Chooxen

This is a case of an exception not disproving the rule. Many managers continually shout from the sidelines, that's not really debatable.

I don't think there's any indication that people don't use shouts. I guarantee you 90%+ players use a shout when the game isn't going their way. And I don't buy for one second that SI don't have the resources required to fix a system as simple as shouts (not that it's incredibly broken to begin with). SI is a company with 285 permanent employees (not including researchers) and are owned by SEGA. This isn't a two-bit operation. There are multiple systems that are fairly simple and have required work for years. They're prioritising UI and graphical overhauls that aren't required whilst other parts of the game remain borderly dysfunctional.

Come off it, you've seen the screenshots. Big boxes of info rather than spreadsheets, a layout that is suited to a mobile/touchscreen rather than a point-and-click high-res screen. The writing's on the wall, what more evidence do you need? Stop simping for game devs that bite their thumb at you.

Speaking also as someone who has coached in sports (not football), we were in constant communication with the players on pitch. You might want to focus on specific individuals or clarify position or when a team should execute a tactic, etc. General shouts of encouragement and reminders to stay focused are also very helpful over a long game where attention wanes and complacency sets in. I honestly don't think the system was so broken that it warranted removal. It is already fairly clear that shouts don't occur until the ball goes out of play and the game often prompts you to change your mind when a highlight occurs, so that you don't berate a team that just scored. It seems to work well even if it's not an ideal system.

In which case, they have made a mistake. The PC version is a more involving game and this is what its players are looking for. We need to see information displayed in a concise and customisable way that minimises clicking and scrolling. Presenting information in big boxes rather than spreadsheets is one of the most frustrating changes I could imagine making for a game like this. What is useful for developers - having one match engine across platforms - is not useful for players. Potentially a huge misstep here, especially if it can't be customised or modded around.

I think there's three main concerns here. First, the UI is big and blocky and unwieldy. It does look like it's made to align with the UI of the mobile version, which is a mistake. On a PC, we need to have the information presented as concisely as possible to avoid lots of scrolling and clicking. Presenting information in big boxes rather than spreadsheets is not useful to us. We need a UI that is - above anything else - concise, navigable and customisable. Second, women's football being included in the same database as the men's game is liable to be a nuisance. If not separated out from the men's game, you're going to find yourself clicking on results, players, competitions etc that are not relevant because you can never sign any of the players nor compete against any of the teams. To all intents and purposes, it's like including cricket teams in the same database. If loaded together, they need to be separated out in a way that requires you, at a bare minimum, to switch between men's and women's games. Third, the removal of features simply because a) they are underutilised or b) because they do not function well suggests a race to the bottom in terms of functionality. Why not simply improve these systems? How difficult is it really to fix the player shout system to make it function in a clearer way? Why remove these features but not other features that are more commonly complained about, such as player interactions or press conferences? It suggests to me that it's all but inevitable that any system that is currently broken will be removed rather than fixed. Other changes such as to the graphics and match engine we haven't seen enough yet to judge, but I think there's plenty in this announcement to cause concern about the direction of the game.

Oh that's crazy. You'd think they could work in fairly harmless off-the-ball fouls without controversy but I guess they have their reasons.

I could be missing something here but I realised today that in years of playing this game, I don't think I've ever seen an off-the-ball foul in the match engine. Anyone else noticed a lack of off-the-ball fouls or alternatively their occurence?

Yeah I can echo that my finances seem to be broadly good, unless it was a response to the mid-season financial slump. There was no notification of this happening either, it seems to just have occurred at some point overnight across multiple staff roles.

In 3 seasons playing as Man Utd, I was only able to sign one player under 18 from abroad, who was himself only a few weeks away from being 18. I think in the English league system it may actually be hardcoded that you can't sign any. I'd like to know if anyone's actually managed it.

Hey, I wondered if anyone else had encountered this. I'm coming to renew my staff wages and have found that my max staff wage for pretty much every staff role has decreased significantly, so much so that there's many members of staff whose contracts I cannot renew. Has anyone else had this happen or is this a bug?

If they were, we wouldn't have leagues awash with foreign-born players. There's a tinge of the political in the work permit rules I daresay. No, I've never seen that film.

Weighing on this, it's clearly a design decision the developers have deliberately made. It's obviously a workaround design to prevent you from buying up all the 5-star regens when they're 15. Its effect is that it ruins the fun of scouting young foreign players. It is also unrealistic. The premise that a 17-year-old player from an unknown team in South America has zero interest in moving to Man Utd is clearly unrealistic. The idea that 'Brexit' or work permit rules such as int caps or league quality would prevent Man Utd from signing a hot prospect from South America is clearly preposterous. If this were the case, we wouldn't have U-21 squads across the top flight rammed full of players from every corner of the globe. It's a broad-brush solution to a feature of real-life football that is perceived as an 'exploit' in the context of the game. Its lazy implementation ruins both realism and fun. If you want to create obstacles to signing up all the regens in order to balance the game a bit, the obstacles need to be both more realistic and more surmountable. Maybe 1 in 10 South American youths will actually sign a pre-contract with you. Maybe they're all homesick so will require higher wages. Make navigating these obstacles part of the game. Put a little effort into it.

My issue with it isn't simply that player interest ought to be higher, but as far as I'm aware these are imaginary obstacles. In relatively recent versions of the game, you could agree a contract when a player was 16 to bring them to the UK when they turned 18. No real reason that couldn't be how these signings work now as far as I can tell. Also, I don't really believe the work permit rules are as strict as all that. Knowing dear old Blighty as I do, there's no way football clubs are being prevented from signing as many 18-year-olds from Timbuktu as they like regardless of their wage, caps or league quality. Our immigration laws are not that strict, there's no way we're preventing top-flight clubs from bringing young footballers here on temporary visas. It seems like a hangover from FM19, where the game included best and worst-case scenarios of what Brexit might look like in practice. Let's get it in line with reality, there is absolutely no way these rules function like this in practice.