Bojanbbz94

There are still way too many questions that either a) are totally unrealistic and would never be asked in real life. or b) have no meaningful impact on the game. Both increasingly feel like a legacy thing that are still in the game because that's just the way things have always been. They need to be re-considered. a) includes things like being asked your opinion on a recent manager sacking, or (even more bizarrely) a rival manager in your division transfer-listing a player. I genuinely cannot imagine a real-life press conference where a journalist would dare ask a fully-professional manager how they feel about a club he has nothing to do with transfer-listing their second-choice defensive midfielder, who barely ever plays and is obviously surplus to requirements. The answer would be, at best, to deflect and say you "I don't want to talk about other clubs, its not my place" or, at worse, to criticise the question itself and say something like "What has it got to do with me and why should I care? Don't you have something more pertinent to ask me about my squad or the upcoming fixture?" b) includes things like asking my opinion on VAR or how I feel about the league I manage in having a winter break / not having a winter break (delete as appropriate). Yes, these are real-life talking points so I can understand why they are in the game from a realism perspective. But the difference is that in real life clubs and managers have a stake in the leagues they play in, and might have the power to change policies if enough of them ask for it. In FM, we can't. The league rules are hard-coded in and that's that. So why ask me? Unless a question has the ability to change a metric in the game (the morale of one of my players, a rival manager's relationship with me, how a transfer target feels about me, if I'll be fined by the league for disparaging a referee, etc. etc.), I'm not sure it should be in the game. They're just bits of fluff I'm clicking through to get into the meaningful questions. In one recent fixture, I lost 5-2 and in a post-match press conference with six questions in it, three of them were about VAR. They could have asked me about my CB who made a mistake, my striker who missed two clear-cut chances and got subbed with a 6.0 rating, my relationship with the AI manager, anything. But no, three questions about an in-game mechanic I cannot change making the right decision to disallow a goal.

Jarden Dublin, chief scout at Stoke City, has English listed as his nationality in-game, but he's American. Local press article here says he is "a former Google worker from the United States", and that "Dublin has needed to be patient to secure a work permit for his move": https://www.stokesentinel.co.uk/sport/football/transfer-news/stoke-city-jared-dublin-transfer-8551383 His LinkedIn says he studied at UCL Berkley, and that he worked a few jobs in California before coming the UK: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jareddublin/ He also speaks with an American accent in this video, for what it's worth (starts talking around 1min 45 seconds):

I do get what you are saying, and I don't disagree with you. But I also don't think this is a good thing. For a start, if a feature of the game feels off or unrealistic to the extent that it is detrimental to the player's experience this is obviously not ideal for a game that markets as the most realistic football simulation out there. But more importantly, it is really not good that so many features in the game right now really do have, as you say, no 'viable impact on gameplay'. If a feature really only has a minimal affect on the game at all (if any), what is it doing in the final product? What is it achieving other than adding unnecessary bloat to the game: more info for a player to read but to immediately dismiss, screens for a player to click through even though the pages hold no meaningful information, more complexity (and frankly adding work) that I have to navigate before I actually get to the fun and engaging parts of the game? I can understand this with new features that are being implemented and tested in the latest edition of the game so that they can be refined in the future. But increasingly it feels like a lot of features to the game don't actually add any value to the experience. Staff meetings being a formal event that I have to click through to advance the game, rather than informal pop-ups that I can choose to engage with or dismiss as I see fit. Recruitment meetings are forced on me multiple times a transfer window, even though they have literally not even once used any information to inform any transfer decisions (that's what my scouting assignments were and are already for). Squad dynamics has been in the game since 2018 but, to be blunt, it remains a mostly meaningless feature that you are totally safe to dismiss. I certainly don't want to shoot the messenger here, and I agree with you that many player interactions feel mostly meaningless. But if it's an element to the game that only takes away from your sense of immersion if you think about it too hard, and can safely be ignored by a player who understands the systems enough, then it is a feature that seriously lacks polish.

If an 'ongoing' scouting assignment ends, and files a list of reports away on a different screen, without the player manually clicking a button to end the assignment then, by very definition, it isn't 'ongoing'. It is a time-sensitive task, and it is creating more manual work for a player to navigate through more screens to look for historic reports. Bit of an odd UI choice to limit visibility of a revamped feature of the game, imho.

Liverpool got relegated after about 15 years in an FM save I did once, but that was off the back of a slow decline and a few season of mid table mediocrity before they went down. They made very light work of the Championship the next season.

No worries! I appreciate that Stoke's boardroom situation is very unique and I'm sure that causes some problems to code for, but just wanted to flag. lol

Hey just as a quick FYI, this seems to still be happening in FM23. I don't have a lot of spare time atm, but I've tested it twice just by holidaying to June 2023 at the start of a save and on both occasions Stoke have been taken over as a result of Peter Coates retiring. Where is the best place to raise this?

Not necessarily in any particular order, but as a minimum: Passing. First touch. Vision. Composure. Teamwork. Decisions. But just generally, any attributes that the game tells you are important for a deep-lying playmaker in a support role, to be honest.

Correct me if I am wrong but the release clause and the extension are mutually exclusive, no? Unless the release clause has an expiration date. So for example: if a player signs a three-year deal with a one-year optional extension that the club can activate at anytime, there is nothing stopping you from activating the clause to deter bids. But the release clause is a separate clause in the contract, no? A buying club can trigger it at any time and offer him a contract. And if the player agrees a contract and arranges a move, you then cannot force a player to stay for an extra year when he has already been sold.

When foreign staff arrive at your club you can, of course, send them on an intensive language course to learn the local language. I've often felt that the inability to get staff to learn foreign languages is a missing feature, though. If I have, for example, a English scout who could only speak English, I would never send them to South America or to a Francophile African country, no matter how high their adaptability is. It is always just easier to hire a scout who already speaks Spanish and send them to South America, even if their scouting stats are lower. It's how I've always played the game, since I started playing in FM13. Maybe I'd feel differently about that if I was able to send a scout on Spanish and Portuguese language courses while they were posted in Argentina and Brazil, and have them learn a new language within the course of a few months. To a certain extent, I'd always favour sending people to places they always have knowledge of and that wouldn't change anyway. I favour sending an Argentinian scout to S. America than I would a Spanish national with no knowledge of S. America; I'd always prefer (where possible) to send a half-decent Senegalese scout to Senegal than I would a good French scout who doesn't have any knowledge of Senegal. But I'd still be interested in being able to send scouts on language courses. Maybe it would be a way for clubs with very limited world knowledge (and hence limited knowledge of foreign staff) to build up their capability as the board allows a bigger and bigger scouting range. It needs a bit of thought, of course. E.g. I don't think it would feel very realistic to be able hire a monolingual scout in their 40s but have them suddenly a polyglot within three or four years by sending them them on consecutive intensive language courses in four or five languages one after another. But an arbitrary cap on how many languages a staff member can learn doesn't feel like an elegant solution when it's not particularly rare irl for well-travelled players to speak four or five languages by the time they retire (or more for players like Lukaku, Seedorf or Ibrahimović).