mstink

I've been thinking about this for a couple of hours: wondering why someone like wwfan, for example, plays successfully in a low league whereas I'm struggling to get any consistency, sometimes playing well, sometimes playing very poorly. There is the obvious matter of his brain being several times larger than mine, but I don't think that's really it. It's only a football management sim after all, not quantum physics, and a lot of it would seem to be common sense.

I've come to the conclusion that it's the difference between visual and abstract thinking. Someone who is an abstract thinker would approach the game from a more theoretical point of view than someone who's a visual thinker, deciding on theory and logical approaches before hand, applying them and finally observing the results. A visual thinker would start from a fairly neutral position, watch matches and then begin to think about where the tactics can be changed and improved based on what they've seen. The important difference being that for an abstract thinker what actually happens on the pitch has less importance in their way of thinking about the game than for a visual thinker, for whom it's the major source of their thinking.

The lower down the leagues you go, the more "noise" from random chance is introduced as the players' attributes diminish. For visual thinkers, such as myself, playing at the bottom of the bottom, the amount of randomness in what occurs on the pitch interferes with our ability to make sound tactical judgements because we're relying so much on the information gleaned from watching matches, and that information is unreliable at that low a level.

Someone with a more abstract approach will be less phased by the chaotic results of the unskilled players because the information they gain from watching matches will actually be less important to them in the way they play the game, even if they don't realise it themselves.

So visual thinkers will be misled into making unnecessary and poor tactical changes based on random occurences but abstract thinkers will continue to tweak their tactics from a sound theoretical basis without making rash decisions based on faulty data.

Then again that's probably all just nonsense.

retired_monica90

Not at all- I think you've polarised both camps very well.

retired_angelwhite

What a load swollocks.

mstink

Perhaps. Would be nice if you could explain why you think that though. It seems fairly plausible to me on the face of it.

retired_monica90

I certainly think so. There are positive and negative aspects of both approaches in my opinion, but don't really have time to discuss it now. Perhaps later.

Good post.

retired_keeper

I think you're right there, but not entirely.
Probably everyone has a couple of "Sliders" in their head, for "how much you like footiemanagementsims", "logic", "visual interpretation", "willingness to change tactics" etc. etc.
So basically everyone is different and that's why some play better at certain levels and/or nations and/or styles and/or etcetera.

Cheers, R.

retired_ambular0820

If an abstract thinker did not pay attention to what's happening on the pitch, then for all his thinking, he would not make a hair's breadth of progress in his grasp of the game mechanics.

On the other hand, if a visual thinker never paid any attention to certain relations abstracted from others so that they appear better (take this in the fully pictorial sense if you wish), then for all his looking, he wouldnt know what's going on.

Thinking is already seeing, and seeing is already thinking. They belong to the same species.

But for all that, the distinction between abstract thinkers and visual thinkers has often been drawn in psychology, and I believe they are on to something there.

As for your theory about more "noise" -the random element in lower leauges- I do not quite buy it. If you mean by that passes not finding their targets and players not being where they supposed to be - that occurs quite often in higher leauges as well, and is an indicator of incompatible slider settings: too much creative freedom being the leading culprit of such bad behavour, but it is also caused by tempo, passing range and mentality settings as well.

mstink

I wasn't trying to suggest absolutes, only that there might be differences in the amount of importance placed on individual incidents on the pitch.

I'm quite prepared to believe that I'm playing with incompatible slider settings, but surely it's indisputable that a Premiership player's ability to find his target is going to be significantly superior to a Conference South player? How can that lead to any other conclusion than that there will be a lot more "unforced" errors from players playing five leagues below them?

Anyway, I'm going to start a Premiership campaign soon. Will be interesting to see one way or the other what happens.

retired_momma_0307

IMO i think it is a very clever thing to anaylse. I personally am quite impressed that you are able to adapt something that you have obviously learned about to real-life situations. Good stuff, and interesting too. :thup:

mstink

Don't be too impressed! I don't actually know much about the idea of visual and abstract thinking. I didn't intend the post to come across as someone who had studied it. Sorry about that. It's just a lot of supposition really. Glad you found it interesting though.

It just seemed odd that there appeared to be such a clear divide between people who struggle with the game and those that don't and the visual/abstract thinking idea seemed a neat way of explaining that and tying in with lower league play being difficult because of distracting random "noise" on the pitch idea.

One thing I'm absolutely sure of: the required system specs for playing the game don't include an I.Q. of at least 140. It can't be that difficult, but clearly something appears to be stopping some from understanding how to effectively adjust their tactics. And it's not as if anyone on the forums is lacking information and advice (some of it contradictory, admittedly heh).

Anyway, I've developed a new slightly less fancy theory for why I personally seem to be struggling, but it probably applies to quite a few others. What I'd forgotten was that I was actually doing really well up until the excrutiating re-ranking slump kicked in - think Yeading got up to second place before the plummet down the table. At the time I had no idea what was going on and why tactics that had been so effective previously were now so useless. By the time I started lurking here and read all about it, it was too late to do a great deal, being stuck in the viscious circle of terrible team morale making losses so much more likely resulting in further terrible team morale.

Towards the end of the season Yeading managed to pick things up a little using the ideas from wwfan's thread and finished about 14th, so it wasn't actually quite as disasterous a season as I've been imagining. Because the slump was such a major crisis though, I kinda came out of the season with the impression that nothing I did worked, when it really wasn't the case at all thinking back on it.

It seems safe to assume that a lot of players have similar experiences and probably a lot of them end up so frustrated they give up on the game before they start to see their team picking up again, as I nearly did myself at one point.

Incidentally, there are some simple tests that supposedly show whether someone is a visual thinker or an abstract thinker, for anyone who's interested:

Imagine a box.

What colour is it?

If you can answer the question it's because you imagined a visual image of the box, complete with colour information. An abstract thinker can't answer the question because they wouldn't imagine the box as a visual image but in an abstract way.

Also I've had a high temperature for the last few days which is starting to come down and I'm suddenly starting to worry about what embarrassing swollocks I've been posting. Hope I didn't inadvertently insult anyone or anything. :/