NineCloudNine

You have the right to post whatever you like here and other posters have the right to reply. That’s how free speech works . You carry on creating and posting your experiments and sharing them to your heart’s content and I will carry on critiquing them, at least until moderators tell us to stop, which I suspect we’re close to.

This thread is why developers don’t bother giving updates until stuff is ready to be released.

I never once said that you ever once asked SI to use your test . The whole premise of your test, the thread you created for it and the post I replied to is that you still see the need to convince the world “once and for all” that pace is OP and the “doubters” are wrong. No-one needs to be convinced. Pace is OP. It has been for decades. The “doubters” exist only in your imagination. Clearly SI can’t fix it in the current ME without breaking other stuff, or don’t consider it a sufficiently serious problem to devote developer time to. Nothing Zealand puts in a video or you post here tells us or SI anything that’s new. We all hope that the new engine in FM25 gives a better balance between physical, mental and technical attributes. No-one needs to be convinced that this is a good idea.

You believe you have eliminated other attributes from the test by standardising their values for all players. But this assumes that the effects you are measuring exist independently of the attributes you have standardised. They do not. Successful passing includes a very large number of factors, of which the passing attribute itself is only one. You have created an entirely artificial and weird set of players. So there is no way of knowing if your results tell us anything about normal players, or just tell us that weird inputs produce weird outputs.

There aren’t any doubters. Pace & acceleration have been very powerful in FM for years, possibly since it was CM. Everyone knows this, no-one disputes it. It’s also obvious that SI know this because (a) they aren’t stupid, (b) those attributes have very high CA multipliers and (c) they are suppressed from natural levels in lower leagues. Given all this, either SI think it’s fine (since pace is, in fact, savagely potent in football) or, more likely IMO, they have reached the limit of what can be done about it in the labyrinthine monster that is the current ME code. People talk here as if there’s just some simple dial that needs to be turned down from 9 to 7. It’s not like that. The aim of the ME is to give a reasonable approximation of a football match within the normal boundaries of gameplay. That’s a fantastically complicated thing to do. It’s a marvel of coding. ‘Fixing’ this ‘problem’ is clearly not possible without breaking other stuff. I trust SI to know more about this than us. They don’t need your tests or Zealand’s video to jolt them into action.

I agree that a team whose only strength is pace should not thrive. It is also likely there are plenty of players with "16 or 17" pace in the real life lower leagues. As discussed earlier in this thread, it seems weird that pace/acceleration are lower in lower leagues. The fact that pace is downgraded in this way by SI demonstrates all on its own that pace is overpowered in the ME. It always has been. Clearly by now SI cannot change it without messing other stuff up, so their solution is to give pace/acceleration very high CA multipliers and suppress it from natural levels in lower leagues. So the video doesn't suggest anything that isn't already obvious and well-known. That said, it is still right to point out (as @Dagenham_Dave does) that the video creates an artificial scenario and therefore produces artifical results. In normal gameplay such a team would never exist. Therefore, there's no reason for SI to have the game account for it. This is true of all tests that use extreme attribute profiles. I don't want SI to spend time examining extreme, artificial scenarios. I'd rather they found a way to better balance mental/physical/technical attributes in normal gameplay and recreating Zealand's scenario or @MichaelNevo's test doesn't help with that at all.

It’s hard to tell if your experiment has uncovered something interesting or just statistical noise: * Your control group contains far too many weird inputs. Maxing team cohesion, morale and tactical familiarity is fine because this is achievable in-game but the player profiles are too extreme to act as a comparison. * 100 games just isn’t enough to draw out significant structural features of the ME. Natural performance variation in football is so great and scoring so low that you need to simulate vast numbers of games to be sure you’ve found something that isn’t just a streak. * Individual attribute differences of 16-18-20 are just not large enough to distinguish without very very large sample sizes of simulated games.

Those days never existed. People have been trying to crack games since Pong.

This is what roles and role familiarity is intended to achieve. You also get a glimpse of it in assistant advice like 'X is used to a more direct game than is being asked of him'. But as has been pointed out multiple times on these forums, role familiarity can largely be ignored when setting up tactics. Another aspect of this is players becoming annoyed/frustrated at being asked to perform an unfamiliar or non-preferred role. Again, these preferences exist in the game (players sometimes ask for a promise to be played in a particular role) but don't come up in normal play. What you suggest here would make the game much harder. Recruitment, tactics and squad management (arguably the three pillars of the game) would all be significantly more tricky. I'd love this and I suspect many forum regulars would, but added complexity/difficulty of this sort is very much not the development direction of the game.

There’s no way to know if you are uncovering something about physical attributes or something about players who never get injured, never underperform, don’t feel pressure and never give up.

Not just that, but:

You don’t think this might just influence the results a bit?

How did the players react?

Why do you believe this to be a function of the game coding rather than your tactics & game management, or just luck?

Which they did. Can someone please remind me what this argument is about?