Kung Fu

Full on, I moved to Hong Kong
With Bruce Lee's brother and Johnny Wong

I've posted about injuries before but I thought I may as well do a more considered post this time.

First off the old injury system was stupid on all levels. It used to drive me insane how I would get players injured in some random QP which didn't even have any prize money thus leaving me short in the league. Then I would end up dodging opponents waiting for my player to come back.

Of course I usually had some kind of backup and I really wanted to give some of these guys a shot, but why would I ? I could wait a day and have a HHN striker scoring a hatrick or I would give some chump i'd taken a punt on a chance. There's not even a decision to make here, you log off and wait. I wanted to have to play my fringe players but it simply wasn't worth the risk especially when no one else was doing this either.

So finally injuries are changed to a match based system so you can no longer dodge games and crucially you can play as many friendly games as you like without the chance for your season to go down the pan.

Great ! Except now I don't play any friendly games because there's no point ! My old GW pretty much avoided the DYM thing and people had the sense not to join them. There was only one guy running them and they were rank/reputation restricted so I was never allowed to join. "DYM rank 50+!!" etc. We did manage to get a few small prize money competitions running regular, there wasn't much cash to be made but it gave you something to play for.

The second reason I'd play friendly games was to try and win team of the week or push on up the rankings. Again there's no longer any point to this either as the prize is RP 100k and the rankings are soon going to be meaningless again once we split into Bronze, Silver etc. So I can now play as many friendly games as I like, except I don't want to play any now.

The main complaint is predictably people who are unhappy with the amount and length of the injuries being sustained. People are used to being able to have squads of 16 players with slender cover but this isn't enough any more. A football management game which doesn't require squad management isn't really much of a management game is it ?

Generally i'd say you are looking at having 2-4 players out at all times which is probably about right. Obviously some people are going to get unlucky but perhaps they have injury prone players or no physio skills to help. I'd say you should be looking at least 1 backup player for each position. So if you play 4-4-2 you would want 4 strikers, 4 DCs, 4 wingers etc. In the old days I would have just gone for 1 backup striker, 1 backup DC etc.

I do however think there are a couple of perception issues which are seeming to exaggerate the problem a little. The first is the ME shows every single knock as a highlight where as on FM10 it barely shows any on key highlights so you don't even notice some of them. I would say there does seem to be far too many knocks but when the ME is showing you 5+ every game then they really stick in your mind.

The second is a bit of a flaw with how the injury system works because the problem it solved has actually created a new problem. You are only getting players injured in official games, so who are you playing in official games ? You are playing your strongest 11 players, therefore the only players you are ever going to see injured are members best 11.

If you go look at clubs in real life i'd guess you would see that every single one actually has quite a lot of players injured, but how many of them are reserve team players and how many are youth players who don't figure in the first team ?

We are told that the injury rate in FML is lower than real life and i'm sure it is. But on FML the only players getting injured are first team players so i'd assume that the percentage of first choice players injured in FML is actually much higher than real life.

My other annoyance is the number of players getting injured during matches, whether they stick or not. Many don't stick for me which is nice but it's more common to see a player go off injured than it is to get through a game without someone getting injured. Between both teams you are looking at 2-3 players, or often more, getting slightly injured every single game with many more knocks on top of that. This is totally unrealistic, it doesn't happen on FM10 and it doesn't happen in real life. I never use all of my subs any more because you can guarantee that someone is going to get injured at some point.

I'd like to see match based injuries reduced by around 50% but training injuries increased by the same value to compensate. Now i'm sure this would lead to much rage when people logged on to find out that their star striker has picked up a 25 match injury falling over a cone in training. But at least this way, ALL of your squad is going to be susceptible to injury rather than just your best 11. Every match I play at the moment I know there's a good chance that one of my best players, and I don't have many "best players"!! is running the risk of getting himself crippled. I'd rather log on instead and find out that my backup youth striker has put his back out stretching for the TV remote.

I do actually generally like the new injury system including the amount of injuries but I do have some rage. When a player comes back from an injury they tend to be on 85-90% condition depending on how long they have been out for. In case you have missed this, condition no longer increases with time either ! So this means you have to play games to get condition up too. With the way that it drops in game now it would be silly to risk a key player on 90% because he's going to become useless fairly quickly.

If a player comes back on 85% fitness, the first game will tend to take him to about 92% fitness, then each game after that seems to only increase fitness by 1-2% ! So you need to play a ridiculous amount of games to get them ready. CPU clubs will do - I actually spend most of my time logged on banging out games in challenges trying to make sure everyone is back up to fitness.