FrazT

What a pleasnt change to have a reasonable discussion about a relevant FM topic.

In summary I agree that the rating system is in essence a good one but could be better with some fine tuning. If SI had left the system as it was for 07 I suspect there wopuld have been less comment and it has come to attention because it has changed. We dont really know how the rating system works and it would be good to find out at least the basics of it to better aid understanding.

I agree also with the GK ratings as these have always beena mystery.

TeeWee

But doesn't this show exactly what's wrong with the current implementation? You're saying that 7 is a reasonable performance, so there's only a three points left to the upper side. If you calculate the same scale downwards, then you get a minimum performance of a 4. 1-3 are simply unused.

There are three things here: an implied average score of 6 which is not exactly in the middle of the allowed range (1-10); and the interpretation that a decent performance starts at 7. And last but not least, the ratings are not severe enough IMHO. Too many 6s and 7s and not enough 5s and 8s, let alone more extreme. This makes it too hard to judge the relative performances until halfway the season (longer term ratings seem more reasonable)

xouman

I like the 1-10 system. in fact, there are some newspapers that go only from 0 to 4, and 4 are quite unusual to see. The bigger problem is that 6-7-8 ratings are the 90% among all ratings if most games. I would like to start matches with a n/a, and then have a 5 or 6 for plain performances. I think that the average rating for an average player should be a 5.5 among all season, not 7. Why 5.5? Because it's the average value between 1 and 10. Of couse most consistent and quality players could have more than a 7, and some players will perform under 4 due to bad form, bad season for team... etc


IRL, lots of matches have players that have bad performances. Your team can win 2-0, but maybe you have missed lots of passes, haven't marked well your rival, caught off of position all the time... That is a real performance of 3 or 4, but in fm2007 you easily will have a 7. Maybe it's because ratings for players are not best calculated. As it's been said, goals and assists are most important for ratings, and IRL it's also true for fans, but not for managers and people who understand football. A striker who has not scored neither assisted but all the time pressing defenders well, offering to midfielders, finding space, and not scroring just because keeper is quite inspired could easily have an 8, but FM will assign him a 6.

That's IMHO because we lack post match data. We don't know how many saves have keepers made, how many rushes, or why the goals where scored (bad positioning of the keeper, a great shoot, a header from 4 yards...). For defenders we don't know if they were dribbled from rivals or if they marked well. We don't know if midfielders offered to mates when needed, if they made impossible passes or shoots... with those all things, ratings would be more accurate. Just an opinion, tough.

Ched

But doesn't this show exactly what's wrong with the current implementation? You're saying that 7 is a reasonable performance, so there's only a three points left to the upper side. If you calculate the same scale downwards, then you get a minimum performance of a 4. 1-3 are simply unused.

There are three things here: an implied average score of 6 which is not exactly in the middle of the allowed range (1-10); and the interpretation that a decent performance starts at 7. And last but not least, the ratings are not severe enough IMHO. Too many 6s and 7s and not enough 5s and 8s, let alone more extreme. This makes it too hard to judge the relative performances until halfway the season (longer term ratings seem more reasonable) </BLOCKQUOTE>

Well it seems that the majority are in favour of staying with whole numbers (maybe it was just the use of 0.5s in pro evo that made me think of it) but TeeWees point is probably the best made so far. As i implied from the title, the scoring system makes very little effort to include the whole 1-10 spectrum, doing so would allow greater differentiation between "good" players and those that are performing at a world class level.

Seaguls also made an excellent point, that perhaps the scoring of players performances is a little too subtle for a game to accurately calculate (they seem to have so much difficulty with transfers after all...) so perhaps merely reverting back to FM07 scoring would suffice?

Perhaps something along these lines - Sky Sports Ratings - would be better - where a 5 is the neutral point and a keeper with a clean sheet is given a 6 due to a mistake, even tho it didn't lead to a goal (relating to jimbos post).

leftback in the changing room

But doesn't this show exactly what's wrong with the current implementation? You're saying that 7 is a reasonable performance, so there's only a three points left to the upper side. If you calculate the same scale downwards, then you get a minimum performance of a 4. 1-3 are simply unused.

There are three things here: an implied average score of 6 which is not exactly in the middle of the allowed range (1-10); and the interpretation that a decent performance starts at 7. And last but not least, the ratings are not severe enough IMHO. Too many 6s and 7s and not enough 5s and 8s, let alone more extreme. This makes it too hard to judge the relative performances until halfway the season (longer term ratings seem more reasonable) </BLOCKQUOTE>

Well it seems that the majority are in favour of staying with whole numbers (maybe it was just the use of 0.5s in pro evo that made me think of it) but TeeWees point is probably the best made so far. As i implied from the title, the scoring system makes very little effort to include the whole 1-10 spectrum, doing so would allow greater differentiation between "good" players and those that are performing at a world class level.

Seaguls also made an excellent point, that perhaps the scoring of players performances is a little too subtle for a game to accurately calculate (they seem to have so much difficulty with transfers after all...) so perhaps merely reverting back to FM07 scoring would suffice?

Perhaps something along these lines - Sky Sports Ratings - would be better - where a 5 is the neutral point and a keeper with a clean sheet is given a 6 due to a mistake, even tho it didn't lead to a goal (relating to jimbos post). </BLOCKQUOTE>

Good points indeed from Ched and TeeWee.

Sky Sports' method of rating players is unusual - 5 as a neutral point is completely different to the vast majority of the print media, whom use 6 or 7 as 'neutral' (unless they are rating Wayne Rooney or Steven Gerrard, where 8 appears to be the benchmark). However - they've already introduced a major source of error - in Ched's linked example SWP only receives a score of 4 for being the crime of being injured after 4 minutes and substituted at 29!

For this system to work - and it could work in print and in FM2010, say - to be truly neutral the player must be judged on what they did in the time they had - where 5 is "functional", any score above is relative to how positive their impact was and below takes into account mistakes.

FM players are, no doubt, readers of newspapers, teletext and various websites and are used to a culture where a rating of 6 denotes an 'average' performance and a rating below 4 depends on how much the sub-editor turning out the scores hates the player in question.

For SI to adopt the "5-is-neutral" approach would require a significant culture change for FM gamers; could the majority of FM gamers appreciate that a rating of 6.25 for a season actually was a reasonably good rating? For people used to over a decade of CM/FM seeing that rating would mean "Sell him now - he can't cope at this level".

I agree that the unused ratings are, to be frank, a waste of space. In FM07 a rating of 1,2 or 3 just means that the player has played in a team that got an absolute pasting of 4-0 or 5-0. It doesn't necessarily indicate how bad they were - even if they would have got a 6 in a 0-0 draw, they are dragged down by the team's performance. That may require a bit of tweaking.

Tom Leeburn

Has anyone even seen a 10 rating in fm08? I have seen a player score 5 goals against chelsea in the epl, and still get a 9!

Clearly this is another area that si have messed up.

Jimbokav1971

I have seen 10 ratings.

It was for the following though.

Hat-trick for a GK.

Hat-trick and 2 assists for a winger.

4 goals for a striker.

Doesn't happen often enough though.

achilles elbow

Agreed, and good idea.

For those of us who have played FM since the CM days, the current scoring system works well and we know how to react of a player gets a succession of 6's (or an average below 7) and vice versa with higher scores.

Maybe the system just needs tinkering with to overcome the examples seen above.

I like the mid-season average under your management idea. Nice one.

bermybhoy

Cheers Achilles Elbow. While I get where Ched and Teewee are coming from, it would be a massive adjustment to suddenly find that 5 (or is it 6...5.5 is actually in the middle of 1-10, confusing matters further) means 'decent'.

As for players having their rating unreasonably boosted by scoring, that's a huge grey area in real life anyway, think of how much criticism someone like Inzaghi (or Kris Boyd indeed) takes for his lack of contribution other than scoring...but if he misses a load of open goals, doesn't pass to a team mate all night yet scores 2 goals...surely still a MoM performance?

Leading to another point, should (or indeed are they already?) rating be boosted for good performances by 'average' players against better teams, even if they lose? Conversely, do say premiership players deserve 8's and 9's for beating a non-league side 4-0....surely expected of them?

arrogantio

The simple solution is to introduce decimal points, introducing more complexity without deviating from the familiar concept of a 1-10 rating normalised on 6/7 which has been around for over a decade in FM and is pretty widely used in media.

Two ways of doing this:

Firstly, simply adding half points to the scale - for example, a player who came on and did ok would be able to get a 6.5 rather than a 6 or 7 and a player who did the simple things very well or had an excellent performance marred by one bad miss would get a 7.5 rather than a 7 or 8.
A 20 point scale with only 10 of the points used regularly is more precise than a 10 point scale with only 5 points used regularly.
It's also better than what some people here seem to be suggesting, which is a 10 point scale with all 10 points used - which if normalised around the 5/10 mark might to be seen to imply that a player having a decent game put in only 50% of the performance they were capable of

Secondly, you could add two decimal places and calculate detailed ratings (see for example BBC Sport Player Rater) which would be useful in working out more precisely which players' impact in an even game was most and least noticeable, and whether a player's 7.35 performance is consistent with their season average of 7.23. I suspect the underlying formula which SI use to assign ratings could be adapted to display this.