I think it is what they are prioritizing. And if that is the case, I question what they are prioritizing and/or how much time they are giving each priority because the progress of the game has been not much more than QOL stuff for a few years now.