Tied up too tight

I really have to restrain myself from doing crazy things on FML and i'm rather prone to panic signings. I have been known to sell my entire team and buy a new one in the space of a few days in the past. So i'm finding this rather difficult, i'm fully committed to not buying anyone at all this season, this is my strategy. Avoid the early wage auctions which are going to be very costly, push on with what i've got, win some prize money and make my move. Above all else, do nothing stupid !!! I've been known to send my entire club into financial doom after losing a friendly game before too.

There's not a great deal going on with my GW at the moment in all honesty. I joined the Vintage FA for no particular reason and as it goes it seems all of the "best" teams are also in this FA. I'd say something like 60-70% of the teams at the top of the rankings are in this FA meaning i'm in a qualifying group of death. Early form suggests i'm good for a top 4 finish though, then i'm shifting over to an easier looking FA. Why not ? It wasn't my idea to create duplicates of the same FAs, the Classic FA which is exactly the same structure looks far easier so I figure i'll maximise potential prize money with a crafty switch. Hate the game, not the player ? Did I just say that ? hmm. So yeah, things to do ? What's going on with the XTRA FA in your GW ? Nothing in mine, why's that then ?

A fair proportion of my qualifying group appears to be inactive, or maybe they are just on holiday ? Who knows, I figure there's about 150 or so managers on my GW not even in an FA either. So my daily routine consists of sitting online for a bit trying to ensure I win some AI rights and playing a silly number of CPU games trying to sort player fitness after someone returns from injury. It actually takes more games to get a player back to match fitness than they are injured for half the time.... I dare not risk learning the conditioning skill as it was bugged in the beta and I never saw any mention of it being fixed.

Anyway, here's my star signing so far. People said I was crazy, I forgot about the 10x signing on fee, so this guy actually cost me £120k. No one else bid. Turns out that perhaps I do know what i'm doing after all, or at the very least I know how dodgy the ME is ;)





I spent a fair amount of pre-season telling people they are going to need cover for injuries and to watch for the forums going mental. Not many took my advice it seems and the forum rage is well under way, but I think i'll do a different post about injuries later.

Anyway, best go. My DM has just come back from his 5 match injury so I need to play around 10 CPU clubs to get him fit enough to play league games.

Day 3

Team is fixed, at a cost mind. Pretty pleased with what I have got now, everyone slots into my templates and results are going well. From the worst possible pool to top end of the rankings in a day, all is well.

What I like about FML and why I stay online quite a lot is it doesn't really require my attention. So I can play it while watching TV, playing the xbox, doing some exercise or even cleaning the house. So i've been online quite a lot since launch, feeling out my new surroundings and all that. Not many people, other than my mates, seem to have moved over from my old GW so it's pretty much all new to me.

I've said before, that there's not really that much to do any more other than your official games and i've seen a couple of genuine new players on my GW seeming a bit mythed about what they were supposed to 'do'. It doesn't really bother me, because I can keep myself occupied with something else at the same time.

But it begs the question, where are the official quick plays, where are the pre-season official friendly fun competitions ? Where are the official events ? There's so much that could be done, but it's left to the normal managers as usual but things *need* to have some kind of official endorsement to actually *mean* something.

As usual I see mods are too busy trying to impose their authority and generally making rules up. Please point me to some official announcement which says you can't post a link to a player you don't own in the MP ? Does this exist ? No, it doesn't, neither does some tenuous link to "in the spirit of the game" or some such. Some guy has bid on a free agent, he doesn't want him, no one else has bid, so he says, "hey guys, if you bid £1 more than demand on this player, he's yours!" But NO, this isn't allowed. Why ? Who does this harm ? No one. It's just a made up rule.

Do yourselves a favour and do something to make the GW fun instead.

I've said it before, but it's somewhat ironic that the beta GW is the best run and best orged GW I have ever played on yet most of the live worlds, which people are paying for, seem to be run by one armed demented monkeys.

Good old days

Day 2 and it's back to business as usual.

I've made a stupid error - check
Panic bought far too many players - check
Corner hacks a go go - check
Pacey striker with no ability - check
I'm in debt - check
Winning games again - check

The first priority was to buy some new defenders to replace the dirt I got in my pool. Fortunately I have found a decent corner hacker who is a very sold DC for 16k and he's managed 7 goals in 7 games so far, good times! The other DC was less good because he has 9 pace but ticks all the other boxes and hoping the pace issue wont matter so much at the start.

Next priority was to find someone who can actually score. Now as per my previous posts, we all know players like Jermain Beckford, despite being utter shite, are FM legends. So I signed up some chump with 18 pace, 17 acceleration, 8 finishing and 9 composure. I know he's got something about him because he had a 30k AF and an 8k wage demand. Now here's the error, I kind of forgot I had to pay 10x wage signing on fee, 80 fucking K !!! The bank manager is on the phone asking for an explanation to this madness already. Anyway, he's scored 1 in 2 so far.

22 players in my squad now with more incoming tomorrow, no one else has bid on anyone I have gone for so far which is nice. I'll be on about -£50k tomorrow , so my plan for "keep it tight" for the first season has clearly failed!

If anyone hasn't started yet, here's my advice. Pick as few players from your pool as possible, just take the cream then head off to the free agent list and go for the bargains. I reckon if I had confirmed with 0 players and signed an entire team from the free agent list I could have signed the best team in the GW.

Silly season is on with the better looking player already going for 15-20k typical wages. Are you mental ??? Are you going to KEEP any of these players long term ? Of course not, but bid away and make yourselves poor.

Just need a cunning plan to sell all my shite players now... hmm.

Someone has pissed in my pool!

Okay, first off I fully support player pools and would have been happy with 16 player locked squads, but i'm here to moan so here goes.

Nothing goes well for me, ever, so I can't say I was too optimistic about what I was going to get in my starting pool. I did have some limited experience of this in beta and was pretty pleased with what I got in that pool.

However, i'm fairly certain I have been handed the worse pool on the whole bloody GW ! I've put every player through the FM10 editor and discounting the REALLY awful players, the average CA of my top 30 players or so is below 100. Of course, I got one good player and of course, he was a goalkeeper ! Who I didn't pick because he would have cost 85k.

My 'best' players are a pair of wingers with 122 and 128 CA on FM10 which isn't too bad for a starting squad. But I had no central midfielders and had to go with a couple of DMs instead, I don't have any DCs which have any ability to actually tackle, head, jump or mark and I have no strikers who able to actually do anything other than run around a bit.

I didn't even get any decent potential youths in there except one guy who is a -8 but he is blatantly never going to improve and lacks all of the key attributes for his position. I signed him anyway, my most expensive player at 30k.

Having checked my mates squads and various other teams they have pretty much all got 1-2 good players in there leaving me with the shitty end of the stick as usual.

Armed with my knowledge of how many injuries i'm likely to sustain throughout the season I thought I best sign a reasonable amount of these duffers up. I confirmed my squad early as I had a plan to build a youth academy to try and get some high potentials from a semi major nation before there were 100's of academies on the GW.

So out of interest I head off to the free agent list, there's not going to be anyone good on there surely ? After the utter dross in my pool, what are the players going to be like that others didn't want ? Well, as it turns out.... a hell of a lot better than anyone else in my squad !! So I have spent too much money buying shite from my initial pool only to find there's bloody loads of great free agents (many without bids) meaning i'm going to end up with too many players, too high wages or a squad that can't win a game.

The youth academy idea is pretty much off now because i'm going to have to spend all my money trying to improve the team instead.

Ramble on

The reset is looming very close now and I shall be playing in Butragueno as of next week, I just need to try and remember how to spell it.

Just about all of the flaws and issues which lead to the eventual closure of the original GWs have been fixed and there seems to be sensible policies in relation to new GWs and placement of teams. I suspect once we see 3D introduced we might get some advertising and some new GWs up and running for those folks.

But i've been wondering of late, is everything which caused the game to fail for the many the very thing which made it enjoyable for the few ? Back before player tax, things like trading players was fun, winning money in friendly competitions was fun, pursuing the world ranking spot was fun, going for team of the week was fun (many late nights waiting for the news item to come through!) for that sweet £100k.

It was essentially survival of the fittest with the weak either quitting or stuck at the bottom of the food chain, but if you were at the top it was great fun. Now we have equality and equal rights with everyone striving for mediocrity. I do support all of the changes and some of the original game play mechanics were blatantly way off the mark.

But I am wondering if i'm actually not going to enjoy the game any more. I think many of the fixes have inadvertently created a brand new problem - there is actually less to do, or more accurately, less things to do which have any meaning. There's no point me playing any friendly games because I can't win any money, nothing for team of the week and rankings are uninteresting now.

I can't really think of any way to make any money or do anything interesting at the start. Had a little discussion about starting strategies with my friends who are carrying on and while we have a couple of ideas we are not really able to come up with much to help rise above everyone else.

So it all leads on to the age old problem of there being little reason to actually be online. Say you are in a traditional FA playing about 38 games a season you are looking at a couple of games a day. You could probably play through them in 30 minutes or so but now there's no play times so what are the chances in those 30 minutes you are going to be on at the same time as your league opposition ?

I'd quite like to play in the AFA but from the beta i'm seeing that everyone wins AI rights over me despite the fact I am usually on for a few hours a day so my only option is to sit online all day, not doing anything, in the hope that someone from my league comes online.

There needs to be a proper PvE structure built into the game to keep people online. Challenges are, erm, a bit naff ? I actually play quite a lot of these to get players match fitness up after injuries but there's no emotion or interest attached to them. Oh look I beat Tinpot Town in a challenge... great ? I got some RP too, cheers.

You need a proper PvE structure whereby you have something relevant and engaging to do at any time you wish. The main benefit to this, aside from giving you something to do, is you will be online more and thus more likely to come across your league opponents. What I really want is the ability for my FML team to compete in real life leagues against real life teams. So while waiting for my league games I could be having a crack at winning the Premiership. It's been mentioned before, but there's murmurs of licensing issues around this, but we have the players, are the teams not covered ? If not, fine, do something else interesting ! Use real life players (static DB copies) and create some new teams or something, then knock up some competitions.

Back to the equality thing, i'm sure that the cream will still rise to the top but there is one final leveller, my most favourite thing in the world - The ME. Even if you manage manage to put together a top team while balancing the books you still have the ME spewing out random results all over the place. The main reason i'm really not actually that excited about the reset next week is because the ME is just so awful.

My last post was about my FM10 game, so how is it going this season ? Finished 2nd in the league, won the League Cup again and won whatever the UEFA cup is called these days. Jermain Beckford managed to score an astonishing 48 goals. Seriously ? My team team is still awful - It's possibly worse than last season because I spent £16m on a wonderkid DL and £15m on a striker that has been injured all season - transfer budget gone and all my other players sold! Had to play random youths in some games because my squad is so tiny.

It's just boring because I know I will beat all the good teams and lose to the crap ones. I was worried when I was 5-0 down to Ajax in the semi final of the UEFA but I won 7-5 on agg, job done.

Champions League ? Your having a laugh !

Well actually i'm not, but the ME is.

I was going to post about things I like and that i'm looking forward to in the reset but i'm really not having a good day (unrelated to FML) and decided to moan about my favourite subject instead.

I decided to start again, again, on FML beta and in the meantime I thought I would push on with my FM10 game which is now on the 839 ME which is pretty much what FML is running.

Playing as Leeds, first season I stormed League 1 (understandable) then the second season I stormed the Championship by about 20 clear points (probable?) then the third season in the Premiership ? Things are going to be tough now, or so I thought.

Well actually, not really. It's a piece of piss because most attributes and player ability mean nothing whatsoever in this ME and beating bigger teams is actually easier than smaller ones.

So here's my team.


And here's where I finished:


I also won the league cup.

Now LOOK at the state of my team ! Jermain Beckford.... I downloaded the real time editor after finishing this season and he has a CA of 120 yet manages 30 goals against the best in the world ? I only missed out on 3rd place because I lost to someone near bottom of the league in the last game which brings me nicely on to my next point. I did lose quite a few games this season, with the likes of Chelsea, Arsenal and Man Utd what else should I expect ? Well, actually I spanked all of those teams off the park and beat Arsenal 6-2 to get to the League Cup final.

The only teams I lost to were the likes of Hull, Spurs (who were in relegation places most of the season) Fulham, Bolton. The only top team that beat me really was Man City - and that was only after I was 3-0 up and they had 10 men before they scored 4 in the last 20 minutes, like you do.

So i'm once again concluding that it is EASIER for poor teams to beat better teams and player ability is absolutely bloody meaningless ! I didn't even get lucky against most of the teams, I completely played them off the park. My squad was so small I only had 2 fit midfielders at one point when the ANC was on.

I think i've got it cracked now as to what is needed for a team to win games on this ME. I'm not going to bother going into detail because the reset is looming and i'll take any advantage I can get but if anyone wants to check out those players there's some common traits. Except Ben Parker, who's a fucking mystery he's just shit on all levels! (CA 121)

With this being FM10 I suppose people will suspect some jiggery pokery, but I can assure you there was no editing or anything going on. In the interest of honesty I will admit I cheated one match. I saved it just before playing bottom of the league Bolton at home who promptly turned into Brazil and smashed me 3-0 ending a nice run I was on. I only saved it because I knew this would happen. But in the grand scheme of things this match didn't really make any difference as I would have finished in same place and I doubt that single incident would have massively altered my season.

No corners were hacked in the making of this season.

Hoping to bag Beckford a Champions League medal next season.

Back to the start

Not having a good week people. Not good at all.

You know when you really want to impress someone ? Shall I explain, what the very best thing NOT to do is ? First off, drinking shit loads of Champagne (because it's free) is a very bad idea, especially if you are a beer drinker. Also after this you shouldn't decide your not drunk and buy some Stella to try and address this perceived problem.

Your next memory is, walking into a door. Now, shit happens, doors can be hard to see, especially if they are made of glass or some such or you could even accidentally open one into your face perhaps. But have any of you, just WALKED, without stopping head on, into a big wooden, double door, with no windows in it ? I have... it fucking hurt and i'm surprised I didn't break my nose. And of bloody course, I couldn't get away with such a thing without anyone seeing it happen could I ?

Fortunately though you have the sense to go home after this incident and you are 100% confident that nothing else retarded happened in around the 20 minutes memory blank before this incident, it was only 20 minutes after all..... You'd be wrong... oh so so very very wrong.

This is my life, of being a massive fucking idiot.... i'm sure no one wants to here the calamity of what has happened after this.... So anyway, what's happening on FML ? I've been patiently saving up my prize money from last seasons great performance. The first 2 runs in the AFA have gone pretty bloody awful and i'm stuck in the Championship so it's time to spend my way out of the division. Spent £4m on some strikers, got done on a fake JP reading on one and he got injured after one match and the other is also injured and hasn't played a game yet.

Before buying these players I decided to get the opinion of my trusted FML buddy to make sure I didn't make an error. I gave him a list of my 4 choices as I tend to make rash decisions without the assistance of my friends. We both decided that the first choice was a bargain, he'd been available for ages, so I go to bid and he's just this second been sold ! Then my mate double crosses me and signs my second choice on an auto accept!! god damn!

So im plugging away without my new signings and actually enjoying my new youth team. My U17's have got me into the top 30 of the youth rankings so far by playing U17 games only, not bad !

Corners are finally fixed !! Rejoice people.

The reset has been announced for the 25th so it should be fun on a nice new GW just like the old days. My main account will be wherever the St John returning stars people get placed, so may see some of you around. I reactivated my account last week especially to make sure I got where I wanted to be without any issues and of course to plug in a few more skill points!

Not much else to say, lots of changes I could probably comment on but i'm dazed and confused about half the stuff going on, I perhaps have brain damage from the door incident.

Holiday

So today I returned from my FML holiday.

Unsure how the first run of the league ended as it had already been reset but I didn't get promoted or relegated so I'm guessing top half from my results.

Anyway, just in time for the next run ! Good timing! Played and won the first 3 games. Logged off, come back and i've lost a game 8-1 with my full strength team. Seriously ? The team handing our this battering isn't even top of the league anything. Completely random.

Played a few games, several players injured every game as usual.. none stuck but still, so stupid watching 3-4 players go off injured.

Meanwhile i've reactivated my live team (alas I did this before checking out the latest bullshit the ME had thrown at me) to round up the troops ready to get everyone in the same GW for the reset. I likely be heading to the Casual FA or wherever I can go to avoid to make sure I have the least exposure as possible to the ME.

Maybe it's time to forget about holidays and go retire instead. Seriously disillusioned with the way things are at the moment, there's no enjoyment to be had at all when everything is so random.

Bugger me

Well seen as i'm having a break from FML I decided now would be a good time to resume my FM10 game which I have been enjoying immensely.

Unfortunately as I purchased this on Steam, the game automatically updated when I loaded it today.

Unfortunately as I purchased it on steam and the game automatically updated, it downloaded the new patch with the new ME which has also ruined that bloody game too ! It's made it as shit as the ME in FML is !

I was really bloody enjoying that game too... wont be playing that shit again.

Gutted :(

I'm gonna have to start raging about other things at this rate !