Tonton_Zola

If I could give one piece of advice to SI it would be “less is sometimes more”. the game is overstuffed, carrying so much padding/deadweight/entire limbs that have long since lost function. it’s a mess!

But it’s haphazard to the point of randomness. and there’s SO MUCH clicking / so many questions that anybody sane loses the will after a while. and you lack that sense of purpose/intention, which I think the modifier would bring.

As an extension of this, as your communication stats improve as manager, the dice roll element falls more and more in your favour. I.e if you are “silver-tongued” a la mourinho, you are more likely to get positive outcomes

Game needs a totally fresh idea for media or player interactions. Currently no jeopardy or obvious implication to your action. I would borrow from grand strategy games and create clear, transparently communicated modifiers connected to your response to a question. So, before games you get max one or two media interactions (quite why you need more I don’t know) so, build up to cup final. Haaland’s out of form. ”boss, would you agree that your star striker is out of form?” “yes, he’s out of touch and I have told him so. He needs to buck his ideas up” (50% chance you get “Haaland fired up”, all attacking attributes +0.5 for one game, 50% chance you get “head dropped”, all attacking attributes -0.5 for one game) ”nah, the lad’s okay, he’s getting in the right areas” (50% chance you get “arm around the shoulder” morale improves +1, 50% chance you get “don’t patronise me”, morale declines -1) All of these modifier chances would vary depending on player personality etc. also, always option just to “spout cliche/no comment” and get no modifier) This would be so much better!

Breaks my heart that money that could have been spent on a graphics person specialising in lighting effects (or even non/floating scarves) was instead spent on a UEFA champions league licence. Why introduce a totally unnecessary licensing dependency? Why deploy your resources in that way? …let me also say this about the UCL license. It is a lot harder to take things like that away than it is to introduce them…

This has to be an inflection point now, surely. Something clearly isn’t right/functioning/effective in the onward development of this game… The disappointing mess that is Squad Planner - an inferior, unnecessary reheat of Squad Depth - is just another canary in the mine. The UI now resembles a Frankenstein monster of poorly stitched together parts, barely-functioning limbs (set pieces?) and half-forgotten threads (data science?) Meanwhile the bloat is in all the wrong areas - an inbox from a middle manager’s anxiety dream, enough clicks to fell a marathon runner, and a media mini-game that manages to be both sadistic and utterly redundant at the same time. I hear people above refer to the old question of realism or entertainment. Dare I say it, at this rate the game risks ending up as neither.

Very constructive. basically this is code for: “I am losing and I don’t like it” Last time I checked, great defenders sometimes defend terribly. The game has to simulate this possibility ne probability. (this year ref: VVD, koulibaly, 100m full back on Trent etc)

Clearly I am just using it to push the point to its extremes (a Dall-e + human for 10 minutes is exponentially better, as is anybody with graphics or illustration chops), but the idea that this can’t be sorted quickly and efficiently with big perceived quality of life improvements is absurd. I am no graphics expert, but presumably similar tools exist to help a resource-short team make improvements rapidly? Or just take the 15 minutes of your day to upres a stone wall at one of the rendered stadia?

And for Latin America I am only doing this to highlight that this is hardly a strategic drain on resources. Literally 30 mins (I could even do the above in the graphical style of FM) and tag into database metadata. Some of us feel instantly 5% better

In under 3 seconds this is what Dall E came up with based on “football manager’s office in Northern Europe - with training ground in the distance.”

Can see the argument, but feels like a pragmatism that borders on the pig-headed. You have a core user base up in arms about some of this stuff. If it’s a day of somebody junior’s life and it’s perceived as an immediate win, then do it. plus, respectfully, the office background environment stuff wasn’t put in all that long ago. I remember them celebrating it as a feature. But it’s just unimaginably poorly executed. Again, please correct me if you feel differently. How do you even get it that badly wrong? I could hire somebody freelance and pay them for half a day and get somewhere 1000 times better than that. Sorry to be so blunt - it is exasperating at this point.

Usual arguments about “wider implications for AI” do not apply. the picnic tables, the poorly rendered random stadium furniture, the lack of graphical or immersive scaling/variation in background screens - you could put two of us in the code for about a day and we could sort this out! Am I wrong? Tell me if I am

Yeah I think it’s the sheer mystery of some of this stuff that has begun to grate. Making that office screen better, or creating 12 different variants of it, should literally take a day max? I mean, if it’s not integrated into a wider three dimensional environment experience, why not just take 12 royalty free photographs (or illustrator graphical renders) of different offices from different locations…perhaps scaled against size and location? If you want a graphical style, no problem, I could do this in 10 minutes using DALL E if I wanted? I am pushing the point, but WHY (along with so many other graphical irritations) does this stuff not get changed? It begins to border on an elaborate practical joke.

Of course many of the content creators are paid by SI. it’s called a modern marketing strategy. ten years ago you bought billboards, today you pay micro-influencers to make stuff.

Mate seriously it’s okay for you to judge.

Ps - why could a graphics team not just build a prettier “render” on top of the existing engine? i.e sharper player models, better lighting etc?

Respectfully, I am not sure we require forensic market segmentation here. The game’s graphics/in-game visualiser is mystifyingly obsolete and and needs to be improved. No further analysis required

Risks being a little binary to say people who like decent graphics have no patience. Smart visuals and strategic depth need not be opposite ends of the spectrum, or mutually exclusive… We are asking for an AND, not an OR.

Creating 4 or 5 stadium typologies with 3 x size scales/levels…? Then binding that into the database (e.g Wembley = bowl x size 3, Selhurst park = trad Northern European box x2)? again, surely this is a week’s work no? I mean - honestly - I think I could do it in an afternoon but still! I mean, for goodness sake it doesn’t affect the pitch / AI so you could even just bloody well commission an illustrator and render it? It’s mystifying to me. Can anybody explain.

I fear this is wishful thinking. Does anybody have any evidence of this? plus, the low res poorly scaled brick wall thing in the corner that the earlier poster mentioned? Surely this is a 60 minute job? Probably less? Why wouldn’t you just tidy it up? I am lost.

The situation is now exasperating - and definitely feel like it's reaching an inflection point. Strategy is just as much about deciding what you won't do as what you will do. Why are devs putting time into ever more sprawling feature-creep? The frankenstein monster grows more dysfunctional limbs etc... I'd argue that the game doesn't NEED new features, it just needs what's already there to work better...it may even need some features (e.g. the reams of nonsense stuff that barely works) to be TAKEN AWAY! ------- If i were Miles I would keep it really simple. I.e. "we won't spend ANY time on anything else until the match visualiser is a significant improvement." I would just do that one thing and pour all resources into that. This single thing would be transformational for the series. To be concrete: - a dozen templated stadium 'typologies' at three levels of scale - greater player animation variety, even if underlying AI doesn't change. - rebuild of player sprites/skins/outer vis - higher res, closer to what you'd expect in 2022 - rebuild of in-game lighting And if you can't do this why wouldn't you just license a visualisation engine and map it on to the top, so it doesn't interfere with underlying AI? Please explain this to me. a decent graphics team could surely produce a dramatically improved 'render' on top of the underlying information within a few weeks? what am i missing?