[[U.S.A.] (Official) League Specific Issues]

Live example a few seasons into the game that a player can be signed and waived on the same day. See image below that Rafael Ramos's contract starts on 03/16/23, game date is the same, and he has been placed on the waiver list.

I will say this specific bug is noticeably less common in FM21 than previously. Another thing that has changed drastically too is that teams appear to trade far less now. Very few MLS teams have made offers or express interest in my players - in FM20 and earlier, at least half my squad would be coveted every season by another team.

[[U.S.A.] (Official) League Specific Issues]

14 minutes ago, Sebastian Szlenkier said:

Thanks, this is now with our team and under review. These sliders work correctly after the international transfer window is open in the middle of February, but we will look into why it is not possible to adjust this earlier. 

This is an interesting point. Is the slider only available during the transfer window? Or at least, there appears to be some sort of conditional logic trigger that 'unlocks' them with the start of the transfer window in Feb. 

This appeared to be an issue that was also present in FM20 as well. My experience is that once you hit like year 10 in MLS, the sliders seem to stop unlocking. I haven't made it that far yet in FM21, so I can't report on how persistent this issue is. 

[Actually Using TAM and GAM in MLS]

GAM is bugged - you can check the MLS league thread in the bugs forum for some back-and-forth on this. As far as TAM is concerned, I believe the spending just happens automatically - as long as you have it, and you bring in Designated players, it'll be consumed.

[MLS Can't buy down with GAM]

We've reported this issue over in the bugs forum and haven't really gotten any good feedback on it. One user suggested moving the player to B-team prior to registration day, and then after the initial registration is finalized, try registering your player while they are on the B-team (use the filter so you can see your B team players), and then move them over after you submit and forwarded. This should allow you to shift the player from B team to normal team and not have it impact your cap and put you over the limit.

I also noticed that once the second transfer window opens, it will let me buy down player cap impact for some reason at that time. So if the method above doesn't work, you might have some luck around July in bringing the player back up from the B team and adjust their salary cap impact then.

Kinda wild that you have to jump through hoops to execute on a mechanic that literally defines how squad building works in the league, but that's MLS in FM for ya

[For Those Who Use a Target Man, Is He Your Main Threat or More of a Supportive Role?]

4 hours ago, zyfon5 said:

Previous team I managed in my current save has a star player that I played as a target man on support. Top goalscorer in the league two successive seasons. Paired him with a pressing forward on attack using tactics that I tweaked from the preset 442 wing play tactic.

Yeah, I'm finding pressing forwards to be one of the most effective roles up front, moreso for me than a poacher or advanced forward pairing with the target man.

[For Those Who Use a Target Man, Is He Your Main Threat or More of a Supportive Role?]

Follow-up: What do you like to pair with a target man (and in what formation)?

This is more philosophical theory-crafting. I've been gravitating away from speedy tiki-taka and looking to play a more physical, aerial dominance type of game. Wanna give those bigger, slower players some love.

[Can Portraits be Added for Newgens?]

In an effort to add more immersion into the game, I was wondering if we can override the newgen faces with portraits (similar to players). There's lots of computer-generated profiles pictures (for example: https://www.thispersondoesnotexist.com/) that we can use to create portraits out of. 

I tried downloading a facepack and replicating the process by creating portraits for the players using their uniqueID, but it didn't work after I cleared the cache and reload (the real players with their facepack portraits did reload however).

[The maxed out player experiment, number 10 and ME]

To get a 6.3 rating means he's either botching plays (unlikely in 3 consecutive games), or probably not involved in many plays as you intended (more likely). Do you have the analysis portion of the matches saved? Check the heat map and the passing. Odds are your instructions send the balls to the wingbacks, who do back/forth passes with mezzalas up the field, while the AM is just kinda sitting there. With shorter passing enabled, your wingers are probably opting to do shorter/safer passes to the mezzs, who in turn take shots or pass it forward to the strikers. 

[Should We Have a Stickied Frequently Asked Questions about Game Mechanics Thread?]

Given the complexity of this game, I think the community could really benefit from a thread with comments made by developers / experts about the frequently discussed game mechanics. For example, there have a great deal many threads in prior years about what determination actually does and is it related to development (and since '18, the answer is yes, but prior to that, apparently not). Or another is explaining how newgens CA/PA is created/set so players can maximize their odds of getting good newgens if they want to play a youth save. 

It's easy to speculate and offer wrong answers. I think having the devs chime in with 'official' responses about how things work can benefit those who want to understand the game at a more fundamental level. We see snippets here and there of answers regarding various game mechanics like players having different (and hidden) development trajectories: why not have this information located in one easily referenced thread? 

[MLS waiver.]

You can normally find it under "Contract" -> "Waive Player" (see image below).

Are you in the offseason? There is no waiver activity in the offseason. You also won't have the option to waive players who are on Designated Player contracts. Barring expiration, the only other way to move players on DP contract is via loaning or selling.

Note: waived players will probably still affect your salary cap if it's past the initial squad registration date (visit the League Rules to see what the stipulations are for who will count against the cap and who won't). If possible, move the excess players to your B-team instead. While in the B-team, they won't count against your salary or roster limit. This is where I store all my excess reserve contract players. You can swap during the season between main team and B-team (make sure to register the squad each time though, or else you'll end up losing unregistered players to waivers! Exception being DP contracts - can't waive 'em).

 

[Are my youth players just screwed in MLS?]

2 hours ago, jcp1417 said:

Managing MLS is simply not fun in FM. To be fair, the actual MLS isn’t a lot of fun either

I find it refreshing in its own way. Unlike mega-money leagues like the EPL where the big teams consistently get the best players, you at least get a sense of parity in MLS (if not in practice, then at least in theory). It's designed to have churn at the top, with the worst-performing teams are best set up for future success (via drafts positions, bonus allocation money if they don't have enough DP-contract players, etc.). The best players on the best teams tend to be poached by bigger leagues, so they can't just coast at the top forever. A salary cap means judicious management is required for prolonged success (though you can certainly go 'all in' and form super-teams for 1-2 seasons). It's different than most of the leagues world-wide, which contributes to its perceived strangeness, but I think it's a good thing. The top 4-8 teams should not be a foregone conclusion year-to-year, barring major disruptions. 

That said, the whole allocation fund/target allocation fund/actual club transfer budgets seem to break behind-the-scenes fairly often. I respect that they're trying to mirror the real league complications, but sometimes I'm willing to take a hit on realism just so the game mechanics will execute as intended. Then there's the mess with the roster too, with what counts towards the cap and what doesn't (and the various ways you can 'cheat' that). 

[Are my youth players just screwed in MLS?]

2 hours ago, looknohands said:

I was able to post job adverts for the B team, but the game wouldn't hire a head coach (the advert option was greyed out) so I edited a former player that I had released after the first season (he was unattached and already had decent staff attributes) and made him the head coach.

I agree that the idea of a B team is good, but SI really needs to make sure that the feature is actually functional before throwing it in!

I submitted the B team coaching issue a while back and SI has confirmed that it's something they're aware of and looking to resolve at the moment.

Clever on the editing bit though. At least the in-game editor can provide a workaround to some of these issues. Really hate having to rely on it though...that said, I might have to do that too so I can offload the friendlies arranging duties to him xD

[Are my youth players just screwed in MLS?]

On 15/12/2019 at 01:03, looknohands said:

Doesn't appear as though the B squads serve much of a purpose.  In my second season with Vancouver and the board decided to create a B team that supposedly plays in the PDL but, like others have pointed out, they don't seem to play actual games.

I created my own little pyramid for both the US (untouched MLS+ 3 twenty-team USL divisions) and Canada (3 leagues) and have used the in-game editor to set up affiliate teams in both the US (higher competition) and Canada (to allow foreign players to gain Canadian citizenship.)  I typically sign 3-4 players from the youth team each year and, if they aren't quite MLS-ready, I use the in-game editor to move them on loan to one of the affiliate clubs to hopefully get some playing time.

I basically use the B-team as an extension of the main squad for reserve and minimum salary players to navigate the first-team roster limit. Since only those with your main squad will count towards the 6 maximum reserves and 10 maximum off-salary players, you can stash the rest of your reserve players in the B-team. I usually sign 2-3 of the youths from Academy every season, so I end up with around 8-10 reserve players (plus whatever the draft gives you) by year 2-3. Having a place to stash them now while they develop is great. 

You just have to move the players around the day before match, so you can advance the game and register them to the main squad. Also be careful, as the roster lock near the end of the season will prevent you from doing this, so at some point, you do have to choose who to keep in the main roster and who stays with the B-team for the remainder of the season. Also make sure to register them so they don't fall into waivers...

Since they don't play any league games, you do have to schedule weekly friendlies for them however, and last I checked hiring staff for the B-team is still non-functional, so you have to micromanage everything to make sure they develop at all. I'm glad we have the B-team again, but there's definitely some work to be done before it becomes the resource it was intended to be.

[Playing Control Possession/Tiki-Taka in lower leagues]

I already play in a 'lower league' as my main save (MLS, relative to European powerhouses), and a tiki-taka-ish style is possible for sure. Your biggest weakness will be player decision making when being pressed. Teams with high pressing will dispossess you a lot more since lower league players will not have the same level of ball control or mental awareness, which tends to result in subpar passing decisions when under pressure. Since your players will tend to inch up the field through controlled passes, losing the ball in their third will usually mean a devastating counter-attack with all your players caught on their half, so you'll need speedy players in fullback/defense to recover. 

[This has to be a joke!]

When you see that many shots and with that much possession, what most likely happened is that the opposition team is parking the bus (narrow defensive play, basically a wall around the goal box). Your players will move the ball around until they are frustrated and take wild shots. Most of these are low-percentage shots are shots that will be right at the goalkeeper. You are most likely playing some variant of a high-pressing, forward-pushing, attacking style. Parking the bus is quite effective at neutralizing this style of play - this is why they only have one shot in response since you spent most of the time with the ball. You have to design a tactic specifically to break this wall. It won't always work, and you'll have far fewer shots, but they'll be much higher quality chances.

[If You Think FM Is Always Broken on Release, Here's Your Chance to Fix It]

11 minutes ago, Neil Brock said:

We already have a closed testing program which we run for a longer period prior to the Pre-Release Beta. We invite people directly from our forums who raise issues via the bugs forum. If you want to get involved in this process, all you have to do is raise issues and you'll likely be invited. 

And yes, absolutely there will be some issues raised for FM which given time and resource constraints we may not be able to fix. Every single issue raised is logged and prioritized, then based on the development team's available time they will be fixed on a priority basis. Ideally we'd find and fix every single thing from the game, but the reality is this would be extremely difficult to do, unless we vastly expand our team. Given the difficulty we've had filling roles already available via our website as Glenn linked to above, we'll continue to do the best we can with what we've got. 

Thanks for the response, Neil. And again, I am NOT being critical of the dev. team. I appreciate that we have devs. to talk to directly, and yes, some people abuse that privilege. The rest of us just wants to get the game as clean as possible like you and your team does, given your limited resources. I understand the resource constraints issue very well, being in a team of 4 individuals at our company spread across a dozen business systems to support.

I do believe the game gets incrementally better each year, and that a lot of mini-bugs have workarounds or are a minor enough nuisance that I'll just deal with it. There are other ones though can and do ruin the game experience, even if they're relatively minor in the scheme of things. I'm not griping because I want to give your team headaches. FM is probably 20%+ of all my gaming time in the last 5 years, and no other game/franchise comes close at being 2nd. It's a good product. If I can help you test it, I will. I just get frustrated when I see something occasionally that's been an issue for a while, with repeated submissions (myself as well as others), and no responses. Maybe there should be a stickied thread on each bugs forum of commonly submitted issues that are currently under review/in the queue/de-prioritized? I think you had something like that for the match engine forums, and that helped me at least get a sense of what you guys are focused on so I can save the minor quibbles for another time. 

[If You Think FM Is Always Broken on Release, Here's Your Chance to Fix It]

Just now, santy001 said:

Are you not capable of applying a bit of thought to a situation then?

Because either you look and see its still not resolved and just conclude "ah unfortunately they must not have been able to resolve this yet" or you look and see its not resolved and conclude "ah they've done this to spite me, and won't even be honest about it"

Well, obvs they're out to get me! The whole world revolves around me the user, wahhh!

I get it, it's not resolved. I don't doubt they try every year and as hard as possible to resolve each issue they're aware of. I literally do this for our business systems at work as part of my job - either resolve a bug, or escalate it with notes if I can't resolve it myself. In all cases, I respond and let each end user who submitted a bug know that their concern regarding Bug XYZ was received, logged, and any tentative resolution we have (or a workaround if we don't). Hell, they can even let me know it's not actually a bug and to git gud. I'm cool with that too. 

I don't think it's unreasonable that we get a response for any bugs we logged (especially in the bugs forum - not referring to the hyperbolic "OMG this game sucks!!!" type of comments in the general discussion here). I'm not asking for a detailed timeline or a peek behind the codes - just some generic details like "hey, this bug is logged but there's no immediate fix, gotta prioritize this other fire first that's impacting 75% of users." If nothing else, acknowledging user submitted issues is just good customer service. Want me to live with a bug because other ones are worse? Fine, I'm adaptable, the bug is an annoyance and not game-breaking (though I will say, MLS bugs can be game-breaking, especially when it concerns the salary cap/squad registration issues), I'll play around it like always. 

I'm not looking to be antagonistic or combative. I personally know this kind of work is thankless at best. I'm just looking for open communication, especially if it's a bug that's been present and submitted across multiple FM iterations, and heard radio silence on. 

[If You Think FM Is Always Broken on Release, Here's Your Chance to Fix It]

So I have to immigrate to the UK, get hired for the Q&A job, report bugs which have been persistent in multiple iterations of FM (I'll grant that most of them are not game-breaking, only immersion-breaking), pay for the game on official release date, in the hopes that a product which I paid for will deliver as intended? I say all this as a lover of the game despite its flaws. Bugs are always ever-present, but they don't always detract from the gaming experience (there's usually workarounds that you pick up via experience). 

Maybe our beta release lead time should be 2 months instead of 2 weeks. So much more user data can be obtained, and issues ironed out long before official release. I want to help, and I report bugs I find in the game. I don't always receive a response though, and I find the same bug persistent in the following release. Maybe if a bug can't be resolved (or resolved without breaking something else), we just get some transparency on the matter? I get it, coding is hard. I'm always willing to work around minor annoyances - I just want honesty if something is not worth their attention to resolve because other bugs are higher in priority. 

I'm assuming you're mostly hinting at the perceived weaknesses of the match engine, which seems to be a huge gripe every year. I can get why people might be upset that strikers do almost nothing, wingers are shooting from 88 degree angles, defenders head the ball to their opposition despite being under no pressure, players refusing to cross/square the ball when common-sense opportunities present themselves, etc. It breaks immersion and it detracts from the player's sense of agency (why pay for a good striker if they all miss 90% of their 1v1s anyways? Why does my world-class winger make decisions that even a Sunday league player in real life with 3 decision wouldn't?). The experience becomes less about designing tactics to generate fun and memorable football, and more about designing tactics to get around the FME.