Basic tips for developers how to make the game better

[cetto]

Firstly, I am not a native english speaker so please excuse all mistakes. I made a list of a few things that annoys me and should be definitely improved:

I see the main problem in the game´s tendency to crash very often and in large amount of bugs. But this is not what I wanted to mention.

I think that the game should be sometimes a little bit more user friendly. For example when your player is injured and you want to change him for another player – this takes mass amout of time (I play for Anaheim and Corey Perry is very injury prone. I play him in each situation –ES, PP, SH – so when he gets hurt I have to manually move another player to all these lines and do the same thing again when he cures. Why not just right-click on another player and then on some icon like „fill in all free slots in lines“ or „change for player XY“). It would be also great if the cursor changed when pointing on something that could be clicked on.

There is one thing that really pisses me off in all managerial games – player development. For example Belfour, Michalek, Kunitz etc. They have never been drafted. Which means that they got ahead of expectations about their future performance. But this never happens in managerial games. But why? Why is the development of all players so strict? I want some“happy coincidences“ when the player drafted in 6th round become a star etc. But this should work both ways – a star player that reaches fever pitch at the age of 26 and then his abilities drops from 9 to 6 in two years. This happens in real life so these coincidental situations should be included in the game.
On the other hand I finished last but one in my first season so I might have drafted really great rookies. These players were Bennett (potential 10), Draisatl (9) and Pastrnak (8.5). After 2 seasons their potential dropped to 8, 7.5 and 7.5. This is ludicrous, isn´t it? I´m not sure if this is scouting issue and the scouts somehow overrated these players or their abilities just dropped. I think that if these drops of potential are included, the opposite situation should not be excluded.

And one more thing about abilities – my best scorers in Anaheim are predominantly Getzlaf and Cogliano while Perry has the most assists. This is quite inaccurate.

If talking about abilities, I would really recommend you trying Fifa Manager. It is in general worse than Football Manager but some of its parts are pretty cool. There exists some kind of evaluation of player´s potential but e.g. when a player does not play at all, he can be very talented but he will never become a star. But even if he is not that talented, he can become a star when he plays a lot, when his trainers are skillful… then his performance is getting better and his abilities are rising. When a player scores tons of goals, his overal ability improves a little (e.g. 72 -> 74). And this has nothing to do with his potential. This is how I managed to keep my best striker over 80, although we was already 35. Just like in real sport, don´t you think? This is the best way to make a functioning system because it is based on player´s performance, not on potential. Player´s potential is just one of the determinants of his abilities.

If talking about tactics – I would really enjoy the tactics-making system more adjustable. I mean having the possibility to create (or just set up) some situations that would be specific for each line. And generally to have more posibilities – play short passes, long passes, fast, slow, use more right\left side etc. Right now I´ve got a feeling that I can not vastly influence my team´s performance.

Another thing relates to the historical mode – why the transfers are not included? There should be some choice between „real transfers“ and „user-defined transfers“ because it is impossible to manually follow all transfers (Winnipeg will never accept offer for Selanne..) but I´d love to have real lines for the whole 50 years.

There is just one more thing about the performance of goalies – I find the user-controlled goalies too „leaky“. They never achieve the % over 90 which is not good. Even changing the tactics to more defensive doesn´t make much of a difference. It influences the productivity a lot but not the defense.

In general I like this game and that´s why I wrote this – I want the game to be even better. Thanks for reading this and I hope that at least some of the things mentioned above will be improved in FHM15.

[Alessandro]

Originally Posted by cetto

If talking about abilities, I would really recommend you trying Fifa Manager. It is in general worse than Football Manager but some of its parts are pretty cool. There exists some kind of evaluation of player´s potential but e.g. when a player does not play at all, he can be very talented but he will never become a star. But even if he is not that talented, he can become a star when he plays a lot, when his trainers are skillful… then his performance is getting better and his abilities are rising. When a player scores tons of goals, his overal ability improves a little (e.g. 72 -> 74). And this has nothing to do with his potential. This is how I managed to keep my best striker over 80, although we was already 35. Just like in real sport, don´t you think? This is the best way to make a functioning system because it is based on player´s performance, not on potential. Player´s potential is just one of the determinants of his abilities.

I party agree with this. So far the actual player performance has a very little influence on how things go on in the game. Hopefully the improvements seen on the .19 version will be even better in the next patch and FHM 2015

[Crombeen]

But those are features you can't expect this early in a brand new game..

We all would like to see a game with so much detail and finesse, what to think about a personal player handling like Football Manager has, where a top Free Agent will never sign with a bottom league club or the influence of a player-agent will costs you the deal, stuff like that would increase the realism of the game a lot. Eventually they will get there but it just takes time..

The structure behind a game could be compared with a sitemap.

All those colorful labels will be functions, change one function and it will also effect other functions because they're connected with each other.
The most difficult task in the first years is getting all functions in the game and let them play nice with each other when you're at that level of development things will become very good and they can start doing super cool stuff like mentioned above.

Just look at the game they released in october and how many parts of the game they had to completely rewrite during the year. That wasn't because they simply like to redo everything for fun. It's probably because they changed lets say the scouting function and all other functions connected couldn't handle that so they had to be redone too.

Those first 2 a 3 years are so important to create a solid foundation.

[cetto]

Originally Posted by Crombeen

But those are features you can't expect this early in a brand new game..

Well, in general, I agree. Nevertheless, when you buy a game, you expect it to be fully-fledged. I appretiate developper´s efforts for making the game better step by step, patch by patch. I just tried to poke the things that I find crucial out.

The thing is that Football Manager exists already 10 years but some of its parts are still not working correctly even though the community yells year after year and complains about the same things over and over again. I think that the sooner the developpers try to enhance above mentioned parts, the better. At some moment it might be quite difficult to make such changes without influencing all parts of the game..