Not sure i agree with a lot of what has been written here - that's not to say i don't think there's a problem.
1/ I firmly believe the PA of regens is fine - we can't expect 5 regens with 170+ PA in every team (or even every big team) as it just isn't realistic. One 107+PA player every other year (or every third year) for the biggest clubs in the world is fine - scouts can be used to pick up the rest.
2/ World wide the number of high PA regens is almost perfect - i'm running around 10 nations, and have had 3 190+ PA, 5-8 180+, and around 25 170+ appear in europe alone - these numbers seem acceptable to me, as not all of these players come close to their PA. This is the average number, some years i've had as many as 6 190+ regens (of which my scouts found 5 - they deserved bonuses that year!) whilst other years there has been very little in the way of decent players. All things considered PA is not a problem.
3/ The most significant problem is CA. Wonderkids just don't exist. (well i've had 1 in 20years...) Regens tend to have too low aCA, or reach a passable CA too late - this means they don't become first team worthy until they are 25 - by which time they are more often than not "seeking a new challenge" - even though by this time i've loaned then all over the world. Similarly international teams get clogged up with slow 31 year olds as they still manage to have a higher CA than their younger replacements.
Bojans, messis and rooneys just cannot exist when CA develops so slowly - this
IMO is the area that needs most work.
4/ The other problem is physical development. This is particularly relevant when looking at GKs. n my current save, there are 3 GKs
IN THE WORLD with >15 agility. Ditto jumping. This creates an appaling knock-on as the number of goals scored has rocketed - my top striker has 15 goals in the first 6 games....
Thankfully after reporting this in the bugs forum SI siad they were looking at it.
Similarly other players physical stats are woeful. They just don't seem to develop correctly at all - there are some players with decent stats, but they are the minority.
5/ Players just aren't well rounded enough. The vast majority of regens have glaring flaws. There are currently only 2 perfectly rounded regens that i've found (one of which is my son, so i'm quite chuffed about that
) the rest tend to have either one vital technical stat in single figures or one or more physical stat that is far too low.
I'm not referring to 150CA players here, that i could accept, however i have a regen with 190+CA whi has only 2 passable physical stats and 3 technical stats above 10...the reason for this one is that he's two footed, but it's a consistent trend with single footed players - defenders who have no strength, wingers with 20 pace but 4 acceleration, whole teams that can't jump...the list goes on - now i'm all for players developing into individuals, we don't want everyone the same after all, however they are just too different from each other - a 180+CA CB or CF or CM etc will generally have decent stats in most areas, this just doesn't happen with regens.
I can post screenshots of any examples if people need them, but anyone who plays thee game for 20+ years will soon see that it gets very daft.
6/ Pat on the back if you've read this far, i'll shut up soon. The major knock on effect of the regen poblem is that the game becomes FAR too easy.
E.g. the AI sees a player with 190CA, and thinks "yippee i'll have a world class team now" - when in reality the player is badly flawed and any human can easily avoid such mistakes - repeat this event over a decade and the result isn't pretty.
In short, my team consists of well rounded players with excellent physical and technical stats appropriate for their position and tactics.
The AI teams consist of whichever high CA players they could get their hands on, with a bunch of 120CA players as they NEVER fill every gap created. In FM07 this worked, as the regens were if anything a little too good (although i personally liked it) and they also were well rounded (in general) however it is now the case that the AI buys players and must be scratching it's head as to why they are awful.
I don't expect the AI to consider individual stats - just going off CA is acceptable in order to make the game run quickly - however, regens need to work in order for the game to remain playable.
In the last 3 seasons the only points i've dropped were 4 draws - it just isn't fun anymore, the AI teams are just too incompotent to amke the game any sort of challenge. As i've said previously, the quality of GKs in particular is causing any half decent striker to get 30+ goals in a premier league season.
Sorry if this all sounded negative, but i feel SI have a quite severe problem here, i can only hope that it gets sorted for 09, and i have full faith that it will be. But as it stands, i just can't play my save anymore, i either have to buy poor players, or win every game....it just gets dull.
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