[JeffR]

Originally Posted by batdad

I am afraid I do not like this. Teams always misvalue their players, and think too highly or too little of them. Having the maxed out top level scouting, I hope does not mean that we will have an "absolutely perfect" view of what our own contracted players can do in this game.

A-level scouting definitely doesn't mean "absolutely perfect", even with great scouts. There will still be inaccuracies in the way a team views its own players.

Now other things seemed to have been improved which is great, but I hope the graphics person gets some time on this game before the match engine patch, so that this absolutely amateur UI can be repaired and this game can have a first impression that has a wow factor, not a blah factor.

And before everyone jumps on me for this, sure the game has improved. But if you go back and look...there I was calling for the UI to be repaired on day one along with what...a ton of very very experienced Hockey Manager and other Management sim people such as:

archibalduk--anyone give him any credit for knowing what he is talking about?
Alessandro--yeah, think he has a clue even though sometimes we disagree.

and several others, I believe including several really old timers that I remember from the SI Boards such as smetana.

I mean archi and alessandro are on the testing team. Not sure who else is, but I am pretty sure that these super experienced and well informed people should be listened to by the developers, and I hope they have been and are being listened to.

Other than the match engine, the #1 priority to make this game good and successful now....FIXING THE UI.

archi made a monster post about it way back when (I am not going to look for it) and I read every word of it. But funny enough Sebastien and Jeff...nothing commented so cannot even be sure it was read by the development team.

If Colin thinks he's being ignored and I'm not "giving him any credit for knowing what he's talking about", he's doing a very good job of not letting on when I talk to him. Just because you don't see our discussions on the public forums doesn't mean they're not taking place. That's what internal testing and research forums are for.

Can the UI be improved? Of course. Is it ever going to be identical to EHM's? No, it isn't, and I realize that's going to irritate some people. And since you were on the SI forums during the old days, you must remember how many people complained, when the first version came out, that using the Football Manager UI had "ruined" Riz's freeware EHM? A lot of the freeware EHM fans, some of them on the research teams, walked away from the game at that point and continued to cling to the old version (and some still do, years later.)

The FHM interface is going to resemble OOTP's, just like EHM's resembled FM. With a small development team, it would be a ridiculous waste of resources to develop two completely different UI's.

The next version of FHM will likely incorporate big parts of the interface changes that will be introduced in OOTP15. It'll look better, and we'll continue to look for ways to improve the way it works in our game. I particularly want to present things like stats in a way that's more familiar to hockey fans, and add things like interesting data visualizations - SI made big strides in that area after the end of EHM, and I see a lot of people online doing fascinating things with the presentation of hockey data. It's a very logical thing to do with a game that's numbers-heavy.

But we're not going to overhaul it right now. That would make no sense, not when we're going to be re-working it anyhow in a few months for the next version. The rebuilt match engine will bring some significant interface changes with it, particularly to the game presentation and tactical options, but other than that, big changes to the UI won't be happening in this version.

I will not look at buying the next game either until I know the UI is good. And the opinions I will trust (should they continue with the game themselves) are the guys who have been working on EHM since what 2000? 1999? in some way shape or form, and have put their personal time into FHM as well.

Well, hopefully that trust extends to the FHM guy who worked on EHM the longest (winter of 03-04 for the SI version, actually, research started the previous summer), and spent many hundreds of hours of his personal time working on FHM before being hired by OOTP.