Blünderbossu

If those screenshots used space any worse they'd have to rename the game Starfield.

It's certainly a nice thing to have if the engine looks better graphically but I hope they're staying laser-focused on how it plays. I suspect a pretty but unbalanced and glitchy match engine would not be perceived as an improvement. If they're struggling for time I pray they'll throw everything at functionality and leave making it shiny until next year.

I think it would be neat to notice wages/prices gradually go up in a save for inflation reasons. A super-tiny thing that you wouldn't make a fuss over or model particularly deeply, but it'd be one of those touches of environmental storytelling that'd make the gameworld feel a bit more real. Maybe my Slack-personality part-timer no-nonsense centre back could also inflate three stone over the summer due to moving job to the pie factory... alas the latest update suggests that news item is never gonna come into my inbox portal now.

I appreciate the openness on the development direction for the game as it allows people to make informed decisions on whether they want to buy it. I think it looks like one to wait and see after release for a few months to get an extended grasp of the community feedback rather than a must-buy. There's a certain vibe given by the delay, a new engine and most of the announcements being about things they're removing. There has been a tendency to implement new features in the past for the sake of it and without them being fully realised and improved over time, but with some of the stuff getting removed the flaws have been known for ages and they should have been prioritised years ago to improve so their outright removal doesn't look great. From an immersion point of view, the loss of shouts is strange as it makes sense to me that in addition to giving tactical instructions a manager would be able to motivate their players from the dugout. International management in real life is very media-management heavy and how flat it feels in the game may be somewhat tied up with the flaws of in-game media and press conferences. A lot of people who have developed a degree of interest in women's football recently mainly follow national teams so the removal of international management at the same time as adding women's football feels like an area where this long-term project hasn't meshed together terribly well. I don't think they needed to announce removing weight from the game. The only use case I've honestly had for it is it's included in my desperation filter for when I accidentally my entire scouting budget in lower league as along with height and previous club it allows some emergency guessing on loan youngsters and narrowing down free agents in terms of guessing what type of player they *might* be. I'd caution against taking up too much in these posts about things that won't matter for the regular user, especially if they come across as patting themselves on the back for their own progressivism where the change is either very small or where the impacts on the general user are negligible or even negative. In terms of where it can be negative, I've seen some speculation (not from the devs directly at this stage), that the questionable direction of the UI may be for accessibility reasons. To be blunt, if the UI does turn out garbage then accessibility won't be a defence - nobody wants to roll around in a dumpster even if it's wheelchair accessible.

For the following reasons: all the in-game indicators (data hub, league statistics) suggest that I should be winning enough of the matches to be top of the league rather than 15th and in relegation form. because watching the matches in comprehensive confirms that my opponents are making fewer chances and that these chances are of lower quality. Where there are sections of the match where the opponents are doing well, I make minor changes to roles and opposition instructions and my team returns to being the most active in creating chances. because I have followed the approach of having a slightly more attacking and defensive version of the tactic. These have the impacts you would broadly expect, with the slightly more defensive version regularly resulting in very few highlights for the opponent even in comprehensive...except for the single shot from an opponent with a long shots attribute of 6 going in from 25 yards. The defensive tactic also continues to create chances on the break, indicating that it is unlikely to be 'too defensive'. because in the same save, a slightly less pronounced version of the same thing happened in a previous season for a run of 20 matches resulting in a relegation where the indicators said I should have been comfortably top-half. because in the same save, I've had a team promoted which was nowhere near good enough to get promoted go up with nearly 100 points with tons of pretty fortunate wins in a faintly ridiculous run of straight wins mid-season. Now, clearly, the plural of anecdote is not data. Because I regularly play on comprehensive, I only have the one save of four and a bit seasons for this year to go off. I am in the feedback thread giving the feedback that it seems perhaps too extreme because out of those four seasons three of them have felt wacky due to extreme runs of form.

My team is only a few points clear of relegation in December on a run of one win in ten while the XG stats are saying I should be top of the league (we are underachieving in both attacking and defensive xG by 8). The data hub says we're excellent in both attack and defence. Watching in comprehensive highlights, build-up and pressing looks fine, we've only been outplayed in one game. No pattern to the opposing goals except it's often 80% + of the shots on target that they have. The opposing team's goals are not individually high xG chances. My dynamics are fine, morale is okay, the squad comparison suggests we we're among the top teams in attributes. My goalkeeper has good attributes for the level and was excellent last season. He isn't inconsistent. My forward players are regularly missing good chances. Please god for next year's game tone down the impact of 'being on a run'. You can certainly argue it's realistic but when the player has minimal agency to make any difference to results it's not a very satisfying game.

I'm in my fifth season with the same team and still in the Vanarama North so I'm not feeling the vibe that the game is too easy overall. I feel like the old trope about 'morale manager' applies more this year than ever though. Generally I find that matches are pretty close and when I have a bad run it's not because the AI is doing a great job with tactics but because I happened to lose a couple of narrow matches and then suddenly 75% of my opponent's shots go in match after match. Similarly there's parts of the season where this applies to my team. That's fine in aggregate stats maybe but inconsistent form rather than blocks of extremes would make it feel like the manager has more impact on the game. I can see the small in match changes I make impact the engine and move stats in my direction a bit but that's not much good when the opponent has 3 shots on target and 2 goals and at best I can lose 2-1 or if I get things just right pull it back to 2-2 before the next match is a rinse and repeat. When it's my team's turn to be good again I can speed through a session of a half dozen matches barely needing to pay attention to highlights. The last couple of seasons I've had a run of 1 win in a dozen followed by ten wins in a row without changing anything which feels a bit off.

End of season one. I'm 15% below my wage budget. My team has a positive bank balance. I can't renew any contracts because can't offer a reasonable wage. Depending on playing time status I can offer between 50% and 75% of what the game is elsewhere telling me I should be able to offer. External players also want similar wages. I would be able to afford all renewals if I was actually allowed to offer the 'advised maximum basic wage' that's set out on the wages screen. The phrase 'game-breaking' is probably overused but reckon this one qualifies.

I'm seeing a lot of goals from corners, free kicks. Both for and against. Number from first phase possibly okay but then also from second phase where players seem to switch off after the initial ball is cleared. Have manually changed suggested set pieces to have players on edge of area but doesn't seem like they actually follow the instruction. Other issue I've noticed is only a couple of times seen anything resembling decent counter attacking hold up play. The side who had the set piece usually gets the ball back, the players don't push up quickly enough, the player runs in to long shot or to cross to someone edge of the area unchallenged with the ball usually pinging in off one of the defenders still sitting way too deep.

Don't know if this is just because I'm finding this year's game bastard hard and so player morale is in the toilet and they're too depressed to run, but I've noticed my players really won't close down players at the edge of our area. Tried increasing their pressing, using step up more instruction, tighter marking etc. but nothing I do seems to be having much of an impact in the match engine.

Christ. Profile pic looks like something from a horror film. Man's just been jumped from behind by carnivorous popcorn.

As an update to this for anyone else struggling with something similar there is one kind-of workaround for now. The excessively low wage cap for my staff doesn't apply when hiring someone who is also registered as a player. So after manually searching through all the oldest players in the player search screen I found there was one 37 year old willing to be player/chief scout on emergency backup playing time. He'll probably retire from playing at the end of the season though, at which time I imagine he'll leave. His player/staff wage is £450 and I guess he's going to be no keener than anybody else to accept the maximum offerable wage for Chief Scout (£200) when I try to extend after he retires...

Starting my King's Lynn save, I put out adverts for all the vacant staff positions (head physio, chief scout, head performance analyst, sports scientist, director of football, and also a couple of U19 roles). Received no external applicants for any of them via the job centre after leaving the advert running for a couple of months. The only people interested were staff already at my club in other roles who I believe were on non-contracts. They couldn't be offered a non-contract for their new role but both happily accepted a full-time contract of £1 per week. Offered their old positions back out to the job centre for a month so far, zero applicants for them either. One of my £1/week staff members was a Director of Football so next idea was to set him to try to hire staff in the staff responsibilities. He's not made a single offer to anyone, which I can't particularly hold against him given what we're paying him. Gone into the the staff search screen now and hit on what seems to be the issue - even the lowest world-reputation staff who come up on the 'interested staff' filter want double the wages that I can offer for any given role. Not above any of my budgets so wages aren't being capped for that. Board won't accept raising any of the job budgets. Therefore can't hire any scouts and am relying on my £1/week Director of Football with judging ability of 3 to scout one player a week. Probably not working as intended - guessing the staff wage limits are scaled as if the team is part-time and so they're not set at a level anybody is close to willing to accept for a full-time role.

Vast majority of the time those players complaining in my save, when I check the game's judgement of their "actual playing time" vs. "agreed playing time" they are getting the same or even one tier above what was agreed. Players complaining when it's not reasonable to do so is for sure something that real life managers have to deal with so I don't have any problem with it from a realism point of view. The game could handle it a *lot* better in terms of the fit with the player interaction/conversation module though. If in such cases there was a conversation option to say "actually you're getting as much time as we agreed" and then he either accepts or says "I need more game time to develop/for the benefit of my career" then this would feel a lot better for me as a player of the game than only having options to choose from which sound like they're me accepting I haven't been sticking to what's agreed. It's not about the end result - I wouldn't expect them to back down any more than they already do - but if the dialogue tree I go down made sense with what the game is reporting for his game time elsewhere then it would stop the conversation being jarring and feeling like a bug even if the mechanics underneath maybe reflect how players are unreasonable sometimes.

I frequently get asked in the press conferences about the referee performance and there being some controversial decisions in the match but during the match I've not been alerted by the game in any way about anything potentially controversial having happened so have no idea what specifically I'm being asked to comment on. In some cases it'll probably be an accumulation of bad decisions or lots of cards or something like that. But if there's a specific incident, the game could have a link to go view in the match engine so I can escape "Arsene Wenger mode" in my responses once in a while!

Just like FM22, I'm finding that the difficultly level swings wildly based on small movements in player morale, team form, and player concerns/complaints. I mention the latter two separately because it often plays like they're barely related mechanically to morale and a problem with even a couple of players or a completely expected run-ending loss causes the whole team to go from genius to utterly inept even when the morale for the team is still in the green. I can be on a run of five comfortable wins in a row and then after narrowly losing in the cup to a team two divisions higher my form will still go off a cliff and I'll lose eight in a row even though the morale was still good; similarly I can have a player come to me with a concern that usually doesn't really make much logical sense, have only a couple of bench-warmers agree with them and still despite the morale still looking good my team have all suddenly completely forgotten how to pass or press for the next half dozen games. And then the next time I load the game I'm winning every match at a canter again. It's sort of balanced because my tactics and squad building probably never merited the run of wins I was on in the first place, but it certainly feels like a whole season of mediocrity happens a lot less than these feast/famine seasons the past few iterations of FM. When mediocre form is happening it feels like things you are doing are having an impact whereas most of the time I'm playing I feel either like I barely need to pay attention to win or that I need to be peak Fergie to get a draw against the bottom team in the Vanarama National North.

Previously no issues running the game. Post update the game took several minutes to lag through the loading screen. My PC then turned itself off twice from the graphics card overheating in matches (I play on 2D!) I've applied the launch command mentioned above and the loading screen time went back to normal but I'm a little bit reluctant to go back into a match in case it melts my PC NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1080 Ti