wazzaflow10

I think part of the issues is that development is very linear. you go one step each progression and it can take a long long time for players to reach their potential in some cases in my experience. It would be great to see some variation of a teenager just bursting onto the scene and have the attributes of a world class player after having marginal attributes during their youth career. Obviously this is PA willing I'm not asking for just have a player go from tweener championship to top level premier league player in the matter of a few months.

this tends to give active teams better academy players too right? It'll get a little unbalanced in terms of needing to buy/sell players since most of your needs will be covered by youth players.

The manual part of this is way too painful when you're at a bigger club with 15-20 scouts in my opinion. LLM its maybe a little more practical and maybe more realistic than saying to scout the whole area you've assigned.

I actually like owning things for one and despise everything becoming a subscription. The number one problem with subscription model is licensing imo. How would you feel if during a save SI lost licensing for a league you were in and your save was ruined as a result? Hell I get mad when Paradox updates their games from CK or HOI and old saves aren't compatible anymore. I also doubt a lot of fixes or mods would be even allowed - one of the reasons I never bothered with Stadia and my biggest pro for playing PC games: fine tuned control compared to consoles Just as an example GTA4 lost a fair bit of the original radio/music due to licensing and they actually went back and patched the game to take it out. Besides its quite fun to go back in time for these games to get a snapshot of the world sometimes or enjoy simpler features/functions. Also it's harder to make nostalgic memories once you're an adult. So a lot of pining for games like they used to be is just everyone wanting to experience the feeling of awe you get as a child playing video games and only the good games have survived the last 40+ years.

fair enough.

Yeah i figured but did a double take reading like wait a minute. thanks.

you don't mean human player here right? the on field players in the game. Just clarifying before it turns into a "see told you SI rigged the game against us".

See I found last year's game completely unplayable with the CB's being fatigued by halftime and away teams being nerfed so badly it was almost futile expecting anything but a draw at best unless you were a top team and even then it was a struggle to score more than 1 goal. PL teams were regularly conceding fewer than 10 goals a season at home. That's happened maybe twice in the past 15 years. I think positional play improved the match engine. Perhaps opened up a few exploits but its hard to argue that it isn't an improvement when players recognize where each other are in space and work together. This year at least what I envision what a tactic should be doing actually happens more often than not and there's fewer wtf moments. I do think defending, particularly positioning, can be improved - if not in mechanically at least visually. My moments of frustration often happen when my central midfield disappear from what they should be doing defensively. But attacking-wise there's a been a big improvement for me compared to 23. I disagree somewhat that their focus is the online portion of the game considering they don't seem to police how the game is played there. I have to think they're aware of the match engine exploits that occur and either can't fix it without breaking the normal part of the game or have decided that it isn't worth the time and effort to rectify these issues individually. There's simply not enough time to try out every single formation and every single combination of role/duty and determine if the formation is breaking something and put a fix in to penalize you for using it.

I don't think there's any way SI could flip the game into the former in its current state. Maybe as you get coaching badges you get access to more advanced roles or formation freedom. Or some sort of GUI on top of the tactics creator that lets you pick a manager's who style you want to emulate and then your attacking 4/5/6 players and formation while in/out of possession and defensive 6/5/4 players and formation while out of/in possession. The game picks roles and duties for you that best match your choices and off you go. Kind of remarkable we've gone from WIBWOB to sliders to the current interface and its still regarded as too complicated.

I mean i've played various competitive online games enough to know that it sucks I don't think there's anything to learn. If the online gameplay for FM is that toxic why bother unless you're playing with people you know? The game itself isn't too easy. Its that there's no repercussions for essentially using known glitches playing online. If that's how people want to play good for them I guess. I suppose there's a sense of accomplishment when you're just copying the latest "best" tactic from a website designed to break the engine. I don't get it though. Maybe when I was 12 that would have been fun.

I don't want to get into a debate of what you do or don't do. Just pointing out that saying the game is too easy while using or having knowledge of what breaks the engine is kind of ironic. Personally I only play offline so I don't have any need to go to these testing sites that may or may not be 'testing' correctly. If I did play online and someone was incessant on creating wonky formations or using roles/tactics that didn't seem grounded in basic tactical principles or obvious attempts to break the engine I'd probably just not play with them. I'd just tell them cool, you've broken the game I guess you're "the best" and move on. If that's fun for them, congrats on copying someone else's work and getting enjoyment out of that. I'm sure the game could be impossible if SI wanted it to be by letting the top AI managers have more creative freedom and view the details of your tactic to exploit every weakness instantly. I don't think that would be realistic but it could probably be done. There's always going to be exploits. I wouldn't call the game easy because of the presence of them.

Sorry not to pile onto you here but you're going out of your way to find websites that produces tactics designed to break the match engine and then claim the game is too easy? I know you can't "unlearn" a glitch but of course the game will be easy if you're trying to break it.

Have you tried playing as a small side to increase difficulty? With increased injuries? Gegenpressing isn't overpowered but you can overload the match engine by doing some crazy tactics (that's existed in every game since the beginning of time). I'll agree scouting is broken, I've never had an issue with interactions once I've established myself, not really encountered many bugs. I don't really think you're going to see much in terms of changes from a late stage patch. Well its "late" compared to other years because they're incorporating more leagues and licenses than they ever have so who knows whats going on behind the scenes. Probably would have been pretty easy to shut up shop for this years version considering the impending change. Not saying we should be thankful we get an update but is there really much difference between April 5th and April 10th in the grand scheme of things? If you've already put the game down then 5 days or whatever it ends up being isn't really going to make or break anything. This happens every year I don't think its indicative of anything. Just fascinating that people think this last update is going to completely overhaul the game.

I'm not really fussed about when it specifically comes out unless they completely miss their target (i.e. its may 1 and there's been no communication as to why its delayed). But realistically I don't think we're going to see anything substantially different in this update barring a few player changes and whatever they just posted. So i don't understand the constant posting on here about "Where's my update." I guess everyone's got their own hopes.

Well if you divide a month into 3 10 day segments then early april could be from April 1 to April 10. Or if you bisect a month then early April will be April 1 to April 15.

Like everyone else who've suggested this you're vastly overestimating the capability of LLM's. Even if it were implemented as a "feature" the game has to know how to take the free text in determine how the players/media would react. SI certainly do not have the resources to codify it into something that makes sense in the game. And then its not even just English they'd have to do this for but however many languages they support in the game. Considering its not really a key module of the game I'm very skeptical of the benefit this would even bring to game, especially if it pulled resources away from the match engine or the transfer market. They'd be better off just hiring a writer to spruce up some of the questions/responses than dump a bunch of resources into technology that's not designed for what you're suggesting.

Yep that's 1000000000% by design. I don't think I've ever disagreed with logic in this game as much as this one.

Correct. But players who are either too good and won't join or not good enough (as deemed by the scout after scouting) should still be scouted and given a letter grade of E, F or D and placed in you scouted players pool for reference. This doesn't happen currently. They just disappear or aren't scouted at all. If a manager sets a scout like the OP example above you should be getting inundated with reports. 95% of them will be useless because the focus is so broad with the CA/PA levels set. Your scout should be reporting back X number of scouting cards on a regular cadence and its up to the manager (assuming you're in control) to acknowledge (defer), keep scouting (prioritize), or discard (stop scouting completely). If SI want to up the challenge for managers finding players and prevent/slow down obscure wonderkid hunting then you should have to be intentional about what it is you're scouting and where. Otherwise you're going to get buried in a bunch of scouting reports that are useless to you. No more scouring the world freely with your scouts only sending you reports of relevant players/wonderkids. For example: If you're a top level club you're not going to scout all of Austria - maybe you only scout the Austrian Bundesliga and look for players with a CA/PA of 2*/3* or maybe you only scout RB Salzburg, Rapid Wien, Sturm Graz, LASK matches. Or if you're a League One Club you don't scout all of England because you're going to get everything from National League to Premier League level players. Instead you focus on Championship, League One, League Two and maybe U21/U18's for youth loans so you're finding relevant players for your team's ability. So naturally you're going to miss players because you can't possibly scout everywhere without creating a load of junk. You also may not have a complete picture of a player when you see rivals are interested in them. Do you buy them with only 30-50% knowledge and wide ranges of attributes only for them to turn out to be a dud? Or do you let your rivals purchase them and miss out on a potential star?

While technically true - its definitely not right. This is apparently what SI want but they've seem to conflate recommendations and actual scouting. It'd be fine if a recommendation didn't have any suggestions because players don't meet the ability level or were wholly uninterested in joining. It's not realistic and very annoying to set broad parameters like this and literally get nothing back in terms of actual scouted players. The game simultaneously knows and doesn't know which players are good enough for you, which players are and are not interested in joining before even scouting them. Logically that doesn't make sense. SI claims the restriction is to slow the player down more or less from scooping up all the wonderkids. That's fine I guess but there's still the player search capability in the same scouting tab where you can literally make a filter for whatever you want. You can also queue players to be scouted from that screen so the scouts will scout them if asked. In my opinion, someone changed something and they're not sure where or what happened and therefore can't separate the recommendation from the scouting modules. It's severely affected my interest in any long term saves. Either I use player search and filter which feels like cheating because you're effectively bypassing scouting, or fumble along this awkward scouting module lose immersion in the game because I have no idea who players are.

The parameters you set are applied only when you click "keep scouting" or ask for a scouting report. If they are doing an assignment as part of a focus I think there's some default behavior that has them set to watch a set amount of matches. It'll all clear out eventually. You can also reorder the list if there's someone you have to scout right away. With that said, scouting doesn't seem to work very well, at least not the same as it did in FM23. It's kind of just there and your scouts may or may not find players depending on how good your team is or how interested a player is in joining your club. Focuses exist to just recommend players. If there's no one to recommend, no one seemingly gets scouted. How they know who is interested or if they are good enough before being scouted is circular logic. But that's what we've been told based on bug reports of scouts twiddling their thumbs while on assignment. Its more of an issue if you're a top European club than anyone else.

14 of the 24 are two goals or fewer. What's the obsession with 1-0 for every match? What a boring game that would be. Might as well go home after one team scores.

Given they've gone down the new engine route it seems like they don't think they can fix the existing bugs without completely rewriting the core modules anyway. The main benefit to the Unity change I think is they'll widen the pool of prospective applicants and reduce ramp-up time for newly hired developers. Equally, losing a senior developer either via promotion or exit won't be as devastating to the team since the code should be more standardized.

Could be. I didn't play 22 very much so I have no idea if it was an issue there for me. I sent them a version of the game pre and post schedule issue in the bug report I opened for this year. I would think it'd be an "easy" fix for them but who knows.

That would be one of the more mild conspiracy theories about this game lol. I'm currently playing 21 and I don't have this issue and I'm seven season in now. I've not come across it at all until 24.

You know its almost like someone accidentally runs a sort based on something close to reputation or expected finish in the fixture maker part of the code. Arsenal - MC - Liverpool - Chelsea - Spurs - Man Utd - Everton - Fulham - Wolves - Palace - Villa - Burnley - Forest - Brighton - Brentford - Luton - West Ham - Bournemouth - Sheffield Utd Newcastle seems to be a bit of a wildcard slotting in as needed.