Jack Joyce

Defending is very... involved There's a lot of factors, and even when doing a high press, you're right in that there's situations where the team is forced to revert into a mid/low block based on the situation, short-term condition of the players etc. Looking at your posts there's various different things going on - set pieces are very isolated and separate to any open-play issues, so cases where your team is too deep against an AI goal-kick are isolated issues that can be reported specifically for those situations alone. But I assume its because the opposition is taking a long kick, so your team isn't anticipating the play going short. Other things - such as the DM looking to get goal-side of the striker when they should be screening - again specific issues that can be reported as its own thread. Or strikers not tracking back well enough with the team.

It should not be - it's a debug-only preference used for internal builds and should be reported as a bug. It's used to test experimental changes that aren't quite ready for test by the wider studio - but only works in specific branches of development code where those changes are being made. I'd recommend not using it, since it could cause instability issues. However the (if available) part is key, I'm pretty sure it won't have any effect at all.

The current live ME is the exact same ME as from the early access.

It's a good example of why being specific and detailed about an issue is really important to help QA/developers. The issue doesn't seem to be the loan listing, but the fact that nobody picked him up. So then the bug report becomes more about good loan listed players not being signed than it does about young players not being played enough. If they went 2 years on the loan list with no loan, that definitely sounds like something worth reporting with save game examples.

Generally the industry does use a lot of external QA, but not really at SI. We have a full dedicated internal QA team who are all integrated directly into the development team. Not enough companies do that! We do have some external QA support too, but as additional support and not at the expense of internal development. Unfortunately there's so many reasons why games can come out with bugs, and it's never quite as simple as it looks from the outside. All I'll say is that our QA team are very, very good at their jobs and are an invaluable part of our development process. It's a shame sometimes that you can't see what they do day-to-day because if you did, you'd understand just how good they are! QA get a lot of unfair stick (in general, not just in that post).

Reputation isn't really as big of a factor as some people make it out to be, especially in team selection and dealing with your squad players. In this example (Rico Lewis going on loan) it's a very close call - we're talking about an 18 year old who's not got the CA to be making regular starts. It's a tough call between handing them the occasional appearance in cups, or keeping them around in case of injury crises - or sending them out on loan to get regular football. You could argue that in real life Man City are a bit unusual in how they handle young players like that - people were complaining about Foden not getting enough game time for years. If I told you City had a 136 CA 18 year old in the team and they sent him out on loan to develop and get match experience, would that sound so crazy? Because that's Rico Lewis. This is the data the game is working with, and it doesn't seem like a bad call really in isolation looking at the data.

It should be factored in to the jumping, so even though they're exceptional jumpers, because of their height their actual 'jumping reach' would still be lower than it would for someone who's really tall.

Ah, i think I misunderstood what you meant. Jumping Reach is more or less all that matters yes, since it factors in height already. I believe this is actually how it always worked, and the UI/name was just updated to help people understand it better.

They are still connected, from the research guidelines: "Jumping Reach defines how good a player is at reaching a ball in the air. It indicates the highest point an outfield player can reach with their head. It is not necessarily reflective of how tall a player is, but when considering their jumping ability, it makes sense to take into account the player's height. For example, a male player of 200+cm will still possess a high reach even if he is a poor jumper, while a player who measures in at 170cm will struggle to compete at the same height due to the 30cm difference in height between the two." If you're seeing newgens that break these guidelines in a significant way - then it should be reported as a bug.

Could you DM me some more info about your issue here? Maybe with a save game or screenshots to show what you mean. I'll have a look

We don't get scheduled any time on the forums (outside of QA and dedicated support staff) - any time I spend on here is in addition to my day-to-day, working on FM24, 25 and beyond. I try to help where I can, but there's always going to be things I miss, or times where I'm not responding as much, and that's mostly just down to me being busy working on FM, or personal life is busy! We're always listening even if we don't always have time to respond.

Unfortunately training is not my area of expertise so I couldn't say, but I can see that this thread as been marked for QA to review. 1. I think will be determined by the swing you've chosen - routines aren't set based on side anymore but swing, so if you have an inswinging routine, that is what is used to determine who takes the set piece. To swap them round, change from inswing to outswing, or vice versa. 2. There should be a button on the left that says 'corners', click that and you can change between the different routine types.

Absolutely not. We would never announce a feature that isn't in the game, personally I'm a long, long term fan of the game and would never accept that. But that doesn't mean new features won't have bugs/issues. No matter how many features or improvements you make to a complex system like this (similar to the match engine AI!) - there's always more you can do. It'll never be 'finished', and once the game goes live there's suddenly millions of matches being played, way more than any amount of internal testing can cover. The bug reports are really helpful!

Yeah there's definitely variance between leagues but it's not something the match team force e.g. through regional trends or tactical differences. We don't do any cheats or hacks like that. Everything is data driven, so e.g. in Bundesliga there's less goals so there must be something with the players or managers that leads to them having less chances. But also because we don't do any 'cheats' or 'hacks' to force goals up or down in specific leagues, it does mean that there will be some variance in stats, as long as its not really unrealistic and is within reasonable ranges it should be ok.

Thanks I'll have a dig through, I think QA have already been looking but more eyes can't hurt.

Absolutely! GK injuries - we're working on some tweaks to reduce them down a bit. Just for GKs, the overall injury balance is looking good. Subs - I know the team are working on this one as well, but anything to do with team selection such as rotation, subs etc. takes a hell of a lot of fine-tuning, balancing etc. I know it's painful sometimes waiting for improvements but the more time we get the better changes we can make. Rushing these things can often make things worse and we've really tried to move away from these rushed fishes with the match engine in recent years. Rotation - Similar to subs, the team are working on it and there's a bunch of improvements in the works. Fixes are coming and apologies for the wait, but all the feedback has really been invaluable so keep it coming please with save games and PKM examples.

as per? You're entitled to believe what you like, but I've tried my best to be very active on these forums answering questions both publicly and via DMs (outside of working hours!) and believe I've been nothing but polite and cordial. I understand you're not happy, but being rude doesn't help anyone and can just push people away from engaging on here. As I said, if you have links to threads where detailed info can be found, please do send it my way so we can investigate.

Hey! Is there a bug report anywhere where these soaks you're doing can be found? Which detail level are they played in? Which league (or leagues) are you looking at? Have you uploaded any save games for us to investigate? There's important information and context missing from your posts, which doesn't really help us identify potential issues. Every league has its own goal levels, some closer to real life figures than others. It's really important context to provide so we know what sort of data we're working with here. I keep seeing you post about these stats/tests and I've tried searching your profile for anywhere you've posted evidence of these tests for us to investigate, but I can't find anything. Apologies if I'm missing it, but you're really not giving us much information to work with here to help identify any potential problems. Any help is much appreciated!

Are you looking at the right tab there? I don't see any coaching attributes on that tab you've shown.

He's right, the feedback forum is for feedback on the game based on your experience of playing it. Repeating other people's feedback when you haven't tried the game or experienced a certain issue yourself can make it really hard to gauge actual player sentiment, it's really important that feedback is from your own lived experience with the game. It's not an unreasonable request and there's plenty of other threads/forums to post in.

It's hard to explain, but the match really is its own isolated thing and the only data it has access to is data that is deliberately passed through by the 'outside of match' game system. The more data you pass through, the more costly matches are to run in terms of memory and performance. The initial team selection is done pre-match, after which the AI will pick their 'final' starting 11 right before kick-off. So it's important for us to have a save game from directly before the match, so we can have the full picture in terms of how that initial matchday squad was selected, since that occurs before the match begins. It also allows us to re-run those save games with any new code, to see if our fixes have had a positive effect. So it's a bit of a boring answer, but it's not really possible without slowing down the processing matches to a fairly large degree, which is fine for our internal debug builds but for a public release we want things to be as smooth/fast as possible.

Yeah the stat appears to be called 'games without conceding' which can be misleading. It's under the 'form' header so it's implied that it's not across the whole season. But feel free to log a bug report for it to be changed to e.g. "Current Clean Sheet Streak" or something similar. If you scroll down to the defending section you can see the total clean sheets there.

I'm certain you're looking at current streak for consecutive clean sheets, not total clean sheets. Our last internal stats for the premier league consistently have the top clean sheet team with 15-20. In your bug thread, your screenshot is looking at the wrong statistics. Teams are certainly not only keeping 1/2 clean sheets across a whole season..

Absolutely, it's tricky! I always make a habit of saving before every match so I can catch anything I need to. But reporting specific examples isn't easy, and it's certainly not an expectation that people should or have to be doing this. Any help we get with this stuff is greatly appreciated and anything we get we see as a bonus.

This is definitely a factor that is often overlooked, for sure. However there's certainly more we can do to improve rotation even in a world with less injuries than real life and we're constantly striving to improve things. However, the best possible thing people can do if they want to help us improve squad rotation is provide clear and concise examples for us to investigate: If you're seeing matches with low number of subs - log a bug report with direct PKM examples. Hyperbolic statements such as "AI never makes subs" are not only unhelpful but also clearly untrue, examples are key here. If you think AI teams aren't rotating their squads enough in general - provide save games directly before matches where AI teams start players on surprisingly low fitness, where its clear they should have been rested or rotated the team. It's important to not make assumptions on data and always try to do research into real-life statistics - we've had multiple cases where people say e.g. no lower league team should have 80+% pass completion, Burnley shouldn't be averaging 80+% pass completion, or "90% of matches teams use all their subs". All of which are fairly easily disproven by real life statistics that are publicly available, but people can read these sort of statements and just assume the person is right. This sort of info is so much more useful to us than random out of context soak tests - I'm sure people's hearts are in the right place with this stuff, but you have to be so careful with controlling certain factors, and our internal tests are likely to be a lot more extensive and reliable from a data POV. Specific use-case examples are a lot more useful!