Supermercado99

I think the finances play into it, clubs getting relegated from the EPL have the parachute payments that stop them from going into terminal decline but I'd love to see more cases of teams imploding and plummeting through the divisions. It's probably not going to happen because of licensing, but even crap chairmen buying out clubs and wrecking them would add some spice.

FM is a mighty effort of a game to put together but agree that an option to dial back some of the monotonous stuff would be great. Just let me do media interaction, team meetings, deadline days, draws etc... from the inbox. If people want to choose to have the draw experiences and backgrounds for press conferences let them, but have the option to streamline it for enthusiasts. Put the nice graphics on the ads, give those of us who just want to get through a game an option to make it quicker. I've also got back into CM01/02 recently, and I think the devs of the modern version should spend a couple of days playing it and realise that more complicated is not always better. There's a lot of great stuff that game doesn't have, but it's so much easier to play through without all the fancy stuff. Media interaction should be a bit more than an inbox message saying "Player X is doing well" - build up praise/play down praise, but I don't need to go to a different screen and respond to four questions by A. Journo from the London Football Times to do the same thing.

Side question - best versions of simulation of the football world. The depth of players and teams in the later versions is amazing (especially if you torment your computer by loading them all like me), but I find the movement of the teams and yo-yoing between divisions really boring. Teams rarely bomb through the divisions, and more often than note when relegated to the National League they bounce right back when in real life teams often go into freefall. I recently fired up CM01/02 with some of the fan made patches and enjoyed the volatility of the leagues. It helps that money wasn't out of control yet, but I saw Stockport get promoted to the Premier League, overspend, go horrifically bankrupt, and a few years later battle to avoid relegation to the Conference. Everton got relegated, lost the Division 1 playoff final, then got relegated again and are struggling in Division 2. Pre-Tycoon Manchester City battled for a couple of years to get promoted to the top flight, won the title, nearly got relegated the next year, are back in the title hunt now, Preston and Ipswich have looked possible EPL winners in a couple of seasons etc... etc... Maybe it's a product of its time (and that as a Wimbledon fan I can play with the last real squad before you-know-what happened) but even with less teams and less players the game world just feels more variable than later versions.

(NB: If there's a way to do this and I'm missing it somebody please let know!) One of the big frustrations for me is that newgen managers come in at an unreasonably high reputation and get jobs they shouldn't, so each season when the new managers are created I lower their reputations. At the moment I need to go through a clunky process in <snip> to do this, so it would be great if this could be added to the official IGE to make it easier.

Not expecting an editor on release either. There's already the risk of the brand-new version of the game having a million bugs to fix after release, I feel like they won't want to complicate that process by having people (e.g. us!) testing it with 20 level English databases, fictional nations and advanced rules split seasons with average points tables. I'm in the minority of FM players who use it as a football world simulator rather than a management game, so I'm really hoping that there are improvements to how that's done in the new version (and just to be clear, I think the game does an amazing job of this at the moment but some tune-ups will make it even better) but will hold off until the editing capabilities are at least equal to what we've got now.

The panel was hidden and you had to go through a process to get it. It was a great step when they introduced it as default.

I know editing is so far down the FM foodchain that there won't be any grand announcements, but with the major changes to the next version I'm wondering if there will be changes (good or bad) for editors. For all it's flaws and complications, the current version of the editor is amazingly powerful but hasn't been completely overhauled in years. The dead giveaway is when you choose 'use real fixtures' and the example date shown is from 2009, but there's also references to the Australian league that hasn't existed for 20 years, COVID rescheduling etc... Presumably the same data will be the base for competitions in the new game, but am wondering how different (if at all) the editor will look, and whether we'll be able to do advanced rules from day one or it'll be hidden again to stop people from breaking the new game on launch. What's already in the editor is so good (albeit so much of it unexplained, relying on trial and error or the experience of others to use) there doesn't need to be a great leap forward, but I'd be interested to know if we should look forward to/fear any major changes in design or functionality rather than being surprised on release. There's been a decade of suggestions to improve things already in there which either can't be used (changing regen name pools, setting regen nations for clubs] or need complicated workarounds to get right [drafts, all star games, national service etc...] but I'm more pessimistic and think editing will go backwards for a couple of years under the new version. SI people, if you're reading is there any insights you can give about the future of editing in FM?

Update on this - with a combination of: - Matches with altered times for TV - General > Don't use home match days <- Ignore this, it creates days where neither of the teams that share a ground plays at home - Stadium Rules > Stadium Pool > Allow Multiple Matches Per Day Per Stadium - Fixture Rules > Fixture Times > Alternative Times To Use - League Schedule > Match Days (by adding multiple entries for the same day with different times) ... I'm getting the desired effect. These are the defined times set in the Match Days, and the game has stayed loyally to them with no random times/days thrown in. EDIT: In case anyone finds this via Googling for the answer - just want to let you know this only works when matches are moved for television, so the lower divisions still shift games to alternative days. It's frustrating that the setting for offset times when matches are played in the same stadium + the same stadium setting isn't enough to do the job. Is there a league where teams playing home games on the same day so I can look at the advanced rules for clues? I tried Gibraltar but they play in a specific stadium so it's not the same.

I'm in the vast minority of players who use FM more as a football world simulator than a manager game but a small change that shouldn't be too hard to implement would be a 'do not disturb' option in manager profile where you're not offered jobs and automatically reject media questions. It's especially annoying several years in when you're still being asked if you're open to working overseas when you've never had a single job.

When teams share a stadium, is there a setting that will force them to play home league games on alternate match days? It's frustrating seeing Saturday fixtures pushed to Sunday so both can play at home. I might be able to use offset dates to make one of the teams play earlier on the same day but would prefer to have them alternating.

This is more of a bug, but now that you can't post user interface issues I'll do it in here and hope it might be addressed another way. If you subscribe to a competition's facilities updates in the social feed you get a story like the one below when a team proposes a new stadium, and you get a story when their move is delayed, but you never get one when the new stadium actually opens. I'm sure there's supposed to be one, because it makes no sense to give all the updates but announce the actual opening date. If you subscribe to facilities updates for an individual team you'll get the news story. This was reported last year as well so hopefully it's an easy fix for the future.

Regens that don't look like Sega Master System characters.

These are so good - I especially like the staff photos. Should embarrass SI for their ugly, Sega Master System level regen pictures.

It's a niche concern because I'm sure most people don't start with empty databases, but this would be relevant to people who are adding lower leagues that require fictional players/staff to be generated. - All managers generated at the start of the game are aged 29 to 35. It's only the second season when managers in their 40s are created. Can we get a wider variety of manager ages in the first season? - Generated players seem to have a PA cap regardless of the youth rating of the nation and the reputation of the club/division. If we can have any cap lifted this will open up the prospect of a different sort of 'fake players' game, where you delete all the existing players in the database and let the game make new ones. - My set ticket prices in the database are changing. What is meant to be a 20 pound ticket loads in the game as a 3 pound ticket. I've noticed in lower league databases covering other countries that ticket prices stay as expected, so I think it's got something to do with the reputation of the country. This is something that needs to be looked at because it affects the finances in a fictional league.

I just have it on during the day and walk in to click a button every few minutes. Prefer to watch the world unfold (slowly) than manage my own team anyway. Update - posting this was like a drug addict realising they've hit rock bottom. I'll never give up my all players loaded lifestyle but dialling the leagues back to level 9 so I'm not stuck on the same season for a month.

I've got every player in the world loaded + a Level 13 English database + my own custom leagues (about 520,000 players), and if the file makes it to 20 seasons it will be a miracle of modern computing. Mind you, it's so slow that I'll be lucky to live that long.

What setting can I use to ensure that if eight teams are relegated to four groups of a child league that two go into each group? It seems to randomly distribute for me, so I often end up with two of the groups getting three relegated teams and the others one each. There's no geographical rules set for the parent or child divisions. UPDATE - I've just had a season where the four groups got 3, 3, 0, 2 teams - with sides randomly being moved into the third group to replace the relegated sides. This is definitely not what I want.

One of the English lower league databases had an issue where some tiny team folded midway through this year so SI removed them from the database in an update. Then the editor data file was looking for a team ID that didn't exist anymore so couldn't validate. Should never be an issue with a new game (unless a team dies right before the season) but can be an issue with mid-year database updates.

If you're playing an observer game, running through to test something, or simply can't be bothered with them the in game editor should allow you to choose not to receive any journalist questions. I haven't spoken to them for years, they don't take the hint on their own.

It's ridiculous that this isn't available to editors, it would open up so many more possibilities for creative databases.

One problem is if teams have been deleted from the database in the update - I know that's caused problems for mod makers in the past. If there's no issues the files will validate ok - what about a bulk validator so you don't have to do all your files individually?

It's not great for AI teams - they'll sign players just short of the maximum age then let them rot. I hoped a non-contract team would automatically release players when they became ineligible but they keep them until the end of the season - and sometimes even longer.

The news system needs a reboot. It's great how you can subscribe to the topics you want (and smashes the way news is done in comparable games like OOTP) but we've been looking at the same interface for years. This is something that could be refreshed without affecting crucial elements like match engine/transfers, because in the end it's just reporting what happens elsewhere in the game. I've put this in the new version suggestion forum for the last couple of years with no luck but hoping for a fresher interface for news next year. I've got a vision of what I'd like to see but no point going into major detail if it's not a development priority.