retired_taustin

I said it because in the game itself, reputation isn't a number, it's a word: Obscure, Local, National, Worldwide, etc.

I assume they are talking about who has heard of them in this case, regardless of how it's technically used in the game.

retired_w0lfpack1

Great, thank you for the raw data + analysis , isuckatfm; I really appreciate the contribution you've been making to the forum these past six months. KUTGW. :thup:

That's been bugging me since it happened to me in an FM'05 game; I had no problem with the idea that my player wanted to move to a bigger club .. but the idea that he signed on to move to the club in 20th and bound for relegation when it was pretty clear we'd be in the Premiership the following year ..

.. He wound up playing two consecutive seasons in the Championship when he could have spent the second in the Premiership - and then his "bigger team" failed to come back up, so he was on into his third season (and, predictably, unhappy).

It has me thinking that players making transfer arrangements after the close of the January window, for the following July window, ought to take into account "expected division" and "expected European play".

For example, Aston Villa (to pick a team out of a hat) have just spent four straight 10th-place seasons, with no Europe at the end of it. On March 1st, they're currently sitting in 3rd. Some excitement should be starting to build - and players might not view them as a "Champions League" team, but should at least see them as a "UEFA Cup" team.

Likewise, Crystal .. who was that again, Chas? .. Palace are sitting 13th on March 1st.. but have just won the League Cup. Players should be able to "look ahead" to see their UEFA Cup berth next year, and make decisions based on that.

Finally, Sheffield United are sitting 20th, ten points adrift and sure to get relegated .. players should begin evaluating them as a Championship side, and even more, their own players should start thinking about moving - at least the disloyal, ambitious ones.

I'd even love to hate receiving a message "Joe Ambitious has stated that he wants to move in the summer. He is not interested in playing for the club following its inevitable relegation, and asks to be placed on the transfer list." .. and worse, you might get disinterested, unmotivated play from Joe if you don't transfer-list him. Flipping it, if he's transfer-listed, he has more motivation .. at least until a deal is finalized .. as he sees himself as "in the shop window."

Your loyalists, of course, would still be working hard to avoid relegation, and some might even tell you so in a 'message of support for under-fire manager Tom Relegationbound.'

leftfoot

As difficult as it is for an Irishman to accept a compliment, I'll say thank you. It's nice to see a thread like this with people questioning how accurately the game reflects real life as it can highlight issues that might not come up in testing given the volume of paths any one gamer can take down the FM road. It beats the unconstructive 'this game sucks' threads that have dominated since the new release.

Being this is my first time on the forums when a new version is released, I have to ask is the reaction always like this? People have a crazy attachment to this game, a sense of ownership that seems to invoke some fairly over the top reactions.

When I first started thinking about this on 07 I started testing as the events occurred. In real life we have a sense of the expected whereas in the game it deals in absolutes. Even if a team has suffered 10 straight defeats and the probability of them surviving relegation is 99% the game does not reflect this. It only adjusts reputation when the event occurs e.g. when the R appears beside a relegated team and it is a 100% certainty.

I don't see it as a capability issue to generate probabilities but more that it would slow down the processing to unbearably slow speeds. As the game becomes even more popular the aim will be to make it less processing intensive as your average customer, such as myself, doesn't buy a PC with top of the range specs just to play video games. So whether or not the market widens, and prices drop, to the point where the average user PC specs increase dramatically will probably have a huge bearing on how more complex the game becomes.

The only way that the game simulates how a team is perceived from their league position dynamically is reputation changes based on results, but from my testing these are minimal. For example I am Leeds in my first season in the Champions League and I get drawn with Barca, whose rep is more or less the same as at the start of the game in 2007 because I don't have Spanish Leagues active. The reputation points difference at the time of playing was 2000+ points so roughly National to Continental. Yet for achieving a miracle result of a 4-1 home victory I get a reputation increase of 9 points. So you can imagine how difficult it is to increase your reputation substantially based solely on results.

The problem is though how do you replicate this human logic within the code and ensure it works consistently? For us it seems so easy to do but in the game it would have to look at position, take into account how many games have been played, have they played more home games, have they played the top sides etc. I am not a programmer (I seem to make that statement alot on this forum) but I think that would create a massive processing crunch if this had to be done for every single player in the database on a continuous basis.

As much as I am pointing out flaws in the module here, I can't think of a more efficient way to do it as in the vast majority of cases it does the job intended of simulating how a player's stature can determine which clubs they would sign for or when a player might decide he needs to further his career etc.

:thup: definitely something I would like to see. I am not sure if that is in the game at the moment. I might check it out the next time it happens to see if professionalism has any impact on how a 'transfer listed by request' player performs. I would hazard a guess that morale is used too simulate this. So a more professional player might keep on performing if his request is denied but a temperamental player would start to perform poorly.

Also so far I have seen players from relegated Premiership teams request transfers 'bigger club' statement but I have never seen a player specifically reference the fact that the team got relegated which I remember happened on 01/02. Maybe there was a lot of complaints about it at the time so they decided to tone it down or have removed it altogether. Admittedly it is probably a programming tightrope to ensure it doesn't turn to bedlam with every relegated player demanding a transfer, but I don't see why it couldn't be linked to personality types like all of the other player revolt events.

The game displays it as a word but under the hood in the game memory it is represented by numerical values as follows

Obscure 0 to 1299
Local 1300 to 2899
Regional 2900 to 4499
National 4500 to 6999
Continental 7500 to 8999
Worldwide 9000 to 10000

In the game players judge clubs based on this numerical value so to a player one 'continental' club at the top of the range of 8999 is far more appealing than another 'continental' club at the bottom of the range at 7501.
When playing the game this isn't that obvious because as football fans we have an in built view of how clubs are perceived in real life and by and large this is reflected in the game at the beginning. You just have to look at the recent Bayern Munich thread to see how people's perceptions of a club's real life status impacts on how they judge the realism level of FM.

retired_jamoca

Fantastic posts. :thup: :thup: :thup: