retired_roshawnda82

You can summarise most thread's of this nature fairly simply along the lines of:

FM is no fun equals FM is now too hard/complex/in-depth etc

and/or

FM is no fun equals FM is now too time consuming/complex/in-depth etc


Its fair to say that SI have always strived to deliver the most in-depth, quality simulation of football management on the market, year on year. To complain that year on year it has become a more and more in-depth simulation of football management is to say that Man Utd should have taken it easy in the new millenium after dominating the 90s and now tried to bring the lies of Ronaldo to the club. Not going to happen.

For the few that actually get frustrated/disappointed purely with bugs/badly implemented features then fair enough, these can spoil things for some people and obviously it would be better if they didn't happen.

At the end of the day, I'm sure SI will simply have the attitude that they'll continue to try and make the game better and better and more in-depth and complicated, and if that doesn't please everyone, there's always Fifa Manager etc. And I have to say I agree with them. The one adendum to that now is that perhaps FM Live will stop that section of fans going to Fifa Manager, that is, until they get beat every week by those FM fans who like to be in-depth.

retired_dego72

Further to this if your the best team and fail to break down a poor team then you can guarantee that they will have a single chance and sneak a win.

Again yeah it happens but in FM regardless of gulfs in player ability if you fail to get tactics "just right" then you will have problems every match, and conversely if you get the tactics right you can get unbelievable success with very average players.

SI need to hit the correct balance between ability, morale and tactical choices- as currently the most important real life factor is the players yet in FM they arguably fall into 3rd place.

Its just wrong, wrong, wrong.

retired_dego72

The problem is that the "challenge and complexity" are for all the wrong reasons.

The challenge in FM is down to a tactical side that has little to do with real life tactics (the tempo issue is a perfect case in point here), add to that god awful tactical interface that has been IGNORED whilst SI "improve" the AI and you see why the game is hard for the wrong reasons.

retired_martina

Fairly speaking, according to what SI has been putting their biggest effort into and by using a cool head, we, who play the game in seires, should really appreciate and at the same time realized how the game has been improving through these year. When this FM08 came out, it was introduced that, about the development of its match engine, Ray Houton, the real life football manager/coach put much realism to the game especially the match engine, right?! So why there aren't many who have realized this. I mean, I've been talking about the ME repeatedly as it is the key part of the game and matches itself. I said the match engine greatly improves and much more like-real-life in FM08. Did you feel the difference in 8.0 match engine. It is what I'm using now. Yes, I only use 8.0 and never apply the patches. Why? Is the game/the match engine really so bugged? Or the problem is in the view and way how we users think of the ME.

As far as I can see, I think we are too impatient maybe. After so many years, everytime when a new version of FM comes out, it looks like we're always already expecting to find bugs and waiting immediately for the patch *.0.1/*.0.2/*.0.3 to be made for us. Comparatively, I've been playing in 8.0 for the most of my FM time. I think it's the realest one. I'm using ManU also. Win matches and also concede goals. The so-called "closing down" bug is also not a big problem because i think its true in realife that when defending not everytime the defender will rush towards the opponent to get the ball. Anyway, what I'm trying to stress is that the original ME of 08 is so good in realism. Players pass the ball around more smoothly and the movement is especailly great you can see goals after nice movement and teamwork. But since there are so many users claiming about bugs and you know in such a short time after getting the game, I think the power of claiming bugs is so overwhelming that the patches are coming out. I'm not saying there are no bugs. But after 8.0.1 and 8.0.2, there's still bugs and some are still claiming the game is not fun anymore. So for me, maybe there's so obviously a bug in 8.0 as many users think, I still stick in playing with 8.0. It may has bugs, but for match engine, it's the best, and I can have fun playing it. Sorry for my poor english hope you get what I mean.

retired_ramanan_5

I kind of see where your coming from here and I something that I don't want to be mistaken with is that I am not asking for the game to be made easier. I like the fact that new features are added each time and that the game is made more realistic. I have more fun building clubs up with feeder clubs and wage structures because this does reflect real life teams better.

However the problem for SI is that if they continue the trend of making the game more realistic, but more frustrating then people will begin to turn to Fifa Manager and whatever other games there are and as a business they can't afford to do that.

Like I said right at the start of the thread, what I am trying to do is not to have a go at SI, but to be as contructive as I can in giving ideas how they can please both types of customer, those who like the time consuming in depth game and those you like the fun playable game and in my opinion and with the ideas above and continuing ideas they can do that simply by expanding what an assistant manager or automated response system can do to take out a lot of the repetive frustrating parts of the game, e.g media repetitive comments, team talks that don't work and then tune up the bugs.

At no point have I said make the game easier, just faster and more playable. Those who are willing to put in time to the game should get better results, but that shouldnt mean that the majority of people who buy and play the game can't enjoy it, as the trend is going.

Think of it as a friend of mine said. Think of an old car racing computer game. Those who chose manual gears could get a better top speed and ultimately better results but had more work to do. Those with automatic could still win though. Just as in assistant and head coach, those willing to do all the parts of the game should get better results, but those who hire a great assistant manager to let him do the work should get good results too.

and a playable game.

retired_seeme

I'm personally sick of reading all the 'its your tactics' answers that people give on these forums.simply put,if a team is creating plenty of chances and giving away very few their tactics must be fairly spot on.when the players dont take these chances and concede from a large proportion of those few given away then thats when I think that maybe people should accept that the game is somewhat at fault for this

KryptonSean

Its not realistic at all in ANY way. IRL a slower tempo game is EASIER (sorry for the caps cant be bothered with italics!) to defend against as it allows the defending team time to regain shape and get numbers behind the ball.

The worst thing about it is that in FM its the way you almost HAVE to play once you become one of the best teams, its just counter intuitive in terms of the way the best teams irl play and therefore real life tactics have little to do with FM. </BLOCKQUOTE>

It's debatable whether slower temps are eaiser to defend against. Generally I'd agree with you, but look at Arsenal, they just pass it around the defenders...
Also, the main reason teams use slow tempos IRL is because they know that eventually the defending team will make a mistake. They can then capitalise on the mistake.
Are you applying that all the best teams play with a fast tempo? I'd have to disagree there; United and Barca do, but that's all IMO.

retired_martina

Yes, that's true. I myself havn't been a football fan for a long years though, but from what I can see, the FM game now has progressed towards realism greatly. And SI people must be much more knowledgable and professional about football than me. I think football itself can be entertaining, everyone no matter how crap you're you can just participate and run and kick ball around. But if you are really to manage a team and set up training and match tactics, I believe you must have a much deeper look into the game. Let me explain:

Just now I did another test to prove my thoughts using the default 8.0 version. My intention is to try to play physical violent ugly football in FM2008. I took charge of Blackburn. Everything is set with default. Training and tactics. Arrange a friendly match against own reserve team. I noticed that players with high aggression and bravery will go up to compete for the ball bravely while other's like wingers always never close down even if I set cd to often. Players with low marking and tackling also won't go for the ball easily. Of course, it is commonly know that closing down can be or must be a bug, but I just wanna point out it is also for us to try to understand more about football logic as well. For instance, I'm still learning and thinking too. Ok, back to the point. The match aginst reserve team won by 3-1. And now the next game against Trabzonspor which is not so weak as reserve team. Currently I just paused the game to come up here to write. Because the match maybe proved something I thought. In order to try to let my players run up to compete for the ball like a crazy dog, I used the same ugly hard tackling tactics as in last match. But till 50 minute the score was still 0-0. And one of their central defender is hurt while Steven Reid is hurt badly. So I can see the match is quite physical and violent. The substitute for Reid is Dunn. He fight for the ball quite well, very hard working. No problem as to closing down. Then at this moment I realized that players make decision like everyone of us. When it's time to defend there're two ways to defend. 1. you can just let the opponent has the ball and you just position yourself at good defending point. 2. you go up for the ball to kick it away or to get possession of the ball. So there's another situation that we might do our best to compete for the ball like hell. It is when you're trying to score one and you're running out of time. So now the match, it's around 60 minutes and there's no goal. So I tuned up team mentality to attacking and time-wasting to nil. Then the next thing I saw is Savage got a direct red card to be sent off because he was trying to get the ball like crazy. Haha!

So the conclusion is that the game may has bugs. But we're also responsible for putting more thoughts to what we see and get from the 2d screen. Don't be confused and annoyed by the slider system easily. cool down and think about the logic behind the sliders clearly. They are really logical and connected. Anyway, just hope everyone find his way to have fun. Please feel free to critize or correct me.

retired_michelleferguson

I could not agree more!

The game being hard is good but it has to be for the right reasons.

It should be hard when you're a small club because you have no money, your best players always want to leave and thre is constant speculation about big teams coming to poach them which is unsettling. It should NOT be hard because you hve to spend hours refining the minutia of tactics so that sliding one bar 3 notches to the right suddenly turns a 5 game losing streak into a 10 game winning one.

The old games were more fun, especially 01/02, exactly because of this. Even if you were a fairly big club like Newcastle, the even bigger ones would come and try and take your best players and if you constantly rejected, the less loyal ones got ****ed and played like **** until you left them leave. This is how it is in real life so if you want to make a simulation, make it like this. People will say that it means you can never build a smaller club into one that dominates Europe - Well you can after many, many years when the reputation of that club goes up and players are more likely to stay.

That is why 01/02 was so good - If you were losing you could find out why and the difficulty of the game was based much more around the players and your signing than tactics. Was 01/02 perfect? No it was not but for me it was more fun because I spent more time around the player aspect of the game than the tactical engine of the game. If the engine was true-to-life it would prolly be better because I wouldn't be spending time figuring out what works best in the game, I'd be spending time figuring out what would work best in real life. Until the engine is at that realism, I think the importance of tactics needs to be reduced. The tempo example is fine case in point...

retired_martina

Finally, the match ended up with Trabzonspor got sent off of one of its midfielder because previously I thought wingers have low marking and aggression are shy to hard tackling so I tried my best to conquer that. So this red is caused by Bentley trying to get the ball from behind and this must annoys the opponent midfielder and he got angry and did something voilent and got sent off. The commentary said his teammates have to drag him away. Looks like he really got p*ssed off by my violent ugly tactics. Hehe! So apart from slight problems with closing down the match engine in 8.0 is billiant as I can see.