This is Hardcore

I see Jak seems unhappy of late looking at his recent blog posts.

Main complaint seems to things are a bit boring and the game is a little too casual. I do see his point of view and agree with it to a certain extent. The reason i'm not in total agreement is because of the amount of effort and time I am having to put in just to ensure that no one can win AI or play my AI - considering 3 runs of the EFA per season this is quite a tiring and time consuming task. If I had lost just 1 more game last season I would not have won the league, I had 0% AI but if I had left some games to my AI I can guarantee that I would have lost a fair chunk of them and thus not won the league title.

So I am finding myself online quite often (taking the night off today due to league reset day which will no doubt mean i'll lose all my day 1 AI!) but yeah, in fairness, i'm not actually doing a right lot. I'm just kind of there, waiting for games, waiting for something to happen really. I've got a tonne of youth games to play as I went a bit OTT on the XFA competitions but I never pay much attention to those.

I have withdrawn from all XFA competitions mainly because they pretty much all have home playing rights enabled. As you may gather from the above, I don't like people playing my AI, just because I lose and I certainly don't like losing. The second reason is how bloody random and different your form is in these competitions compared to the league.

The only other competition my senior team is in is the ladder and despite playing teams which are generally poorer and of a lower standard than my league (not not low enough for a big underdog factor) my form is horrific. I've been stuck in same level for god knows how long and just seem to draw every single game every time it resets. I know I would probably just be going mental if I was in a load more competitions with my form up and down all over the place.

So generally I do agree with what Jak is saying about the game being too casual. It's easy for people to just spend a small amount of time online, enjoy the game and do reasonably well and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that ! But why don't people spend more time online ? Well, because there's not that much else to do ! People say, "oh well, I don't have enough time, I don't want to play more" but how many people signed up to something like WoW thinking "hey i'm going to spend 30 hours a week playing this game!" They spent that time playing it for a reason.

On FML the main thing you can do though is simply play games, which is fine, but the games need to mean something. This is one of the reasons pre-reset I was championing FAs being deleted so you could just enter as many official competitions as you liked so you could be super intense if you wish and then the next week you could scale things back if you needed a break and there would always be something to do, always meaningful games to play and a reason to log on.

Anyway, when it was clear that wasn't going to happen I was hoping that the XFA might be put to good use to fill the void. Alas, there's probably 50+ or so competitions to wade through, half of which have been there months and never started or others which have not really been maintained properly and the rest all have home playing rights, even the cups - well thought out that one.

So we are just left with the quick plays, which are okay.... but they aint quick, they last about 6 hours and again, I don't want to log off and let someone play my AI ! Plus they are always the same, same structure, same format, same snooze-a-thon waiting for games.

I was hoping for a really active engaging environment where there was always something going on, always some competition to play and meaningful things to play for but i'm pretty much in the age old routine of waiting for AI. At least start chucking some RP around in these XFA competitions !

Back before the reset on my old GW I was often criticised because I didn't discuss competition type ideas in the right place, speaking to orgs was wrong, posting on blog or forum was wrong, starting a discussion in game was wrong and I was told I apparently should email the mod list. So I tried this a couple of weeks ago in my current GW asking for a weekend league in the XFA that ran from Friday to Sunday, explaining how it should be set up, alas I didn't get any response.

I think I might be coming to the end of my time with this game soon, it's just becoming a very time consuming chore for little reward. I know something is wrong because its not made me angry for about 2 weeks ;)