[FM23 Headline Features Revealed]

2 minutes ago, DJ Sir Matthew said:

My biggest beef with FM isn't that there are so many inbox items and/or meetings, my beef is that you can't turn most of them off. They are forced down your throath, unless you holiday till next match and then just put all inbox items to "Read" which i've seen many veteran FM'ers do. That and the intermittent processing stops happening for no reason at all, even when you toned it down in the preferences. 

The game keeps feeling sluggish that way. Or like some mentioned, it feels like "Work". Maybe it's SI desire to simulate the life of a English football manager, but imho they are driving it too far and should limit it to only the fun stuff or at least allow players to limit the interaction to what that player finds fun. I for one want a game simulating the game of football, not a simulation of the work life of a football manager. 

Certainly, one feature that would improve my FM experience greatly right now is "Go on holiday, but stop when a player is unhappy". Because right now I want to skip 2 weeks of pointless email dross, but if one player wanted a playing time meeting at that point you'd come back to a transfer crisis. In other words, the email/meeting bloat is so bad that the most helpful 'feature' would be to help skip most of it.

There are many different ways to simulate a football manager. The game already decides not to simulate other aspects because they wouldn't be fun or would be too different a game. Take player happiness. We know that managing players' feelings is a huge part of the modern manager's job. Fine. But as a customer, I don't enjoy their solution of repeatedly clicking 4 submenu buttons to pass on a generic 'well done' every other week hundreds of times per playthrough - especially because there's not much ingame feedback that makes you feel that something has changed in your playthrough because you have a hard-ass reputation or your players all have crybaby personalities, etc. It just feels like slamming the frowning face in an airport satisfaction terminal again and again.

[FM23 Headline Features Revealed]

6 hours ago, Federico said:

Same here. I've been saying already how suffocating the readings of so much stuff in "Football Manager" is. The thing that truly astonish me the most is that the more we ask to reduce iteractions/conversations/interviews/readings in general, the more they add.

I agree so much with this that I've reset my login to post (been playing & reading for years but never really posting here).

It's not just one feature or another, but it's been a consistent general trend last few years: more meetings, almost none of them any fun at all. If SI say that X feature is too hard / costly and can't happen for a while, alright, that's one thing - but it's another thing to see resources & strategy actively go into beefing up FM as a soul-crushing work simulator.

Each year I've become more and more used to simply ignoring various features, many of them new, to retain/improve my playing experience. No press conferences ever. No tunnel interviews ever. Skip reading 90% of the emails in the inbox. And make no mistake, this isn't coming from the typically "casual" segment of the player base - people like me are people who've played FM for a long time and often spend a lot of time learning the ins and outs of the game, people who aren't wanting FM Lite or whatever it's called. It's got nothing to do with 'streamlining' or 'making it easier to understand', it's about the fact that these meetings and emails usually don't add anything useful or fun. I'm fine with playing a difficult and complex RPG, for example, but not if it wants me to file tax forms to sell my loot.

[*Official* Football Manager 2022 Early Access Beta Feedback Thread]

18 hours ago, Fettucine_Alfredo said:

Some promises and reactions of the players to them are just freaking ridiculous in that game. When you HAVE TO put a promise to a player to play in a certain role, and if you play him in a slightly different role, he immediately is unhappy and wants to leave without any possibility to do anything about it. No player would be so pissed IRL about playing wing back role instead of full back role. Roles are taken way too seriously in that game, football isn't that binary IRL.

I have a CB who demands he MUST play.... wide centre back to sign a new contract.

Guess he has forgotten we've been playing 4atb the last two seasons!

[Player Value and Value to Club]

You're free to ask for whatever price you want, the other club is free to bid however low or high they want. You asked for 60, they clearly have no intention and just want to lowball and maybe unsettle the player. It's hard to see what the issue is.

 

[Football Manager 2022 Headline Feature Blogs]

"Our attacking statistics are interesting."

"Our attacking statistics are not very interesting."

Looks like we'll be bombarded with that for a few years longer until they eventually make it work in a meaningful way.