NineCloudNine

@fat mole did you try to negotiate the price higher when clubs bid? Did the players want to move? Did you set an asking price in the transfer centre and see what the player thought of it?

You’re playing a modded game and the mod doesn’t include staff at the level you need. That’s a problem for the modder, not the game. It would be a great addition to the mod to add staff that are not in the base game. I believe there are also pre-game editor settings to manage staff wage levels. Sounds like a fun project .

This interface was presumably put in to simplify searching/filtering but as you describe it is less flexible. I respect the intent but it’s unintuitive (why are some things tick box, others drop down and others manually selected?). I suspect it was done in a hurry.

Yes to those. Being asked for my reaction every time a player scores for their country is dull. As is the limited set of questions in press conferences. But that's a different thing - a very small database of questions in a module that hasn't been updated for years. Not the same as your brain convincing you that you are seeing patterns in the vast range of outcomes and events in a football match.

I don’t recall ever seeing food poisoning. I may have done. It certainly hasn’t happened often enough for it to register as a thing. You didn’t say “given away a penalty” you said “the first round of the league cup almost always ends in a penalty shootout”. I don’t recall ever going to a penalty shoot-out in an early League Cup round. I may have done. It certainly hasn’t happened often enough for it to register as a thing. I could go on… Your brain is playing tricks on you. We’re all wired to spot patterns. It’s a useful survival skill in the wild, but it’s terrible when applied to random events in things like games. There is an enormous scientific literature around this. Start by looking up “confirmation bias” and go from there.

The picture shows Roofe registered so I am confused about who was and was not registered when, and when they complained .

But it’s in red!!! His bravery & aggression suck though. He’s not going to be hurling himself into the bodies to get to the ball Van Dijk style!

It’s a bit more complicated than that. An employer is allowed to use an under-represented characteristic to select a candidate from among those who are otherwise equally qualified for the job, and can encourage or enable applications from under-represented groups. All-female shortlists (for example) are illegal. The Govt of the time gave themselves an explicit exception to the law to allow for all-female Parliamentary candidate shortlists.

No

A player in FM needs 15 mins to get a rating and I believe that this is the threshold for the minutes contributing to development and playing time happiness.

Why don’t you find out if it does first?

I don’t recall any of these things ever happening to me.

I do the opposite. If I am winning I sub off the players with the highest ratings, to preserve that rating. Keeps them fresh, keeps them happy, gives minutes to understudies. Scores are not added up btw. Your players have high scores because they are playing well. It’s not more complicated than that.

If you have so many players that you need to leave someone decent out of a 25-player roster then you have too many players. I never have more than 20 senior pros, with around 5-8 kids bridging first team and youth teams. The specific example you had might be odd in itself, but large squads leading to discontent is perfectly reasonable IMO.

If a net transfer income of £51m only leaves the club £24m in the black, that doesn’t suggest strong underlying finances.

What does the 5-year financial projection look like? Has your wage bill gone up? Commercial income strong? Not saying it isn’t a glitch, just looking for why your AI boss’s algorithm has arrived at its decision.

Nunez came to mind for me as well. But I think the fuller answer is from @Freakiie above: strikers who miss chances IRL are likely to be given average finishing but poor composure / first touch etc by researchers. So you’d see 10 finishing / 5 composure players, never 5 finishing / 10 composure. However, the newgen template in the game can give you a 5 / 10 player.

Why is his tackling attribute relevant?

No, they just represent the PA range from which the player PA will be drawn when you start a game. You can see how it all works if you play around in the (free) pre-game editor.

Whenever I see slightly mad results I wonder what would be made of it on these forums if it were to happen to someone in FM. Team goes into a Cup final missing 4-5 guaranteed starters, loses a midfielder to injury after half an hour so the RB has to play on the wing, opposition miss several hilarious sitters, reserve keeper makes a couple of blinding saves, team plays extra time with 5 players aged 20 or below and an average age of 22, then wins in the 119th minute with a header from a corner. It was in the script I tell you!

While it might seem that forums are a hostile environment for developers, my experience from other game communities is that dev engagement is almost always well and respectfully received. Posters who respond rudely are quickly shut down by others who want to engage constructively. SI’s policy of near-absolute omerta is an outlier in game communities despite this forum being a relatively benign place. Posting here is definitely not going to be for everyone and no dev should be obliged to do so, but those who are willing should be allowed and would be well received. And it is very hard to see the rationale for complete official silence on patch timing and development.

There is logic to this. Of course, unless you are Xavi, Zidane or De Rossi you have to work your way up to the big teams. Whereas in FM you go straight in to managing Real Madrid and buying Mbappe and 15 wonderkids in year one because that’s what people want to do. Thus LLM is harder than managing the best teams in the world, which is completely upside down.

Making the game challenging for experienced and “incredibly good” players would make it impossible for large numbers of casual players on whom the commercial viability of the game depends. FM is already a daunting learning curve for a new player. It is easy to get into a spiral where you are losing and nothing works and you get fired. The game will give you little to no clue as to why or what to do. The difference is that you - the incredibly good player - have tools available to make your game more difficult. You snarkily dismiss these, but they exist. Attribute masking, not using player search, not making unrealistic transfers, not using tactics you know to be OP. The casual player faced with a daunting array of confusing and poorly explained game elements has nowhere to turn. If difficulty levels were introduced then they would work the exact same way as other number-based games: artificially boosting AI numbers while nerfing yours, or vice-versa. Would this work for you?

I’m not a massive fan of subscription either, but for as long as there is an annual release with a new name then the current cycle wil continue. There is limited Dev resource and at least some of it will be spent on New Shiny Thing. That means only one or two of the last dozen Shiny Things will get touched. Your list of hopes is basically just “be better” but let’s assume the Dev team are already doing their best. So either the annual model has to change, the price has to go up or SI have to take the risk of an annual release focused on optimisation but with no new features and hope that they don’t get destroyed in reviews.

Many games locked into an annual expansion / release cycle get caught in this trap. Marketing insists that there has to be some new thing or feature. So there is one. If there’s nothing glaring missing, something is invented. Over time this means a game contains a LOT of features, many of which won’t have had much Dev love in the first place, or whose champion has moved on. With limited Dev resources and a lot of accumulated features, each year most things get left untouched. This annoys players, who cannot understand why half the game feels like it is still in beta or hasn’t been updated since the feature was added. It makes the game bloated, fiddly and complex. Most of the things that frustrate me - player interactions and press conferences in particular - have been barely touched for years. But until the annual release requirement is stopped, in favour of a subscription model with regular small/medium/large updates, I don’t have much hope this will change.